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: Corporations are endangering Americans. Trump doesn’t care
From Boeing to Monsanto and beyond: this week has revealed the tip of the iceberg of regulatory neglect
Why didn’t Boeing do it right? Why isn’t Facebook protecting user passwords? Why is Phillip Morris allowed to promote vaping? Why hasn’t Wells Fargo reformed itself? Why hasn’t Monsanto (now owned by Bayer) recalled its Roundup weedkiller?
Answer: corporate greed coupled with inept and corrupt regulators.
These are just a few of the examples in the news these days of corporate harms inflicted on innocent people.
To be sure, some began before the Trump administration. But Trump and his appointees have unambiguously signaled to corporations they can now do as they please. [..]
Big money has had an inhibiting effect on regulators in several previous administrations. What’s unique under Trump is the blatancy of it all, and the shameless willingness of Trump appointees to turn a blind eye to corporate wrongdoing.
Trump and his Republican enablers in Congress yell “socialism!” at proposals for better balancing private greed with the common good. Yet unless a better balance is achieved, capitalism as we know it is in deep trouble.
Walter Dellinger: How the Mueller report can still threaten Trump’s legitimacy
counsel Robert S. Mueller III would reveal devastating information. But those who vested Mueller’s Russia inquiry with their hopes may yet be proven right.
All we can do right now is speculate about a report that only a few people have seen, at least until the redacted version comes out in April. But even based on what little we know — Attorney General William P. Barr’s summary, the indictments and court filings that came from Mueller’s team — it’s premature to write off its 400-page findings . Mueller’s office may have properly drafted a detailed and damning account of Trump’s obstruction of justice and simply cast it as a set of facts, a road map for the analysts who must decide what to do about it: members of Congress.
If Mueller believed it was inappropriate to pronounce on the president’s guilt — after all, the Justice Department has a long-standing policy against indicting a sitting president — he could still be following the example of Leon Jaworski, the Watergate independent counsel who decided against indicting President Richard Nixon, but instead submitted to Congress an extensive accounting of all the facts surrounding his efforts to shut down the investigation. Jaworski’s testimony skipped all the adjectives and adverbs. It simply told the story and allowed the branch of government tasked with oversight to do the rest.
Michael Paarlberg: Enough collusion talk. It’s time to focus on Trump’s corruption
If there is a silver lining to the confusion and disappointment of Russiagate, it is that we can now pay attention to the real fleecing
It’s a fortunate thing for Donald Trump that the Democrats, and much of the media, spent the past two years focused on the narrow question of whether his 2016 campaign actively colluded with Russian agents to hack his opponents’ emails. Were it not for this singular obsession, we might have come to appreciate the full scope of graft, influence peddling and petty theft that has made this the most crooked administration in US history.
One doesn’t have to go to Moscow to see it; pick almost any country in the world. Take my former home, Panama, famous for its canal and secret banks. Towering over the Panama City skyline is a 70 story hotel-casino shaped like a sailboat formerly known as the Trump Ocean Club. Trump had gifted it to his daughter Ivanka as her first real estate deal, which court records show earned Trump between $30m and $50m. Ivanka Trump put in charge of its sales a Brazilian financier, whom a Reuters investigation identified as an admitted money launderer with ties to Russian organized crime, who would later be arrested for fraud and forgery.
Jennifer Rubin: We should finally pass tax reform
Republicans promised to pass tax reform but instead delivered tax cuts heavily tilted to the rich and to corporations. Far from simplifying the code, this added complications, including the 20 percent rate for pass-through income. The result has been massive deficits, no sign of the economic boom President Trump promised and increased income inequality.
In response, some Democrats are proposing a wealth tax, which is politically attractive but would raise less revenue than other proposals. Natasha Sarin and Lawrence H. Summers argue that “base-broadening reforms — rolling back President Trump’s tax plan, increasing tax compliance by the rich, closing shelters, eliminating stepped-up basis and deductions for the wealthy, and broadening the estate tax base — together raise more revenue than the wealth tax [from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] is estimated to.” They argue, as Republicans did once upon a time, that “these measures would be desirable even if they did not raise revenue, because they would improve investment efficiency and correspond to the basic notion of fairness: If two people are similarly situated economically, one of them should not be able to pay substantially less tax because of cheating or taking advantage of quirks in the law.” The biggest argument against wealth taxes is that they don’t work all that well
Roy Greenslade: While newsrooms have shrunk, investigative journalism is thriving
Once maligned, digital tools have turned out to be a wonderful addition to our armoury
investigative journalism is dead. I think I heard it first in 1987 when I joined the Sunday Times, the newspaper generally considered to have pioneered agenda-setting investigations. Several of my new colleagues were convinced, despite ample evidence to the contrary, that the paper was no longer committed to providing the necessary resources for lengthy probes into institutional bad behaviour. They held fast to the myth even as the paper went on publishing investigations.
Later, I discovered that the same mistaken belief existed across the industry and has persisted over the course of 30 years. It gained ground once the digital revolution took hold, and I admit to sharing concerns about the negative effects of the resulting cuts to editorial staffs. But digital tools have turned out to be a wonderful addition to the reporting armoury and it is possible to argue that investigative journalism today is in a healthier state than ever before. Computer terminals have proven more effective in discovering secrets than shoe leather.
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