Thomas Piketty at The Guardian writes—Panama Papers: Act now. Don't wait for another crisis:
The question of tax havens and financial opacity has been headline news for years now. Unfortunately, in this area there is a huge gap between the triumphant declarations of governments and the reality of what they actually do.
In 2014, the LuxLeaks investigation revealed that multinationals paid almost no tax in Europe, thanks to their subsidiaries in Luxembourg. In 2016, the Panama Papers have shown the extent to which financial and political elites in the north and the south conceal their assets. We can be glad to see that the journalists are doing their job. The problem is that the governments are not doing theirs. The truth is that almost nothing has been done since the crisis in 2008. In some ways, things have even got worse. [...]
It is the political fragmentation of Europe and the lack of a strong public authority which puts us at the mercy of private interests. The good news is that there is a way out of the current political impasse. If four countries, France, Germany, Italy and Spain, who together account for over 75% of the GDP and the population in the eurozone put forward a new treaty based on democracy and fiscal justice, with as a strong measure the adoption of a common tax system for large corporations, then the other countries would be forced to follow them. If they did not do so they would not be in compliance with the improvement in transparency which public opinions have been demanding for years and would be open to sanctions.
Paul Krugman at The New York Times writes—Snoopy the Destroyer:
At the end of 2014 the regulators designated MetLife, whose business extends far beyond individual life insurance, a systemically important financial institution. Other firms faced with this designation have tried to get out by changing their business models. For example, General Electric, which had become more about finance than about manufacturing, has sold off much of its finance business. But MetLife went to court. And it has won a favorable ruling from Rosemary Collyer, a Federal District Court judge.
It was a peculiar ruling. Judge Collyer repeatedly complained that the regulators had failed to do a cost-benefit analysis, which the law doesn’t say they should do, and for good reason. Financial crises are, after all, rare but drastic events; it’s unreasonable to expect regulators to game out in advance just how likely the next crisis is, or how it might play out, before imposing prudential standards. To demand that officials quantify the unquantifiable would, in effect, establish a strong presumption against any kind of protective measures.
Of course, that’s what financial firms want. Conservatives like to pretend that the “systemically important” designation is actually a privilege, a guarantee that firms will be bailed out. Back in 2012 Mitt Romney described this part of reform as “a kiss that’s been given to New York banks” (they never miss an opportunity to sneer at this city, do they?), an “enormous boon for them.” Strange to say, however, firms are doing all they can to dodge this “boon” — and MetLife’s stock rose sharply when the ruling came down.
E.J. Dionne, Jr. at The Washington Post writes—Faith’s mysterious ways in the 2016 campaign:
Even in defeat in Wisconsin on Tuesday, Trump did about as well among evangelicals (he won 34 percent of their ballots) as among non-evangelicals (36 percent).
In one sense, it is not surprising that the politics of white evangelicals are evolving. Their social issue frame and the most important institutions in their movement were created in the late 1970s and 1980s. But this year’s developments do suggest, as Elizabeth Bruenig (now of The Post) argued in the New Republic, that “the old-fashioned model of reaching evangelicals no longer appears functional.”
Robert Jones, chief executive of the Public Religion Research Institute (and with whom I have collaborated), sees many evangelicals now as “nostalgia voters.” Writing in the Atlantic, he said they are animated less by “a checklist of culture war issues or an appeal to shared religious identity” and more by an anger and anxiety arising from a sense that the dominant culture is moving away from their values.
Larry Summers at The Washington Post writes—What’s behind the revolt against global integration?
Since the end of World War II, a broad consensus in support of global economic integration as a force for peace and prosperity has been a pillar of the international order. [...]
This broad program of global integration has been more successful than could reasonably have been hoped. We have not had a war between major powers. Global standards of living have risen faster than at any point in history. And material progress has coincided with even more rapid progress in combating hunger, empowering women, promoting literacy and extending life. A world that will have more smartphones than adults within a few years is a world in which more is possible for more people than ever before.
