“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.
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Heidi Mooore: The Wall Street second-chances rule: scandal makes the rich grow stronger
For SAC’s Steve Cohen and CEOs like him, money always wins. Who needs retirement – or jail – when you can’t lose?
Wall Street is a place where memories are short, profit is amoral, and money is the only thing that settles all the scores.
That’s why financiers and CEOs are largely destined to overcome any scandal. Money and influence reserve a permanent place at the trough of money. It’s usually absurd to hope that any kind of setback – a loss, a bankruptcy, a harrowing proximity to eight insider-trading convictions – will leave a mark. They never do. Disgrace is not a functional term in a business that is still, at its core, based upon relationships with a closed circle of people.
For the powerful movers of money in this country, second acts are not the exception – they are very much the rule.
Ana Marie Cox: Obama’s equal-pay myth is one thing. The GOP’s chauvinism is a problem
Go ahead, turn the White House’s 77-cents quote into the new 47% video. But don’t preach until you know where wage-gap vigilantism gets us
Republicans have been both very right and very wrong about their many objections over the past week to the White House’s flashy “paycheck equality” push. They’re right to characterize it as a mostly political ploy, an unserious legislative gambit to prove that Republicans are insensitive to the needs of working women. (Who knows why Democrats felt they had to force the issue – Republicans are perfectly capable of proving their insensitivity all by themselves.) Republicans are also correct in pointing out that women have made steady gains receiving equal pay for equal work; if you correct for enough “lifestyle choice” factors, the gap almost disappears.
But here’s where Republicans are wrong: they believe that a gender pay gap due to “lifestyle choices” is somehow OK, or inevitable, or – and this gets to the core fallacy of modern conservatism – that it is OK because it is inevitable.
Pro-lifers can’t reverse Roe v Wade. So they’re shutting down clinics with red tape and a smile. Don’t believe the lie
Last November, a new law went into effect in Texas: abortion clinics would now be required to have an agreement with a local hospital so that patients needing treatment could be transferred.
Now that sounds reasonable, doesn’t it?
Perhaps, until you consider the fact that it caused one-third of health centers to stop providing abortions. Women in the Rio Grande Valley now have to travel hundreds of miles (if they’re lucky enough to have the transportation and resources) to get access to a safe, legal abortion. [..]
But this law, like so many others in the works, also imposes all kinds of obstacles to providers and clinics actually gaining these privileges. The end result: abortion clinics are shutting down all across the country. And because the (often Evangelical) bill-crafting language is so deceptively reasonable and so effective at defusing public outrage, we might not even have noticed that our constitutional right to safe and legal abortions is being steadily eroded
Zoë Carpenter: The Tax Breaks That Are Killing the Planet
ExxonMobil, the world’s largest oil company, hauled in a $32.6 billion profit last year. Chief executive Rex Tillerson got a 3 percent bump in his pay package, sending it above $28 million. And today the company gets its annual boost from the federal government: an estimated $600 million in tax breaks.
All told, the government gifts as much as $4.8 billion to the oil industry each year, more than any other country. Much of that comes not as direct handouts but instead via loopholes in the tax code; deductions for depleting oil reserves, for example, and write-offs for the expense of drilling a new well. These reflect a long-past era in which oil exploration was financially risky, and prices were low. Now oil prices and profits are high, and the government is losing revenue while promoting the continued exploitation of carbon-intensive fuels. In the face of a changing climate and a constrained domestic budget, the lunacy of such preferential treatment is hard to overstate.
Bryce Covert: Why We Can’t Strip Race Out of the Gender Wage Gap Conversation
April 8 was Equal Pay Day, the day by which women will have theoretically worked enough to catch up to what men made the year before. In honor of that, the Senate voted on the Paycheck Fairness Act, a bill aimed at giving women a little more power to fight wage discrimination, which Republicans unanimously blocked. While some Republicans claim they care about the wage gap and just object to what they see as burdensome regulation, other conservatives have been calling the idea of the gender wage gap itself into question. [..]
In trying to figure out how much of the wage gap is discrimination and how much can be explained by other factors, nearly every statistician conducts regression studies that take measurable factors into consideration by holding them constant and seeing what’s left over. From government agencies like the Office of Personnel Management (pdf) and the Government Accountability Office (pdf) to women’s advocacy groups like AAUW to economists like Francine D. Blau and Lawrence M. Kahn (pdf), a similar group of factors are held constant to find the “unexplained” gap, or the murk where bias would rear its head if it does exist. One of those constant factors is race.
Michelle Chen: What the French E-mail Meme Reveals About America’s Runaway Culture of Work
Last week, a dazzling meme captured the viral hive-mind of an overstressed generation: French workers had adopted a new labor policy to ban work-related e-mail after 6 pm. [..]
n a half-jeering, half-envious tone, commentators trumpeted France’s hardline defense of living well and “life after 6 p.m.” You could almost hear the champagne glasses clinking at the strike of six as Vuitton-clad employees powered down their mobiles in lockstep and promptly flipped off the supervisor.
In reality, France’s off-clock life remains essentially unchanged. The image of legions of French office grunts downing smartphones en masse was, alas, slightly hyperbolic. As Buzzfeed and others pointed out, this was not a law, but something known as a “labor agreement.” On behalf of a group of organized professional employees, the CFDT (Confédération française démocratique du travail) union engaged employer’s associations via collective bargaining and agreed to an “obligation to disconnect from remote communications tools” outside of normal working hours, which professionals measure by days worked annually (no set hours, much less a post-6 pm ban). The measure, aimed at preserving workers’ health and wellness, now awaits approval by the Labor Ministry.
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