Lurker > Antifar

weapon_d00d816 posted...

abortion is not an issue that is evenly split amongst the voting populace.

It basically is
http://www.gallup.com/poll/183434/americans-choose-pro-choice-first-time-seven-years.aspx
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an aspirin the size of the sun.

Obama is no fucking leftist, come on.
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an aspirin the size of the sun.

The appearance of a conflict is a conflict; it does Obama no good to be giving his critics and opponents such fodder
http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/4/25/15419740/obama-speaking-fee

The fundamental concept of Donald Trump's ethnonationalist demagoguery is that white middle-class Americans are locked in a zero-sum conflict with foreigners and ethnic minority groups. That's Marine Le Pen's message in France and Geert Wilders's message in the Netherlands, and it is ugly and false.

A counterproposal on the left is to reframe the populist theme and argue that middle-class Americans more generally are locked in a zero-sum conflict with rich people.

Obama and other center-left leaders around the world do not espouse that view primarily, I think, because they believe it is simplistic and wrong. But a crucial vulnerability of center-left politics around the world is that their sincere conviction — a faith in the positive-sum nature of cosmopolitan values and appropriately regulated forms of global capitalism, tempered by a welfare state — is easily mistaken for corruption. The political right is supposed to be pro-business as a matter of ideological commitment. The progressive center is supposed to be empirically minded, challenging business interests where appropriate but granting them free rein at other times.

This approach has a lot of political and substantive merits. But it is invariably subject to the objection: really?

Did you really avoid breaking up the big banks because you thought it would undermine financial stability, or were you on the take? Did you really think a fracking ban would be bad for the environment, or were you on the take? One man's sophisticated and pragmatic approach to public policy can be the other man's grab bag of corrupt opportunism.

Leaders who sincerely care about the fate of the progressive center as a nationally and globally viable political movement need to push back against this perception by behaving with a higher degree of personal integrity than their rivals — not by accepting the logic that what's good for the goose is good for the gander.
...
Beyond politicians' speaking fees, people are, of course, troubled by larger questions of revolving doors between the private and public sectors. What would be nice would be to devise some convenient bright-line rule presidents could propose that would prevent the government from being suborned by special interest.

Realistically, it can't be done. "Nobody can ever work in the private sector before or after joining the government" isn't a viable rule. What's troubling isn't any one specific case. It's the sheer accumulation of them, leading to the perception that service in Democratic Party politics was viewed in general as just a stepping stone to a higher-paid gig in New York or Silicon Valley.

But the difficulty of drawing a clear, overarching ethical line is exactly why an ex-president, who is uniquely high-profile and uniquely insulated from financial pressures, ought to set a high standard. Obama doesn't need a next job. As a former president, he is entitled to lifelong health care and a pension worth more than $200,000 a year. He's already written two best-selling books and could easily write a third or fourth. (A recent deal between the Obamas and Penguin Random House will reportedly earn the former first couple at least $65 million.)

Obama has already raised millions for his library and presidential foundation. He, more than any of his former subordinates, can safely say no, that Harry Truman was right and this is an unseemly thing for a former president to be doing, and that it was a mistake of American society to normalize that form of conduct from his immediate few predecessors.

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an aspirin the size of the sun.

I see we're now basing our foreign policy on "movies made by the South Park guys"
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an aspirin the size of the sun.

Asherlee10 posted...

I'm not well-versed on this subject, but isn't capital gains just another form of income? If so, then why would it not be taxed as income is taxed?

