“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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Robert Reich: Here’s Why the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement Is Just Plain Wrong
Republicans who now run Congress say they want to cooperate with President Obama, and point to the administration’s Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP, as the model. The only problem is the TPP would be a disaster.
If you haven’t heard much about the TPP, that’s part of the problem right there. It would be the largest trade deal in history – involving countries stretching from Chile to Japan, representing 792 million people and accounting for 40 percent of the world economy – yet it’s been devised in secret.
Lobbyists from America’s biggest corporations and Wall Street’s biggest banks have been involved but not the American public. That’s a recipe for fatter profits and bigger paychecks at the top, but not a good deal for most of us, or even for most of the rest of the world.
Ben Norton: Media Are Blamed as US Bombing of Afghan Hospital Is Covered Up
A US-led NATO military coalition bombed a hospital run by international humanitarian aid organization Doctors Without Borders (known internationally as Medecins Sans Frontières, MSF) in Afghanistan, killing at least 22 people-12 staff members and 10 patients, including three children-and wounding 37 more. [..]
If you read US corporate media coverage of this incident, however, US culpability would likely not be evident. Instead, readers would learn that a hospital was bombed in Afghanistan, and that people died. Who exactly carried out the bombing would not be clear. [..]
Ambiguous, misleading and even downright dishonest language abounds throughout the coverage. US media spin the story to reflect positively on the culprit; they report that the US is investigating the atrocity, while failing to acknowledge that the US itself is responsible for the atrocity.
This technique is very reminiscent of the loaded language police departments use to downplay police brutality-language that is often repeated verbatim by journalists who just uncritically quote government press releases.
Last week, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump released his plan for changing the tax code. Trump wants big across the board tax cuts, with the largest tax cuts going to the wealthy. He claimed that his tax cut won’t lead to a loss of revenue since it would lead to a huge spurt of economic growth. His number was 6.0 percent annual growth over the next decade, topping Jeb Bush’s 4.0 percent growth rate by two full percentage points. [..]
But apart from what the tax cuts may or may not be able to do in terms of growth, there is also the matter of how the Federal Reserve Board would react. If that sounds strange, you should be very angry at the reporters at your favorite news outlet, because they should have been talking about this part of the picture.
Suppose that Donald Trump’s tax cut really is the magic elixir that would get the economy to grow 6.0 percent a year. But what if the people at the Fed’s Open Market Committee (FOMC) don’t recognize this fact? After all, many on the FOMC want to raise interest rates now because they think the economy’s current 2.0 percent growth rate is too fast.
David Dayen: We must despise our kids: Our ugly war on teachers must end now
Last week’s jobs report showed the labor market decelerating. This appears to be the fifth straight year that promising signs in the winter end up softening in the summer and fall. And indicators like the labor force participation rate (which is at a 38-year low) and wage growth (which has stagnated for decades, including in what should be a surge period since the Great Recession) make it look even worse.
But Elise Gould of the Economic Policy Institute dug out perhaps the worst numbers in the report. With September’s data in, we can see how many teachers went back to school this year. And Gould finds that the tremendous gap that opened up when local budgets crashed during the recession has not come close to being filled.
At the peak, we had 8.1 million public K-12 education teachers and staff in July 2008. Seven years later, we have far less, 7.8 million, despite a larger population of students that need to be served. According to EPI, the local public education shortfall, accounting for additional student enrollment, is 410,000 jobs.
This means that classrooms built for 25 or 30 students now have 35 or 40 in them. It means that kids don’t get the same level of personalized instruction, or in some cases any attention at all. It means that programs like art and music have to be excised, or extracurricular activities, simply because there are no resources available to staff them.
Mark Weisbrot: WikiLeaks cables shed light on US foreign policy failures
Documents show Washington backing of regime change is a major problem
Some the most important historical information for understanding current events comes, not surprisingly, from sources that were intended to be shielded from the public. From November 2010 to September 2011, more than 250,000 communications between U.S. diplomats that were never meant to see the light of day were made public. They are available at WikiLeaks, the nonprofit media organization that accepts confidential information from anonymous sources and releases it to news sources and the public. A number of researchers have put together a treasure trove of information and analysis that can be immensely clarifying. (The recently released book from this research, published by Verso, is “The WikiLeaks Files: The World According to U.S. Empire.”)
Consider Syria, which is dominating the international news because of increased Russian military intervention as well as a surge of some 500,000 refugees from the region arriving in Europe. Why has it taken so long for Washington to even begin – yes, it is unfortunately just beginning – to reconsider the policy of requiring Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to agree to resign before any meaningful negotiations can take place? After all, any diplomat could have told the White House that demanding the political suicide of one party to a civil war as a condition for negotiations is not how civil wars end. Practically speaking, this policy has been a commitment to indefinite warfare.
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