Paul Krugman at The New York Times writes A Moveable Glut:
Whatever the precise mix of causes, what’s important now is that policy makers take seriously the possibility, I’d say probability, that excess savings and persistent global weakness is the new normal.
My sense is that there’s a deep-seated unwillingness, even among sophisticated officials, to accept this reality. Partly this is about special interests: Wall Street doesn’t want to hear that an unstable world requires strong financial regulation, and politicians who want to kill the welfare state don’t want to hear that government spending and debt aren’t problems in the current environment.
But there’s also, I believe, a sort of emotional prejudice against the very notion of global glut. Politicians and technocrats alike want to view themselves as serious people making hard choices — choices like cutting popular programs and raising interest rates. They don’t like being told that we’re in a world where seemingly tough-minded policies will actually make things worse. But we are, and they will.
Joe Conason, writing for Creators Syndicate, ponders the
Clinton Emails: Is This Watergate? Or Just Another Whitewater?
Whatever Woodward or McCain may imagine, the Clinton email flap is nothing like Watergate. Perhaps new and terribly incriminating evidence of something will emerge someday. But at the moment, media coverage of this “scandal” closely resembles the overheated and underreported promotion of Whitewater.
Indeed the parallels are remarkable—especially the notable role of The New York Times in publishing inaccurate stories that insinuated wrongdoing where there was none. As a “scandal,” Whitewater began with a front-page Times story, inspired by Republican opponents of Bill Clinton in Arkansas, that was grossly inaccurate in its most salient details. The email story caught fire with two inaccurate Times stories, including its debunked “scoop” alleging a “criminal referral” to the FBI.
More pundit excerpts can be found below the fold.
Andrea Gabor at The New York Times writes—The Myth of the New Orleans School Makeover:
Was Hurricane Katrina “the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans,” as Education Secretary Arne Duncan once said? Nearly 10 years after the disaster, this has become a dominant narrative among a number of school reformers and education scholars.
But the New Orleans miracle is not all it seems. Louisiana state standards are among the lowest in the nation. [...]
There is also growing evidence that the reforms have come at the expense of the city’s most disadvantaged children, who often disappear from school entirely and, thus, are no longer included in the data. [...]
The rhetoric of reform often fails to match the reality. For example, Paul G. Vallas, the superintendent of the Recovery School District from 2007 to 2011, boasted recently that only 7 percent of the city’s students attend failing schools today, down from 62 percent before Katrina, a feat accomplished “with no displacement of children.” This was simply false.
John Nichols at
The Nation writes—
Lincoln Chafee Keeps Ripping ‘Delusional’ Neocons and Democrats Who Compromise With Them:
incoln Chafee has no taste for neoconservative fantasies, or for the politicians of both major parties who entertain them.
That may not make him the winner of the Democratic presidential contest that the former Rhode Island senator and governor has entered—Chafee’s poll numbers are low, and his campaign has a quirky, do-it-yourself feel that tends to earn him marginal media coverage at best. But it could make him a duly disruptive voice in the Democratic debates that are scheduled to begin in October.
Chafee is skeptical about militarism and enthusiastic about diplomacy. He argues that issues of war and peace must be considered with a long view, that the challenges of the moment have roots that cannot be neglected, and that Americans must understand the damage done by past errors of judgment in order to avoid new errors of judgment. To that end, Chafee refuses to let other candidates—Republicans or Democrats—play the margins with regard to the Iraq war or its aftermath.
James Downie at
The Washington Post writes—
Why Republicans don’t care about electability in 2016:
Republican voters don’t seem to value electability this election cycle. As Donald Trump has maintained (though not increased) his lead for the 2016 Republican nomination, a recent Fox News poll found that only 13 percent of GOP voters said defeating the Democratic nominee was the most important quality in a candidate. Contrast that with four years ago, when poll after poll showed that a solid majority of Republicans valued beating Barack Obama more than anything else. Why the change? [...]
