“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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Zephyr Teachout: Legalized Bribery
Last Thursday, Sheldon Silver, the speaker of the New York Assembly for the past 20 years, was arrested and charged with mail and wire fraud, extortion and receiving bribes. According to Preet Bharara, the federal prosecutor who brought the charges, the once seemingly untouchable Mr. Silver took millions of dollars for legal work he did not do. In exchange, he used his official power to steer business to a law firm that specialized in getting tax breaks for real estate developers, and he directed state funds to a doctor who referred cases to another law firm that paid Mr. Silver fees.
Albany is reeling, but fighting the kind of corruption that plagues not only New York State but the whole nation isn’t just about getting cuffs on the right guy. As with the recent conviction of the former Virginia governor Bob McDonnell for receiving improper gifts and loans, a fixation on plain graft misses the more pernicious poison that has entered our system.
Corruption exists when institutions and officials charged with serving the public serve their own ends. Under current law, campaign contributions are illegal if there is an explicit quid pro quo, and legal if there isn’t. But legal campaign contributions can be as bad as bribes in creating obligations. The corruption that hides in plain sight is the real threat to our democracy.
Trevor Timm: The war on leaks has gone way too far when journalists’ emails are under surveillance
The outrageous legal attack on WikiLeaks and its staffers, who are exercising their First Amendment rights to publish classified information in the public interest-just like virtually every other major news organization in this country-is an attack on freedom of the press itself, and it’s shocking that more people aren’t raising their voices (and pens, and keyboards) in protest.
In the past four years, WikiLeaks has had their Twitter accounts secretly spied on, been forced to forfeit most of their funding after credit card companies unilaterally cut them off, had the FBI place an informant inside their news organization, watched their supporters hauled before a grand jury, and been the victim of the UK spy agency GCHQ hacking of their website and spying on their readers.
Now we’ve learned that, as The Guardian reported on Sunday, the Justice Department got a warrant in 2012 to seize the contents – plus the metadata on emails received, sent, drafted and deleted – of three WikiLeaks’ staffers personal Gmail accounts, which was inexplicably kept secret from them for almost two and a half years.
Alexis Tsipras, leader of the left-wing Syriza coalition, is about to become prime minister of Greece. He will be the first European leader elected on an explicit promise to challenge the austerity policies that have prevailed since 2010. And there will, of course, be many people warning him to abandon that promise, to behave “responsibly.”
So how has that responsibility thing worked out so far?
To understand the political earthquake in Greece, it helps to look at Greece’s May 2010 “standby arrangement” with the International Monetary Fund, under which the so-called troika – the I.M.F., the European Central Bank and the European Commission – extended loans to the country in return for a combination of austerity and reform. It’s a remarkable document, in the worst way. The troika, while pretending to be hardheaded and realistic, was peddling an economic fantasy. And the Greek people have been paying the price for those elite delusions.
Jonathan Schwartz: Survivor of ‘Charlie Hebdo’ Massacre ‘Very Happy Obama Didn’t Come to Paris’
In a new interview Laurent Léger, an investigative reporter at Charlie Hebdo and a survivor of the January 7th assault on the magazine’s Paris office, condemned President Obama for his administration’s attack on press freedom.
“You have to be very happy Obama] didn’t come to the march in Paris,” said Léger. “[His administration’s actions are] an absolute scandal. It’s very good he didn’t come to the march that day.” A 2013 report by the Committee to Protect Journalists [stated that the Obama administration’s “war on leaks and other efforts to control information are the most aggressive… since the Nixon administration.” Eight whistleblowers have been prosecuted by Obama’s Justice Department under the 1917 Espionage Act, twice as many as under all other presidents combined. [..]
Léger said he believed many French officials at the January 10th rally in Paris protesting the assault on Charlie Hebdo were sincere. However, he described the presence of numerous top officials from countries with poor records on freedom of the press as “incredible and ludicrous. It’s too bad that the cartoonists who were killed couldn’t be there to see it. If they had, they would have made some fantastic cartoons.”
Lyric R Cabral and David Felix Sutcliffe: Counter-terrorism is supposed to let us live without fear. Instead, it’s creating more of it
How many ‘terrorism plots’ initiated by FBI informants will the agency interrupt before Congress finally performs some oversight?
People think that catching terrorists is just a matter of finding them – but, just as often, terrorists are created by the people doing the chase. [..]
The stated purpose of the FBI’s counter-terrorism mission is to enable Americans to go about their daily lives without fear. But in addition to imprisoning hundreds of Muslim men caught up in the FBI’s informant-led traps, the agency has actively created and encouraged a pervasive climate of fear and suspicion among Americans exercising their constitutional right to freedom of religion. In fact, the FBI’s tactics have profoundly impacted law enforcement’s ability to maintain a relationship of trust with Muslim American communities, much to the detriment to our collective national security. Authorities must rein in the informant program, and institute immediate congressional oversight, if they sincerely aim to defend the liberty and security of all Americans, regardless of race or religion.
Wendall Potter: Health Insurers’ Stock Soars as They Dump Small Business Customers
Several million previously uninsured Americans now have coverage because of Obamacare, but it could be argued that the people who have benefited most from the law — at least financially — are the top executives and shareholders of the country’s health insurance companies.
Among those who apparently have not yet benefited much at all, at least so far, are owners of small businesses who would like to keep offering coverage to their employees but can no longer afford it. They can’t afford it because insurers keep jacking their rates up so high every year that more and more of them are dropping employee health benefits altogether.
And let’s be clear, these insurers aren’t suffering. UnitedHealth Group, the largest health insurer, reported last week that it made $10.3 billion in profits in 2014 on revenues of $130.5 billion. Both profits and revenues grew seven percent from 2013.
On this day in 1788, Captain Arthur Phillip guides a fleet of 11 British ships carrying convicts to the colony of New South Wales,
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