“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.
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Elizabeth Warren: What Apple Teaches Us About Taxes
APPLE got a big surprise last week when the European Commission ordered Ireland to collect more than $14 billion in back taxes from the company. The global giant had been attributing billions of dollars in profits to a phantom head office, allowing it to pay a tax rate of 1 percent or lower. [..]The Apple ruling is big, but it is only the latest international effort to end the deals that American multinationals have used to pay near-zero tax rates. The European Commission is investigating Luxembourg’s tax arrangements for Amazon and McDonald’s, and last year the European Court of Justice struck down tax advantages to companies and their subsidiaries selling e-books throughout Europe. Also last year, Britain enacted a new tax to target profits siphoned off by international companies — nicknamed, without much subtlety, the “Google tax.”
It’s not just Europe. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and the Group of 20 nations are coordinating on a global effort to end the cross-border games that allow companies to avoid taxation by moving money among various subsidiaries. Multinational corporations are especially worried about losing access to Cayman Island-style tax rates in European countries where they can also get rule of law, political stability and an educated professional class of attorneys and consultants.
Charles M. Blow: Donald Trump Is Lying in Plain Sight
It has generally been my experience that when people pepper their speech with the phrase “believe me,” they are not to be believed.
The default position among people of honor — the silent agreement between speaker and listener — is one of truth and trust.
But Donald Trump is not a person of honor.
Presidents lie. Politicians lie. People lie. But Trump lies with a ferocious abandon. [..]
And yet in polls like the CNN/ORC poll released Tuesday, Trump leads Clinton on the issue of being honest and trustworthy by 15 percentage points. (I should point out that some have raised questions about the methodology of that poll.)
I believe that this is in large part because we, an irresponsible media, have built a false equivalency in which the choice between Clinton and Trump seems to have equally bad implications, because we have framed it as a choice between a liar and a lunatic.
But this obscures the fact that the lunatic is also a pathological liar of a kind and quality that we have not seen in recent presidential politics and perhaps ever.
Trump is in a category all his own.
E.J. Dionne, Jr.: Trump’s best example of political corruption is himself
Better than anyone, Donald Trump made the case for why our campaign money system is rotten. Unsurprisingly, the prime example he used was himself.
“I was a businessman,” Trump explained at a Republican debate in August 2015. “I give to everybody. When they call, I give. And you know what? When I need something from them two years later, three years later, I call them, they are there for me. And that’s a broken system.”
Bravo. Sort of. In retrospect, it’s remarkable that Republican primary voters seemed to reward Trump for saying that he bought off politicians right and left, as if admitting to soft bribery was a sign of what a great reformer he would be.
And it turns out that there is one candidate who was so metaphysically perfect, so personally close to him, that Trump tells us his (illegal) contribution to her was not designed to make sure she’d be “there” for him.
Meet Pam Bondi, Florida’s attorney general.
Arjun Sethi: 9/11 was 15 years ago. Why do so many of us feel less safe?
I remember feeling scared after 9/11. A few days after the attacks, a classmate jumped in front of my car and menacingly yelled “go home”. When I looked out the window, everyone turned away. Around the same time, a McDonald’s cashier nearly refused to sell my dad a cheeseburger. He eventually got the burger, but had lost his appetite.
But my family got off easy. In the days and weeks following the attack, many religious and ethnic minorities were bullied, harassed and assaulted. On 15 September 2001, Balbir Singh Sodhi, a Sikh American, was murdered in a violent hate crime in Mesa, Arizona.
I always thought things would get better. I was born and raised in Virginia, played soccer as a kid and went to high school football games with my friends. Apart from my Sikh articles of faith, a turban and beard, I didn’t feel too different from my peers. America was my home.
But 15 years later, I feel worse than I did then. Profiling, hate violence and bigotry now braid through the daily lives of Muslim, Arab, Sikh and South Asian Americans. We are outsiders looking in, forever struggling for equality and understanding.
Alan Farafo: A Mosquito Will Bring Down Marco Rubio
What is Marco Rubio thinking? In Miami, it’s Zika time.
Business is down. Real estate sales are slowing. Zika is hitting South Florida hard, but progress has been halted by Florida U.S. Senator Marco Rubio’s political gamesmanship.
Why didn’t Senator Rubio vote to fully fund an emergency response to Zika months ago? He isn’t leading Congress from the front, he’s not even leading from behind. Marco is nowhere.
The first local spread of Zika came in Miami — Rubio’s backyard. The first domestic Centers for Disease Control travel advisory was issued in Miami-Dade and Hillsborough.
Everyone knew Zika was going to be an emergency for Florida’s tourism and real estate economy as well as a public health crisis, but Rubio and the GOP leadership let Congress go on a seven-week vacation without funding the race against Zika.
All Rubio has to show after a seven week vacation is another partisan vote that was never going to pass the Senate because of GOP riders inserted like poison pills.
Rubio is as fatalistic about his own Senate seat as he is about Zika.
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