“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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Bryce Covert: Bernie’s Revolution vs. Hillary’s Getting Things Done
Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are locked in an intense, occasionally nasty, policy battle — a fight finally being put to its first voter test today in Iowa. One advocates a single-payer health care system (Mr. Sanders), the other is attacking his plan to make it a reality (Mrs. Clinton). One refuses to raise taxes on the middle class (Mrs. Clinton), the other is O.K. with doing so in order to fund certain programs (Mr. Sanders). Mrs. Clinton is hammering her opponent over his previous milquetoast support for gun control measures. Mr. Sanders claims Mrs. Clinton doesn’t go far enough on Wall Street reform.
These are substantive, important differences. Democrats haven’t finished the debate over whether, and how, the country should have a government-funded health care system, for instance.
But the largest difference between Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Sanders is not over policy. (I should note that my spouse works on the technology team for the Clinton campaign, but is not involved in policy.) There is scant daylight between them on most issues and certainly almost all of the causes near and dear to Democrats’ and progressives’ hearts. The largest difference, and therefore what the Democratic Party is truly grappling with, is not about two different visions of the party. The choice is between two theories of change. It’s the difference between working the system and smashing it.
Paul Krugman: Wind, Sun and Fire
So what’s really at stake in this year’s election? Well, among other things, the fate of the planet.
Last year was the hottest on record, by a wide margin, which should — but won’t — put an end to climate deniers’ claims that global warming has stopped. The truth is that climate change just keeps getting scarier; it is, by far, the most important policy issue facing America and the world. Still, this election wouldn’t have much bearing on the issue if there were no prospect of effective action against the looming catastrophe.
But the situation on that front has changed drastically for the better in recent years, because we’re now achingly close to achieving a renewable-energy revolution. What’s more, getting that energy revolution wouldn’t require a political revolution. All it would take are fairly modest policy changes, some of which have already happened and others of which are already underway. But those changes won’t happen if the wrong people end up in power
To see what I’m talking about, you need to know something about the current state of climate economics, which has changed far more in recent years than most people seem to realize.
Robert Kuttner: In Praise of Unrealistic Ideas
The core blockage of American politics today is that nothing in mainstream debate is radical enough to fix what’s broken in the economy. Today, the vast majority of Americans are being left far behind a halting economic recovery. The typical American family has not gotten a raise in more than three decades.
The Sanders campaign on the populist left and the Trump campaign on the populist right are both emblematic of the fact that large numbers of Americans have concluded that the system is not serving them, and they want radical change.
The Trump voters, more likely to be older white males, working class or lower middle class, are sick of the fact that they seem to be losing ground every year. The question of whether they are losing ground to blacks, or immigrants, or Wall Street, or to jobs leaving our shores, gets blended into a blur or undifferentiated anger. The fact that they keep hearing that the economy is in recovery is all the more enraging.
Trump frightens the Republican elite both because he is uninformed and unpredictable, but also because he is in many respects the least conservative of the conservatives. He doesn’t hate government and he doesn’t have much use for Wall Street and free trade. But the Trump program, to the extent that he has one, doesn’t address the deeper causes of working class rage.
Nomi Prins: Democracy of the Billionaires
Speaking of the need for citizen participation in our national politics in his final State of the Union address, President Obama said, “Our brand of democracy is hard.” A more accurate characterization might have been: “Our brand of democracy is cold hard cash.”
Cash, mountains of it, is increasingly the necessary tool for presidential candidates. Several Powerball jackpots could already be fueled from the billions of dollars in contributions in play in election 2016. When considering the present donation season, however, the devil lies in the details, which is why the details follow.
With three 2016 debates down and six more scheduled, the two fundraisers with the most surprising amount in common are Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. Neither has billionaire-infused super PACs, but for vastly different reasons. Bernie has made it clear billionaires won’t ever hold sway in his court. While Trump… well, you know, he’s not only a billionaire but has the knack for getting the sort of attention that even billions can’t buy.
Regarding the rest of the field, each candidate is counting on the reliability of his or her own arsenal of billionaire sponsors and corporate nabobs when the you-know-what hits the fan. And at this point, believe it or not, thanks to the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision of 2010 and the super PACs that arose from it, all the billionaires aren’t even nailed down or faintly tapped out yet. In fact, some of them are already preparing to jump ship on their initial candidate of choice or reserving the really big bucks for closer to game time, when only two nominees will be duking it out for the White House.
Bill McKibben: The Zika virus foreshadows our dystopian climate future
I’ve spent much of my life chronicling the ongoing tragedies stemming from global warming: the floods and droughts and storms, the failed harvests and forced migrations. But no single item on the list seems any more horrible than the emerging news from South America about the newly prominent Zika disease.
Spread by mosquitoes whose range inexorably expands as the climate warms, Zika causes mild flu-like symptoms. But pregnant women bitten by the wrong mosquito are liable to give birth to babies with shrunken heads. Brazil last year recorded 4,000 cases of this “microcephaly”. As of today, authorities in Brazil, Colombia, Jamaica, El Salvador and Venezuela were urging women to avoid getting pregnant.
Think about that. Women should avoid the most essential and beautiful of human tasks. It is unthinkable. Or rather, it is something out of a science fiction story, the absolute core of a dystopian future. “It is recommended that women postpone – to the extent possible – the decision to become pregnant until the country can move out of the epidemic phase of the Zika virus,” the Colombian health authorities said, adding that those living in low altitude areas should move higher if possible, out of the easy range of mosquitoes.
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