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Politics

Indiana Official Reportedly Advised Scott Walker To Stage A Phony Violent Attack By Union Supporters

By George Zornick on Mar 24, 2011 at 5:05 pm

walkerDuring the intense public battle with public employee unions last month, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) received an intriguing email from an admirer claiming to be a deputy prosecutor from Indiana. The email suggested that Walker should fake an attack on himself, in order to create sympathy for his cause and damage the reputation of the unions. The Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism has the email:

The e-mail was signed by “Carlos F. Lam.” WCIJ did some digging and discovered that indeed, there is a Carlos F. Lam who is a GOP public official in Indiana. He is a deputy prosecutor in Johnson County, Indiana — which is the same area the e-mail was sent from, according to its IP information. Lam also has a history of anti-union comments online: he’s written that Indiana is “an unsustainable public worker gravy train bubble.” In another, he said “unions & companies that feed at the gov’t trough will fight tooth & nail against anything that un-feathers their nests.”

WCIJ contacted Lam and asked him if the Hotmail address on the email belongs to him. Lam confirmed that it does — but categorically denied sending the email. “I am flabbergasted and would never advocate for something like this, and would like everyone to be sure that that’s just not me,” he said, after being read the email. He said he plans to file a police report about the matter this week.

Oddly, the email was sent on the very same day that another Indiana law enforcement official tweeted out violent plans for the protests. Jeffrey Cox, a deputy attorney general for the state, tweeted that police should “use live ammunition” against the protestors. He was fired the next day – but for now, Lam’s boss is backing him. “He didn’t send it,” he told WCIJ.

Update

According to the Johnson County Prosecutor’s office, Lam has admitted that he wrote the email and resigned his post.

Yglesias

“Chocolate City” Status In The Balance

By Matthew Yglesias on Mar 24, 2011 at 4:08 pm

I’d been waiting with baited breath for new census data to prompt a bunch of stories about DC’s decreasing blackness, and now that the new numbers are out they show exactly 50 percent of the city’s residents to be non-Hispanic blacks:

The really interesting thing in the census data, though, is that I’d expected the very uneven pattern of growth in the city to force a major post-census redrawing of our Ward boundaries. It looks like I’m going to be disappointed. The two wards with the highest population growth—Ward 2 and Ward 6—had the lowest total populations after the 2000 census. Consequently, it’ll only take a pretty minor redrawing of the lines (if any) to keep things in line.

Economy

Corporations Behind ‘WinAmerica’ Tax Holiday Campaign Already Pay Extremely Low Taxes

By Pat Garofalo on Mar 24, 2011 at 4:00 pm

As we’ve been documenting, several multinational corporations (along with their Republican allies) have been pushing Congress to enact a tax repatriation holiday, allowing them to bring money they have stashed offshore back to the U.S. at a dramatically lower tax rate. Usually, money brought back to the U.S. is subject to the statutory corporate tax rate of 35 percent.

The corporations pushing for a tax holiday claim that it will allow them to bring funds into the U.S. that they will invest in domestic operations and job creation. However, Congress approved a repatriation holiday in 2004, only to see companies use the money to line their executives’ pockets. The holiday also encouraged corporations to stash more money overseas, because they figured they could sucker Congress into approving holidays over and over.

The Obama administration, as well as some leading Republicans on the relevant tax committees, have thrown cold water on the tax holiday idea. Not to be deterred, a group of corporations, have launched a new website — WinAmerica — to try to convince policymakers of the wisdom of another holiday. It includes pictures of smiling workers and extols the supposed virtues such a tax holiday would provide.

However, many of the corporate supporters behind the WinAmerica campaign already use the various loopholes and giveaways in the corporate tax code to drastically lower their corporate tax rate. Here’s what these companies begging for a new corporate tax cut currently pay in corporate income taxes:


Corporation Effective Tax Rate*
Apple 25%
Broadcom 1.4%
Cisco 19.8%
Cognizant 16%
Google 2.4%
Microsoft 25%
Pfizer 17.1%
Oracle 27.1%
Qualcomm 20%

On their website, these corporations claim “providing American businesses with incentives to invest at home is a common sense solution that will immediately inject up to $1 trillion into our economy and provide businesses with the certainty they need to help get Americans back to work.” However, Kristen Forbes, who was on President Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers when the last repatriation holiday was approved, said that the holiday “didn’t accomplish the stated goals of bringing jobs and investment to the US.’’

