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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Katrina vanden Heuvel: Time For a ‘New Deal’ For Greece

Don’t believe the tripe about the crisis in Europe. With the election of the Syriza Party in Greece, the Greek people have offered Europe hope. This is Europe’s chance to turn from the crippling austerity that has left the South mired in depression and the North sinking in deflation. Syriza is calling for a “New Deal,” not only for Greece but for all of Europe.

The question is whether the rest of Europe will exhibit statesmanship-or condemn the people of Europe to years more of misery. The initial reactions in Germany and Brussels opt for misery. Now is the time for the Obama administration, progressives in Congress and across the country to join in a bold call to save Europe from its folly.

The facts of the situation are clear. The Greek debt cannot be repaid. When the bottom dropped out of the global economy, Greece, plagued by a corrupt and indebted government, was the most vulnerable of the European Union nations. The so-called “troika”-the EU, the European Central Bank and the IMF-stepped in to bail out reckless banks, assume most of the debt, and inflict harsh terms on the Greeks to repay it. The Greeks have sold off their assets, crushed workers, trampled labor laws and slashed vital public services to ensure that the private bankers be paid.

Michelle Goldsberg: The GOP’s Embrace of Anti-Vaxxers Reveals the Craziness Gap in American Politics

It is grotesque that, in the midst of the current measles outbreak, some leading Republicans are humoring vaccine denialists, but it is not surprising. It is, rather, a near-perfect illustration of the craziness gap in American politics. Vaccine skepticism is one of those issues, like 9/11 Trutherism, where parts of the fringe right and fringe left, each driven by their own distinct fears about authority, curve around and meet each other. Yet only the fringe right finds indulgence among mainstream politicians.

There is a popular perception that vaccine refusal is driven by the sort of affluent, vaguely left-wing parents satirized by the Los Feliz Day Care Twitter feed. (“Vax or no vax, none of our kids had measles, and we only went to Disneyland to protest commercialism and the anthropomorphization of animals.”) But susceptibility to misinformation about vaccines is less about politics than about paranoia, and paranoia, whether towards Big Pharma or big government, operates in many different cultural milieus. A recent paper by Yale Law School’s Dan M. Kahan found that perception of “vaccine risks displayed only a small relationship with left-right political outlooks,” though it is slightly more common on the right. “Respondents formed more negative assessments of the risk and benefits of childhood vaccines as they became more conservative and identified more strongly with the Republican Party,” it said.

Bryce Covert: A Job at McDonald’s Now Includes Singing and Dancing on Demand

TV spectators of last night’s Super Bowl were treated to many slick, high-concept ads, but one probably stuck out to the millions of McDonald’s employees who were watching: the company’s spot trumpeting its new “pay with lovin'” campaign. The company is rolling out a new way to bribe customer loyalty amid declining sales by randomly picking some who will get their food and drink for free. Instead of money, they have to pay with “lovin.'” [..]

According to the Super Bowl ad, this can range from being told by the cashier to call your mother and tell her you love her (no word on what happens if you don’t have a mother) to being commanded to dance to giving the cashier a fist bump. Leaving aside what customers may think of being asked to perform these tasks in return for their food, little attention is given to the other side of the register: the workers themselves.

McDonald’s employees are notoriously low-paid. Average hourly pay, according to Glassdoor, is $8.25 for a crew member. (It’s just slightly more for the food and beverage industry generally at $8.84.) Even in a low-paid service job, of course, there is a minimum expectation of professional behavior at work that would require being polite and even friendly to customers.

John Nichols: People Power Is Winning Net Neutrality

Can the people ever win in an new age of oligarchy, when corporate power is so frequently and thoroughly unbound?

Yes, sometimes, they can.

After years of bumbling, blustering and bureaucratic attempts to avoid necessary action, the Federal Communications Commission is expected to move on Thursday to defend net neutrality. According to the design and technology blog Gizmodo, “It’s Finally Game Time for Net Neutrality.” The more staid Wall Street Journal explains that the commission majority is moving to “fully embrace the principle known as net neutrality”-the “central element” of which “would be a ban on broadband providers blocking, slowing down or speeding up specific websites in exchange for payment.”

Translation: The FCC is preparing to defend the Internet as we know it against subdivision by profiteers who would create a “fast lane” for paying content from multinational corporations and billionaire-backed politicians and a “slow lane” for communications from those who are not on the winning side of the income-inequality chasm.

Eugene Robertson: Golden Opportunity for GOP Deal-Making

To understand why the centerpiece initiative of President Obama’s budget makes so much sense, imagine that U.S. corporations decided to bring home-in cash-the estimated $2 trillion in profits they are stashing overseas to avoid paying taxes.

If they shipped the money by air, cargo planes stuffed with dollar bills would land at aging airports that no longer measure up to international standards. If they sent it by sea, the cash would arrive at ports too antiquated to accommodate the newest and biggest container ships. Either way, the money would eventually be loaded onto trucks that headed for their final destinations via crumbling, traffic-choked freeways and rusting bridges.

So the president’s idea is hard to argue with: Impose a one-time 14 percent tax on those foreign profits to partially fund a multi-year, $478 billion program to renew the nation’s sagging infrastructure. The rest of the money would come from the existing gasoline tax.

Corporations would surely squawk-since at present they are paying no U.S. tax on that offshore money-but in return they would get permanent cuts in corporate tax rates, with the levy on overseas profits slashed nearly by half. And Republicans have long maintained that they want corporate tax reform and recognize the need for new infrastructure spending.

Therefore, given the Mad Hatter’s logic that holds sway in Washington, GOP leaders immediately announced their opposition to Obama’s budget and everything it stands for.