NEWS FLASH
Orrin Hatch Predicts Obama Will Call For Single-Payer Health Care By 2015 | “If president Obama is reelected within a year or two he’ll throw his hands in the air and say, ‘it’s not working we have to go to a single payer system.” — Orrin Hatch’s prediction at this afternoon’s address at the Heritage Foundation. Watch it:
NEWS FLASH
We’re Live Blogging Tonight’s GOP Debate | As we’ve done with all the previous GOP debates, ThinkProgress will be bringing you the best analysis we can offer in real-time of the Bloomberg News-Washington Post debate tonight. The event kicks off at 8 p.m. from Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, and can be seen on Bloomberg TV or streamed lived on the Washington Post’s website here or Bloomberg’s website here. It will be moderated by venerate interviewer Charlie Rose, the Washington Post’s Karen Tumulty, and Bloomberg’s Julianna Goldman.
A useful primer, for the confused:
There have been plenty of red flags around the Slovakian vote for a while now, but I know some in the U.S. were inclined to believe that whatever Germany agreed to could be forced down the throats of other countries. Hopefully some kind of groundwork has been laid over the past few days on the American side that doesn’t just depend on a quick reversal.
The New York Police Department is not having a great publicity month. First they were deluged with criticism for responding to a string of sexual assaults in Brooklyn by stopping women on the street and telling them to dress less provocatively. Now they’re facing repeated charges of police brutality for arresting and pepper spraying Wall Street protesters.
Today, the AP reports that the NYPD is infiltrating many of the city’s colleges — including Brooklyn College, CUNY, Hunter College, and Queens College — using undercover agents to spy on their their Muslim Student Associations. Cops reportedly stalked Muslim students online, chatted with them in message boards, and sent agents to meetings — all because these students were going on paintball trips they deemed “militant”:
The documents show police were worried about “militant paintball trips” organized by Muslim students at Brooklyn College. The Justice Department has in the past accused would-be terrorists of using paintball games as a sort of paramilitary training. But current and former officials said there was no standard for what kind of paintball trips the NYPD considered militant.
An old website formerly used by the group shows photos from one of these trips to a paintball range in Jim Thorpe, Pa. An announcement for an upcoming trip gives strategy tips like separating players into offensive and defensive lines. It jokingly describes the “luxurious cheesebus” members will ride in and advises them to check “the back of your ‘Fruit of the Loom’” for equipment sizes.
Islamic Society members said it has been years since members did any organized paintball trips. They scoffed at the NYPD report, noting that the club has also organized basketball, football and cricket games in the past.
The NYPD apparently first turned its attention to Muslim college students after receiving sketchy information that a student wanted to be a “martyr.” But police never found this person and did not bring cases charging Muslim student groups with training terrorists.
According to the AP, schools that cooperated with the spying program could have broken a federal law barring schools from releasing students’ information without their consent. This puts them at risk of losing all their federal funding. The cops also apparently violated a 1992 memorandum of understanding between the NYPD and CUNY prohibiting the department from conducting undercover work on campus.
Gawker notes that in the past the NYPD has “imported tactics and personnel from the CIA to set up a massive surveillance operation that the CIA itself is legally barred from creating—casing Muslim cafes, pulling over Pakistani cab drivers for routine infractions and pressuring them to become informants, and even tailing moderate Muslim allies while they dine with the mayor.”
As we’ve been reporting, GOP 2012 presidential candidate Herman Cain’s “999″ tax plan — which would eliminate all taxes in favor of a 9 percent income tax, 9 percent corporate income tax, and 9 percent national sales tax — would wallop low-income Americans (all of the candidate’s protestations notwithstanding). On average, the lowest-income Americans would see their tax rate multiplies nine times, from about 2 percent to about 18 percent, under Cain’s plan.
But according to Rich Lowrie, the Wells Fargo wealth manager who helped Cain craft the plan, it’s just “Washington thinking” to try and deduce how hard Cain’s plan will hammer those who can least afford it:
Lowrie says it’s just “Washington thinking” to look at whether modest-income Americans will wind up shouldering much more of the tax burden. He repeatedly refused to say how much more of the tax burden would be borne by the poor and middle class than under the current system. But he implicitly acknowledged the problem by saying that the campaign would “fix this” with a new empowerment-zone plan that would be laid on top of the 9-9-9 plan and would presumably lower taxes in inner cities.
Cain’s sales tax would be levied on just about everything, including food and housing (which have traditionally been exempted from sales taxes), pounding low-income Americans, who spend nearly all of what they earn in a given year on necessities. At the same time, Cain would eliminate investment taxes which, along with lowering the income tax rate all the way down to nine percent, would result in a massive tax windfall for the wealthy.
