“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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Dean Baker: The disastrous idea for privatizing Fannie and Freddie
A new bill proposes that government guarantee mortgage-backed securities
In his State of the Union Address on Jan. 28, President Barack Obama briefly referred to his hopes for reforming Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two government-sponsored and publicly traded entities that support the mortgage market by buying and securitizing mortgages. Both companies failed during the 2008 financial crisis and had to be taken over by the government. [..]
The smart money in Washington is betting on the Housing Finance Reform and Taxpayer Protection Act, sponsored by Sens. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., and Mark Warner, D-Va. The Corker-Warner bill, put together by two of the more centrist senators in both parties, does not simply get the government out of the mortgage guarantee business – an idea that actually has a plausible argument in its favor.
Instead, Corker-Warner would replace Fannie and Freddie with a new a system in which private financial institutions could issue mortgage-backed securities (MBSs) that carry a government guarantee. In the event that a large number of mortgages in the MBS market went bad, the investors would be on the hook for losses up to 10 percent of their value, after which the government would cover the rest. [..]
In short, the Corker-Warner plan to privatize Fannie and Freddie is essentially a proposal to reinstitute the structure of incentives that gave us the housing bubble and the financial crisis, this time with the added fuel of an explicit government guarantee on subprime MBSs. If that sounds like a stupid idea, you obviously haven’t spent enough time being convinced by lobbyists at one of Washington’s finest restaurants.
Henry A. Giroux: Totalitarian Paranoia in the Post-Orwellian Surveillance State
The revelations of whistle-blowers such as Chelsea Manning, Jeremy Hammond and Edward Snowden about government lawlessness and corporate spying provide a new meaning if not a revitalized urgency and relevance to George Orwell’s dystopian fable 1984. Orwell offered his readers an image of the modern state that had become dystopian – one in which privacy as a civil virtue and a crucial right was no longer valued as a measure of the robust strength of a healthy and thriving democracy. Orwell was clear that the right to privacy had come under egregious assault. But the right to privacy pointed to something more sinister than the violation of individual rights. When ruthlessly transgressed, the issue of privacy became a moral and political principle by which to assess the nature, power and severity of an emerging totalitarian state. As important as Orwell’s warning was in shedding light on the horrors of mid-20th century totalitarianism and the endless regimes of state spying imposed on citizens, the text serves as a brilliant but limited metaphor for mapping the expansive trajectory of global surveillance and authoritarianism now characteristic of the first decades of the new millennium. As Marjorie Cohn has indicated, “Orwell never could have imagined that the National Security Agency (NSA) would amass metadata on billions of our phone calls and 200 million of our text messages every day. Orwell could not have foreseen that our government would read the content of our emails, file transfers, and live chats from the social media we use.” [..]
The dangers of the surveillance state far exceed the attack on privacy or warrant simply a discussion about balancing security against civil liberties. The latter argument fails to address how the growth of the surveillance state is connected to the rise of the punishing state, the militarization of American society, secret prisons, state-sanctioned torture, a growing culture of violence, the criminalization of social problems, the depoliticization of public memory, and one of the largest prison systems in the world, all of which “are only the most concrete, condensed manifestations of a diffuse security regime in which we are all interned and enlisted.” The authoritarian nature of the corporate-state surveillance apparatus and security system with its “urge to surveill, eavesdrop on, spy on, monitor, record, and save every communication of any sort on the planet” can only be fully understood when its ubiquitous tentacles are connected to wider cultures of control and punishment, including security-patrolled corridors of public schools, the rise in super-max prisons, the hyper-militarization of local police forces, the rise of the military-industrial-academic complex, and the increasing labeling of dissent as an act of terrorism in the United States.
When focus shifts from inequality to opportunity, progressives lose
Inequality is out, opportunity is in. Or so read the tea leaves from President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address. As late as December the president described “a dangerous and growing inequality and lack of upward mobility … this is the defining challenge of our time.” However, by the time of his Jan. 28 speech, the framing of his agenda had morphed to “opportunity is who we are. And the defining project of our generation must be to restore that promise,” with barely any mention of inequality.
