Many U.S.-based companies doing a lot of business abroad pay a good deal more taxes overseas than they do here, the study shows. Among 125 Fortune 500 corporations with foreign pretax profits of at least 10 percent of their total worldwide pretax profits from 2008 through 2012, two-thirds paid higher corporate tax rates to foreign governments where they operate (27.3 percent) than they paid in the United States on their domestic profits (15.8 percent), according to the study by the Citizens for Tax Justice (CTJ) and The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP).

Further, the effective foreign tax rate on the 125 companies was 2.7 percentage points higher than their effective tax rate in the United States, says the study, which looks at the profits and U.S. federal income taxes of the 288 Fortune 500 companies that were profitable in each of the five years between 2008 and 2012.

“Corporate lobbyists incessantly claim that our corporate tax rate is too high, and that it’s not ‘competitive’ with the rest of the world,” Robert McIntyre, director of Citizens for Tax Justice and the report’s lead author, said in a press release. On the contrary, he added: “Most multinationals are paying lower tax rates here in the United States than they pay on their foreign operations.”

http://ww2.cfo.com/tax/2014/02/corporate-america-pays-higher-tax-abroad-study/

In the heat of the 2010 governor’s race, Scott Walker urged both county employees and campaign aides to go to news websites and post comments promoting him and his record, newly unsealed documents show.

...

Scott Walker’s defense has always been that he had no connection to any of this, but it is impossible to make that argument when a message sent from his Blackberry ends up posted nearly word for word on a website just a half of an hour after he sent it. On Fox News Sunday, Walker refused to answer questions, and got very defensive when asked about the emails.

...

His main defense is that he wasn’t charged with a crime. However, not being charged with a crime isn’t the same thing as not committing a crime. Walker’s refusal to answer questions about the emails is only serving to heighten the scrutiny on the governor.

...

There is enough evidence in these emails for a new investigation into Gov. Walker. If the state won’t investigate, the apparent level of corruption is so severe that this may require federal involvement. It appears that Scott Walker committed numerous crimes, but it may take a public outcry for justice to be done.


http://www.politicususa.com/2014/02/23/scott-walker-scandal-explodes-documents-show-directed-county-workers-break-law.html

And for $25,000, 28 giant companies found their way onto the DLC’s executive council, including Aetna, AT&T;, American Airlines, AIG, BellSouth, Chevron, DuPont, Enron, IBM, Merck and Company, Microsoft, Philip Morris, Texaco, and Verizon Communications. Few, if any, of these corporations would be seen as leaning Democratic, of course, but here and there are some real surprises. One member of the DLC’s executive council is none other than Koch Industries, the privately held, Kansas-based oil company whose namesake family members are avatars of the far right, having helped to found archconservative institutions like the Cato Institute and Citizens for a Sound Economy. Not only that, but two Koch executives, Richard Fink and Robert P. Hall III, are listed as members of the board of trustees and the event committee, respectively–meaning that they gave significantly more than $25,000.

The DLC board of trustees is an elite body whose membership is reserved for major donors, and many of the trustees are financial wheeler-dealers who run investment companies and capital management firms–though senior executives from a handful of corporations, such as Koch, Aetna, and Coca-Cola, are included.

I added the emphasis.

Fitting, isn’t it? The entity that tries to undermine the progressive agenda from within the Democratic Party was getting funding from the guys who are trying to destroy the Democratic Party from the outside.

Just a side note: The DLC’s long-time CEO, Bruce Reed, is now the Executive Director of the Obama administration’s Debt Commission, a.k.a. the Cat Food Commission.

http://americablog.com/2010/08/koch-industries-gave-funding-to-the-dlc-and-served-on-its-executive-council.html

The decision to drop so-called “chained CPI” came after Sen. Bernard Sanders, I-Vt., and 15 other senators wrote Obama a letter Feb. 14 urging Social Security to be spared in the president’s budget blueprint.
......

Obama had included the proposal, which would shrink the inflation rate used to calculate a host of benefits and tax breaks, as part of an attempted grand bargain on the budget, but Republicans refused White House demands for new revenue to go along with cuts in entitlements.

However, while the proposal will not be in his budget blueprint, Deputy Press Secretary Josh Earnest said Thursday that the president’s proposal remains “on the table,” but only as part of a larger package that would shrink tax breaks for the wealthy and corporations.

“It’s a principle of fairness,” Earnest said.

