As we close in on Tax Day, a time when many of us will be writing sizable checks to the IRS (ahem), well-heeled people around the world are enjoying their wealth tax-free thanks to secret accounts. On rare occasion, one of these immense piggy banks briefly becomes visible thanks to a data dump such as the Panama Papers. It’s worth noting that the US already has many agencies in lightly-regulated states that can help set up shell companies, thus likely explaining the relatively small number of Americans exposed in this case.
Most people face negative consequences when they’ve made huge mistakes, deeply damaged their clients, and proven themselves a greater threat to civilization than rogue asteroids. Then again, most people don't work on Wall Street.
When adjusted for inflation, wages for investment bankers and securities-industry employees, including salary and bonuses, increased 117 percent from 1990 through 2014, according to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data. Over the same period, wages for all other industries rose 21 percent, to $51,029 in 2014, about one-fifth of the $264,357 that bankers and brokers earned that year.
The wealthy banker was already a trope decades ago, but back then the money men only pulled down about three times the income of people in other industries. Despite much whining on Wall Street, that ratio is now greater than 5:1. And do note that we’re talking all workers in these industries. The averages for bankers and brokers are pulled up mostly because the values at the top of the chart are unbelievably high. That gap between bank pay and other industries has increased since the 2008 crash. It’s continued to increase following the 2011 Occupy movement.
But now Wall Street has a sad. Wages are still climbing, but for the first time in a long time average bonuses are down.
Wall Street’s average bonus fell to $146,200 in 2015, a 9 percent drop from the previous year.
The average worker at Goldman Sachs pocketed a mere $344,511 bonus in 2015.
You can start planning your charity fundraiser now.
●MD-Sen: It's usually a fair sign that neither side is certain of victory when both candidates in a two-candidate primary start going negative on one another. Last week, with polls showing the race close, Rep. Donna Edwards launched her first ad of the Democratic primary, in which she hit Rep. Chris Van Hollen for expressing a willingness to "consider" cuts to Social Security.
Now Van Hollen is firing back with his own spot, where a pair of narrators accuse Edwards of leveling "false" attacks on him, then say she was "ranked one of the least effective members of Congress—dead last among all Democrats." They go on to cite a study from the Lugar Center claiming Edwards was "the least willing to find common ground, then reference a Washington Post editorial that described Edwards as "allergic to compromise, just like tea party Republicans."
Suggesting that your opponent is not bipartisan enough, though, hardly seems like a winning message in a Democratic primary. Maryland Democrats are really supposed to be upset that Edwards hasn't shown an interest in working with people like Ted Cruz? The fine print of the ad also reveals a telling detail: A footnote that appears onscreen with the Lugar study says the report was "Accessed 3/7/16," meaning this bit of oppo has been kicking around Van Hollen headquarters for over a month. If this is really the best Van Hollen has on Edwards, then it doesn't seem like much.
I had a whole theme worked out for today’s post, but then I heard a “Farmers Only dot com” commercial in the background, and the entire contents of my brain was erased.
Still a bit to catch up on with respect to the delegate situations on both sides. Plus a few extra notes on the Dennis Hastert saga. And maybe after that, we can get to the really weird stuff, which has only temporarily been out-weirded by the political circus.
There are thousands of you downloading the podcast and listening to the show live each day, five days a week. That’s about 20 shows each month, so on a per-show basis, mere pocket change from each listener is all it would take to turn this from a pleasant pastime into something my family wouldn’t shake their heads and sigh about.
Give it some thought, won’t you? Thanks!
Did you happen to miss our last LIVE show? You can catch it here:
Late last week Kerry Eleveld and li'l old me posted about a walking, talking punchline of the Bible-thumping variety who was planning to gather petition signatures for a 2017 referendum that would strip decade-old statewide LGBT protections from Maine's human rights law. It seems to be the cause du jour among the conservative movement nationally (see: North Carolina, Mississippi), and Mr. Walking Talking Punchline is salivating at the chance to grab headlines while separating gullible bigots from their money.
Turns out there was a similar attempt to do this one year ago this week via our legislature. I'd forgotten all about it. Because it died so fast:
A Republican state senator is withdrawing his so-called religious freedom bill, a proposal similar to legislation that has sparked controversy, protests and threats of boycotts in Indiana and other states.
