“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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Kaura Flanders: ‘Jamie Dimon, You’re No Good. The People Need a Robin Hood’
Tuesday June 19th, saw the formal launch of an NNU-led national campaign for the Robin Hood Tax. Not just in DC, but all over the country, nurses and their allies showed up at branches and offices of JP Morgan Chase summoning the spirit of the 13th century British bandit.
As National Nurses United President Rose Ann deMoro explains: “It’s time to pay up for the damage you have done to our communities and our nation.”
It’s an idea whose time has long since come, they say, and there’s no better time to be talking about it than this moment. The Robin Hood tax, or financial transaction tax (also known as the Tobin tax after the US economist who first proposed a version of it,) would impose a levy on financial transactions, like sales of stocks, bonds and derivatives. It would take from the rich and generate revenues for poor public services, and stymie reckless speculation — like the gamble that lost JP Morgan that missing $2 billion — in the process.
Katrina vanden Heuvel: Progressive action can move the candidates
After a rough few weeks, filled with disappointing economic news and distracting political gaffes, President Obama finally had a rare throw-down-the-mike moment. In a highly anticipated campaign speech in Ohio last Thursday, he clearly and unequivocally framed the November election as a choice, not simply “between two candidates or two political parties, but between two paths for our country.”
The choice is indeed a stark one: a return to the failed Bush policies of unregulated markets and antitax fundamentalism that served the 1 percent as they failed the country; or concerted government action to rebuild the middle class as the foundation for sustained economic growth. As Obama said, “this is not another trivial Washington argument.”
Protests continue in Los Cabos, Mexico, during the G20 summit of world leaders, though learning of these demonstrations-especially if one lives within the United States-is quite a difficult task for consumers of the establishment media.
On Monday, activists unfurled a giant “one trillion dollar” bill to represent the money given in fossil fuel subsidies every year, and the group Avaaz.org says it collected more than 750,000 signatures for a petition calling for a shift to renewable energy.
But rather than discussing environmental policies or austerity measures, NBC’s Chuck Todd obsessed endlessly over the body language between Russian President Vladimir Putin and President Obama.
Victoria M. DeFrancesco Soto: Obama Boxes in Republicans on Immigration
What do the Republican Party of Texas and the president have in common? Not much of anything, except their support of an immigrant guest worker program. Just over a week before President Obama issued his executive order establishing a work authorization program for undocumented youth, the Texas GOP approved a platform calling on the federal government to implement a guest worker program. While the president did what the Lone Star Republicans asked, I doubt they’ll be sending a “thank you” card anytime soon (they also advocate for the repeal of birthright citizenship for people whose parents are not American citizens).
Republicans now find themselves in a tricky position. Up until last week they could say that they opposed the president on immigration because his reforms came with pathways to citizenship. Amnesty, or a pathway to citizenship, has been the greatest point of contention between Republicans and Democrats. Republicans believe that to give citizenship to those who came to this country illegally as children would reward those who broke the law, even if it was through no fault of their own. And what the president did last week was concede this non-negotiable.
Katha Politt: What’s the Matter With Creationism?
Do you know what the worst thing about the recent Gallup poll on evolution is? It isn’t that 46 percent of respondents are creationists (“God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last ten thousand years or so”). Or that 32 percent believe in “theistic evolution” (“Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process”). Or that only 15 percent said humans evolved and “God had no part in this process.” It isn’t even that the percentage of Americans with creationist views has barely budged since 1982, when it was 44 percent, with a small rise in the no-God vote (up from 9 percent) coming at the expense of the divine-help position (down from 38 percent). Or that 58 percent of Republicans are creationists, although that does explain a lot.
It’s that the proportion of college graduates who are creationists is exactly the same as for the general public. That’s right: 46 percent of Americans with sixteen long years of education under their belt believe the story of Adam and Eve is literally true. Even 25 percent of Americans with graduate degrees believe dinosaurs and humans romped together before Noah’s flood. Needless to say, this remarkable demonstration of educational failure attracts little attention from those who call for improving our schools.
Alice Slater: The Folly of Mindless Science
In 2000, I traveled to India, invited to speak at the organizing meeting of the Indian Coalition for Nuclear and Disarmament and Peace. About 600 organizations, including some 80 from Pakistan gathered in New Delhi to strategize for nuclear disarmament. India had quietly acquired the bomb and performed one nuclear test at Pokhran in 1974 but it was in 1998 that all hell broke out, with India exploding five underground tests, swiftly followed by six in Pakistan.
The trigger for this outbreak of nuclear testing in Asia was the refusal of the US Clinton Administration, under the pressure of the US nuclear weapons scientists, to negotiate a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty that precluded laboratory testing and “sub-critical” tests, where plutonium could be blown up underground with chemicals without causing a chain reaction-hence defined as a non-nuclear test by the US and the nuclear club. India warned the nuclear powers at the Commission on Disarmament (CD) where the CTBT was being negotiated, that it opposed the CTBT because it contained discriminatory “loopholes … exploited by some countries to continue their testing activity, using more sophisticated and advanced techniques”, and it would never agree to consensus on the treaty unless the ability to continue high-tech laboratory testing and computer-driven nuclear experiments was foreclosed.
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