“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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Ezra Klein: 14 reasons why this is the worst Congress ever
This week, the House of Representatives voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act. On its own, such a vote would be unremarkable. Republicans control the House, they oppose President Obama’s health reform law, and so they voted to get rid of it.
But here’s the punchline: This was the 33rd time they voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act.
Holding that vote once makes sense. Republicans had promised that much during the 2010 campaign. But 33 times? If doing the same thing twice and expecting a different result makes you insane, what does doing the same thing 33 times and expecting a different result make you?
Well, it makes you the 112th Congress.
Hating on Congress is a beloved American tradition. Hence Mark Twain’s old joke, “Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.” But the 112th Congress is no ordinary congress. It’s a very bad, no good, terrible Congress. It is, in fact, one of the very worst congresses we have ever had. Here, I’ll prove it: [..]
New York Times Editorial: What They Knew
As the Barclays rate-rigging scandal threatens to engulf other big banks, politicians in Washington and London are asking whether regulators allowed years of manipulation of benchmark interest rates that are tied to trillions of dollars of loans and other transactions worldwide. The answer is hiding in plain sight.
The rate-rigging settlement last month between Barclays and the Department of Justice includes a litany of findings that each side agrees are “true and accurate.” The document says that, in late 2007 and in 2008, Barclays employees raised concerns with the Bank of England, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and other officials that Barclays and the other banks involved in setting the key London interbank offered rate, or Libor, were reporting rates that “were too low” and did not accurately reflect the market. It also said that Barclays told regulators it wanted to report “honest rates” and would if other banks did, too.
How did the regulators respond? According to the settlement, the communications from Barclays “were not intended and were not understood as disclosures through which Barclays self-reported misconduct to authorities.”
If only. If only Brian Moynihan designed fashionable shoes, Jamie Dimon pitched a mean slider, and Lloyd Blankfein had written the song “Boyfriend” for Justin Bieber. Then they’d prosecute bank fraud.
The Justice Department used as many people to investigate one baseball player as it’s doing to pursuing Wall Street housing fraud. It has coordinated fifteen federal agencies to seize counterfeit goods worth $178 million, yet all but ignored a bankers’ crime wave which cost the global economy trillions.
Our largest (and, lest we forget, taxpayer-rescued) banks have already paid tens of billions of dollars to settle civil and criminal charges — and now there’s LIBOR. Yet there have been no arrests for a well-documented litany of charges which includes bribery, perjury, forgery, investor fraud, consumer fraud, and money-laundering for Mexican drug cartels.
Robert Reich: The Selling of American Democracy: The Perfect Storm
Who’s buying our democracy? Wall Street financiers, the Koch brothers, and casino magnates Sheldon Adelson and Steve Wynn.
And they’re doing much of it in secret.
It’s a perfect storm:
The greatest concentration of wealth in more than a century — courtesy “trickle-down” economics, Reagan and Bush tax cuts, and the demise of organized labor.
Combined with…
Unlimited political contributions — courtesy of Republican-appointed Justices Roberts, Scalia, Alito, Thomas, and Kennedy, in one of the dumbest decisions in Supreme Court history, Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission, along with lower-court rulings that have expanded it.
Combined with…
Roger Brabury: A World Without Coral Reefs
IT’S past time to tell the truth about the state of the world’s coral reefs, the nurseries of tropical coastal fish stocks. They have become zombie ecosystems, neither dead nor truly alive in any functional sense, and on a trajectory to collapse within a human generation. There will be remnants here and there, but the global coral reef ecosystem – with its storehouse of biodiversity and fisheries supporting millions of the world’s poor – will cease to be.
Overfishing, ocean acidification and pollution are pushing coral reefs into oblivion. Each of those forces alone is fully capable of causing the global collapse of coral reefs; together, they assure it. The scientific evidence for this is compelling and unequivocal, but there seems to be a collective reluctance to accept the logical conclusion – that there is no hope of saving the global coral reef ecosystem.
Doug Glanville: I Am What I Throw
Every year, my family honors my father with a scholarship given out in his memory to the best students from a church in my hometown, Teaneck, N.J. I always think about what to say to these young student-recipients, and it turns out the best inspiration comes from my dad’s own words. One of my favorite lines of his was “How you do one thing is how you do everything.” And that line now makes me think of the Mets pitcher R.A. Dickey.
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