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.

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Richard Wolff: Has 2016 turned into most trivial US election ever?

This is a public service announcement.

Despite all the drama of the debates; despite all that’s at stake for the world’s security and stability; despite all the breathless coverage; this election is about as small as it gets.

A little more than a month away from election day, what have we really debated through this long contest?

We have dissected the midnight tweets of a delusional, failed businessman. We have watched in awe at his man-child tantrums and eruptions. We have investigated emails that the National Archives will never see. We have fretted about a candidate’s bacterial infection.

Let’s be honest. We have not debated war and peace, capitalism and socialism, or even surveillance and privacy. More than anything else, we have simply obsessed about the psychopathic freak show that is the Trump campaign.

Let the historians of the future know that the great Trump-Clinton contest of 2016 was much like the famous Seinfeld pitch to NBC: it’s a show about nothing.

Katrina vanden Heuvel: How to get justice after the Wells Fargo scandal

Wells Fargo’s abuse of its customers — its employees opened some 2 million accounts and credit cards for depositors who may not have wanted them — has sparked deserved outrage. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D.-Mass.) charged Wells Fargo chair and chief executive John Stumpf with “gutless leadership,” calling on him to resign and give back the pay he pocketed, and called on the Justice Department to launch a criminal prosecution. Rep. Maxine Waters (Calif.), the senior Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee said Wells Fargo had committed “the most egregious fraud we’ve seen since the foreclosure crisis.” Criticism, however, is easy. The question is whether there will be real consequences and real reforms coming out of the scandal.

The Obama administration’s record to date isn’t reassuring. Big banks have been fined more than $110 billion for what the FBI called the “epidemic of fraud” in the mortgage wilding that blew up the economy. But the banks have ended up bigger and more concentrated than ever. And only one top banker has been prosecuted or forced to disgorge his or her ill-gotten wealth. With no personal accountability, the scams are likely to be replicated in different forms, as the Wells Fargo scandal shows.

Eugene Robinson: Only you can prevent a Trump presidency

I know, I know, the point I’m about to make is painfully obvious. But it is not in any sense trivial: If you care who wins the election next month, get off the couch, go down to your polling place and vote.

National polls taken since last week’s debate show Hillary Clinton with a solid lead over Donald Trump; a Politico-Morning Consult poll released Monday morning, for example, put the gap at 6 points. New polls in swing states, including some that once looked favorable for Trump, also report that Clinton is now ahead. There is every reason to believe that most Americans favor the former U.S. senator and secretary of state over the bigoted, clownish real estate mogul who claims he’s worth billions of dollars yet apparently avoids paying federal income taxes.

If you’re tempted to think this is in the bag, however, look around.

In Colombia on Sunday, voters narrowly rejected a peace deal intended to end a war against leftist guerrillas that has raged for five decades and claimed tens of thousands of lives. Supporters of the agreement were shocked because respected polls had shown it would be approved easily.

Amanda Marcotte: Rudy Giuliani’s comment that Donald Trump is better “than a woman” is made even more sexist by the context

The Donald Trump campaign has, to no one’s great surprise, decided to make Hillary Clinton’s gender the centerpiece for their arguments against her fitness to be the president. In a single speech on Saturday, Trump attacked Clinton’s sanity, her stamina, her ability to please her husband, and her own fidelity. In other words, he hit the Big Six of misogynist slurs: Ugly, slutty, crazy, disloyal, deceitful, and weak.

In case these sexist attacks are too subtle for some of the dimmer bulbs in the right wing base, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani went on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday and spelled out the misogynist antipathy to Clinton in the bluntest of terms.

“Don’t you think a man who has this kind of economic genius is a lot better for the United States than a woman,” Giuliani said, “and the only thing she’s ever produced is a lot of work for the FBI checking out her emails.” [..]

There’s not a lot of wiggle room to argue that Giuliani’s statement was anything but what it seemed. Even if he had used less blunt language, there’s a fundamental sexism to arguing that a honking, incurious, repeatedly failed businessman like Trump even deserves to be in the same room as an accomplished lawyer, activist, and politician like Clinton. The fact that there’s even a contest between them is a cosmic satire of male privilege.

Robert Parry: Do We Really Want Nuclear War with Russia?

The U.S. propaganda war against Russia is spinning out of control, rolling ever faster downhill with a dangerous momentum that threatens to drive the world into a nuclear showdown

Through an endless barrage of ugly propaganda, the U.S. government and the mainstream American press have put the world on course for a potential nuclear showdown with Russia, an existential risk that has been undertaken cavalierly amid bizarre expressions of self-righteousness from Western institutions.

This extraordinarily dangerous moment reflects the insistence of the Establishment in Washington that it should continue to rule the world and that it will not broach the possibility of other nations asserting their own national interests even in their own neighborhoods.

Rather than adjust to a new multi-polar world, the powers-that-be in Washington have deployed a vast array of propaganda assets that are financed or otherwise encouraged to escalate an information war so aggressively that Russia is reading this onslaught of insults as the conditioning of the Western populations for a world war.