“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”.
Paul Krugman: Party of Pollution
Last month President Obama finally unveiled a serious economic stimulus plan – far short of what I’d like to see, but a step in the right direction. Republicans, predictably, have blocked it. But the new plan, combined with the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, seems to have shifted the national conversation. We are, suddenly, focused on what we should have been talking about all along: jobs.
So what is the G.O.P. jobs plan? The answer, in large part, is to allow more pollution. So what you need to know is that weakening environmental regulations would do little to create jobs and would make us both poorer and sicker.
Ari Berman: How the Austerity Class Rules Washington
In September the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB), a bipartisan deficit-hawk group based at the New America Foundation, held a high-profile symposium urging the Congressional “supercommittee” to “go big” and approve a $4 trillion deficit reduction plan over the next decade, which is well beyond its $1.2 trillion mandate. The hearing began with an alarming video of top policy-makers describing the national debt as “the most serious threat that this country has ever had” (Alan Simpson) and “a threat to the whole idea of self-government” (Mitch Daniels). If the debt continues to rise, predicted former New Mexico Senator Pete Domenici, there would be “strikes, riots, who knows what?” A looming fiscal crisis was portrayed as being just around the corner.
The event spotlighted a central paradox in American politics over the past two years: how, in the midst of a massive unemployment crisis-when it’s painfully obvious that not enough jobs are being created and the public overwhelmingly wants policy-makers to focus on creating them-did the deficit emerge as the most pressing issue in the country? And why, when the global evidence clearly indicates that austerity measures will raise unemployment and hinder, not accelerate, growth, do advocates of austerity retain such distinction today?
Funny, he doesn’t look like Marie Antoinette. But when former New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller asks his readers if they are “bored by the soggy sleep-ins and warmed-over anarchism of Occupy Wall Street,” it displays the arrogance of disoriented royal privilege.
Perhaps his contempt for anti-corporate protesters was honed by the example of his father, once the chairman of Chevron. In any case, it is revealing, given the cheerleading support that the Times gave to the radical deregulation of Wall Street that occurred when Keller was the managing editor of the newspaper.
Michelle Chen: It’s NAFTA x3 as Free Trade Deals Sweep Through Congress
One day in September, Isidro Rivera Barrera, a contract worker and labor organizer who was campaigning at an Ecopetrol refining facility in Barrancabermeja, Colombia, was reportedly gunned down outside his home. His death was met with the usual silence-just business as usual in a country with one of the world’s worst human rights records for attacks on trade unionists. But now, the hushed suffering of Colombian workers reverberates in the U.S. Capitol, which has just passed a deal to bring even more business-as-usual to Colombia.
Congress last week approved three long-pending trade deals with Panama, South Korea and Colombia. The rationale behind each of them is dubious; there’s little evidence that the agreements will lift up the U.S. economy and plenty that they could lead to massive job loss in key sectors. But free trade deals have always been less about creating jobs than exporting neoliberal ideology to the Global South, thereby accelerating poor nations’ cascade toward low labor standards, environmental exploitation and deregulation.
Allison Kilkenny: Occupy Wall Street: Cutting Edge, Old-Fashioned Village
It seems like every day more news emerges about Occupy Wall Street’s plans to expand the movement. New chapters spring up across the country, more citizens join the cause, and now OWS even has its very own commercial.
As David Dayen reports, the commercial is set to run on national television thanks to LoudSauce, a crowd-funding group. Dayen applauds the commercial as an “innovative way to get the message out for a new kind of protest movement, one that refuses to let other people tell their story.”
David Graeber calls this a movement of “horizontals,” meaning people who don’t require traditional hierarchical structures to lead the movement, who believe in direct action and don’t rely on a messiah-like figure to guide them. Basically, OWS is the opposite of the traditional political party structure and, as such, neither political parties nor the establishment media devoted to covering those parties understand it.
John Nichols: Replace Biden? No, Embrace His Economic Populism
The 2012 presidential election is, as too many Republican debates to count have reminded us, barely a year away. And President Obama is still wrestling with some nasty poll numbers. A majority of Americans contacted for a new AP-GfK survey say the president does not deserve to be reelected, while only 46 percent favor a second term.
Sounds dismal for the president.
But it doesn’t necessarily have to be, if Obama and his aides keep their wits about them and take a few more signals from the one member of the administration who seems to “get it”: Vice President Joe Biden.
Jonathan Shell: Occupy Wall Street: The Beginning Is Here
Nothing is more striking about the Occupy Wall Street movement, which in a political instant has swept through not only the United States but the world, than its origin. It seemed to come out of nowhere, like a virgin birth. There were, of course, organizations that played a critical initiating role, which is gradually being acknowledged and rightly honored (see, for example, Nathan Schneider, “From Occupy Wall Street to Occupy Everywhere,” October 31). But it would be wrong to assign paternity in any ordinary sense to them, and they indeed disavow such a claim. On the contrary, the core activists in Liberty Plaza founded on the spot a decentralized, nonviolent pattern of “leaderless” self-organization that made every participant, old or new to the process, a “founding father” (or mother). The movement, you could say, was father and mother to itself. To join it was, immediately, to become it.
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