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Nuclear Turkeys
By the time you sit down for Thanksgiving dinner, the 12-member congressional supercommittee will have succeeded in meeting its November 23 deadline to approve a plan to shrink the budget deficit by at least $1.2 trillion over the next decade. Or it will have failed – and produced a turkey instead.
Buyer’s Remorse
Ohio voters elected tea-party-backed John Kasich as their Republican governor last year. One of his most prominent initiatives was legislation limiting public employees’ collective bargaining rights. Opponents collected 1.3 million signatures to subject his anti-bargaining bill to a referendum. On November 8th, Ohioans overwhelmingly voted to repeal Kasich’s bill, which they rejected by 61 percent to 39 percent.
The OMG Congress
You can tell politicians are getting nervous. They’re playing the “In God We Trust” card again.
Big Corporation, Tiny Heart
Just a couple of years ago, this $408 billion-a-year retailing colossus tried to hush critics of its Dickensian labor policies by ballyhooing a bare-bones health care plan for its “associates.” The insurance scheme had such high deductibles, however, that barely half of its employees bought into it.
A Missile in Every Pot
The Class War is So Over
Between 1979 and 2007, the after-tax household income of America’s most affluent 1 percent ballooned by 275 percent, while the bottom 20 percent’s income inched up just 18 percent. The top 1 percent now owns more than an entire third of the nation’s wealth, which is more than the combined wealth of the bottom 90 percent.
For the Corporate 1 Percenters, a 50 Percent Tax Discount
Over a quarter century ago, in 1984, the Washington, D.C.-based Citizens for Tax Justice released its first in-depth report on how much America’s top profitable corporations were actually paying in taxes. America’s top companies, this initial study found, were paying only 14.1 percent of their profits in taxes, less than a third of the corporate tax rate then in effect.
The Lineup: Week of Nov. 7-13, 2011
Scorse proposes a deficit-shrinking end to the gap between the capital gains and income tax that would raise more revenue and make the tax code fairer.
The GOP’s Empty Rhetoric on Obama’s Immigration Record
The Obama administration, which is currently deporting a record 400,000 people each year, took a minor step to protect immigrants. Now many Republicans are accusing him of treason. “Potential illegal immigrants may surge across the border making it difficult for the border patrol,” said Rep. Candice Miller (R-MI) at a recent hearing.
Protect the Public Schools’ Whistleblowers
It seems like new reports of scandalous cheating schemes or other wrongdoing at public schools emerge every week. From New York City to Tulsa, Oklahoma, the problem of school corruption is widespread.
What can be done? There’s no surefire solution. Teachers and administrators alike are under pressure to see that an increasing number of objectives are met. The pressure to achieve results can be unbearable. Waste, fraud, and abuse can happen in any bureaucracy — and public schools aren’t immune to those scourges.
