“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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Ted Rall: You Know Your Country Sucks When You Look Wistfully Back at Stalin
You can tell a lot about the state of a country by comparing the state of its public and private infrastructure.[..]
The World Economic Forum ranks the U.S. 25th in the world in infrastructure, behind Oman, Saudi Arabia and Barbados.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
Josef Stalin, of all people, showed how infrastructure could be prioritized over private property. The dictator approved every extravagance – and why not? Obama signs off on every luxury the military can dream up.
Determined that his new Moscow Metro be a “palace of the people” for the Soviet capital’s subway commuters, Stalin ordered that no expense be spared to create a system that was not only fast and efficient, but beautiful. “In stark contrast to the gray city above,” The Times wrote as late as 1988, “the bustling, graffiti-less Metro is a subterranean sanctuary adorned with crystal chandeliers, marble floors and skillfully crafted mosaics and frescoes fit for a czar’s palace.” With good reason: First, Stalin had chandeliers ripped out of the czar’s old palaces and moved underground; for future stations he had even more stunning ones designed from scratch using radically innovative techniques.
The Moscow Metro remains a showcase of what socialism could do at its best: prioritize the people and thus improve their daily lives.
Then there’s us.
Nathan Schneider: From Ellsberg to Snowden – From Risks to Hacks
Sharing the stage today with a video feed of Edward Snowden, Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg noted that the new generation of whistleblowers has improved his reputation. Government officials and others seeking to discredit Snowden and Chelsea Manning have claimed Ellsberg’s historic leak as more legitimate than, and somehow different in kind from, the leaks of the new generation. Ellsberg of course rejected such claims as ridiculous and intentionally misleading. He emphasized the similarities, and also cited all sorts of ways in which the recent leaks have been even more daring than his.
In the course of their conversation, however, differences between the two figures did emerge, and maybe those differences say something about the rest of us.
Court decision is likely to undermine faith in the integrity of US judicial and financial system
In the flurry of rulings ending the Supreme Court’s latest term, an item that got relatively little notice was its decision not to review a case on Argentina’s government debt. This refusal let stand a lower court decision that makes the United States an extreme outlier in dealing with Argentina and potentially other troubled debtor nations.
The dispute has its origins in the decision of the Argentine government to default on its debt in December 2001. At the time, the government was struggling under an International Monetary Fund austerity program. Argentina’s economy had already shrunk 10 percent from its 1998 level – a much sharper falloff than the United States experienced after the 2008 financial crisis. Argentina’s unemployment rate was at 20 percent and rising. Still, the IMF was demanding further budget cuts as a condition for lending the money needed to keep paying its debt. [..]
In a world where the United States’ economy is no longer the largest or even close to it, we are not going to be able to write the rules for our own convenience. If countries like Argentina cannot count on being treated fairly in U.S. courts, they will simply take their business elsewhere. The loss will be ours, not theirs. The U.S. will again pay a high price for allowing well-connected people in the financial sector to set policy.
Robert Parry: Kerry’s Latest Reckless Rush to Judgment
Secretary of State John Kerry boasts that as a former prosecutor he knows he has a strong case against the eastern Ukrainian rebels and their backers in Russia in pinning last Thursday’s shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 on them, even without the benefit of a formal investigation. [..]
If you were, say, a U.S. intelligence analyst sifting through the evidence and finding that some leads went off in a different direction, toward the Ukrainian army, for instance, you might hold back on your conclusions knowing that crossing senior officials who had already pronounced the verdict could be devastating to your career. It would make a lot more sense to just deep-six any contrary evidence.
Indeed, one of the lessons from the disastrous Iraq War was the danger of enforced “group think” inside Official Washington. Once senior officials have made clear how they want an assessment to come out, mid-level officials scramble to make the bosses happy.
If Kerry had cared about finding the truth about this tragedy that claimed the lives of 298 people, he would have simply noted that the investigation was just beginning and that it would be wrong to speculate based on the few scraps of information available. Instead he couldn’t resist establishing a narrative that has – in the eyes of the world – made Russian President Vladimir Putin the guilty party.
Eugene RobinsonL The Downside of Giving Weapons
The bodies and debris that rained from the Ukrainian sky offer a cautionary lesson about the danger of giving heavy weapons to non-state actors. I hope the hawks who wanted President Obama to ship anti-aircraft missiles to the Syrian rebels are paying attention.
By now there is little doubt that Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, with 298 people on board, was blasted out of the sky Thursday by a Russian-made SA-11 missile fired from eastern Ukraine. U.S. officials say they have solid evidence that Russia supplied such arms to the separatist rebels who control that part of the country.
It is unclear whether the missile was fired by rebels who had been trained to operate the complex SA-11 system or by Russian military advisers. This seems to me a distinction without a difference. Whoever pulled the trigger, Russia must bear responsibility-and be held accountable.The bodies and debris that rained from the Ukrainian sky offer a cautionary lesson about the danger of giving heavy weapons to non-state actors. I hope the hawks who wanted President Obama to ship anti-aircraft missiles to the Syrian rebels are paying attention.
By now there is little doubt that Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, with 298 people on board, was blasted out of the sky Thursday by a Russian-made SA-11 missile fired from eastern Ukraine. U.S. officials say they have solid evidence that Russia supplied such arms to the separatist rebels who control that part of the country.
It is unclear whether the missile was fired by rebels who had been trained to operate the complex SA-11 system or by Russian military advisers. This seems to me a distinction without a difference. Whoever pulled the trigger, Russia must bear responsibility-and be held accountable.
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