“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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Dean Baker: Big Insurance’s Health Care Scam for the Holidays
Last week United Health Care (UHC), the country’s largest health insurance company, announced that it was considering leaving the health care exchanges set up under the Affordable Care Act (ACA). It claimed that it was losing money on the plans it offers in the exchange, so it might decide to give up this market. [..]
Unless we can get access to the details of UHC books we may never know for sure whether the company is being run by incompetents or liars, but this situation does point to the value of one part of the original plan for the ACA that got left on the cutting room floor: the public option.
Suppose that there was a Medicare-run plan available in each of the exchanges. If people were unable to find a plan they liked from a private insurer, or their insurer left the market, as UHC is now threatening to do, they would be able to buy into the Medicare program. This would ensure that everyone would have at least one good option in the exchanges.
The insurers obviously hate the idea of having to compete with Medicare. That’s why the public option got killed when the plan was being debated by Congress. But we should all see UHC’s threats as a wake-up call reminding us of why we needed a public option in the first place.
Amanda Marcotte: White men are the face of terror: Race, Donald Trump, Fox News and the real story of the Minneapolis #blacklivesmatter shooting
With the daily trickle of news about racist incidents around the country, it was probably just a matter of time, in our gun-soaked country, before something like Monday’s nights shooting in Minneapolis happened. A Black Lives Matter protest was violently interrupted by gunfire last night, with five people hit, though thankfully all survived with non-lethal injuries. Police are looking for three white male suspects and witnesses at the scene say that white supremacist counter protesters were at the protest last night, and that the gunfire came from them after a tense confrontation.
There’s a brutal irony in all this, because these shootings come at the crescendo of months upon months of hysteria about how white people need to live in terror of black people and immigrants trying to kill us. Things kicked off over the summer, when Donald Trump started his presidential campaign on the premise that Mexican immigrants are rapists and criminals and that we need to build a big wall to keep them out. [..]
It would be nice if the Minneapolis shooting was a wake-up call, a reminder of how stupid all this propaganda fueling conservative hysteria over fantasy threats to white people actually is. But it probably won’t. After the Trump supporters attacked a BLM protester in Birmingham, right-wing media went straight to work painting the protester as the attacker and arguing that people had to swarm him in, uh, self-defense. It probably won’t take long before conservative media has some narrative minimizing the shooting in Minneapolis, before returning to a ready stream of programming claiming that foreigners and black people are out to get white people.
Simon Jenkins: Another big corporation is flagrantly dodging tax. This must be outlawed
No invention of modern capitalism so enrages the public as does the tax haven. When giant corporations and very rich people choose not to pay their taxes, and government turns a blind eye, faith in the state crumbles.
The decision of the American drugs giant, Pfizer, to merge with Dublin-based Allergan, thereby “relocating” its headquarters to Ireland is not because some wizard potion has been discovered in the hills of Connemara. It is to dodge tax. The same has applied to Starbucks, Amazon, Google and countless other global companies.
Meanwhile western governments, and more important their taxpayers, must forego staggering sums in revenue. Some $20tn is estimated lost by individual tax dodgers round the world alone, almost a third of it (according to Oxfam) to just 10 British-jurisdiction tax havens. The corporate losses are thought incalculable.
Farhad Mirza: Obama’s gun control plan ignores the excesses of US arms industry
At least 430 people have been killed and more than 1,200 others injured in 338 mass shootings in the United States so far this year. An estimated 400,000 Americans have been shot and killed since 9/11.
On Oct. 1, a few hours after a 26-year-old gunman murdered nine people and injured 20 others at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon, a visibly agitated President Barack Obama addressed a grieving nation — the 15th such statement he has given since taking office. “We’ve become numb to this,” he said from the White House. He’s right. [..]
His focus on the plight of shooting victims, however noble, exposes another, less discussed form of national numbness. The United States’ arms trade with countries that violate the human rights of their citizens is a major contributor to the armed violence that has gripped the Middle East, especially since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.
Even as he implores the nation for the fate of Americans affected by gun violence, he has failed to acknowledge Washington’s responsibility for the lives of civilians whose oppressive governments kill and maim using U.S.-made weapons. So why is he antsy about tackling gun violence in the U.S. but silent on the excesses of the U.S. military-industrial complex?
The answer is simple: It’s a political choice. The U.S. is one of the largest suppliers of weapons to India, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, all of which are strategically important but have dismal human rights records.
Jeb Lund: Donald Trump doesn’t care what’s true, just what his base feels is true
Donald Trump is exhausting. On Saturday and Sunday, he said and then repeated that “thousands” of Muslims in New Jersey on 11 September 2001 cheered the attacks on New York City. It never happened, but he doesn’t care who gets hurt.
Trump will keep saying things like that, and by the time journalists are done disproving the last spurious claim, he will be on to the next one. His campaign website might as well be Snopes.com. The only limits to Donald Trump are the limits of belief. [..]
Trump’s pandering is truly peerless, but sooner or later, it may run afoul of his own competitiveness. He will be fine so long as he takes care never to make something up contrary to the polite fictions beloved by his base. But, one day, he won’t be able to help himself. He will tell some insolent person waving arithmetic at him that he has some of the best mathematicians in the world, All the best math guys, they know all the very beautiful, very exclusive math, and we know that two plus two is seven.
And somewhere a supporter will think, That can’t be right. Two plus two is five.
In June 2011, Google had a problem. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) had opened multiple investigations into whether the tech giant illegally favored its own shopping and travel sites in search engine queries; restricted advertisers from running ads on competing sites; and copied rival search engines’ results.
To fight this threat, Google turned to a key third-party validator: academia, and in particular one university with a long history as an advocate for corporate interests. [..]
The growing peril of corporations buying off academics to support their perspective recently came to light when Senator Elizabeth Warren called out Robert Litan, a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution think tank, for producing suspect industry-funded research. Litan was subsequently relieved of his position with Brookings. It should come as no surprise that Litan also received money from Google to issue a paper in May 2012.
Joshua Wright recently ended his tenure at the FTC, going back to George Mason to teach. With Google again threatened in the U.S. and Europe with additional lawsuits over anti-competitive practices, he is free to write on their behalf again and benefit from Google’s large storehouse of funds for academic underwriting.
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