“Pondering 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 Making of an Ignoramus
Truly, Donald Trump knows nothing. He is more ignorant about policy than you can possibly imagine, even when you take into account the fact that he is more ignorant than you can possibly imagine. But his ignorance isn’t as unique as it may seem: In many ways, he’s just doing a clumsy job of channeling nonsense widely popular in his party, and to some extent in the chattering classes more generally.
Last week the presumptive Republican presidential nominee — hard to believe, but there it is — finally revealed his plan to make America great again. Basically, it involves running the country like a failing casino: he could, he asserted, “make a deal” with creditors that would reduce the debt burden if his outlandish promises of economic growth don’t work out. [..]
The Trump solution would, among other things, deprive the world economy of its most crucial safe asset, U.S. debt, at a time when safe assets are already in short supply.
Of course, we can be sure that Mr. Trump knows none of this, and nobody in his entourage is likely to tell him. But before we simply ridicule him — or, actually, at the same time that we’re ridiculing him — let’s ask where his bad ideas really come from.
Trevor Timm: As the US meddles in another Middle East war, candidates must address it
The Pentagon quietly announced on Friday that US military troops are on the ground in yet another Middle Eastern country – this time in Yemen – and have been there for the last two weeks. That’s how US wars get started these days: no public debate, no congressional authorization, no presidential address; just an after-the-fact pre-weekend news dump.
This time, instead of Isis, the US military “advisers” (don’t call them “boots on the ground”!) are supposedly assisting Yemeni forces fighting a resurgent al-Qaida organization, the same terrorist group that the US has helped strengthen over the past year by giving Saudi Arabia all sorts of support for their appalling and destructive war against Yemen. [..]
The fact that the Obama administration has not only stayed largely silent on the war but actively supported it behind the scenes should be one of the true scandals of its foreign policy posture toward the Middle East, yet you can bet the vast majority of Americans have no idea it’s happening. As far as I can tell, not a single question has been put to any of the presidential candidates about US policy in Yemen, despite an obsession with covering the ”war on terror” and its latest metamorphosis with Isis.
You can expect the US troops, or “advisers”, that are supposedly “assisting” Yemeni and Emirati forces, will soon morph into a direct fighting force, just like when the Pentagon was saying the same thing about troops Iraq and Syria just months ago, only to later announce that some troops are now, in fact, fighting themselves.
And we will spin around, once again, in the never-ending cycle that we refuse to escape in the now entirely predictable ”war on terror”.
Leo W. Gerard: Failure of Korean Trade Deal Voids TPP
On the fourth anniversary of the Korean trade deal, its lofty promises have been revealed as putrid pie in the sky: More jobs lost. No exports gained.
Just like NAFTA, just like China’s entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO), free traders swore that the Korean deal would shower jobs and economic prosperity down on America.
It didn’t happen. Actually, the exact opposite did. In all three cases, the schemes enticed corporations to close American factories and offshore work. That enriched CEOs and shareholders. But it impoverished millions of American workers and bankrupted communities.
Now, a backlash is evident in the groundswell of support for insurgent presidential candidates on both the left and right who denounce these failed free trade policies. This is an uprising against a quarter century of Washington, D.C., based free-trade boosterism. Its first victim should be the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a massive scheme between the United States and 11 Pacific Rim countries.
Robert Kuttner: Pitiful Giant: The Republican Establishment
We keep hearing that the Republican Party is on track to suffer an epic split over the presumed nomination of Donald Trump. But what exactly does this mean? What happens once the 2016 election is over?
On one side are traditional business conservatives, devoted to government-bashing, low taxes and pro-corporate globalization — coupled with dog-whistle appeals to racism. This establishment has delivered all recent GOP nominees, despite the Tea Party takeover of much of the Congressional Republican Party — until this year when the party elite was upended.
Since Reagan, the business right has papered over the cracks in a coalition that used social conservatism to win votes of a suffering working class. Now, Trump has demolished that phony alliance.
Trump’s brand of rightwing populism is anti-tax but not anti-government, and is occasionally anti-business. In place of government-bashing, Trump substitutes a crude form of political and economic nationalism. He has turned voter wrath against the financial elites in the GOP who have been calling the shots.
Sabrina Vouvoulias: Donald Trump’s kryptonite: millions of active – and furious – Latino voters
Barely a day goes by when Donald Trump offers Latino something new to get riled up about. In a “Cinco de Mayo” tweet on Thursday, for example, he declared “I love Hispanics!” in the caption to a selfie that showed him digging into a “taco bowl” at his desk.
“This can’t be serious,” said my Mexican cousin. “No words,” wrote a Cuban colleague. “No” and “disgusting” were just some of the other comments my Latino friends – both Democratic and Republican – posted after I uploaded a screen shot of the tweet to my Facebook page.
The presidential candidate started his campaign by saying that Mexicans are rapists and criminals. He then extended his hateful remarks to include those “coming from all over South and Latin America” and the Middle East, vowed to deport all undocumented immigrants and bar all Muslims, and proposes rescinding birthright citizenship and building a great wall between us Mexico. And yet, he is now the presumptive Republican nominee.
And it’s apparently dawned on him that he might need some of the approximately 27.3 million Latino eligible voters to cast a ballot for him if he actually wants to win.
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