“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: A Debt-Free College Education
Last Wednesday – almost a month after Congress failed to prevent student loan rates from doubling – Democrats and Republicans reached a compromise that will keep rates low, at least temporarily, for most graduates.
From a body with a record of procrastinating on student debt worse than students procrastinate on term papers, this was welcome news. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. [..]
A stopgap reduction in loan rates won’t do anything to fix this. We need a whole new model for financing higher education.
Fortunately, though Washington remains perpetually paralyzed, some states are demonstrating refreshing creativity and determination in tackling this issue. Last month, the Oregon legislature passed a bill that paves the way for students to attend state and community colleges without having to pay tuition or take out traditional loans.
Alexis Baden-Mayer: Monsanto Hates Democracy
Monsanto hates democracy because democracy doesn’t work for Monsanto.
Nine out of 10 of us want to know where Monsanto’s been hiding the GMOs in our food and a most of us wouldn’t eat those GMOs if we knew where they were.
If everything in this country were decided democratically, most of the food we eat would be non-GMO and Monsanto would be driven out of business.
We don’t have a problem convincing people we’re right, we have a problem with our democracy when we can’t get the politicians to pass the laws that the majority of us want.
But no government, no matter how corrupted by corporate money, will be able to stop us when we get the nine out of 10 people who agree with us to take action with us. And that’s what’s starting to happen.
The Detroit bankruptcy is looking suspiciously like the bail-in template originated by the G20’s Financial Stability Board in 2011, which exploded on the scene in Cyprus in 2013 and is now becoming the model globally. In Cyprus, the depositors were “bailed in” (stripped of a major portion of their deposits) to re-capitalize the banks. In Detroit, it is the municipal workers who are being bailed in, stripped of a major portion of their pensions to save the banks. [..]
Interestingly, Lansing Mayor Virg Bernero, Snyder’s Democratic opponent in the last gubernatorial race, proposed a solution that could have avoided either robbing the pensioners or scaring off the bondholders: a state-owned bank. If the state or the city had its own bank, it would not need to borrow from Wall Street, worry about interest rate swaps, or be beholden to the bond vigilantes. It could borrow from its own bank, which would leverage the local government’s capital into credit, back that credit with the deposits created by the government’s own revenues, and return the interest to the government as a dividend, following the ground-breaking model of the state-owned Bank of North Dakota.
There are other steps that need to be taken, and soon, to prevent a cascade of municipal bankruptcies. The super-priority of derivatives in bankruptcy needs to be repealed, and the protections of Glass Steagall need to be restored. While we are waiting on a very dilatory Congress, however, state and local governments might consider protecting themselves and their revenues by setting up their own banks.
Lisa Graves: Voices Rising Against Hedge Fund Millionaire Larry Summers to Head the Fed
Opposition is growing to the idea of President Obama naming Larry Summers to head the Federal Reserve. As William Greider wrote in The Nation, “Summers is a toxic retread from the old boys’ network and a nettlesome egotist who offended just about everyone during his previous tours in government. More to the point, Summers was a central player in the grave governing errors that led to the financial collapse and a ruined economy.”
Summers is so cocksure and callous he once suggested using “underpopulated countries in Africa” as toxic waste dumps. [..]
The last thing America needs right now is a Friedmanite at the helm of the Fed. Summers would bring more winter in the economy for ordinary Americans while his buddies on Wall Street would get more and more of America’s wealth to offshore.
Valerie Strauss: Five Absurdities about High-Stakes Standardized Tests
Barely a day goes by when the education world isn’t treated to some new story involving high-stakes standardized tests, the chief metric of “accountability systems” in the modern era of school reform.
It might be about how student test scores went up or down or all around; about how standardized tests were incorrectly scored by giant companies that make millions from testing contracts; that some questions on the test don’t make any sense; that the high stakes being attached to the results – which are being used to evaluate students, teachers, principals, schools, districts and states – have gone from being unfair to preposterous.
Sue Sturgis: The South’s Widening War on Abortion Rights
Date on which North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory (R) signed into law a bill that requires the state’s abortion clinics to meet the same standards as ambulatory surgical centers, despite a campaign promise that he would not sign any legislation that further restricts abortion: 7/30/2013
Additional cost to build a clinic that meets ambulatory surgical center standards: $1 million
Number of bodyguards that accompanied McCrory the following day when he left the executive mansion and stepped into the street to deliver cookies to abortion rights advocates protesting outside, who returned them with a note that said, “We want women’s health care, not cookies”: 4
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