“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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Matt Taibbi: Too Smug to Jail
As we reach the close of an election season marked by anger toward the unaccountable rich, The Economist has chimed in with a defense of the beleaguered white-collar criminal.
An editorial called “Jail bait” is the latest in a line of salvoes against what the magazine imagines is a wave of politically driven regulatory actions against corporate executives.
The piece makes many of the usual Wall Street arguments: locking up executives wouldn’t do any good, populist passions are ignorant, etc. But this is the crucial passage:
“Most corporate crime is the result of collective action rather than individual wrongdoing—long chains of command that send (often half-understood) instructions, or corporate cultures that encourage individuals to take risky actions. The authorities have rightly adjusted to this reality by increasingly prosecuting companies rather than going after individual miscreants.”
Yikes! This extraordinary argument is cousin to the Lieutenant Calley defense, i.e., that soldiers bear no responsibility for crimes they were ordered to execute. The Economist here would have you believe that there’s no such thing as an individual crime in a corporate context.
This is a line you hear a lot not only in the finance community, but among the lawyers who defend the likes of banks and pharmaceutical companies.
Jay Rosen: Newspapers shouldn’t apologize for telling the truth about Donald Trump
Did you hear about the Florida newspaper that apologized to its readers for running too much news that was critical of Donald Trump? It happened last week at the Daily Commercial, based in Leesburg, Florida, in a conservative-leaning area of the state with a lot of affluent retirees nearby. The editors published an open letter to readers in which they wrote:
“The Daily Commercial hasn’t done enough to mitigate the anti-Trump wave in the pages of this paper … This is not an endorsement of Trump, a candidate whose brutish, sometimes childish antics are responsible for his sizable deficit in the polls. Rather, it is a recognition that you, the voter, deserve better than we in the media have given you. You deserve a more balanced approach.”
I have frequently observed in my press criticism that mainstream journalists sometimes place protecting themselves against criticism before serving their readers. This is troubling because that kind of self-protection has far less legitimacy than the duties of journalism, especially when the criticism itself is barely valid. This is how the phrase “working the refs” got started. Political actors try to influence judgment calls by screeching about bias, whether the charge is warranted or not.
Marcy Wheeler: The Story About Judicial Dysfunction Behind the Comey Whiplash
I’ve been home from Europe for less than a day and already I’m thinking of sporting a neck collar for the whiplash I’ve gotten watching the wildly varying Jim Comey opinions. [..]
Effectively, the Weiner investigators, in reviewing the content from devices seized in that investigation, found emails from Huma Abedin, told the Hillary investigative team, and they’re now obtaining a warrant to be able to review those emails.
So of course the Republicans that had been claiming Comey had corruptly fixed the investigation for Hillary immediately started proclaiming his valor and Democrats that had been pointing confidently to his exoneration of Hillary immediately resumed their criticism of his highly unusual statements on this investigation. Make up your minds, people! [..]
Of course I’ve been critical of Comey since long before it was cool (and our late great commenter Mary Perdue was critical years before that).But I’d like to take a step back and talk about what this says about our judicial system.
Heather Digby Parton: Clinton White House plus GOP Senate? It’s a recipe for total disaster
When Justice Antonin Scalia died in his sleep at age 80 several months ago, I don’t think anyone thought it would be easy to replace him before the election. President Barack Obama’s appointing a justice to his seat would change the balance of the court, and that would be a fraught proposition regardless of the timing.
But it did come as a surprise when the Republicans didn’t simply delay hearings or drag their feet. Instead, they openly declared that a president in his seventh year had no right to name a Supreme Court justice at all. As it has done repeatedly in recent times, the anarchistic GOP is simply making up new rules to serve its interests and daring the Democrats to do something about it.
Despite numerous sanctimonious speeches and interviews by Republicans explaining that they simply wanted to ensure that members of the public could “weigh in” on the Supreme Court choice through their presidential selection (as if they hadn’t done that already by electing Obama twice) it now appears that at least a few Republicans are prepared to continue the blockade as long as a Democrat is in the White House. As Salon’s Sophia Tesfaye reported yesterday, GOP Sens. Richard Burr, Ted Cruz and John McCain have all made statements to that effect.
Gareth Porter: Justifying the Saudi Slaughter in Yemen
The Obama administration has carried out a deliberately deceptive campaign accusing Iran of covertly sending arms to the Houthis by sea, a claim that Washington cites to help justify the Saudi massive air attack against the Houthis that began last year.
By repeating the accusation over and over, the administration has been largely successful in turning a dubious allegation into accepted fact, even though it is contradicted by evidence that is well-documented on the public record. [..]
But the Obama administration has no interest in the considerable evidence gathered by the monitoring group that provides a more credible explanation for the arms found on those four fishing dhows.
Such an explanation isn’t political useful, whereas the accusations of Iranian smuggling of arms to the Houthis fulfilled multiple political and bureaucratic interests, justifying Saudi Arabia’s bloody U.S.-backed air campaign over Yemen and endless Washington alarms about “Iranian aggression.”
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