“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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Katrina vanden Heuvel: Fixing the economy, a new focus for Congress
The Perils of Pauline melodrama over the “fiscal cliff” will drag on as Washington heads toward another “debt ceiling” faceoff that will climax over the next eight weeks or so.
This farce captivates the media, but no one should be fooled. This is largely a debate about how much damage will be done to the economic recovery and who will bear the pain. There is bipartisan consensus that the tax hikes and spending cuts that Congress and the White House piled up to build the so-called fiscal cliff are too painful and will drive the economy into a recession. So the folderol is about what mix of taxes and spending cuts they can agree on that won’t be as harsh.
Largely missing is any discussion of how to fix the economy, to make it work for working people once more. Just sustaining the faltering recovery won’t get it done. We’re still struggling with mass unemployment, declining wages and worsening inequality. Corporate profits now capture an all-time record percentage of the economy; workers’ wages have hit an all-time low. A little constriction, or a lot, won’t do anything to change that reality.
Liz Ševčenko: Guantánamo Bay’s Other Anniversary: 110 Years of a Legal Black Hole
Even if President Obama finally fulfills his promise to close the detention camp, America’s ambiguous Cuban dominion goes on
As the fourth anniversary of Obama’s pledge to close Guantánamo approaches, the pressure is on: it’s been far too long, and the moment is now. But why is Guantánamo so hard to close?
Because it’s been an integral part of American politics and policy for over a century. To understand what it takes to close Guantánamo, we should look to how we’ve failed – and succeeded – in closing it before.
Gitmo’s “legal black hole” opened in 1903 with a peculiar lease that affirmed Cuba’s total sovereignty over Guantánamo Bay, but gave the US “complete jurisdiction and control”. This inadvertently created a space where neither nation’s laws clearly applied: a purgatory that’s been used to park people whose legal rights posed political threats. Gitmo’s generations of detainees have been inextricable, if often invisible, parts of America’s deepest conflicts: over immigration, public health, human rights, and national security.
Michael Bennet was supposed to be going off a cliff in Vail.
But instead of his usual New Year’s trip to a ski lodge with his wife and three daughters, the junior senator from Colorado found himself in a strange, unfamiliar place in the middle of the night: breaking with the president and his party to become one of only three Democratic senators and eight senators total to vote against President Obama’s fiscal deal. [..]
In frantic New Year’s Day deal-making, he voted “nay” at about 2 a.m., and the House passed the bill around 11 p.m. He said he did so because the deal did not have meaningful deficit reduction, explaining: “Going over the cliff is a lousy choice and continuing to ignore the fiscal realities that we face is a lousy choice.”
He said he thinks the president wants serious deficit cuts but is dealing with people “so intransigent I’m not sure they could be brought to an agreement that’s meaningful in the absence of going over the cliff. But it’s a terrible thing to say. People at home are so bone-tired of these outcomes.”
Laurie Penny: Russia’s Ban on US Adoption Isn’t About Children’s Rights
The row between Russian and the US on adoption ruins lives and leaves both countries looking sordid
Russia and the US are squabbling over whose human rights abuses are bigger. After the US signed the Magnitsky Act, which blacklists any Russian deemed to be a human rights violator, Russia has retaliated by barring American couples from adopting Russian children, 60,000 of whom have found new families in the US since 1992. Perhaps this is how the cold war really ends: not with a bang, but a series of petty policy disputes that savage individual lives and leave both countries looking sordid.
The uncomfortable truth is that underneath the posturing, Vladimir Putin has a point. The international adoption trade is a shady business – the perfect micro-example of how America’s concept of itself as a benevolent superpower is so often at odds with reality.
Fran Quigley: How Human Rights Can Save Haiti
Last month, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon announced a new initiative to address the cholera epidemic in Haiti. The plan includes a variety of measures, most notably the building of desperately-needed water and sanitation infrastructure.
This is not yet cause for celebration. The UN and the international community have so far committed to pay only a fraction of the estimated $2.2 billion cost of the program. And the 10-year plan lacks an appropriate sense of urgency, with many more Haitians sure to die needlessly while it is being carried out.
But the announcement is definitely promising news, because it shows that the United Nations is responding to the pressure of a relentless global human rights campaign. Multiple experts, including a member of an investigatory panel appointed by the UN itself, have concluded that the cholera outbreak was triggered by the UN’s own reckless disregard for the health and safety of the Haitian people. Those investigations establish that, in October, 2010, untreated human waste from cholera-infected UN troops was dumped into a tributary of Haiti’s main waterway, leading to a gruesome wave of chaos and death that claimed 7,800 lives and sickened 600,000 more.
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