“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 Incredible Arrogance of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Crowd
There are few policies that show the split between elite opinion and everyone else as clearly as trade policy. On trade we see a remarkable convergence of the leadership of both parties against their base, with the elites firmly behind the leadership against what they view as the ignorance of the masses.
As is often the case, the ignorance rests largely on the side of the elites. If that seems surprising, after all these are highly educated people, remember these are people who could not see the $8 trillion housing bubble whose crash wrecked the economy. There is little reason to believe their understanding of economics has improved much in the last seven years.
For the elites, trade agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) are a no-brainer. After all, do we want autarky? Globalization is a natural process and standing in the way is like trying to block the flow of the Amazon River.
Robert Reich” Ten Ideas to Save the Economy #4: Bust Up Wall Street
When Americans think of how the economic rules are stacked against them, they naturally think of Wall Street.
When the Wall Street bubble burst in 2008 because of excessive risk-taking, millions of working Americans lost their jobs, health insurance, savings, and homes.
But The Street is back to many of its old tricks. And its lobbyists are busily rolling back the Dodd-Frank Act, intended to prevent another crash.
The biggest Wall Street banks are also much larger. In 1990, the five biggest banks had 10 percent of all of the nation’s banking assets. Now, they have 44 percent – more than they had at the time of the 2008 crash. [..]
The only sure way to stop excessive risk-taking on Wall Street so you don’t risk losing your job or your savings or your home, is to put an end to the excessive economic and political power of Wall Street.
It’s time to bust up the big banks.
Over the weekend, the US government announced that special forces soldiers entered Syria to conduct a raid that killed an alleged leader of ISIS, Abu Sayyaf. In the process, anonymous US officials leaked classified information to the New York Times that’s much more sensitive than anything Edward Snowden ever revealed, and it serves as a prime example of the government’s hypocrisy when it comes to disclosures of secret information.
Here’s how the New York Times described how the US conducted this “successful” raid:
The raid came after weeks of surveillance of Abu Sayyaf, using information gleaned from a small but growing network of informants the C.I.A. and the Pentagon have painstakingly developed in Syria, as well as satellite imagery, drone reconnaissance and electronic eavesdropping, American officials said. The White House rejected initial reports from the region that attributed the raid to the forces of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria.Read that carefully and pretend it was Snowden who leaked this information, instead of nameless Pentagon spokesmen. US officials would be screaming from the rooftops that he leaked extremely timely and sensitive intelligence (it was literally only hours old), that he will cause specific terrorists to change their communications behavior, and most importantly, he put the lives of informants at risk. (Note: none of Snowden’s leaks did any of these things.)
Mike Lux: Trade and the Enforcement Issue
The trade debate is a thoroughly engrossing saga full of intriguing story lines, as both parties find themselves in civil wars as the strange bedfellows of Obama, McConnell, and Boehner, and the combined might of corporate America, try to ram home a deal that, with such an alliance, should be easy to ram. But the fight goes on, and the story lines keep getting more interesting: Will the tea party faction in the House finally trust Obama with the kind of unlimited power on trade he is asking for? Will Hillary take a stand? Will Obama keep taking pot shots at Elizabeth Warren? Will Pelosi rally the Democratic troops in the House to be against Obama the same way Warren and Harry Reid have in the Senate?
I have worked and written a lot on the TPP fight over the last couple of years, and it is going to be intense all the way through, but I wanted to throw another thing into the whole trade discussion today, and that is the issue of enforcement: Why are we to have any faith in the language of these trade deals on labor, the environment, or anything else if the administration won’t enforce the rules of trade that already exist?
Jeffrey Sachs: Why Fast Track Is a Dangerous Gift to Corporate Lobbies
The Obama Administration is now on track to get “fast track” legislation through the Senate, heading towards a close vote in the House. The end goal is to conclude two major business treaties: the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership Agreement (TTIP) and the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP). The House Democrats are right to withhold their support until key treaty positions favored by the White House are dropped.
One of the key reasons to fight fast track is the Administration’s insistence on including Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) in the two draft treaties. ISDS is a dangerous policy that undermines the case for TPP and TTIP. The ISDS framework is an unjustified grant of exceptional power to multinational companies above and beyond the legal system in which the companies operate.
ISDS allows foreign companies and individuals to sue their “host-country” governments through ad hoc arbitration proceedings rather than through normal administrative and judicial channels in the country. Through this mechanism, foreign investors can challenge domestic laws, regulations, court decisions (including Supreme Court decisions) and other domestic actions in front of party-appointed tribunals, and governments can be ordered to pay the investor millions or even billions of dollars. When governments lose, they have little recourse to challenge the decision, even if the tribunal erred on matters of fact or law.
Kevin Gosztola: Obama Task Force Recommends Array of Measures to Curb Warrior Mindset Among Police
A task force on policing setup by President Barack Obama issued its report and a number of the recommendations appear to be geared toward reducing the warrior mindset adopted by officers in police departments throughout the United States.
Obama appointed a task force to review police practices in December after demonstrations against police brutality in Ferguson, Missouri, spread throughout the nation. It was his administration’s attempt to tamp down some of the outrage toward police and channel it into some kind of constructive change in government policies, despite the reality that police who killed unarmed black men were still escaping prosecution. [..]
These recommendations are just that-recommendations. Some of them are very good. The police data initiative could provide a lot of information that reveals the inner workings of police departments and makes it easier for citizens to push to end policies that make it easy for officers to torment their communities. However, cities like Chicago, New York, San Francisco, and others with police forces, which desperately need real oversight, are not participating in the police data initiative.
Maybe there will be some demilitarization. Maybe there will be a shift toward more community policing. But it is highly unlikely that the institutional racism underpinning the culture of policing, which promotes the warrior mindset, changes significantly with these reforms.
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