The Resistance: Seeds Coming Up

From Nancy LeTourneau at Political Animal:

Finally, as a budding gardener pinning for spring up here in the tundra, I love this!

A Working-Class Job Worth Fighting For

I grew up with kids who graduated from college and earned mid-six-figures and proudly spoke of their fathers who were gas station attendants. I remember when the first self-serve gas stations appeared and everybody laughed and pointed. Who would ever go there if you had a choice?  But then gas prices spiked and the self-serves were a nickel cheaper and the repugs started destroying jobs and the rest is history.

Or maybe the future.

 

Erik Loomis at LGM:

There are times when I would like to just pop out of my car and pump my own gas. But then I realize that these are jobs. And jobs are important. The dismissal of these jobs goes very far to show how strongly we have internalized right-wing arguments about employment and innovation. Earlier today I discussed the idea, proposed by Democratic leaders a mere 40 years ago, that we should be able to sue the government if we can’t find a job and how this is completely lost to our ideas of what our relationship to the government could be in the present. In a similar vein, the idea of actual working-class employment repulses many of us if it bothers our idea of what work should be.

Oregon and New Jersey are the only two states to mandate gas station attendants. Are these great jobs? No. But what do you think actual working-class employment looks like? In a deindustrialized and automated economy, how many options do people like this have? It’s not a great job, but it tends to pay $1 or $2 higher than minimum wage so it places a slight upward pressure on wages for unskilled workers. Most, but certainly not all, gas station attendants are working class men. Many of them likely do not have a high school diploma. Some are missing teeth and things of this nature that make their employment in other fields kind of hard. This is also a job that allows people to interact with others, be outside, and work hard for a wage. For a lot of people, that is their desired result from a job. 

SNIP

This is why I strongly believe in full employment policy as the core of how to escape the jobless future. We can have a wide definition of what full employment is and we will need to. These are not easy policies to work out. But it’s a more solid political position, in my view. Even if a UBI (Universal Basic Income) is passed, Americans will still demand jobs. Even if you don’t want to work or think work sucks or want to be emancipated from work, you aren’t most people and neither am I.

Again, there’s nothing magical about gas pumping jobs. They aren’t great. But they are real. When we make fun of them, we need to examine our own prejudices toward working people and to examine how deeply we have internalized really awful narratives about work, technological innovation, and society. There may be reasons to not have gas pumping, but those who hate this aren’t really presenting very good ones. What would you have low-skill workers do? And if your primary driver in creating economic policy is “I don’t want to talk to people” or “This is dumb” or “I could do this faster,” you need to think a whole lot harder about your place in society and the world. A full employment economy may in fact require small sacrifices around the margins to make this work, such as you waiting 3 minutes for your gas to be pumped. This is not necessarily a bad thing given the societal benefits of full employment.

That the people in our economy who do the dirtiest, hardest and most necessary work - janitors, represent!- is a fundamental indictment of not just capitalism, but of our failure to establish economic justice.

Economic Justice is Racial Justice

There will always be white supremacist racist motherfuckers who will starve their own children rather than see a single morsel of food go to someone black or brown or muslim or LGBT or anything else they fear and hate.

Fuck them.  Guarantee civil and human rights to all, and let the chips fall where they may.

Paul Campos:

Currently there’s a fierce debate in the Democratic party and among what passes for the left in this country about the extent to which resistance to white nationalist authoritarianism, i.e., the contemporary Republican party, ought to focus on economic/class issues, or, supposedly in the alternative, what is called “identity politics.”

As many people are pointing out this is a false dichotomy.  This post is about some new data that highlight in the starkest terms two inexorably interrelated facts:

(1) Since the 1970s, the poor, the working class, and most of the middle class have seen (or rather failed to see, cf. the election of Donald Trump) essentially ALL the trillions of dollars of economic growth America has experienced over this time go, in ascending order of intensity, to the upper middle class, the middle upper class, the rich, the very rich, the obscenely rich, and the we don’t really have a word for that yet rich.

