Corporate Tax Avoidance

Enough U.S. corporations have essentially switched their citizenship to avoid paying taxes that the process even has its own name now, inversion. Essentially it means that U.S. corporations invert reality and declare that they are owned by one of their foreign subsidiaries. If Walmart, for instance, continues along the path it has declared itself committed to, it will soon become a Swiss company. Nothing in Walgreen's operations will change, except for the amount of taxes it pays in the U.S.

Since the Supremes have been going out of their way lately to stress that corporations are persons, I like the proposal I read recently that corporations who engage in this slight of hand be prohibited from spending money in U.S. political campaigns. A Swiss citizen may not contribute to, or attempt to influence, the U.S. electoral process. If Walmart wishes to become a Swiss citizen, it should be subject to the same restrictions. No more donations to PACs or to political campaigns.

Apologists for this practice on the right like to point to imperfections and loopholes in the U.S. tax structure and say what is needed is all-encompassing tax reform. As if that is going to happen in the current political climate. And in the meantime, these corporate tax dodges would continue indefinitely in their world.

I love the way conservatives throw up smoke screens to divert attention from real problems. I'm reminded of a panel discussion I watched recently in which the subject of the immigrant children on the border came up. One of the conservatives bemoaned the fact that this situation was draining money that we could be spending on solving the problems faced by poor American children. And he did it with a straight face. They're good, you've got to admit.

Republicans and Irony (and Chutzpah)

I read two news stories this morning back to back. With regard to immigration, Boehner bemoans the fact that Obama has been president for five and a half years and hasn't done anything. Let's set to one side the fact that Boehner is factually wrong and just remember the fact that Republican obstructionism is the main reason nothing gets done anymore.

Ironically, the next news story of the morning had to do with Boehner's justification for the lawsuit against Obama, namely that he is abusing his executive powers by doing too much to circumvent the above-cited obstructionism.

The Republicans have long had this problem of not being able to make up their mnds about Obama. The very same same people at times castigate Obama as a revolutionary socialist with a master plan for destroying the country and at other times as a pathetic weakling who couldn't lead John Boehner to a tanning salon with free booze.

It can't be said often enough. Oh, for the days of a sensible Republican party.

Breaking News: Right Wingers Caught Lying

People on the right have been spreading the story that liberals have been over-reacting, nay lying even, about the significance of the Supreme Court Hobby Lobby ruling. Their story is that the ruling only applies to a select few birth control methods, the abortion-y ones. They say all the other government-approved contraceptive measures are still covered for Hobby Lobby employees and everyone else. The implication, if not outright allegation, is that liberals are playing politics with the issue, and of course there is no right-wing war on women.

The truth is that some lower courts have ruled in favor of similar closely-held corporations that object to coverage for all contraception methods. The Supremes not only left all of those lower court rulings in place, but they also ordered those lower courts which had ruled the opposite way, in favor of the Obama administration, to reconsider their decisions in light of Monday´s 5-4 Hobby Lobby ruling. There are supposedly something like fifty lawsuits in the pipelines challanging all contraception coverage, and the Supremes have just settled all of them.

So no, it´s not about abortion. It´s about contraception. And yes, this is the 21st century.

Ahh, the Good 'Ol Days

There is an obituary in the NY Times today for the Russian (Soviet) Air Force General who, in 1983, relayed the order to shoot down the Korean Air Lines plane which had strayed into Soviet territory, killing all 269 people on board.

It would be good if today's neo-con blatherers and right wing sabre rattlers would keep in mind, as they go on and on about how Obama is making America weak, what their boyfriend, Ronald Reagan, did at the time, i.e. nothing. Which, face it, was about all he could do.

When the Law Becomes Personal

There was a story in the NY Times 10 days ago that looked at a study showing that Supreme Court justices with daughters are more likely to vote in favor of women's rights than are those without daughters. Even William Rehnquist, in 2003 after his daughter divorced and became a single mother with a demanding job, became enough of a feminist to write in one of his rulings against “stereotypes about women's domestic roles.”

Now the Supremes have ruled 9-0 in favor of cell phone privacy, despite the eagerness that the conservative core have shown in other cases to expand the rights of police and limit the definition of unreasonable searches and seizures. In her column today, Linda Greenhouse looks at this ruling and wonders why the change in this particular case. Her suggested answer: because all of the justices are cell phone users themselves, the issue became personal.

