“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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New York Times Editorial: The Anti-Union Roberts Court
The Supreme Court’s ruling this week in Knox v. Service Employees International Union
(pdf) is one of the most brazen of the Roberts court. It shows how defiantly the five justices act in advancing the aggressive conservatism of their majority on the court. [..]The court said the union infringed on the free speech rights of the nonmembers by not giving them the chance to prevent the use of their dues to support expressions of political views unrelated to collective bargaining. Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg agreed with this narrow judgment only.
This produced a 7-to-2 ruling on that specific question. But Justice Samuel Alito Jr., writing an opinion representing the conservative five only, went far beyond this principle, which has been settled law since 1986.
David Cay Johnston: America’s Long Slope Down
A broad swath of official economic data shows that America and its people are in much worse shape than when we paid higher taxes, higher interest rates and made more of the manufactured goods we use.
The numbers since the turn of the millennium point to even worse times ahead if we stay the course. Let’s look at the official numbers in today’s dollars and then what can be done to change course. [..]
We need to recognize that the tax cutters were snake oil salesmen, the Federal Reserve an enabler of damaging debts and that bilateral trade deals are written of, by and for global financiers, not workers.
To paraphrase the Huey Lewis song, we need a new policy.
Eric Schneiderman was right.
New York State’s Attorney General told an audience at the Take Back the American Dream Conference that we need a “transformational politics” that will change the way we look at ourselves, our society, and our economy. [..]
Schneiderman’s distinction between “transformational” and “transactional” politics was also valid: Voters don’t just want to see a legislative accomplishment — any accomplishment — regardless of its impact. They want to see accomplishments that reflect who we are as a people, and which advance us as a society.
But transformation will need some involvement from the world of “transactional” activity, too. As I told the group, I can’t think of any single act that would be more “transformative” that the arrest of a senior Wall Street executive.
Daniel Denvir: Austerity-Crazed Republicans, Big Banks Are Killing Public Transportation
Americans have since the second world war built an entire way of life around the automobile. It turns out, however, that our faith was an unsteady one and, in the face of high gas prices and young people’s increasing preference for urban living, we are heading back to subways, trains, buses and trolleys in droves. In the first quarter of this year, we took an additional 125.7m trips on mass transit compared with the same time period last year – an increase of 5%.
Yet, Republican-led austerity is pushing public transit, like most everything public, into severe fiscal and physical crisis. All at the very moment when we want and need it the most. Nationwide, 80% of mass transit systems either did move to boost fares and cut services or considered doing so in 2010, according to the most recent report from the American Public Transportation Association.
Charles M Blow: Bullies on the Bus
“Making the Bus Monitor Cry.”
That’s the name of the video. It’s more than 10 minutes long, but if you make it through more than three of them with your eyes not getting misty and your blood not boiling then you are a rock, or at least your heart is. [..]
But what, if anything, does this say about society at large? Many things one could argue, but, for me, it is a remarkably apt metaphor for this moment in the American discourse in which hostility has been drawn out into the sunlight.
Those boys are us, or at least too many of us: America at it’s ugliest. It is that part of society that sees the weak and vulnerable as worthy of derision and animus.
Davis Sirota: Don’t Fall for Corporate Blackmail
With states looking to raise taxes on oil and gas production and better regulate the most controversial drilling practices, we can expect industry to soon trot out its tried and true argument against such moves. As they did here in Colorado a few years back when our governor proposed a hike in severance levies, oil and gas companies will promise to leave any place where taxes or regulation increase.
Such blackmail deftly plays to our reflexive fears of job outsourcing-and those fears are understandable. Indeed, in a “free-trade” era that has seen corporate decision-makers dream of putting “every plant you own on a barge” and shifting production to the lowest-wage nations on earth (a direct quote from GE’s then-CEO Jack Welch), offshoring is very real in too many industries.
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