“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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Paul Krugman: The Geezers Are All Right
Last month the Congressional Budget Office released its much-anticipated projections for debt and deficits, and there were cries of lamentation from the deficit scolds who have had so much influence on our policy discourse. The problem, you see, was that the budget office numbers looked, well, O.K.: deficits are falling fast, and the ratio of debt to gross domestic product is projected to remain roughly stable over the next decade. Obviously it would be nice, eventually, to actually reduce debt. But if you’ve built your career around proclamations of imminent fiscal doom, this definitely wasn’t the report you wanted to see.
Still, we can always count on the baby boomers to deliver disaster, can’t we? Doesn’t the rising tide of retirees mean that Social Security and Medicare are doomed unless we radically change those programs now now now?
Maybe not.
Lori Wallach and Ben Beachy: Obama’s Covert Trade Deal
THE Obama administration has often stated its commitment to open government. So why is it keeping such tight wraps on the contents of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the most significant international commercial agreement since the creation of the World Trade Organization in 1995?
The agreement, under negotiation since 2008, would set new rules for everything from food safety and financial markets to medicine prices and Internet freedom. It would include at least 12 of the countries bordering the Pacific and be open for more to join. President Obama has said he wants to sign it by October. [..]
This covert approach is a major problem because the agreement is more than just a trade deal. Only 5 of its 29 chapters cover traditional trade matters, like tariffs or quotas. The others impose parameters on nontrade policies. Existing and future American laws must be altered to conform with these terms, or trade sanctions can be imposed against American exports.
In his commencement address at the United States Military Academy late last month, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel urged the newest graduates of the two-centuries-old academy to help stamp out the “scourge” of sexual assaults in the military. His call had special resonance. It had been revealed just days before that a sergeant responsible for advising cadets had been charged with secretly videotaping female cadets in the shower – just one of an alarming cascade of incidents in recent weeks evidencing the depth, frequency and sheer brazenness of the military’s sexual misconduct problem. [..]
The issue will get an airing Tuesday at a hearing convened by Senator Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat who heads the Senate Armed Services Committee, to consider possible changes in the Uniform Code of Military Justice, using the annual defense authorization bill as a vehicle. The question, however, is whether Congress will undertake the broad reforms necessary to encourage more victims to come forward and to show that legislators take seriously the pledge of zero tolerance for such crimes that military leaders and successive administrations have been making for decades.
Kumi Naidoo: In Turkey, The Last Tree or the Final Straw?
Our office in Istanbul has been under siege. It is in the heart Taksim, an area in which a brutal police clampdown has been trying to end the peaceful protest over the planned destruction of the small, and historic, Gezi Park by Taksim Square. The protest has grown to involve tens of thousands of people and drawn the support of people from all over the world.
People are travelling from all over Turkey to Taksim, people are gathering elsewhere in the country and around the world in solidarity to say “I am in Gezi” and to say “we are watching and we are horrified by the brutality”.
It is no longer about a handful of trees in a tiny park or the plans to cover it with a shopping mall. But, make no mistake, the fundamental human need for natural spaces over the inexorable march of shopping malls remains an important factor.
Richard (RJ) Eskow: The Truman Show Economy (With a Nod to Philip K. Dick)
A Northern Ireland county made news this week when it literally created a false front of prosperity for dignitaries in town for the G8 conference. The Irish Times reports that County Fermanagh spent roughly £300,000 ($456,000 at today’s exchange rates) to conceal the shuttered storefronts and empty buildings left behind by economy-killing austerity cuts. [..]
It would certainly embarrass British Prime Minister (and austerity extremist) David Cameron to let his peers see the fruits of his economic philosophy in a region which, while largely self-governing, is still part of Great Britain. [..]
The deceptions go on anyway. It’s been a “false-front” economy for nearly five years. Ireland’s deception was ours, in physical form.
Welcome to The Truman Show economy.
Janet Cotter and Eric Darier: When Will Governments Learn That GE Crops Are Uncontrollable?
Shockwaves are being felt across the world’s wheat markets following the first-ever discovery of unauthorised genetically engineered wheat growing on a US farm – a development that gives further proof that GE crops cannot be controlled.
The discovery of Monsanto’s GE wheat, confirmed by US authorities, sparked alarm among Washington’s trading nations, pushed wheat prices lower and is threatening US exports. It should not be seen, however, as totally unexpected.
The GE wheat is a herbicide tolerant wheat (probably MON 71800) that Monsanto tested in fields across 16 states between 1998 and 2005. The wheat was never authorised and never commercialised because Monsanto withdrew its application in May 2004 following massive global opposition from farmers, consumers and environmentalists.
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