Yet a revolt against global integration is underway in the West. The four most prominent candidates for president of the United States — Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz — all oppose the principal free-trade initiative of this period: the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Trump’s proposals to wall off Mexico, abrogate trade agreements and persecute Muslims are far more popular than he is. The Brexit movement in Britain commands substantial support and could prevail. Whenever any aspect of the E.U. project is submitted to a popular referendum, it fails. Under pressure from a large influx of refugees, the European commitment to open borders appears to be crumbling. In large part because of political constraints, the growth of the international financial institutions has not kept pace with the growth of the global economy.
Steven Cohen at The New Republic writes—The Covert Roots of the Panama Papers:
It should come as no surprise that the CIA’s finances are a secret. One of the rare glimpses into the agency’s funding came when Edward Snowden leaked a copy of the intelligence “black budget” to The Washington Post in 2013. But if history is any indication, the CIA may well have resources that don’t appear on any congressional document, highly classified or otherwise. Covert operations, by their very nature, often require access to off-the-books funding. The CIA’s first operation was paid for with funds seized from the Nazis, and in the years since, the agency has been notoriously creative about how it obtains its money.
Adnan Khashoggi would know. A “principal foreign agent” of the United States, as one Senate report referred to him, the billionaire playboy made a fortune (more than $100 million between 1970 and 1975 alone) from commissions negotiating arms deals with his native Saudi Arabia. He used these windfalls, in turn, to cultivate political clout—including, allegedly, with President Richard Nixon. In the aftermath of Watergate, when Congress began reining in the CIA, Khashoggi helped establish the supranational intelligence partnership known as the Safari Club. Soon after, he aided the CIA in circumventing another congressional impediment. With money borrowed from the Saudi and U.S. intelligence-linked Bank of Credit and Commerce International, he financed the illegal arms sales that set off the Iran-Contra scandal.
One way Khashoggi structured his shadowy holdings during his heyday was through the specialized services of Mossack Fonseca, the law firm that is in the news for having helped global luminaries like Vladimir Putin hide their money. Thanks to a recent report from the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, we now know Khashoggi to be among a number of former spies and CIA associates implicated by the 2.6 terabytes of offshore financial documents provided to the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung last summer.
Marcy Wheeler at Salon writes—The Looming Mystery Behind the Panama Papers: How Did the Largest Document Leak In History Even Happen?
The source reached out to Bastian Obermayer, a reporter for Germany’s Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper, over a year ago, explaining, “I want to make these crimes public.”
Beyond that, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), the group with which Süddeutsche Zeitung shared the documents in order to expand the investigation, has explained only that, “The source wanted neither financial compensation nor anything else in return, apart from a few security measures.”
Indeed, Obermayer has claimed, in an interview with Wired, that he doesn’t know who the source actually is. “I don’t know the name of the person or the identity of the person,” though he says he has had extensive conversations with the person.
So four hundred journalists are writing — and have been reporting on, many of them, for a good part of a year — about documents that they can’t explain the provenance of.
David Dayen at The New Republic writes—How a Judge Became the Sheriff of Wall Street:
There’s a new sheriff of Wall Street in town, with the power to overrule the Treasury Department, Federal Reserve, and all the other banking regulators. She can determine to impose or withdraw oversight of financial institutions, and analyze whether financial regulations make sense for the overall economy.
The only problem is that nobody elected her or charged her with that duty.
Our new super-regulator is named Rosemary Collyer. She’s a George W. Bush-appointed federal district court judge in Washington, D.C. Last week she announced that insurance giant MetLife should not be subject to enhanced supervision and larger capital requirements imposed by the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC), a group of regulators tasked under Dodd-Frank with monitoring the overall financial system. MetLife sued to overturn FSOC’s ruling designating it a systemically important financial institution (SIFI) and subjecting it to stronger regulations along with three other non-bank institutions (AIG, Prudential, and GE Capital). All of those designations are now threatened by Judge Collyer’s MetLife opinion, as this opens them up to legal challenge.
Katherine Stewart at The Nation writes— Why Mississippi’s New Anti-LGBT Law Is the Most Dangerous One To Be Passed Yet:
One of the more disconcerting sections of the law is that which discusses people who provide foster-care services. The government, we are told, will no longer be allowed to take action against any foster parent that “guides, instructs, or raises a child…in a manner consistent with a sincerely held religious belief.” If you want to know what that could mean, check out Focus on the Family’s “spare the rod” philosophy of child rearing. On its website, the religious-right advocacy group offers handy tips on “the Biblical Approach to Spanking.”