The article details the long history of this, but the short version is "Because those who benefit want it this way"

The Revenue Act of 1921 introduced a preferential or reduced tax rate on income from capital gains into the U.S. tax code, in a reversal of how policymakers had thought about different forms of income for several decades. When Congress deliberated over adjusting the tax code to peacetime conditions after the First World War, even Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, a champion of austerity, argued that reducing the tax rate on earned (wage) income relative to unearned (capital gains) income would spur industry and thrift amongst the working classes.
But Mellon’s remedy for postwar depression, inflation, unemployment, and radicalism was out of step with new ways of thinking about the relationship between citizenship and investment. Millions of Americans had purchased some form of federal bond during the First World War. The Liberty bond and War Savings sales campaigns broadcast a new model of the economy that put investors in the drivers’ seat. Building upon longstanding and widely-held beliefs that broad-based property ownership secured the independence and virtue of citizens, the Liberty bond and War Savings drives stretched the meaning of property to encompass financial investments and championed the ideal of a mass-investment society.

So when Congress deliberated over the Revenue Act of 1921, investment income no longer seemed as plutocratic as it once had. In Congressional hearings, a consensus that the income tax code should “be trying to protect . . . the investor” emerged. Based upon this consensus, the Revenue Act of 1921 separated different forms of income and honored investors with a 12.5 percent rate on capital gains income, well below the top rate of 50 percent for ordinary income from wages and salaries.

This tax break survived the Great Depression and the Second World War, thanks largely to the efforts of the nation’s foremost stock exchange and conservative southern Democrats. These critics of the New Deal came to view investors as a constituency that might be mobilized across the Mason-Dixon line.

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an aspirin the size of the sun.

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/tax-policy-history-by-for-1-percent

Polls suggest that Americans won’t stomach a tax plan that will enrich the rich at the expense of the rest. In 2016 Gallup found that 61 percent of Americans agreed that “upper income people” paid “too little” in taxes. And a majority (52 percent) concurred that “our government should redistribute wealth by heavy taxes on the rich.”

Debates about federal taxes tend to focus on the tax rates levied on ordinary earned income and on tax deductions taken mostly by wealthy households. But there’s another front in the battle for tax justice: the tax code’s preferential treatment of income from capital gains (that is, from profits on investments).1 This preference fuels inequality and financialization alike.

Thanks to this tax break for capital gains, households keep more of their income from investment after taxes than they keep from their wages and salaries. This is because income received from profits on the sale of investments is taxed at a lower rate than the same amount of income from salaries and wages. Because the wealthiest households earn the bulk of capital gains every year, the tax code’s preference for this form of income overwhelmingly benefits the rich.

In 2016, for example, nearly 76 percent of all capital gains went to households earning more than $1,000,000, according to estimates by the Tax Policy Center. And 96.2 percent of the households in the top 1 percent of the income distribution are white. Preferential treatment for capital gains meant that the federal government forewent $109.5 billion in taxes in 2016, a giveaway second only to the tax exclusion for employers’ contributions to employees’ health plans.

The tax break for capital gains also enables the oversized financial sector to wield enormous influence on the U.S. economy. It encourages corporate executives to take stock-based compensation, because it’s taxed more lightly than the same amount of salary income would be. This practice encourages executives to obsess over short-term stock-market performance at the expense of the long-term success of the corporation.

The capital gains tax preference might seem wonkish, but it cuts straight to the heart of neoliberalism because fundamentally, it rests on the assumption that investors and investment matter most in our economy and in our society—and therefore, tax policy should privilege these actors and these practices. It presupposes that financial markets guarantee the economic self-determination of all those who strive to invest. And it assumes that those markets recycle capital gains back into the economy to fund entrepreneurs, business expansion, and employment—despite all evidence to the contrary.

Abolishing the tax break for capital gains would destroy a key mechanism of inequality and financialization. And a strike against this preference would force a reconsideration of the ideological predilections deeply embedded in our economic policies—such as the tax code—that continue to sustain neoliberalism in a post-Brexit, Trumpian world.

The equalization of tax rates on different forms of income might seem like a top-down, technocratic liberal fix. But in fact, it would radically reorient the U.S. tax code according to a simple democratic principle: everyone’s income counts the same.
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Little evidence indicates that the tax break for capital gains benefits the economy overall, although its relationship to inequality is quite clear. It’s true that a majority of American households own stocks. But still, the tax break for capital gains benefits these households very little because they mostly hold stocks in tax-free accounts.