(2) Since the 1970s, what was at that time a shamefully vast gap between the economic status of white and black Americans has remained totally untouched by efforts to ameliorate it. (It would be more accurate to say that efforts to ameliorate it have been completely cancelled out by efforts to quash the former initiatives).

SNIP

It’s a commonplace of a lot of political argument in this country right now to claim that white working class resentment is based in the supposed economic decline of white America relative to the improving economic fortunes of black America. This relative decline is imaginary.

SNIP

Fighting for economic justice in this country is fighting for racial justice, and vice versa.

The Limitless Benefits of Being White

Not to mention the infrastructure and economic foundation built by slaves and slavery.

Erik Loomis at lGB:

White people benefit each and every day from the legacy of slavery and racism. They can move to the suburbs to “give their children the best education” because they have better jobs and histories of redlining, restrictive covenants, job flight, and violence made the suburbs traditionally a white-only space. They benefit from a lack of police violence. They benefit from better jobs and education. They benefit each and every day. The middle class is built on a foundation of slavery and racism. If we are going to accept those benefits, we also need to pay up to even the playing field. Otherwise, we are just continuing to invest and benefit from a racist society.

Justice Dept. to Locals: Stop Fleecing the Poor

Are you old enough and Southern enough to remember referring to impoverished white people as "white trash"?

That racist expression distinguished people who were trashy but white from people who were just trashy - that is, all non-white people.  Blacks in the South east of the Mississippi; Blacks, Mexicans and American Indians west of it.

The need to distinguish white trash from regular trash arose from the legal and social structures that sought to punish economically all non-whites - who were almost all poor - but which sometimes swept up poor whites, too.

After 150 years, the U.S. Justice Department might finally put an end to at least that vestige of slavery and Jim Crow.

Think Progress:

(In March), officials at the Department of Justice (DOJ) sent a letter to chief justices and court administrators across the country warning them against operating modern-day debtors’ prisons and deploying other tactics that harm the poor.

In the letter, Vanita Gupta, principal deputy assistant attorney general in the DOJ’s Civil Rights division, and Lisa Foster, director of the office for access to justice, warn against seven practices that turn courthouses into a source of revenue, rather than justice.

The letter reiterates that courts shouldn’t jail people who don’t pay fines and fees levied by the court without first determining whether they are able to pay. It says that courts should also consider options for those who can’t afford to pay the fines and fees that don’t include jail time. The letter mentions money bail schemes that result in poor people being jailed “solely because they cannot afford to pay for their release,” and condemns the use of arrest warrants or drivers license suspensions as a way to coerce people into paying. Those tactics make it more likely that the poor will be arrested, fined, and jailed simply because they couldn’t afford what they were charged with in the first place — while also making it likely they will miss work and fall further behind on payments.

In some places, the letter notes, defendants can’t even start a judicial hearing until their debts are cleared, an “unconstitutional practice” that is “often framed as a routine administrative matter.” The letter also warns against the practice of using private companies to enforce debt collection or probation, allowing them to profit from discretionary fines tacked on top of what defendants owe courts.

“Individuals may confront escalating debt; face repeated, unnecessary incarceration for nonpayment despite posing no danger to the community; lose their jobs; and become trapped in cycles of poverty that can be nearly impossible to escape,” the letter says. “Furthermore, in addition to being unlawful, to the extent that these practices are geared not toward addressing public safety, but rather toward raising revenue, they can cast doubt on the impartiality of the tribunal and erode trust between local governments and their constituents.”

