“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: Terror Watch Lists Run Amok
After eight years of confounding litigation and coordinated intransigence, the Justice Department this week grudgingly informed (pdf) Rahinah Ibrahim, a Malaysian architecture professor, that she was no longer on the federal government’s vastly overbroad no-fly list.
The official admission, made under court order, is one of the few shards of information about Dr. Ibrahim’s erroneous inclusion on the list that she has been allowed to see. Much of the rest – including the specific grounds for repeatedly denying her a visa to return to the United States – has been kept hidden under a claim of protecting state secrets. [..]
In a recently unredacted portion (pdf) of his January ruling, Judge Alsup noted that in 2009 the government added Dr. Ibrahim back to its central terrorist-screening database under a “secret exception” to its own standard of proof. This would be laughable if it weren’t such a violation of basic rights. A democratic society premised on due process and open courts cannot tolerate such behavior.
Sen. Bernie Sanders: Who Are the Koch Brothers and What Do They Want?
As a result of the disastrous Citizens United Supreme Court decision, billionaires and large corporations can now spend an unlimited amount of money to influence the political process. The results of that decision are clear. In the coming months and years the Koch brothers and other extraordinarily wealthy families will spend billions of dollars to elect right-wing candidates to the Senate, the House, governors’ mansions and the presidency of the United States. These billionaires already own much of our economy. That, apparently, is not enough. Now, they want to own the United States government as well. [..]
The Koch brothers are the second wealthiest family in America, making most of their money in the fossil fuel industry. According to Forbes Magazine, they saw their wealth increase last year from $68 billion to $80 billion. In other words, under the “anti-business,” “socialist” and “oppressive” Obama administration, their wealth went up by $12 billion in one year.
The world’s predicament on climate change reminds me of an old saying: “The hurrier I go, the behinder I get.”
Despite mounting evidence that global warming is an urgent crisis, emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases grew faster between 2000 and 2010 than over the previous three decades, according to an authoritative new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Some governments have instituted policies to try to hold down emissions of carbon dioxide-by far the biggest contributor to climate change-but these measures do not go nearly far enough. We’re doing a Michael Jackson moonwalk, appearing to move ahead while actually sliding backward-toward what scientists fear is an abyss.
David Sirota: Will Government Use Its New Leverage Over the Financial Industry?
If you read one business book this year, make it “Flash Boys” by Michael Lewis. The journalist famous for “Moneyball” and “The Big Short” takes readers inside the parasitic world of high-frequency trading that is harming the broader economy.
The technical architecture of high-frequency trading is right out of a sci-fi movie-the schemes rely on algorithms that seem artificially intelligent, and the velocity of transaction signals approach light speed. As Lewis recounts, all that technological wizardry is marshaled to let insiders know information before everyone else, which consequently lets those insiders extract wealth from the market.
The good news is that a financial transaction tax can at once raise public resources and disincentivize the most predatory schemes. The even better news is that structural changes in the industry have made such a tax more economically viable than ever.
Greg Palast: Lap Dancers, the CIA, Payoffs and BP’s Deepwater Horizon
“There was CIA involvement through a company called Mega Oil. They were shipping in arms under the cover of oil tools.”
The BP executive was explaining to me how the CIA, MI6 and British Petroleum engineered a coup d’état, overthrowing a nation’s elected president who was “not favorable to BP.” The corporation’s former vice president, Leslie Abrahams, is pictured above, holding an AK-47 in front of BP’s offices in Baku, Azerbaijan. Like most of the other BP executives I spoke with, he proudly added that although he was working for BP, he was also an operative for MI6, British intelligence.
This conversation, which took place in 2010, was far from the weirdest I had in my four-continent investigation of the real story of the Deepwater Horizon. [..]
To understand what really happened in the Gulf of Mexico, and how BP became a corporate creature beyond the reach of the law, British television network Channel 4 sent me on an investigation through a labyrinthine fun house of bribery, lap dancing, beatings, WikiLeaks, a coup d’état, arrests and oil-state terror.
I found the cause of the tragedy of the Deepwater Horizon 7,000 miles from the Gulf in the ancient city of Baku, the Central Asian caravan stop on the Silk Road.
Joe Conason: Congratulations! A New Conspiracy Is Born
With the happy news that Chelsea Clinton and Marc Mezvinsky expect their first child later this year, the Clinton family can anticipate warm good wishes from most Americans-and a less uplifting response from all of the usual suspects.
The inane, but mostly harmless, speculation from the pundit class already has begun. How will Hillary Rodham Clinton’s prospective future as a grandmother, they ask, affect her potential candidacy for the presidency? (Not at all, except in the minds of the political geniuses who have never noticed that most presidents and many candidates were grandfathers.) Even more inanely, a prominent columnist suggested on television that her daughter’s announcement might actually be a scheme to “soften” Hillary’s image and improve voters’ opinions of her.
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