“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.
Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.
Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt
Bruce A. Dixon: How Complacency, Complicity of Black Misleadership Class Led to Supreme Court Evisceration of the Voting Rights Act
Did the Supreme Court kneecapping of the Voting Rights Act have to happen? Could black leadership have seen it coming and prevented it? Why didn’t they, and what can we do now?
Yesterday’s June 25 Supreme Court ruling tearing the guts out of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 should be a surprise to nobody. As recently as 2009, Chief Justice John Roberts telegraphed his specific intent to kneecap the Voting Rights Act by invalidating its enforcement formula. [..]
The black political class, which was brought into existence by the voting rights act, has failed to protect its constituency, failed to protect even themselves. They possessed the moral high ground and the political initiative for a generation and squandered it through inattention and inaction. They spent more time celebrating the victories of the sixties than consolidating them, and we will all pay the price.
We can and must blame neo-segregationist Republican thugs in black robes for doing what they do.. That’s clear, cut and dry. But a large share of the blame in this week’s kneecapping of the Voting Rights Act also belongs to our lazy and complacent black political establishment, our black misleadership class, who lacked the vision to see this coming, or the courageous leadership to avoid it, or in most cases both.
Les Leopold: Big Lie: America Doesn’t Have #1 Richest Middle-Class in the World… We’re Ranked 27th!
America is the richest country on Earth. We have the most millionaires, the most billionaires and our wealthiest citizens have garnered more of the planet’s riches than any other group in the world. We even have hedge fund managers who make in one hour as much as the average family makes in 21 years!
This opulence is supposed to trickle down to the rest of us, improving the lives of everyday Americans. At least that’s what free-market cheerleaders repeatedly promise us.
Unfortunately, it’s a lie, one of the biggest ever perpetrated on the American people.
The week’s judicial work, however, leads to the question of which way the Supreme Court is looking and how the nine justices are using their enormous power, some of it unchecked even by public needs and wishes. The Tuesday decision to gut the Voting Rights Act takes the country back to some of our worst instincts: the tyranny of the majority, the oppression of minorities.
At least five of the nine claim just the opposite but are, in fact, “activist judges.” This time, in overruling history, precedent and laws, the “conservatives” decided that Congress is using old data in making sure all citizens get a fair shot at voting. That is certainly arguable, but it is a matter of public policy, not constitutional law. And public policy is the business of the public, their representatives in Congress and in the White House. A reader named Andrew Weiss wrote this to the Los Angeles Times:
“We have more proof that these nine judges are indeed partisan,” he wrote. “Whatever happened to doing the right thing? … It’s time put an end to the fantasy that the court isn’t just a nine-member legislative body.”
Mark Weisbrot: Obama retreats on Snowden
In his videotaped interview with journalist Glenn Greenwald, Edward Snowden said that “the world’s most powerful intelligence agencies” (like the CIA) were so formidable that “[n]o one can meaningfully oppose them. If they want to get you, they’ll get you in time.”
That remains to be seen. On Wednesday President Obama beat a hasty retreat from his global public relations and diplomatic, and political campaign against Snowden. It was quite an amazing, if implicit, admission of defeat. Here was the president of the world’s most powerful nation, with the world’s most influential media outlets having rallied to his cause, now quietly trying to lower the profile of an issue that his own government had elevated to one of the biggest stories in the world.
Ralph Nader: The Duty of Lawyers
What happens when the rule of law increasingly bows to the whims and violations of unaccountable public officials?
In the United States, we are seeing the rule of law eroded by those at the top levels of our government. We are witnessing the dismantling of the guiding principles of justice and the rule of law. Our legal system has been gamed to preferentially serve the needs of the few rather than those of the many.
The rule of law should be a persistent guard against — rather than an instrument of — unfair advantage or injustice for those with power, money and influence.
Richard (RJ) Eskow: “Believe It or Not!”13 Mindblowing Facts About America’s Tax-Dodging Corporations
A judicious writer avoids adjectives like “mindblowing,” especially when covering political or economic issues. But no other word seems to describe the stunning reality of corporate taxation in modern America, which cries out for the italics-heavy, exclamation-point-driven format made famous by Ripley’s Believe It or Not.
Stylistic overkill? Read these thirteen facts and you may change your mind. [..]
It’s all true – and there are many more astonishing facts to be found in the world of corporate taxation. To fix the economy more people will need to learn about them – and demand that they be changed.
The writer and analyst in me wants to apologize for all the italicizing and all those exclamation points. But the American citizen in me wants to shout the truth out for all the world to hear – believe it or not!
Recent Comments