Abbreviated Pundit Round-up: austerity and stupidity

_{Visual source: Newseum}

Doyle McManus says Mitt Romney will not be "pivoting" to the center when it comes to economics.

Paul Krugman:

What should we do to help America's young? Basically, the opposite of what Mr. Romney and his friends want. We should be expanding student aid, not slashing it. And we should reverse the de facto austerity policies that are holding back the U.S. economy ' the unprecedented cutbacks at the state and local level, which have been hitting education especially hard.

Yes, such a policy reversal would cost money. But refusing to spend that money is foolish and shortsighted even in purely fiscal terms. Remember, the young aren't just America's future; they're the future of the tax base, too.

A mind is a terrible thing to waste; wasting the minds of a whole generation is even more terrible. Let's stop doing it.

The New York Times:

First-quarter growth was not far off the recent average pace and conditions are certainly worse elsewhere, with many European nations in recession. But that's false comfort. To make up the damage the Great Recession did to jobs, income, wealth and confidence, the economy needs consistent above-average growth. Europe's problems will only exacerbate America's own, by shaving growth from exports or, in a worst case, by destabilizing banks that are linked to the European financial system.

Erin Aubry Kaplan writing on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the 1992 Los Angeles riots (the so-called Rodney King Riots):

Everybody agreed back then that the root of the unrest was economic, yet 20 years later, blacks are still the ethnic group in Los Angeles County most likely to be unemployed or underemployed. In 2010, the Economic Roundtable found that a staggering 66% of black men ages 16 to 24 in Los Angeles County, and 68% of black women in the same group, were unemployed. The recession hit people in Los Angeles particularly hard. The Economic Policy Institute recently reported that, between 2006 and 2011, the black jobless rate in the L.A. area ballooned from 8.6% to 19.3%.

Los Angeles Times:

Human rights activists are pressing for the public release of a Senate Intelligence Committee report on the CIA's post-Sept. 11 detention and "enhanced interrogation" practices, hoping that it will answer the question once and for all of whether torture played a role in locating Osama bin Laden. Whatever the document might say about that question, releasing it would add to public knowledge about what President Obama rightly has called a "dark and painful chapter in our history."

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown:

These are the best of times for the rich and middle classes and the worst of times for the disadvantaged, hopeless and vulnerable. I am talking about the children of Britain. Most are better looked after and loved than ever before in history while the rest are as wretched and impecunious as poor Victorian children. Exceptional individuals and committed organisations do try to save these lost kids, but the rest of society seems not to give a damn. More attention is paid to the recycling of rubbish than to the many kids trashed by families and disregarded by the state.

The recession and benefits cuts will make these young lives even more exposed to domestic violence, sexual exploitation and mistreatment. The PM and Deputy PM and too many members of the Cabinet represent constituencies with low levels of poverty and relatively few problem families. Their voters despise the "feckless, fecund and feral" underclass, so the politicians can happily ignore the losers.

Ben Shapiro, indicating once again that he hasn't read any books on the accrual of presidential authority, claims Barack Obama is engaging in an unprecedented power "grab."

Vincent Carroll:

Romney is trapped in a time warp. He's being judged for his callous treatment of a dog 29 years ago by today's rapidly evolving attitudes toward pets, and he muffed an opportunity with ABC's Diane Sawyer this month to simply admit his decision was a mistake. [...]

In 1983, Barack Obama published an article in the Sundial at Columbia University decrying the "relentless, often silent spread of militarism in the country." The piece offered a fawning profile of disarmament groups opposing Reagan administration policies that in fact would produce, just four years later, a radical shift in Soviet policy and a treaty in which the two powers agreed to get rid off an entire class of nuclear weapons.

If we can forgive Obama for his shortsighted naivete in that year ' as we obviously have ' then surely we can forgive Romney for giving poor Seamus the ride of his life.

E. J. Dionne sees Connecticut's decision to end the death penalty as more evidence that support for capital punishment, though still robust, is slipping.

At In These Times, 14 activists, young and old, comment on the Port Huron Statement, the founding document of Students for a Democratic Society, completed half a century ago, in June 1962. Although it was a collaborative document, its leading author was Tom Hayden, now 72:

For all its flaws, the core of The Port Huron Statement ' somewhat like the Declaration of Independence ' sent a message to be fulfilled by future generations, one that resonates in democracy movements today. That message was a nonideological emphasis on participatory democracy, both as a means and an end.

But participatory democracy meant more than small democratic meetings in the style of the Quakers. It meant 'voting with your whole life, not a mere strip of paper,' in the words of Henry David Thoreau. It meant the Progressive Era reforms of recall, referendum and initiative. And it meant extending the democratic process to remote and inaccessible institutional hierarchies, from patriarchy to Pentagon, from plantations to knowledge factories. It meant bringing the banks and corporations under more democratic control and regulation, and also greater bottom-up participation for workers in decision-making, and power for neighborhood assemblies against outside commercial developers intent on building 'monster cities.'

Today we face a War on Terror not unlike the Cold War, and a fierce conservative attack on the social, economic and environmental gains of the 1930s and the 1960s. The state's secrecy is increasing. Corporations have escaped reforms at home to create sweatshops and tax havens abroad. Our representative democracy is being rented. But movements toward participatory democracy have a way of growing again, like flowers in frozen ground.

Sady Doyle, age 29:  

There is an accepted narrative of feminism: First, we were all secretaries and housewives. Then, in 1963, The Feminine Mystique happened. Then a sexual revolution, then Gloria Steinem, and now, here we are. The facts of the matter, of feminism's slow accumulation from several sources ' not least the frustration of women within the student and peace movements, acknowledged to exist, and then written off as someone's 'girl' ' are harder to mythologize.

Yet The Port Huron Statement speaks volumes about the world those women lived in, and why it was inevitable that they would stage their own revolutions. The Port Huron Statement is a call for young people to radically interrogate everything they believe about how politics works, about who has value in the social arrangement, about the shape of the world. The 'people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort ' looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit' were half female. And if you listen, if you look between the lines of The Port Huron Statement, to those half-invisible girls at reception desks and in kitchens and in classrooms, you can sense them looking out at the world, beginning to ask for something new.