In Trump’s case, backers don’t appear to be sending the message that candidates should be “more conservative” or “more ideological,” but that they want to “change how things are done in Washington.” Polls suggest that Trump doesn’t draw his support from one or two specific candidates, but a few points from almost all of them. It’s much less about the content of the message, and much more about the style with which it is delivered. Whether Trump adopts conservative or moderate policies doesn’t really matter to these voters; they just want him to “Make America Great Again.”
The Editorial Board at The New York Times laments that
Target Shooters Bring Mayhem to National Forests:
Recreational target shooters call it “trigger trash” — tons and tons of refrigerators, car parts, televisions, sofas, bowling pins and other unwanted junk that shooters haul onto pristine federal woodlands and shred with gunfire for sheer enjoyment.
The abuses are scarring forest lands from the Carolinas to the Pacific Northwest. An emergency halt to target shooting had to be issued for the Croatan National Forest, in North Carolina, after hundreds of complaints from alarmed visitors. Forest Service records show an increasing raft of violations, like shooting from cars and shooting in campgrounds. [...]
It’s bad enough that federal crews have to clean up after the shooters leave their bullet-riddled detritus behind in the forests. More alarming is that these feckless “sportsmen” have been taking pot shots at priceless prehistoric petroglyphs — the rock art depicting animals and people left behind by ancient Indian tribes in such treasured sites as Utah’s Lake Mountains.
“You feared for your life,” one petroglyph hobbyist told Jack Healy of The Times in describing scenes of desecrated rock art, shredded juniper trees, spilled shotgun shells and the mess from cans of spray paint that shooters like to explode.
The Editorial Board of the Los Angeles Times asks
Can California meet its ambitious greenhouse gas goals?
[California]'s commitment to a serious climate change policy began in 2006 with the passage of AB 32, the landmark Global Warming Solutions Act. That law required the Air Resources Board to formulate a plan for 2020 that would bring greenhouse gas emissions down to where they had been in 1990. And now that California is on track to meet that goal, it's time for the next, more ambitious step: SB 32.
The bill would ratchet up the effort considerably, calling for the state to reduce greenhouse emissions by 2030 to 40% below where they were in 1990.
That's not a figure to shrug or yawn about; it's considerably more aggressive than the AB 32 goal, which entails cutting emissions by 15% of what they would have been under a business-as-usual scenario. Nonetheless, the bill should pass.
Jim Hightower at
TruthDig writes—
It’s Time to Free Students From Debt:
Back in the olden days of 1961, I attended the University of North Texas. At this public school, I was blessed with good teachers, a student body of working-class kids (most, like me, were the first in their families to go to college) and an educational culture focused on enabling us to become socially useful citizens. All of this cost me under $800 a year (about $6,250 in today’s dollars)—including living expenses! With close-to-free tuition and a part-time job, I could afford to get a good education, gain experience in everything from work to civic activism, make useful connections, graduate in four years and obtain a debt-free start in life. We just assumed that’s what college was supposed to be.
It still ought to be, but for most students today, it’s not even close. In the U.S., tuition and fees charged by public four-year colleges and universities average more than $20,000 per year. For a private four-year college, it’s more than double that amount. Even public two-year colleges cost around $11,000 per year. [...]
“Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife,” said American philosopher and education reformer John Dewey. It’s time we give birth to a new of debt-free democracy. Put a tiny tax on the billions of daily, automated transactions by speculators, and more than enough money will come into the public coffers to free up higher education for all.
Steven Thrasher at
The Guardian writes—
Republicans' deep hatred for teachers can't be denied and they're not trying:
Republicans love to hate teachers and imply that all the ills of US society are the result of their laziness. If only schools could be turned over to market forces and not held back by greedy teacher unions, conservative logic goes, everything would be fine – even though charter schools perform no better than traditional schools. Trying to bust unions in general (and those of teachers in particular) turns conservatives on as much as trying to deny climate change, defend the NRA, defund Planned Parenthood or battle for a check from the Koch brothers. [...]
