Pondering the Pundits

“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.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Pondering the Pundits”.

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New York Times Editorial Board: Visa Abuses Harm American Workers

There is no doubt that H-1B visas — temporary work permits for specially talented foreign professionals — are instead being used by American employers to replace American workers with cheaper foreign labor. Abbott Laboratories, the health care conglomerate based in Illinois, recently became the latest large American company to use the visas in this way, following the lead of other employers, including Southern California Edison, Northeast Utilities (now Eversource Energy), Disney, Toys “R” Us and New York Life. [..]

Criticism of the visa process has been muted, and reform has moved slowly, partly because laid-off American workers — mostly tech employees replaced by Indian guest workers — have not loudly protested. Their reticence does not mean acceptance or even resignation. As explained in The Times on Sunday by Julia Preston, most of the displaced workers had to sign agreements prohibiting them from criticizing their former employers as a condition of receiving severance pay. The gag orders have largely silenced the laid-off employees, while allowing the employers to publicly defend their actions as legal, which is technically accurate, given the loopholes in the law. [..]

Congressional leaders of both parties have questioned the nondisparagement agreements. Bipartisan legislation in the Senate would revise visa laws to allow former employees to protest their layoffs. Beyond that, what Congress really needs to do is close the loopholes that allow H-1B abuses.

Richard (RJ) Eskow: Would You Trust Henry Kissinger With Your Social Security?

Years ago a political scientist said that the mass media can’t influence what people think, but it can influence what people think about. Today it does both. If you’re a billionaire who wants to manipulate public opinion, that means you’ll keep feeding it stories that serve your ideology and self-interest.

Hedge fund billionaire Peter G. “Pete” Peterson is a master of the art. At a time when 47 million Americans (including one child in five) live in poverty, when our national infrastructure is collapsing and the middle class dream is dying before our eyes, he’s managed to convince a few voters, a lot of politicians, and far too many major-media journalists that our most urgent problem is … federal deficit spending.

They don’t just want you to be concerned about it. They want you to be afraid.

The front for this effort (one of many assembled by the Peterson Foundation) is called “The Coalition for Fiscal and National Security,” and they’ve assembled a list of prominent figures to promote it. Let us consider the message, and the messengers.

Paul Rosenberg: Beyond Trump’s threat: The GOP, with help from the left, has been destroying democracy for decades

“Can Donald Trump Wrestle Democracy into Submission?” the New Republic headline in early June read, but “So far, the heartening answer is no,” the subhead reassured. The analysis by Salon alum Brian Beutler laid out the case, building on an earlier piece from late March. It is Trump’s threats to democratic norms, such as press freedom (his promise to “open up libel laws”) and the separation of powers, (Speaker Ryan “going to have to pay a big price”)  Beutler argued, “more than his offensive, oft-ridiculed policy agenda” that set Trump apart as beyond the pale. But what’s worked for him in the GOP primary, allowing him to defy the laws of normal politics, won’t work the same way going forward — as events since then have already proved. [..]

But saying that Trump won’t destroy American democracy single-handedly isn’t really saying very much. Because the truth is, the GOP has been undermining our democracy for decades, eroding our political institutions [see my March 2015 story on “constitutional hardball”], as well as hollowing out our middle class.  At the same, Democrats have mostly been playing along, offering “GOP lite” alternatives on most major questions, except for a few flagship social issues, such as reproductive choice, and more recently gay marriage.

Indeed, just before Obama took office, in the midst of the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression, he announced plans for a bipartisan approach to cutting Social Security and Medicare. It was just another in long line of neoliberal “solutions” that have lead us to a place of political gridlock and sharply diminished expectations, typified by the explosion of student loan debt putting a whole generation of the most talented & ambitious in hock, with only marginal incomes from the gig economy keeping many of them half-afloat.  The widespread multiracial youth support for Sanders was strong evidence of how bankrupt that approach is now seen to be.

Jim Hightower: Bowing down to Trump: Is there even an iota of courage in the GOP hierarchy?

The opposite of courage is not cowardice, it’s conformity. And, boy, America’s Republican leadership is conforming like a pack of lemmings, dutifully marching in lockstep behind their maniacal new leader. Even the nastiest of Trump’s unhinged outbursts don’t jar them enough to say: “Wait a minute, why are we following this wacko?” His incendiary rants insult, demean and mock women, Mexican immigrants, Muslims, refugees, disabled people, African-Americans, Latinos, and many more — but his destructive bigotry hasn’t repelled the GOP hierarchy.

The final straw should have been this recent, blatantly-racist insistence that Judge Gonzalo Curiel should not be allowed to preside over the current fraud cases that Donnie has against him. However, shamefully, top Republicans have tried to protect their own political butts by distancing themselves from the bigoted remarks, but continuing to hug the bigot. House speaker Paul Ryan was typical of the GOP’s pusillanimous posturing, saying: “I regret those comments he made.” Regret? How about “I’m repulsed, appalled, nauseated”? Ryan lamely added that Trump’s scurrilous assault on the judge was “sort of like… a racist comment.” Then he rushed to say that, of course, he still backed the bigot to be America’s president.

Likewise, the GOP’s Senate Leader, Mitch McConnell, mumbled that “I couldn’t disagree more with what the had to say,” before declaring that, nonetheless, “we’re all behind him now.”

With morally rotten, gutless politicos like these, no wonder our Home of the Brave is sliding into mediocrity.

Amanda Marcotte: Trump’s campaign of innuendo: Like many Republicans before him, Trump’s arguing through insinuation

At this point, one needs a spreadsheet housed in its own server to keep track of all the various grudges Donald Trump is nursing, but special attention should be paid to his attempts to beef with the Washington Post, and not just because it indicates, yet again, Trump’s hostility to a free press. The whole debacle speaks volumes about what kind of game Trump is playing and his attempts to get away with deeply sleazy behavior.

At issue is a completely accurate piece by Jenna Johnson headlined “Donald Trump seems to connect President Obama to Orlando shooting.”

It’s an alarming headline indeed, because it accuses a major presidential candidate of linking a sitting president to an act of terrorism. [..]

The main difference between Trump’s rhetoric and the standard issue Republican rhetoric is that Trump is less artful and more ham-fisted. He just isn’t as good as most at playing the “who, me?” game, and it’s made worse because he flies into a defensive rage when his efforts at pretending he’s not saying what he’s saying fail.

This inability to be subtle about his bigotry has helped him win over huge sectors of the conservative base, who increasingly conflate Republican efforts at plausible deniability with kow-towing to “political correctness”, but it makes him seem like an artless buffoon to everyone else. But make no mistake, just because he’s bad at it doesn’t mean Trump isn’t trying to play the same game as many Republicans before him.