The French Election: Today's News for April 24th

CNN:

Head to head: How Le Pen and Macron compare

The French electorate gave the country's political establishment a wake-up call Sunday as it voted for two outsider presidential candidates: one who has never held elected office and the other the leader of France's far-right party.

Fed up of the parties that have dominated French politics for decades, voters opted for the two politicians that promised the biggest shakeup -- Marine Le Pen and Emmanuel Macron, early results indicated. They will face each other in a runoff election on May 7.

"It's a political earthquake in this country and in Europe," veteran French journalist Christine Ockrent told CNN.

But the voters have chosen to trust politicians who they know relatively little about. 

There is a smug statement that doesn't belong in a news analysis. Exactly how does CNN know how much or how little the French voters know? The answer is obvious: The French voters failed to vote the way CNN thought they should, ergo they must "know relatively little".

Back in the USA...

USA Today:

Trump executive orders target tax rules, 'too big to fail' financial institutions

President Trump aimed to dismantle even more financial regulations with executive orders on Friday, directing Treasury officials to take another look at tax rules and oversight of "too big to fail" financial institutions.

In a signing ceremony at the Department of the Treasury, Trump once again signaled that he intends to roll back many of the sweeping regulations the Obama administration adopted in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis.

Before the Lefties go screaming about how Trump is making us less safe, consider these regulations have done nothing to stop "too big to fail" banks from becoming even bigger. If they were too big before, what comes after big? Bigger? Biggest? Gargantuan?

Back to the executive orders:

The directives Trump signed Friday will: 

► Review significant tax regulations issued in 2016 and 2017 that are overly complex and "impose an undue financial burden" on taxpayers. 

...But the order is more likely to target corporate taxes than individual returns. Among the most significant tax regulations adopted in the last year of the Obama administration were a clampdown on so-called "tax inversions," which allow multinational corporations to get favorable tax treatment by merging with companies in lower-taxed countries.

This is the kind of crap you get with a complex tax code. Regardless of whether you think tax inversions are good or bad, tax inversions wouldn't exist without burdensome tax regulation. If you need to understand why we need tax reform, tax inversions are good evidence.

Continuing:

► Direct the Treasury Secretary not to use orderly liquidation authority to bail out insolvent financial institutions, reigniting the debate over a key provision of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010. Critics have said that provision could actually allow banks to take more risks than they ordinarily would, and Trump wants to re-examine whether court-supervised bankruptcy would be a better way to wind down failing banks.

...Former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has been among those who are vocal supporters of the provision. Eliminating it “would be a major mistake, imprudently putting the economy and financial system at risk," he wrote in an essay for the Brookings Institution in February, calling the provision "an essential tool for ensuring that financial stress does not escalate into a catastrophic crisis."

The same Ben Bernanke who was in charge of the Federal Reserve when the economy tanked? Can we get someone's opinion who actually knows something, and not a political tool?

The fact is, if we had allowed the courts to oversee an orderly liquidation of the "too big to fail" banks, it would have sent a strong message to banks: Be averse to risk, or lose it all. Instead, government hopped into bed with the TBTF's, and we aren't any safer from systemic economic collapse then we were prior to 2008.

Continuing:

► Review the process for the Financial Stability Oversight Council to designate non-bank financial institutions like insurance companies as "systemically important" to the financial system. Those companies are then subject to additional oversight by the Federal Reserve. The order will impose a 180-day moratorium on new designations.

Trump said the regulations "enshrine 'too big to fail' and encourage risky behavior."   

Trump is right. By labeling any company as "systemically important", these regulations send the wrong message to companies that risk management isn't necessary, because the government will bail them out of any trouble, thus ensuring the very thing it is designed to prevent.

Finally...

Los Angeles Times:

Civilian casualties from airstrikes grow in Iraq and Syria. But few are ever investigated

A recent airstrike by the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq is believed to have caused more than 270 civilian deaths, a tragedy that provoked an international outpouring of grief and outrage.

But the uproar over the March 17 deaths in the Jadidah neighborhood of Mosul masks a grim reality: Hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of other civilians have died in hundreds of airstrikes in Iraq and Syria during the war against Islamic State, and it appears likely that the vast majority of those deaths were never investigated by the U.S. military or its coalition partners.

It also appears that the number of civilian casualties has risen in recent months as combat has shifted to densely populated west Mosul and the coalition has undertaken the heaviest bombing since the war began almost three years ago.

...Coalition warplanes have carried out 20,205 strikes in Iraq and Syria since 2014, according to the latest published numbers, which the Pentagon says have aided in the killing of more than 70,000 militants. Yet Pentagon officials also claim to have killed just 229 civilians over that time.

But Airwars, a nonprofit with a staff of journalists and researchers who keep detailed records and conduct independent research, said its figures showed at least 3,111 civilians have been killed in 552 strikes for which it has significant evidence: Either the coalition has specifically confirmed the strikes, or it has confirmed strikes in the area on that date and Airwars has two or more credible sources.

Airwars has also tracked an additional 610 reports of strikes in which civilians were killed based on a single source or contested claims, which could mean that several thousand additional civilians have been killed. 

The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic. The number of corpses keep piling up, and yet we are no safer.