Sen. David Burns, R-Whiting, announced Wednesday that he was abandoning the proposal, saying in a news release that the anticipated backlash and protests would prevent the bill from getting a fair hearing in Augusta. […] Withdrawal of the bill shows how the politics of religious freedom legislation have tilted in favor of lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender activist groups, as well as Democrats, who have used the proposals to paint their Republican backers as supporting discrimination.
Elise Johansen, executive director of EqualityMaine, a group that led the drive to legalize same-sex marriage in Maine, said in a written statement that when people study such laws, they realize they are bad for business and conducive to discrimination.
A bill introduced by Sen. Burns two years ago also died a quick death. We'll certainly keep an eye on Mr. Punchline's "religious freedom" referendum. But if past is prologue, it looks like Maine's LGBT and conservative Christian communities are both going to have to contend with the tyranny of going about their lives with equal protections and freedoms for the foreseeable future. Oh the humanity.
Cheers and Jeers starts below the fold... [Swoosh!!] RIGHTNOW! [Gong!!]
Do you favor the Senate bill being drafted that would prohibit building unbreakable encryption into cellphones and force companies to help the government break into phones and computers?
Do you favor the Senate bill being drafted that would prohibit building unbreakable encryption into cellphones and force companies to help the government break into phones and computers?
We begin today’s roundup with Dana Milbank’s piece at The Washington Post pointing out that Republican Party Chairman Reince Priebus is in way over his head:
If the party accepts Trump, it could consign itself to political oblivion by antagonizing women, minority groups and immigrants. If it accepts Ted Cruz instead, it risks a riot by the Trump populists and the loss of all but far-right voters. And if Priebus and his fellow Republicans try to rally around a mainstream figure such as Paul Ryan, they could salvage the party in the long run but would risk alienating the majority of this year’s GOP voters. [...]
Priebus failed to act to stop Trump when he could have, or to coordinate Republicans to clear the field for a mainstream alternative. And now he compounds the damage by sticking with the same moral neutrality and happy talk of GOP unity that allowed the situation to develop. [...] history is unlikely to remember kindly a Republican chairman who turned the party of Lincoln over to a populist demagogue or to an ideologue loathed even by Republican colleagues. Hopefully those twin menaces will be enough to wig out Priebus — before his Republicans get Whigged out
Janet, a Walmart shop assistant in Louisiana, is so visibly stressed by working in a very understaffed store that a customer tells her she looks as if she’s going have a heart attack. Rochelle, a care worker in Newcastle, is miserable that her hours are so long that she can’t get home to put her children to bed. She also wishes she was better paid so that she didn’t owe £4,000 in catalogue bills, from buying clothes and shoes on credit for her children. Leah, a KFC worker from Richmond, Virginia, works six days a week, but is still behind on her rent and juggles calls from debt-recovery companies. Everyone in Katharine Round’s new documentary, The Divide, is struggling, trying to improve their lives; everyone is feeling the pressure. This is the reality of a low-wage existence in two of the world’s most unequal economies. Based on The Spirit Level, the 2009 bestselling book studying global inequality, the film highlights the toxic effects of divided communities on everyone who lives in them. Even the wealthy are scrabbling to stay happy.
We meet Wall Street psychologist Alden, who wants to get ahead and join the top 1% of earners, and who is working so hard to save up to move his family into a gated community that he gets home too late for story time with his daughters. When he has back surgery, he can’t afford to convalesce, and is in his office the next morning. [...]
The finished film gives moving portraits of the lives of seven people, five in the US and two in the UK, illustrating how economic division creates another division socially, with dangerous consequences for everyone. Its scope is ambitious, looking back over 35 years at the political and economic decisions that have caused the widening divide. The film races from person to person, from one side of the Atlantic to the other, giving sharp snapshots of the problems people encounter as they scrape along in economically divided nations. The documentary attempts to answer the teasing question in the film’s subtitle: “What happens when the rich get richer?”
Goldman-Sachs $5 billion settlement for fraudulent promoting of mortgage securities announced by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. The firm, which manages $861 billion in assets, will actually only be assessed $2.385 billion as a civil penalty. The rest—$2.61 billion—in consumer relief actions for New York residents and settling related cases will be payments that Goldman-Sachs can write off. And, as Allan Pyke reports:
And individual homeowners aren’t as lucky as the bank when it comes to taxes. Any debt relief they receive from Goldman as part of this deal will likely count as taxable income. An appendix to the settlement notes that Goldman has to “clearly disclose to borrowers the potential tax consequences of any relief offered or provided” but is not itself liable for covering any tax hit a borrower might take after Goldman helps them.
