“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”.
New York Times Editorial: Cars, Trains and Partisan Posturing
The transportation bill is vital, providing billions of dollars to states and communities to build and repair roads, ensure bridges are safe and improve mass transit for millions of commuters. It also sustains some 2.9 million jobs, many in the hard-pressed construction industry.
The Senate gets the importance of this legislation – and the danger of playing partisan games with it. The House does not.
The bipartisan Senate bill calls for investing $109 billion on critical projects over two years. This would keep spending at present levels by supplementing gas-tax revenues – the main source of financing for transportation programs – with money from other parts of the federal budget. In recent years, gas taxes have dwindled even as construction costs rose.
The House bill, by stark contrast, would extend current financing for three months, but makes no provision for sustaining programs over the long haul. The problems don’t end there.
Michael Weibot: Breaking the Eurozone’s Self-Defeating Cycle of Austerity
It has become a ritual: every six months, I debate the IMF at their annual meetings, the last two times represented by their deputy director for Europe. It takes place in the same room of that giant greenhouse-looking World Bank building on 19th Street in Washington, DC. And each time, the IMF’s defense of its policies in the eurozone does not get any stronger.
Maybe, it’s because most economists at the IMF don’t really believe in what they are doing. The fund is, after all, the subordinate partner of the so-called “troika” – with the European Commission and the European Central Bank (ECB) – calling the shots. And most fund economists know their basic national income accounting: fiscal tightening is going to make these economies worse, as it has been doing. Those that have tightened their budgets the most – for example, Greece and Ireland – have shrunk the most, as would be predicted.
The austerity fetish of those making economic decisions is killing Europe’s economy.
The last few days have provided further proof.
“Spain officially slipped back into recession for the second time in three years Monday, after following the German remedy of deep retrenchment in public outlays, joining Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and the Czech Republic,” the New York Times reported this week.
And more bad news has followed.
“Britain slid back into recession in the first quarter of the year, according to official figures released Wednesday, undercutting the government’s argument that its austerity program was working,” says today’s Times.
But those in charge seem to be eternally clueless.
Michelle Chen: Depression Symptoms: What’s Behind Europe’s Spike in Suicides
The metaphor of suicide has been used to depict the downward spiral surrounding countries bludgeoned by the economic crisis-particularly U.S. and Eurozone communities plagued by epidemic joblessness and a rash of budget cuts. Now the term literally describes the psychological dimension of the crisis, according to studies on suicide rates.
Some symptoms of the social despair have been grimly spectacular. Greece was jolted one recent morning after aging pensioner Dimitris Christoulas put a pistol to his head in Athens’s main square. In 2010 Americans were shaken by the suicide-by-plane of Andrew Stack, whose anger at the political establishment propelled him into an Austin office complex. Poorer regions have flared with public self-immolations, particularly in the communities of the “Arab Spring” where many youth come to see life as a dead-end street. Underlying these more dramatic examples are statistical patterns that reflect society’s unraveling.
A recently published Lancet study showed spikes in suicide across Europe during the recession. While many factors could contribute to this pattern, researchers found a significant correlation between unemployment and suicide trends.
Robert C. Koehler: States of Fear in a World of Injustice
This was the headline: “Zimmerman, Martin’s parents to face off in court.”
The words, of course, merely summed up a moment in the news cycle last week. We, the news-consuming public, were primed – by CBS, but it could have been any mainstream outlet – for a tidbit of potential drama the next day in the hottest murder trial around right now. But in the process, we were also silently reminded, yet again, that everything is spectacle. At the level at which we call ourselves a nation, nothing is serious, not even matters of life and death
There’s something so painful about all this – painful beyond the horror of the crime itself, or the national murder rate. The 24-7 media trivialize the stakes and gleefully report the “courtroom drama” as a sporting event; but even more distressingly, the legal bureaucracy swings into motion without the least awareness of any value beyond its own procedures. It all happens with a certainty of purpose that generates the illusion that things are under control and social order prevails.
But none of this has anything to do with what social order actually requires when harm has occurred, which is . . . healing.
Scientists Cry Fowl Over the FDA’s Regulatory Failure
Overuse of antibiotics in factory farming kills thousands every year, yet the industry is force-feeding chickens pharmaceuticals
In 2005, the antibiotic fluoroquinolone was banned by the FDA for use in poultry production. The reason for the ban was an alarming increase in antibiotic-resistant campylobacter bacteria in the meat of chickens and turkeys – “superbugs”, which can lead to a lethal form of meningitis that our current antibiotics are no longer effective against.
Antibiotic-resistant infections kill tens of thousands of people every year, more than die of AIDS, according to the Infectious Diseases Society of America. This problem is on the rise because antibiotics are recklessly overused, especially in the commercial livestock industry, where 80% of all antibiotics manufactured in the US end up.
Fluoroquinolone used to be fed to chickens primarily to stimulate their growth. But why did the banned substance show up recently in eight of 12 samples of “feather meal”, the ground-down plumage leftover from commercial poultry production?
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