As Center for American Progress Vice President for Economic Policy Michael Ettlinger put it, the plan “would be the biggest tax shift from the wealthy to the middle-class in the history of taxation, ever, anywhere, and it would bankrupt the country.” But Lowrie “acknowledged that Cain didn’t care about progressivity,” which perhaps explains why he is so nonchalant about a plan that would unabashedly give poor Americans the short end of the stick.
Oops:
Europe’s efforts to stem the sovereign debt crisis suffered an embarrassing and potentially costly setback on Tuesday night when the Slovak Parliament failed to approve the expansion of the euro rescue fund, a development that appeared likely to bring down the government.
The politics of a Euro-bailout are particularly toxic in Slovakia, which is considerably poorer than Greece or Portugal. Slovak taxpayers are not eager to bailout either Greek borrowers or German banks.
Now it does appear that the votes are actually there to pass the plan, but opposition parties will first bring down the governing coalition. But this is a reminder that the EU institutional process is very clunky. To get through this crisis intact, the Eurozone is going to need many more rounds of this kind of voting.
NEWS FLASH
Obama Sued For Overruling Smog Standards | Public health and conservation groups filing a lawsuit against the Obama Administration for rejecting stronger ozone smog standards. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposed the stronger standards almost two years ago, but President Obama directed the EPA to drop the proposal on September 2, 2011. Rejection of the protective standards leaves in place weaker Bush-era ozone standards that leave tens of thousands of Americans at risk of suffering serious health impacts, according to leading medical organizations. Earthjustice is representing the American Lung Association, Environmental Defense Fund, Natural Resources Defense Council, and Appalachian Mountain Club in this challenge.
– Bill McKibben’s remarks to Occupy Wall Street at Washington Square Park Saturday. Video at the end.
Today in the New York Times there was a story that made it completely clear why we have to be here. They uncovered the fact that the company building that tar sands pipeline was allowed to choose another company to conduct the environmental impact statement, and the company that they chose was a company was a company that did lots and lots of work for them. So, in other words, the whole thing was rigged top to bottom and that’s why the environmental impact statement said that this pipeline would cause no trouble, unlike the scientists who said if we build this pipeline it’s “game over” for the climate. We can’t let this pipeline get built.
On November 6, one year before the election, we’re going to be in DC with a huge circle of people around the White House and they’re going to be carrying signs with quotations from Barack Obama from the 2008 campaign. He said, “It’s time to end the tyranny of oil.” He said, “I will have the most transparent government in history.” We have to go to DC to find out where they have locked that guy up. We have to free Obama, because there is some sort of stunt double there now. So on November 6, I hope we can move, just for a day, Occupy Wall Street down to the White House and get them in the fight against corporate power.
The reason that it’s so great that we’re occupying Wall Street is because Wall Street has been occupying the atmosphere. That’s why we can never do anything about global warming. Exxon gets in the way. Goldman Sachs gets in the way. The whole fossil fuel industry gets in the way. The sky does not belong to Exxon. They cannot keep using it as a sewer into which to dump their carbon. If they do, we’ve got no future and nobody else on this planet has a future.
Here’s Matt Labash and the Weekly Standard trying to mislead you about taxation and the income distribution:
You’re either part of “us,” the “99 percent” (as all the surrounding signage identifies us), or you’re part of “them” — the rapacious 1 percent, who are purportedly strangling our nation by holding roughly one-third of its wealth, even if they also pay 38 percent of all federal income taxes while the bottom 47 percent of the population pay nothing (a Revolution is no place for facts and figures).
You might as well say that the 20 percent of Americans who smoke cigarettes regularly pay 95 percent of federal tobacco excise taxes while 70 percent of the population pays nothing. Does 70 percent of the population really pay nothing to maintain public services? Of course not. They pay income taxes and payroll taxes and property taxes and sales taxes and alcohol taxes and all the rest.
The genius of the conservative rhetorical move here is that most people think of the taxes that you pay when you “do your taxes” in April as being your income taxes. It is, in fact, a consolidated income tax and payroll tax. Thanks to some temporary tax cuts implemented during the recession, a very large share of American workers currently have only payroll tax liability rather than income tax liability. So through sleight of hand, you can convince many more than 53 percent of the people that they are part of the put-upon “53 percent” forced to bear the burden of a nation of slackers. It’s clever. But don’t fall for it, and don’t let your friends and family fall for it either.
NEWS FLASH
Seattle Approves Transgender Health Benefits For City Employees | After six months of negotiations, the Seattle City Council has given its approval for transgender health care procedures to be included in the benefits city employees receive. The Council’s Energy, Technology, and Civil Rights Committee pointed out that “City employees denied health care coverage because of their gender identity could develop debilitating secondary medical conditions, be at higher risk for suicide, and experience increased psychological distress.”
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