SNIP

While debtors prisons were abolished in the 1800s and Supreme Court cases found that jailing people because they can’t pay debts without assessing their ability to pay violates the constitution, these practices have seen a resurgence across the country. Courts, particularly those in municipalities that are strapped for resources, levy fines and fees against defendants, and when they can’t pay often put them in jail until they can come up with the sum. Other municipalities turn the debtors over to private probation companies that can tack on fines and fees to what the defendants already owe at their discretion and have been accused of using intimidation tactics like threatening jail time to get clients to pay up. Yet those who have the resources to pay court fees on the spot can avoid jail time and probation.

SNIP

The department has also had its eye on problems with the money bail system. “When bail is set unreasonably high, people are behind bars only because they are poor,” Attorney General Loretta Lynch said at the White House in December. “Not because they’re a danger or a flight risk — only because they are poor. They don’t have money to get out of jail, and they certainly don’t have money to flee anywhere. Other people who do have the means can avoid the system setting inequality in place from the beginning.”

Yes, the Rich Have Too Stolen All Your Money; Let's Take It All Back

They do it every day, in an infinite number of ways.  They can do it and get away with it because the system is set up - rigged - that way.

Paul Campos at LGM:

The basic myth the right wing of The Money Party has sold to Republican voters over the past 40 years (the left wing of the party is called the Democrats) goes like this: the economy boomed in the decades immediately after World War II, and standards of living rose rapidly. But since then, too much government regulation, too many taxes, and an overly generous welfare system that has made Those People even lazier than they were before have combined to kill the American dream.

That is why ordinary Americans (aka working and middle-class white people) have bank accounts that don’t reflect the rewards they should have received for all their hard work. If not for government meddling we would have a thriving economy, just like the one we enjoyed back in the good old days.

All this is a fantastic lie, as a glance at the actual economic history of America since 1945 illustrates. (In what follows, all figures have been converted to constant, inflation-adjusted dollars).

America is a vastly wealthier country today than it was forty years ago. Furthermore, on a per-person basis, the country’s wealth has increased far more over the past four decades than it did in the thirty years immediately after World War II.

Here are the numbers: between 1945 and 1974, per capita GDP in the U.S. grew from $17,490 to $27,837. That is an impressive improvement, but it pales in comparison to what has happened since: in 2014, per capita GDP was $55,185, i.e., almost exactly double what it was in 1974. In terms of economic output, the country is twice as rich per person now as it was then.

Where has all this money gone? The answer ought to shock anyone who cares about either economic opportunity or increasing inequality. The average household income of the bottom 50% of American households was $25,475 in 1974, and $26,520 in 2014. In other words, half the population has gotten essentially none of the extra $10 trillion dollars of national wealth that the American economy has generated over the past forty years.

So taxing the living fuck out of everybody who has stolen that $10 trillion is not really taxing; it's forcing them to return what they've stolen.

Obama's Giveaways to "the blacks" Skipped African-American Kentuckians

Contrary to the fever dreams of wingnut racists, no, there really is not a secret welfare fund giving billions of dollars to black families in poverty while white families in poverty starve.  Not even in Obama's America.

And here's the proof:

According to data from the U.S. Census Bureau, African-Americans living in Kentucky saw their average yearly incomes drop by more than 11 percent in one year.

The Courier-Journal (http://cjky.it/1L0s1lr ) reports that the data released last week show that for black Kentuckians, household income fell from $30,183 annually to $26,735. The state's overall median household income fell by 2 percent from 2013 to 2014, from $44,097 in to $42,958.

During that same time period the poverty rate went up for African-Americans in Kentucky from 28.8 percent in 2013 to 32.4 percent. The state's overall poverty rate sat at 19.1 percent in 2014.

Incoming Louisville Urban League President and CEO Sadiqa Reynolds says the trend is troubling and underscores an urgency to create policies that will end cycles of poverty.

Why should you care? African-American families with 11 percent less income spend at least 11 percent less money at restaurants and clothing stores and car lots and on college tuition and rent and ball games.

And that means at least 11 percent fewer jobs and less income for everyone.

Something is way the fuck out of whack in this economy, and billionaire tax cheat Matt Bevin and his billionaire tax cheat friends are the reason.

