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”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Dean Baker: Why Would the Democrats Want to be ‘Tough’ on Trade, as Opposed to Smart on Trade?

Over the last three decades, the United States has negotiated trade deals to benefit U.S. corporations

The New York Times has created an absurd dilemma for Democrats; “how to be tougher on trade than Trump.” This framing of the trade issue is utterly bizarre and bears no resemblance to reality.

While Trump has often framed the trade issue as China, Mexico, and other trading partners gaining at the expense of the United States because of “stupid” trade negotiators, this has little to do with trade policy over the last three decades. The United States negotiated trade deals to benefit U.S. corporations. The point of deals like NAFTA was to facilitate outsourcing, so U.S. corporations could take advantage of lower-cost labor in Mexico.

The same was true with admitting China to the WTO. This allowed U.S. corporations to move operations to China and also made it possible for retailers like Walmart to set up low-cost supply chains to undercut their competitors. The job loss and trade deficits that resulted from these deals were not accidental outcomes, they were the point of these deals.

Robert Reich: The Myth of the Rugged Individual

If everyone thinks they’re on their own, it’s easier for the powerful to dismantle unions, unravel safety nets, and slash taxes for the wealthy.

 

The American dream promises that anyone can make it if they work hard enough and play by the rules. Anyone can make it by pulling themselves up by their “bootstraps.”

Baloney.

The truth is: In America today, your life chances depend largely on how you started—where you grew up and how much your parents earned.

Everything else—whether you attend college, your chances of landing a well-paying job, even your health—hinges on this start.

So as inequality of income and wealth has widened – especially along the lines of race and gender—American children born into poverty have less chance of making it. While 90% of children born in 1940 grew up to earn more than their parents, today only half of all American adults earn more than their parents did. 

And children born to the top 10 percent of earners are typically on track to make three times more income as adults than the children of the bottom 10 percent.

The phrase “pulling yourself up by the bootstraps” itself is rubbish. Its origins date back to an 18th-century fairy tale, and the phrase was originally intended as a metaphor for an impossible feat of strength. 

Leonard Pitts Jr.: Republicans, Either Cowed or Clueless, Are Useless After a Mass Shooting

Everything except the gun, everything except the fact that this is a country where the angry and disaffected can buy weapons of mass destruction more easily and with less regulation than you could buy a car.

And again.

And still.

Nine people shot dead in Dayton, 13 hours after 22 shot dead in El Paso, six days after three shot dead in Gilroy. And tears and disbelief and funeral preparations, candlelight vigils and a search for meaning, and talking heads on cable news and T-shirts and hashtags touting resilience in the face of pain: “Dayton Strong,” “El Paso Strong,” “Gilroy Strong.”

And still.

And people asking “Why?” and Republican officials trotting out explanations noteworthy mainly for their uselessness. They blame mental illness, Colin Kaepernick, Barack Obama, video games, drag queens, gay marriage, TV zombies, immigrants and recreational marijuana. Everything except the gun, everything except the fact that this is a country where the angry and disaffected can buy weapons of mass destruction more easily and with less regulation than you could buy a car.

Which suggests a cognitive bankruptcy that defies overstatement. Because while Kaepernick and Obama may be singularly American, this is hardly the only country where people play video games. It is not the only country where they watch zombies on television, suffer mental illness or use pot. It’s not even the only country where citizens keep and bear arms. But it is the only country where mass murder is routine. The only one.

And again.

And still.

Dahlia Lithwick: “Double-Checking” the Second Amendment

A white man “tested” whether or not his Second Amendment rights were still protected—by wandering around a Walmart with an AK-style weapon.

Over the weekend, news surfaced of Dmitriy Andreychenko, the 20-year-old man who thought it would be a useful “social experiment” to walk through a Walmart in Springfield, Missouri, wearing body armor, carrying an AR-style rifle less than a week after a gunman killed 22 people at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas. Andreychenko was also carrying a semi-automatic handgun loaded with one round in its chamber. And more than 100 rounds of ammunition. When the cops apprehended him, he insisted, as told by the Washington Post, that he had only been “testing” whether “his Second Amendment rights would be honored in a public area.”

Oddly enough, both his sister and his wife had warned him that people might not react well to this social experiment—that perhaps context mattered in the days after the massacre at the Texas Walmart. But Andreychenko told cops he “did not anticipate customers’ reactions,” because, as he told investigators, “This is Missouri … I understand if we were somewhere else like New York or California, people would freak out.”

Or like Texas, maybe.

Ester Shor: What the Trump Administration Gets Wrong About the Statue of Liberty

Americans once aspired to aid the poor and oppressed of all lands. The new “public charge” statute will make that impossible.

It has happened again. August rolls around and a new, harsher set of immigration restrictions emerges from the White House. Two years ago, President Trump’s senior adviser Stephen Miller rolled out the points-based RAISE Act, which would reduce legal immigration by as much as 50 percent over a decade. Two days ago, the acting Citizenship and Immigration Services director, Ken Cuccinelli, unveiled an anti-immigrant statute that vastly expands the meaning of “public charge.”

Both Mr. Miller and Mr. Cuccinelli came face-to-face with a reporter quoting two lines from Emma Lazarus’s “The New Colossus”: “Give me your tired, your poor,/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” In response, Mr. Miller blasted his questioner, CNN’s Jim Acosta, with the dire news that “there is no Statue of Liberty law of the land,” pointing out that the poem “was added later, is not actually a part of the original Statue of Liberty.” This week Mr. Cuccinelli, facing a similar question from NPR’s Rachel Martin, nimbly rewrote the poem: “Give me your tired and your poor who can stand on their own two feet and who will not become a public charge.”

