“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”.
Nicolas D. Kristof: Born to Not Get Bullied
When she was in high school, Lady Gaga says, she was thrown into a trash can.
The culprits were boys down the block, she told me in an interview on Wednesday in which she spoke – a bit reluctantly – about the repeated cruelty of peers during her teenage years. [..]
Searching for ways to ease the trauma of adolescence for other kids, Lady Gaga came to Harvard University on Wednesday for the formal unveiling of her Born This Way Foundation, meant to empower kids and nurture a more congenial environment in and out of schools.
Lady Gaga is on to something important here. Experts from scholars to Education Secretary Arne Duncan are calling for more focus on bullying not only because it is linked to high rates of teen suicide, but also because it is an impediment to education.
Robert Reich: Stop Starving Public Universities and Shrinking the Middle Class
Last week Rick Santorum called the President “a snob” for wanting everyone to get a college education (in fact, Obama never actually called for universal college education but only for a year or more of training after high school).
Santorum needn’t worry. America is already making it harder for young people of modest means to attend college. Public higher education is being starved, and the middle class will shrink even more as a result.
FROM the 1940s to the 1970s, organized labor helped build a middle-class democracy in the United States. The postwar period was as successful as it was because of unions, which helped enact progressive social legislation from the Civil Rights Act to Medicare. Since then, union representation of American workers has fallen, in tandem with the percentage of income going to the middle class. Broadly shared prosperity has been replaced by winner-take-all plutocracy.
Corporations will tell you that the American labor movement has declined so significantly – to around 7 percent of the private-sector work force today, from 35 percent of the private sector in the mid-1950s – because unions are obsolete in a global economy, where American workers have to compete against low-wage nonunion workers in other countries. But many vibrant industrial democracies, including Germany, have strong unions despite facing the same pressures from globalization. [..]
In fact, the greatest impediment to unions is weak and anachronistic labor laws. It’s time to add the right to organize a labor union, without employer discrimination, to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, because that right is as fundamental as freedom from discrimination in employment and education. This would enshrine what the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. observed in 1961 at an A.F.L.-C.I.O. convention: “The two most dynamic and cohesive liberal forces in the country are the labor movement and the Negro freedom movement. Together, we can be architects of democracy.”
Jim Hightower: The Keystone XL Flim-Flam
For Rep. Allen West, the skyrocketing price of gasoline is not just a policy matter, it’s a personal pocketbook issue. The Florida tea-party Republican (who, of course, blames President Obama for the increase) recently posted a message on Facebook wailing that it’s now costing him $70 to fill his Hummer H3.
It’s hard to feel the pain of a whining, $174,000-a-year congress-critter, but millions of regular Americans really are feeling pain at the pump – especially truck drivers, cabbies, farmer, commuters and others whose livelihoods are tethered to the whims of Big Oil. It’s an especially cynical political stunt, then, for congressional Republicans, GOP presidential wannabes and a chorus of right-wing mouthpieces to use gas price pain as a whip for lashing out at Obama’s January decision to reject the infamous Keystone XL pipeline.
Matthew Rothschild: Don’t Lower the Corporate Tax Rate
Republicans love to talk about how high the U.S. corporate tax rate is, and how bad that is.
But when you examine their arguments, their case falls apart.
They predicate it on the fact that the current tax rate is 35 percent. But because of creative accounting and loophole sneaking, the actual rate that corporations paid last year was just 12.1 percent.
Many of our biggest companies paid nothing in corporate taxes, or even got rebates.
Take GE, for example. In the last decade, it made $81 billion in profits but paid only 2.3 percent in corporate income taxes. And over the last five years, it got $2.7 billion in rebates.
So for all the crying over how high the corporate tax rate is, it’s pretty much a myth. As Robert Reich points out, corporate taxes used to account for one out of every three dollars of federal tax revenue back in Eisenhower’s day. Now they account for only one out of every ten dollars.
New York Times Editorial: Romney Wins, the Middle Class Loses
Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum fought each other to nearly a draw in the Michigan primary and may actually have to split its delegates, but together they may have lost Michigan for their party by running campaigns that were completely disconnected from the lives of middle-class voters and pushed ever farther to the right margins of American politics.
A month ago, the state was rated a tossup in this November’s general election. But after voters got a taste of the Republican field, Michigan seems to be on President Obama’s side of the ledger, along with Wisconsin. Both elected Republican governors in 2010, but large numbers of blue-collar voters have turned away from the party after realizing how little regard it has for their interests.
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