True Story of the Bluegrass Pipeline Premiering at the Kentucky This Thursday

I saw the preview and it is wonderful. If you are not moved after watching it to take action for justice yourself, at the very least you will learn why it is a bad idea to get on the wrong side of nuns.

​

Please spread the word!

You can invite your friends on facebook at https://www.facebook.com/events/1640998036148861/

DVDs will be available at the screening, and can be ordered online at www.selluswilder.com/dvd.

Why Bernie? Because He Wants to Tax the Rich Out of Existence

It's not just the right thing to do. It's not just the only thing that will restore a middle-class economy.  It's the thing you know you really, really want.

Think Progress:

In an interview with CNBC’s John Harwood, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), who is running for the Democratic presidential candidacy, said he could back a 90 percent top marginal tax rate.

Harwood brought up that some have likened efforts to combat income inequality to Nazi Germany. Sanders noted sarcastically, “When radical, socialist Dwight D. Eisenhower was president, I think the highest marginal tax rate was something like 90 percent.”

Harwood followed up by asking, “When you think about something like 90 percent, you don’t think that’s obviously too high?” to which Sanders replied, “No.”

He continued, “What I think is obscene…when you have the top one-tenth of one percent owning almost as much as the bottom 90.”

Sanders is right that the top marginal tax rate, that paid by the wealthiest Americans, was around 90 percent under Eisenhower — it was actually 92 percent in the 1950s. Today, the top marginal tax rate is 39.6 percent, although the richest 1 percent end up paying less than that on average and the average rate actually fell for many years.

Republicans have consistently claimed that higher tax rates on the wealthy will hold back economic growth, while lowering rates further will spur it forward.

But that’s not likely the case. Last year, economists found that the point at which the top tax rate is high enough to maximize government revenues but not so high that it discourages the rich from trying to earn more is quite high: about 95 percent for the 1 percent. History bears that out. Economists have pointed out that post-war American growth has been higher during periods with much higher top marginal tax rates and lower when tax rates were substantially lower. When the top rate was more than 90 percent in the 50s, economic growth averaged more than 4 percent a year. But recently when the top rate has been closer to 35 percent, growth has been less than 2 percent a year on average.

The point of higher tax rates isn’t just to penalize the rich, of course. They would need to serve a policy function. For Sanders, that’s combatting income inequality. “If you have seen a massive transfer of wealth from the middle class to the top tenth of one percent, you’ve got to transfer that back,” he told Harwood.

A 90 percent top tax rate could achieve that goal. The same economists who found that the rich can swallow a 95 percent rate also found that a 90 percent tax rate for the 1 percent could significantly reduce the Gini index, a measure of income inequality. It would also help lower wealth inequality. Meanwhile, everyone’s wellbeing would improve, rich and poor alike.

So far, many Republican presidential candidates have proposed a radically different approach: a flat tax. Sen. Ted Cruz (TX), Sen. Rand Paul (KY), and Ben Carson have all backed this idea. The details of each proposal differs, but the basic premise is an attempt to simplify the tax code by only having one rate that everyone pays, rather than the current system rates increase as income increases. An analysis of one flat tax plan put forward by Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) found that it would raise taxes for those at the bottom of the income scale by between $102 and $462, while the tax bill for those making more than $1 million a year would decrease by about a half million dollars.

It would also lower government revenue by between $500 and $1 trillion a year. If a candidate wanted to maintain the current level of revenue, it would require taxing everyone, rich or poor, by at least 25 percent.

Jobs for Everyone Disappear Because of Conservatard Racism

Actually, conservatard racism is literally why we can't have anything decent or humane in this country: universal health care, living wages, workers' rights, decent housing, free higher education and all the other social goods enjoyed for decades by people in prosperous European countries are denied to all Americans, including white people, because racists would rather millions of their fellow whites get nothing than a black person get a single penny.