Because the Goldman-Sachs settlement is typical of so many of these arrangements in which the headline sticker price doesn’t quite match the financial reality, Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren and Republican Senator Tom Coburn have, since 2014, attempted to get the Truth in Settlements Act through Congress. The bill passed the Senate by unanimous consent in September last year, but it appears to be going nowhere in the House, where it has been assigned to the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
The April 14, invitation-only Capitol Hill panel will include not just Nye and Palin, but also Rep. Lamar Smith, the science-challenged Republican chair of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology. It’s all part of the run up to the May 2 screening of Mike Morano’s “documentary” Climate Hustle in hundreds of theaters across the country. It's aptly named since it will feature numerous climate-change deniers who have hustled themselves into a ton of cash from ExxonMobil, Koch Industries and other fossil fuel fools that have been lying and funding liars about climate change for decades.
Yesterday, hope for a miracle deep beneath the mountains of West Virginia was extinguished as the bodies of the last four miners were found. The cause of the explosion that took the lives of 29 men has not yet been determined, but from the nature and strength of the explosion, it seems likely that it involved both a build up of methane and an accumulation of coal dust—both of which should have been prevented by adequate supervision and implementation of safety regulations.
The CEO of Massey Energy, Don Blankenship, is even more wealthy than [Coal Company magnate Bob] Murray. He donates huge amounts to conservative causes, has funded a good chunk of the Tea Party movement in West Virginia, famously spent over $3 million to get a friendly judge elected to the state Supreme Court, and donated another $3 million in an attempt to fund a Republican takeover of the state legislature. Blankenship regularly engages in calling Democratic leaders "the crazies" and has said that any move to regulate pollution is the first step toward communism. Grist named Blankenship the "scariest polluter" in the country.
Now that Blankenship's disregard for safety has cost the lives of 29 men, what should we expect?
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: Next stop: NY. Lots of delegates. Lots of claims to home team advantage. Lots of nuance. Mr. “Art of the Deal” can’t close. Will things get rough? Does “Trump” really give to “charity?” Can developers even politics, bro?
At what point does a person's ideology make a relationship with them impossible?
At what point does a person's ideology make a relationship with them impossible?
My girlfriend and I rarely argue. I am at a loss to express in words how deeply I love her, and there’s nothing in this world I wouldn’t do for her, but like most people we sometimes don’t see eye to eye. We tend not to discuss The Walking Dead often, since it usually ends with her telling me to shut up. She’s a huge fan of the show, and any time I start speculating on who I think is going to die next, she thinks I’m spoiling too much even though I don’t have any inside info. So she shoots me a side-eyed look which says stop talking or I’m going to slap you.
But the one other place where we sometimes argue is over politics. While we agree on many issues, we fundamentally disagree about the nature of politics. My girlfriend is Mexican by birth, but grew up in the United States as a permanent resident, which gives her a unique perspective. She sees the system —the connections between government, media, and society itself— as inherently flawed, and thinks a belief in the ability of politics to affect positive change as something borne out of American arrogance and self-delusion. Therefore, taking part in said system is something she thinks of as a waste until something else replaces it. While I agree with some of her critiques, my biggest problem with her position is that throwing up our hands and saying “FUCK THE SYSTEM!” without working inside the system to change it doesn’t solve anything. In fact, it would only make things worse, since it would let people like Donald Trump, and probably some even worse than Trump, to take power. However, this conversation usually ends with the same side-eyed slap look, and me seeing her pretty smile and remembering why I love her. And honestly, I like it when she challenges me.
Conventional wisdom holds a relationship is based upon common interests. The general course of most couplings involves going out on dates where people have to find interesting things to discuss, through continued interactions it builds intimacy, trust, and closeness, and hopefully good sex, commitment and love comes afterwards. But common interests doesn’t always mean sameness. Some of the most boring conversations in the world can be where someone just repeats: “Yes, me too.” For some, the most attractive quality in a partner is to have someone who’s different and challenges what one thinks. However, how different is too different?
So this got me thinking a good topic to discuss is the idea of how ideology intersects with relationships. People all over this world are in love with someone else who probably have cultural differences, class differences, religious difference, or even political differences. All of us have family and friends we care about deeply, but who think differently than we do on one aspect or another. But in this time of political polarization and internecine battles even between people who are ostensibly on the same side of the left-right divide, what is your limit? What ideological difference is the point where you say I can’t date this person, let alone be friends?