The Congressional Research Service actually found that the largest beneficiaries of the last tax holiday cut jobs over the subsequent two years. So while “WinAmerica” might be good for corporations and their executives, it’s undoubtedly a loss for everyone else.

*Tax rate is for 2010 or 2009, depending on the latest data these companies have made available. Cross-posted on The Wonk Room.

Economy

Corporations Behind ‘WinAmerica’ Tax Holiday Campaign Already Pay Extremely Low Taxes

By Pat Garofalo on Mar 24, 2011 at 4:00 pm

As we’ve been documenting, several multinational corporations (along with their Republican allies) have been pushing Congress to enact a tax repatriation holiday, allowing them to bring money they have stashed offshore back to the U.S. at a dramatically lower tax rate. Usually, money brought back to the U.S. is subject to the statutory corporate tax rate of 35 percent.

The corporations pushing for a tax holiday claim that it will allow them to bring funds into the U.S. that they will invest in domestic operations and job creation. However, Congress approved a repatriation holiday in 2004, only to see companies use the money to line their executives’ pockets. The holiday also encouraged corporations to stash more money overseas, because they figured they could sucker Congress into approving holidays over and over.

The White House, as well as some leading Republicans on the relevant tax committees, have thrown cold water on the tax holiday idea. Not to be deterred, a group of corporations, have launched a new website — WinAmerica — to try to convince policymakers of the wisdom of another holiday. It includes pictures of smiling workers and extols the supposed virtues such a tax holiday would provide.

However, many of the corporate supporters behind the WinAmerica campaign already use the various loopholes and giveaways in the corporate tax code to drastically lower their corporate tax rate. Here’s what these companies begging for a new corporate tax cut currently pay in corporate income taxes:


Corporation Effective Tax Rate*
Apple 25%
Broadcom 1.4%
Cisco 19.8%
Cognizant 16%
Google 2.4%
Microsoft 25%
Pfizer 17.1%
Oracle 27.1%
Qualcomm 20%

On their website, these corporations claim “providing American businesses with incentives to invest at home is a common sense solution that will immediately inject up to $1 trillion into our economy and provide businesses with the certainty they need to help get Americans back to work.” However, Kristen Forbes, who was on President Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers when the last repatriation holiday was approved, said that the holiday “didn’t accomplish the stated goals of bringing jobs and investment to the US.’’

The Congressional Research Service actually found that the largest beneficiaries of the last tax holiday cut jobs over the subsequent two years. So while “WinAmerica” might be good for corporations and their executives, it’s undoubtedly a loss for everyone else.

*Tax rate is for 2010 or 2009, depending on the latest data these companies have made available.

Yglesias

Federal Reserve Press Conferences

By Matthew Yglesias on Mar 24, 2011 at 3:59 pm

The Fed announced today that Ben Bernanke is going to start holding regularly scheduled press conferences. I’m open to persuasion, but this seems like a bad idea to me.

Expectations are a very important part of monetary policy. That’s why Open Market Committee meetings end with the release of a written statement offering public guidance about what’s happening and not just a 140 character tweet about interest rates. That statement is assembled, one hopes, with care and precise wording. In a live press conference there’s a lot that could go wrong, and I see relatively little upside.

On some level, though, this is clearly intended as some kind of pushback to the political criticism the Fed’s been getting for the past year. That makes sense, but it underscores the fact that there needs to be a progressive anchor to this debate and not just a circling of the wagons around an institution that has, in fact, failed.

Alyssa

On Sucker Punch

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Mar 24, 2011 at 3:33 pm

I get the objections to Sucker Punch, though I think people seem to forget that Zack Snyder’s wife, Deborah, is producing the movie—this gets to be her fantasy as well as his. But more to the point, Amber is exactly right about this: it can be a feminist fantasy to look however you want while you’re kicking ass and solving quests. I will buy the popcorn, and the leather bustier.

