“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 Kuttner: Needed: A Mass Movement for College Debt Relief
Austerity has failed in Europe, where the European Union just racked up 18 months of negative growth with no end in sight. It is failing in the United States, where this year’s deficit reductions will cut the growth rate in half. [..]
What might change this grim politics?
Last seek, Senator Elizabeth Warren — how splendid to be able write the words Senator and Warren in the same sentence — showed the way. Warren introduced her very first free-standing bill, and fittingly it was a bill to cut interest rates on student loans.
Glen Ford: Radicalized = Weaponized = Kill at Will
“The line between political beliefs and illegal action is eradicated, so that the ‘radicalized’ person or group is inherently deserving of liquidation.”
Like all advanced police states, the U.S. national security regime has begun speaking its own, degenerate language. It is a mode of speech that simultaneously defines the “enemy” and justifies his or her destruction. The soulless, bureaucratic roots of National Security Speech belie the ruthless intent, which is to make the utter destruction of the targeted group or individual appear to be the natural order of things.
“Self-radicalization” is one of the terms coined by national security speakers. To people like President Obama, a guy who adds targets to his Kill List every Tuesday, “self-radicalization” represents a grave threat to the American state. “One of the dangers that we now face,” said Obama, in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing, “are self-radicalized individuals who are already in the United States,” because it is difficult to prevent them from carrying out “plots.”
“This systematic abuse cannot be fixed with just one resignation, or two,” said David Camp, the Republican chairman of the House tax-writing committee, at an oversight hearing Friday morning dealing with the IRS. “This is not a personnel problem. This is a problem of the IRS being too large, too intrusive, too abusive.”
David Camp has it wrong. There has been a “systematic” abuse of power, but it’s not what Camp has in mind. The real scandal is that:
The IRS has interpreted our tax laws to allow big corporations and wealthy individuals to make unlimited secret campaign donations through sham political fronts called “social welfare organizations,” like Karl Rove’s “Crossroads,” the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and “Priorites USA.”
Marion Wright Edelman: How Children Transformed America
“Daddy,” the boy said, “I don’t want to disobey you, but I have made my pledge. If you try to keep me home, I will sneak off. If you think I deserve to be punished for that, I’ll just have to take the punishment. For, you see, I’m not doing this only because I want to be free. I’m doing it also because I want freedom for you and Mama, and I want it to come before you die.”
This teenage boy overheard talking to his father by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was one of the hundreds of Birmingham children and youths who, 50 years ago this month, decided to stand up for freedom. They stood up to fire hoses and police dogs and went to jail by the hundreds and finally broke the back of Jim Crow in that city known as “Bombingham.” On this 50th anniversary of the Birmingham Children’s Crusade it is a time to remember, honor, and follow the example of the children who were frontline soldiers and transforming catalysts in America’s greatest moral movement of the 20th century – the movement for civil rights and equal justice.
Richard (RJ) Eskow; A Letter From Senator Warren
The day may come when the worst nightmare a crooked banker or compromised regulator can have begins with the words, “You have a letter from Senator Warren.”
But before we get to that, here’s an experience that may seem familiar: You’re at a party or family get-together – a Sunday barbecue, perhaps – and someone says something like, “We need less government regulation.” Next thing you know you’re having an argument.
Here’s some advice for the next social event: There’s no need to get into an argument. You can just ask, “How do you figure?”
With every unreasonable assertion you can ask a reality-based question like, “Where’s the study that says that?” Once in a while they may cite a shallow white paper from sine right-wing foundation, but more often than that they won’t even get that far. Soon the conversation will peter out with a “Well, uh …”
We can never go wrong asking questions. We only go wrong when we don’t ask questions.
Ray McGovern: Boston Suspect’s Writing on the Wall
Quick, somebody tell CIA Director John Brennan about the handwriting on the inside wall of the boat in which Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was hiding before Boston-area police riddled it and him with bullets. Tell Brennan that Tsarnaev’s note is in plain English and that it needs neither translation nor interpretation in solving the mystery: “why do they hate us?”
And, if Brennan will listen, remind him of when his high school teachers, the Irish Christian Brothers, taught him the meaning of “handwriting on the wall” in the Book of Daniel and why it became an idiom for predetermined, imminent doom.
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