“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”.
Wednesday is Ladies’ Day
Katrina vanden Heuvel: It’s accountability time for banks and Wall Street
There’s a scene in the HBO adaptation of Andrew Ross Sorkin’s book “Too Big to Fail” where Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s adviser suggests he call Warren Buffett to ask for help with Lehman Brothers. “As what?” responds Paulson. “Warren’s friend? His former banker? The treasury secretary? No!” In the movie, Paulson understands the difference, that there are bright lines that he should not cross. In real life, it turns out, these were not the kind of distinctions Paulson was particularly concerned about making.
Missing from that movie – and other first drafts of recent financial history – was a bombshell recently uncovered by Bloomberg’s Richard Teitelbaum: Paulson gave his hedge fund friends inside information about government plans to seize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, seven weeks before it happened. Common stock and some preferred stock would be wiped out in the process, he told them, meaning a bet against the giants was a bet that could make them millions. Those without connections to Paulson didn’t get a tip-off; worse, they got the opposite. On the same day that Paulson met with the hedge funds, he told the New York Times that markets would soon have reason for renewed confidence in both enterprises.
Wow, I have to hand it to Obama’s spinmeisters. They’ve managed to find a way to resurrect his old hopium branding by calling it something completely different that still has many of the old associations. [..]
Team Obama may have planned to wheel this new, improved image out later, with the timing accelerated by Judge Jed Rakoff’s decision against a proposed $285 million settlement between the SEC and Citigroup over a bum CDO in which Citi allegedly wielded considerable influence over its contents so it could bet against it. The SEC has gone on a full bore media offensive against Rakoff, with enforcement chief Robert Khuzami’s becoming uncharacteristically accessible to the media and also using scheduled speaking engagements to take issue with Rakoff’s ruling. And on top of Khuzami’s own efforts, the media has taken up some other dubious plants by the SEC. The biggest howler is a story in the Wall Street Journal earlier this week. Titled “Financial Crimes Bedevil Prosecutors,” not one of the sources for the story is a prosecutor!
There is a growing consensus here in Durban that the United States is the main impediment to progress at these crucial talks. A consortium of 16 of the major environmental groups in the U.S. wrote a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who directly oversees the U.S. climate negotiations. They pointed out that, while President Barack Obama originally campaigned on a promise to lead in global climate negotiations, “three years later, America risks being viewed not as a global leader on climate change, but as a major obstacle to progress.”
The fossil-fuel industry exerts enormous influence over the U.S. government, and over the U.S. public, with tens of millions of dollars on lobbying and PR campaigns to shape public opinion. Kumi Naidoo, who has been jailed many times for his activism, compared the struggle against apartheid to the fight against climate change: “If people around the world can actually unite-trade unions, social movements, religious leaders, environmental groups and so on, which we saw in the march on Saturday-I pray and hope that we will have a similar kind of miracle to get these climate negotiations to deliver a fair, ambitious and legally binding outcome.”
Naomi Wolf: The American hangover
Trends in American leisure activities reflect a change – frugality and making do are in, gaudy consumerism is out.
New York, NY – As turmoil stalks the US financial markets and protests fill its streets, Americans’ lifestyle choices are evolving in a telling way: Once seen by the rest of the world as an exuberant teenager – the globe’s extrovert, exporter of rock ‘n’ roll and flashy Hollywood movies – Americans are now becoming decidedly withdrawn, or at least inward-looking. Trends in leisure activities reflect that change: Frugality and making do are in; gaudy consumerism is out. [..]
Ronald Reagan asserted in 1980 that it was “morning in America”, but in the US now, it is the morning after. This drive towards an off-the-grid, eat-what-you-raise, bike-there-on-your-own, solar-powered collective fantasy is inevitable: Americans were pumped full of hope that more consumption would make them happier, and instead were left with a pile of debt. They were asked to admire the top of the income pyramid, only to find that they were looking at a pyramid scheme.
Maureen Dowd: Silence Is Golden
Hello chatter, my old friend.
The sounds of silence are a dim recollection now, like mystery, privacy and paying attention to one thing – or one person – at a time.
As far back as half-a-century ago, the Swiss philosopher Max Picard warned: “Nothing has changed the nature of man so much as the loss of silence,” once as natural as the sky and air.
As fiendish little gadgets conspire to track our movements and record our activities wherever we go, producing a barrage of pictures of everything we’re doing and saying, our lives will unroll as one long instant replay.
There will be fewer and fewer of what Virginia Woolf called “moments of being,” intense sensations that stand apart from the “cotton wool of daily life.”
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