“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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Suzanne Moore: Inequality isn’t inevitable, it’s engineered. That’s how the 1% have taken over
Who will look after the super-rich and think about their needs? It’s not easy for them: the 1% of the world’s population who by next year will own more global wealth than the 99%. Private security costs a fortune, and with the world becoming an increasingly unequal place a certain instability increases. It could be dangerous!
Very smartly, Oxfam International is raising such questions at the World Economic Forum at Davos, where the global elite gather to talk of big ideas and big money. Oxfam executive director, Winnie Byanyima, is arguing that this increasing concentration of wealth since the recession is “bad for growth and bad for governance”. What’s more, inequality is bad not just for the poor, but for the rich too. That’s why we have the likes of the IMF’s Christine Lagarde kicking off with warnings about rising inequality. Visceral inequality from foodbanks to empty luxury flats is still seen as somehow being in the eye of the beholder by the right – a narrative in which poverty is seen as an innate moral failure of the poor themselves has taken hold. This in turn sustains the idea that rich people deserve their incredible riches. Most wealth, though, is not earned: huge assets, often inherited, simply get bigger not because the individuals who own them are super talented, but because structures are in place to ensure this happens.
Most of us – I count myself – are economically dyslexic. The economic climate is represented as a natural force, like uncontrollable weather. It’s a shame that the planet is getting hotter, just as it’s a shame that the rich are getting richer. But these things are man-made and not inevitable at all. In fact, there are deliberate and systemic reasons as to why this is happening.
Paul Krugman: Hating Good Government
It’s now official: 2014 was the warmest year on record. You might expect this to be a politically important milestone. After all, climate change deniers have long used the blip of 1998 – an unusually hot year, mainly due to an upwelling of warm water in the Pacific – to claim that the planet has stopped warming. This claim involves a complete misunderstanding of how one goes about identifying underlying trends. (Hint: Don’t cherry-pick your observations.) But now even that bogus argument has collapsed. So will the deniers now concede that climate change is real?
Of course not. Evidence doesn’t matter for the “debate” over climate policy, where I put scare quotes around “debate” because, given the obvious irrelevance of logic and evidence, it’s not really a debate in any normal sense. And this situation is by no means unique. Indeed, at this point it’s hard to think of a major policy dispute where facts actually do matter; it’s unshakable dogma, across the board. And the real question is why.
Before I get into that, let me remind you of some other news that won’t matter. [..]
The question, as I said at the beginning, is why. Why the dogmatism? Why the rage? And why do these issues go together, with the set of people insisting that climate change is a hoax pretty much the same as the set of people insisting that any attempt at providing universal health insurance must lead to disaster and tyranny?
Earlier this month, the Pew Research Center released a study that found that most wealthy Americans believed “poor people today have it easy because they can get government benefits without doing anything in return.”
This is an infuriatingly obtuse view of what it means to be poor in this country – the soul-rending omnipresence of worry and fear, of weariness and fatigue. This can be the view only of those who have not known – or have long forgotten – what poverty truly means.
“Easy” is a word not easily spoken among the poor. Things are hard – the times are hard, the work is hard, the way is hard. “Easy” is for uninformed explanations issued by the willfully callous and the haughtily blind.
Allow me to explain, as James Baldwin put it, a few illustrations of “how extremely expensive it is to be poor.”
Mary Turck: Today’s civil disobedience continues MLK’s legacy
Protesting injustice is the best way to celebrate King’s life
On Jan. 14, authorities in Bloomington, Minnesota, filed criminal charges against 10 members of the Black Lives Matter Minneapolis group in connection with a large-scale peaceful protest at the Mall of America last month. An additional two dozen protesters were arrested for trespassing during the Dec. 20 demonstration. They may yet be charged. City attorney Sandra Johnson has said she wants to make the organizers pay for police costs and for the mall’s costs incurred in the form of additional security. [..]
King wrote his letter to clergymen who called the protest that led to his arrest “unwise and untimely.” Apparently, the protest at the Mall of America was also untimely and inconvenient. On a busy Saturday before Christmas, the mall didn’t have time or space to welcome the #BlackLivesMatter protest. After all, it is private property, meaning that anyone who enters the mall with a purpose other than spending money may be declared a trespasser. But the mall also receives millions of dollars in public financing.
“You deplore the demonstrations taking place in Birmingham,” King reminded his critics, admonishing them for failing “to express a similar concern for the conditions that brought about the demonstrations.”
What would that kind of concern look like?
Robert Kuttner: The Politics of Gesture
Looking forward to Tuesday’s State of the Union address, we are seeing a somewhat bolder Barack Obama. The White House has already pre-announced or leaked several “fourth-quarter initiatives,” in the president’s words. Some of these can be accomplished by executive order; most will require legislation. [..]
The time to have fought for such policies was when Obama still had a majority in Congress. But back then, in 2010, he was promoting deficit reduction.
And there are two deeper problems. None of Obama’s proposals will fundamentally change the distribution of wealth and power in America. None addresses the structural erosion of decent payroll jobs.
With one hand, the administration proposes some useful, if marginal, help to working families. With the other, it is promoting trade deals such as the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), both of which will increase the power of corporations to weaken health, safety, labor and environmental regulations and increase the outsourcing of jobs.
Jason Wilson: ‘Cultural Marxism’: a uniting theory for rightwingers who love to play the victim
What do the Australian’s columnist Nick Cater, video game hate group #Gamergate, Norwegian mass shooter Anders Breivik and random blokes on YouTube have in common? Apart from anything else, they have all invoked the spectre of “cultural Marxism” to account for things they disapprove of – things like Islamic immigrant communities, feminism and, er, opposition leader Bill Shorten.
What are they talking about? The tale varies in the telling, but the theory of cultural Marxism is integral to the fantasy life of the contemporary right. It depends on a crazy-mirror history, which glancingly reflects things that really happened, only to distort them in the most bizarre ways. [..]
The idea of a cultural Marxist conspiracy has also endured because, in the absence of a genuine clash of ideas about the way the economy should be run, it provides an animating idea for the political contest. For Cater to claim that Bill Shorten is a Marxist of any kind is laughable precisely because to the extent that the opposition leader is explicitly offering anything, it’s plainly just a slightly more cushioned version of the same underlying economic orthodoxy embraced by Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey. Until that changes, the right will always be able to offer their story of victimhood and conspiracy with some hope of success.
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