“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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Dean Baker: The Battle Over the Trans-Pacific Partnership and Fast-Track Gets Hot
President Obama must be having trouble getting the votes for fast-track authority since the administration is now pulling out all the stops to push the deal. This has included a press call where he apparently got testy over the charge by critics that the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is a secret trade deal.
Obama insisted the deal is not secret, but googling “TPP” will not get you a copy of the text. Apparently President Obama is using a different definition of “secret” than the ordinary English usage. [..]
The Obama administration has punted in the one area where a trade deal may have had a major positive impact. The deal will not have any rules on currency. The main reason the United States continues to run large trade deficits is that our trading partners deliberately prop up the dollar against their currencies. This makes their goods relatively cheaper and ours more expensive.
The Obama administration could have made currency rules front and center in a trade deal, but that would have only made sense if its main concern was jobs and workers. Instead we have a deal that is a piñata for the corporations who were at the table, and who the Democrats are counting on to give generously in the 2016 campaign.
This doesn’t look very pretty to the rest of us, which is why the Obama administration will have to play fast and loose with the truth to get the TPP through Congress.
Jason Nichols: Black Baltimore residents aren’t ‘animals’. We punish people for killing animals
After massive protests in the streets of Baltimore to raise awareness about Baltimore City police practices and to demand answers and accountability in the death of Freddie Gray, the 25-year-old man whose spine and neck were severed in 4 different places while in police custody – eventually resulted in the destruction of property and serious injury to some police officers, the protesters’ frustration prompted many white people (on blogs and in social media) to refer to black Baltimoreans as “animals” for their actions.
But “animals” is a misnomer. People – including police officers – are punished for killing or doing harm to domestic animals. Baltimore has busted dog fighting rings and sent offenders to prison for animal cruelty. In 2014, former Baltimore City police officer Alec Taylor was sentenced to a year behind bars for killing a dog. That might not seem like much, but it is longer than the sentences given to the killers of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin, Rekia Boyd or 7-year-old Aiyana Stanley-Jones.
The Pentagon’s new 33-page cybersecurity strategy is an important evolution in how America proposes to address a top national security threat. It is intended to warn adversaries – especially China, Russia, Iran and North Korea – that the United States is prepared to retaliate, if necessary, against cyberattacks and is developing the weapons to do so. [..]
It is essential that the laws of armed conflict that govern conventional warfare, which call for proportional response and reducing harm to civilians, are followed in any offensive cyberoperations. With so many government agencies involved in cybersecurity – the National Security Agency, the Department of Homeland Security, the Central Intelligence Agency, the F.B.I. and the Pentagon – the potential for turf fights and duplication is high.
The new strategy is the latest evidence that President Obama, having given up on Congress, is putting together his own response to the challenge. Since this is a global issue, still needed are international understandings about what constitutes cyberaggression and how governments should respond.
Andrew Cockburn: The Kingpin Strategy
As the war on terror nears its 14th anniversary — a war we seem to be losing, given jihadist advances in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen — the U.S. sticks stolidly to its strategy of “high-value targeting,” our preferred euphemism for assassination. Secretary of State John Kerry has proudly cited the elimination of “fifty percent” of the Islamic State’s “top commanders” as a recent indication of progress. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi himself, “Caliph” of the Islamic State, was reportedly seriously wounded in a March airstrike and thereby removed from day-to-day control of the organization. In January, as the White House belatedly admitted, a strike targeting al-Qaeda leadership in Pakistan also managed to kill an American, Warren Weinstein, and his fellow hostage, Giovanni Lo Porto. [..]
Analyses of this policy often refer, correctly, to the blood-drenched precedent of the CIA’s Vietnam-era Phoenix Program — at least 20,000 “neutralized.” But there was a more recent and far more direct, if less noted, source of inspiration for the contemporary American program of murder in the Greater Middle East and Africa, the “kingpin strategy” of Washington’s drug wars of the 1990s. As a former senior White House counterterrorism official confirmed to me in a 2013 interview, “The idea had its origins in the drug war. So that precedent was already in the system as a shaper of our thinking. We had a high degree of confidence in the utility of targeted killing. There was a strong sense that this was a tool to be used.”
Had that official known a little more about just how this feature of the drug wars actually played out, he might have had less confidence in the utility of his chosen instrument. In fact, the strangest part of the story is that a strategy that failed utterly back then, achieving the very opposite of its intended goal, would later be applied full scale to the war on terror — with exactly the same results.
Aaron Pasitti: Raising the Minimum Wage Boosts Growth and Does Not Cause Unemployment
The Federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour is far too low. A full-time worker — 40 hours per week for 52 weeks — earning the minimum wage is guaranteed to live at the poverty level. Raising the minimum wage is good economics, good policy, and good for workers. It would reduce income inequality and poverty while boosting growth, without increasing unemployment.
A higher minimum wage would also reduce the Federal budget deficit by lowering spending on public assistance programs and increasing tax revenue. Since firms are allowed to pay poverty-level wages to 3.6 million people — 5 percent of the workforce — these workers must rely on Federal income support programs. This means that taxpayers have been subsidizing businesses, whose profits have risen to record levels over the past 30 years. [..]
By failing to ensure the minimum wage keeps pace with the cost of living and worker productivity, policymakers have created a situation where full-time workers earning the minimum wage have to rely on public assistance to make ends meet. Programs such as the Earned Income Tax Credit, Medicaid, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance, and Temporary Assistance to Needy Families cost taxpayers billions of dollars each year. Half of this spending goes to working people earning less than $10.10 per hour. Raising the minimum wage to this amount would lower welfare rolls by 1.7 million people and reduce government spending on welfare programs by $7.6 billion per year.
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