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Category: Money & Politics

The US Public Domain floodgates prepare to open

It’s hard to believe that the major media companies will actually let things start sliding into the public domain again on 1 January 2019. But is there any desire or will in Congress to protect Big Media right now? (This may be the sole tarnished silver lining of having the GOP in charge, given that the Dems have tended to be more Big Media-friendly.)

Here’s hoping the past starts being accessible again.




A Mass of Copyrighted Works Will Soon Enter the Public Domain – The Atlantic
For the first time in two decades, a huge number of books, films, and other works will escape U.S. copyright law.

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I guess Trump doesn’t need the farm vote

Surprising absolutely nobody (except maybe the President of the United States), China is retaliating on Trump’s Chinese aluminum and steel tariffs with 15% tariff on American fruits and nuts (China is the third largest importer of such items, or at least has been) and 25% on pork and other goods (the US sold $1B in pork products to China last year).

There are certainly legitimate concerns over China’s steel and aluminum exports to the US, but starting a trade war over them is not going to be terribly productive. Maybe some of those farmers who thought Trump would be great for their business might want to give the White House a call about it.




China to slap tariffs on 128 U.S. goods – POLITICO

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FCC tries to have its cake and eat it, too

Or, maybe, say that they have no authority to do anything about net neutrality, but that they can block individual states from doing anything about net neutrality.

Quite a number of states aren’t having any of it and are taking that contradiction to court.

#netneutrality




How the FCC May Have Shot Itself in the Foot on Net Neutrality
News: When AT&T, Verizon and Comcast lobbied the Trump FCC to ignore the public and kill net neutrality last fall, they also convinced t

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Infrastructure, Regulations, and Lies

A look at one of Donald Trump’s go-to lines from his “State of the Union” self-applause-fest:

America is a nation of builders. We built the Empire State Building in just one year. Isn’t it a disgrace that it can now take ten years just to get a minor permit approved for the building of a simple road.

Trump has said this multiple times in the past, and as he lurches toward an “infrastructure” bill, I’m sure we’ll hear more. But is it actually true? And, if permitting of federal-level infrastructure projects takes time … is that a good thing or a bad thing?

We all dislike restraints on our actions. But those restraints, regulations, permission processes, reviews, etc., are usually in place for actual historical reasons. And before we toss them out because they are inconvenient and make it difficult for someone to make more money faster, they need to be looked at from that historical perspective. Otherwise we get that whole “are condemned to repeat it” thing going again.

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Draining the swamp … right into his own coffers

It’s good to have the President of the United States owe you millions of dollars.

The Trump administration has waived part of the punishment for five megabanks whose affiliates were convicted and fined for manipulating global interest rates. One of the Trump administration waivers was granted to Deutsche Bank — which is owed at least $130 million by President Donald Trump and his business empire, and has also been fined for its role in a Russian money laundering scheme.

The waivers were issued in a little-noticed announcement published in the Federal Register during the Christmas holiday week. They come less than two years after then-candidate Trump promised “I’m not going to let Wall Street get away with murder.”

The article correctly points out that the Obama Administration issued similar waivers — though it’s worth noting that Trump has issued them for three years, rather than one, and, again, one of the beneficiaries is a bank that Trump owes at least $130M, and possibly as much as $300M.




Trump Administration Waives Punishment For Convicted Banks, Including Deutsche — Which Trump Owes Millions
President Donald Trump owes millions to Deutsche Bank, which was one of five convicted banks that just saw its punishment waived by the Labor Department.

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Everyone gets offshore oil drilling … except, it seems, Florida

After Trump’s Interior Secretary Zinke announced that pretty much everywhere would now be open to offshore oil drilling (and it was also announced that a bunch of regulations put in place around offshore drilling in the aftermath of the BP oil disaster a few years back), there was a lot of outrage from (among others) lots of different states that happen to have coastlines that they would rather not seen covered with spilled out (or coastal views they would just as soon have filled with offshore derricks [1]).

Well, worry not, because it’s easy to get out of offshore oil development: just ask!

Zinke announced today that, no, there won’t be any exploration off the coast of Florida. All Gov. Rick Scott had to do was ask.

Oh, and be a loyal Trump supporter.

Oh, and be running for the US Senate and wanting to avoid having Floridans, including even maybe some Republicans, being pissed off about offshore drilling.

Of course, the excuse looks to be “Florida is unique and its coasts are heavily reliant on tourism as an economic driver.” Because I’m sure no other coastal states are “unique,” or that their coasts are reliant on tourism, or fisheries, or other things that big oil spills might damage.

California? Virginia? Maine? Washington? Alaska? Ugly coastlines, no tourists, drill, baby, drill.

