“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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Paul Krugman: Being Bad Europeans
The U.S. economy finally seems to be climbing out of the deep hole it entered during the global financial crisis. Unfortunately, Europe, the other epicenter of crisis, can’t say the same. Unemployment in the euro area is stalled at almost twice the U.S. level, while inflation is far below both the official target and outright deflation has become a looming risk. [..]
Why is Europe in such dire straits? The conventional wisdom among European policy makers is that we’re looking at the price of irresponsibility: Some governments have failed to behave with the prudence a shared currency requires, choosing instead to pander to misguided voters and cling to failed economic doctrines. And if you ask me (and a number of other economists who have looked hard at the issue), this analysis is essentially right, except for one thing: They’ve got the identity of the bad actors wrong.
For the bad behavior at the core of Europe’s slow-motion disaster isn’t coming from Greece, or Italy, or France. It’s coming from Germany.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson : Feds Need Look No Further Than Rodney King for the Case Against Wilson
In August 1992, nearly three months to the day after the four LAPD officers that beat black motorist Rodney King were acquitted on nearly all charges by a jury with no blacks on it, Lourdes G. Baird, the United States Attorney for California’s Central District, stepped before a battery of news cameras and reporters and announced that three of the officers would face federal charges. The charges were violating King’s Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable arrest and with depriving him of his 14th Amendment due-process rights during his March, 1991 arrest. The four would face up to 10 years in prison and $250,000 in fines if convicted.
The Justice Department’s decision to prosecute rested squarely on two compelling legal and public interest points, neither of which significantly involved any need to proof racial animus. The legal charges were that the officers who beat King acted under the color of the law. This violated a near century old federal statute that makes it a crime to deprive any person of a Constitutional right under the color of law. The statute specifically targeted police officers and public officials who abuse their authority and violate public trust by physically victimizing citizens. [..]
Brown as was King was unarmed. Brown and King were not charged with a crime when detained. Brown as King received injuries after he ceased resisting. Brown as King was abused during an official stop. These, as they were with King, are compelling civil rights violations.
Associate Attorney General Wayne Budd, who directed the federal investigation into the King beating case, issued this terse statement after the indictment of the LAPD cops was announced “The Department of Justice has a responsibility to vindicate the violation of the fundamental rights protected by the United States Constitution.” The indictment he said was the first step toward fulfilling that responsibility.
The Justice Department should take the same step in the Brown slaying it took 22 years ago in the King beating case. That is to fulfill its responsibility and prosecute Wilson.
Contrary to what Barack Obama says about the U.S. being built on the rule of law, the country routinely resorts to official violence and illegality.
Barack Obama looked at his most clueless, responding to the riots and rage in Ferguson, Missouri. He hasn’t seemed so callow since the BP oil spill. Like he just wished it was over and could get on to the delights of his post-presidency. Or back to immigration reform and stalling that damn pipeline.
Using his slow voice, as if he’s explaining something so basic that it’s hard to understand, he declared that the U.S. is a “nation built on the rule of law” and added next day, he has “no sympathy” for those who go violent. The problem with this, at least for those in the streets, is the U.S. is not a nation of laws and resorts to official violence and/or illegality routinely.[..]
Obama and others like pointing to Martin Luther King Jr. as the model for peaceful protest. But King wasn’t a law-abider, he was a lawbreaker. He just did it non-violently, a preferable term to peaceful. His reasons were both pragmatic and principled. There was no way for protesters to match the firepower of the protestees — then or now. But more tellingly: you turn into them if you mirror their methods and then nothing’s been gained. In these protests I heard cries I hadn’t heard in a long time — Revolution! … By any means necessary! That’s not nostalgia, it’s despair, and loss of hope for change by normal, lawful means.
Robert Kuttner: The Cheap Oil Curse
Remember “Peak Oil?” The world was running out of oil, prices would soon skyrocket, and we had better find other fuels.
Well, that argument didn’t work out so well for environmentalists, did it? As oil reserves and those of other carbon fuels became scarce and prices rose, the law of supply and demand kicked in. The industry invested the profits from those higher prices in new technologies, and the oil barons found even more destructive ways to extract oil and gas — by exploiting the muck from tar sands, inventing hydro-fracking, and despoiling Third World sources.
So now, oil is cheaper than it’s been in years, about $66 a barrel. Regular unleaded gasoline can be had for well under $3 a gallon. [..]
Cheap oil, of course, is a curse. It promotes increased use of carbon fuels at a time when we should be investing massively in substitutes. And the apparent plenty of oil and gas takes the spine out of most politicians.
Robert Reich: Patrolling the Boundaries Inside America
America is embroiled in an immigration debate that goes far beyond President Obama’s executive order on undocumented immigrants.
It goes to the heart of who “we” are. And it’s roiling communities across the nation.
In early November, school officials in Orinda, California, hired a private detective to determine whether a seven-year-old Latina named Vivian — whose single mother works as a live-in nanny for a family in Orinda — “resides” in the district and should therefore be allowed to attend the elementary school she’s already been attending there. [..]
The nation’s attention is focused on the border separating the United States from Mexico, and on people who have crossed that border and taken up residence here illegally.
But the boundary separating white Anglo upscale school districts from the burgeoning non-white and non-Anglo populations in downscale communities is fast becoming a flashpoint inside America.
In both cases, the central question is who are “we.”
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