That it neither rhymes nor scans is the least of our worries.

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”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Harry Reid: The Filibuster Is Suffocating the Will of the American People

To save our country’s future, Democrats must abolish this arcane Senate rule.

I am not an expert on all of government, but I do know something about the United States Senate. As the former majority leader, I know how tough it is to get anything through the chamber, which was designed to serve as the slower, more deliberative body of the United States Congress.

But what is happening today is a far cry from what the framers intended. They created the Senate as a majority-rule body, where both sides could have their say at length — but at the end of the day, bills would pass or fail on a simple majority vote. In their vision, debate was supposed to inform and enrich the process, not be exploited as a mechanism to grind it to a halt.

The Senate today, after years of abusing an arcane procedural rule known as the filibuster, has become an unworkable legislative graveyard. Not part of the framers’ original vision, the modern filibuster was created in 1917. The recent use of the filibuster — an attempt by a minority of lawmakers to delay or block a vote on a bill or confirmation — has exploited this rule, forcing virtually all Senate business to require 60 of the 100 senators’ votes to proceed. This means a simple majority is not enough to advance even the most bipartisan legislation.

Paul Krugman: Useful Idiots and Trumpist Billionaires

Greed, ego and willful blindness at the top.

Whoever came up with the phrase “useful idiots” — it’s often credited to Lenin, but there’s no evidence he ever said it — was on to something. There are times when dangerous political movements derive important support from people who will, if these movements achieve and hold power, be among their biggest victims.

Certainly I found myself thinking of the phrase when I read about the Trump fund-raiser held at the Hamptons home of Stephen Ross, chairman of a company that holds controlling stakes in Equinox and SoulCycle.

Most reporting on the Ross event has focused on the possible adverse effects on his business empire: The young, educated, urban fitness fanatics who go to his gyms don’t like the idea that their money is supporting Donald Trump. But the foolishness of Ross’s Trump support goes well beyond the potential damage to his bottom line.

I mean, if you’re a billionaire who also happens to be a racist, supporting Trump makes perfect sense: You know what you’re buying. But if you’re supporting Trump not because of his racism but despite it, because you expect him to keep your taxes low, you’re being, well, an idiot.

Eugene Robinson: Trump’s claim that he supports legal immigration turns out to be a lie

The erratic Trump administration has had just one consistent policy principle, one guiding North Star: punitive and often sadistic treatment of nonwhite immigrants.

President Trump’s claim that he supports legal immigration, as opposed to the undocumented “invasion” he rails against, turns out to be — big surprise — a lie. On Monday, the administration proved its antagonism toward those who “stand in line” and “come in the right way” by issuing a new rule forcing many legal immigrants to make an impossible choice: accept needed government benefits to which they are fully entitled, or preserve their chances of obtaining permanent residence.  [..]

You may be legally entitled to health care through Medicaid. You may be entitled to food assistance through the SNAP program, formerly known as food stamps. You may be entitled to housing assistance. But according to the new Trump administration rule — set to take effect in two months — if you use any of these programs, you might forfeit the opportunity to ever obtain a green card making you a permanent resident. That means you also forfeit the chance of ever becoming a citizen.

Long advocated by White House adviser Stephen Miller, the Torquemada of the immigration inquisition, the new policy is a major step in Trump’s crusade to Make America White Again. If it survives court challenges, the new rule could dramatically reduce legal — I repeat, legal — immigration from low-income countries. Not just coincidentally, I am sure, this means fewer black and brown people would be granted resident status.

Trump’s message to the world: Keep your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. As he memorably and disgracefully put it: “Our Country is FULL!”

Karen L. Cox: What Changed in Charlottesville

For white supremacists, Confederate monuments aren’t about the past — they symbolize a racist vision of the future.

Two years ago this week, hundreds of white nationalists descended on Charlottesville, Va., under the pretense of protesting the city’s decision to remove a monument to Robert E. Lee from a public park.

They were joined by old-guard white supremacists like David Duke, and before they were through, a young man, inspired by this gathering and the white supremacist ideology, drove his car into a crowd of peaceful counterdemonstrators, injuring several dozen and killing a young woman, Heather Heyer.

Until Charlottesville, the debate over Confederate monuments was mostly about history, pitting claims about the preservation of Southern heritage against the monuments’ historical ties to slavery and Jim Crow. What has become crystal clear in the last two years is that these monuments are no longer relics of a horrendous past — they have been resurrected as symbols of white nationalism.

Michael H. Fuchs: Bull, meet China shop: Trump’s foreign policy in Asia is disastrous

Asia’s historical, political and economic landmines are increasingly blowing up, and Donald Trump seems intent on accelerating the damage in ways that could threaten US national security and prosperity.

Things didn’t always seem so bleak. Analysts have long heralded the coming of the “Asian century”. Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Indonesia and others have transformed from autocracies to democratic members of the G20. Today, nations across Asia are innovative economies, flourishing democracies and contributors to global security. Any measurement of GDP size, military might or population illustrate how Asia could be the most important region in the world in the 21st century.

The future of Asia remains bright, but a crippling array of challenges threatens to upend its potential – and could have an immense impact on the US.