It’s good to be a political ally of the the majority party, whether it’s getting access to all that precious oil and gas for your bottom line, or sealing it off so that you get votes for a Senate run.

——
[1] Insert ironic comment here about how Donald Trump pitched a hissy-fit over wind farms offshore from his Scottish golf course.




The Trump Administration Will Not Allow Drilling Off the Florida Coast
Florida’s GOP Governor opposed the idea

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The Republican “Victory”

So by running roughshod over every convention, forcing through a closed-door-written one-party budget with no hearings or even opportunity for input from the opposition, hand-waving polling that says the measure is highly unpopular, dropping any pretense of being the “fiscally responsible’ party by racking up a $1.5T debt over the next ten years, impacting the lower and middle class the most (including raising taxes for some of them), slashing taxes primarily for the wealthy and super-wealthy, and sweetening the pot to get final approval by throwing suitcases full of money at wavering GOP Senators, the GOP in Congress — and the President — have scored a great “victory.”

It’s true that this will mean fiscal victory for the time being for the GOP Donor class, and for most of those GOP Reps and (particularly) Senators. But I have to believe that this victory — which you will hear our toddler-in-chief crow about on a weekly basis for the rest of his presidency — will be Pyrrhic at best, that it will have profoundly negative political consequences in 2018 and 2020 for the Republican party, and that while no doubt some of the politicians involved will cash out successfully (at the mere cost of their souls), their “brand” has taken a crippling wound that it will take a generation to recover from.

Which doesn’t mean a lot of non-politicians won’t get hurt in the meantime, of course. But in desperation to score a “victory,” any “victory,” the Republicans have ruined themselves.

(As a note about the political hackery involved in this effort, there’s word that Trump won’t sign the bill until January, so that the automatic cuts to Medicare, etc., won’t take place until 2019, after the midterm elections. Can’t have the folk still being allowed to vote feeling too much pain too soon.)




House sends GOP tax bill to Trump’s desk – CNNPolitics
Republicans plan a celebration at the White House with President Donald Trump after their most significant legislative victory of 2017.

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Trump drops climate change as a national security threat

Indeed, in the Administration’s new National Security Strategy, it’s “an anti-growth energy agenda” that’s a threat to the world, and that only American can lead the way out of.

Which sounds like a weaselly way of saying that climate change is too expensive to deal with, particularly in terms of energy company profits, and the oil/coal/gas must flow, so suck it up, future, because Donald won’t be around in a few decades, so what the hell does he care what happens then?




Trump Administration Dropping Climate Change As National Security Threat
Hurricanes, floods, and fires don’t count.

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Laws and Sausages

As Otto von Bismarck didn’t actually say, you shouldn’t watch either laws or sausages being made. That said, the GOP Tax Cut for the Wealthy Bill’s process in getting made, remade, reprocessed, compromised, wheeled-and-dealed, etc., is particularly … sausage-like. Except we’re all going to be dealing with the heartburn.

[via BoingBoing]

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Your tax dollars at work

What do school vouchers mean in this age of Betsy DeVos?

Vouchers for private education are not new to this Administration, but as Trump’s Secretary of Education, De Vos has been pushing those programs like crazy. Public schools, after all, are full of government and unions and even (crazy though it sounds) minorities and poor people and unbelievers. Only by taking tax dollars and turning them over to private educational institutions can good people get the right-thinking education for their successors followers children.

So what sorts of things do kids get to learn at some of the more, um, devout private schools that are paid for by voucher programs?

— How Satan invented “psychology” and “evolution” in the late 1800s in a plot against the growth of Christianity in the United States.

— How women getting the vote led to increasingly un-Biblical behavior in the United States.

— How the Civil War was really a punishment by God of blasphemy and religious cults, and how He made a good thing out of it by causing the South to rise again as the Bible Belt.

Remember, these are lessons being taught from book being bought with your tax dollars, handed over to religious zanies running private schools who are thrilled to have such funding, even as they despise the government that makes it possible.




These Schools Are Teaching Some Truly Insane Things
HuffPost looked into the curricula at Betsy DeVos’s preferred form of education.

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Fight to keep Net Neutrality

This is an important cause, if only because so much of our lives is now based on Internet access. That’s not going to change any time soon — but getting rid of Net Neutrality is going to give big media companies and the ISPs they own (or who own them) much more of a say in what you have access to online.

The chances the GOP-domiated FCC is going to actually listen to anyone about this is passingly small, as their minds are clearly made up. But staying silent isn’t going to help, either.

Originally shared by +Doyce Testerman:

CONGRATULATIONS, everybody! We only have 10 days to fight the FCC & the repeal of #NetNeutrality!

