“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”.
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Katrina vanden Heuvel: Oklahoma is schooling the nation on early education
In the richest country in the world, the poorest among us are children. [..]
What gets lost in the hype about K-12 education reform, and the unhealthy obsession with things like standardized tests and charter schools, are a child’s crucial early years. Research from Stanford University (pdf) shows that the gap in language proficiency between low-income and high-income children starts as early as 18 months and compounds over time as poorer children enter kindergarten less prepared than their wealthier peers and find it hard to catch up.
To stand idle in the face of these facts is to allow millions of children to fall behind in school before they even start. We can do better – and Oklahoma can show us how.
Heidi Moore: Reality check: Obamacare is not to blame for Walmart’s sluggish sales
Corporations love using Obamacare as a scapegoat for poor performance, even though the numbers don’t support that at all
The thing is, this search for a financial scapegoat is a pattern, the kind of fantasist imagining best dreamed up while the corporate jet – of which Walmart has 19 – sits idle on the tarmac.
Walmart, once a Wall Street darling, has spent all year exuding excuses for its disappointing financial performance in the same way that an isotope of uranium emits radiation. In January, Walmart’s bete noire was the payroll tax. In June, it was government uncertainty. In the fall, it was cuts to food stamps. This week, it’s Obamacare.
Two things Walmart has reliably avoided mentioning: that rivals like Costco and Family Dollar have been doing pretty well all year, which undermines all the conspiracy theories, and that Walmart has been struggling with its own divisive labor issues. One of those labor issues – its infamously low pay – has led some Walmart stories to start a food drive, asking workers to donate food to their own colleagues.
With budget negotiations on the horizon, a buzz is building around Social Security, from Elizabeth Warren and other Democrats calling for an expansion of benefits to The Washington Post arguing that seniors must be sacrificed for the good of the “poor young.”
Two of the biggest players in the debate are largely behind the scenes: Business Roundtable and Fix the Debt, corporate lobbies that use deficit fear-mongering to sell benefit cuts. These groups are made up of CEOs of America’s largest corporations-people with retirement accounts that are more than 1,000 times as large as those of the average Social Security beneficiary. [..]
Saving more is an increasingly unworkable solution for the millions of workers whose wages and benefits are being undercut by some of the same CEOs directing them to do so. As the report lays out, many of the most effective ways to strengthen Social Security involve asking more of executives, not employees. Eliminating the cap on wages subject to Social Security taxes (currently set at $113,700) would eliminate 95 percent of the projected shortfall for seventy-five years, according to the Congressional Research Service. That’s three times the deficit reduction achieved by raising the retirement age to 70. Subjecting stock-based compensation to Social Security taxes would raise billions more.
Michelle Chen: Chinatown: the next front in the gentrification war
Chinatowns across the US are being replaced by ‘development’. For those fighting back, it’s about civil rights not just culture
There will always be a little corner of the American public imagination reserved for Chinatown. Whether the word evokes for you the stereotypical mystique of opium dens and gambling halls, or the gritty restaurants and garment factories that fueled generations of working-class immigrant families, Chinatown, as a cultural idea, seems to endure through the generations as a place of wonder, chaos, and cultural hybridity. But the real, brick-and-mortar Chinatown is vanishing rapidly, as its people, traditions and cultural life are swept away by what some call “development”. [..]
While gentrification has invaded many low-income areas in New York, its impacts are perhaps most starkly apparent in this neighborhood, which began over a century ago as a ghetto for mostly male migrant laborers, and has over the past generation morphed into one of the city’s hottest real estate markets. That transformation has come at the expense of the people and institutions who have anchored generations of Chinese American heritage. As immigrant families are expelled through mass evictions and spiking rents, in their wake comes an onslaught of white young professionals, forming a hyper-commercialized cityscape that billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg has championed. Big property values, little character.
A recent study of three Chinatowns in Boston, New York City and Philadelphia starkly maps out gentrification’s effects in crowding out once tight-knit ethnic communities.
Ana Marie Cox: On healthcare, Obama is starting to sound like a misbehaving boyfriend
The GOP has popular opinion trending on on its side for the first time in years, and they will run this issue into the ground
Yesterday’s press conference saw Obama at his least compelling: the burdened genius mode, in which he shows clear frustration with others’ inability to follow his logic and shows little sympathy for those who don’t share his faith in his own vision.
In general, Obama’s personal reactions to the Affordable Care Act (ACA) rollout have resembled those of misbehaving boyfriend. “I’m sorry you feel that way” instead of a real apology and “I meant it when I said it” instead of an explanation.
Along those lines, the press conference was in many ways a master class in mansplaining. His arrogance peeled off another layer of cool, and he seemed genuinely surprised that the American people could seriously accused him of intentionally misleading the country:
Catherine Deveny: Sorry, but being a mother is not the most important job in the world
It’s time to drop the slogan. It encourages mothers to stay socially and financially hobbled, it alienates fathers and discourages other significant relationships between children and adults
Being a mother is not the most important job in the world. There, I said it. Nor is it the toughest job, despite what the 92% of people polled in Parents Magazine reckon.
For any woman who uses that line, consider this: if this is meant to exalt motherhood, then why is the line always used to sell toilet cleaner? And if being a mother is that important, why aren’t all the highly paid men with stellar careers not devoting their lives to raising children? After all, I never hear “being a father is the most important job in the world”.
The deification of mothers not only delegitimises the relationship fathers, neighbours, friends, grandparents, teachers and carers have with children, it also diminishes the immense worth and value of these relationships. How do gay dads feel about this line, I wonder? Or the single dads, stepdads or granddads? No matter how devoted and hard working you are, fellas, you’ll always be second best.
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