Visual Source: Newseum
Joseph E. Stiglitz:
I was among those who hoped that, somehow, the financial crisis would teach Americans (and others) a lesson about the need for greater equality, stronger regulation, and a better balance between the market and government. Alas, that has not been the case. On the contrary, a resurgence of right-wing economics, driven by ideology and special interests, once again threatens the global economy—or at least the economies of Europe and North America, where these ideas continue to flourish. ...
Do we really need another costly experiment with ideas that have repeatedly failed? We shouldn't, but increasingly it appears that we will have to endure another one nonetheless. A failure of either Europe or the United States to return to robust growth would be bad for the global economy. The failure of both would be disastrous—even if the major emerging-market countries have attained self-sustaining growth. Unfortunately, unless wiser heads prevail, that is the way the world is heading.
Eugene Robinson:
Do progressives care about reducing the national debt? Of course they do, no matter what the White House might believe.
“We think that obviously there are some Democrats who don’t feel as strongly about deficit reduction as [President Obama] does,” senior adviser David Plouffe said Wednesday at a breakfast with reporters and columnists. But that’s not obvious at all. It isn’t even true.
After which Robinson comes up with his own plan to cut $4 trillion out of the deficit over 10 years. The Pentagon isn't going to like it.
Naomi Klein ponders whether Montana's two disasters—record flooding and a burst oil pipeline—have the same root: climate change.
Despite all this, Montana is in the midst of a fossil fuel frenzy. The state's governor may be shaking his fist at Exxon now, but he has championed virtually every fossil fuel project that has crossed his desk, from a vast new coal mine near the Northern Cheyenne Reservation, to new rail lines that would help ship Montana's coal to China, to the controversial Keystone XL pipeline, which would carry oil from Alberta's tar sands to refineries along the Gulf Coast.
Tim Rutten wonders whether a British and an Irish observer are right about a loss of American optimism.
Mark Morford has a few things to say about the 9 billion people the U.N. predicts will be on Earth in 2050:
In slightly more comforting news, China and India's populations will hold steady at 1.3 billion or so (China declining slightly, India growing), which is good news indeed because everyone agrees they're already completely preposterous as it is. Japan has almost no idea what's going on and will stay in vague socioeconomic limbo for many thousand more days. Parts of Europe are on the birth-rate "uptick," mostly because it feels good and they like sex more than they like God. Which is as it should be, really.
Paul Krugman says President Obama is repeating right-wing talking-points on the economy:
Now, this might just be theater: Mr. Obama may be pulling an anti-Corleone, making Republicans an offer they can’t accept. The reports say that the Obama plan also involves significant new revenues, a notion that remains anathema to the Republican base. So the goal may be to paint the G.O.P. into a corner, making Republicans look like intransigent extremists — which they are.
But let’s be frank. It’s getting harder and harder to trust Mr. Obama’s motives in the budget fight, given the way his economic rhetoric has veered to the right. In fact, if all you did was listen to his speeches, you might conclude that he basically shares the G.O.P.’s diagnosis of what ails our economy and what should be done to fix it. And maybe that’s not a false impression; maybe it’s the simple truth.
Johann Hari:
The two most dreaded words in any office are the same – management consultants. Their arrival rumbles through a workplace like the approaching thwump-thwump of the T-Rex in Jurassic Park, rattling our desks and making us all fear we will be picked up and gored at random. We're right to be afraid – and scornful. According to "Rip Off", a report on management consultants by David Craig, 170 organisations who used management consultants were studied in the 1990s by the Cranfield School of Management, and only 36 per cent of clients thought they had brought any value. We all know now that management consultants were threaded through the banksters and hedge funders who just crashed the global economy.
But now management consultancy has been taken to a whole new level, according to a startling new report by Greenpeace entitled: "Bad Influence: How McKinsey-inspired plans lead to rainforest destruction." Management consultants have, in effect, been tasked with setting the future of the world's rainforests – and facing accusations that they are using our money to draw up plans that will result in their more rapid destruction. Instead of stopping the loggers and miners, the report suggests they are aiding them.
Michael Reagan weighs in with predictable results on California's move to include gay contributions in the social studies curriculum:
Singling out a segment of the population for specific inclusion in school studies programs on the basis of their sexual preferences elevates what -- rightly or wrongly -- many see as a form of sexual perversion, to a civil right. ...
Unless I'm badly mistaken, what the legislature has done is to classify sexual preference as a form of disability, meaning that those who adopt the lifestyle are mentally or physically disabled though no fault of their own. Somehow I seriously doubt that gays or cross-dressers will appreciate being classified as disabled as a result of their sexual orientation or preferences.
Jim Hightower puts the smackdown to Gov. Rick Perry's supposed economic miracle in Texas:
Most damning, however, is that Perry-jobs are really "jobettes," offering low pay, no benefits and no upward mobility. In fact, under Rickonomics, Texas has added more minimum wage jobs than all other states combined! After 10 years in office, Gov. Perry presides over a state that has more people in poverty and more without health coverage than any other.