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an aspirin the size of the sun.

Poliitics makes strange bedfellows. It wasn't too long ago that African-Americans (being more Christian on average than the rest of the population) widely opposed gay marriage. The black vote was sometimes pointed to as a deciding factor in the prop 8 election in California. But of course, being pro-LGBT and anti-black is no solution.
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an aspirin the size of the sun.

bump
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an aspirin the size of the sun.

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/big-pharmas-dirtiest-dealer-insys

In my fifteen years of reporting on the War on Drugs—the disproportionate government crackdown on certain communities using narcotics—I've never seen a case that pulled back the curtain and tied the whole room together quite like Insys Therapeutics.

First, you've got a publicly-traded pharmaceutical company pushing fentanyl, a drug that's 50 times stronger than heroin. And then you've got the same company donating half-a-million dollars to a smear campaign against cannabis legalization in Arizona, where Insys is based, while simultaneously developing its own synthetic THC (tetrahydrocannabinol, the main psychoactive component of cannabis) drug with full state and federal government approval. What a magnificent intersection of irony, hypocrisy, and corruption.

Meanwhile, given the way the War on Drugs is generally conducted in America, the only truly surprising event in this whole sordid affair is that the Federal Bureau of Investigation actually stepped in last year and arrested six former Insys executives, including the company's one-time CEO, for allegedly "leading a nationwide conspiracy to bribe medical practitioners to unnecessarily prescribe a fentanyl-based pain medication and defraud healthcare insurers."

Not to mention the countless people who got seriously hooked on Subsys. Throw in multiple lawsuits and a looming Congressional investigation, and it's all taken a sizable toll on the company's bottom line. On April 4, Insys reported a 41.6 percent decline in quarterly revenue, presumably the only negative outcome the company really cares about.

But it's not all bad news for Insys. Just last month the company won approval from the Drug Enforcement Administration to start selling Syndros, a wholly lab-produced 100 percent THC liquid. Meaning, as far as the federal government is concerned, a cancer patient smoking a joint in California is a criminal in possession of a Schedule 1 narcotic with no proven medical value and a high risk of abuse. But Insys can produce and sell marijuana's most psychoactive component in its purest possible form.

How is this okay with the DEA? According to a Washington Post investigation, since 2005, at least 42 officials from the agency have gone on to work for Big Pharma, including 31 directly from a division tasked with regulating the industry.
...
In the meantime, here's a few things we know already:

According to data collected by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, Insys paid doctors $6.3 million in 2015 alone, with at least four doctors collecting over $100,000 each.

In June 2015, a nurse practitioner at a pain and headache center in Connecticut plead guilty to federal anti-kickback charges. According to the prosecution, she'd prescribed $1.6 million worth of Subsys while pocketing payments of $83,000 from Insys for speaking engagements that frequently consisted of nothing more than going out to dinner.

In Illinois, Insys paid $84,400 in speaking fees to a doctor the company knew had been indicted on federal false claims charges. When one of its sales teams informed company superiors that "the doctor runs a very shady pill mill and only accepts cash"—and then followed up with a claim that the doctor's office was under DEA surveillance—a supervisor called the doctor a "go-to physician" and advised: "Stick with him"

So far, that's all just a particularly egregious example of business-as-usual for the opioid-industrial-complex.

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an aspirin the size of the sun.

The correct answer is no
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an aspirin the size of the sun.

http://www.newsobserver.com/news/politics-government/state-politics/article146471059.html

Students could gain admission to charter schools based on where their parents work or where they live under legislation that would make significant changes in the ways the schools fill their classrooms.

The state House is considering a collection of bills that would change who can start a charter and how quickly the schools can grow. Corporations would be able to reserve spaces in schools for their employees’ children, and two towns would be able to set up charter schools for their residents. Under current law, charters are open to any student in the state, although schools can give preference to siblings and school employees’ children.

