“Punting 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.
Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.
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New York Times Editorial Board: Unmet Promise on Discrimination
President Obama has made repeated use of executive orders to advance the administration’s goals when Republicans in Congress refused to act. Last week, he signed two orders requiring modest but important steps by federal contractors to narrow the wage gap between female and male employees.
These useful measures made even more glaring his failure to honor a 2008 campaign pledge to ban discrimination by federal contractors based on sexual orientation or gender identity. [..]
What Mr. Obama needs to do is act on his principles and issue such an order, without the religious exemption that was put into the Senate bill to lure Republican votes. Challenged last week to explain the mystifying delay on this issue, Mr. Obama’s spokesman said that the president supported broader legislation and that its enactment by Congress would make an executive order “redundant.”
Dean Baker: The Hedge Fund Managers Tax Break: Because Wall Streeters Want Your Money
The coming of tax day provides a great opportunity for everyone to focus on their favorite tax break, and there are many from which to choose. However for all the sneaky and squirrelly ways that the rich use to escape their tax liability, none can beat the hedge fund managers’ tax break. This is the way the rich tell the rest of us, because they are rich and powerful, the law doesn’t apply to them.
The hedge fund managers’ tax break, which is also known as the carried interest tax deduction, is different from other tax breaks in that it has no economic rationale. With most other tax breaks there is at least an argument as to how it serves some socially useful purpose. That is not the case with the hedge fund managers’ tax break. This is simply a case where the rich don’t feel like paying taxes and are saying to the rest of us, “what are you going to do about it?”
The Washington Post and the Guardian won the Pulitzer Prize for public service today. There’s no prize for the network of individuals and institutions that brought the surveillance story forward.
As the New York Times reported:
Though the citation did not name specific reporters, the work was led by Barton Gellman at the Washington Post and Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill at the Guardian, and Laura Poitras, a filmmaker and journalist who worked with both newspapers.
And people will debate that- not naming the reporters. Just as they debate the handling of the Snowden documents by Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras. (Disclosure: I am an advisor to First Look Media.)
Here I share some thoughts about the Snowden story – or story system – that go beyond what the prizes can recognize.
Juan Cole: Top 6 Pulitzer Prize ‘Traitors’ in American Journalism
The Pulitzer Prize committee’s opinion that Edward Snowden is a public servant rather than a traitor or criminal, as evidenced in its award to The Guardian and The Washington Post for their reporting from his trove of government documents, is a scandal on the American Right. But it is not a new scandal. Journalism is about the public’s right to know what our government is up to. The National Security State is about preventing us from knowing what it is up to. The potential for black cells to operate within the secret government, beyond oversight of any elected official, should be obvious. Those who value order and authority and obedience over critical public debate abhor investigative journalism. Always have, always will. Voltaire had to flee several courts and several cities over the course of his lifetime, because of his writings, under threat of arbitrary royal decrees. [..]
Eve Berliner reminded us that the Pulitzer has gone in the past to persons viewed by the Right as traitors. She quotes the odious Bill Bennett, who served in the Reagan and Bush senior administrations, regarding Dana Priest, James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, who won Pulitzers in 2006 for reporting that revealed W. Bush’s resort to torture and warrantless surveillance: [..]
And we who actually believe in the US constitution, Mr. Bennett, view them as heroes and view you as a miserable toady. So here is a review of some of these remarkable individuals who have done what they could to stanch the blood of our perhaps mortally wounded liberties:
Chuck Collins: Close the Billionaire Tax Loophole
Billionaires are exploiting a tax break to pass their fortunes along to their heirs and laying the groundwork for dynasties.
Estate taxes have historically raised substantial revenue from Americans with the greatest capacity to pay. A century ago, President Theodore Roosevelt – who inherited and squandered a fortune of his own – joined with steel magnate and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie – one of the richest men in the world at the time – to support establishing the modern version of the estate tax.
TR and Carnegie shared a goal of slowing the build-up of wealth dynasties, which they believed would corrode our democracy.
Although they succeeded, their goal remains elusive. We’re living in a new period of increasingly extreme wealth inequality.
The wealthiest 1 percent of households now own over 38 percent of all private wealth and almost half of all financial wealth, such as stocks and bonds. And our political system is being corrupted by billionaire political contributions facilitated by a string of Supreme Court rulings that toppled key campaign finance limits.
Gary Blasi: The 1% wants to ban sleeping in cars – because it hurts their ‘quality of life’
Depriving the homeless of their last shelter is Silicon Valley at its worst – especially when rich cities aren’t doing anything to end homelessness
Across the United States, many local governments are responding to skyrocketing levels of inequality and the now decades-long crisis of homelessness among the very poor … by passing laws making it a crime to sleep in a parked car.
This happened most recently in Palo Alto, in California’s Silicon Valley, where new billionaires are seemingly minted every month – and where 92% of homeless people lack shelter of any kind. Dozens of cities have passed similar anti-homeless laws. The largest of them is Los Angeles, the longtime unofficial “homeless capital of America”, where lawyers are currently defending a similar vehicle-sleeping law before a skeptical federal appellate court. Laws against sleeping on sidewalks or in cars are called “quality of life” laws. But they certainly don’t protect the quality of life of the poor.
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