Howard Schultz, the founder of Starbucks coffee, wants to run for president as an independent because (surprise!) the billionaire dislikes the 70% marginal tax rate proposed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. He also hates the Medicare for All platform and even wants to cut Social Security and Medicare. In other words, a card-carrying member of the greedy oligarchy, the kind of Ayn Rand acolyte that former speaker Paul Ryan drools over.
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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s proposal to raise the marginal income tax rate for incomes over $10 million to 70% has sparked a huge amount of interest in general and also alarm among the wealthy. Much of the discussion has focused on how much revenue it might raise. But as Vanessa Williamson writes, the main purpose of such a tax is not to raise revenue but to reduce inequality, and that those who focus on the former are missing the point.
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As more and more people try to monetize YouTube fame, they are resorting to ever more dangerous acts. We see that in the case of so-called ‘First Amendment Auditors’. These are people who use their First Amendment rights to deliberately provoke police officers in public and actively seeking a hostile response, record the resulting encounter, post the videos on the internet, and make money from the views they generate.
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That things are a shambles in both the US and the UK is obvious. But I want to step back a bit from the immediate issues and look at how in both countries, political norms have been breached that may not be recoverable. In the US, we now have a president who shamelessly and repeatedly utters lies that are known to be lies even as he speaks. He is also corrupt and has surrounded himself with corrupt family and government officials and private advisors. And yet his party supports him and is willing to find excuses for his outrageous behavior.
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It seems like the UK is heading towards the March 29 deadline without any real progress towards a deal with the European Union. If no deal is reached by then and no extension has been negotiated, then the UK will crash out of the EU and there are fears of massive disruptions as suddenly border controls will have to be imposed at least across the English Channel, one of the main routes for commerce between UK and Europe. There are fears that this will lead to loss jobs due to businesses shifting operations to Europe and all manner of shortages, and people are stocking up on food and medicines in fear.
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Kristin Hook is a scientist working for the government who was furloughed. She decided to use her unwanted ‘free time’ to research into the actual claims that are being made to justify the building of a wall, such as that there is a crisis along the southern border that can only be met with a wall. She says that there are three elements to the argument for the wall.
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It is ridiculous for the US government to keep lurching from one shutdown (or the threat of one) to the next and the last one was utterly insane, based as it was on a personal obsession of Donald Trump to get an unworkable solution to a manufactured crisis. In the end, absolutely nothing was achieved but many ordinary people were hurt. The stress that such shutdowns causes extend well beyond the federal employees actually furloughed. I think that fiasco has finally caused members of both parties to realize that something must be done to prevent the government repeatedly being held hostage over increasingly trivial policy disagreements.
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We have seen that new congresswoman Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez’s proposal to raise the marginal tax rate on incomes over $10 million to 70% has raised alarm bells among the oligarchy that could be heard even as far away as in Davos, Switzerland during their annual get-together. I mean, this is a tax on incomes over $10 million, for crying out loud. Nobody, absolutely nobody, would suffer if the tax were made even higher. But nothing is ever enough for these people.
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One of the things that the Trump shutdown made glaringly obvious is that the wealthy people around Trump have no idea what life is like for ordinary people. Wealthy people have no lack of sources who would give them credit and banks rush to lend them money. They seem to think that this is true for everyone, as evidenced by multi-millionaire commerce secretary Wilbur Ross expressing puzzlement as to why workers were going to food banks when they could just get a loan from a bank, or Trump’s economic advisor Larry Kudlow claiming that the furloughed workers were proud to volunteer for the government, as if doing their jobs was like the unpaid internships that rich people’s children do. Meanwhile, Trump thinks that shops will be more than willing to give credit to furloughed employees.
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I wonder if Donald Trump capitulated to Nancy Pelosi and agreed to reopen the government because he wanted so badly to give the State of the Union speech originally scheduled for January 29 and then cancelled by Pelosi because of the shutdown.
It will be interesting to see what happens on that front now. If he asks about giving the speech, perhaps Pelosi should say that she needs time to properly prepare for the occasion and suggests a new date after February 15th, i.e., when the government needs to be funded again, on the condition that the government remains open. That would put Trump in yet another bind. In short, Pelosi would have reversed Trump’s hostage tactics, using the SOTU as a hostage to force Trump to keep the government open. The difference is that nobody gets hurt if there is no SOTU speech while plenty get hurt when the government shuts down.
Pelosi can keep this process going, dangling the SOTU speech in front of Trump like a carrot, hopefully making him capitulate again and again.