Punting the Pundits: Sunday Preview Edition

The Dow ended the week below 12,000 for the first time since March. This is the sixth straight week of downs for the Dow. It’s almost as bad over at the Nasdaq. All the gains racked up in 2011 have now been erased.

What’s going on?

The real economy is catching up with the financial economy, as it always does eventually. Wall Street is built on smoke and mirrors, while the real economy is based on jobs and wages. Smoke and mirrors can only take you so far – as we learned so painfully three years ago.

Jobs and wages stink, if you haven’t noticed. They’ve been bad for months, even before this week’s data made it fairly clear the recovery has stalled.

Eileen Appelbaum: No Tax Holiday for Multinational Corporations

If you think that “double Irish” and “Dutch sandwich” are schoolyard jump rope games girls play, think again. These are the nefarious, but legal, games that hundreds of multinationals play to avoid paying their fair share of taxes. According to a report by Bloomberg, Google used these techniques to cut its tax rate to 2.4 percent and its taxes by $3.1 billion over the three years from 2007 through 2009. The company’s top two markets by revenue are the US, with a 35 percent corporate income tax rate, and the UK, with a 28 percent rate, yet Google – using practices widely employed by global companies – dramatically reduced its tax rate.

At the heart of this strategy is the transfer of rights to intellectual property developed in the US – often, as in Google’s case, with early research funded by US taxpayers through the National Science Foundation – to a subsidiary in a low-tax country. Foreign earnings based on the technology are then attributed to the subsidiary. Google transferred its search and advertising technology for much of the world to its Irish subsidiary at a price sanctioned in 2006 by the IRS. But even the much-vaunted low Irish taxes were not low enough for Google. That’s where the “double Irish” and the “Dutch sandwich” come in.

Michelle Alexander: Think Outside the Bars: Real Justice Means Fewer Prisons

A white woman with gray hair pulled neatly into a bun raises her hand. She keeps it up, unwavering and rigid, as she waits patiently for her turn to speak. Finally, the microphone is passed to the back of the room, and she leaps to her feet. With an air of desperation she blurts out, “You know white people suffer in this system, too, don’t you? It’s not just black and brown people destroyed by this drug war. My son, he’s been in the system. He’s an addict. He needs help. He needs treatment, but we don’t have money. He needs his family. But they keep givin’ him prison time. White people are hurting, too.” She is trembling and sits down.

There is an uncomfortable silence in the room, but I am in no hurry to respond. I let her question hang in the air. I want people to feel this discomfort, the tension created by her suffering. The audience is overwhelmingly African American, and a few of them are visibly agitated or annoyed by her question. I’ve spent the last forty minutes discussing my book, The New Jim Crow. The book argues that today, in the so-called era of colorblindness, and, yes-even in the age of Obama-racial caste is alive and well in America. The mass incarceration of poor people of color through a racially biased drug war has birthed a new caste system. It is the moral equivalent of Jim Crow.

Michael Winship: The Perils of Ignoring Science

A local NPR reporter was talking with Joseph Nicholson, CEO of Red Jacket Orchards in Geneva, New York, up in the neck of the upstate woods where I was born and raised. There’s been a lot more rain than usual, he said. Produce hasn’t been exposed to sufficient “heat units” — in other words, the sun.

“We’re going to be at least two weeks behind in harvest or ripening,” he said, and if the skies don’t brighten up soon, yields could be down 30 to 35 percent. That’s a lot of lost apples — and cherries, peaches and plums (although the rhubarb is doing just fine, thanks for asking).

As upstate kids we were told — apocryphally — that the only part of the world more overcast than us was Poland, so the idea that all these years later it’s cloudier than ever is startling. Is this part of manmade climate change?

Nicholas D. Kristof: When Food Kills

The deaths of 31 people in Europe from a little-known strain of E. coli have raised alarms worldwide, but we shouldn’t be surprised. Our food often betrays us.

Just a few days ago, a 2-year-old girl in Dryden, Va., died in a hospital after suffering bloody diarrhea linked to another strain of E. coli. Her brother was also hospitalized but survived.

Every year in the United States, 325,000 people are hospitalized because of food-borne illnesses and 5,000 die, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That’s right: food kills one person every two hours.

Yet while the terrorist attacks of 2001 led us to transform the way we approach national security, the deaths of almost twice as many people annually have still not generated basic food-safety initiatives. We have an industrial farming system that is a marvel for producing cheap food, but its lobbyists block initiatives to make food safer.