“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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Dean Baker: WaPo Wants Us to Mourn the Lost Political Power of Big Business
Seriously, the Post ran a major front page article in its Sunday business section telling us that “big business lost Washington.” The piece does acknowledge that business lobbies are still very effective in getting special deals for their industry, like favorable tax treatment for offshore profits and low-cost access to public lands for fossil fuel extraction, but it complains that business leaders are not openly setting the national agenda.
It’s not clear where exactly business leaders are seeing their needs go unmet. One of the most fundamental items on the national agenda is returning to full employment. Here the business community, lead by groups like the Peter Peterson funded organization “Fix the Debt,” along with the Washington Post, played a large role in pushing the government towards austerity in 2011. The result was sharply slower growth and much less job creation than would otherwise be the case.
Jessica Valenti: Phyllis Schlafly won some battles, but she lost the war
Phyllis Schlafly believed feminism was a losing battle. The conservative icon, who died on Monday aged 92, insisted that the movement for gender equality was “a fight with human nature”, and therefore doomed to fail. Women belonged in the home, she believed, men belonged in the workforce and women didn’t need any more rights than the ones they were already afforded.
But despite Schlafly’s predictions and beliefs, the world she left behind this week is one that largely embraces the issues she most feared. Feminism is more popular than ever, women are in the workforce en masse, LGBT rights are front and center and the country is mostly pro-choice.
It turns out “human nature” is more attached to social progress than it is the idea that women belong in the kitchen. And with Schlafly’s death, we’re witnessing the end of a particular brand of conservative antifeminism that simply can’t survive in a country that has moved well beyond its values.
John Atcheson: Empire in Decline: When the Oligarchy Inherits the Wind
The unthinkable may well happen.
The US may elect as President a racist, xenophobic, narcissistic, con man with no knowledge of policy or governance.
As of now, Trump holds a slight lead over Clinton in the latest poll.
Real progressives could be forgiven for feeling a healthy dose of schadenfreude, but then, schadenfreude is a bitter banquet if you’re all in the same lifeboat.
How could this be happening? Well, the bottom line is, the Oligarchy is getting hoisted on its own petard.
For going on three decades now, the Oligarchy has been turning elections into a game of “heads-I-win, tails-you-lose” in which candidates from either party represented them, and not us.
The only difference between the two parties and the majority of the candidates they field is how they portray themselves, and how closely they feel they have to hew toward reality. In terms of what they actually do once elected, the differences are less pronounced.
Jill Stein: It is undemocratic to exclude me and Gary Johnson from presidential debates
Presidential debates should be an opportunity for the American people to decide the direction of our nation. But since 1987, everything about the debates has been predetermined by the party bosses who run Washington.
Consider that 76% of Americans want the presidential debates to include Gary Johnson and me. Yet the phony Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) is trying to rob voters of the open debates they want.
The CPD is actually a private corporation that refuses to disclose its current funders or sponsors. The Democratic and Republican National Committees both select its leaders. The CPD literally excludes the 50% of voters who reject their parties.
This two-party cartel posing as a public service “commission” admitted in a 1987 press conference that independent candidates and alternative political parties should be excluded from the debates, and they create artificial barriers to exclude them.
Bill McKibben: The oceans are heating up. That’s a big problem on a blue planet
So, just as a refresher, it’s always good to remember that we live on an ocean planet. Most of the Earth’s surface is salt water, studded with the large islands we call continents.
It’s worth recalling this small fact – which can slip our minds, since we humans congregate on the patches of dry ground – because new data shows just how profoundly we’re messing with those seven seas. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature has published an extensive study concluding that the runaway heating of the oceans is “the greatest hidden challenge of our generation”.
When we think about global warming, we usually fixate on the air temperature. Which is spiking sharply – July was the hottest month ever measured on our planet. But as the new study points out, 90% of the extra heat that our greenhouse gases trap is actually absorbed by the oceans. That means that the upper few meters of the sea have been steadily warming more than a tenth of a degree celsius per decade, a figure that’s accelerating. When you think of the volume of water that represents, and then try to imagine the energy necessary to raise its temperature, you get an idea of the blowtorch that our civilization has become.
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