“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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New York Times Editorial: Europe Moves Ahead on Privacy
The European Union is considering far-reaching privacy regulations that would give the citizens of its member countries significant control over how Web sites and marketing companies collect and use data about them. Years in the making, the effort stands in stark contrast to the much slower pace of discussions about online privacy laws in Washington. [..]
The Obama administration has talked with technology and marketing companies about creating voluntary industry standards. But the best way to ensure that Americans can keep their personal information private is through federal legislation backed by regulatory enforcement. Europe is setting an example of how that might be accomplished. While the United States is unlikely to go as far as the E.U., it needs to do a lot more.
Paul Krugman: Friends of Fraud
Like many advocates of financial reform, I was a bit disappointed in the bill that finally emerged. Dodd-Frank gave regulators the power to rein in many financial excesses; but it was and is less clear that future regulators will use that power. As history shows, the financial industry’s wealth and influence can all too easily turn those who are supposed to serve as watchdogs into lap dogs instead.
There was, however, one piece of the reform that was a shining example of how to do it right: the creation of a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a stand-alone agency with its own funding, charged with protecting consumers against financial fraud and abuse. And sure enough, Senate Republicans are going all out in an attempt to kill that bureau.
Why is consumer financial protection necessary? Because fraud and abuse happen.
The ever-increasing many who are struggling cannot support a structure that favours a tiny number of the very rich
Last month, Barack Obama, on his re-election to a country with 42 million living in poverty, warned: “America cannot succeed when a shrinking few do very well and a growing many barely make it.” At the World Economic Forum in Davos, its founder, Klaus Schwab, said: “Capitalism in its current form no longer fits the world around us.” How badly it “fits” is powerfully demonstrated in Inequality for All, a documentary made by Jacob Kornbluth, that recently won the special jury prize at the Sundance festival. As discussed in today’s New Review, the film “stars” Robert Reich, professor of public policy at Harvard, prolific author, campaigner, former labour secretary under Bill Clinton, a charismatic man whose lectures are renowned for the way he surgically dismembers the mutant capitalism that has taken hold in the US over the past 40 years.
While the debate in the UK is mostly focused on growth and how best to engender it, Reich explains in chilling detail why growth alone may not be enough. For too many, he explains, social mobility has begun to slide backwards. A small but growing band of global pirates – billionaires all, without allegiance to community or country, devoid of civic responsibility – accrue wealth from the continued immiseration of the squeezed majority. These hugely rich are fawned over and subsidised by governments even as inequality widens to a chasm that may yet produce social unrest.
Robert Kuttner: Weak Economy, Wrong Debate
What is it with this economy? The Dow hits 14,000, the unemployment rate rises in January, and GDP actually falls in the last three months of 2012. Could it be that what’s good for the stock market is bad for the rest of the economy? Could it be that captains of industry like weak labor markets, high unemployment, low wages — and a Federal Reserve that has to use ultra-low interest rates to try to keep things afloat?
Well, yes, but the story is also richer and more complicated.
Basically, the economy is still weighted down by the legacy effects of the financial collapse of 2008 — mortgages that exceed the value of homes, students staggering under the weight of college loans in a dismal job market, retired people for whom low interest rates mean low returns on savings, corporations looting pensions, and above all flat or declining wages. [..]
In sum: unless we stop obsessing on cutting the debt ratio as an end in itself, we are condemned to a decade of economic underperformance.
President Obama got some nice political lift from his re-election and his new, more assertive tone. But he (and the economy) are still dragged down by the undertow of bad economic assumptions that continue to contour the debate.
Robert Reich: An Anniversary of America’s First Progressive Revolution
A progressive backlash against concentrated wealth and power occurred a century ago in America. In the 1880s and 1890s such a movement seemed improbable if not impossible. Only idealists and dreamers thought the nation had the political will to reform itself, let alone enact a constitutional amendment of such importance – analogous, today, to an amendment reversing “Citizens United v. FEC” and limiting the flow of big money into politics.
But it did happen. And it will happen again.
Robert Dreyfuss: The Hagel Disaster
Chuck Hagel may still be confirmed by the Senate as secretary of defense, because Democrats who hold the majority will probably vote with the president. But if the Israel Lobby manages to cull a few Democrats to join what appears to be a growing Republican tidal wave against Hagel, he’ll be shot down. Just as Chas Freeman-whose views are in roughly the same ballpark as Hagel’s-was shot down, even before his appointment got off the ground three years ago.
But Hagel didn’t help himself with a confused, stumbling appearance yesterday in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Admittedly, the SFRC was infested with what seemed to rabid jackals, extreme-right Republicans like Ted Cruz of Texas and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, along with John McCain of Arizona, still fighting the long-lost Iraq war.
But Hagel, rather than take any of them on, shucked and jived his way through the ordeal. It was the Apology Tour, during which Hagel alternately apologized for having semi-progressive views on issues such as Israel and Iran or, otherwise, denied he had them.
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