“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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Paul Krugman: Cheap Money Talks
What with everything else going on, from Trump to Brexit to the horror in Dallas, it’s hard to focus on developments in financial markets — especially because we’re not facing any immediate crisis. But extraordinary things have been happening lately, especially in bond markets. And because money still makes the world go ’round, attention must be paid to what the markets are trying to tell us.
Specifically, there has been an extraordinary plunge in long-term interest rates. Late last year the yield on 10-year U.S. government bonds was around 2.3 percent, already historically low; on Friday it was just 1.36 percent. German bonds, the safe asset of the eurozone, are yielding minus — that’s right, minus — 0.19 percent. Basically, investors are willing to offer governments money for nothing, or less than nothing. What does it mean?
Some commentators blame the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank, accusing them of engineering “artificially low” interest rates that encourage speculation and distort the economy. These are, by the way, largely the same people who used to predict that budget deficits would cause interest rates to soar. In any case, however, it’s important to understand that they’re not making sense.
Lucia Graves: In Dallas, yet another shooting that won’t move the needle on gun control
Less than a month after the tragedy in Orlando, a familiar cycle is setting in.
On Wednesday, Americans went to bed thinking about one shooting. On Thursday morning, we woke up to another, watching an innocent victim die on a video taken by his girlfriend. On Thursday night, we fell asleep to the horrors of a third.
Such events used to feel like an aberration. And while the killing of blameless cops reporting for duty at a peaceful Black Lives Matter protest in Dallas on Thursday night is a new, heinous twist, the outcome – the gunning down of innocents – has become the status quo.
The trouble is, ending America’s scourge of mass shootings and the deep-seated bias in police killings will require many things that our country is not good at. It will require persistence and cooperation, empathy and bipartisanship. It will require policy reform and, specifically, gun control. It will require us to walk a line between numb detachment and murderous rage.
So far, we haven’t found the line.
Nomi Prins: Donald Trump’s Anti-Establishment Scam
“Establishment: A group in a society exercising power and influence over matters of policy, opinion, or taste, and seen as resisting change.” — Oxford Dictionary
Early on in his presidential bid, Donald Trump began touting his anti-establishment credentials. When it worked, he ran with it. It was a posture that proved pure gold in the Republican primaries, and was even, in one sense, true. After all, he’d never been part of the political establishment nor held public office, nor had any of his family members or wives.
His actual relationship to the establishment is, however, complex in an opportunistic way. He’s regularly tweeted his disdain for it. (“I wish good luck to all of the Republican candidates that traveled to California to beg for money etc. from the Koch Brothers. Puppets?”) And yet, he clearly considered himself part of it and has, at times, yearned for it. As he said early on in his run for the presidency, “I want the establishment — look, I was part of the establishment. Let me explain. I was the establishment two months ago. I was like the fair-haired boy. I was a giver, a big giver. Once I decided to run, all of a sudden I’m sort of semi-anti-establishment.”>
An outsider looking to shake up the government status quo? An insider looking to leverage that establishment for his own benefit? What was he? He may not himself have known.
Robert Reich: Donald Trump Wants Americans to Believe He’s the Anti-Establishment Candidate
The tectonic plates of American politics are no longer moving along the old fault lines of “left” versus “right” or even Democrat versus Republican.
As we’ve seen this bizarre political year, the biggest force welling up is rage against insider elites in both parties, and against the American establishment as a whole – including the denizens of Wall Street, large corporations, and the mainstream media.
Now, with Bernie Sanders essentially out of the race, Donald Trump wants Americans to believe he’s the remaining anti-establishment candidate.
It’s smart politics but it’s a hoax.
Trump is even more of an establishment figure than Hillary Clinton – inheriting a fortune from his father, spending years bribing politicians to subsidize his hotels and casinos, and repeatedly using bankruptcy to shield his money while leaving creditors and workers holding the bag.
But Trump is also a brilliant huckster who knows his mark.
Amanda Marcotte: Anti-choice activists attempt to hijack Black Lives Matter to shame women for abortion
Last week, the news was dominated by the specter of racism and violence, after the well-publicized deaths of two black men at the hands of police followed by a horrific shooting of police officers providing security for a Black Lives Matter protest. Most of the discussion was centered around issues like how to reduce violence and build trust, what role racism plays in the violence, and how to balance human rights with the need for security.
But for one subset of conservatives, all that mattered less than their real concern: Women keep having sex without having babies. And so, furious that all this talk about race and violence and justice might distract from the supposed national tragedy of baby-free screwing, anti-choicers online redoubled efforts to hijack the Black Lives Matter conversation and turn it towards their obsession with abortion.
While liberal Twitter was busy talking about the deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, conservative Twitter was lighting up with increased activity on the hashtag #UnbornLivesMatter, a co-option of the phrase/movement name “Black Lives Matter.” Many of the tweets focused on shaming liberals for believing there are more important things to worry about than women terminating unwanted pregnancies.
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