“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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Paul Krugman: ‘The Big Short,’ Housing Bubbles and Retold Lies
In May 2009 Congress created a special commission to examine the causes of the financial crisis. The idea was to emulate the celebrated Pecora Commission of the 1930s, which used careful historical analysis to help craft regulations that gave America two generations of financial stability.
But some members of the new commission had a different goal. George Santayana famously remarked that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” What he didn’t point out was that some people want to repeat the past — and that such people have an interest in making sure that we don’t remember what happened, or that we remember it wrong. [..]
Which brings me to a new movie the enemies of financial regulation really, really don’t want you to see.
“The Big Short” is based on the Michael Lewis book of the same name, one of the few real best-sellers to emerge from the financial crisis. I saw an early screening, and I think it does a terrific job of making Wall Street skulduggery entertaining, of exploiting the inherent black humor of how it went down.
David Cay Johnston: America: Home of the wimps?
Listening to Republican presidential candidates on Tuesday night, you would think that America has become a nation of wimps, cowering in fear for no good reason over a murderous band of Middle Easterners with little power to harm us.
Polls show strong support for Donald Trump, who wants to spy on mosques and ban all Muslims from entering the country. Ben Carson fears a Muslim president would follow Sharia, unaware of the most basic principles of our Constitution. Sen. Ted Cruz spreads sophisticated versions of the same un-American rhetoric and calls President Barack Obama “an apologist” for terrorists during appearances on conspiracy theorist Glenn Beck’s show.
All three, along with the other Republican candidates, say if elected they will protect us from “radical Islamic terrorists.” But the reality is that their vile comments threaten America far more than those they attack.
The Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) is a pipsqueak. It has no capacity to occupy a single inch of American soil and never will. It is no military threat to America or Europe. All it can do is recruit foolish people to harry us with violent crimes that have no military significance.
Yet under the influence of such political hyperventilating, Americans express their fears to journalists and pollsters about this mouse that cannot even roar. Their anxiety is as ludicrous as the plot of the 1959 Peter Sellers farce about the fictional Duchy of Grand Fenwick invading Manhattan so that, by surrendering, it could get American aid for its wine industry.
Bill Moyers and Michael Winship: Lurking Within That Ominous Omnibus Spending Bill
There is an unwritten rule in Congress that before you do even a little for the working class you must do a lot for the donor class. So while the $1.1 trillion — yes, that’s a “t” — budget bill now winding its way to passage contains some tax breaks for low-income workers, in reality, it’s a bonanza for Big Business.
Congressional leadership actually split the bill in two with one devoted to spending and the other devoted to cuts. “That way,” Paul Singer writes in USA Today, “Republican conservatives can vote against the spending bill, Democratic liberals can vote against the tax bill, and both bills still pass and a government shutdown is averted.”
Kari Lydersen: Rahm Emanuel’s moment of truth
Holiday lights illuminated stacks of moving boxes in a downtown Chicago plaza this week. With labels such as “false tears,” “injustice” and “cover-ups,” the boxes were meant to be Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s, ready to go his hoped-for moving day.
The boxes were props in one of the many recent protests against the mayor. But it is plausible that Emanuel, one of the country’s most feared and storied politicians, could be forced to leave office.
The Nov. 24 release of police dashcam video of a white officer gunning down black teenager Laquan McDonald last year has caused political fallout dwarfing previous outrages against Emanuel, including ones over the closing of almost 50 public schools, the shuttering of public mental health clinics and the privatization of city services.
The past year made clear that the public is not happy with Emanuel. He was forced into a runoff election with upstart progressive candidate Jesús “Chuy” García and then beat Garcia by a margin of only 12 percentage points despite a massive fundraising advantage.
But the video of the police shooting, along with Emanuel’s unsuccessful bid to suppress it, have sent his political fortunes plunging to new lows.
Jill Richardson: Make America Great, as It Was … When?
The holiday season is a time for nostalgia. We watch ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ and ‘A Christmas Story,’ engage in time-honored traditions, and even sing songs about sleighs and sleigh bells.
Honestly, when was the last time you rode in a sleigh?
I’ve eaten a roasted chestnut (purchased on the streets of Chicago, so I don’t know if there was an open fire involved in the roasting process), but I haven’t gone for a single sleigh ride in my whole life.
Donald Trump’s campaign slogan – ‘Make America Great Again’ – plays on this idea of some imagined time in the past when things were better, simpler, than they are now. But The Donald isn’t the only one who evokes this mythical past.
On the other side of the aisle, Democrats often wax poetic about the strong middle class of the era that followed World War II, or about the social safety net President Franklin Delano Roosevelt put in place before that.
And it’s true: America did accomplish great things in the past. But I fundamentally disagree that our better days are behind us.
This notion of a lost Norman Rockwell America is an illusion.
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