Punting the Pundits

“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”

Goldie Taylor: Why Obama shouldn’t have had to ‘show his papers’

“Show me your papers!”

Major Blackard, then just 19 years old, dug into his trousers in search of his wallet. He padded his jacket, but could not find his billfold.

“Sir, I done left my wallet…” Blackard said. Before he could finish his sentence, the young man was posted against the brick wall, cuffed and taken to the St. Louis city jail. Unable to prove his identity, he would spend the next 21 days in a cramped, musty cell. That’s where his older brother Matt found him, beaten and bloodied. Matt returned with Major’s employer later that day, wallet and identification card in hand, to post bond.

The year was 1899. Major Blackard was my great, great grandfather.

The real crime, as Pulitzer Prize winning author Doug Blackmon points on in his seminal work Slavery by Any Other Name, was that my grandfather was a colored man in America.

This morning, as White House staffers released copies of the president’s long form birth certificate, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something very ugly was going on. For the first time in recorded history, a sitting president of the United States found it necessary to produce his original birth certificate for public inspection. Not once, in 235 years, have we ever demanded proof that our president was born on American soil.

Glen Ford: Michigan’s “Emergency” Financial Regime: What Fascism Looks Like

Fascism is not all about jack-boots and guys with mustaches. It is a system of economic and social control. The particularities of fascism in any given nation grow out of the special dynamics of that country. Fascism in the United States will be blow-dried. And its legal and bureaucratic form will take shape in places like Michigan, where an innocuous sounding piece of legislation called the Local Government and School District Fiscal Accountability Act is the prototype for a host of laws designed to make government – the state – a compliant tool for the dictatorial rule of the most predatory sections of the ruling class. In 2011 America, that’s Wall Street, finance capital.

Michigan’s law allows the state to appoint emergency managers to nullify contracts, including labor agreements – which is what has unions upset. But the scope and intention of the law is much deeper and wider than simply anti-union. The legislation allows emergency managers to nullify the powers and authority of local governments of all kinds. One of its supporters gave the game away when he spoke of the need to impose a kind of “financial martial law” in which all pretense of democracy would be abolished in targeted communities. The community the Republican politician had in mind was Detroit, the Black metropolis, where the public schools were promptly put under emergency state control. But there is nothing to stop the state from abolishing democratic governance in any of Michigan’s cities, if an emergency can be declared or created. On April 15, the mostly Black city of Benton Harbor, the poorest jurisdiction in the state, was placed under total financial martial law, its citizens suddenly made more powerless than Blacks in Selma, Alabama, prior to the civil rights movement.

Richard (RJ) Eskow: Why We Regulate — and Why John Walsh Needs to Resign

Regulatory agencies exist to protect the public, not the corporations they regulate. The head of the Office of Comptroller of the Currency doesn’t seem to understand that. But that’s not why John Walsh needs to resign.

The OCC was created to stabilize the economy, make it easier to conduct trade, and protect people’s savings. It didn’t do that. In fact, it ignored the warnings raised by others. But that’s not why John Walsh needs to resign.

His agency failed to anticipate the foreclosure crisis, and it overlooked bank criminality. Later John Walsh misled a Senate panel — and the general public — about the size of the problem. And even after being forced to clarify those misleading statements, Mr. Walsh keeps on repeating them. Whether by intent or ineptitude, he continues to misinform the public.

And that’s why John Walsh needs to resign.

Daphne Eviatar: WikiLeaks Documents Reveal Hazards of Blindly Relying on Secret Evidence

The flood of news stories in the wake of the latest WikiLeaks document dump reveal how one Guantanamo detainee after another was imprisoned at Gitmo for years based on tips from informants that turned out to be false. As James Carafano of the Heritage Foundation said in today’s New York Times, that’s not a big surprise. Law enforcement relies on such dubious tips in building criminal cases all the time. “The nature of intelligence is that it is ambiguous sometimes. It is sometimes based on sources you wouldn’t take to Sunday school.”