“This is loosening the restrictions on how charters operate and what they’re allowed to do,” Rep. Graig Meyer, an Orange County Democrat, said of the collection of bills the House Education Committee approved Monday in divided votes.

Under one bill, up to half a charter school’s seats could be reserved for children whose parents work for companies that donate land, buildings or equipment to the school. Employees of those companies would also be able to join the charter school’s board of directors.

Rep. John R. Bradford III, a Mecklenburg Republican, framed the bill as an economic development tool that could help attract companies to rural counties. Companies would be able to offer classroom seats as employee perks, Bradford said, equating charter enrollment to companies paying for employee meals.

“This creates a vehicle where a company can create an employee benefit,” he said.

Meyer objected, saying the provision would have taxpayer money going to company schools.

“This moves closer to privatization than North Carolina has ever allowed before,” he said.

Another bill would allow charter enrollment to grow 30 percent a year without approval from the State Board of Education. Charters are now limited to 20 percent annual growth without board approval. Some Democrats objected on the grounds that it could fuel growth in schools that aren’t good. Allowing charters with bad records to expand would not be fair to taxpayers, parents or students, said Rep. Bobbie Richardson, a Louisburg Democrat.

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an aspirin the size of the sun.

Hitler invented atheism
https://twitter.com/search?q=hitler%20invented%20atheism&src=typd
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an aspirin the size of the sun.

Find me a Republican who supports increasing corporate taxes, and then we can discuss whether Democrats are too ideologically rigid.
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an aspirin the size of the sun.

Bump
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an aspirin the size of the sun.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/24/business/hollywood-writers-unions-vote-to-authorize-strike-against-producers.html

Unions representing 12,000 Hollywood writers said on Monday that members had overwhelmingly voted to authorize a strike, bringing show business closer to its first production shutdown in a decade.

Leaders of the Writers Guild of America, East, and the Writers Guild of America, West, announced the results of an online strike authorization vote in an email to members. The unions said that 6,310 eligible members voted; 96 percent of the vote was in favor of a strike.

A three-year contract between the guilds and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which represents the makers of films and TV series, expires at midnight on May 1. Negotiators were set to resume talks on Tuesday, with funding of a failing union health care plan a sticking point.

“We thank you for your resolve,” the union email said. “We are determined to achieve a fair contract.”

In a statement, the producers’ alliance said: “The companies are committed to reaching a deal at the bargaining table that keeps the industry working. The 2007 writers’ strike hurt everyone. Writers lost more than $287 million in compensation that was never recovered.”

If no agreement is reached, a walkout could happen as soon as May 2 and potentially idle tens of thousands of workers — not just writers but the drivers, caterers, set carpenters, dry cleaners and other service providers who make Hollywood’s wheels turn. Writers picketed for 100 days in the 2007 strike, bringing TV production to a halt and causing $2.5 billion in economic losses in Los Angeles, according to government economists.

A strike would first affect late-night talk shows and soap operas that use guild writers, sending the programs into repeats or forcing hosts to ad-lib. The production of scripted TV series would slow down, as producers burned through scripts. Networks would rely more heavily on news, sports and reality programming. Moviegoers would not experience immediate effects; studios have finished shooting most summer and fall movies.

Striking is awkward for Hollywood unions because of optics: The workers involved are not coal miners struggling to feed their families. Some television staff writers earn hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. A few elite wordsmiths — Chuck Lorre, Shonda Rhimes — earn millions.

But leaders of the two writers’ unions, which bargain as one, say that the middle-class majority of their members are struggling as never before, even as television production booms in the video-streaming age and some blockbusters take in more than $1 billion at the worldwide box office.

Networks are ordering fewer episodes per season — as few as 10 compared with 22 just a few years ago — so series writing jobs pay less than they once did. At the same time, staff writers can work for only one series at once, taking them off the market for up to a year. And broadcast network reruns do not attract many viewers anymore, limiting residual payments. On the movie side, studios have cut way back on what is known as development, or the polishing and reworking of scripts to produce a good one.

