“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: Knowledge Isn’t Power
Regular readers know that I sometimes mock “very serious people” – politicians and pundits who solemnly repeat conventional wisdom that sounds tough-minded and realistic. The trouble is that sounding serious and being serious are by no means the same thing, and some of those seemingly tough-minded positions are actually ways to dodge the truly hard issues.
The prime example of recent years was, of course, Bowles-Simpsonism – the diversion of elite discourse away from the ongoing tragedy of high unemployment and into the supposedly crucial issue of how, exactly, we will pay for social insurance programs a couple of decades from now. That particular obsession, I’m happy to say, seems to be on the wane. But my sense is that there’s a new form of issue-dodging packaged as seriousness on the rise. This time, the evasion involves trying to divert our national discourse about inequality into a discussion of alleged problems with education.
And the reason this is an evasion is that whatever serious people may want to believe, soaring inequality isn’t about education; it’s about power.
Robert Reich: Why We’re All Becoming Independent Contractors
GM is worth around $60 billion, and has over 200,000 employees. Its front-line workers earn from $19 to $28.50 an hour, with benefits.
Uber is estimated to be worth some $40 billion, and has 850 employees. Uber also has over 163,000 drivers (as of December — the number is expected to double by June), who average $17 an hour in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., and $23 an hour in San Francisco and New York.
But Uber doesn’t count these drivers as employees. Uber says they’re “independent contractors.”
What difference does it make?
For one thing, GM workers don’t have to pay for the machines they use. But Uber drivers pay for their cars — not just buying them but also their maintenance, insurance, gas, oil changes, tires, and cleaning. Subtract these costs and Uber drivers’ hourly pay drops considerably.
For another, GM’s employees get all the nation’s labor protections.
Last week the nation was treated to the sad and embarrassing spectacle of Jeb Bush, mollycoddled scion to an empire of failure, proclaiming that “‘m my own man.” Here’s a simple rule of thumb: Anyone who has to say he’s his own man, or woman, isn’t. The 62-year-old Mr. Bush has been coasting on his family’s power and privilege since he was a weed-smoking, Steppenwolf-listening prep school student in the sixties.
From prep school slacker to presidential frontrunner: Now that’s a “Magic Carpet Ride.”
Sadder still was the list of Jeb’s advisors published this week, a list which included – and was tarnished by – the genuinely execrable Paul Wolfowitz. [..]
When it comes to the Iraq War, Paul Wolfowitz was – in the words of another Steppenwolf song – “The Pusher.” His promotion of that conflict was the defining act of his career, and it leaves him a failure in every conceivable intellectual or moral application of that word.
Paul Buchheit: The Corporate Debt to Society: $10,000 Per Household, Per Year
That estimate is based on facts, not the conservative-style emotion that might deny the responsibility for any debt to the American people. Wealth redistribution to big business has occurred in a variety of ways to be explained below. And there’s some precedent for paying Americans for the use of their commonly-held resources. The Alaska Permanent Fund has been in effect, and widely popular, for over thirty years.
Over half (57 percent) of basic research is paid for by our tax dollars. Corporations don’t want to pay for this. It’s easier for them to allow public money to do the startup work, and then, when profit potential is evident, to take over with applied R&D, often with patents that take the rights away from the rest of us.
All the technology in our phones and computers started this way, and continues to the present day. Pharmaceutical companies have depended on the National Institute of Health. The quadrillion-dollar trading capacity of the financial industry was made possible by government-funded Internet technology, and the big banks survived because of a $7 trillion public bailout.
A particularly outrageous example of a company turning public research into a patent-protected private monopoly is the sordid tale (here) of the drug company Gilead Sciences.
Zoë Carpenter: One Thing Republicans and Democrats Are Starting to Work Together On (and It’s Not War)
Could this be the year that lawmakers really begin to dismantle the system of mass incarceration that they have been building for decades? It seems conceivable, thanks to a surge in interest from elected officials at the state and federal level, as well as an “unlikely” coalition of left- and right-wing groups that announced its formation on Thursday. The Coalition for Public Safety, as the group is called, includes organizations like the Center for American Progress and the American Civil Liberties Union along with Tea Party-aligned FreedomWorks and Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform. It’s backed, in part, by Koch Industries. [..]
Where, exactly, is that wind blowing? The transpartisan alliances springing up around criminal justice reform agree on the problem: the United States locks up too many people for too long. But the allies have varying explanations for why that’s a problem, and what its origins are. For groups like Americans for Tax Reform and libertarians like Rand Paul, lowering prison populations is a means of shrinking government; they have obvious differences with those on the left who believe significant investment in social services and gun safety laws would make communities safer. So to what extent do they agree on solutions, and where is the greatest potential for progress?
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