“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.
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Paul Krugman: Egos and Immorality
In the wake of a devastating financial crisis, President Obama has enacted some modest and obviously needed regulation; he has proposed closing a few outrageous tax loopholes; and he has suggested that Mitt Romney’s history of buying and selling companies, often firing workers and gutting their pensions along the way, doesn’t make him the right man to run America’s economy.
Wall Street has responded – predictably, I suppose – by whining and throwing temper tantrums. And it has, in a way, been funny to see how childish and thin-skinned the Masters of the Universe turn out to be. Remember when Stephen Schwarzman of the Blackstone Group compared a proposal to limit his tax breaks to Hitler’s invasion of Poland? Remember when Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase characterized any discussion of income inequality as an attack on the very notion of success?
New York Times Editorial: The Crisis This Time
They blew it, again. With Greece in meltdown, raising fears of cascading bank insolvencies and deepening recession, Europe’s leaders failed again this week to agree on the ambitious initiatives needed to quell the crisis.
For a few days before their Wednesday dinner meeting, it sounded as if Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany might be ready to change her all-austerity-all-the-time tune. France’s new president, François Hollande, had campaigned and won on a pro-growth agenda, and Ms. Merkel was suddenly suggesting that some stimulus for Greece and others to spur growth might be possible.
But, on Wednesday, she was again insisting on the same draconian budget cuts and the same unreachable targets as the price of aid to Greece and other indebted euro-zone nations.
Austerity protests have become part of the new global landscape, a reality underscored by a wave of recent protests in Philadelphia and Quebec.
More than 1,000 people rallied Wednesday to protest the Philadelphia District’s plans to “transform schools,” a pleasant euphemism generally meaning school closures and mass layoffs. The Philly district plans to possibly lay off 2,700 blue-collar workers, including every member of SEIU B2BJ Local 1201, the city school union representing bus assistants, cleaners, mechanics and other workers. [..]
For over 100 days now, protests have raged in response to Quebec Premier Jean Charest and his Liberal Party’s plans to raise tuition fees at universities by a whopping 82 percent, or $1,700, over five years, a move that would price many students out of an education.
The police have responded by making mass arrests. More than 300 protesters were arrested overnight on Sunday following the passage of the draconian law, Bill 78, that places restrictions on demonstrations and suspended classes at strike-bound universities, the AP reports.
Robert Reich: Obama has to Explain Why Fairness is Essential to Growth (and Why Some Democrats Have to Stop Believing Otherwise)
The Cory Booker imbroglio has ignited a silly but potentially pernicious debate in the Democratic Party between so-called “pro-growth centrists” who want the President to focus on how well he’s done getting the economy back on its feet after the Bush administration almost knocked it out, and “pro-fairness populists” who want him to focus on the nation’s widening inequality and Wall Street’s (and Romney’s) continuing role in generating profits for a few at the expense of almost everyone else.
According to the National Journal’s Josh Kraushaar, for example:
Conversations with liberal activists and labor officials reveal an unmistakable hostility toward the pro-business, free-trade, free-market philosophy that was in vogue during the second half of the Clinton administration….. Moderate Democratic groups and officials, meanwhile, privately fret about the party’s leftward drift and the Obama campaign’s embrace of an aggressively populist message… [T]hey wish the administration’s focus was on growth over fairness.
This is pure bunk – or should be.
Fairness isn’t inconsistent with growth; it’s essential to it. The only way the economy can grow and create more jobs is if prosperity is more widely shared.
Robert Sheer: Do the Bain Hustle
Obviously Barack Obama was right in criticizing Mitt Romney’s stewardship of Bain Capital. How else to evaluate the business experience that Romney has made a central tenet of his campaign?
As Obama put it all too accurately: “My opponent, Governor Romney-his main calling card for why he thinks he should be president is his business experience. He’s not going out there touting his experience in Massachusetts. He’s saying: ‘I’m a business guy. I know how to fix it.’ ”
And the fixing of the beleaguered companies acquired under Romney’s leadership at Bain Capital involved the very practices that have led to the loss of good American jobs to ensure the outrageous rewards that made Romney so wealthy.
E. J. Dionne: Conservatives used to care about community. What happened?
To secure his standing as the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, Mitt Romney has disowned every sliver of moderation in his record. He’s moved to the right on tax cuts and twisted himself into a pretzel over the health-care plan he championed in Massachusetts – because conservatives are no longer allowed to acknowledge that government can improve citizens’ lives.
Romney is simply following the lead of Republicans in Congress who have abandoned American conservatism’s most attractive features: prudence, caution and a sense that change should be gradual. But most important of all, conservatism used to care passionately about fostering community, and it no longer does. This commitment now lies buried beneath slogans that lift up the heroic and disconnected individual – or the “job creator” – with little concern for the rest.
Pratap Chatterjee: How Obama Helped Authorize Shell’s Drilling the Arctic
President Barack Obama personally helped Shell obtain authorization to drill for oil in Alaska, according to a 4,678 word front page article in the New York Times. This is a startling break from decades long U.S. policy which regarded the environment in the Arctic region too fragile to tamper with.
“(T)he president concluded that the reward was worth the risk, and created an unusual interagency group, overseen by a midlevel White House aide, to clear Shell’s path through the often fractious federal regulatory bureaucracy,” write John Broder and Clifford Krauss.
In November 2010, almost two years after he was elected, Obama told William K. Reilly and Carol M. Browner, two former heads of the Environmental Protection Agency, what he wanted them to do. “Where are you coming out on the offshore Arctic?” he asked. “What that told me,” Reilly told the New York Times, “was that the president had already gotten deeply into this issue and was prepared to go forward.”
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