“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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New York Times Editorial Board: Reining In Predatory Schools
The for-profit college industry is pressuring the Obama administration to water down proposed new rules that would deny federal student aid to career training programs that saddle students with crippling debt while giving them useless credentials.
That’s a potent threat from the government, given that for-profit schools can get as much as 90 percent of their revenue from federal student aid programs. But it doesn’t go far enough. The administration should actually strengthen the rules to put the worst actors in this industry under tighter scrutiny.
Charles M. Blow: Minimum Wage, Maximum Outrage
No one should ever endure the kind of economic humiliation that comes with working a full-time job and making a less-than-living wage.
There is dignity in all work, but that dignity grows dim when the checks are cashed and the coins are counted and still the bills rise higher than the wages.
Most people want to work. It is a basic human desire: to make a way, to provide for one’s self and one’s loved ones, to advance. It is that great hope of tomorrow, better and brighter, in which we can be happy and secure, able to sleep without hunger and wake without worry.
But it is easy to see how people can have that hope thrashed out of them, by having to wrestle with the most wrenching of questions: how to make do when you work for less than you can live on?
Seven years after the crash, corporate and political leaders haven’t made much of a dent in unemployment. Maybe they’re listening to the wrong people
“I promise you there’s not a job out there that will pay you a lot without some kind of training,” President Obama said to a group of students and workers at a Pittsburgh community college Wednesday afternoon.
Yet many American companies are not training new workers or re-training existing ones, and Congress isn’t even close to passing any major jobs-related legislation – and hasn’t since 2011. [..]
t’s a shame, because it’s not as if there aren’t good ideas about how to fix the unemployment crisis. They’re just going ignored.
So Obama stood before a mostly working-class audience at a local community college and tried to make two well-meaning but musty job-training programs look like a glittery spectacle of unicorns and rainbows. The event, designed to showcase the White House’s commitment to jobs and education and show up an ineffectual Congress, will just end up highlighting how small a dent all of our corporate and political leaders have made in reducing unemployment.
Gail Collins: There’s a Moon Out Tonight
Let’s talk about something cheerful. I nominate the apocalypse.
You may not have noticed, but we survived an end-of-the-world moment again this week when a lunar eclipse made the moon look sort of reddish. This is known as a Blood Moon, and, in certain circles, it was seen as the Start of Something Big.
“The heavens are God’s billboard,” said televangelist John Hagee, the author of the best-selling “Four Blood Moons: Something Is About to Change.” This is the same John Hagee who once theorized that Hurricane Katrina was God’s punishment to New Orleans for scheduling a gay pride parade. He later apologized. And moved on. To the moon. [..]
Our moral today is that things often turn out better than we might have imagined. Look on the bright side. Even when it’s dark and the moon appears to be a rather unusual color.
Robert Reich: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age
We’re in a new gilded age of wealth and power similar to the first gilded age when the nation’s antitrust laws were enacted. Those laws should prevent or bust up concentrations of economic power that not only harm consumers but also undermine our democracy — such as the pending Comcast acquisition of Time-Warner.
In 1890, when Republican Senator John Sherman of Ohio urged his congressional colleagues to act against the centralized industrial powers that threatened America, he did not distinguish between economic and political power because they were one and the same. The field of economics was then called “political economy,” and inordinate power could undermine both. “If we will not endure a king as a political power,” Sherman thundered, “we should not endure a king over the production, transportation, and sale of any of the necessaries of life.”
Shortly thereafter, the Sherman Antitrust Act was passed by the Senate 52 to 1, and moved quickly through the House without dissent. President Harrison signed it into law July 2, 1890.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: Restoring Louisiana’s Coast Will Require Restoring Its Democracy — Governor Jindal Is Trying to Undermine Both
The Mississippi’s River southernmost delta is home to a rich ecosystem, robust, culture and booming economy. Wetlands provide critical storm protection for the Louisiana’s coast. A recent poll by America’s Wetland Foundation found that 74 percent of Louisiana residents “consider saving the coast to be the most important issue [in the state] of our lifetime.” For Delta citizens, flood protection is a matter of survival. Louisiana wetlands are disappearing at a rate of approximately 1 football field every hour and coastal communities are already washing into the Gulf of Mexico. To date, roughly 2,000 square miles of land have disappeared under water and the erosion is accelerating. The disappearing land once buffered communities including New Orleans from catastrophic storm surges. [..]
Genuflecting to Big Oil’s pressure, the industry’s chief indentured servant, Governor Bobby Jindal, is leading an attempt to kill the suit by orchestrating the replacement of several members of the levee authority. Jindal’s caper violates state laws that guarantee that body’s political independence. Urged on by the Governor, crooked Legislators are currently advancing bills to undermine the levee board and retroactively kill the lawsuit. Louisiana is a classic corporate kleptocracy. There is no sunshine in Baton Rouge ; Like so many cockroaches Big Oil’s state house sock puppets are working their mischief in the darkness with no accountability or public participation.
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