Some commentators welcome this shift in focus. Political analyst Ruy Teixeira, for example, argued that discussing opportunity is the “most effective way to sell the progressive vision for the economy” and “challenge inequality.” This may be the case, and so far the substantive policy agenda the president has forwarded hasn’t changed with the language.
With this change in focus, however, there’s a real chance that important pieces of progressive agenda could disappear and ideological blind spots be introduced. It’s crucial, then, to identify these, in order to better combat them in advance.
Paul Buchheit: How Entitlements for the Rich Cheat the Rest of Us
The word ‘entitlement’ is ambiguous. For working people it means “earned benefits.” For the rich, the concept of entitlement is compatible with the Merriam-Webster definition: “The feeling or belief that you deserve to be given something (such as special privileges).” Recent studies agree, concluding that higher social class is associated with increased entitlement and narcissism.
The sense of entitlement among the very rich is understandable, for it helps them to justify the massive redistribution of wealth that has occurred over the past 65 years, especially in the past 30 years. National investment in infrastructure, technology, and security has made America a rich country. The financial industry has used our publicly-developed communications technology to generate trillions of dollars in new earnings, while national security protects their interests. The major beneficiaries have convinced themselves they did it on their own. They believe they’re entitled to it all.
Their entitlements can be summarized into four categories, each of which reveals clear advantages that the very rich take for granted. [..]
Entitlements for the rich mean cuts in safety net programs for children, women, retirees, and low-income families. They threaten Social Security. They redirect money from infrastructure repair, education, and job creation.
And the more the super-rich take from us, the greater their belief that they’re entitled to the wealth we all helped to create.
Michael P. Jeffries: Reaction to Michael Sam coming out is as much about race as homophobia
Michael Sam doesn’t conform to what the white dominated media and entertainment corporations are used to. It scares them
But when Sam came out as gay to the rest of the public yesterday, National Football League executives and coaches surveyed by Sports Illustrated were clear in their response: risky move. They said Sam’s announcement would mark him as a man on “a lonely path”, hurt his stock in the upcoming NFL Draft, and damage his chance to have a prosperous career. One executive said, “It’d chemically imbalance an NFL locker and meeting room.”
Sam’s star is rising, and NFL executives’ skies are falling. How can the league’s gatekeepers be so deaf and blind to the evidence that Sam’s sexual orientation does not inhibit his play or damage his team? Why can’t they see Sam for what he is or read the situation correctly?
Part of the answer is, of course, the immense power of homophobia, which continues to sew injustice and insult across all sorts of workplaces and social situations. But the reaction to the NFL’s would-be first out gay player is about way more than that – it’s about the ways gender combines with race and class, the roles and stereotypes cast upon black men in America, and the peculiar position Michael Sam now occupies.
Jeffrey Bachman: Time to Take a Stand to End US Impunity
Why is it that when the United States is responsible for violations of international law, international human rights law, and international humanitarian law, discussions of the violations center almost exclusively on whether such violations are necessary and effective? It’s almost as if international law only exists for others, and even then the ‘others’ to which international law applies is limited to those the U.S. views as ‘rogue’ states.
The United States has disregarded international law time and again, making a mockery of its very existence. Such behavior makes clear to the rest of the world that the U.S. lacks the moral authority necessary to make serious and substantiate its proclamations. I cannot help but conclude that U.S. hypocrisy, along with the clarity with which the populations of other states view U.S. policy, contributed to the U.S. being ranked as the greatest threat to world peace.
More significantly, the term ‘hypocrisy’ is incapable of contextualizing exactly what it is being used to describe. In just the past twelve-plus years, the United States has illegally invaded one country and systematically tortured individuals it has rendered and detained. Currently, the U.S. maintains oversight over facilities in Afghanistan at which detainees are still systematically tortured, force-feeds individuals protesting their indefinite detention at Guantanamo Bay, and operates a “targeted” killing program that continues to kill innocent people. As per usual, the U.S. has succeeded in egregiously violating some of the most significant international legal standards with complete impunity.
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