Here are the topics for this Ground Hog Day week: American justice; taxing America; cyber surveillance;  Holocaust memories; Are you from here?; the planet's fate; campaign delusions; that shadowy rodent.

White collar crime vs. the rest of us. You are, no doubt, familiar with the old saw, "to the fullest extent of the law." In The Intercept, David Dayen writes about Senator Elizabeth Warren (D, MA) has written a report highly critical of how the US justice system does NOT prosecute white collar crime. What happens to the blue collar suspect, the white collar suspect? The senator promises a yearly report, much like the late Senator William Proxmire (D, WI) who issued his monthly "Golden Fleece" award for frivolous government spending.
[Warren's report is] a thorough indictment of a rigged system in Washington that allows corporate criminals to go free while those without the same power and influence get severely punished. The report — a 12-page booklet titled “Rigged Justice: How Weak Enforcement Lets Corporate Offenders Off Easy” — cites 20 well-documented civil and criminal cases from 2015 “in which the federal government failed to require meaningful accountability.... [T]he real issue, as Warren sees it, comes in installing the personnel to carry out the laws on the books that protect public safety and the economy.The report is the first in a promised annual series from Sen. Warren, where she will highlight the most egregious cases of unprosecuted corporate crime from the previous year.

Paying taxes in the US. Read George Will's Saturday column for a short primer about taxation in the US. I thought his likening Congress to a Calder mobile was particularly apt: "Something jiggled here causes things to wiggle over there." Will also notes (and warns) that "If there is going to be growth-igniting tax reform — and if there isn’t, American politics will sink deeper into distributional strife — Brady [chairman of the House Ways and Means committee] will begin it." Alas, how many Americans taxpayers would think a tax increase notice meant that, to paraphrase Mark Twain, the government was just paying more attention to her/him?

Surveillance, Chinese style.  If you hear a unexpected click on your phone line, consider this article by Peter Fuhrman, chairman and CEO of China First Capital (Shenzen, China), about his experiences with Chinese telephone surveillance. His perceptions and those of his Chinese associates illustrate an important cultural difference in our interconnected cyber world. We Americans tend to be outraged and suspicious; the Chinese much less so.

The Holocaust remembered. In last Saturday's column Washington Post's Colbert King noted two firsts in the US regarding this year's Holocaust Remberance, two Americans joined the ranks inducted into the ranks of some 26,000 Righteous Among the Nations hailed by Israel in gratitude for their courage and compassion.
     Until then, no Israeli ceremony honoring non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust had ever been held in the United States. This year, four honorees — two Americans and two Poles — were posthumously inducted into the ranks of some 26,000 Righteous Among the Nations hailed by Israel in gratitude for their courage and compassion....The other first occurred when Barack Obama showed up for the ceremony. Until then, no sitting U.S. president had spoken at the Israeli Embassy in Washington. 

Our not so public universities. According to a recent story, most every state's flagship public university is more likely "growing" money by admitting an increasing percentage of out-of-state/foreign students.  For example: "In 2004, 72 percent of new freshmen [cheering for the national champion football team] here were Alabamians. By 2014, the share was 36 percent." Texas A&M leads the nation with the highest percentage of actual Texans in the student body. Nationwide, declining state funding undoubtedly plays a major role.

Climate change. In his Monday NY Times op-ed, "Wind, Sun, and Fire," Nobel Prize-winning economist, Paul Krugman, begins with this blunt, sobering assessment: "So what’s really at stake in this year’s election? Well, among other things, the fate of the planet." Even after 2015 having been declared the "hottest year on record" by NOAA, NASA, and other agencies, there is little promising news on the horizon. None of the candidates in Tuesday's IA primaries made this an important issue, nor are they likely to change their tune on down the road.

Delusions, right and left. Stephen Stromberg wrote of the "Three delusions driving the Cruz and Sanders campaigns. (1) We will transform the country, uniting it behind an expansive agenda that will move the nation’s politics sharply away from center. The country must see that it agrees with us and has all along. (2) The nation is primed for a revolution because things are terrible. (3) The country is in its current state because of the corrupt or otherwise illegitimate actions of others.

Ground Hog Day.  May you be at peace with Punxsutawney Phil's prognostication. I had one young English professor at Penn State for whom Punxsutawney, PA, was the "end of the earth," far worse than Pittsburgh, home of those hated football rivals, the Pitt Panthers! I cannot help but wonder, did he lived long enough to see Bill Murry's movie, Ground Hog Day? Filmed, by the way, in Woodstock, IL, which has installed a memorial plaque in the sidewalk at the site of that damnable pothole. (Take heart: statistically Phil is only correct a mere 39% of the time.)
     Here in Denver, Phil saw no shadow. It was snowing! Dubious news for CO ski areas.

Thanks for reading. Enjoy whatever is coming your way for the next six weeks.