This correlates with a similar 9-0 ruling a couple of years ago that the police could not place a GPS device on a suspected drug dealer's car. During oral arguments in that case, in response to a question from the bench, the government conceded that the justices themselves could be subjected to such an invasion of privacy. It became personal.

Fourteen years ago, Greenhouse says, Rehnquist was part of a 7-2 majority ruling that limited the ability of the police to inspect checked luggage. Again, because the justices were all travelers themselves, the issue was personal.

The best justices have always kept in mind that their rulings have concrete effects in the lives of real people, and are more than just interpretations of the law or applications of abstract ideology. Apparently even the most ideological of justices recognize this when they see themselves as part of that mass of real people.

In a Just World

Open Carry Texas and Their Apparent Heroes, Open Carry Somalia

Six undesirables, no matter how you slice it.

It Would Be Funnier If It Were Not So Sad

Pursuit of Happiness

In Sandy Springs Georgia, you can carry a gun almost everywhere, but need a prescription for a vibrator.

My favorite part of the story is this paragraph:

Of course there are plenty of other reasons besides medical afflictions – real or imagined – that a woman might need a sex toy. Maybe she's bored. Maybe her partner likes them. (Maybe they're more fun than her partner.) Maybe it's Tuesday.

The gun nuts rely on the currently-popular misinterpretation of the 2nd Amendment. Well, what about that "pursuit of happiness" thing?

The Alfred E. Neuman Party

Still aren't convinced that the once-respectable Republican Party is dominated by lunatics? Check out this story.

With a mostly party-line vote on Thursday, the House of Representatives passed an amendment sponsored by Rep. David McKinley (R-WV) that seeks to prevent the Department of Defense from using funding to address the national security impacts of climate change.

Posted Just Because His Name/Image Drive Right Wingers Apoplectic

Bill De Blasio has supplanted Nancy Pelosi as the chief bugaboo for the right wing boobs. Just say his name and quiver.

 

William Black: How to rob a bank (from the inside, that is)

I think this is poorly titled, but that's a minor point. This is just one more refutation of those few diehards who still would have it that the banks were the victims in the housing debacle that took down the U.S. economy.   Yes, there are still people who believe the crisis was driven primarily by Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac, and by poor people deliberately lying to the banks in order to obtain fraudulent loans. 18:48 minutes · Filmed Sep 2013 · Posted May 2014 · TEDxUMKC William Black is a former bank regulator who’s seen firsthand how banking systems can be used to commit fraud — and how “liar's loans” and other tricky tactics led to the 2008 US banking crisis that threatened the international economy. In this engaging talk, Black, now an academic, reveals the best way to rob a bank — from the inside. William Black is a professor of economics and law at University of Missouri, Kansas City. WATCH NOW http://www.ted.com/talks/william_black_how_to_rob_a_bank_from_the_inside_that_is?utm_source=newsletter_daily&utm_campaign=daily&utm_medium=email&utm_content=button__2014-05-12#t-3097

Teensy Weensy Glimmers of Republican Sanity

Republican Senator Rand Paul is right about two things in today's news. Like a stopped clock?

His op-ed piece in the NY Times demanding release of the "Drone Memos" is exactly right. Obama has nominated the author of at least two memos which authorize the killing of US citizens abroad to the First Circuit Court of Appeals, one step below the Supremes, and everyone deserves to see how he has justified target killings of citizens who have never been tried or convicted.

And Paul gets it right again when he calls for the Republicans to stop all of their craziness around the country on the voter id non-issue. Crazy is his word...and mine.

And Mitt Romney thinks the minimum wage should be raised. OMG

Sports Racism

It is remotely possible that I could somehow be talked into having the teeniest bit of sympathy for Donald Sterling, the racist owner of the Los Angeles Clippers. His troubles have, after all, been caused by the release of taped private conversations. (I don't know that this matters, but I seem to recall hearing at some point that the conversations were taped at his request.) For that to happen, however, someone will have to make a far stronger 4th-amendment argument than anything I have yet heard. As far as I'm concerned, he deserves all of the penalties that have been handed down by the NBA as well as all of the social opprobrium generally.

There has been much written about the fact that Sterling's history of racism was never a secret. His fellow owners, who now feel forced to take action against him, have been quite comfortable with him for the last 35 years. I think that is probably true and speaks to the matter of institutional racism in the United States.

