“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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Robert Naiman: Let’s Help #WikiLeaks Liberate the Trans-Pacific Partnership Negotiating Text
On September 6, negotiators will go to Leesburg, Virginia, for the latest round of secretive talks on the “Trans-Pacific Partnership” agreement. This proposed agreement threatens access to essential medicines in developing countries (pdf), threatens environmental regulations (pdf), and threatens internet freedom. Even Members of Congress and their staff have been blocked from seeing the draft text, while corporate representatives have been allowed to see it.
Americans – and citizens of the other countries that would be covered by the agreement – have a right to see what our governments are proposing to do. Parts of the draft negotiating text have been leaked. But don’t we have a right to see the whole text before the agreement is signed? After the agreement is signed, if there’s anything in it we don’t like, we’ll be told that it’s too late to change it.
Just Foreign Policy is issuing a reward if WikiLeaks publishes the TPP negotiating text. Instead of getting one rich person to put up the money, we’re “crowdsourcing” the reward. We figure, if many people pledge a little bit, that will not only potentially raise a helpful sum of money for WikiLeaks, it will show that the opposition to this secretive agreement is widespread.
Kevin Gosztola: Why Did Ecuador Grant Asylum to Julian Assange?
On the morning of August 16, in the face of rumors that British authorities were considering storming the Ecuadorean embassy in London to arrest Julian Assange, Ecuador’s Foreign Minister, Ricardo Patiño, announced that his country will grant the WikiLeaks founder diplomatic asylum. He declared that his government endorsed the “fears” expressed by Assange that he could face political persecution if sent to Sweden, and that such asylum would protect him from the possibility of being extradited to the United States. [..]
Patiño, like many of Assange’s supporters, also acknowledged that Assange must answer for the allegations of sexual assault that have been leveled against him, but added that Swedish prosecutors have undermined his procedural rights during their investigation. Ultimately, he said, “if Mr. Assange is reduced to custody in Sweden (as is customary in this country), [it] would start a chain of events that would prevent the further protective measures taken to avoid possible extradition to a third country.”
The lines on Wednesday were huge, like the ribbon of humanity at Navy Pier in Chicago that snaked through halls and stairwells and along the pier and then stretched, amazingly, out to and under Lake Shore Drive. Young illegal immigrants by the tens of thousands formed similar lines in other cities across the country. They lined up outside churches and nonprofit agencies, holding paperwork and folders, to learn more about a new Obama administration policy that would protect them from deportation and give them permission to work.
It was the first day of applications for the administration’s “deferred action” program, which does not give legal status to unauthorized immigrants, just a two-year reprieve from expulsion. It’s simply a step away from indiscriminate deportations, a reordering of enforcement priorities to shield law-abiding young people who were brought here illegally as children.
It’s also an application of common sense. But to Mr. Obama’s more strident critics, Wednesday was no less than the beginning of the end of the Constitution. One of them called it “A-Day,” for amnesty, and invoked the fall of the Roman Empire.
Donna Smith: Dead Woman Working: American Dream Died Long Ago
It was a slow and torturous death, my American dream. And for millions of others, I am guessing it is the same. Nothing this current round of politicos is planning to do can restore it. Just like there is nothing to being a little bit pregnant, there is nothing anyone can do to breathe life back into what once seemed possible. Now I just hang on waiting to die.
This piece is not about who will or will not be our president or vice president, as after voting in every election since the 1970s, I am pretty sure what I need and want isn’t coming from any of them.
When I launched into my adult life as a rather average American woman, I held dear all the illusions that I could work my way out of any financial or societal calamity if only I had the spirit and drive to do so. I was so wrong. I was born into a working class family where my parents struggled and worked hard to make sure I was positioned with an education and life experiences to live a better life than they had and perhaps struggle a little less. It was all for naught.
David Suzuki: How Environmental Destruction Causes Illnesses and Diseases
Preventing illness is the best way to get health-care costs down. So why aren’t governments doing more to protect the environment? We’ve long known that environmental factors contribute to disease, especially contamination of air, water, and soil. Scientists are now learning the connection is stronger than we realized.
New research shows that 60 percent of emerging infectious diseases affecting humans-those that rapidly increase in incidence or geographic range-start with animals, two-thirds from wild animals. Lyme disease, West Nile virus, Ebola, SARS, AIDS… these are just a few of the hundreds of epidemics that have spread from animals to people. A study by the International Livestock Research Institute concludes that more than two-million people a year are killed by diseases that originated with wild and domestic animals. Many more become ill.
Tom Englehardt: Baseless Deconstruction: How Your Dollars Became Ghost Towns in Iraq
A war and occupation thousands of miles away that lasted seven years and involved more than 1.5 million Americans, military and civilian, has passed into the history books and yet we still know remarkably little about so much of it. Take American military bases in Iraq. There were, of course, none in March 2003 when the Bush administration launched its regime-change invasion with dreams of garrisoning that particular stretch of the planet’s oil heartlands for generations to come.
At the height of the American occupation, in the face of Sunni and Shiite insurgencies and a bloody civil war, the Pentagon built 505 bases there, ranging from micro-outposts to mega-bases the size of small American towns — in one case, with an airport that was at least as busy as Chicago’s O’Hare International. As it happened, during all but the last days of those long, disastrous years of war, Americans could have had no idea how many bases had been built, using taxpayer dollars, in Iraq. Estimates in the press ranged, on rare occasions, up to about 300. Only as U.S. troops prepared to leave was that 505 figure released by the military, without any fanfare whatsoever. Startlingly large, it was simply accepted by reporters who evidently found it too unimpressive to highlight.
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