“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”.
Amy Goodman: Black in White Plains: The Police Killing of Kenneth Chamberlain
“My name is Kenneth Chamberlain. This is my sworn testimony. White Plains police are going to come in here and kill me.”
And that’s just what they did.
In the early hours of Saturday, Nov. 19, 2011, U.S. Marine veteran Kenneth Chamberlain Sr. accidentally hit his LifeAid medical-alert pendant, presumably while sleeping. The 68-year-old retired corrections officer had a heart condition, but wasn’t in need of help that dawn. Within two hours, the White Plains, N.Y., police department broke down his apartment door and shot him dead. Chamberlain was African-American. As with Trayvon Martin, the black teen recently killed in Florida, there are recordings of the events, recordings that include a racial slur directed at the victim.
Henry A. Giroux: Hoodie Politics: Trayvon Martin and Racist Violence in Post-Racial America
The killing of a young African-American boy, Trayvon Martin, by an overzealous white Hispanic security guard who appears to have capitulated to the dominant post-racial presumption that equates the culture of criminality with the culture of blackness, has devolved into a spectacle. While there is plenty of moral outrage to go around, a recognition that racism is alive and well in America, and that justice has been hijacked by those who can afford it, the broader and more fundamental questions and analyses are not being raised. Complex issues get lost when spectacular events are taken over by a media frenzy that feeds on sound bites and simplified answers. Yet, under the intense spotlight on the personal defects of the two men involved, important issues such as the social and human costs of a corporate-driven gun culture, the privatization of security forces, the price paid by poor minority youth whose every act is criminalized, and the crimes committed through an all-embracing racism are shrouded in darkness, off stage and invisible. To bolster the incredulous claim that we live in a post-racial society, crimes such as these are often isolated from a larger set of socio-economic forces that might provide a broader understanding of both the needless death of a 17-year-old black youth but also its relationship to a much more all-encompassing war on youth that is causing massive suffering and needless deaths among many young people in America.
Hallelujah, Washington has finally heard the people’s cries for jobs! In an urgent bipartisan push, Democrats and Republicans have joined hands across the aisle to pass the JOBS Act. In this time of “The Great Hurt” – with widespread unemployment, middle-class incomes tumbling and the price of gasoline skyrocketing – we can all applaud our stalwarts in the capital city for meeting the No. 1 need of America’s hard-hit economy: deregulating Wall Street.
Huh? I thought this was a jobs bill?
We’ll get to that, but first (as always) Wall Street bankers must be served. Yes, them. The same priests of unmitigated arrogance who caused the disastrous financial crash that continues to rumble across our land. The same Wall Streeters we bailed out with trillions of public dollars. That Wall Street is now sulking and skulking around the U.S. Capitol, insisting that it is an economic victim, held back from its profiteering potential by government regulations to protect the public from finaglers and fraudsters. “Free Wall Street,” is their cry!
Simon Johnson: Volcker Rule Would Cause Irreparable Damage to The Muppets – And Much More Broadly
A major new research report – released this weekend by the renowned international consulting firm, IMS – finds conclusively that implementation of the proposed Volcker Rule would damage not just the irreplaceable Muppets but also “all children-oriented television or other media-based educational program content.”
The logic in the report is straightforward and, quite frankly, compelling. The Volcker Rule – which aims to limit proprietary trading and excessive risk-taking by the country’s largest banks – would reduce the ability of “too big to fail” institutions to bet heavily on the price of commodities used to produce puppets (mostly cotton, but also apparently wood, aluminum, and some rare earths.)
“In response to the changing demands of their customers, banks have expanded their role of providing financial resources and services to include risk management and intermediation services to [various kinds of puppets]” (p. ES2)
Robert Reich: The Choice in 2012: Social Darwinism or a Decent Society
The returns aren’t all in yet on today’s Republican primaries but President Obama didn’t wait. He kicked off his 2012 campaign against Mitt Romney with a hard-hitting speech centered on the House Republicans’ budget plan – which Romney has enthusiastically endorsed.
That plan, by the way, is the most radical reverse-Robin Hood proposal propounded by any political party in modern America. It would save millionaires at least $150,000 a year in taxes while gutting Medicaid, Medicare, Food Stamps, transportation, child nutrition, college aid, and almost everything else average and lower-income Americans depend on.
Tom Engelhardt: Data Mining for a New American World
I was out of the country only nine days, hardly a blink in time, but time enough, as it happened, for another small, airless room to be added to the American national security labyrinth. On March 22nd, Attorney General Eric Holder and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, Jr. signed off on new guidelines allowing the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), a post-9/11 creation, to hold on to information about Americans in no way known to be connected to terrorism-about you and me, that is-for up to five years. (Its previous outer limit was 180 days.) This, Clapper claimed, “will enable NCTC to accomplish its mission more practically and effectively.”
Joseph K., that icon of single-lettered anonymity from Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial, would undoubtedly have felt right at home in Clapper’s Washington. George Orwell would surely have had a few pungent words to say about those anodyne words “practically and effectively,” not to speak of “mission.”
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