On Sunday France will hold its presidential runoff. Most observers expect Emmanuel Macron, a centrist, to defeat Marine Le Pen, the white nationalist — please, let’s stop dignifying this stuff by calling it “populism.” And I’m pretty sure that Times rules allow me to state directly that I very much hope the conventional wisdom is right. A Le Pen victory would be a disaster for Europe and the world.

Yet I also think it’s fair to ask a couple of questions about what’s going on. First, how did things get to this point? Second, would a Le Pen defeat be anything more than a temporary reprieve from the ongoing European crisis?

Some background: Like everyone on this side of the Atlantic, I can’t help seeing France in part through Trump-colored glasses. But it’s important to realize that the parallels between French and American politics exist despite big differences in underlying economic and social trends.

To begin, while France gets an amazing amount of bad press — much of it coming from ideologues who insist that generous welfare states must have disastrous effects — it’s actually a fairly successful economy. Believe it or not, French adults in their prime working years (25 to 54) are substantially more likely than their U.S. counterparts to be gainfully employed.
They’re also just about equally productive. It’s true that the French over all produce about a quarter less per person then we do — but that’s mainly because they take more vacations and retire younger, which are not obviously terrible things.

And while France, like almost everyone, has seen a gradual decline in manufacturing jobs, it never experienced anything quite like the “China shock” that sent U.S. manufacturing employment off a cliff in the early 2000s.

Meanwhile, against the background of this not-great-but-not-terrible economy, France offers a social safety net beyond the wildest dreams of U.S. progressives: guaranteed high-quality health care for all, generous paid leave for new parents, universal pre-K, and much more.

Last but not least, France — perhaps because of these policy differences, perhaps for other reasons — isn’t experiencing anything comparable to the social collapse that seems to be afflicting much of white America. Yes, France has big social problems; who doesn’t? But it shows little sign of the surge in “deaths of despair” — mortality from drugs, alcohol and suicide — that Anne Case and Angus Deaton have shown to be taking place in the U.S. white working class.

By early 1967, American and allied forces appeared stuck in the morass of Vietnam. Publicly, military commanders talked about progress; off the record, Army officers told journalists that they weren’t “anywhere near the mopping up stage.” Moreover, the press increasingly noted Lyndon B. Johnson’s own frustrations. One report even suggested that the president was “tormented by the slow progress” of the war effort.

Ever an eye on domestic political trends, the president responded that spring by starting what would become a yearlong campaign to not only “sell” his Southeast Asia policy, but also disprove accusations of a stalemated war in Vietnam. Johnson began this publicity drive in April by bringing the head of the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, Gen. William Westmoreland, to report on the war’s progress. It was the first time in American history a president had called back a wartime field commander to testify on the administration’s behalf.

At the time, Westmoreland seemed the embodiment of post-World War II American military power. In naming Westmoreland its 1965 “Man of the Year,” Time magazine called the four-star general a “jut-jawed six-footer” and a “straightforward, determined man.” Westmoreland, already a veteran of two wars before arriving in Vietnam, had led the famed 101st Airborne Division and had served as West Point’s superintendent. In inheriting the multiple roles of a politically sensitive command in Vietnam, Time quipped, Westmoreland wore “more hats than Hedda Hopper.”

In 1965, however, Westmoreland had only one strategic goal in mind — arrest the losing trend. By most accounts, South Vietnam teetered on the verge of collapse. Hanoi was sending full infantry regiments along the infamous Ho Chi Minh Trail into South Vietnam. Acts of terrorism targeted local officials. The South Vietnamese Army (officially known as the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, or A.R.V.N.) appeared incapable of keeping pace with the escalating levels of violence.
Westmoreland realized, though, that regaining the strategic initiative meant more than just killing the enemy. Rather, military operations were means to a larger end. In short, battlefield victories were intended to have political purpose.
Thus, throughout 1966 and early 1967, American forces undertook a host of missions helping to extend Saigon’s control over the population. They fought alongside the A.R.V.N. and local militia against enemy main force and insurgent units. They implemented nonmilitary civic action plans, such as medical visits to rural hamlets and administrative training of district officials. And they instituted programs to “win the hearts and minds of the people.”

This article was first posted by Alternet.

Every 12 days, a member of my union, the United Steelworkers (USW), or one of their non-union co-workers, is killed on the job. Every 12 days. And it’s been that way for years.

