Pondering the Pundits

“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.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Pondering the Pundits”.

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William K. Black: Obsessing About The “Thin Blue Lines” While Elite White-Collar Crime Runs Rampant

The New York Times published a book review entitled “Thin Blue Lines.”  The two books reviewed were about street crimes.  Based solely on reading the NYT book review, and wearing my criminology hat, neither book adds materially to the useful literature.  The two books, and the book review, however, share a common characteristic that is worth analysis.  All three conflate “street crime” with “crime” and “police” with “law enforcement.”  The “blue lines,” of course, refer to police, rather than the FBI white-collar crime section that is supposed to investigate elite white-collar crime.  If the American police represent “thin blue lines,” then in comparison the pittance of law enforcement personnel charged with investigating elite white-collar crime represent the sheerest tissue paper – so insubstantial that they must be described as diaphanous or gossamer.

We are living with the consequences of the three most devastating epidemics of elite financial frauds (liar’s loans, appraisal fraud, and the fraudulent resale of these fraudulently originated mortgages through fraudulent “reps and warranties”) in U.S. history.  Not a single executive who led, and became exceptionally wealthy, by leading those epidemics has been imprisoned or even required to pay back the fraud proceeds.  But none of this shows up in reported “crime rates” for a reason so basic and so outrageous that it reveals how little our political cronies care about crimes by their elite supporters.  The FBI and the Department of Justice refuse to keep statistics on the most damaging white-collar crimes committed by elites.

Trevor Timm: The US needs its own Chilcot report

As the UK parliament released its long-awaited Chilcot report on the country’s role in the Iraq war on Wednesday, there have been renewed calls all over Britain to try former prime minister Tony Blair for war crimes. This brings up another question: what about George W Bush?

The former US president most responsible for the foreign policy catastrophe has led a peaceful existence since he left office. Not only has he avoided any post-administration inquiries into his conduct, he has inexplicably seen his approval ratings rise (despite the carnage left in his wake only getting worse). He is an in-demand fundraiser for Republicans not named Donald Trump, and he gets paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to speak at corporate events. The chances of him ever saying in public, “I express more sorrow, regret and apology than you can ever believe,” as Blair did on Wednesday, are virtually non-existent.

The only thing close to the Chilcot report in the US was the Senate intelligence committee’s long-delayed investigation on intelligence failures in the lead-up to Iraq, released in 2008. The Democratic-led committee faulted the CIA for massive intelligence failures and the Bush administration for purposefully manipulating intelligence for public consumption. It led to a couple days of headlines, denunciations from the Bush White House (still in office at the time) and that was it.

Ralph Nader: This election year, we can’t lose sight of the perils of climate change

Every election year, candidates for office engage in a perverse form of theater. Some flatter voters or try to scare them, others offer promises of a better future. Unfortunately, few candidates feel an obligation to follow through on campaign pledges or grapple with serious problems confronting our country and planet.

Take Barack Obama. He has done far less on climate than his supporters might have expected. Despite claiming COP21 as a victory, Obama’s legacy will tell the story of the US surpassing all other nations in oil and gas production. Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org, has called the US “a global warming machine”, adding: “At the moment when physics tell us we should be jamming on the carbon brakes, America is revving the engine.”

Today, that lack of leadership on climate change continues. Candidates running for Congress and the presidency aren’t offering real solutions, despite growing scientific alarm.

Lucia Graves: The FBI gave Hillary Clinton a legal victory – and a political setback

On Tuesday, FBI director James Comey removed a dark legal cloud from over Hillary Clinton’s head and replaced it with a political one. [..]

A criminal indictment could derail Clinton’s path to the presidency and help secure a Donald Trump victory in November. But after Tuesday’s announcement, that outcome looks more unlikely than ever.

Federal prosecutors generally seek to avoid having their investigations affect election outcomes, and over at the Justice department where the case is now heading, US attorney general Loretta Lynch has already suggested she will accept the FBI’s findings with regard to the investigation.

Democrats would be foolish to get too complacent, however. If what Clinton received on Tuesday amounts to the beginnings of a legal vindication, she has not received a political one. And she never will.

Peter Markowitz: Can Obama Pardon Millions of Immigrants?

WHEN the history of President Obama’s legacy on immigration is written, he will not go down as the president who boldly acted to protect millions of families from the brutality of our nation’s unforgiving immigration laws. The Supreme Court made sure of that last month, when it deadlocked on the legality of his program to defer the deportation of parents of American citizens and residents. Instead, he will be judged on what he actually did: deport more immigrants than any other president in American history, earning him the moniker “deporter in chief.”

However, President Obama can still act to bring humanity and justice to an immigration system notoriously lacking in both. He can do so by using the power the Constitution grants him — and only him — to pardon individuals for “offenses against the United States.” [..]

There is one area, however, where the president’s unilateral ability to forgo punishment is uncontested and supported by over a hundred years of Supreme Court precedent: the pardon power. It has been consistently interpreted to include the power to grant broad amnesties from prosecution to large groups when the president deems it in the public interest.

Such pardons have been used by presidents including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson. Most recently, Jimmy Carter issued a pardon to around half a million men who had violated draft laws to avoid military service in Vietnam.