“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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New York Times Editorial Board: Coke Tries to Sugarcoat the Truth on Calories
The Coca-Cola Company, which has suffered a large decline in consumption of sugary sodas as consumers worry about obesity, has formed a new organization to emphasize exercise as the best way to control obesity and to play down the importance of cutting calories.
Coke and other beverage makers have long funneled money to industry-leaning scientists and formed innocent-sounding front groups to spread the message that sugary sodas have no deleterious effect on health and should not be taxed or regulated. The new organization, the nonprofit Global Energy Balance Network, is the latest effort to put a “science based” gloss on industry positions, as described by Anahad O’Connor in The Times. [..]
Meanwhile, the evidence continues to mount that sugar-sweetened drinks are a major contributor to obesity, heart disease and diabetes, and that exercise makes only a modest contribution to weight loss compared to ingesting fewer calories.
Paul Krugman: Bungling Beijing’s Stock Markets
China is ruled by a party that calls itself Communist, but its economic reality is one of rapacious crony capitalism. And everyone has been assuming that the nation’s leaders are in on the joke, that they know better than to take their occasional socialist rhetoric seriously.
Yet their zigzagging policies over the past few months have been worrying. Is it possible that after all these years Beijing still doesn’t get how this “markets” thing works?
The background: China’s economy is wildly unbalanced, with a very low share of gross domestic product devoted to consumption and a very high share devoted to investment. This was sustainable while the country was able to maintain extremely rapid growth; but growth is, inevitably, slowing as China runs out of surplus labor. As a result, returns on investment are dropping fast.
Social Security was signed into law eighty years ago, on August 14, 1935. In those eight decades, it has taught us a number of important lessons.
Social Security has demonstrated that there are some undertakings that government does better than the private sector. Social Security is more efficient, universal, secure, and fair than any counterpart private sector arrangement is or could be.
Social Security has also taught us that some people hate government no matter how effective it is, and will say just about anything to prevent its good work. Indeed, these opponents of government fight hardest when a government program works well, because it undermines their bias that government is the problem, when government is, in truth, often the best or even the only solution. And so they really hate Social Security. It works so extraordinarily well that it is a shining example of government at its best.
David Cay Johnston: Enforcement for white-collar crime hits 20-year low
The donor class doesn’t want to be policed by Congress
Congress is starving federal white-collar law enforcement – a subtle and lucrative favor to the crooks and connivers among the political donor class. The move is costing honest people everywhere, damaging economic growth and perverting government.
This year the number of federal white-collar crime prosecutions will be about 37 percent below 20 years ago, when Bill Clinton was in the White House.
The decline grows from our corrupt campaign finance system, which by its nature shifts the focus of elected leaders away from crimes in the C-suites to harsh enforcement of laws on the streets.
The reduction in prosecutions for white-collar crimes was revealed in Department of Justice data analyzed by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University.
Daphne Aviatar: Stalled 9/11 Case Is Another Reason to Close Guantanamo
The military commissions have once again cancelled two weeks’ worth of hearings scheduled in the case of the five alleged plotters of the September 11 attacks. Although the attacks themselves took place nearly 14 years ago, the five men accused of masterminding the deadliest terror attack to ever take place on U.S. soil are still nowhere near trial. As President Obama wrangles with his own defense department over how to keep his promise to close the prison, the stalled 9/11 case stands as one of the many glaring reasons he should be sure to get it done.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his co-defendants have been described as an obstacle to Obama’s closing Guantanamo, because Congress has blocked the administration’s ability to transfer them to the United States for trial. But their case is actually one of the strongest reasons, as a matter of justice for the victims of the 9/11 attacks, for the U.S. government to shutter the prison and its flailing justice system once and for all.
Clive Stafford Smith: The military ignores Obama’s order to release Shaker Aamer from Guantánamo
Recent history demonstrates that if President Barack Obama, arguably the most powerful person on planet Earth, wants to prioritize almost anything – from pardoning 46 convicted drug felons to bombing a foreign country without the consent of Congress – little can stand in his way. Why, then, is Shaker Aamer not home in London with his wife and four children? [..]
On Thursday, we came a little closer to understanding the reason that Aamer’s youngest child, Faris – who was born on Valentine’s Day 2002, the day that Aamer was rendered to the detention center at Guantánamo Bay – has never even met his father. The Guardian revealed that “the Pentagon [is] blocking Guantánamo deals to return Shaker Aamer and other cleared detainees.” President Obama, it seems, has personally ordered Aamer’s release, and his subordinates have ignored and thwarted his order.
However, Article II, Section 2 of the US Constitution provides that the “President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States”. Under Article 90 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, to disobey an order in peacetime is punishable by life in prison. If we believe the Pentagon theory that we are involved in a “Global War on Terror”, then there is an ongoing war, and the punishment for disobeying orders is death.
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