“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: Greece as Victim
Ever since Greece hit the skids, we’ve heard a lot about what’s wrong with everything Greek. Some of the accusations are true, some are false – but all of them are beside the point. Yes, there are big failings in Greece’s economy, its politics and no doubt its society. But those failings aren’t what caused the crisis that is tearing Greece apart, and threatens to spread across Europe.
No, the origins of this disaster lie farther north, in Brussels, Frankfurt and Berlin, where officials created a deeply – perhaps fatally – flawed monetary system, then compounded the problems of that system by substituting moralizing for analysis. And the solution to the crisis, if there is one, will have to come from the same places.
New York Times Editorial: Fiscal Cliffs Notes
Word has it that senators from both parties have begun discussing ways to avert the “fiscal cliff” – the tax increases and spending cuts slated to take effect starting in January and totaling some $700 billion next year alone.
More power to them. If Congress does nothing to soften the blow of automatically higher taxes and lower spending, the changes would further devastate the economy and provoke a recession in 2013, according to the Congressional Budget Office and private analyses.
On the other hand, if lawmakers decided to undo or delay all of the scheduled changes – in effect, extending today’s policies indefinitely – there would be no progress toward long-term deficit reduction, and that would raise the risk of fiscal crisis in the future.
I was unable to watch J.P. Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon’s Senate testimony live the other day, so I had to get up yesterday morning and check it out on the Banking Committee’s web site. I had an inkling, from the generally slavish news reports about the hearing that started to come out Wednesday night, that it would be a hard thing to watch.
But I wasn’t prepared for just how bad it was. If not for Oregon’s Jeff Merkley, who was the only senator who understood the importance of taking the right tone with Dimon, the hearing would have been a total fiasco. Most of the rest of the senators not only supplicated before the blowdried banker like love-struck schoolgirls or hotel bellhops, they also almost all revealed themselves to be total ignoramuses with no grasp of the material they were supposed to be investigating.
Eric Margolis: Dangerous Games in Syria
America’s most vital national security concern is to maintain calm, productive relations with Russia.
The reason is obvious: Russia and the United States have thousands of nuclear warheads targeted on each other. Many are ready to launch in minutes. Compared to this threat, all of America’s other security issues are minor.
Avoiding confrontations with a major nuclear power is obvious. Yet the United States and Russia are ignoring such common sense in their increasingly heated war of words over Syria’s civil war.
John Nichols: Paul Ryan (and Mitt Romney) Versus the Nuns
Paul Ryan has made it clear enough that he’s interested in joining Mitt Romney’s 2012 Republican ticket. [..]
And the consideration will be fully in play on Monday, when Romney rolls his battleground-state bus tour into Ryan’s hometown of Janesville.
Ryan has become something of a defining figure for the bus tour, using media appearances to scope out its theme. In a bombastic statement circulated not by Ryan himself but by the Romney campaign, Ryan says, “On Day One, because we need a new president, Mitt Romney will fix this.” [..]
So it is that, on the day after Romney and Ryan visit Janesville, Catholic nuns will come to town as part of a national “Nuns on the Bus” tour organized to highlight efforts to ease the conditions of low-income Americans. Ryan has tried to suggest that his proposals are in keeping with Catholic social-justice teaching; the nuns do not agree.
Ben Adler: Romney, Republicans in a Bind Over Latinos and Obama’s Immigration Shift
President Obama executed a political masterstroke on Friday morning. He announced that undocumented immigrants brought here as children would be allowed to stay indefinitely if they complete high school or serve in the military. This is essentially the promise of the DREAM Act that Obama has urged Congress to pass and Republicans have blocked. The DREAM Act would offer the security of permanent residency, whereas Obama can only offer renewable work visas without legislation. (The executive branch can decide which undocumented immigrants to deport and which not to, but it cannot unilaterally create a path to citizenship.)
The DREAM Act is wildly popular among Latinos. The GOP has alienated most Latino voters by harboring an intensely anti-immigration movement on its right wing. Mitt Romney has been shameless about pandering to that element: he won anti-immigration crusader Tom Tancredo’s endorsement in 2008. In the recent Republican primaries he attacked staunch conservatives such as Newt Gingrich from the right on immigration, complaining that Gingrich admitted he had no intention of deporting grandmothers who have been here for over 25 years.
But now Romney is trying to win over Latinos. He recently announced the formation of a Latino outreach team and began sending out press releases in Spanish.
Julia Olmstead: Climate Change, Food Security and the G-20
From north to south, Mexican farmers are facing some of the most severe climate instability they’ve ever confronted. The northern states are suffering from what the Mexican government has called the worst drought the country has ever experienced; rain just won’t fall, and the crops that have been planted have dried up. In the south, they’ve had year after year of devastating floods, the result of which has been devastating topsoil loss on the uniformly hilly terrain
Elias Ventura, a small-holder corn farmer in the state of Oaxaca, told me about the hopelessness of this situation when we sat next to each other yesterday at the seminar IATP is co-hosting this week in Mexico City, “New Paradigms and Public Policies for Agriculture and Global Food Systems,” in advance of next week’s G-20 meeting in Los Cabos, Mexico. He said that he’s had either too much rain, or not enough, and that getting a good harvest under the unpredictable new weather extremes (that he said are the result of climate change) seemed like an impossibility. I asked him if the Mexican government provided any support when his crops failed and he gave me a resolute “No.” Not only would he be without the income that the crop would provide, but his community would have to adjust to a sharp decrease in food availability. This challenge Mexican farmers and rural communities face in the wake of climate change stands in stark contrast to the risk-management program the U.S. Senate has proposed for the 2012 Farm Bill, which would guarantee up to 90 percent of farmers’ revenue if crops fail or prices fall, but there are some similarities.
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