“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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Thomas Piketty: Panama Papers: Act now. Don’t wait for another crisis
The question of tax havens and financial opacity has been headline news for years now. Unfortunately, in this area there is a huge gap between the triumphant declarations of governments and the reality of what they actually do.
In 2014, the LuxLeaks investigation revealed that multinationals paid almost no tax in Europe, thanks to their subsidiaries in Luxembourg. In 2016, the Panama Papers have shown the extent to which financial and political elites in the north and the south conceal their assets. We can be glad to see that the journalists are doing their job. The problem is that the governments are not doing theirs. The truth is that almost nothing has been done since the crisis in 2008. In some ways, things have even got worse.
Paul Krugman: Snoopy the Destroyer
Has Snoopy just doomed us to another severe financial crisis? Unfortunately, that’s a real possibility, thanks to a bad judicial ruling that threatens a key part of financial reform.
Some background: When catastrophe struck the troubled U.S. financial system in September 2008, the proximate cause was the looming collapse of three companies — none of which were banks in the normal sense of the word, that is, institutions that take deposits and lend them out. One of them was, of course, Lehman Brothers; the other two were The Reserve, a money-market fund, and American International Group, or A.I.G, an insurance company. [..]
Oh, and yes, the episode also showed that making the breakup of big banks the be-all and end-all of reform misses the point.
What we need is regulation that limits the risks from nonbank institutions — and the 2010 financial reform tries to do just that. The way it does this is by allowing regulators to designate some firms “systemically important,” meaning that, like A.I.G., their failure or the prospect thereof could threaten financial stability. Once an institution is so designated, it is subject to extra oversight and regulation.
Harvey Wasserman: Are You Ready for President Paul Ryan? Why Democrats Desperately Need a Plan C
[..] The Democrats’ abject failure to deal with the stripping of the voter rolls and the flipping of the electronic vote count could doom their chances this fall, no matter who their presidential nominee. With that loss will go control of the Congress, governorships, state legislatures and countless other elective offices at all levels.
But in the interim, the Democrats’ hopes for winning the White House now rest on two candidates with serious handicaps that could cost either of them any reasonable chance for victory in the fall, especially amidst the dark tsunami of Koch cash.
The time to start at least considering potential backup alternatives is very much now.
Likewise the need to guarantee that the immense grassroots energies ignited by Bernie Sanders become an organized, tangible force for long-term change.
And – 16 years after the stolen election of 2000 – we at long last must confront the strip and flip “selectoral” realities that have turned our government into an utterly corrupt, globally lethal corporate subsidiary.
Martha Burk: Republicans Move to Hide the Gender Pay Gap
Popular mythology has it that women don’t really understand numbers as well as men. That shopworn notion from the 19th century is still harming girls from elementary school on up — female students drop out of the science, math and tech pipeline around the time they hit junior high.
But there’s one number women understand very well — the gender pay gap. At 79 cents for every dollar earned by men, the needle hasn’t moved in over a decade.
Pay Equity Day — the day every year when women catch up with what men earned by the previous December 31 — is April 12. Never mind that payingwomen less than men for substantially the same work has been illegal since the 1960s.
One big reason the pay gap is so stubborn is that women can’t find out what they’re making compared to the guys alongside them. Many employers prohibit talking about pay with co-workers, and god forbid a company should publish its statistics on pay, gender and job category.
Robert Weissman: Americans Agree: It’s Corporate Power That’s In Our Way
There is widespread recognition among politicians and pundits that Americans are sharply divided by party on virtually all of the big questions facing our country.
Everyone knows this is just the way things are, and it’s why we have gridlock in Congress.
But here’s one thing: That story is not true.
In fact, Americans overwhelmingly agree on a wide range of issues. They want policies to make the economy more fair and hold corporate executives accountable. They want stronger environmental and consumer protections. And they want to fix our political system so that it serves the interest of all, not just Big Money donors. These aren’t close issues for Americans; actually, what’s surprising is the degree of national consensus.
William Hartung: The Pentagon’s Military Waste Machine Is Running Full Speed Ahead
From spending $150 million on private villas for a handful of personnel in Afghanistan to blowing $2.7 billion on an air surveillance balloon that doesn’t work, the latest revelations of waste at the Pentagon are just the most recent howlers in a long line of similar stories stretching back at least five decades. Other hot-off-the-presses examples would include the Army’s purchase of helicopter gears worth $500 each for $8,000 each and the accumulation of billions of dollars’ worth of weapons components that will never be used. And then there’s the one that would have to be everyone’s favorite Pentagon waste story: the spending of $50,000 to investigate the bomb-detecting capabilities of African elephants. (And here’s a shock: they didn’t turn out to be that great!) The elephant research, of course, represents chump change in the Pentagon’s wastage sweepstakes and in the context of its $600-billion-plus budget, but think of it as indicative of the absurd lengths the Department of Defense will go to when what’s at stake is throwing away taxpayer dollars.
Keep in mind that the above examples are just the tip of the tip of a titanic iceberg of military waste. In a recent report I did for the Center for International Policy, I identified 27 recent examples of such wasteful spending totaling over $33 billion. And that was no more than a sampling of everyday life in the twenty-first-century world of the Pentagon.
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