Thanks to John Oliver there’s a SUPER easy way to do this.

Here’s what you can do – takes less than a minute:

1. Go to gofccyourself.com
(the shortcut John Oliver made to the hard-to-find FCC comment page)

2. Click on the 17-108 link (Restoring Internet Freedom)

3. Click on “express +” (see the picture I attached)

4. Be sure to hit “ENTER” after you put in your name & info so it registers.

5. In the comment section write, “I strongly support net neutrality backed by Title 2 oversight of ISPs.”

5. Click to submit, done. – Make sure you hit submit at the end!

Feel free to share this

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How can you tell when an ISP is lying?

When its marketing people are talking.

Either …

… Net Neutrality regulations under Title II status were a horrifyingly bad thing for the networking industry, suppressing investment, quashing innovation, and making a great case to Republicans for getting rid of such regulation.

… or …

… Net Neutrality had little to no effect, with robust ISPs continuing to invest and grow and innovate, and making a great case for Investors to keep driving up the company stock price.

Of course, Charter can have it both ways, because the GOP was always going to get rid of Net Neutrality once it came to power, and who cares if someone notices Charter saying contradictory things because what’s anyone going to do about it?




Charter brags about big speed boost—after saying Title II stalled investment
Charter told investors that net neutrality regs “didn’t really hurt us.”

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Oops — the GOP tax bill also screwed over some major GOP supporters

In their unseemly rush to get the Senate Tax Bill passed — rush so great that the final 400-odd page version was handed out to Senators only a few hours before the vote, including hand-written marginal notes as part of the law — they managed to screw up their own repeal/reduction of the Alternate Minimum Tax for corporations.

It will probably get “fixed” in reconciliation with the House, but it’s a sign of the dangers in throwing everything and the kitchen sink into complex legislation at the very last second, skipping any hearings or review, and hoping all will turn out okay.




Senate Republicans Accidentally Killed Some of Their Donors’ Favorite Tax Breaks
Passing a tax bill that you wrote over lunch — and never actually read — appears to have some downsides.

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As with Climate Change, Republicans have become Economics Deniers

Do they actually believe in supply-side economics? Or is that just a rhetorical cover for cutting the taxes their donors want cut?

See also a couple of pertinent John Kenneth Galbraith quotations:




The Republican War on Economics
Even the most liberal Republican denies basic economics.

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Who’s breathing easy at the end of the Estate Tax?

If you earn a big chunk of money from working, you owe taxes on it. Similarly, if you get a really, really, really big chunk of money as an inheritance, you should owe taxes on it, too.

That’s the basic principle of the estate tax. It’s not a “death tax.” It’s not a tax on someone who’s passed on. It’s a tax on the person who’s inheriting the wealth. And at $5.5M for an individual’s estate, or $11M for a couple (should they pass at the same time), the number of people impacted by the estate tax was trivial, and only among the most wealthy who could afford it.

Seventy-two percent of estate tax payments come from the top 1 percent of U.S. taxpayers; 42 percent comes from the top 0.1 percent.

Not the sort of thing anyone but a handful of Americans have to worry about. Yet the the GOP has insisted, to the point of a sacred mantra, that the estate tax is bankrupting family farms (poor barely-scraping-by farmers, suddenly driven out of business by wicked Uncle Sam) and destroying family wealth.

Nowhere is the cognitive dissonance (or, alternately, blatant lying) about the tax more clear than in Sen. Chuck Grassley’s (R-Iowa) recent comments:

An estate tax effectively and unfairly taxes a person’s earnings twice, he argued: first when they earn it and again when they die.

At the same time, Grassley was more than happy to rescind the federal tax exemption for state and local income tax, thus very distinctly “taxing a person’s earnings twice.”

And, he added, it penalizes savers without touching spenders. “I think not having the estate tax recognizes the people that are investing,” Grassley said, “as opposed to those that are just spending every darn penny they have, whether it’s on booze or women or movies.”

Right. If you aren’t saving enough to pass on a $5.5M estate, then clearly you’re just throwing it all away on “booze or women or movies.”

That’s how the GOP politicians think. Or, alternately, what they want the American public (very, very few of whom will have an estate that large) to think.

And that’s why tax bill they just passed essentially gets rid of the estate tax. Because the folk who are inheriting multi-million dollar estates need every single penny.

Remember that in 2018.




Estate taxes never threatened many Iowa farmers, but GOP slashes them anyway
For years, U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley has argued the estate tax hurts Iowa family farmers. But only 65 farms in the whole country actually pay it.

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The remarkable list of “economists” who supported the GOP tax bill

The Senate GOP and President Trump touted loudly a list of 137 economists who supported the Senate tax bill as being a really, awfully, terribly keen idea.

