“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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Richard (RJ) Eskow: 80 Years Later, Republicans Are Still Fighting Social Security
Some things never change. “The lash of the dictator will be felt,” a Republican House member said in 1935 when Social Security was first proposed. “Social Security is the delinquent child of the left,” a Fox News commentator said this week, “that grew up to be an evil dictator.”
“Dictator”? A program created by popularly elected politicians, and which enjoys widespread support among voters?
Polls have consistently shown that Americans are extremely pleased with Social Security, which provides benefits at costs far below those in the private sector. But Republicans are still working to erode the public’s trust in it, just as they did when GOP presidential candidate Alf Landon called it “a fraud on the workingman” in 1936 and said “the saving it forces on our workers is a cruel hoax.”
To campaign against Social Security is to court political suicide. (It certainly didn’t help Alf Landon; he was trounced.) It therefore becomes imperative to convince voters instead that the program is unreliable. That’s the Republican strategy.
Yves Smith: How to Make Private Equity Honest
The people who manage some of the country’s largest public pension funds — money that ensures the retirements of teachers, police officers, firefighters and other state employees — say they want government regulators to help them avoid getting ripped off when they invest in private equity firms.
Instead, regulators should push them to do a better job of monitoring the investments on their own.
In a letter last month to Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Mary Jo White, 11 state treasurers, plus the New York state and New York City comptrollers, asked for “better disclosure” of expenses at private equity firms, which typically generate returns by buying companies, restructuring them and selling them at higher prices. The officials’ complaint: The firms have been levying all sorts of suspicious fees without their knowledge, effectively siphoning money away from future retirees.
Jeb signals openness to another of his brother’s failed policies: torturing detainees. And he’s not alone!
Half a year ago, while speaking at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, Jeb Bush made a show of distancing himself from the Bush family foreign policy legacy. “I am my own man,” he said, “and my views are shaped by my own thinking and own experiences.” It was transparent nonsense at the time he said it – Jeb was a fervent Iraq war supporter and his foreign policy team is built from the same neoconservative chuckleheads who shepherded George W. Bush into the Iraq catastrophe. But the Bush Doctrine still retains its well-earned political toxicity, and Jeb had to say something to at least give the impression that he wouldn’t be a replica of his brother on the world stage.
In the months since making that declaration, though, Jeb has shown no indication that his foreign policy preferences are substantively different from those of George W. Bush – he’s still defending the Iraq war, he wants American combat troops to fight in Iraq, he’s pushing regime change in another Middle Eastern country (Syria), and he favors a hardline posture on Iran that eschews diplomacy in favor of isolation and tough talk.
And now we can add torture to the list of Bush-era policies that Jeb might bring back.
Eugene Robinson: Jeb Bush: The Republican to Vote For (If You Wish His Brother Were Still in Office)
Jeb Bush has firmly established himself as the Republican to vote for if you wish his brother were still president. Best of luck with that.
In what was billed as a major foreign policy speech Tuesday, Bush proposed inching back into Iraq, wading into the Syrian civil war and engaging in much the same kind of geopolitical engineering and nation-building that George W. Bush attempted. So much for the whole “I am my own man” routine.
He finally understands that to have any credibility, even amid a field of uber-hawks (minus Rand Paul), he has to say the invasion of Iraq was a mistake. But judging from his actions, that’s not what he seems to believe. Why would someone who thinks the war was wrong include Paul Wolfowitz, one of its architects, among his top foreign policy advisers? Why would someone who sees the Middle East as an unholy mess reveal that he consults his brother, the chief mess-maker, on what to do next?
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