If the point were only to spare the fine moral sentiments of a few florists, why would the law’s sponsors seek such a wide-ranging exemption from the laws and norms that apply to the rest of society? A helpful clue can be found in a letter that the American Family Association sent out in support of the Mississippi bill before it was passed. (The AFA has been named a “hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center since 2010.) The bill, said the AFA, is crucial because it protects the AFA, and groups like it, from the “governmental threat of losing their tax exempt status.”
Jessica Valenti at The Guardian writes—Anti-abortion politicians deserve to be asked if they've helped a woman get one:
If the many outrageous things presidential hopeful Donald Trump has said to the media, there’s one line in particular that I just can’t get out of my head. When New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd asked Trump if he had ever been involved with a woman who had an abortion, the Republican frontrunner offered a telling refusal: “Such an interesting question … So what’s your next question?”
It’s not hard to imagine why Trump – who has left voicemails about “getting more pussy” than Tucker Carlson and defended the size of his penis in a presidential debate – would shy away from the question. It may be the same reason that he told MSNBC host Chris Matthews that women should be “punished” for procuring illegal abortions but the men who impregnated them should not.
But why hasn’t he been pressed to answer? More importantly: why isn’t this considered a reasonable question to ask male politicians that seek to curb reproductive rights? If anti-abortion men are comfortable pushing policy that strictly dictates women’s private medical decisions, they should be prepared to defend their own.
Jud Lounsbury at The Progressive writes—Young Wisconsin Voters Aren’t In It Just for Bernie, Despite What the Media Say:
The latest negative media narrative about Bernie Sanders is that Bernie supporters are, like their leader, only in it for Bernie, and not willing to show up to support “down-ticket” Dems (those running for lower-level offices).
Want proof?
The Washington Post reports that in Wisconsin’s race for Supreme Court justice, “15 percent of Sanders voters skipped the Bradley-Kloppenburg race; just 4 percent of Hillary Clinton voters did the same.” [...]
Using cocktail napkin math, if Obama won Wisconsin with 58 percent of the vote, similar proportions of high roll off rate voter demographics as Sanders 57 percent win, then it’s reasonable to compare 2008’s 64 percent roll-off rate to 2016’s 8 percent and safely estimate that Sanders’ voters did exponentially better than Obama's voters.
Yet I don’t remember a media narrative of Obama only being about Obama and not helping down-ticket candidates.
Robert Reich writes—Bernie and the Big Banks:
The recent kerfluffle about Bernie Sanders purportedly not knowing how to bust up the big banks says far more about the threat Sanders poses to the Democratic establishment and its Wall Street wing than it does about the candidate himself.
Of course Sanders knows how to bust up the big banks. He’s already introduced legislation to do just that. And even without new legislation a president has the power under the Dodd-Frank reform act to initiate such a breakup.
But Sanders threatens the Democratic establishment and Wall Street, not least because he’s intent on doing exactly what he says he’ll do: breaking up the biggest banks.
The biggest are far larger today than they were in 2008 when they were deemed “too big to fail.” Then, the five largest held around 30 percent of all U.S. banking assets. Today they have 44 percent.
Henry A. Giroux at TruthOut writes—Radical Politics in the Age of American Authoritarianism: Connecting the Dots:
The United States stands at the endpoint of a long series of attacks on democracy, and the choices faced by many in the US today point to the divide between those who are and those who are not willing to commit to democracy. Debates over whether Donald Trump is a fascist are a tactical diversion because the real issue is what it will take to prevent the United States from sliding further into a distinctive form of authoritarianism. [...]
If progressives are to join in the fight against authoritarianism in the United States, we all need to connect issues, bring together diverse social movements and produce long-term organizations that can provide a view of the future that does not simply mimic the present. This requires connecting private issues to broader structural and systemic problems both at home and abroad. This is where matters of translation become crucial in developing broader ideological struggles and in fashioning a more comprehensive notion of politics.