Digby:

I have written for a long time that the fact that the public sector helped build the black middle class over the past four decades is one of the main reasons the right wing hates it so much.  I've heard the racist talk for years when I've stood in line at the DMV and the Post Office or overhearing conversations about "the problem with teachers." (You don't hear it as much about cops and firefighters, but all you have to do is look at the lawsuits against "quotas" to know it exists.)  These people consider government work largely a "welfare program" and resent the fact that public employees have good benefits and decent salaries because they are undeserving. And by "undeserving" they mean black. 

Racism isn't the only explanation for the right's hostility to public sector jobs. But it underlies much of conservatism's ongoing loathing for government which many of them see as catering to the lazy, undeserving poor (even those who work for a living!).  If the government benefits African Americans in some way, regardless of whether it also benefits whites, some people are against it.

Your Occasional Bernie

This is how you fight a class war.  This is how you win.

 

Via Down with Tyranny:

This Isn't Public Safety; This Is Stealing From the Poor to Engorge Rich Corporations

We've all forgotten our Willie Sutton: You tax the fuck out of the rich for the same reason Willie robbed banks: because that's where the money is.

Stealing from the poor just impoverishes the rest of us.

Think Progress:

With federal action expected this summer to regulate the cost of prison phone calls, the National Sheriffs’ Association announced they may “significantly limit or eliminate altogether” the right of prisoners to make those calls.

Incarcerated people and their families — who are disproportionately low-income — have fought for decades against the often exorbitant rates charged for a phone call home by companies that hold exclusive contracts and provide kickbacks to the jails themselves.

In 2013, they appeared to win a major victory when the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) passed an interim rule to cap the cost of calls between states at 25 cents per minute — meaning 15-minute calls that used to be as high as $17 could no longer cost more than $3.25. In announcing the change, the FCC said the current fee structure is “unjust and unreasonable.”

But this reform has sparked a revolt from those who benefited financially from the old system: the prison phone industry that makes more than a billion a year in profits, and the state and county governments that get “commissions” from those calls that they use to pad their budget. In some states, commissions make up as much as 94 percent of the cost of the call, funneling millions of dollars to cash-strapped local jurisdictions.

Deborah Golden, an attorney with the DC Prisoners’ Rights Project, told ThinkProgress she views these commissions as “another tax on poor people and people of color.”

It's Economic Violence That's Killing Our Cities

There's not a rich person or corporation in this country that didn't get that way by cheating and stealing from the poor. That doing so also keeps the blahs down is just a bonus.

Zandar:

Charles Warren details in The Atlantic how Ferguson, Missouri spent years using its police as a taxation force, harassing the (mostly black) citizenry to raise money to run the local government despite Ferguson being the home of a $24 billion Fortune 500 corporation.

Take a walk along West Florissant Avenue, in Ferguson, Missouri. Head south of the burned-out Quik Trip and the famous McDonalds, south of the intersection with Chambers, south almost to the city limit, to the corner of Ferguson Avenue and West Florissant. There, last August, Emerson Electric announced third-quarter sales of $6.3 billion. Just over half a mile to the northeast, four days later, Officer Darren Wilson killed Michael Brown. The 12 shots fired by Officer Wilson were probably audible in the company lunchroom. 

Outwardly, at least, the City of Ferguson would appear to occupy an enviable position. It is home to a Fortune 500 firm. It has successfully revitalized a commercial corridor through its downtown. It hosts an office park filled with corporate tenants. Its coffers should be overflowing with tax dollars. 

Instead, the cash-starved municipality relies on its cops and its courts to extract millions in fines and fees from its poorest residents, issuing thousands of citations each year. Those tickets plug a financial hole created by the ways in which the city, the county, and the state have chosen to apportion the costs of public services. A century or more of public-policy choices protect the wallets of largely white business and property owners and pass the bills along to disproportionately black renters and local residents. It's easy to see the drama of a fatal police shooting, but harder to understand the complexities of municipal finances that created many thousands of hostile encounters, one of which turned fatal.

