“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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Trevor Timm: A government surveillance bill by any other name is just as dangerous
Less than two weeks after Congress was forced into passing historic NSA reform, the Senate tried Thursday to sneak a dangerous “cybersecurity” proposal, which would exponentially expand the spy agency’s power to gather data on Americans, into a massive defense-spending bill. The amendment thankfully failed, but it will be back – possibly within days – and it may require a huge grassroots effort to stop its passage.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell wanted to attach the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (Cisa) to the defense bill in order to push through the controversial measure while avoiding a large public debate about it. But he just missed getting the 60 votes required to move the amendment forward. [..]
But the bill has an even darker, more dangerous element that’s only come to the fore in the last couple weeks, even though the legislation has been kicked around for a few years.
In a little-reported speech on the Senate floor on Thursday, Oregon Democrat Ron Wyden issued an ominous warning (pdf) to the public about the so-called “cybersecurity” bill, which he has called a “surveillance bill by another name” on multiple occasions. He warned every senator not to vote on the bill without reading a secret Justice Department memo interpreting the government’s existing legal authorities.
Ellen Brown: Fast-Track Hands the Money Monopoly to Private Banks-Permanently
In March 2014, the Bank of England let the cat out of the bag: money is just an IOU, and the banks are rolling in it. So wrote David Graeber in The Guardian the same month, referring to a BOE paper called “Money Creation in the Modern Economy (pdf).” The paper stated outright that most common assumptions of how banking works are simply wrong. The result, said Graeber, was to throw the entire theoretical basis for austerity out of the window.
The revelation may have done more than that. The entire basis for maintaining our private extractive banking monopoly may have been thrown out the window. And that could help explain the desperate rush to “fast track” not only the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), but the Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA). TiSA would nip attempts to implement public banking and other monetary reforms in the bud.
The fight over Trade Promotion Authority was never about Barack Obama, despite the best efforts of the White House and many in the media to portray it as such. The president’s effort to obtain congressional consent to “fast track” a sweeping Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, which failed Friday amid a complex flurry of House votes, was about something that runs far deeper: frustration on the part of Americans with race-to-the-bottom trade policies as defined by the North American Free Trade Agreement and extended across ensuing agreements.
This is something the president and his allies need to recognize as they revisit fast track and trade issues-not just in advance of an expected “revote” on a key measure Tuesday but in the weeks and months to come. America is moving beyond the point where a politics of partisanship or personality is sufficient to secure support for “free trade” policies that have not worked and that will not work.
Eugene Robinson: Who Controls Iraq: President Obama or Islamic State?
Don’t feel bad if you’re confused about what the United States is trying to accomplish in Iraq. President Obama doesn’t seem to know, either-or else he won’t say.
Days after admitting that “we don’t yet have a complete strategy” for training Iraqi government forces-which are supposed to ultimately defeat Islamic State-Obama is sending an additional 450 troops to execute this unstrategized mission. That will raise the number of U.S. military personnel in Iraq to about 3,500. But what, realistically, is their goal? And how are they supposed to achieve it? [..]
Obama’s hesitancy suggests a deep skepticism about what, at this point, must be considered his war. That would explain why he keeps announcing we have no strategy. Maybe one does exist-but the president doesn’t think it will work.
Or perhaps Obama is playing for time. Maybe he has decided to do just enough to keep the Iraqi government from collapsing, while giving his generals every chance to make their far-fetched training program work.
The problem is that in any war, the enemy gets a vote. And nothing, so far, has altered the fact that Islamic State is far more in control of events than the president.
Roisin Davis: Iceland Jailed Bankers and Rejected Austerity-and It’s Been a Success
When the global economic crisis hit in 2008, Iceland suffered terribly-perhaps more than any other country. The savings of 50,000 people were wiped out, plunging Icelanders into debt and placing 25 percent of its homeowners in mortgage default.
Now, less than a decade later, the nation’s economy is booming. And this year it will become the first culturally European country that faced collapse to beat its pre-crisis peak of economic output.
That’s because it took a different approach. Instead of imposing devastating austerity measures and bailing out its banks, Iceland let its banks go bust and focused on social welfare policies. In March, the International Monetary Fund announced that the country had achieved economic recovery “without compromising its welfare model” of universal health care and education.
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