“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”
Daniel Ellsberg: This shameful abuse of Bradley Manning
The WikiLeaks suspect’s mistreatment amounts to torture. Either President Obama knows this or he should make it his business
President Obama tells us that he’s asked the Pentagon whether the conditions of confinement of Bradley Manning, the soldier charged with leaking state secrets, “are appropriate and are meeting our basic standards. They assure me that they are.”
If Obama believes that, he’ll believe anything. I would hope he would know better than to ask the perpetrators whether they’ve been behaving appropriately. I can just hear President Nixon saying to a press conference the same thing: “I was assured by the the White House Plumbers that their burglary of the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s doctor in Los Angeles was appropriate and met basic standards.”
E.J. Dionne, Jr.: The High Cost of a Broken Metaphor
“We’re broke.”
You can practically break a search engine if you start looking around the Internet for those words. They’re used repeatedly with reference to our local, state and federal governments, almost always to make a case for slashing programs-and, lately, to go after public-employee unions. The phrase is designed to create a sense of crisis that justifies rapid and radical actions before citizens have a chance to debate the consequences.
Just one problem: We’re not broke. Yes, nearly all levels of government face fiscal problems because of the economic downturn. But there is no crisis. There are many different paths open to fixing public budgets. And we will come up with wiser and more sustainable solutions if we approach fiscal problems calmly, realizing that we’re still a very rich country, and that the wealthiest among us are doing exceptionally well.
Paul Krugman: Another Inside Job
Count me among those who were glad to see the documentary “Inside Job” win an Oscar. The film reminded us that the financial crisis of 2008, whose aftereffects are still blighting the lives of millions of Americans, didn’t just happen – it was made possible by bad behavior on the part of bankers, regulators and, yes, economists.
What the film didn’t point out, however, is that the crisis has spawned a whole new set of abuses, many of them illegal as well as immoral. And leading political figures are, at long last, showing some outrage. Unfortunately, this outrage is directed, not at banking abuses, but at those trying to hold banks accountable for these abuses.
The immediate flashpoint is a proposed settlement between state attorneys general and the mortgage servicing industry. That settlement is a “shakedown,” says Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama. The money banks would be required to allot to mortgage modification would be “extorted,” declares The Wall Street Journal. And the bankers themselves warn that any action against them would place economic recovery at risk.
All of which goes to confirm that the rich are different from you and me: when they break the law, it’s the prosecutors who find themselves on trial.
Robert Kuttner: The Continuing Mortgage Mess
One of the most startling exit-poll results to emerge from the 2010 midterm elections was the finding that the 35 percent of voters who (correctly) blamed the economic collapse on Wall Street actually voted Republican by a margin of 56-42 percent. As Ruy Teixeira and John Halpin wrote in a sifting of the exit polls, “The Obama administration’s association with bailing out Wall Street bankers, who are heavily blamed for the bad economy, apparently had a negative effect on Democratic performance in this election.”
To put it mildly.
But since the election, Republicans keep on demonstrating that they are even better friends of the banks than the ambivalent Democrats. Tea Party populism at the grass roots coexists with close alliance with the financial industry where it counts. Under the guise of reducing the budget deficit, the Republican House and Senate budget would dramatically reduce funding for the agencies that regulate Wall Street.
Richard Shelby, the ranking Republican on the Senate Banking Committee, keeps inserting himself into a law-enforcement proceeding, trying to block the proposed legal settlement of abuses in mortgage foreclosures and documentation that has been put forward by the 50 state attorneys general.
John Nichols: Undaunted! More Than 100,000 Wisconsinites Rally “To Take Our State Back!”
“Wow! You go away for a couple of weeks and look at what happened!” shouted state Senator Jon Erpenbach, as he surveyed a crowd that organizers estimated at well over 100,000 that had rallied to welcome home Wisconsin’s dissident senators.
Erpenbach and 13 other senators fled the state Capitol in mid-February, when Governor Scott Walker and his Republican allies were using their legislative majorities to strip state, county and municipal workers and teachers of their collective bargaining rights. That move blocked a vote on the legislation for three weeks, before the Republicans finally adopted a “nuclear strategy” to force adoption of the anti-union measure.
While opponents of the bill suffered a momentary legislative defeat, they enjoyed a dramatic political victory — as a mass movement built, attracting hundreds of thousands of Wisconsinites to mass rallies in Madison and communities across the state and causing the collapse of Walker’s approval ratings even in Republican-sponsored polls.
That movement now proposes to recall at least three Republican state senators who backed the bill, shifting control of the chamber to the Democrats and restoring a system of checks and balances to what is now one-party government in Wisconsin.
Sen. Bernie Sanders: Deficit Reduction Requires Shared Sacrifice
The rich are getting richer. The middle class and poor are getting poorer. What is the Republican solution to the deficit crisis? More tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires. Savage cuts in programs that are desperately needed by working families.
There is another approach, which is why I’ve just introduced legislation imposing a surtax on those households earning a million dollars or more and the elimination of tax loopholes which the big oil companies take advantage of.
Everyone agrees that this country has a major deficit crisis, but few discuss how we got there. When George W. Bush inherited the White House from Bill Clinton we had a significant surplus. Now we have a $1.5 trillion deficit. How did that happen?
William Astore: I’m Proud of P.J. Crowley
I’m proud of Philip J. Crowley. As Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs, Crowley had the guts to denounce the sustained (mis)treatment of Private Bradley Manning as “ridiculous” and “counterproductive” and “stupid.” For this burst of principled honesty, the Obama administration cashiered him. Never has the moral obtuseness of the Obama/Hillary Clinton duumvirate been more clearly displayed.
snip
Again, I commend P.J. Crowley for being a man in the arena, for standing up for what he believed in, for taking some hard swings before a milquetoast establishment forced him out of the ring. Pick yourself up, P.J., and hold your head high. For those who fired you, they deserve only to hang their heads in shame.
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