“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: The Trans-Pacific Partnership threatens our liberty
Economic theory holds that removing trade barriers among nations should increase global wealth. But the proposed 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership that Congress must soon give a straight up-or-down vote threatens our liberties as Americans and is likely to add almost nothing to U.S. economic growth.
I have been a longtime critic of the agreement, especially since WikiLeaks obtained a draft of its intellectual property provisions, showed a clear bias in favor of corporations.
Since Washington made the text public in October I have come to see some very real benefits in the agreement — but not nearly enough to warrant making it the law of the land. What I see now is a pact that would make government subservient to corporations, posing a real threat to freedom and self-governance.
Bill Black: The Wall Street Journal Lies About Liar’s Loans (Pt 1)
It is time to break out one of our two family rules again: It is impossible to compete with unintentional self-parody. How fraudulent is finance even now? The Wall Street Journal reports that “big money managers” want to bring back “liar’s loans.” The WSJ article exemplifies the lies that the industry and the media told about liar’s loans before and after 2008.
Liar’s loans, as the name admits, are pervasively fraudulent. Only fraudulent lenders make liar’s loans as a regular business practice. These home loans make the officers wealthy through the “sure thing” of the “fraud recipe” for “accounting control fraud.” The WSJ, of course, ignores these facts and presents instead falsehoods provided by fraudulent officers.
This column addresses the lie in the WSJ article that invokes our family rule: “The money managers think that risk is manageable with rigorous underwriting [of liar’s loans]…” If this were written for the Onion it would have been a stellar example of irony. Instead, it is an oxymoron crafted by someone who thinks that WSJ reporters and their readers are regular morons. Because the reporter regurgitated such a clumsy lie about liar’s loans as if it were revealed truth, we know that the “big money managers'” opinion about the reporter’s abilities proved correct.
Algernon Austin: It’s Time to Stop Whitewashing Civil Rights History
The African American Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s failed more than it succeeded. Yet, in the popular history of the Civil Rights Movement, we never talk about its failures. Popular Civil Rights history makes the movement into a fairytale: Once upon a time there was racism; then Martin Luther King Jr. marched into town; he slayed the evil racism; and we all lived happily ever after. The End. Boiled down to its essentials, nearly every Civil Rights movie follows this basic script. It would be nice if this history were true, but just about all of it is false.
Consider the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. We like to say that this decision desegregated America’s schools. But today in my city, Washington D.C., which is more than a third white, there isn’t a white child in any of the schools in my neighborhood. For a while there was some progress toward desegregation, but that progress was reversed by a renewed commitment to segregated schooling. When we teach the history of the Brown decision, we need to say that it was the decision that failed to desegregate America’s schools.
E. J. Dionne, Jr.: Why Democrats can’t seem to decide between Clinton and Sanders
If Republicans are engaged in a three-sided civil war, Democrats are having a spirited but rather civilized argument over a very large question: Who has the best theory about how progressive change happens? [..]
The Democratic contest is far more subtle and, as a result, intellectually interesting. The obvious contours of the race are defined by Hillary Clinton’s identity as a moderate progressive and Bernie Sanders’s embrace of democratic socialism.
But there is less distance between Sanders and Clinton than meets the eye. Their sharpest programmatic differences (other than on Sanders’s mixed gun-control record) are over his sweeping ideas: breaking up the largest banks, establishing a single-payer health-care system and providing universal free college education. These disagreements are closely connected to their competing theories of change.
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