“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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Chris Hedges: Let’s Get This Class War Started
“The rich are different from us,” F. Scott Fitzgerald is said to have remarked to Ernest Hemingway, to which Hemingway allegedly replied, “Yes, they have more money.”
The exchange, although it never actually took place, sums up a wisdom Fitzgerald had that eluded Hemingway. The rich are different. The cocoon of wealth and privilege permits the rich to turn those around them into compliant workers, hangers-on, servants, flatterers and sycophants. Wealth breeds, as Fitzgerald illustrated in “The Great Gatsby” and his short story “The Rich Boy,” a class of people for whom human beings are disposable commodities. Colleagues, associates, employees, kitchen staff, servants, gardeners, tutors, personal trainers, even friends and family, bend to the whims of the wealthy or disappear. Once oligarchs achieve unchecked economic and political power, as they have in the United States, the citizens too become disposable. [..]
“There are only two or three human stories,” Willa Cather wrote, “and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.”
The seesaw of history has thrust the oligarchs once again into the sky. We sit humiliated and broken on the ground. It is an old battle. It has been fought over and over in human history. We never seem to learn. It is time to grab our pitchforks.
Graphic by Banksey
Richard (RJ) Eskow: The Road from Here: What About Medicare and Social Security?
As the Bob Dylan song says: “Things should start to get interesting right about now.” You may think they’re already interesting – what with government closings, threats of a debt default, and extremist rhetoric under the Capitol Dome – but chances are we ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
In twelve weeks or so our new system of government-by-crisis will resume its regularly scheduled programming: more threats, more confrontations, and even more extreme rhetoric.
There are only a few ways this could play out, and most of them involve cuts to Medicare and Social Security. The ones which don’t probably involve either A) catastrophic gridlock or B) a mobilized citizenry.
Your personal level of optimism probably correlates closely to whether you think A or B is more likely.
It’s time for Israel to stop making military threats and to propose an imaginative diplomatic move – risky as it may seem – to help ease nuclear tensions in the Middle East.
It can start by acknowledging its own nuclear weapons program.
It has accused Iran of seeking the capability to produce nuclear weapons, when for years Israel has been believed to possess hundreds of nuclear bombs and missiles, along with multiple delivery systems. It continues to insist it doesn’t have them.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders continue to accuse Tehran of deceit in describing its nuclear program as peaceful.
Perhaps Netanyahu sees Iran following the path Israel took 50 years ago when it’s known that his country joined the relatively small nuclear weapons club.
Dylan Ratigan: Forming the Renaissance Preparation Committee
As we suffer in a paradigm where those who nominate dictate, our election finance system (juiced by less than one half of one percent of all Americans dispersing funds from a flawed banking system based on a monkey-wrenched housing and tax code) sprouts rotten fruit such as closed primaries and defective districting that perpetuate what I have longed defined by three nasty syllables — extraction.
With all due respect to the reform-minded types, we need to come to grips with the fact that we are not fixing an old engine. We are preparing for a renaissance, and our metaphors should reflect this reality in order to guide our actions.
How do we look past the debate on debt and taxes to focus on distributed electoral finance, open primaries and banking and tax reform?
Or, to crib a little Thoreau, how do we hack at the roots instead of the branches of our illness?
Bill Moyers and Michael Winship: Yes, Virginia, There Is a Santa Claus — Campaign Cash
If you want to see how grossly money can distort democracy, just go to the state of Virginia, where there are no limits on how big a check can be written for statewide office. Groups and individuals from outside the Old Dominion are taking full advantage, pouring millions into a governor’s race they see as a dry run for the tactics they’ll use in the 2014 midterms and the 2016 presidential race — sort of the way the Spanish civil war turned out to be a testing ground for many of the deadly weapons of World War II.
Billionaires like environmentalist Tom Steyer on the left and the Koch Brothers on the right are placing their bets, but as they say at the track, the horses they’re backing are just a couple of hay burners. Once the home of Washington and Jefferson, James Madison and Patrick Henry, Virginia now has a choice between two mediocrities slavishly devoted to their wealthy contributors.
William Astore: ‘Shock Doctrine’ Americana: Endless War as the Ultimate Business Model
Disaster Capitalism on the battlefield and in the boardroom
There is a new normal in America: our government may shut down, but our wars continue. Congress may not be able to pass a budget, but the U.S. military can still launch commando raids in Libya and Somalia, the Afghan War can still be prosecuted, Italy can be garrisoned by American troops (putting the “empire” back in Rome), Africa can be used as an imperial playground (as in the late nineteenth century “scramble for Africa,” but with the U.S. and China doing the scrambling this time around), and the military-industrial complex can still dominate the world’s arms trade.
In the halls of Congress and the Pentagon, it’s business as usual, if your definition of “business” is the power and profits you get from constantly preparing for and prosecuting wars around the world. “War is a racket,” General Smedley Butler famously declared in 1935, and even now it’s hard to disagree with a man who had two Congressional Medals of Honor to his credit and was intimately familiar with American imperialism.
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