“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 Time-Loop Party
By now everyone who follows politics knows about Marco Rubio’s software-glitch performance in Saturday’s Republican debate. (I’d say broken-record performance, but that would be showing my age.) Not only did he respond to a challenge from Chris Christie about his lack of achievements by repeating, verbatim, the same line from his stump speech he had used a moment earlier; when Mr. Christie mocked his canned delivery, he repeated the same line yet again.
In other news, last week — on Groundhog Day, to be precise — Republicans in the House of Representatives cast what everyone knew was a purely symbolic, substance-free vote to repeal Obamacare. It was the 63rd time they’ve done so.
These are related stories.
Mr. Rubio’s inability to do anything besides repeat canned talking points was startling. Worse, it was funny, which means that it has gone viral. And it reinforced the narrative that he is nothing but an empty suit. But really, isn’t everyone in his party doing pretty much the same thing, if not so conspicuously?
The truth is that the whole G.O.P. seems stuck in a time loop, saying and doing the same things over and over. And unlike Bill Murray’s character in the movie “Groundhog Day,” Republicans show no sign of learning anything from experience.
Chelsea Manning: Prison keeps us isolated. But sometimes, sisterhood can bring us together
Prisons function by isolating those of us who are incarcerated from any means of support other than those charged with keeping us imprisoned: first, they physically isolate us from the outside world and those in it who love us; then they work to divide prisoners from one another by inculcating our distrust in one another.
The insecurity that comes from being behind bars with, at best, imperfect oversight makes us all feel responsible only for ourselves. We end up either docile, apathetic and unwilling to engage with each other, or hostile, angry, violent and resentful. When we don’t play by the written or unwritten rules – or, sometimes, because we do – we become targets. It’s easy enough to make us go away; it’s easy enough to make us “someone else’s problem”.
The unique problem for transgender women in prison is that our health and welfare are also the responsibility of those charged with overseeing us. We live in an environment in which the same staff given the job of keeping us in prison for lengthy periods of time and occasionally “teaching us a lesson” are the same ones given the job of ensuring our transitions, when we’re allowed to transition at all. The first job always takes precedent over the other, seemingly more annoying one.
Raffi Cavoukian: It’s not just water that’s poisoning our kids; it’s also our collapsing democracy
What in the water is going on in North America?
In Flint, Michigan, people were unknowingly forced to drink lead-contaminated water for months after Governor Rick Snyder’s administration decided to save money by changing families’ water source from treated Detroit municipal water to the polluted Flint River. The river water contained a variety of biological and other contaminants which, when inappropriately treated with chlorine, apparently caused lead to leach from the ageing city pipes and into the drinking water.
More than 100,000 Flint residents have now been subjected to lead poisoning, a very serious developmental hazard for children; documents emerging from the state government indicate that Snyder and senior members of his administration were apprised of the problems with the water and residents’ complaints but dismissed them for months as children were being poisoned. Film-maker Michael Moore has called for Snyder’s arrest and prosecution; others have called for his immediate resignation.
But the people of Flint are not alone.
Jeffrey Sachs: How the US Congress Hands US Corporate Taxes To Europe
The American Congress is so incompetent that it is arbitrarily handing billions of dollars of U.S. tax revenues to Europe. The issue involves tax manipulation by America’s top IT and pharmaceutical companies, including Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Gilead and others. These companies should be paying U.S. taxes that instead are increasingly being collected by European countries thanks to Congressional (and IRS) gross negligence.
The issue is simple and yet hopelessly muddled in U.S. tax policy. Tech companies engage in R&D. When successful, they sell products at prices far above marginal cost. Indeed, sometimes the marginal cost of their products is zero. Their profits are a kind of rent or return on intellectual property (IP).
When Google or Apple or Amazon or Gilead earns international profits, the profits are the returns to prior R&D. That R&D was undertaken in the United States, or almost all of it was. The stream of earnings, therefore, is properly viewed to be the return to intellectual property that should reside in, and be taxed in, the United States.
Leo W. Gerard: TPP Would Further Emasculate America
A century ago, Carl Sandburg dubbed Chicago the City of Big Shoulders: “hog butcher for the world, tool maker, stacker of wheat, player with railroads and the nation’s freight handler; stormy, husky brawling.”
All of this was true of America itself as well: Nation of big shoulders. The United States was a brawny country that would intervene to help win World War I and later quickly retool factories to serve as munitions mills to win World War II. Now, though, as America’s tool makers and freight car builders are furloughed, their factories shuttered and offshored, America is wasting. Ill-conceived free trade deals are reducing it to a nation of stooped shoulders.
The newest proposed deal, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), signed in New Zealand last week by representatives of its 12 member states, would further enfeeble American manufacturing. The first of the ilk, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), devastated U.S. manufacturing. Allowing China into the World Trade Organization and the bad trade deals that followed NAFTA all pummeled American manufacturing when it was already down.
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