The familiar convention of the true-crime story turns out to be utterly inadequate for describing the social, economic, and legal subjection of black people in Ferguson, or anywhere in America. Understanding this requires looking beyond the 90-second drama to the 90 years of entrenched white supremacy and black disadvantage that preceded it.

The key to Ferguson's plight is nothing less than decades of a regressive "race to the bottom" taxation system designed exclusively to benefit white property owners and businesses at the expense of black tenants and renters.

Like most of the rest of St. Louis Country, mid-century Ferguson was defended by exclusionary zoning codes and whites-only collusion in the real estate market. In the 1960s Ferguson was known as a “sun-down” community: African Americans, mostly from neighboring Kinloch, came in to work in the houses of wealthy whites in Ferguson during the day, but were expected to be out of town by the time the sun set. To this day, the adjacent cities are joined by only two through streets, the Ferguson city line runs down a neutral zone lined on either side with mirror-image three-way intersections. If you have been to St. Louis, you likely landed in Kinloch. Over the last three decades, the vast majority of that city’s black residents have been displaced to accommodate the expansion of Lambert-St. Louis Airport. Over the same period of time, a small number of African American homeowners and a much larger number of African American renters have gradually replaced whites in Ferguson. Ferguson, which was almost entirely white in 1970, today has a black majority. 

In 1981, a federal judge in Missouri declared that the “severe” residential segregation of the St. Louis metropolitan area had produced a constitutionally impermissible degree of segregation in the region’s schools. The court tasked the East-West Gateway Government Council and the Missouri Housing Development Commission with developing a plan to desegregate the metropolitan area, but they simply ignored the ruling. At the turn of the 21st century, almost one-half of St. Louis County’s 90-odd municipalities had black populations under 5 percent.

And that brings us to Emerson Electric.

For tax purposes, Emerson’s Ferguson campus is appraised according to its “fair market value.” That means a $50 million dollar solar-powered data center is only worth what another firm would be willing to pay for it. “Our location in Ferguson affects the fair market value of the entire campus,” Polzin explained. By this reasoning, the condition of West Florissant Avenue explains the low valuation of the company’s headquarters. 

In fact, the opposite is true: The rock-bottom assessment value of the Ferguson campus helps ensure that West Florissant Avenue remains in its current condition, year after year. It severely limits the tax money Emerson contributes to the Ferguson-Florissant district’s struggling schools (Michael Brown graduated from nearby Normandy High School, a nearly 100 percent African American school that has been operating without state accreditation for the last two years), and to the government of St. Louis County more generally. On the 25 parcels Emerson owns all around St. Louis County, it pays the county $1.3m in property taxes. Ferguson itself receives far less. Even after a 2013 property tax increase (from $0.65 to the state-maximum $1 per $100 of assessed value), Ferguson received an estimated $68,000 in property taxes from the corporate headquarters that occupies 152 acres of its tax base—not even enough to pay the municipal judge and his clerk to hand out the fines and sign the arrest warrants. 

St. Louis County doesn’t just assess Emerson a low market value. It then divides that number in three—so its final property value, for tax purposes, ends up being one third of its already low appraised value. In some states, Ferguson would be able to offset this write-down by raising its own percentage tax rate. Voters would even be able to decide which services needed the most help and raise property taxes for specific reasons. But Missouri sets a limit for such levies: $1 per $100 of property. As Joseph Pulitzer wrote of St. Louis during the first Gilded Age, “millions and millions of property in this city escape all taxation."

A $24 billion company generates just $68,000 in taxes for the city in which it resides.  One percent of assessed value.  Put the $50 billion data center in a place like Ferguson and it becomes nearly worthless to tax.

America is broken.

How to Get Back All the Money the Rich Stole

The next time somebody says that the government doesn't have the money to do something, print out this article, wrap it around a brick and then smack that somebody in the head with it.

