“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”.
Dean Baker: Greece, Home of Democracy, Deprived of a Vote
Armed by Papandreou with a referendum, the Greek people had clout. Now, they’re powerless before the troika’s austerity plan
Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou touched off a firestorm last week when he proposed putting the austerity package designed by the “troika” (the IMF, the European Central Bank and the European Union) up for a popular vote. The idea that the Greek people might directly be able to decide their future terrified leaders across Europe and around the world. Financial markets panicked, sending stocks plummeting and bond yields soaring.
However, by the end of the week, things were back under control. The leaders of France and Germany apparently laid down the law to Papandreou and he backed off plans for the referendum. While the government is in the process of collapsing in Greece, the world can now rest assured that the Greek people will not have an opportunity to vote on their future.
Matt Taibbi: Why Mitt Romney’s Entitlement-Privatization Plan Is Crazy
David Brooks, the (gratuitous insult deleted), wrote this this morning entitled “Mitt Romney, the Serious One.” In it, he explained how Romney’s recent decision to unveil a plan for reforming the entitlement system “demonstrates his awareness of the issues that need to define the 2012 presidential election.”
Romney grasped the toughest issue – how to reform entitlements to avoid a fiscal catastrophe – and he sketched out a sophisticated way to address it.
So we had a giant financial crash in 2008 that necessitated a bailout costing a minimum of nearly $5 trillion and perhaps ultimately costing $10 trillion more, we have foreclosure crisis with more than million people a year losing their homes, and we have a burgeoning European debt disaster that threatens to devastate the global financial system – and the chief issue facing the country, according to Brooks and the Times, is reforming the entitlement system?
If only he’d written them on his wrist.
The most recent Republican debate will be remembered forever as the time Rick Perry announced that as president he’d immediately close down three federal agencies and then could remember only two. (“Commerce. Education. What’s the third one?”)
He appeared to be asking Ron Paul, who gave him the wrong answer. There we were, back in third grade, peeping at the next kid’s paper. Except for the part where everybody in class is running for president.
So much for Governor Perry, who went out not with a bang but an “oops.”
Richard (RJ) Eskow: Sorry, GOP: It Looks Like America’s Bullsh*t Detector Just Went Off
It’s great when we can disagree in a civilized way, but it’s getting pretty hard to avoid the conclusion that the phrase “right-wing logic,” as delivered by the GOP and mimicked by Mitt Romney, has become the mother of all oxymorons. They tell us corporations are people. But people? Not so much. That Right used that argument that in yesterday’s elections, but it’s starting to look like voters in swing states and the heart of Red America have had enough.
They love to preach the “corporate personhood” principle. IBM, Goldman Sachs, Halliburton: They’re people! Why, they can even “speak”! Sure, they may be limited to the crude vocabulary of millions and billions, but you gotta admit: Come election time, they’re fluent in it.
These corporations are endowed with freedom of speech, say Mitt and Friends, but employees of the same corporations aren’t – especially when that speech involves forming a union. Follow the logic and the conclusion is inescapable: the Right believes that the company is a person but the people who work for it aren’t.
Got that?
Michelle Chen: Tar Sands Protest Shows Unity, Tension in Green-Labor Alliance
Thousands gathered near the White House on Sunday to say no to the Keystone oil pipeline. The human chain the protesters formed symbolized unity among environmentalists, youth, indigenous groups and other communities, all calling for decisive political action against climate change and fossil fuels.
But the emergent coalition has encountered fissures between environmental and economic goals. Pipeline boosters have controversially claimed that some 20,000 jobs are at stake in the project, which would channel notoriously dirty tar sands oil (PDF) from Alberta to Texas. Activists have challenged and debunked the fuzzy math surrounding the projections of new jobs and “energy security,” and say environmental destruction shouldn’t trump narrow economic arguments, anyway. But tell that to struggling construction workers and others frustrated at Washington’s failure to alleviate the jobs crisis–some of the same folks you might find nearby at an Occupy DC rally.
Jim Hightower: Don’t Just Salute Veterans, Rally With Them
Here’s a surprise that the power elites really hate to see: Many members of the 1 percent are joining the “We are the 99 percent” movement in various Occupy Wall Street protests.
I don’t mean that corporate CEOs and hedge fund billionaires are suddenly in the streets to show solidarity with millions of Americans who’re fed up with the systemic inequality and corruption infesting our economic and political systems. No, no – those swells aren’t about to dirty their Guccis with any street action. Rather, I’m talking about another, extra-special 1 percent of our society – the soldiers who’ve been the “boots on the ground” in Washington’s long misguided and bloody wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
This Veterans Day, thousands of vets from America’s abused “war class” are not marching in little feel-good parades. Instead, they’re rallying with the Occupy movement, expressing their anger at being used in two senseless wars that enriched corporate contractors while the troops lucky enough to come home alive can’t find decent jobs and are shorted on the health and education programs they desperately need.
Paul Hogarth: Across the Country, Voters Reject Right-Wing Extremists
While San Francisco elections were largely anti-climactic, across the country voters rejected en masse the right-wing Tea Party politics that have plagued national politics. Nowhere was it more obvious than Ohio – where voters decisively, by a 2-1 margin, crushed Republican Governor John Kasich’s attack on public employees. In Maine, voters rescued same-day voter registration from the right-wing Governor – as marriage equality advocates prepare to go back to the ballot next year. And even in Mississippi, voters rejected an extreme measure that would define a fetus as a person. After polls closed on the East Coast and before they closed in San Francisco, I followed these results on my laptop – giddy with excitement, as if America had finally awaken from a coma and was back. I hadn’t felt this much hope and optimism about politics since 2008.
Once it became clear that Ohio’s Issue 2 – which would take away the right of the state’s public employees to collectively bargain – was going down in flames, Governor Kasich made a televised concession speech. It was defensive and defiant (he said he would “take a deep breath” and “assess where the voters are” at least three times), while trying to save face about how his intentions had “always just been” to “help create jobs” in Ohio.
Robert Parry: An Iraq-WMD Replay on Iran?
The American public is about to be inundated with another flood of “expert analysis” about a dangerous Middle Eastern country presumably hiding a secret nuclear weapons program that may require a military strike, although this time it is Iran, not Iraq.
In the near future, you will be seeing more satellite photos of non-descript buildings that experts will say are housing elements of a nuclear bomb factory. There will be more diagrams of supposed nuclear devices. Some of the same talking heads will reappear to interpret this new “evidence.”
You might even recognize some of those familiar faces from the more innocent days of 2002-2003 when they explained, with unnerving confidence, how Iraq’s Saddam Hussein surely had chemical and biological weapons and likely a nuclear weapons program, too.
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