But rather than try to generalize about past actions, or the lack of actions, and speculate about what that all means, it is far more interesting to me to look at the world of professional sports right now, already thinking of Donald Sterling as a relic of the past. The same sports commentators who are congratulating the new NBA commissioner for his prompt action against Sterling's overt racism, apparently see no racism in the names and logos of the Washington Redskins or the Cleveland Indians.

People need to stay away from Cleveland baseball games and Washington football games, wherever they are played. At home in recent years, Cleveland has always ranked at or near the bottom of Major League Baseball attendance. At this early point in the current season, they are at the bottom. If baseball fans around the country would simply refuse to show up to Cleveland's road games, so that they drew as poorly on the road as they do at home, I have no doubt the other owners would unite to take action.

I don't know anything about the NFL, but I think I know enough about capitalist owners to think a similar boycott of Washington football games around the country would produce results.

Yeah, I'm Still Here

Because I feel better writing what is on my mind, than not doing so, I've decided to start this nonsense again after a break of several weeks. But, let me repeat, I'm doing it for myself, not for you.

The obesity / diabetes epidemic documented in this film can hardly be considered an example of progress, in the event there is still anyone left who thinks the march of time is synonymous with social/political/economic advance.



The irritating aspect of this story is that there are people who genuinely prefer to believe this problem just, somehow, happened, and that for the government to try to do anything about it is overreach or another obnoxious example of the nanny state at work. These are the people who label as "bad science" all studies that don't support their economic interests. And they are people who clamor for individual responsibility but have no sense of, or understanding even, of the need for corporate responsibility.

Here is a shameful, but typical, story from 2003 about the pressure the sugar industry brought to bear on the US State Department to extort the World Health Organization into changing the conclusions about sugar in one of its reports. At the time this story ran, the issue was still up in the air. I believe the ultimate result was that the WHO bowed to US threats to pull its funding support and changed its report.

No doubt there are some examples of corporations who have made socially-responsible decisions that went against their bottom line. And it might even be true that those stories are under-reported, although that would seem to indicate a very atypically non-media-savvy corporation. But, if those examples exist, gawd gave us the internet to find them. Personally, I'm not going to waste my time, but I'll gladly give equal time to anyone who can find a story about corporate good citizenship that can offset the corporate role in obesity, or the recent story about General Motors and the faulty ignition switch.

The Earth As Seen From the Surface of Mars

CPAC 2014 Panel on Minority Outreach

This picture was posted a few days ago by John Hudak of the Brookings Institute, who covered the CPAC convention. Hudak claims to have taken this photo about 10 minutes into the Panel on Minority Outreach.

Of course Republicans / Conservatives think they have an imaging problem and/or a message problem when it comes to minorities. What they really have is a core belief problem.

 

It's Time for New Rules

There is definitely a humor gap. The right is too far behind to ever catch up.

Would You Like a Side of Irony with Your Hypocrisy?

Has everyone already seen this story? The CEO of ExxonMobile, Rex Tillerson, has joined with his neighbors to file a lawsuit in Texas to stop a fracking project near his horse ranch, arguing that a planned water tower, and the large number of heavy trucks hauling on the nearby roads would "devalue their properties and adversely impact the rural lifestyle they sought to enjoy."

And the lawsuit is right. But ExxonMobile is the largest natural gas producer in the U.S. and the company has never shown any concern about the rights and interests of other property owners around the country.


Watch the documentaries Gasland I and Gasland II to see how much respect fracking companies have for property owners around the country.

A New One Percent Doctrine

To those people who continue to deny the evidence for climate change, or who admit climate change but deny there is enough proof that it is caused by man, I have always thought the best argument is that the world simply doesn´t have time to wait for perfect, 100% conclusive evidence. The risk is that, by he time we have such evidence, we will all be toast, water-logged toast if we live by a coast. I marvel at the risk these people are willing to take with other people's lives.

Ted Kaufman, in a recent blog post, makes the point much more deftly. He reminds us of the so-called Cheney doctrine shortly after 9-11 which declared the U.S. had to act in situations where there was even a 1% chance of a terrorist attack. Kaufman asks:

Can a rational human being who doesn’t believe in climate change at least agree there is a remote possibility that 95 percent of climate scientists are right? Maybe a 1 percent chance?