“The offer to Speaker Boehner remains on the table for whenever the Republicans decide they want to engage in a serious discussion about a balanced plan to deal with our long-term fiscal challenges that includes closing loopholes for the wealthiest Americans and corporations,” a White House official said in a separate background memo.

http://blogs.rollcall.com/wgdb/sanders-applauds-obama-for-dropping-social-security-cuts-from-budget/

We're living in an age of unprecedented austerity.

Now, that sounds impossible to conservatives who know, just know, that government has exploded under Obama's socialist watch. And that we have trillion dollar deficits—dun, dun, dun—as far as the eye can see. But I have some good news for them (though not the economy). They're wrong. Government employment has actually fallen under Obama, and the deficit is falling fast too.

As Ben Bernanke put it, "people don't appreciate how tight fiscal policy has been." And how much that's knee-capped the economy. Take jobs. Bernanke points out that total public sector employment—local, state, and federal—has fallen by over 600,000 during the recovery alone. As point of comparison, it rose by 400,000 during the previous one.

But even this million person job swing doesn't tell us how historic austerity has been this time. You have to look at the chart below to see that. It shows government job growth during every recovery on record, going back to 1945.

The actual prison memorial is like a live re-enactment of the Josef Goebbels Handbook, complete with (American) mannequins torturing (Vietnamese) mannequins and a set of instructions for each torment, no matter how self-explanatory it may seem, including:

To break Prisoners Tooth: Torturer puts tip of wood chunk on prisoners tooth. He strikes violently. Tooth breaks immediately.
To Drive Nails into prisoners body: The torturer drives nails of differing lengths (three to ten centimeters) into vulnerable organs of the prisoner: fingertips, backs of hand, instep, shoulder blades, knee and even skull.
To force prisoners to turn somersaults on iron bar: Jailer forces prisoner to take his clothes off and turn continuous somersaults on iron bar full of sharp pointed holes. All his body is peeled off.
To Boil prisoner: torturer covers prisoner with jute bag and throws him into cauldron of water on the boil. Prisoner dies with his skin peeled off.
To BROIL prisoner: Prisoner is tied to two long iron bars, 80 centimeters off the ground. Torturer broils prisoner on slow fire. Like broiling a mullet.


http://www.abroadabroad.com/2014/01/19/the-dark-side-of-phu-quoc-the-idyllic-torture-island-that-comes-with-instructions/

On November 22nd, 1963, my uncle, president John F. Kennedy, went to Dallas intending to condemn as "nonsense" the right-wing notion that "peace is a sign of weakness." He meant to argue that the best way to demonstrate American strength was not by using destructive weapons and threats but by being a nation that "practices what it preaches about equal rights and social justice," striving toward peace instead of "aggressive ambitions."

Despite the Cold War rhetoric of his campaign, JFK's greatest ambition as president was to break the militaristic ideology that has dominated our country since World War II. He told his close friend Ben Bradlee that he wanted the epitaph "He kept the peace," and said to another friend, William Walton, "I am almost a 'peace at any price' president." Hugh Sidey, a journalist and friend, wrote that the governing aspect of JFK's leadership was "a total revulsion" of war.

Nevertheless, as James W. Douglass argues in his book JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters, JFK's presidency would be a continuous struggle with his own military and intelligence agencies, which engaged in incessant schemes to trap him into escalating the Cold War into a hot one. His first major confrontation with the Pentagon, the Bay of Pigs catastrophe, came only three months into his presidency and would set the course for the next 1,000 days.

JFK's predecessor, Dwight D. Eisenhower, had finalized support on March 17th, 1960, for a Cuban invasion by anti-Castro insurgents, but the wily general left its execution to the incoming Kennedy team. From the start, JFK recoiled at the caper's stench, as CIA Director Allen Dulles has acknowledged, demanding assurances from CIA and Pentagon brass that there was no chance of failure and that there would be no need for U.S. military involvement. Dulles and the generals knowingly lied and gave him those guarantees.

When the invasion failed, JFK refused to order airstrikes against Castro. Realizing he had been drawn into a trap, he told his top aides, David Powers and Kenneth O'Donnell, "They were sure I'd give in to them and send the go-ahead order to the [U.S. Navy aircraft carrier] Essex. They couldn't believe that a new president like me wouldn't panic and try to save his own face. Well, they had me figured all wrong." JFK was realizing that the CIA posed a monumental threat to American democracy. As the brigade faltered, he told Arthur Schlesinger that he wanted to "splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds."

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/john-f-kennedys-vision-of-peace-20131120#ixzz2sPPyCwVx
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