Tech titans lobby Congress for giant tax break

Carolyn Lochhead, Chronicle Washington Bureau

Friday, November 25, 2011

Washington --

Silicon Valley's tech titans are in full holiday mode - tax holiday that is.

Google, Apple, Oracle, Cisco and other multinationals have fielded more than 160 lobbyists and consultants - including, according to Bloomberg Businessweek, 60 insiders such as Karen Olick, former chief of staff for Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif. - to get Congress to give them a giant tax break on their overseas profits.

U.S. multinationals currently have $1.4 trillion parked offshore. A rising portion of it is held in tax havens using innovative tax dodges known as the "Dutch Sandwich" and "Double Irish."

Banded together with pharmaceutical companies and other multinationals in a group called the Win America coalition, Bay Area technology giants say that slashing their tax rate from 35 percent to 5.25 percent on foreign profits they return or "repatriate" to the United States will create millions of jobs. READ MORE

The Shocking True Tale Of The Mad Genius Who Invented Sea-Monkeys

By Evan Hughes | June 28, 2011

"Sea-Monkeys, do monkeys / Story of my life / Send three bucks to a comic book / Get a house, car and wife"—Liz Phair, “Gunshy"

In a 2002 interview with Erik Lobo of Planet X magazine, Harold von Braunhut comes across as the kind of charming old guy who might detain you in conversation a bit too long if you were volunteering at a home for the aged. An inventor and entrepreneur who brought us legions of wonderfully gimmicky toys before he died, at 77, in 2003, von Braunhut holds forth about times gone by, interrupted only when his cockatoo chews at the wire connecting his hearing aid to the telephone.

Von Braunhut was a short, balding man who had the accent that turns “beautiful” into “bee-YOO-dee-full,” and he often cast himself as the guy they all doubted until he showed ’em. In the interview he seems to delight in telling Lobo about his most famous and successful novelty item, Sea-Monkeys. These little critters, you may recall, carry with them the promise of “a BOWLFULL OF HAPPINESS—Instant PETS!” They’re supposed to arrive in the mail, spring to life in water, and soon start horsing around and making babies. According to von Braunhut, the problem with selling Sea-Monkeys early on, ya see, was that “nobody believed it!” He adds, “It’s a little bit like the story of the Wright brothers.”
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Five Ways that Financial Elites are Destroying Democracy

Is democracy compatible with a financial system run by billionaires? Maybe not.
November 21, 2011

Is democracy compatible with a financial system run by billionaires? Maybe not. Here are five ways that high finance is undermining democracy:

1. Billionaires replace one person, one vote.

Ask any American what’s wrong with our country and they will say that money rules politics. And they are correct. It’s obvious that major political donors and lobbyists for the super-rich have more political influence than we do. As the top 1 percent gains more and more of the nation’s income, the 99 percent effectively become disenfranchised. And of course, the Citizens United Supreme Court decision makes it even easier for the rich to buy political power. Lopsided campaign contributions by and for the super-rich are making a mockery out of elections. In 2010, for example, business outspent labor by a factor of 14 to 1.
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Why Do Men Visit Strip Clubs? Their Confessions Revealed

A new blog gives voice to guys who empty their pockets just to see naked flesh, and reveals a lot about male desire.
November 22, 2011

Why do men visit strip clubs? The answer to that question may seem so obvious as to not even warrant asking in the first place, but the new blog Letters From Men Who Go to Strip Clubs” proves just how wrong that assumption is. It’s the brainchild of journalist Susannah Breslin and just the latest in a series of “Letters” projects in which men email her with brief confessionals about why they gravitate toward the sex industry – whether it’s by watching porn at home, trolling Craigslist for a cheap blow job or tucking dollar bills into strippers’ g-strings – some of which she then posts online. The result is essentially open-source sociological data — and some of it is bizarrely poetic.

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The Virus of GOP Ignorance: Why Don't Media Protect Us From the Lies Spewed in the Republican Primary?

Reporters representing reliable media outlets are supposed to defend the discourse from the virus of this ignorance.
November 23, 2011

The following article first appeared on the Web site of the Nation. For more great content from the Nation, sign up for its email newsletters.

It is a symbol of our current political predicament that anytime anyone tells the truth about anything in the contest for the Republican nomination, a new scandal erupts. Newt Gingrich was briefly drummed out of the Republican Party for accurately terming Paul Ryan’s destructive Medicare plan a “radical” step toward “right-wing social engineering.” Jon Huntsman caused virtually the only stir of his all-but-invisible campaign when he admitted to what the Salt Lake Tribune straight-facedly called the “politically dicey belief that climate change is human-caused and needs to be addressed.” And most recently, CBS’s John Dickerson caused a contretemps when a stray e-mail revealed that Michele Bachmann was “not going to get many questions” in the debate the network was sponsoring because “she’s nearly off the charts.”
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Corporations Are Patenting Human Genes and Tissues -- Here's Why That's Terrifying

A medical ethicist explains the dark implications of corporate medical patents and the nightmarish scenario of our medical-industrial complex.
November 23, 2011

Do you think that granting corporations the rights of people in the Citizens United case is disturbing? Then contemplate the fact that corporations have been patenting human genes and tissues at alarming rates -- in the last 30 years, more than 40,000 patents have been granted on genes alone.

As the Occupy movement fights against the unmitigated influence of corporations on our lives, author Harriet Washington's new book, Deadly Monopolies: The Shocking Corporate Takeover of Life Itself--And the Consequences for Your Health and Our Medical Future, is a timely wakeup call to protect the very essence of human life from the medical-industrial complex.
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How White Supremacists Are Trying to Make an American Town a Model for Right-Wing Extremism

A recent influx of white supremacists and Patriot group members to the town of Kalispell, Montana, is causing alarm.
November 22, 2011

Editor's note: This is the first of a four-part series by Media Matters of America.

At first glance the Pioneer Little Europe website seems like it could be the work of the Montana Office of Tourism. Photographs depict the rugged beauty of the Flathead Valley region near Glacier National Park in northwest Montana.

One image shows a young blond-haired girl playing in a meadow overlooking Kalispell, the largest town in the area, with a population around 20,000.

The site also features short news items about the Northwest Montana State Fair and a wildflower beautification program along with Kalispell job postings.

But then there's this: A scan of a full-page advertisement in a recent edition of the Flathead Beacon, the local paper, with photographs of 47 babies newly delivered in the Kalispell Regional Medical Center. All but one are fair-skinned with light-colored hair. "Wonderful white babies being born in Kalispell," the website reads. "What do the babies look like being born in your town?" Another item on the Pioneer Little Europe site depicts white families relaxing on the shore of a lake. A caption reads,"This is how white our beaches are, and I'm not talking about sand."
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