“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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Richard (RJ) Eskow: American Greed: Trump’s Economic Team Is A Who’s Who Of What’s Wrong
“I hear America singing,” Walt Whitman wrote, “the varied carols I hear.” Donald Trump hears America singing too. But where Whitman heard men and women, masons and carpenters, Trump hears only the unvarying monotone of rich white males like himself.
Trump’s tone-deafness was in full effect last week, when he announced his team of economic advisers in advance of what is being billed as “a major economic address” in Detroit on Monday.
Trump’s team isn’t just monochromatic and male. At least four, and perhaps as many six of the men are billionaires. They range in age from 50 to 74 — or, from “younger old white guy” to “older old white guy.”
Five team members are named Steve — which means that eight of them are not. For diversity, that will have to do.
There are only two economists on the team — and one of them believes in the flat tax.
But hedge funds are represented. So is fracking. And tobacco. And guns. And banking. And steel. And there’s the guy who mismanaged Chrysler before it was rescued by a government intervention.
Trump’s advisory team is a “suicide squad” for the American economy — which seems fitting, since a funder of the new “Suicide Squad” movie is on it too.
Three team members — economist Peter Navarro, steel magnate Dan DiMicco and real estate investor Thomas Barrack Jr. — have criticized the bad “trade” deals supported by both major parties over the last 25 years. That’s a start, I suppose. But it’s not enough, not by a long shot. [..]
Who’s not represented on Trump’s economic team? Working people. Women. Minorities. The middle class.
There are no union leaders or labor economists to explain why higher wages and a more unionized workforce leads to broader growth prosperity. There’s nobody who’s fighting to close the gender pay gap, or to resist the economic predation that has decimated minority communities. There’s no one who understands the devastating impact that environmental destruction is having on our economy, as well as on our planet and on our bodies.
Robert Reich: The real threat to American sovereignty: Citizens United and global money influencing our politics
“Without a border, we just don’t have a country,“ Donald Trump says repeatedly. For him, the biggest threats to American sovereignty are three-dimensional items that cross our borders, such as unwanted imports and undocumented immigrants.
He’s wrong. The biggest threats to American sovereignty are invisible digital dollars wired into U.S. election campaigns from abroad.
Yet Trump seems to welcome foreign influence over our democracy.
Sovereignty is mainly about a government’s capacity to govern. A government not fully accountable to its citizens won’t pass laws that benefit and protect those citizens — not just laws about trade and immigration but about national security, the environment, labor standards, the economy and all else.
To state it another way: Without a functioning democracy, we just don’t have a country.
Trump’s recent public request that hackers connected to the Russian government sabotage his opponent Hillary Clinton is the tip of a Trumpian iceberg of foreign influence.
Dean Baker: Will Uber Go Under?
Uber, the huge taxi service, is undoubtedly still reeling from its defeat in China. After investing $2 billion to get a foothold in the Chinese market, Uber sold out to its competitor, Didi Chuxing, and agreed to be a junior partner in China.
While this is a dramatic story that made headlines across the country, a less covered story could have far more impact on Uber’s future. This is the story of Uber’s departure from Austin, Texas.
Uber, along with Lyft, stopped operating in Austin in early May after the city’s voters endorsed a requirement that drivers for these services had to be fingerprinted and undergo background checks. The companies complained that the requirement placed an onerous burden on them and instead said that they would just stop operating in the city.
As a practical matter, the real issue almost certainly was not the difficulty of fingerprinting. After all, taxi companies across the country have complied with similar requirements for decades and it is unlikely that the management of these old-styled cab companies are much more competent than Uber’s management.
Richard Wolffe: The Republicans tried to sink Obama. Instead, the party imploded
It may seem too early to call, but we already have a winner in the 2016 election.
He’s someone the pundits wrote off long ago. An improbable outsider who rode an insurgent wave to snatch the nomination from the establishment. An unconventional politician whose raucous rallies underscored his appeal to voters far outside his party base.
His name is Barack Obama. And he can thank the freak show that is Donald Trump’s Republican party for restoring his stature as a unifying, national leader with a moderated and mature approach to a complex and unstable world. [..]
If your political priorities are the total defeat of a single politician – not the advancement of your own policies through debate or legislation – then you are already in pretty desperate shape. You render it impossible to compromise with your opponents, and you fan the flames of extremism that will burn anyone in the center.
Lucia Graves: Trump’s national security nightmare: now even the neocons are freaking out
As the first woman to clinch a major party nomination, Hillary Clinton’s candidacy is already historic – and increasingly it looks like Donald Trump’s is too. But not in a flattering way.
If last week came the point at which he self-immolated the campaign and beloved Trump brand, this week may be remembered as the time he finally drove his party’s national security leadership to support the Democratic candidate for president en masse, either by voting for her expressly or by abstaining.
National security is an issue that Republican presidential candidates have historically been able to dominate, but Trump may be the first guy in recent history to blow that for the party. Even more remarkable is that top neoconservatives in the party are all taking the Democrat’s side: Clinton has said Trump “shouldn’t have his finger on the button” of our nuclear arsenal. It looks like even Republican top brass agrees.
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