These are horrible deaths. Workers are crushed by massive machinery. They drown in vats of chemicals. They’re poisoned by toxic gas, burned by molten metal. The company pays a meaningless fine. Nothing changes. And another worker is killed 11 days later.

Of course, it’s not just members of the USW. Nationally, at all workplaces, one employee is killed on the job every other hour. Twelve a day.

These are not all accidents. Too many are foreseeable, preventable, avoidable tragedies. With the approach of April 28, Workers Memorial Day 2017, the USW is seeking in America what workers in Canada have to prevent these deaths. That is a law holding supervisors and corporate officials criminally accountable and exacting serious prison sentences when workers die on the job.

Corporations can take precautions to avert workplace deaths. Too often they don’t. That’s because managers know if workers are killed, it’s very likely the only penalty will be a small fine. To them, it’s just another cost of doing business, a cost infinitely lower than that paid by the dead workers and their families.
This year is the 25th anniversary of the incident that led Canada to establish federal corporate criminal accountability. It was the 1992 Westray coal mine disaster that killed 26 workers. The Plymouth, Nova Scotia, miners had sought help from the United Steelworkers to organize, in part because of deplorable conditions the company refused to remedy, including accumulation of explosive coal dust and methane gas.

Nova Scotia empanelled a commission to investigate. Its report, titled The Westray Story: A Predictable Path to Disaster, condemns the mine owner, Curragh Resources Inc., for placing production—that is profits—before safety.

According to many reports, Donald Trump is getting frantic as his administration nears the 100-day mark. It’s an arbitrary line in the sand, but one he himself touted in many pre-inauguration boasts. And it will be an occasion for numerous articles detailing how little of substance he has actually accomplished.

Yet many of these reports will, I suspect, miss half the story. It’s important to note just how little the tweeter-in-chief has managed to achieve; but we also need to focus on what, exactly, it is that he hasn’t achieved.

For Mr. Trump sold himself to voters as unorthodox as well as effective. He was going to be a different kind of president, a consummate deal-maker who would transcend the usual ideological divide. His supporters should therefore be dismayed, not just by his failure to actually close any deals, but by the fact that he evidently has no new ideas to offer, just the same old snake oil the right has been peddling for decades.

We saw that on Trumpcare, where the administration outsourced its policy to Paul Ryan, who produced exactly the kind of plan you might have expected: take insurance away from millions, make it worse for the rest, and use the money to cut taxes on the wealthy. Populism!

And now we’re seeing it on taxes. Mr. Trump has promised to unveil a “massive” tax cut plan next week. This announcement apparently came as a surprise to his own Treasury officials, who obviously don’t have a plan ready. Still, one thing is clear: Whatever the details, Trumptax will be a big exercise in fantasy economics.
How do we know this? Last week Stephen Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, told a financial industry audience that “the plan will pay for itself with growth.” And we all know what that means.

Welcome to Interviews for Resistance. Since election night 2016, the streets of the United States have rung with resistance. People all over the country have woken up with the conviction that they must do something to fight inequality in all its forms. But many are wondering what it is they can do. In this series, we'll be talking with experienced organizers, troublemakers and thinkers who have been doing the hard work of fighting for a long time. They'll be sharing their insights on what works, what doesn't, what’s changed and what is still the same.

Renata Pumarol: My name is Renata Pumarol. I am the deputy director of New York Communities for Change (NYCC).

Sarah Jaffe: You guys had an action on Tuesday at Goldman Sachs on official Tax Day. Can you tell us about that and about what the theme of that action was?

Renata: Yesterday, on actual Tax Day, April 18th, we headed to the headquarters of Goldman Sachs here in New York to call them out for avoiding $10 billion in taxes, or for rather extracting $10 billion from our tax dollars—that is, by exploiting loopholes or their roles in company mergers and acquisitions. We really wanted to send a message that it is not only about [Donald] Trump releasing his taxes, but it is also about the 1% and companies like Goldman Sachs that really continue to exploit tax loopholes and avoid massive amounts of taxes that could be going to pay for basic services.
Sarah: Tell us about the action on Tuesday.

Renata: Tuesday we had New York Communities for Change, Resist Here, Democratic Socialists of America join us. We had about 50 people there, including members of the community who are directly impacted by service cuts and who will be impacted by the massive cuts in funding that Trump is going to implement. We headed there with a clear message that Goldman has avoided $10 billion in taxes and that they should be not only paying their fair share, but also ending their influence on the American government.

