“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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Robert Reich: Corporate tax deserters shouldn’t get the benefits of being American corporations
Apple is only the latest big global American corporation to use foreign tax shelters to avoiding paying its fair share of U.S. taxes. It’s just another form of corporate desertion.
Corporations are deserting America by hiding their profits abroad or even shifting their corporate headquarters to another nation because they want lower taxes abroad. And some politicians say the only way to stop these desertions is to reduce corporate tax rates in the United States so they won’t leave.
Wrong. If we start trying to match lower corporate tax rates around the world, there’s no end to it.
Instead, the President should use his executive power to end the financial incentives that encourage this type of corporate desertion. President Obama has already begun, but there is much left that could be done.
In addition, corporation that desert America by sheltering a large portion of their profits abroad or moving their headquarters to another country should no longer be entitled to the advantages of being American.
Heather Digby Parton: Recession hangover and the rise of Trump: His rise is fueled by an anger based on fiction
Jeff Greenfield wrote a piece in Politico recalling the 1992 campaign in which he compared the rise of Donald Trump to Pat Buchanan’s primary challenge and the political environment that spawned it. It’s an interesting look back at a race that has some intriguing parallels to 2016. Greenfield thinks Trump’s timing is better than Buchanan’s because immigration is a more acute problem and American global dominance seems less assured so the isolationist argument has more salience today. And he points out that the white working class, a focus of much of this election, has seen stagnant wages since the start of the new millennium, as manufacturing jobs continue to disappear. This is the recipe for the kind of right-wing populism that both Buchanan and Trump represent.
But it appears that at long last the cloud is lifting. Immigration really isn’t such an acute problem (it’s been declining for years) and even Vladimir Putin admits that American dominance is as overwhelming as ever. Most importantly, the economic news this week was very good. [..]
This news won’t make a difference in this election, of course. The narrative has been set. But whoever wins may be coming in with a strong wind at his or her back. Let’s hope to God it isn’t Donald Trump, who would not only destroy whatever gains we might have in our future, he would take credit for the upswing and use it to seize a mandate for some of his worst policies. And instead of a well-deserved period of economic well-being, Americans would be faced once again with mourning in America. If things are getting better, the last thing we need is another Republican to come in and mess things up again.
Gareth Porter: Al Qaeda’s Ties to US-Backed Syrian Rebels
The new ceasefire agreement between Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, which went into effect at noon Monday, has a new central compromise absent from the earlier ceasefire agreement that the same two men negotiated last February. But it isn’t clear that it will produce markedly different results.
The new agreement incorporates a U.S.-Russian bargain: the Syrian air force is prohibited from operating except under very specific circumstances in return for U.S.-Russian military cooperation against Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, also known as Daesh, ISIS or ISIL. That compromise could be a much stronger basis for an effective ceasefire, provided there is sufficient motivation to carry it out fully.
The question, however, is whether the Obama administration is willing to do what would certainly be necessary for the agreement to establish a longer-term ceasefire at the expense of Daesh and Al Qaeda.
Jill Stein: Pardon Edward Snowden, now
On 6 June 2013, the Guardian broke the news National Security Agency (NSA) had ordered Verizon to provide it with the phone records of its customers. As the story developed it became clear that the two other major telephone networks as well as credit card companies were doing the same thing; and that the NSA and FBI were being provided with access to server systems operated by Google, Apple, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft and Skype.
On 11 June the Guardian reported the source as Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old who had been working at the NSA for four years. [..]
Snowden’s whistleblowing was among the most important in US history. It showed us that the relationship between the people of the United States and the government has gone off track and needs a major course correction.
The fourth amendment of the constitution provides that a court must find probable cause that an individual has committed a crime before issuing a warrant, and forbids systematic spying on the American people. The requirement of individualized suspicion should prohibit this type of dragnet surveillance. Spying on whole populations is not necessary, and is actually counterproductive.
Jim Hightower: Cleaning Up After Pundits
Being a muckracking political writer often makes me feel like a custodian in a horse barn, constantly shoveling manure. It’s a messy, stinky job — but on the bright side, the stuff is plentiful, so the work is steady. Indeed, I’m now a certified Equine Excrement Engineer, having developed a narrow, but important, professional specialty: cleaning off the horsestuff that careless politicos and sloppy media types keep dumping on the word “populist.”
As you might imagine, in this year of global turmoil, I’ve been especially busy. Populism — a luminous term denoting both an uplifting doctrine of egalitarianism and a political-economic-cultural movement with deep roots in America’s progressive history — has been routinely sullied throughout 2016 by elites misusing it as synonym for ignorance and bigotry:
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