“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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Trevor Timm: The NSA bill got to the House at warp speed. Senators are our only hope
The USA Freedom Act ended up surveillance a non-issue. Congress might have to hold it hostage, just to start over again
In just over two weeks, the bill known as the USA Freedom Act – formerly the best chance to pass meaningful NSA reform in Congress – has gone from strong, to weak, to horrible. So naturally, after months of stalling the once-promising bill, the House of Representatives was rushing to pass a gutted version on Thursday.
When it inevitably passes Thursday afternoon by a wide margin, the NSA’s biggest supporters will surely line up to call this legislation “reform”, so they can go back to their angry constituents and pretend they did something about mass surveillance, while really just leaving the door open for it to continue. But the bill is still a long way from the president’s desk. If the Senate refuses to pass a strengthened version of the USA Freedom Act this summer, reformers should consider what 24 hours ago was unthinkable: abandon the bill and force Section 215 of the Patriot Act to expire once and for all in 2015. Because it’s one thing to pass a weak bill, but it’s entirely another to pass off smoke and mirrors as progress.
Heidi Moore: Credit Suisse’s plea is kabuki theatre. Big US banks are still getting off easy
It’s not difficult to look tough on a Swiss bank. Call me when Eric Holder starts yelling about JP Morgan’s corruption – or says Bank of America isn’t too big to jail
Getting a bank on tax evasion is like getting Al Capone on tax evasion. It’s a punchline that suggests with absolute certainty that bigger crimes are going to go unpunished.
Consider Credit Suisse, a giant international bank that on Tuesday pleaded guilty to one charge of conspiracy for helping wealthy Americans avoid taxes. It will pay a $2.6bn fine, which is triple the amount of money it had set aside.
To be fair, the public image of the secretive system of Swiss banking, which has been the basis for plot lines in everything from James Bond to the Bourne films, is not too far from the truth: those banks are open only to the absurdly wealthy, and their promise of discretion is essentially their business model. The US government thinks the Swiss banks are helping rich people avoid taxes by fooling the IRS and filling out fake bank statements, and they’re not entirely wrong: one colorful example involves a Credit Suisse banker who passed such fictionalized documents to a client in the middle of an issue of Sports Illustrated.
The Senate is unnecessarily rushing to vote on President Obama’s nomination of David Barron for a seat on the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in Boston, even though the public has yet to see documents written by Mr. Barron that have raised legitimate concern among civil liberties advocates on both the left and the right.
Mr. Barron, a Harvard law professor, was a top official in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel when he wrote two classified memos justifying the drone strike in Yemen in 2011 that killed Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen accused of being a terrorist. [..]
In other respects, Mr. Barron appears clearly qualified for the job. Some senators will vote for him in spite of (or because of) what is in the memos; some, like Mr. Paul, will vote against him. But what’s the rush in pushing through this vote? A federal judgeship is a lifetime appointment. The American people should be able to decide for themselves whether their elected representatives are making the right decision.
Jane Hamsher: The Price of Whistleblowing: Manning, Greenwald, Assange, Kiriakou and Snowden
We were eating dinner last night around my kitchen table when the news of the dustup between Wikileaks and the Intercept came through the tubes. As I read the details to the people who came here to share food and conversation, everyone’s eyebrows raised.
The eyebrows at a lot of tables probably raised as Wikileaks took the Intercept to task for its latest story, and failing to release the name of one of the countries in which the United States is spying on its citizens. The Intercept maintained they had been shown compelling evidence that led them to redact the name; Wikileaks maintained the citizens of the country have a right to know. [..]
I know that in the past, Assange has had concerns about releasing documents himself without redacting the names of innocent people who could get hurt, and has contacted the Pentagon offering to work with them to redact documents before their release. And I also understand his concerns that the Pentagon is not always acting in good faith when they say people are in danger. They have cried wolf so many times that nobody believes them any more.
But I also don’t think you can assume bad faith on the part of the people at the Intercept. We may learn two days from now, or in 10 years, that there were fierce internal battles over the Snowden documents. Or we may learn that everyone was in general agreement to redact the name of the country. I have no idea and have had no discussions with anyone at the Intercept about the story, including Glenn Greenwald.
Robert Reich: The Practical Choice: Not American Capitalism or “Welfare State Socialism” but an Economy That’s Working for a Few or Many
For years Americans have assumed that our hard-charging capitalism is better than the soft-hearted version found in Canada and Europe. American capitalism might be a bit crueler but it generates faster growth and higher living standards overall. Canada’s and Europe’s “welfare-state socialism” is doomed.
It was a questionable assumption to begin with, relying to some extent on our collective amnesia about the first three decades after World War II, when tax rates on top incomes in the U.S. never fell below 70 percent, a larger portion of our economy was invested in education than before or since, over a third of our private-sector workers were unionized, we came up with Medicare for the elderly and Medicaid for the poor, and built the biggest infrastructure project in history, known as the interstate highway system.
But then came America’s big U-turn, when we deregulated, de-unionized, lowered taxes on the top, ended welfare, and stopped investing as much of the economy in education and infrastructure.
Meanwhile, Canada and Europe continued on as before. Soviet communism went bust, and many of us assumed European and Canadian “socialism” would as well.
That’s why recent data from the Luxembourg Income Study Database is so shocking.
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