Ah, the blithe joys of springtime in the United States. Azaleas in bloom at the Masters, breezy picnics on balmy afternoons, Easter egg hunts — and the annual ordeal of tax forms, with helpful I.R.S. instructions like this: “Go to Part IV of Schedule I to figure line 52 if the estate or trust has qualified dividends or has a gain on lines 18a and 19 of column (2) of Schedule D (Form 1041) (as refigured for the AMT, if necessary).”

Americans will spend more than six billion hours this year gathering records and filling out forms, just to pay their taxes. They will pay some $10 billion to tax preparation firms to help get the job done and spend $2 billion on tax-preparation software (programs that still require hours of work). Millions will subsequently get a notice from the I.R.S. saying they got the figures wrong, or put the right number on the wrong line or added wrong in calculating line 47 — which means more hours of work or more fees to the tax preparer.

And here’s the most maddening thing of all: It doesn’t have to be this way.

Parliaments and revenue agencies all over the world have done what Congress seems totally unable to do: They’ve made paying taxes easy. If you walk down the street in Tel Aviv, Tokyo, London or Lima, Peru, you won’t see an office of H & R Block or a similar company; in most countries, there’s no need for that industry.

In the Netherlands, the Algemene Fiscale Politiek (the Dutch I.R.S.) has a slogan: “We can’t make paying taxes pleasant, but at least we can make it simple.” It is certainly simple for my friend Michael, a Dutch executive with a six-figure income, a range of investments and all the economic complications that come with an upper-bracket lifestyle.

An American in the same situation would have to fill out a dozen forms, six pages long. Michael, by contrast, sets aside 15 minutes per year to file his federal and local income tax, and that’s usually enough. But sometimes, he told me, he decides to check the figures the government has already filled in on his return. At this point, Michael was getting downright indignant. “I mean, some years, it takes me half an hour just to file my taxes!”

The reputation of KPMG, one of the Big Four accounting firms, took another hit this week, when it fired five partners, including the head of its audit practice in the United States, for “unethical behavior.” The firings come on top of existing questions about the firm’s policies and practices: KPMG has for years been the auditor of scandal-scarred Wells Fargo and was the longtime auditor of problem-plagued FIFA, the world soccer governing body. Year after year, KPMG auditors saw no evil in either company.

The latest breach deepens doubts about KPMG and, in the process, raises fundamental questions about the integrity of all public-company audits.
The partners and one KPMG employee were fired because they failed to report on leaked information they had received (or knew of) about inspections planned by the firm’s regulator, the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, which was established after the accounting scandals at Enron. During such inspections, the regulators carefully examine a selection of an accounting firm’s completed audits. The point is to measure compliance with auditing rules, and in that way give investors a benchmark for assessing the quality of a firm’s audits.

The leaked information, which came from an employee at the regulator who no longer works there, enabled the partners to know in advance which audits would be inspected. Advance notice would give them a chance to make sure that any targeted audits were squeaky clean.

KPMG says officials discovered the leak in late February and immediately reported it to the regulator and the Securities and Exchange Commission. KPMG also acknowledged that the leaked information “potentially” undermined the integrity of the regulatory process. The investing public needs a firm answer as to when the leak occurred and which inspections, if any, were affected.
What is clear is that KPMG had good reason to fear its regulator. The firm’s inspection results for 2014 and 2015 were abysmal. In 2014, its deficiency rate was 54 percent, which means that inspectors found more mistaken and unreliable audits than good ones. In 2015, the deficiency rate was 38 percent, which was an improvement, but still worse than that of the other three big accounting firms.

Of course, the proper response to fearing a bad grade is to improve performance, not succumb to the lure of cheating on the test. KPMG had no choice but to fire the partners and the employee. For its part, the regulator now has no choice but to give the public a full picture of what happened, why and when and which audits may be affected.

Good audits are the bedrock of fair and transparent financial markets. They have proved elusive — KPMG is at the bottom of the Big Four pack, but other firms also have disturbingly high deficiency rates. The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board was supposed to help fix that and now it, too, must take steps to ensure its own integrity and, in so doing, the integrity of markets.

NYT/The Opinion Pages/By The Editorial Board

Does anyone still remember the Carrier deal? Back in December President-elect Donald Trump announced, triumphantly, that he had reached a deal with the air-conditioner manufacturer to keep 1,100 jobs in America rather than moving them to Mexico. And the media spent days celebrating the achievement.