There's plenty of money. Trillions of dollars in fact.  Blatantly stolen by the motherfucking rich, who are sitting on it and laughing their asses off at the rest of it.

Let's get it back.

David Sirota:

Roads are crumbling, bridges require repairs, schools need upgrades and public pension systems remain underfunded. How can states and cities find the money to address any of these problems? One way could be through their tax codes.

According to a new report, if the rich paid the same state and local tax rate as the middle class, states and cities would have hundreds of billions of dollars more a year in public revenue.

Last month, the nonpartisan Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy found that the poorest 20 percent of households pay on average more than twice the effective state and local tax rate (10.9 percent) as the richest 1 percent of taxpayers (5.4 percent).

That preceded the new report from the left-leaning groups Good Jobs First and the Keystone Research Center which finds that if tax laws were changed to compel the highest income earners to pay the same rate as everyone else, states and localities would rake in up to $128 billion a year in new revenue. If just the top 1 percent of earners were compelled to pay the typical middle-class tax rate, the report says the change would raise more than $68 billion in new annual revenues.

Join Kentuckians for the Commonwealth on Economic Justice Day at the Capitol. Find your legislators and ask them why Kentucky taxes working people more than the lazy rich (in Kentucky, poors pay 12 percent in state taxes; the rich pay 6 percent.)

Join us on Wednesday for KFTC’s Economic Justice Lobby Day in Frankfort!
We’ll of course be lobbying on bills that have an impact – minimum wage, housing and renters’ rights, tax fairness and revenue that makes sense.

It’s also important that our legislators understand the impact of the wealth gap in Kentucky. So we’ll be doing a demonstration to lift up Kentucky’s income gap to legislators, reminding them of their important role in closing the gap with good economic policy that puts people first.

Meet in the Capitol Annex Room 171 starting at 8:30 a.m.! Wear black if you can, and bring something small that symbolizes what economic stability means to you. Register here to let us know you’re coming!

KFTC’s Economic Justice Lobby Day is Wednesday, March 4, and you can take action today, too!

HB 374 would close some corporate tax loopholes to raise about $66 million in revenue. This revenue would fund a 7.5% state Earned Income Tax Credit, which would help low-income working families become more financially secure. Rep. Jim Wayne is sponsoring the bill, and Speaker Greg Stumbo is the primary cosponsor.

The bill is getting called up in the Appropriations and Revenue Committee on Tuesday at 10 a.m. We need to make sure that the members of that committee have the opportunity to vote on the bill.

Take Action

Call the Legislative Message Line at 1-800-372-7181 (open 7 a.m. to 11 p.m.). Leave a message for your representative, the House Appropriations and Revenue Committee, and House leadership: “I’m another Kentuckian for tax fairness. Please vote yes on HB 374, and send it to the Senate.”

Learn more from the Kentucky Center for Economic Policy:

• Find a map that shows how your county would benefit from an EITC like the one in HB 374. It’d be great to add a sentence about how many people in your county would benefit from a state EITC in your message above!
  

• Find a policy brief about HB 374.

It IS A Black Thing, But It's Also a Poor Thing

daChipster nails the real reason the rich don't want to share money with the poor: because then they'd also have to share the power.

But, it’s not a “black thing.”

In fact, with all due respect to the black community, most of what’s going on is not about them, per se.

It’s not black-white. Or brown-white. Or yellow-white. It’s not a race or color thing at all.

It’s a poor thing.

SNIP

Those who stand in opposition to Affirmative Action, public education, and other attempts to level the playing field bleat phrases like “Equality of Opportunity, not Equality of Outcome!” All the while, equality of opportunity is a sham.

The only people with equal opportunity are those who can pay for it.

The only people with equal justice are those who can pay for it.

The only people with equal police protection are those who can pay for it.

The only people with equal access to reproductive health are those who can pay for it.

