“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”.
Robert Reich: The Great Switch by the Super Rich
Forty years ago, wealthy Americans financed the U.S. government mainly through their tax payments. Today wealthy Americans finance the government mainly by lending it money. While foreigners own most of our national debt, over 40 percent is owned by Americans – mostly the very wealthy.
This great switch by the super rich – from paying the government taxes to lending the government money – has gone almost unnoticed. But it’s critical for understanding the budget predicament we’re now in. And for getting out of it.
Robert Scheer: One Lawman With the Guts to Go After Wall Street
The fix was in to let the Wall Street scoundrels off the hook for the enormous damage they caused in creating the Great Recession. All of the leading politicians and officials, federal and state, Republican and Democrat, were on board to complete the job of saving the banks while ignoring their victims … until last week when the attorney general of New York refused to go along.
Eric Schneiderman will probably fail, as did his predecessors in that job; the honest sheriff doesn’t last long in a town that houses the Wall Street casino. But decent folks should be cheering him on. Despite a mountain of evidence of robo-signed mortgage contracts, deceitful mortgage-based securities and fraudulent foreclosures, the banks were going to be able to cut their potential losses to what was, for them, a minuscule amount.
In a deal that had the blessing of the White House and many federal regulators and state attorneys general-a settlement probably for not much more than the $5 billion pittance the top financial institutions found acceptable-the banks would be freed of any further claims by federal and state officials over their shady mortgage packaging and servicing practices and deceptive foreclosure proceedings.
Amanda Marcotte: The War on Contraception Goes Viral
As those of us who’ve been following the anti-choice movement for years can attest, the biggest stumbling block for them has been finding a way to make a move towards restricting access to contraception while still trying to keep something like a decent reputation with the public. Attacking sexual liberation and women’s rights has always been at the heart of the anti-choice movement, but in order to sell such a radical agenda as mainstream, they’ve had to make sentimental and often bad faith claims about simply wanting to protect fetal life. While making frowny faces in the direction of pregnant women who want to terminate has been an effective strategy for restricting abortion rights, however, it has its limits when it comes to attacking women’s ability to prevent pregnancy in the first place.
E. J. Dionne: The symbolic battle over the debt ceiling
Symbolism doesn’t pay off debts or cover the costs of Social Security and Medicare. This has not stopped politicians in the nation’s capital from engaging in an extended and entirely symbolic fight over how to raise the debt ceiling.
It’s time to stop the charade.
The outlines of an eventual deal are already clear. Both parties will agree to some spending cuts and to a deficit-reduction trigger that won’t take effect until well after the 2012 elections. The triggering language will be vague enough so Republicans can say it would force large spending reductions and Democrats can say it would allow for a mix of cuts and tax increases.
John Nichols: Ryan’s Wrong – We Need ‘Medicare for all’
House Budget Committee Chair Paul Ryan proposes to undermine the integrity of the Medicare and Medicaid programs, with an eye toward enriching the insurance companies that so generously fund his campaigns.
The American people are not amused. They have sent clear signals that they want to maintain Medicare and Medicaid.
Ryan’s town hall meetings in April featured noisy opposition in communities such as Milton and Kenosha, and tough questioning even in the most conservative communities of Walworth County. Likewise, Republican House members from Pennsylvania, Florida and other states got earfuls at their town meetings.
The protests at the meetings were just the tip of the iceberg of objection to the plan championed by Ryan, R-Janesville.
Jim Hightower: What’s Inside Big Oil’s Head
The big five of Big Oil might want to mull over a bit of advice that baseball great Ted Williams once offered to rookies: “If you don’t think too good, don’t think too much.”
Apparently, the chieftains of BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil and Shell thought that a bit of gruff, CEO bluster would be just the thing to brush back public anger over the industry’s all-star avarice and arrogance. Bad thinking.
Last week, the head of these multibillion-dollar behemoths, pumped up on narcissism, strode into a U.S. Senate hearing room and took wild swings at a bill titled: Close Big Oil Tax Loopholes.
In a time of $4-a-gallon gasoline, stratospheric rises in petro profits and a federal budget deficit severe enough that Republicans have called for killing Medicare, the spark that exploded the public’s fury at oil giants was the revelation that the big five are on the government dole, drawing more than $2 billion a year in corporate welfare payments.
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