Republicans have always hated teachers’ unions for obvious reasons. They reliably support the Democratic party, even though Democrats routinely go to war against teachers as well, particularly alumni from the Obama administration. Teachers’ unions are made up of groups Republicans always love to bash: government workers with lady parts. Often, when school closure fights happen between unions and austerity politicians, it is black teachers who are the most likely to lose their jobs. [...]
Christie, who has been yelling at teachers for a while, recently said teachers unions deserved a “political punch in the face” for being the “single most destructive force” in education.
The real “most destructive force” in American education right now is not teachers. It is the fact that many of the top contenders for the country’s highest office, running in one of the nation’s two major political parties, are against science, against immigrants, against women—and against supporting the workforce which teaches our children.
Rebecca Leber at
The New Republic writes—
Obama's Climate Change Disclaimer Is Getting Old:
In speaking about climate change, President Barack Obama has a certain rhetorical tic that's starting to wear thin. “We can’t attribute any particular weather event to climate change," he said a few weeks after Hurricane Sandy in 2012. “We know that no single weather event is caused solely by climate change,” he said in a 2013 speech unveiling his Climate Action Plan. And he employed that disclaimer again in a speech this month about his plan to cut carbon pollution: “While we can't say any single weather event is entirely caused by climate change...”
This is true, as far as scientists understand extreme weather today. But Obama should stop saying it, because it's irrelevant to his argument. [...]
No doubt Obama, and the Democratic lawmakers who echo him, issue their climate-change disclaimer about specific weather events so that they can't be accused by Republicans of "politicizing" natural disasters. But there’s nothing political about this; rather, it's completely fair to discuss the overall trend. Obama would do better to emulate fellow Democrat Jerry Brown: Visiting a site burned by the Rocky Fire, the California governor said, “While we’ve had droughts in the past historically, we haven’t had drought with this elevated temperature.”
Andrew O'Hehir at
Salon writes—
Hillary and Bernie at the prison gates: Mass incarceration is finally a hot political issue — if we want to save America we must seize the moment:
Mass incarceration is an issue whose time has finally come. There are many signs that the wind is shifting on the question of America’s vast, wasteful and immensely destructive prison state, both among the public and the political class — and that shift is not limited to the left. Criminal justice reform was supposed to be the issue that separated Rand Paul from the other Republican presidential candidates, at least until he got Trumped. It has become a central focus, believe it or not, of the Charles Koch Institute, the billionaire GOP donor’s libertarian nonprofit. This shift has created an important opening for political change, but it’s also a shift in the moral and cultural landscape, in ways that may be less evident but are just as important. [...]
The political opportunity presented by this moment of rapidly shifting perceptions – the opportunity to change laws, to change hearts and minds, and if possible to re-examine our entire approach to criminal justice — must not be squandered if we want to build a more just society. But real change will not come easily: As Adam Gopnik wrote three years ago in the New Yorker, mass incarceration on a scale never before seen in human history, a policy that has disproportionately affected communities of color that were already marginalized, impoverished and disenfranchised, could be called “the fundamental fact” in American society.
James P. Hoffa, president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters writes at
The Huffington Post—
China's Currency Manipulation Should Serve as a Warning About TPP:
Currency manipulation has long been a drag on the U.S. economy and our jobs. But China's decision last week to devalue the Yuan shows the kind of damage such tinkering can bring to America. And it's why Congress cannot approve the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) until something is done about it.
The Teamsters for years have talked about how the issue is a cancer for trade deals like the 12-nation Pacific Rim pact. It makes imports cheaper to buy in the U.S. but drives up the cost of goods workers make here and export to the world. That, in turn, increases our trade deficits and forces U.S. manufacturers to either move overseas or close up shop.
The practice creates an unfair trade advantage that has already cost millions of jobs in this country and shuttered thousands of U.S. factories. And it will only get worse if America proceeds with the TPP. Japan, Singapore and Malaysia, for example, are part of the trade agreement and have a long history of engaging in currency manipulation. China's decision to lower the value of the Yuan after four years of relative stability will likely cause others nations to do so as well.