Romney Celebrates with Trump as Working New Yorkers Rally Against Rich Tax Dodgers

Mitt Romney's wife held a tax day fundraiser in New York--and found a day of protest from working people angry at the Romneys and their 1% friends' low tax rates.

April 17, 2012

On the street outside the shimmering gold logo of Trump Towers, a baseball team has gathered. This isn't the Yankees or the Mets, though. It's the long-lost Dodgers. The Tax Dodgers, that is.

Photo Credit: Sarah Jaffe

Inside Trump Towers, Ann Romney is celebrating her birthday with a fundraiser expected to bring in close to $600,000. Outside on the street, New Yorkers from the Working Families Party, New York Communities for Change, VOCAL-NY, United NY, and many other community groups have joined forces to remind the Romneys—and anyone passing by—that they pay a higher tax rate than the richest Americans.

The Tax Dodgers pose in their uniforms, hula-hooping cheerleaders hold up their “Tax Loopholes,” and the “team manager” thanks “hardworking, taxpaying Americans” for “paying taxes so we don't have to.”

  READ MORE

The Truth Revealed About Debt and Deficits

Spending and debt are necessary in any economy. The key question is which sector should carry the burden: families and businesses, or the government?

April 18, 2012

It’s hard to open a newspaper or turn on the TV without being bombarded with narratives suggesting that fiscal policy didn’t work and that we therefore need discipline in the form of balanced budget amendments and debt limits. Even those who see themselves as moderates on the issue are embracing a commitment to “eventually” slash deficit spending once recovery gets underway.

But most of this talk arises from a fundamental misunderstanding about the way debt and deficits actually operate.

Private v. Public Debt

When people talk about reducing the deficit, the message is that the U.S. government is running out of money. Virtually everyone in Washington accepts this idea—from the progressive think tanks to the nuttiest free marketeers; from the politicians to NPR’s reporters; from Pete Peterson’s hedge fund cronies to organized labor. All present a unified front against budget deficits—particularly those that supposedly result from “entitlements.”

They all warn we have to cut excessive debt. But what kind of debt? Public or private? And excessive in relation to what? Time? Some threshold?  READ MORE

News From George Soros' Berlin Conference - Economists Discover Human Beings

Photo Credit: shutterstock

Could economists be leaving behind their mechanistic paradise for the messy, unpredictable human world?

April 18, 2012

Economists are peculiar creatures. Last week a large posse of them descended on Berlin for the third annual conference of the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET), a think-tank co-founded by investor and philanthropist George Soros in 2009 in the wake of the global financial crisis.

As I roamed through the various sessions and gatherings, pointy-headed folk squinted at me and rattled off facts and figures that gave them the sort of thrill I get from seeing spring flowers in bloom. The field of economics is known for attracting Asperger’s-spectrum wonks better at formulating financial models than the flow of human interaction. But if the Berlin forum is any indication, the field is now fitfully reorienting itself: it wants to understand those fascinating and often irrational beings known as “people.”  READ MORE

Revolution 2.0: How The Internet Changed Wael Ghonim's Life and Helped Spark Egypt's Uprising

Egyptian demonstrators demanding the ouster of
President Hosni Mubarak and calling for reforms
clash with riot police in Cairo. Police and protesters
clashed in the capital and other parts of Egypt on
Wednesday in a second day of rallies to demand
the ouster of Hosni Mubarak, in the biggest protests
of the president's 30-year rule.
Photo Credit: AFP

In a new memoir, Ghonim describes how the Egyptian people finally rejected 30 years of oppression and found their voice. Here, he discusses with Terrence McNally.

