Punting the Pundits

“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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Jane White: The Best Mother’s Day Gift We Can Give: A More Secure Social Security

Women are twice as likely as men to retire into poverty because of gender inequality in pay and retirement plan coverage. On average, women earn 77 cents to every dollar men earn and for women of color it’s even worse. African American women earn 62 cents and Hispanic women earn 54 cents to every dollar earned by their male counterparts. [..]

However, Social Security’s benefits are extremely modest: on average, women receive only about $13,100 per year. Given this puniness, it’s preposterous that some on Capitol Hill would make benefits even worse. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget has called for a 16.5 percent across-the-board cut. [..]

Bottom line: If the men in Congress love their mothers, then strengthening Social Security should be high on their to-do list, especially this time of year.

Glen Ford: Jail the Bankers? Obama Has Been Their Staunchest Defender

The Obama administration is in a makeover frenzy, cosmetically cleaning up its corporatist act for the sake of the lame duck president’s legacy and endangered Democrats in Congress. Evils must be reapportioned in the public mind, so that the balance between lesser and greater abominations is perceived to tilt in the Democrats’ favor – a tough trick, given the beating the party’s base constituencies have taken since 2008 at the hands of the duopoly Dem-Rep tag-team. Historical revisionism is, thus, the order of the day

Eric Holder, the U.S. Attorney General who successfully intervened in federal court to prevent the retroactive release of thousands of mostly Black prisoners convicted under the old 100-to-1 crack cocaine laws, now acts as point man for his boss’s program of charitable sentencing commutations. Obama’s compassionate mood-swing occurred at whiplash speed; in his first six years in office, he had granted fewer clemencies than any president since Dwight Eisenhower. Obama’s brazenly hypocritical and slap-dash new program “will not represent any significant or permanent change to the nation’s universal policy of mass incarceration, mainly of poor black and brown youth,” as Bruce Dixon has written, but is designed purely to rehabilitate the president’s image among Black voters. With one empty gesture, the president’s record on criminal justice is revised.

Amy B. Dean: The drive to ban mandated paid sick days

On March 20, New York Mayor Bill DeBlasio signed a bill expanding the city’s paid-sick-day law, giving an additional 500,000 workers the right to take up to five sick days in a year to care for themselves or sick family members without losing pay. Other cities – including Seattle; Washington; Portland, Oregon; Jersey City and Newark, New Jersey; and San Francisco – have passed similar mandates (as has the state of Connecticut), creating a benefit that voters support and employees need and that many employers say is economically sustainable. In places without such laws, an estimated 40 percent of the workforce has no paid sick days, meaning that restaurant servers and retail employees often have little economic choice but to work sick, even if that means risking infecting customers and co-workers.

Despite the clear public benefit of paid sick days, a new, troubling backlash is occurring at the state level, urged on by lobbying groups such as the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which promotes conservative legislation at the state level, and the National Restaurant Association. These organizations are pushing legislatures and governors to enact pre-emption (or kill-shot) laws to bar cities and counties from passing paid sick day mandates. With this model, state lawmakers can put an end to mandatory paid sick days, minimum wage increases and other pro-worker policies that voters and city governments have passed or are considering. It is a way of attacking a current wave of grass-roots organizing – organizing that has been gaining momentum, with recent big victories in cities such as Seattle, which just passed a minimum wage increase to $15 per hour.

Paul Rogers:

Sixty years ago smallpox was endemic across much of the world, killing two million people each year. In 1959 an international programme to eliminate the virus was started, not least because it was a disease amenable to large-scale vaccination. In 1977, the last case was diagnosed and recorded. It had taken just eighteen years to achieve the elimination of the entire disease in the wild.

This was the first-ever case of a major disease organism being destroyed in the wild, and there has only been one other – far less well-known, but in its own way quite significant. This is rinderpest, a dangerous viral infection most common in cattle but infecting some other species of livestock.  It took several decades to exterminate, but success finally came in 2001.

A third disease has been the target of atempts at total elimination. This is poliomyelitis, which in the 1980s still infected hundreds of thousands of people. Polio, if not a killer on the same scale as smallpox, is particularly prone to attack children and can leave them with severe impairments that can last a lifetime.

Mark Weisbrot: With friends like the IMF and EU, Ukraine doesn’t need enemies

Euromaidan protesters took to Kyiv’s streets last year in the hopes of Ukraine’s becoming part of the European Union. The Europe they admired was one of material comforts and living standards far beyond the reach of most Ukrainians, whose average income is about the level of El Salvadorans’. The demonstrators wanted for themselves something approaching Europe’s prosperity – a market economy, advanced technology, quality public transportation, universal health care, adequate pensions and paid vacations that average five weeks.f they are fortunate enough to avoid war, Ukrainians may be in for an unpleasant surprise as their current and even soon-to-be-elected leaders negotiate their economic future with their new, unelected European deciders. The Europe of their near and intermediate future may be more like Greece’s or Spain’s – but with less than a third of their per capita income and with a small fraction of those countries’ now shrunken social safety nets.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has announced that one of the conditions of its lending to Kyiv (along with that of the EU and U.S.) will be fiscal austerity for the next two and a half years. Ukraine’s economy is already in recession, with the IMF projecting a steep 5 percent decline in GDP for 2014. The danger is that this fiscal tightening could become a moving target as the economy and therefore tax revenues shrink further and the government has to cut even more spending to meet the IMF’s deficit goals.

Ralph Nader: Let’s Call Out Institutional Insanities

What are the signs that an institution is clinically insane? For over thirty-five years I have been trying to persuade psychological and psychiatric specialists and their professional associations to take up this serious subject for study and corrective suggestions. Alas, to no avail. They are totally occupied with the mental health of individuals.

One symptom of institutional insanity is when the mass media repeatedly goes wild covering offensive words, while ignoring systemic offensive deeds that reflect those words. In 2009, Donald Sterling, owner of the NBA Los Angeles Clippers, settled for $2.725 million with the Department of Justice for unlawfully excluding prospective African-American and Hispanic tenants from his apartment buildings. In comparison to the coverage of his racist words, this injustice received little news coverage.

This past week, all you heard was the endless replay of his private bigotry with whom many believe to be his girlfriend and all the condemnations by wealthy active and retired ball players and coaches. Where was their outrage in 2009? What about the tens of thousands of serf-laborers in Southeast Asia who slave away manufacturing Michael Jordan’s and LeBron James’ shoes?