Punting the Pundits

“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.

Wednesday is Ladies’ Day.

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Katrina vanden Huevel: Memo to Fed: Don’t Raise Interest Rates

The Fed needs to stop worrying about stemming inflation that doesn’t exist and keep the focus on the jobs we need.

 The Federal Reserve governors really want to raise interest rates. For months, they’ve signaled that they are likely to start gradually raising them this fall. Interest rates have been near zero since the “Great Recession.” Unemployment is down. The economy is setting new records for consecutive months of growth. Raising rates would declare that we’re back to normal.

There’s only one problem: The economy may be recovering, as the White House and many economists tell us, but most Americans aren’t. If the Fed raises interest rates, it will slow an economy that is already growing too slowly and cost jobs in an economy that already produces too few jobs. That will, as Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz warned in a news conference outside of the Fed’s annual retreat in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, add to our already extreme inequality.

 So why raise rates? The Federal Reserve has a mandate-the so-called dual mandate-to sustain maximum employment at stable prices. The Fed has made 2 percent inflation its arbitrary target (a little inflation is needed to guard against slipping into deflation-declining prices that lead the way to recession or worse). But every measure of inflation is below that target. So why even think about raising rates?

Hannah McKinnon: Mixed Messages: President Obama’s Alaskan Climate Trip

On Monday, President Obama and Secretary Kerry are going to Alaska. Their main goal (as we talked about here) is to see the front lines of climate change first hand.

Yet at the same time, in the same region, Royal Dutch Shell is now powering ahead with its newly approved summer 2015 drilling season, thanks to the Obama Administration’s greenlighting of their last remaining permit application about two weeks ago.

The tragic irony should be lost on no one. What message is the President sending? Is the melting Arctic an alarm bell for urgent climate action or a welcome mat for Big Oil?

Anyone who suggests it can be both can’t avoid being labelled a hypocrite.

Michelle Chen: The Global Fight Over Our Drinking Water Is Just Getting Started

And already, people are figuring out successful ways of pushing back against privatization.

Water is an essential natural element, but around the world, it’s also an artificially endangered resource.

That would explain why the nations represented at a recent international conference on water rights in Lagos ranged from remote desert towns with hand-pumped wells to modern public utilities in European cities. Precisely because water is universally in demand, it faces boundless threats of exploitation, in countries rich and poor.

As we reported previously, Lagos has become ground zero for the global water-justice movement, as the city’s residents battle against a pending so-called Public-Private Partnership (PPP). This “development” model, promoted globally by neoliberal policymakers, lets governments contract with private companies to finance investment in water infrastructure, and then funnel them proceeds from future operating revenues.

Elizabeth Renzetti: No Time for Women’s Health in an Age of Austerity

The war waged by political reactionaries and pro-life advocates against Planned Parenthood in the United States is widely known. I wrote about it a couple of weeks ago, and the undercover videos attempting to show the organization in a bad light are only the latest in a longstanding campaign. Planned Parenthood, which provides health care to millions of American women, has been under threat for years. It has always fought back.

What is less well known is that Canadian sexual health clinics, which offer many of the same vital services as their U.S. counterpart (but not abortions), are under similar threat. Earlier this month a group of Canadian sexual health clinics got together to talk about the increasingly difficult obstacles they face, from cuts in funding to harassment by anti-choice opponents to donors who are suddenly spooked by the Planned Parenthood controversy south of the border.

Ghita Schwarz: Growing Momentum to End For-Profit Immigration Detention

Each year, 400,000 immigrants enter the immigration detention system, charged not with crimes but with civil violations of immigration law. Few have lawyers. The Obama Administration has deported more than 2 million immigrants, more than any president in history.  At an annual cost of $2.2 billion per year, immigration detention is the fastest-growing component of the U.S. system of mass incarceration, due in no small part to the increasing influence of private prison contractors, who control 62% of the immigrant detention beds. Private contractors are the exclusive operators of the family detention centers that the Obama Administration has used to jail mothers and children fleeing violence in Central America. The millions they spend each year in lobbying and political contributions shape public policy toward refugees and long-time immigrants alike.

Michele Goldberg: Feminism Does Not Depend on Whether You Take Your Husband’s Name

Changing your name is not a feminist act. At the same time, you have not betrayed feminism if you change your name.

It is true, as the old feminist rallying cry goes, that the personal is political. From the beginning, sexism shapes the most intimate spheres of our lives. It affects the toys we’re given, the behaviors we’re rewarded for, the interests we’re encouraged to pursue. It determines the way we feel in our own skin and present ourselves to the world. If we’re heterosexual, it affects how we relate to our lovers; if we have kids, it can’t help but influence how we raise them.

Because sexism is so interwoven with how we live our lives, it sometimes feels like the transformation of our personal lives is demanded by feminism. This is extremely exhausting, leading to a neurotic level of analysis and justification of our own preferences, motives and interpersonal relationships. Two kinds of personal essays, repeated with nearly infinite variations, manifest this neurosis. One is confessional: I’m a feminist, but I enjoy X, in which X is some traditionally female thing like not working, wearing makeup, being submissive in bed, or doing all the housework. The other is tautological: don’t judge me for doing this traditionally female thing, because it makes me, a feminist, feel good, and thus must be more feminist than it appears.