"Obviously, some of my rhetoric has been a mistake."
"Obviously, some of my rhetoric has been a mistake."
In an understandably rare interview with Fox News on Sunday, Barack Obama spoke bluntly about the "worst mistake" of his presidency. That error, as he had also recently explained to the BBC and The Atlantic, was the unraveling of Libya following the fall of Muammar Qaddafi:
"Probably failing to plan for the day after what I think was the right thing to do in intervening in Libya."
Whatever you think of that answer, Obama's mea culpa stands in stark contrast to that of his Republican predecessor, George W. Bush. To the extent he could even think of a single mistake he had made, President Bush cited only his “bad language.” You read that right. The man who presided over the worst two-term economic performance since World War II, suffered the devastating 9/11 attacks on his watch, launched the catastrophic Iraq war, and birthed ISIS repeatedly said his bellicose rhetoric like "dead or alive" or "bring them on" wasn't just his biggest mistake—it was his only mistake.
Elkhorn Area School District administrators in Wisconsin are investigating after some of their students reportedly chanted racist taunts at the soccer players from Beloit Memorial High School, a diverse school where more than half the student population is either black or Hispanic.
Denu said the chants affected some of his players to the point they had to leave the game.
"They came off the field and weren't able to finish the game because they were too upset and distraught over what happened to them," Denu said. "One of the girls was cradled in the arms of one of our assistant coaches for a good 15 to 20 minutes.
Words matter. Coach Denu wants the kids from Elkhorn who were responsible for the racist taunt and the pain it caused to learn from the hurtful mistake:
"I'd like them to just kind of take in what they said, think about their words before they say them. My guess is that they're good kids that have some really bad ideas in their head," Denu said. "But those were hurtful and words that you say can last with people for a very very very long time."
Elkhorn school officials confirmed the racist taunt happened and will announce action soon.
Unfortunately, Democrats are powerless to repeal this law legislatively any time soon thanks to Republican gerrymandering, but that didn’t stop them from trolling McCrory in epic fashion. Ralph Johnson, a state representative from Greensboro, died last month, and North Carolina law requires the governor to name a replacement chosen by local party officials to fill out Johnson’s term. Guilford County Democrats used the opportunity to express their disgust over HB2 by forcing McCrory to appoint Chris Sgro, who serves as the executive director Equality NC, the state’s top LGBT rights advocacy group.
Progressives are making it crystal clear that they intend to make McCrory face serious consequences for signing HB2. This November, Democrats have a great shot to beat Gov. McCrory for re-election and make an example of the price elected officials can pay when they enshrine discrimination into law.
Multiple reports surfaced last week of an alarming statement made by Roger Stone, a man described in various accounts over the years as an oppo research expert and now an informal advisor to Donald J. Trump. From TPM:
Stone issued a scathing condemnation of the GOP nomination process in an interview on Freedomain Radio, and urged Trump's supporters to "march on Cleveland" if delegates were to "steal" the nomination from the real estate mogul.
"Join us in the Forest City. We're going to have protests, demonstrations," Stone said. "We will disclose the hotels and the room numbers of those delegates who are directly involved in the steal. If you're from Pennsylvania, we'll tell you who the culprits are. We urge you to visit their hotel and find them."
A few clicks and searches on Google News quickly suggests this is not Stone’s first brush with controversial tactics. In early 2008, Stone founded Citizens United Not Timid to attack Hillary Clinton, where it is implied the vulgar acronym is intentional. His most recent books take on two of Trump’s 2016 political rivals: The Clintons' War on Women released in late 2015, and Jeb! and the Bush Crime Family published in early 2016. A New York Times article put him at the center of a bizarre phone threat made to Elliot Spitzer’s elderly father in 2007:
The consultant, Roger J. Stone Jr., continued to insist that the recorded message — which was made public by lawyers representing the governor’s 83-year-old father, Bernard Spitzer — was not authentic. He said allies of the governor had plotted against him, though an alibi he offered in a statement on his Web site appeared to be problematic.
Trump, who has gotten off to a rocky start whipping delegates to secure the GOP nomination, has made a point at rallies and in interviews to say he gets very good people. Maybe it’s time for investigative media to take him at his word, and find out exactly what that vague assurance means, especially when it comes to advisors, informal or otherwise.
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