“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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David Cay Johnston: Rockefeller price gouging returns to petroleum industry
Next time you fill your gas tank, the price will likely be inflated by a few pennies per gallon because the sightless sheriffs at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or FERC, have ignored a return of the 19th century price gouging techniques made infamous by John D. Rockefeller.
Unless FERC acts, everyone soon will have their pockets picked as pipeline charges are illegally jacked up, by as much as 500 percent, or about 25 cents per gallon, FERC records show.
In this case, the price gouging is by pipeline shippers with rights to transport refined petroleum. They resell those rights at a huge markup and get kickbacks.
The Supreme Court in 1959 reminded us that the Interstate Commerce Act makes it “unlawful for a common carrier to grant rebates to individual shippers by any device whatsoever or to discriminate in favor of any shipper directly or indirectly.” Illegal fees for transporting refined petroleum products in interstate commerce can result in criminal charges and up to two years behind bars upon conviction.
But instead of seeking civil damages and criminal prosecution, FERC is holding a one-day technical conference on Jan. 26 that may institutionalize price gouging rather than stop it.
George Monbiot: Who’s driving high abortion rates? It’s the religious right
Here is the fact that everyone debating abortion should know: there is no association between its legality and its incidence. In other words, banning abortion does not stop the practice; it merely makes it more dangerous.
The abortion debate is presented as a conflict between the rights of foetuses and the rights of women. Enhance one, both sides sometimes appear to agree, and you suppress the other. But once you grasp the fact that legalising women’s reproductive rights does not raise the incidence of abortions, only one issue remains to be debated: should they be legal and safe or illegal and dangerous? Hmm … tough question.
There might be no causal relationship between reproductive choice and the incidence of abortion, but there is a strong correlation: an inverse one. As the Lancet’s most recent survey of global rates and trends notes: “The abortion rate was lower … where more women live under liberal abortion laws.”
Tim DeChristopher: Civil disobedience often leads to jail. But now, protesters can explain themselves
In the face of governmental failure in addressing climate change, the climate movement has seen a dramatic increase of civil disobedience. The threat of jail is real to activists who use these tactics – as I learned first hand. But now activists now have a powerful form of defense: necessity.
For the very first time, US climate activists have been able to argue the necessity defense – which argues that so-called criminal acts were committed out of necessity – to a jury. The Delta 5, who blockaded an oil train at the Delta rail yard near Seattle in September of 2014, have been been allowed to use the defense in a historic climate change civil disobedience trial being heard this week. They said they acted to prevent the greater harm of climate change and oil train explosions.
Like all civil disobedience, this new wave of climate disobedience is an inherent critique of the moral authority of government. The necessity defense is an opportunity to elaborate that implicit critique into a fully developed legal argument for the responsibility of citizen action in the face of governmental failure.
Howard Fineman: Will America Succumb To Trumpism? The World Is Watching.
In his State of the Union address to Congress on Tuesday night, President Barack Obama never mentioned Donald Trump.
But the president’s speech, stressing optimism, tolerance and good will, was from beginning to end a dismissal and rebuttal to everything the billionaire real estate bigot is and says. [..]
Will the Republican Party pledge allegiance to this message and to one of these messengers, Donald Trump?
If they do so, bringing their nominee within striking distance of winning the White House, what signal will other countries with more tribal histories -– a Germany, a France, a Turkey, a Sweden — take from America’s failure to live up to its ideals?
That is the big question framing the 2016 election, not only for the U.S. but for the world.
We know that the world is watching: social media statistics for 2015 show that the U.S. election was the most followed news story on the planet — and it wasn’t even officially the election year yet.
Sean McElwee: The wealthy are ruining American health care
In a hard-hitting New York Times op-ed on Friday, senior New York Democratic Rep. Steve Israel put all of Washington on notice. He is fed up with campaign fundraising. He joins Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., this year and Sen. Tim Johnson, D-S.D., last year in retiring from Congress. They’ve had enough of shaking down America’s superrich.
Corporate lobbyists and wealthy activists dictate much of American politics today. In the 2012 presidential race, 0.01 percent of Americans contributed almost 30 percent of the money spent in that entire election cycle. Corporations spend billions of dollars annually on lobbying. America’s big spenders exert tremendous influence over elected leaders and have dramatically different priorities from everyday citizens’.
Nowhere is that clearer than in the political battle over the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion, which exemplifies how very wealthy political donors impair access to health care.
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