The only people with equal political speech are those who can pay for it.

The only people with equal access to the ballot are those who can pay for it.

The only people with equal representation in Washington are those who can pay for it.

SNIP

It’s a poor thing.

Remember, chipster: no one on the Ferguson grand jury was rich by your measure. But three-quarters of those jurors were white.

Angry Atheists

Divine Irony:

How the Looters Steal From the Rest of Us

If corporations are people, then make them pay the same share of taxes that people pay.

 

David Atkins at Hullabaloo:

Chart of the day: personal versus corporate income taxes

If you want to know what's wrong America, you could do worse than starting here, courtesy The Swarm Lab:



As I have argued frequently in the past, there are many external factors that help the ultra-rich hoard America's wealth. But intentional plutocrat-friendly tax policy is certainly a big factor, too.

To Save Science, We Must Tax Billionaires Out of Existence

Actually, to save anything good in America and the world, we must tax billionaires out of existence, but why not start with science.

Down with Tyranny:

American billionaires pay virtually no taxes in relation to the amount of wealth they have accumulated. We usually read about it-- if ever-- in regard to the unconscionable and growing wealth back in our country. Income inequality is starting to come up, albeit just barely, as a topic of discussion among political elites. But this weekend, the NY Times pointed to another consequence: the privatization of scientific research. William Broad wrote that "American science, long a source of national power and pride, is increasingly becoming a private enterprise." President Obama may brag about the role of government in inventing the Internet, developing life-saving drugs and putting a man on the moon, but "[i]n Washington, budget cuts have left the nation’s research complex reeling. Labs are closing. Scientists are being laid off. Projects are being put on the shelf, especially in the risky, freewheeling realm of basic research. Yet from Silicon Valley to Wall Street, science philanthropy is hot, as many of the richest Americans seek to reinvent themselves as patrons of social progress through science research."

Read the whole thing.

Treason in Defense of Greed

Political Animal:

* U.S.-based multinationals have now amassed $1.95 trillion in offshore assets. They’re patriots, too.

They get all the benefits - legal protections, government research and development, constitutional status as "persons," and of course trillions of taxpayer dollars in subsidies - of being U.S. companies, without the drag of having to pay actual taxes to the nation that supports their mooching, stealing, traitorous asses.

That Radical Commie Martin Luther King Jr.

Of course prophets are never honored in their own country. But America in particular is a genius at white-washing and borifying "heroes" who were condemned as traitors or worse in their own time and would still be condemned today if their actual politics were acknowledged and publicized.

Peter Dreier at Truthout:

The official US beatification of Martin Luther King has come at the heavy price of silence about his radical espousal of economic justice and anticolonialism.

It is easy to forget that in his day, in his own country, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was considered a dangerous troublemaker. Even President John Kennedy worried that King was being influenced by Communists. King was harassed by the FBI and vilified in the media. The establishment's campaign to denigrate King worked. In August 1966 - as King was bringing his civil rights campaign to Northern cities to address poverty, slums, housing segregation and bank lending discrimination - the Gallup Poll found that 63 percent of Americans had an unfavorable opinion of King, compared with 33 percent who viewed him favorably.

Today Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. is viewed as something of an American saint. The most recent Gallup Poll discovered that 94 percent of Americans viewed him in a positive light. His birthday is a national holiday. His name adorns schools and street signs. In 1964, at age 35, he was the youngest person to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. Americans from across the political spectrum invoke King's name to justify their beliefs and actions.

In fact, King was a radical. He believed that America needed a "radical redistribution of economic and political power." He challenged America's class system and its racial caste system. He was a strong ally of the nation's labor union movement. He was assassinated in April 1968 in Memphis, where he had gone to support a sanitation workers' strike. He opposed US militarism and imperialism, especially the country's misadventure in Vietnam.

In his critique of American society and his strategy for changing it, King pushed the country toward more democracy and social justice.