“There’s a wild disparity between what writers are paid and the profits that are generated from their work,” Howard A. Rodman, president of the West guild, said in an interview this month. “If you look at the budgets of television shows, the part allotted for writing is generally 2 percent. That strikes me as a very small amount given the importance of writing to the enterprise.”

God bless
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an aspirin the size of the sun.

emblem boy posted...

What does Arkansas plan on doing once all the drugs they use for death penalty run out

Find new ways to kill people
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an aspirin the size of the sun.

GoatHunter posted...

Antifar posted...

Saloonist posted...

When is he allowed to earn money in your opinion

He's earning a $200,000 a year pension, for starters. +ongoing book royalties

Why are you butt sore?

#45 literally promoted marlago in the state dept web page. LITERALLY.

I already made that topic.
https://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/400-current-events/75273888

I am not a Trump supporter.
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an aspirin the size of the sun.

Mine, mainly.
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an aspirin the size of the sun.

Saloonist posted...

When is he allowed to earn money in your opinion

He's earning a $200,000 a year pension, for starters. +ongoing book royalties
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an aspirin the size of the sun.

The deal is that the death penalty is immoral and this man posed no threat to the society that killed him in 2017, to say nothing of the doubts regarding the fairness of his trial.
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an aspirin the size of the sun.

Yes, but he was until three months ago, and he would not be the first to parlay pro[x] moves as an official into cushy private gigs.
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an aspirin the size of the sun.

Wealth is fine, until it turns public officials into servants of corporate interests.
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an aspirin the size of the sun.

I hold the view that Harry Truman did; it's unbecoming of a president to go right from office to sucking at Wall Street's teat. I have no illusions about where Obama sucked from in office, but maybe something like this will convince those who spent years feeling Obama was a progressive constrained by DC reality.

The presidency shouldn't be a stepping stone to corporate wealth.
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an aspirin the size of the sun.

56 seems incredibly young for someone who was on TV in the 70s. I get she was young at the time, but
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an aspirin the size of the sun.

Ampelas posted...

What happened to

http://thehill.com/homenews/house/330186-bipartisan-lawmakers-call-for-clean-spending-bill-with-no-border-wall-funding#

?

A clean spending bill everyone was happy with but Trump

Bipartisanship happened.
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an aspirin the size of the sun.

Ah, the invisible hand has deemed that $400,000 in Obama's pocket maximizes efficiency, who are we to judge otherwise?
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an aspirin the size of the sun.

So, uh, seriously, are Democrats just pre-emptively giving Republicans what they want, or
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an aspirin the size of the sun.

Jesus Christ.
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an aspirin the size of the sun.

That's not even pronounced like damn
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an aspirin the size of the sun.

Update: they fucked it up

https://twitter.com/bellwak/status/856691741990285312
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an aspirin the size of the sun.

Paper_Okami posted...

Yes it it does, I still think he's the greatest president evil, but this was an unforgivable offense.

Freudian slip? lol
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an aspirin the size of the sun.

Asherlee10 posted...

@unclekoolaid73 - you have the headline wrong.

former Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean suggested that pro-life Americans are unwelcome in the party because the younger voters that Democrats need to energize are concerned with “social justice,”

Ah, shit, that's what this is? I just assumed Perez had said something following the controversy in Omaha; this whole topic has been about such a benign statement from Howard Dean? lol
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an aspirin the size of the sun.

Maeiv posted...

It's funny how so many history teachers gloss over the fact that FDR tried to rule the country like a king.

I don't know, I remember a lot about his court-packing stuff
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an aspirin the size of the sun.

I think the phrasing in the title was referring to candidates; voters are free to do as they please, but I don't think Democratic candidates should be running on pro-life platforms.
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an aspirin the size of the sun.

Suchomimus posted...

Do you guys think it takes away from FDR's presidency? He's consistently ranked as one of our greater leaders.

Yes, it does.
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an aspirin the size of the sun.

