“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: Why the President Doesn’t Present a Bold Plan to Create Jobs and Jumpstart the Economy
Americans are deeply confused about why the economy is so bad – and their President isn’t telling them. In fact, the White House apparently has decided to join with Republicans and blame it on the long-term budget deficit.
Before I turn to the President, though, let’s be clear: The lousy economy is due to insufficient demand. Consumers – who are 70 percent of the economy – can’t and won’t buy because they’re running out of cash. They can’t borrow against homes that are worth a third less than they were five years ago, and most consumers are bad credit risks anyway because they’re losing their jobs and their wages are dropping. They also have to start saving for the kids’ college or for retirement, which will cut their spending even more.
Robert Sheer: Another Bailout Joins the Goofball Economy
The whole thing is nuts. The economy is a shambles, saved from a free fall only by the Federal Reserve’s unprecedented promise of free money for banks for at least two years. That’s how long a seven-member majority of the Fed’s Open Market Committee expects it to take for significant relief to take hold for the 25 million Americans who can’t find full-time employment.
The 10-member committee’s three dissenters in Tuesday’s decision, all unelected Fed regional board presidents, are free-market ideologues who don’t believe the government has a role to play in reversing the nation’s economic disaster. One is a former Wall Street investment banker and vice chairman of Henry Kissinger’s consulting firm. The other two are University of Chicago school of economics disciples long committed to free-market purism and blind faith in the mathematical models that had much to do with radical deregulation and the subsequent collapse of the financial markets.
I’ve been angry with slimy politicians before – Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush – for many different reasons, but with the common denominator of sacrificing the public interest for private interests. So, I was thrilled to vote for Obama. My wife and I donated more money to his campaign than we have given to any candidate running for any office. I believed he was more than just pocket “change we could believe in.” I still have an Obama bumper sticker on my car. This weekend, with gusto, I’m tearing it off.
Obama has fulfilled more of the Tea Party’s dreams than Sarah Palin, Grover Norquist or Rush Limbaugh could ever have done as president. He has done more damage to the Democratic Party than Karl Rove in his wettest of dreams. There are two possible explanations for Obama’s behavior, both are equally disturbing.
Thom Hartmann: Democracy Died First in Wisconsin – Long Live the Oligarchs
The Wisconsin recall election was the first major test of the new era in American politics
That new era began in January of 2010 when the US Supreme Court ruled in Citizens United v. FEC that the political voice of We The People was no longer as important as the voices of billionaires and transnational corporations.
Now we know the result, and it bodes ill for both 2012 and for the tattered future of small-d democracy in our republic.
A few of America’s most notorious oligarchs – including the Koch and the DeVos (Amway fortune) billionaires – as well as untraceable millions from donors who could as easily be Chinese government-run corporations as giant “American” companies who do most of their business and keep most of their profits outside the US – apparently played big in this election.
Robert Greenwald: WI: The Kochs, Colbert and $ in Politics
Much of the nation watched last night with breath held, waiting to see the recall results in Wisconsin. In the end, two WI Senate Republicans were replaced with Democrats, falling short of the three needed to take control of the Senate.
While this wasn’t the outcome many hoped for, it was still a bit of a victory. No longer are politics played on an even field, and the situation in Wisconsin makes this clearer than any other state. But despite the slanted scale, working people in Wisconsin were still able to change two seats out of six. It is movement in the right direction.
What I mean about there no longer being an even playing field in politics is the vast amount of control and power money now has in our democratic system. While Scott Walker has pushed so extremely to rob working people of their basic rights and protections, he’s been cushioned in support of endlessly flowing money backing his efforts.
Jim Hightower: The Downgrading of America
As Lily Tomlin noted, “No matter how cynical you get, it’s almost impossible to keep up.”
Many of us view the deficit ceiling brouhaha between the Obama White House and the laissez-fairy extremists in the Republican House as some combination of farce and fiasco. So much political playacting around a made-up deficit “crisis” in order to avoid dealing with the real deficit that’s crushing America’s middle class and draining the lifeblood from our economy: the jobs deficit.
But wait — before I could work out my anger over that fiasco, here came an even more incredible farce. Last Friday, a Wall Street credit rating firm, Standard & Poor’s, thrust itself onto the national stage by arrogantly, recklessly and wrongly downgrading the sovereign credit status of the United States of America from AAA to AA+.
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