Actually, the number of jobs involved was more like 700, but who’s counting? Around 75,000 U.S. workers are laid off or fired every working day, so a few hundred here or there hardly matter for the overall picture.

Whatever Mr. Trump did or didn’t achieve with Carrier, the real question was whether he would take steps to make a lasting difference.

So far, he hasn’t; there isn’t even the vague outline of a real Trumpist jobs policy. And corporations and investors seem to have decided that the Carrier deal was all show, no substance, that for all his protectionist rhetoric Mr. Trump is a paper tiger in practice. After pausing briefly, the ongoing move of manufacturing to Mexico has resumed, while the Mexican peso, whose value is a barometer of expected U.S. trade policy, has recovered almost all its post-November losses.
In other words, showy actions that win a news cycle or two are no substitute for actual, coherent policies. Indeed, their main lasting effect can be to squander a government’s credibility. Which brings us to last week’s missile strike on Syria.

The attack instantly transformed news coverage of the Trump administration. Suddenly stories about infighting and dysfunction were replaced with screaming headlines about the president’s toughness and footage of Tomahawk launches.

But outside its effect on the news cycle, how much did the strike actually accomplish? A few hours after the attack, Syrian warplanes were taking off from the same airfield, and airstrikes resumed on the town where use of poison gas provoked Mr. Trump into action. No doubt the Assad forces took some real losses, but there’s no reason to believe that a one-time action will have any effect on the course of Syria’s civil war.

In fact, if last week’s action was the end of the story, the eventual effect may well be to strengthen the Assad regime — Look, they stood up to a superpower! — and weaken American credibility. To achieve any lasting result, Mr. Trump would have to get involved on a sustained basis in Syria.

One hundred years ago today, Congress voted to enter what was then the largest and bloodiest war in history. Four days earlier, President Woodrow Wilson had sought to unite a sharply divided populace with a stirring claim that the nation “is privileged to spend her blood and her might for the principles that gave her birth and happiness and the peace which she has treasured.” The war lasted only another year and a half, but in that time, an astounding 117,000 American soldiers were killed and 202,000 wounded.

Still, most Americans know little about why the United States fought in World War I, or why it mattered. The “Great War” that tore apart Europe and the Middle East and took the lives of over 17 million people worldwide lacks the high drama and moral gravity of the Civil War and World War II, in which the very survival of the nation seemed at stake.

World War I is less easy to explain. America intervened nearly three years after it began, and the “doughboys,” as our troops were called, engaged in serious combat for only a few months. More Americans in uniform died away from the battlefield — thousands from the Spanish flu — than with weapons in hand. After victory was achieved, Wilson’s audacious hope of making a peace that would advance democracy and national self-determination blew up in his face when the Senate refused to ratify the treaty he had signed at the Palace of Versailles.

But attention should be paid. America’s decision to join the Allies was a turning point in world history. It altered the fortunes of the war and the course of the 20th century — and not necessarily for the better. Its entry most likely foreclosed the possibility of a negotiated peace among belligerent powers that were exhausted from years mired in trench warfare.

Although the American Expeditionary Force did not engage in combat for long, the looming threat of several million fresh troops led German generals to launch a last, desperate series of offensives. When that campaign collapsed, Germany’s defeat was inevitable.

Lenín Moreno, Ecuador’s president-elect, has described being a paraplegic as a blessing. People who walk, he explained a few years ago, keep their gaze trained forward and upward.

“When you don’t have legs, you look down,” he said in 2012, when he was vice president, during a visit to the World Bank. “That’s what I learned: that there’s another life, another existence, that there are other human beings that need a lot from us. For me, this was a novel experience that I thank God for.”

When he assumes office next month, Mr. Moreno will be the only head of state who needs a wheelchair to get around. That will make him among the most powerful and visible champions of people with disabilities, and position Ecuador to continue setting an example on a human rights issue that has lagged as a global priority.

There are reasons to question whether Mr. Moreno, who won a tight runoff contest on Sunday, will be a good president. The way he snapped at journalists during his first news conference does not bode well for Ecuador’s press freedoms, which eroded sharply during the decade-long tenure of President Rafael Correa, who won his first election in 2006 with Mr. Moreno as a running mate. Critics also fear that the incoming president could shield former government officials suspected of corruption from prosecution.