April 16, 2012

Wael Ghonim was a little-known 30-year-old Google manager, unwilling to publicly criticize the Egyptian regime, until he anonymously launched a Facebook campaign to protest the death of one particular Egyptian at the hands of security forces. In his memoir, Revolution 2.0: The Power of the People is Greater than the People in Power, he tells us, from his experience, why and how the Egyptian people finally rejected 30 years of oppression and found their voice. "People have called me a hero, but that is ridiculous – this has not been a revolution of heroic individuals, but about people coming together to overcome dictatorship…Social media allow ideas to be shared. They are places where people can unite, revolutions can begin. A new type of revolution – Revolution 2.0," he says   READ MORE

Arizona Will Ignore Federal Court’s Ruling on Restrictive Voter Law

State election officials say the Court’s order only affects federal voter registration forms—not the state version.

April 19, 2012 

The Arizona voting wars continue. This week, a federal appeals court ruled that Arizona’s photo ID requirement was not a “poll tax” or racially discriminatory, which was a defeat for voting rights activists who offered evidence that certain voting blocks—particularly people of color—disproportionately lack photo ID.  

 

But the other half of the ruling over Proposition 200 addressing whether Arizona could require documented proof of citizenship when registering to vote—if that proof did not already exist in state databases—left voting rights activists only slightly cheered. 

 

Arizona’s Proposition 200 was the nation’s first state law to require documented proof of citizenship before registering to vote—whether a would-be voter used the national voter registration application, found in all post offices; or a state voter registration form that the state gave out at state offices and is used for its online registration.

 

The Ninth Circuit ruling only affected the federal voter registration form, saying Arizona overreached by imposing additional proof-of-citizenship conditions. It ordered Arizona election officials to tell local registrars to accept that application, where people attest to citizenship by signing their name under penalty of perjury.  READ MORE

Where No City Has Gone Before: San Francisco Will Be World's First Zero-Waste Town by 2020

A sculpture made of garbage salvaged from
San Francisco's dump
Photo Credit: Sven Eberlein

A future without landfills? SF is already 78% of the way there -- but the hardest part is still ahead.

April 18, 2012

Last month, the millionth ton of food scraps, coffee grounds and soiled paper from San Francisco’s mandatory composting program returned to residents’ dinner tables in the form of fresh, organic foods grown by local farmers using the city’s nutrient-rich compost as fertilizer. Coming on the heels of the city’s 2009 municipal ordinance requiring city-wide source separation of all organic materials, the first large-scale urban food waste and composting program in the country has not only helped reduce the city’s greenhouse gas emissions to nearly 12 percent below 1990 levels; it's also catapulted San Francisco to a staggering, nation-leading 78 percent waste diversion rate.

Just a few years ago, a zero-waste city was considered a futuristic scenario. Now, the city by the bay is on track to be the first and only North American city to achieve this impressive goal -- and it plans to get there by 2020.  READ MORE

Right-Wing ALEC in Damage Control, While Activists Launch Campaign to Expose 'ALEC Democrats'

ALEC has made some concessions, but activists are keeping the pressure on, expanding their focus beyond corporations to target elected officials who align themselves with ALEC.

April 20, 2012

 The grassroots progressive campaigns calling on corporations to drop their support of right-wing front group American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), have had impressive results so far. Taking advantage of the public's current interest in (and rage over) so-called "stand your ground" laws in the wake of the Trayvon Martin case, groups including ColorOfChange.org and the Progressive Change Campaign Committee have successfully urged about a dozen major groups to ditch ALEC. In response, ALEC has made some concessions and gone into full-on damage-control mode. But activists are keeping the pressure on, now expanding their focus beyond ALEC's corporate supporters to target the members of government who align themselves with ALEC as well.

Several months after the launch of the complementary anti-ALEC campaigns -- which target not only "stand your ground" laws but also voter ID, anti-union, anti-public education, and anti-immigration legislation -- Coca-Cola announced that it would drop its support for ALEC. Being such a high-profile company, Coke started something of a domino effect. Soon PepsiCo followed suit, then Kraft, McDonald's, Wendy's, Intuit, Mars, Arizona Public Service, Reed Elsevier, American Traffic Solutions, Blue Cross Blue Shield, and Yum! Brands (Taco Bell, KFC and Pizza Hut) did the same.   READ MORE