“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: Things Are Not O.K.
In a better world – specifically, a world with a better policy elite – a good jobs report would be cause for unalloyed celebration. In the world we actually inhabit, however, every silver lining comes with a cloud. Friday’s report was, in fact, much better than expected, and has made many people, myself included, more optimistic. But there’s a real danger that this optimism will be self-defeating, because it will encourage and empower the purge-and-liquidate crowd. [..]
And every time we get a bit of good news, the purge-and-liquidate types pop up, saying that it’s time to stop focusing on job creation.
Sure enough, no sooner were the new numbers out than James Bullard, the president of the St. Louis Fed, declared that the new numbers make further Fed action to promote growth unnecessary. And the sad truth is that the good jobs numbers have definitely made it less likely that the Fed will take the expansionary action it should.
So here’s what needs to be said about the latest numbers: yes, we’re doing a bit better, but no, things are not O.K. – not remotely O.K. This is still a terrible economy, and policy makers should be doing much more than they are to make it better.
New York Times Editorail: Shall We Call It the ‘Bronze Standard’?
President Obama usually deserves high marks for his efforts to curb the spread of dangerous nuclear technology. But his administration’s decision not to insist on an important nonproliferation provision in nuclear cooperation agreements is a serious retreat.
Under American law, countries are required to negotiate detailed agreements before they are allowed to buy American nuclear reactors, fuel and services. The United States has signed many of them and many more are expected as additional countries pursue nuclear power.
The Obama administration set a rigorous new standard in 2009. It signed an agreement with the United Arab Emirates in which the U.A.E promised, in exchange for access to American technology, to forswear uranium enrichment and plutonium reprocessing. Those are the processes for making nuclear fuel for reactors – or weapons.
We have seen the world created by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, and it doesn’t work. Oh, yes, it works nicely for the wealthiest and most powerful people in the country, especially if they want to shroud their efforts to influence politics behind shell corporations. It just doesn’t happen to work if you think we are a democracy and not a plutocracy.
Two years ago, Citizens United tore down a century’s worth of law aimed at reducing the amount of corruption in our electoral system. It will go down as one of the most naive decisions ever rendered by the court.
The strongest case against judicial activism-against “legislating from the bench,” as former President George W. Bush liked to say-is that judges are not accountable for the new systems they put in place, whether by accident or design.
Ellen Brown: Why the AGs Must Not Settle: Robo-signing Is Just the Tip of the Iceberg
A foreclosure settlement between five major banks guilty of “robo-signing” and the attorneys general of the 50 states is pending for Monday, February 6th; but it is still not clear if all the AGs will sign. California was to get over half of the $25 billion in settlement money, and California AG Kamala Harris has withstood pressure to settle.
That is good. She and the other AGs should not sign until a thorough investigation has been conducted. The evidence to date suggests that “robo-signing” was not a mere technical default or sloppy business practice but was part and parcel of a much larger fraud, the fraud that brought down the whole economy in 2008. It is not just distressed homeowners but the entire economy that has paid the price, resulting in massive unemployment and a shrunken tax base, throwing state and local governments into insolvency and forcing austerity measures and cutbacks in government services across the nation.
The details of the robo-signing scam were spelled out in my last article, here. The robo-signing fraud and its implications are expanded on below.
Chris Hedges: The Cancer in Occupy
The Black Bloc anarchists, who have been active on the streets in Oakland and other cities, are the cancer of the Occupy movement. The presence of Black Bloc anarchists-so named because they dress in black, obscure their faces, move as a unified mass, seek physical confrontations with police and destroy property-is a gift from heaven to the security and surveillance state. The Occupy encampments in various cities were shut down precisely because they were nonviolent. They were shut down because the state realized the potential of their broad appeal even to those within the systems of power. They were shut down because they articulated a truth about our economic and political system that cut across political and cultural lines. And they were shut down because they were places mothers and fathers with strollers felt safe.
Black Bloc adherents detest those of us on the organized left and seek, quite consciously, to take away our tools of empowerment. They confuse acts of petty vandalism and a repellent cynicism with revolution. The real enemies, they argue, are not the corporate capitalists, but their collaborators among the unions, workers’ movements, radical intellectuals, environmental activists and populist movements such as the Zapatistas. Any group that seeks to rebuild social structures, especially through nonviolent acts of civil disobedience, rather than physically destroy, becomes, in the eyes of Black Bloc anarchists, the enemy. Black Bloc anarchists spend most of their fury not on the architects of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) or globalism, but on those, such as the Zapatistas, who respond to the problem. It is a grotesque inversion of value systems.
Richard Reeves: Romney Hasn’t Won Yet
Now that Mitt Romney has about wrapped up the Republican nomination for president. … What? He hasn’t? They changed the rules?
The Republican Party, which did indeed change its nomination rules and has had to try to deal with new campaign finance circumstances, is a classic example of being careful what you ask for-or is it unintended consequences? By the old rules, Romney would be a lock. Now, he will still probably win, but the party may be the focus of weeks or months more of the ugliness many of us have enjoyed watching through these past months. [..]
The party decided to do something about it and did. The most important changes were to slow down delegate selection in important states and move the Republican “Super Tuesday” to March. It worked. Romney has dominated, but there are enough contests and candidates to keep it interesting-to say the least.
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