Saturday Report 5/4/24 - US Billionaires officially paying lower tax rate than working class for 1st time: where is the outrage?
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— Republicans have handed America’s wealth to the billionaires: where’s the outrage? Economist Gabriel Zucman published an extraordinary op-ed in The New York Times this week showing the impact of 40 years of Republicans transferring over $50 trillion from the pockets of the middle class into the money bins of the morbidly rich via changes in tax policy. Not only has this led to a $34.5 trillion national debt — 100% of which can be accounted for by massive tax cuts on the wealthy and corporations put into place by Ronald Reagan (1981), George W. Bush (2003), and Donald Trump (2017) — but it’s also gutted the middle class, reducing the percentage of Americans who can live comfortably in that realm from almost two-thirds of us in 1980 to around 43% of us today. (Those details are mine, not his.) Zucman explicitly calls for the entire world to take on the challenge of rescuing democracy and working class people by raising taxes on both billionaires and the corporations they use to shield themselves from taxation. It’s about damn time.
— Are Republican Supreme Court justices colluding With Trump to “catch and kill” his insurrection case? Attorney Mitchell Zimmerman, like many Americans, assumed that Republicans on the Court were merely trying to help Trump delay his trial for inciting the attempted overthrow of our government on January 6th when they agreed to hear — at the last possible moment on their calendar — his claim of immunity from prosecution because he was once president. Any other interpretation would, most legal scholars thought, be absurd: the Founders and Framers were clear that they were establishing a democratic republic, not a kingdom with an absolute or even partial monarch. But, notes Zimmerman, they all may well have been wrong: after hearing the oral arguments, a dreaded realization is dawning on the legal community that at least four of the justices had something very much like a kingdom on their minds. Zimmerman notes: “At the oral argument of the case, the conservatives quietly embraced the notion that a president could face no criminal penalties even for ordering the assassination of a political rival or directing the military to stage a coup. They were unfazed by an argument that our president needed to enjoy the immunity of a king although the Constitution says not one word about immunity. And, in a mind-numbing reversal of reality, Justice Alito argued that presidential immunity was required so presidents could ‘leave office peacefully’ and to avoid a cycle of events that ‘destabilizes the functioning of our country as a democracy.’” Step by step, the billionaires who bought and paid for these justices and most of the GOP are getting what they want: oligarchy. To paraphrase T.S. Eliot, this is how democracy dies, not with a bang but a series of corrupt court decisions.
— Ankle monitors for pregnant women? Sure, Trump says, why not? In Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale, the state has taken total control of the reproductive capacity of women; now Donald Trump has endorsed a similar view for America, should he be re-elected this fall. When TIME reporter Eric Cortellessa asked Trump if he’d object to states monitoring the pregnancies of women across the country, the Republican candidate for president essentially said that it was fine with him. Multiple GOP-controlled states are already moving in that direction. Idaho has already passed a law outlawing women leaving the state to obtain an abortion, and in Texas this week we learned the ex-boyfriend of a woman in that state is suing her and her friends for helping her getting an abortion under Texas’ $10,000 bounty law. The technology already exists to continuously monitor the bloodstreams of women for hormonal changes — it’s used right now to monitor blood sugar levels — and it appears it’ll just be a matter of time before Red states will mandate that women are fitted with the devices as soon as a physician determines they’re pregnant. Add an ankle bracelet with a GPS tracker and the dream of many Republican, Catholic, and white evangelical men across the nation will soon become a reality.
— As bird flu spreads to chickens, cats, cattle and a dolphin, how concerned should we be? I wrote about this at length in yesterday’s Hartmann Report so I’ll be brief here, but it’s worth emphasizing that the world could easily be looking at a second pandemic this decade if the current bird flu virus jumps from birds, cattle, and other mammals into humans. In an apparent response to that possibility, Republicans in Congress have proposed to cut fully one-sixth of the budget for the CDC and strip over $60 billion from America’s public health infrastructure. Why? To keep taxes low on billionaires, of course. And to suck up to their Qanon base.
— Are Democrats finally standing up to Big Oil? Democrats in the Senate held hearings this past week on the fossil fuel industry’s six decades of lying to the American people about the damage their products are doing to the environment and thus the future of humanity. The House had unearthed much of the information after subpoenaing millions of documents during the first two years of the Biden administration, when they controlled that body. Now that bought-off Republicans are in charge of the House, all activity to learn more or do anything about climate change has stalled, but the Democratic-controlled Senate is moving forward, at least by continuing the investigation and exposure of the industry’s dishonesty. Good on them. Don’t forget that the Biden administration has done more to mitigate climate change than every other administration in American history combined and has big plans for a second term if we can get out the votes this fall.
— Bigot Alert: Republicans in Utah roll out a “snitch line” to turn in Trans people using public and school bathrooms in that state. Erin Reed’s substack newsletter is a must-read on issues relating to the transgender community:
— Hunter in a Farmer's World Alert! Is ADHD Useful in Our Workforce?Conventional wisdom for the past century has been that managers should look for the “slow and steady” person to fill every position in corporate America: are they wrong?
— Wisdom School alert! Can mindfulness help in the workplace? The meditation technique can have far-reaching benefits, both to its practitioners and those around them…
— Crazy Alert! Local paper takes down Republican SD Governor Kristi Noem for lying about meeting Kim Jong Un. Shooting her dog in the face and killing her pet goat weren’t enough for the South Dakota governor; she also claims in her new autobiography that when she was
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