“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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Dean Baker: Reining in CEO Pay: Market Discipline at the Top
Ever wonder how top executives like former Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina can walk away with $100 million after nearly wrecking a major corporation? The answer is that the market doesn’t work the same way at the top as it does for the rest of us. While most of us expect our pay to bear some relationship to our performance, at the top it’s mostly a story of play money among friends.
Corporate executives get patted on the back when they announce plant closings, layoffs, and pay cuts. This is seen as good news for corporate profits and stock prices. But there is no one to applaud when the CEO gets their pay cut because they are not worth the money. That would be a decision of corporate boards, and these boards tend to have more loyalty to CEOs and top management than to the shareholders they ostensibly represent.
David Coates: Horses for Courses? The Candidates and the Economy.
It may be difficult to believe right now, but eventually the nightmare will be over. The race for the presidency will end, and we will be free of the daily media diet of who is ahead, who is behind, and who might get ahead as others falter. Time and again right now, the bulk of the media – across the entirety of the political spectrum — focus entirely on the race, in the process distracting us from the course over which the race is being run. But when the race is over, reconstructing/improving that course will be the over-riding task facing whoever wins. So can we please start talking now, in a systematic way, less about the candidates and more about their programs?
When we do, a very early item will need to be the state of the US economy. For as the world economy slows down, and (as the IMF says ) prospects for global economic growth dim, it is all the more essential that the US economy grows as quickly as possible and as effectively as it can. Economic growth eases all the resource constraints on public policy; whereas its absence erodes the capacity of individuals to prosper and social reform to flourish. So the strength of the US economy matters – it matters to all of us regardless of our politics – and currently that economy is not strong, certainly not as strong as it needs to be if full-scale economic recovery is to be both substantial and prolonged.
Mike Lux: The Panama Papers Are the Tip of the Iceberg: Cracking Down on Wealthy Cheaters
As you might be expecting from the headline, I am going to be talking about the Panama papers in this article, but the Panama papers revelations are just the tip of the iceberg, so before I get there, I have to spend some time talking about an array of other members of the .1 of the one percent who apparently have no concern whatsoever about breaking the law. I want to highlight this issue not only because I am angry to hear about all this cheating, but because we as a society have to do something serious about it: The costs are just too huge. It is bad enough that governments all over the world are shorted hundreds of billions of tax dollars owed, and the rest of us taxpayers have to bear the consequences. What is just as bad is that legitimate, law-abiding businesses who are doing the right thing are having to compete against the cheaters, making it less likely that good businesses succeed, and making it less likely that most businesses will play by the rules and be good corporate citizens. When governments allow lawbreakers to go unpunished, there will be a lot more law breaking.
Flint Taylor: Homan Square is Chicago’s new ‘House of Screams’
When your local police station is nicknamed the “House of Screams”, you know you’ve got a problem. That’s what a Chicago police station in the south side was known as several decades ago, when police detectives, working with the now notorious Jon Burge, routinely took young African-American men into custody there. Now, a new House of Screams exists in Chicago. It’s called Homan Square.
Back in the 1970s and 80s, men were often kept sequestered from their family and lawyers for hours and days while Burge and his colleagues interrogated them, using tactics that included electric shock, suffocation, brutal beatings with batons and other instruments, “Russian Roulette” with a handgun and death threats.
The station had numerous interrogation rooms on the second floor, with old-fashioned steam radiators that would burn the skin, a garage with dingy holding cells and a dark, foreboding basement. Men were tortured in all of these locations, as well as at a remote torture site. Confessions were obtained, false police reports were filed, perjured testimony was routinely offered, and scores of men, many of them innocent, were sent to prison – some to death row – as a result. At least one man, Jessie Winston, died under questionable circumstances.
Emily Suski: You can’t stop bullying just by passing a law
The spring legislative season is well under way, and, as has been the case for the last several years, a number of states are again considering and passing amendments to their anti-bullying laws.
This year, Florida and Kentucky, for example, saw amendments to their anti-bullying laws introduced in their general assemblies. Florida’s bill, which has been signed into law by Governor Rick Scott, requires schools to review and revise their anti-bullying policies at least every three years. And Kentucky’s bill has come up with a clear definition of bullying so schools better recognize bullying when it occurs
These changes to anti-bullying laws are good first steps, but recognizing the problem is not sufficient. Schools also need to know what to do about it as well. States’ anti-bullying laws can and should guide and require schools to implement interventions that truly address the causes and effects of bullying.
My research on bullying has focused on anti-bullying laws – what they do, what they don’t do. The truth is these laws can both help and hurt students.
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