“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”.
Chris Hedges: This Is What Revolution Looks Like
Welcome to the revolution. Our elites have exposed their hand. They have nothing to offer. They can destroy but they cannot build. They can repress but they cannot lead. They can steal but they cannot share. They can talk but they cannot speak. They are as dead and useless to us as the water-soaked books, tents, sleeping bags, suitcases, food boxes and clothes that were tossed by sanitation workers Tuesday morning into garbage trucks in New York City. They have no ideas, no plans and no vision for the future.
Our decaying corporate regime has strutted in Portland, Oakland and New York with their baton-wielding cops into a fool’s paradise. They think they can clean up “the mess”-always employing the language of personal hygiene and public security-by making us disappear. They think we will all go home and accept their corporate nation, a nation where crime and government policy have become indistinguishable, where nothing in America, including the ordinary citizen, is deemed by those in power worth protecting or preserving, where corporate oligarchs awash in hundreds of millions of dollars are permitted to loot and pillage the last shreds of collective wealth, human capital and natural resources, a nation where the poor do not eat and workers do not work, a nation where the sick die and children go hungry, a nation where the consent of the governed and the voice of the people is a cruel joke.
New York Times Editorial: Europe’s Contagion
Two years of gross mismanagement of the euro-zone debt crisis have all too predictably produced a wider crisis of market confidence that now threatens the entire 17-nation euro zone. This week’s formation of new technocrat-led governments in Greece and Italy has not calmed fears. Practically every euro zone country is paying the price in higher interest costs and ebbing economic growth.
The only country that isn’t suffering – yet – is Germany, whose competitive export-driven economy feeds on foreign demand and an exchange rate held down by its neighbors’ troubles. But all European countries cannot be Germany and run net surpluses, especially if Berlin insists on policies that keep factories shuttered and workers unemployed.
And German leaders are wrong if they think their country will remain unscathed as its major trading partners and neighbors unravel.
In the pantheon of billionaires without shame, Michael Bloomberg, the Wall Street banker-turned-business-press-lord-turned-mayor, is now secure at the top. What is so offensive is that someone who abetted Wall Street greed, and benefited as much as anyone from it, has no compunction about ruthlessly repressing those who dare exercise their constitutional “right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances” that he helped to create.
You would think that a former partner at the investment bank Solomon Brothers, which originated mortgage-backed securities, a man who then partnered with Merrill Lynch in the high-speed computerized trading that has led to so much financial manipulation, would have some sense of his own culpability. Or at least that someone whose Wall Street career left him with a net worth of $19.5 billion would grasp the deep irony of his being the instrument for smashing Occupy Wall Street, the internationally acknowledged symbol of opposition to corporate avarice.
But only in America is the arrogance of the superrich so perfectly concealed by the pretense of democracy that the 12th richest man in the nation can suppress dissent against corporate rapacity and expect his brutal actions to be viewed not as a means of preserving his own class privilege but as bureaucratically necessary to providing sanitary streets.
E.J. Dionne, Jr.: The Easiest Way to Cut the Deficit
Here is a surefire way to cut $7.1 trillion from the deficit over the next decade. Do nothing.
That’s right. If Congress simply fails to act between now and Jan. 1, 2013, the tax cuts passed under President George W. Bush expire, $1.2 trillion in additional budget cuts go through under the terms of last summer’s debt ceiling deal, and a variety of other tax cuts also go away.
Knowing this, are you still sure that a “failure” by the congressional supercommittee to reach a deal would be such a disaster?
In an ideal world, of course, reasonable members of Congress could agree to a balanced package of long-term spending cuts and tax increases to begin bringing the deficit down, coupled with short-term measures to boost the economy.
Gail Collins: Something to Shoot For
You may have noticed that Congress is unpopular.
Really, really unpopular, actually. Only 9 percent of Americans approve of the way Congress has been doing its job, according the latest New York Times/CBS News poll. And you do sort of wonder about that 9 percent. Do you think they misheard and thought they were being asked: “Do you approve of Christmas?”
This week, the House of Representatives took time out of its busy schedule of going home for vacation to remind us, once again, why it has the strong support of about as many people who believe Rick Perry should be the next president of the United States. It approved a bill requiring states with strict gun regulations to honor concealed weapon carry permits issued in states where the gun rules are slightly more lax than the restrictions on who can dispense ice cream cones from a truck.
Richard D. Wolff: Criticism, Violence and Roosting Chickens
The 99 percent offered criticism of the 1 percent. They exposed and made clear what most Americans know. They struggled peacefully to inform and mobilize public opinion. They won huge numbers of hearts and minds. The 1 percent in the US did what their counterparts in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, and so on did earlier this year. First, they tried to deny the 99 percent the media access needed to reach the people. That failed. Then, they tried scattered police intimidation and pressure to stop the criticism. That failed. Then, Democratic Party operatives tried to convert the Occupiers to become Obama enthusiasts for next year’s election. That failed, too.
So now, the weapon of criticism wielded by the 99 percent suffers the counter criticism of violence by servants of the 1 percent. No one will miss which side resorted to organized, massive violence so early and so unnecessarily in this conflict. As in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, having failed to win hearts and minds, US government agencies cover their failure by resorting to violence. Chickens raised abroad return home to roost as they often do. Consider the image: New York Police Department machines and personnel destroy the free library that had functioned so well in Zuccotti Park.
William Rivers Pitt: Deadly Secrets
The world is made of deadly secrets. We are surrounded by them, enveloped in them, yet are seldom able to see them for what they are … and when we do see them, it is a scarring, revolting, horrifying experience of revelation. The child rape scandal still unfolding at Penn State University is a case in point. I have friends and family who attended that school, who love the place with all their hearts, and when the gruesome secret of Jerry Sandusky’s alleged barbaric behavior exploded on to the front pages of every newspaper, a little piece of their hearts died forever.
It scalds when you find out you’ve been deceived, when something you loved and trusted is revealed as being rotten straight to the core, but it is better to know than to be in the dark. Jerry Sandusky’s power over the children he allegedly molested came from the secrecy he operated in. As soon as that secrecy was removed, his power over those children was ended. No matter how sickening the details may be, how heart-wrenching it is to hear and read what is nothing more or less than the stuff of nightmares, it is always better to know.
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