Debating the wealth tax

To understand why the oligarchy in the US absolutely hates the idea of Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren becoming president, one need look no further than their proposals for a tax on wealth to serve two goals: provide income to fund their progressive agendas and to reduce the staggering levels of inequality in the US.

Sen. Bernie Sanders has unveiled his plan to directly tax the wealth of millionaires and billionaires — and it goes substantially further than Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s plan to do the same.

The proposal would cut the wealth of billionaires in the United States in half in 15 years and entirely close the gap in wealth growth between billionaires and the average American family, according to University of California Berkeley economists Gabriel Zucman and Emmanuel Saez, who advised Sanders on his plan. Hitting the richest 180,000 American households, Saez and Zucman estimate the tax would raise $4.35 trillion over the next decade, which Sanders says would go toward paying for his biggest policies, including Medicare-for-all, affordable housing, and universal childcare.
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Cultured meat

Some of the arguments against eating meat are that it is morally wrong to kill animals, that the factory farming practices that it leads to create conditions for the animals that are repugnant and ethically indefensible, and that growing animals for meat is a waste of resources and is economically wasteful and environmentally damaging, since it takes a lot of land and plant products to produce animals for meat. And yet people seem to have a taste for meat.
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Warren joins Sanders in fighting the undermining of public schools

Rachel M. Cohen writes that the two most progressive candidates in the Democratic primary race have both called for reining in the charter school movement and the relentless undermining of the public school system

SEN. ELIZABETH WARREN RELEASED a wide-ranging education plan Monday, pledging to invest hundreds of billions of dollars into public schools if she wins the presidency, paid in part through her proposed two-cent tax on wealth over $50 million. Warren’s plan is infused with her broader campaign themes of reducing corruption and fraud; she backs measures like new taxes on education lobbying, limiting the profiteering of tech companies that sell digital products to schools, and curbing self-dealing within charter schools.
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Power protects power

In an interview, investigative journalist Ronan Farrow says that the resistance he faced from his former bosses at NBC about his investigations into the sexual abuse allegations against powerful media mogul Harvey Weinstein and their own star Matt Lauer are examples of how ‘power protects power’, even though some of the people proclaim themselves to be liberals and even progressives.
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Film review: The Laundromat (2019)

In 2016 there was the explosive leak to the ICIJ (International Consortium of Investigate Journalists) of a massive trove of documents called the Panama Papers from the firm Mossack Fonseca that revealed how that company created massive numbers of offshore shell companies to move money around all over the world to hide the wealth of the global elite so that they could avoid paying taxes. It led to a series of news reports (see here, here, and here) that showed that this was just the tip of the iceberg, that there were many legal and accounting firms operating in small and big countries around the world who were taking advantage of convenient loopholes placed in the tax codes of thosecountries. The US turns out to be one of the biggest tax havens, with the state of Delaware (Joe Biden’s home state, incidentally) being the most accommodating of all these shenanigans.
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The implications of the Canadian elections

The Canadian elections took place yesterday. Prime minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party, hammered by its leader’s political and personal scandals, lost 20 seats and its majority but still managed to remain the single largest party. It won 157 of the 338 seats with 33% of the popular vote and will have to cobble together a coalition with other parties to get a parliamentary majority and form a government. The opposition Conservatives gained 26 seats and now have 121. They also won a narrow plurality of the popular vote with 34.4%. The Bloc Quebecois won 32 seats and the New Democratic Party won 24.

Cory Doctorow analyzes the result and says that Trudeau deserved his comeuppance because for the longest time he has managed to project a progressive image while tacking towards neoliberal policies.
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And … Boris Johnson loses yet another major Brexit vote

The UK parliament has just rejected Boris Johnson’s three-day timetable for debating his Brexit withdrawal deal.

MPs have voted to reject the government’s timetable for the passage of the bill that would implement the prime minister’s Brexit deal.

They voted against by 322 to 308; a majority of 14.

Boris Johnson said earlier today he would withdraw the bill and seek a general election if he lost the vote.

Confusingly, the government had earlier won approval for the withdrawal deal during its second reading by a comfortable majority of 329-299, giving the government hopes that its timetable would also pass.

Johnson now says that he will hit the ‘pause’ button on the legislation but insists he will proceed with the withdrawal plan.

I have no idea what happens now. With Brexit, there never seems to be any final outcome.

We are all Russian assets now

Matt Taibbi writes that Democratic party establishment and its media allies have resorted to Cold War fear mongering rhetoric, epitomized by Hillary Clinton suggesting that Tulsi Gabbard and Jill Stein are “Russian assets”,

Hillary Clinton is nuts. She’s also not far from the Democratic Party mainstream, which has been pushing the same line for years.
…

Everyone is foreign scum these days. Democrats spent three years trying to prove Donald Trump is a Russian pawn. Mitch McConnell is “Moscow Mitch.” Third party candidates are a Russian plot. The Bernie Sanders movement is not just a wasteland of racist and misogynist “Bros,” but — according to intelligence agencies and mainstream pundits alike — the beneficiary of an ambitious Russian plot to “stoke the divide” within the Democratic Party. The Joe Rogan independents attracted to the mild antiwar message of Tulsi Gabbard are likewise traitors and dupes for the Kremlin.

If you’re keeping score, that’s pretty much the whole spectrum of American political thought, excepting MSNBC Democrats. What a coincidence!

Democrats now are assuming the role once played by Republicans of the Tom Delay era, who denounced everyone opposed to the War on Terror as “Saddam-lovers.”
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