“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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Dana Milbank: Wells Fargo: Too big to fail, too arrogant to admit it
The 2008 financial collapse was eight years ago this month — and the big banks are back to their old shenanigans.
Venerable Wells Fargo has engaged in behavior that would have made a robber baron blush: It pressured low-wage workers with unrealistic sales targets, so these workers created 2 million bogus accounts over five years, causing customers to be hit with fees and damage to their credit ratings. Some 5,300 workers have been fired and $185 million in penalties assessed to the bank, but not a single high-level executive has been sacked or even forced to give back the tens of millions of dollars in pay earned based on the fraud.
When Wells Fargo chairman and chief executive John Stumpf sat before the Senate Banking Committee on Tuesday, he represented a bank too big to fail, too sprawling to manage and too arrogant to own up to its failures.
E. J. Dionne: A U.S. election of global consequence
Like it or not, the decision we make in this November’s election will be a choice on behalf of the entire world. How we vote will determine whether the forces of democracy, openness and religious tolerance remain strong, or whether our country throws in its lot with tribalism, prejudice and authoritarianism.
This sounds like melodrama. It isn’t. And while it may ring familiar — citizens of other countries always tell us how important our electoral verdicts are to them — Donald Trump requires us to make a judgment more monumental than any we have faced in our lifetimes.
This is the underlying import of President Obama’s speech to the United Nations on Tuesday, which may prove to be one of the most important of his presidency. He spoke of a “growing contest between authoritarianism and liberalism,” and he was not referring to the L-word we fight about here at home, but to the philosophy of free expression, entrepreneurialism and participatory decision-making that has long been our country’s hallmark. It’s the philosophy that most Americans, conservatives included, honor.
Amanda Marcotte: Wells Fargo scandal is another reminder that we can’t afford Trump and the GOP
Even as Republicans were striking poses of outrage during Tuesday’s Senate hearing over Wells Fargo’s abuses of customers, they were pushing for measures that would terminate the federal government’s ability to root out bank abuses — like the ones discovered at Wells Fargo.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), a brainchild of Sen. Elizabeth Warren, was instrumental to exposing the way that Wells Fargo employees opened unauthorized accounts under customer names in order to meet the company’s impossible-to-meet sales goals. The CFPB discovered, according to their press release, “that employees opened roughly 1.5 million deposit accounts that may not have been authorized by consumers” and that “employees applied for roughly 565,000 credit card accounts that may not have been authorized by consumers”.* Under the authority of the Dodd-Frank bill, the agency is fining the bank $100 million.
But Republicans want to kneecap the CFPB, even though, in its five-year existence, the agency has returned nearly $12 billion to victims of the financial industry’s malfeasance. Despite this high profile victory over Wells Fargo, Republicans are still looking for excuses to destroy an agency that protects consumers and helps prevent some of the exploitative banking practices that led to the financial collapse of 2008.
Robert Creamer: Why A Vote For A Third Party Cannot Be An Option For Progressives
A small but significant group of Americans is considering casting their vote this fall for a third- party “protest” candidate. Some are thinking they may not vote at all. They say they don’t like any candidate enough to vote so they will “sit this election out.”
I realize many of the Americans considering a third-party vote — or sitting out the election — have sincere, deeply-held feelings that are driving their actions. Some are just disgusted by what they think is a vitriolic tone of the campaign.
Unfortunately the media encourages that kind of cynicism and disgust by presenting the attacks mounted by each side in the campaign as equally credible.
But while it is easy to understand the reasons that some people might be inclined to choose a “protest” vote — or decide to sit on their hands — the fact is that either of these actions will have one and only one result: putting Donald Trump into the White House.
And “trust me,” the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States will have long-term consequences that will make it ever so clear why every voter has to overcome his or her cynicism, or personal likes and dislikes, and go vote — for Hillary Clinton.
Jill Abramson: The Trump Foundation: what’s known is shocking. We need to know more
Imagine if Hillary Clinton had a 6ft portrait of herself painted for a charity auction. Then Bill bid it up and paid for it with $20,000 from the Clinton Foundation. And the Clinton Foundation donated $100,000 to the ACLU or Naral.
Then imagine that she spent $258,000 from the foundation to cover expenses arising from legal challenges.
And here’s the really beautiful bit: imagine that the Clinton Foundation has no discernible purpose as a charity.
If the Clinton Foundation had done all of these things, Hillary (and perhaps Bill and Chelsea too) might well be headed to prison, the place Donald Trump and his supporters insist she belongs.
But it’s the Trump Foundation, not the Clinton Foundation, which reportedly bought a portrait of its namesake, settled legal claims for him, donated money to a rightwing advocacy group and whose purpose is somewhat opaque.
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