“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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Trevor Timm: Obama’s new leader at the Pentagon will mean more war – not less
Chuck Hagel is out, and no matter who replaces him, we know this much about the state of Obama’s administration: it’s still addicted to secret war
After yet another weekend of news that the administration is expanding its war footing in the Middle East in secret, the White House yet again is exercising its power to avoid talking about what should be on the tip of the tongue of everyone: How are more troops going to solve a problem that 13 years of war have only made worse?
With Hagel’s resignation, hardly anyone is talking about the alarming story published Friday night by the New York Times, reporting that President Obama has ordered – in secret – that troops continue the Afghanistan War at least through 2015 … after announcing to the public months ago that combat operations would stop at the end of this year. Obama made his “This year we will bring America’s longest war to a responsible end” statement in the White House Rose Garden, on television, six months ago. The extension of the Afghan war was reportedly executed by a classified order.
Meanwhile, Obama was up there smiling next to Hagel on Monday, talking about how “reluctant” he is to see him go. The American president, like the one before him, is apparently reluctant to be upfront with the public about war.
Dean Baker: Seven Years After: Why This Recovery Is Still a Turkey
December will mark the seventh anniversary of the beginning of the recession brought on by the collapse of the housing bubble. Usually an economy would be fully recovered from the impact of a recession seven years after its onset. Unfortunately, this is not close to being the case now.
It would still take another 7 to 8 million jobs to bring the percentage of the population employed back to its pre-recession level. The 5.8 percent unemployment rate (compared to 4.5 percent before the recession) doesn’t reflect the true weakness of the labor force since so many people have dropped out of the labor force. Furthermore, more than 7 million people are working part-time who would like full-time jobs. This is an increase of almost 3 million from the pre-recession level. [..]
Our economic problems are manageable, but they require some serious thought. Unfortunately economic policymaking continues to be dominated by people who were unable to see an $8 trillion housing bubble. There is no reason to believe that these people have a better understanding of the economy today than they did seven years ago.
If you want to understand what makes Elizabeth Warren so special in American politics, consider her nervy leadership of the campaign to block President Obama’s foolish nomination of one Antonio Weiss to be the top Treasury official in charge of the domestic financial system, including enforcement of the Dodd-Frank Act.
For most of his Wall Street career, Weiss has epitomized everything that reeks about financial abuses. As chief of international mergers and acquisitions for Lazard, Weiss orchestrated what are delicately known as “corporate inversions,” in which a domestic corporation moves its nominal headquarters offshore, to avoid its U.S. taxes. It’s hard to improve on Sen. Warren’s description of this play, in her Huffington Post blog of last Wednesday: [..]
And that’s only the beginning. Many of the other deals orchestrated by Weiss resulted in operating companies being bought and sold by giant conglomerates, where the “savings” and “increased efficiency” came mainly from tax breaks and reduced worker compensation.
Weiss, who was paid $15.4 million by Lazard over the past 23 months, will receive another $21.2 million as an early retirement payment if he is confirmed for the Treasury job.
Robert Reich: Why College Is Necessary But Gets You Nowhere
This is the time of year when high school seniors apply to college, and when I get lots of mail about whether college is worth the cost.
The answer is unequivocally yes, but with one big qualification. I’ll come to the qualification in a moment but first the financial case for why it’s worth going to college.
Put simply, people with college degrees continue to earn far more than people without them. And that college “premium” keeps rising.
Last year, Americans with four-year college degrees earned on average 98 percent more per hour than people without college degrees. [..]
But here’s the qualification, and it’s a big one.
A college degree no longer guarantees a good job. The main reason it pays better than the job of someone without a degree is the latter’s wages are dropping.
In fact, it’s likely that new college graduates will spend some years in jobs for which they’re overqualified.
Michael W. Twitty: Americans love the Thanksgiving myth. But food folklore masks a painful reality
None of our culinary traditions were really just shared or contributed – and they certainly were not ‘gifted to us’
Americans love our origin myths – like the comforting one that, before the conflicts, wars and slavery started, there was an idyllic moment in which the “Pilgrims” and their indigenous welcoming committee sat down in a peaceful potluck of multicultural exchange, each contributing something old to the new.
But Thanksgiving is hardly the only celebration of the idea of culinary “contribution” – there’s a similar narrative about the plantation South, where African foods appear in the culinary narrative, as though they were proffered to white Americans through an altruistic cultural exchange program.
The superstar Southern chef, Sean Brock, even recently described the presence of the West African rice in lowcountry Carolina foods as “gifted to us”, without ever asking who “us” is. [..]
But let’s be clear: none of our culinary traditions were ever really just shared or contributed – and they certainly weren’t “gifted”. That latter term is especially galling, since my ancestors in the Carolina lowcountry were coerced through forced labor and with the threat of physical punishment to provide every iota of value from their expertise in rice culture and cuisine to their white owners; it was hardly a gift.
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