Politics

Fax That Compelled LePage To Take Down Labor Mural Conspicuously Missing Date/Time Stamp (Updated)

By Alex Seitz-Wald on Mar 24, 2011 at 3:15 pm

As ThinkProgress reported yesterday, Maine Tea Party Gov. Paul LePage (R) ordered the removal of a labor-themed mural from the state’s Department of Labor offices. LePage’s administration said they had received complaints from business owners who objected to the mural’s allegedly pro-labor undertones. But LePage has so far produced just a single complaint — an anonymous fax, a copy of which was released today. But as Maine progressive blog Dirigo Blue points out, the fax is missing the date/time and phone number stamp that fax machines automatically place on faxes:

Mural Fax

If the LePage administration wanted to redact the sender’s phone number to protect their identity, they could have simply removed the number, instead of the entire stamp. But more importantly, why is LePage making policy decisions based on a single fax from an anonymous “Secret Admirer”? Especially from a sender who saw the mural as reminiscent of “communist North Korea where they use these murals to brainwash the masses.” Even LePage’s spokesperson recognized the eccentricity of the sender, telling TPM that the administration was not trying to “give validity” to the specific sentiments in the fax. So far, LePage has failed to produce evidence showing any kind of major public opposition to the mural.

Update

After dozens of news reports from local newspapers all the way to the New York Times reported the mural complaint was a fax, LePage is now claiming that it was in fact a letter, not a fax. Is unclear why LePage didn’t dispute these myriad reports until now.

Yglesias

European Monetary Union (Unfortunately) Working As Planned

By Matthew Yglesias on Mar 24, 2011 at 3:14 pm

Kevin Drum ruminates on the European situation:

It’s easy to say this from a distance, but Merkel and other European leaders have their heads in the sand. They don’t want Greece, Ireland, or Portugal to default because that would mean big losses for banks in their own countries, which would then have to be bailed out. But they also don’t want to directly bail out the insolvent countries, because voters wouldn’t like that much. So they’re kicking the can down the road with half measures and hoping that somehow things turn up. It’s a recipe for stagnation at best and disaster at worst.

The scary thing is that this is more or less European monetary union working as planned. The introduction of a single currency has de facto committed the nations of Europe to a level of fiscal union that’s politically unacceptable. But total collapse of the European banking system is also politically unacceptable. So they’ll keep kicking the can down the road with half measures until ultimately they wind up much further down the road to fiscal union than anyone deems conceivable. And the same applies to labor market integration. There’s some level of sustained unemployment in Portugal that induces people to migrate to Copenhagen in search of work, and over the next five years we’ll find out what that level is. But in the interim we’re going to witness a lot of stagnation and disaster.

But this is basically the plan. Achieve political union by unleashing a doomsday device in the form of monetary union and assume that over time people can be dragged into making it work. The politicians in the UK and Sweden who kept their countries out of this deserve enormous credit.

Health

DeMint’s Death Panel: Refused To Support Medical Innovation For Sake Of Ideological Purity

By Igor Volsky on Mar 24, 2011 at 3:02 pm

The GOP’s instance on repealing the entire health care law would, among other things, eliminate dependent coverage for children on their parent’s plan, re-open the Medicare Part D doughnut hole and increase taxes on small businesses currently receiving tax creditits for providing health insurance coverage to their workers. Today, McClatchy Newspaper’s James Rosen reports that the Republicans’ efforts to put political ideology ahead of good policy is also jeopardizing the development of money-saving medical technology:

Dr. David Cull, a prominent vascular surgeon in Greenville, had invented a small valve system that, if it works, could spare 300,000 dialysis patients across the country enormous suffering and save U.S. taxpayers billions of dollars.

But Cull’s hometown senator, Jim DeMint, would not write a letter supporting the surgeon’s application for a federal grant under the landmark health care bill that President Barack Obama signed into law a year ago today. [...] Backing a grant application under the law — even for a constituent who lives in the same Upstate town as DeMint — would leave the senator open to charges of hypocrisy, staffers say.

Cull received the $249,479 grant without DeMint’s support and believes that his device could eliminate the need for dialysis patients to “undergo 10 to 12 operations over a lifetime to treat complications from the stents.” “Such surgeries cost taxpayers a fifth — $15,000 — of the $75,000 a year the federal program pays per person with acute kidney failure.” “This is money … very well spent,” Cull said. “If our valve doesn’t work, the government will have lost $250,000. If it does work, they will have saved a gazillion dollars.”

For DeMint — who regularly criticizes the Affordable Care Act for failing to lower health care costs and rails against “wasteful spending” — to oppose a measure that could save Medicare millions of dollars is at best dishonest and at worst hypocritical. Republicans who maintain that ‘Obamacare’ will ration care and slow the development of life-saving medical devices shouldn’t undercut private innovation that could improve the livelihoods of millions of Americans. That would, in their words, “death panel” the sickest among us.

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