A closer look at those 137 show a few … um … issues. Non-economists. Retirees who aren’t listed as such. At least one guy who doesn’t recall sending such a letter. Some folk who work for organizations that are always for tax cuts. Some folk who actually work for banks. And at least one person who may not actually exist.

Maybe we can get that Voter Truth Commission to look at this list.

Not that it made any difference in the Senate throwing around enough favors and pork to get the votes they needed. But it’s worth bearing in mind the next time they start claiming Neutral Support from Learned Individuals for one of their boondoggles.




GOP’s List of Economists Backing Tax Cut Includes Ghosts, Office Assistants, Ex-Felons, and a Sprinkling of Real Economists
Paul Ryan has touted a list of economists who support the GOP tax plan, but the list holds up under scrutiny about as well as the tax plan itself.

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Trump’s disdain for Native Americans isn’t limited to all the “Pocahontas” jabs

And he’s moving to express it with all available speed. After all, there’s Obama Era actions to undo, oil and gas interests to pay back, and environmentalists and minorities to torque off. The man’s on a schedule people!

…[T]the president will visit Salt Lake City, Utah, next Monday to announce that he’s shrinking national monuments of huge importance to Native Americans. Without visiting the monuments he’s targeted, Trump is expected to announce his decision on a review conducted by Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke. He reportedly told Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) that he will shrink the 1.35 million acres Bears Ears and 1.9 million acres Grand Staircase-Escalante monuments to a fraction of their original sizes.

More specifically, Bears Ears will be cut to 100,000 to 300,000 acres; Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument will be shrunk in half, to between 700,000 and 1.2 million acres.

But take the long view, folks. I’m sure that when coal, oil, and gas interests are done, and other business interests have had their go at the territory, everyone will agree that the areas outside the redrawn monuments won’t be worth preserving.




After insulting Native Americans, Trump goes after their sacred land
Ancient rock carvings, burial grounds, and ceremonial sites are all at stake.

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“Science? We don’ need no steekin’ science!”

Not surprisingly, Scott Pruitt doesn’t consider the EPA climate report that says, yup, humans are definitely causing significant climate change, to actually say that humans are definitely causing significant climate change.

In an interview with USA Today, Pruitt said the climate report will not stop his agency from moving forward with dismantling the Obama-era Clean Power Plan, which was designed to cut global warming pollutants from coal-burning power plants. […] “We’re taking the very necessary step to evaluate our authority under the Clean Air Act and we’ll take steps that are required to issue a subsequent rule. That’s our focus,” Pruitt said. “Does this report have any bearing on that? No it doesn’t. It doesn’t impact the withdrawal and it doesn’t impact the replacement,” he said. […] “Obviously the climate is changing and has always changed, (and) humans contribute to that. Measuring with exact precision is very challenging,” Pruitt said. “So I think the report (is) good to encourage an open dialogue on this.”

This has nothing to do with open dialog. Not when dialog is about evading, denying, and discrediting. Or pretending to science when making decisions about what is scientific fact is just about what’s convenient, profitable, or ideologically proper.

We live in mad times.




Shocking no one, the EPA’s Scott Pruitt denies findings of new climate science report
Oh, you mean THAT climate report? Yeah, still no.

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Trump makes the ultimate sacrifice for the middle class

Never mind what you’ve heard from … well … pretty much everyone. The GOP Tax Plan doesn’t help the rich (like Trump). It actually hurts the rich (like Trump). How do we know? Trump is telling us. Or, rather, telling moderate Democrats, to encourage them to vote for the GOP Tax Plan.

Trump told the senators that he has spoken to his own accountant about the tax plan and that he would be a “big loser” if the deal is approved as written, according to multiple people in the room who heard the president on the phone.

“The deal is so bad for rich people, I had to throw in the estate tax just to give them something,” Trump said, according to the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share details of the meeting.

Well, if Donald says it, it must be true, amirite?

Of course, it would be really cool if Donald proved it by showing us his current tax returns, so we don’t have to presume on the honesty of Donald’s accountant. Or, for that matter, Donald.




washingtonpost

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I’m shocked, SHOCKED, to find the GOP Tax Cuts will benefit Donald Trump

The various bits and bobs to the middle class will help some, hurt others, and a lot of the helpful bits expire in a few years.

But guys like Trump — they will be saving many, many millions of dollars every year (and be much more able to funnel that money to their kids) indefinitely. Which, of course, was what this tax reform bill was all about.

Nice work, if you can get it.




Donald Trump Stands to Gain Millions from the Republican Tax Bill | The New Yorker

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