In criminal cases, that’s not necessarily a problem, because criminal defendants ultimately get a chance to test the evidence in court. But that’s not the case for military detainees. Until the Supreme Court ruled in 2008 that Guantanamo prisoners had a right to challenge their detention in federal court, they were stuck in the prison with no independent assessment of their guilt or innocence.

Jim Hightower: Wall Street Tames Washington

They came, they saw, they conquered. This line pretty well sums up a little-reported but important story about the new tea partiers in the U.S. House of Representatives.

No sooner had they arrived than the corporate lobbying corps came to visit, saw what these supposed rebels were made of and quickly conquered them without a fight. The forces of big business needed only to lay out some campaign cash — and quicker than you can say, “Business as usual,” the budding lawmakers snatched up the money and immediately began carrying the lobbyists’ corporate agenda.

Check out the financial services subcommittee, which handles legislation affecting Wall Street bankers. Five tea partiers got coveted slots on this panel, and all five were suddenly showered with big donations from such financial lobbying interests as Goldman Sachs. Now, all five are sponsoring bills to undo parts of the recent reforms to reign in Wall Street excesses.

David Swanson: Your Local Military-Industrial Complex

As in any other U.S. city, things are looking up for Charlottesville, Va., job seekers who don’t mind helping to kill tons of people for no good reason. This week’s “community job fair” features some prominent members of the Charlottesville community whom we don’t usually think of as such.

When I travel the country, people often inform me that their town is a military-industrial town as if that were unusual. I always ask them if they can name a U.S. town that isn’t — in part because nobody has yet been able to, and in part because if someone ever does I might want to move there.

Once you weed through the predictable dead-end poverty-wage, fast-food, and box-store jobs at the job fair, much of what’s left is jobs that help kill people. Whether you support or oppose what the U.S. military is doing in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, and 75 or so other countries, you’re probably not aware that the machinery behind it dominates the local economy here, just as in the rest of the United States. The “community” at the job fair is the community of death.

Andy Worthington: The Hidden Horrors of WikiLeaks’ Guantánamo Files

WikiLeaks’ latest revelations – secret military files on almost all of the 779 prisoners held in the US “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba – are already causing a stir, and for good reason, as they resuscitate a story that appears to have been forgotten in the last few years: how, in their rush to prove themselves tough and vengeful in response to the 9/11 attacks, the most senior officials in the Bush administration not only discarded international laws and treaties including the Geneva Conventions and the UN Convention Against Torture, but also threw out safeguards designed to protect innocent people from being wrongly imprisoned in wartime.

Some of the key discoveries in the Guantánamo files are the documents on the 201 prisoners released between 2002 and summer 2004, which cover new ground, as the US military has never publicly released any of this information before. For the other 578 prisoners, information has at least been revealed through the release of the government’s allegations against the prisoners, and the transcripts of the tribunals and review boards used to assess their significance, which were released in 2006 (with follow-ups in the years since), but for these 201 prisoners, many of the stories are being related for the very first time. These are mostly dispiriting revelations about how children as young as 14 and old men in their 80s were rounded up and sent to Guantánamo, joining farmers, taxi drivers and unwilling Taliban recruits – hordes of the innocent or the insignificant, whose stories help to confirm the folly of Guantánamo.

David Weigel: Birtherism Is Dead. Long Live Birtherism.

The history of a national embarrassment, and why it’s not over yet.

President Obama did not end the “birther” movement today. Hours after the president released his long-form birth certificate-years after releasing the short-form one that proved he was a citizen-the issue had already evolved. Republicans who’d been on the hook demanding proof of his citizenship wondered why it took so long. People with too much time on their hands-in other words, the majority of people surfing the Internet for this kind of stuff-were combing the document for proof of forgery.

So Obama did not end birtherism. He did end one era of conspiracy theories about him-the fifth era, by my count. And maybe all he did was make sure the sixth era got started with as loud and embarrassing a bang as possible. If you understand how this started, and who played the biggest roles in elevating it, maybe you can also understand why it’s not going to end.

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    • on 04/28/2011 at 21:47
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