Do nothing:
- Things likely continue as before
- small chance of a catastrophic attack

Intervene
- Chaos in the region for years at a minimum, putting millions of South Koreans at immediate risk of retaliation

What this argument comes down to is just how small you think the chances of NK nuking a major city is. I don't think they're large enough to justify intervention by force.
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an aspirin the size of the sun.

Gojak_v3 posted...

A party that deals in such absolutes is doomed to fail

The Republican Party has ridden to success on absolutes over the past decade.
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an aspirin the size of the sun.

Are there any views you would say do not belong in the Democratic Party?
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an aspirin the size of the sun.

A party without basic principles is nothing. Women's control over their bodies should be a basic principle for Democrats.
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an aspirin the size of the sun.

QuantumScript posted...

North Korea does not care about self preservation.

I contend that they do. If they are as unhinged as you believe them to be, what explains their unwillingness to attack SK over the past six decades?
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an aspirin the size of the sun.

QuantumScript posted...

They're a militaristic nation that wants to expand its influence.

I have some bad news for you about the US, Russia, Israel, China...
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an aspirin the size of the sun.

QuantumScript posted...

hey can't do anything with them until they develop long-range capabilities.

They don't need long-range capabilities to hit Seoul.
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an aspirin the size of the sun.

Monday posted...

Is Antifar really arguing for NK to have nuclear weapons rite nao

My argument is that they already have nuclear weapons. What they don't have is the desire to use them given the response that would generate.
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an aspirin the size of the sun.

QuantumScript posted...

They have nuclear weapons already.

Correct. They have done nothing with them.

Your position contends that they will just...change this strategy one day, instead of doing what they've always done.
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an aspirin the size of the sun.

Hash-Brown posted...

That is pretty much what happened. Trump supporters really didn't come forward in the polls.

Results were within the margin of error in the swing states he won.
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an aspirin the size of the sun.

QuantumScript posted...

A possible conflict between the north and the south now...or a larger conflict in the future where North Korea launches nuclear weapons?

I think the first is a lot more possible than the second.
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an aspirin the size of the sun.

Hash-Brown posted...

Because much like the US I bet there are alot of supporters for LePen that are staying silent in these polls because of the violent left.

There's no evidence to suggest far right candidates outperform their polling
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/le-pen-is-in-a-much-deeper-hole-than-trump-ever-was/

However, there's no evidence that candidates such as Le Pen systematically outperform their polls. Across dozens of European elections since 2012, in fact, nationalist and right-wing parties have been as likely to underperform their polls as to overperform them.

I've built a database that covers the performance of right-wing parties and candidates, such as Le Pen and the National Front, in European elections since 2012. (More specifically, the parties are those identified by the New York Times as being "right-wing"; they "range across a wide policy spectrum, from populist and nationalist to far-right neofascist.") I found 47 elections during this period in which one of these parties competed and voters were regularly polled about it before the election. Some of these elections featured multiple right-wing parties or candidates, so there are a total of 66 data points.

On average, the right-wing parties were predicted to win 13.5 percent of the vote in polls conducted at the end of the campaign.2 And they wound up with an average of - 13.5 percent of the vote. Polls have been just as likely to overestimate nationalists as to underestimate them, in other words.

That includes the French, who already voted

Polls are anonymous; what sort of fear requires you to lie on the phone to a stranger?

Trump was trailing in polls by like 2-3 points (which was about right nationally). Le Pen is trailing by 20.
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an aspirin the size of the sun.

QuantumScript posted...

I could agree to allowing them nuclear weapons only if they were a civilized nation that wasn't starting shit every week.

Who decides what counts as "starting shit every week?"
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an aspirin the size of the sun.

lww99 posted...

But Obama

You've mistaken me for a Trump supporter
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an aspirin the size of the sun.

QuantumScript posted...

So you want them to have ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear payloads to American soil...because their current launches have been unsuccessful?

What is your proposed alternative?
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an aspirin the size of the sun.