from YES! Magazine:


Don’t Let the Apocalypse Get You Down
The climate crisis is spinning out of control, and the gap between the rich and poor continues grow unabated. It’s time to let the radical uncertainty of this moment enlarge our sense of possibility.

by Sarah van Gelder
posted May 22, 2013


Is YES! Magazine going all apocalyptic? No, we haven’t run out of hope, and we aren’t giving up on transformation. To the contrary, the precariousness of our future is inspiring us to get radical­—to look for change that goes to the roots of our culture.

We humans are in an untenable moment. The window we have to take on the climate crisis is small. The poor and middle class are getting poorer. Species around the world are dying, and along with them the web of life. And many of the change strategies of the past are stymied; marches on Washington get ignored, and the federal government is largely captured by big-money interests.

So for this issue of YES! we asked how change can happen—and how it is happening now. What strategies are imaginative and powerful enough to meet the opportunities and the dangers of this moment?

We didn’t find any one-size-fits-all answers. But we did find approaches to change that blend the best of new and old, and we found shifts in attitude that suggest new openings:

........(snip)........

* There is growing willingness to name corporate rule and global capitalism as key problems, and to look to decentralized, place-based economies as the answer. While capitalism is viewed more favorably among all Americans than socialism, the reverse is true among those under 29, African Americans and Hispanics, and those making less than $30,000 a year, according to a Pew poll. And more Americans have a favorable view of socialism than of the Tea Party. .....................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/love-and-the-apocalypse/how-to-act-powerfully

Think Progress / By Aviva Shen

Average CEO Salary Reached A New Record High Of $9.7 Million In 2012
Skyrocketing executive salaries since deregulation in the 1980s helped the top 1 percent of Americans expand their share of income, even as worker pay has stagnated.

May 22, 2013 |


The average CEO salary broke records in 2011 at $9.6 million — and now, that record high has been topped by 2012 salaries, which averaged out to $9.7 million. Health care and media CEOs enjoyed the highest pay, while utility CEOs had the lowest at $7.5 million. Sixty percent of CEOs got a raise last year.

Though CEO pay dropped slightly after the financial crisis, it quickly rebounded to reach new heights in 2010, 2011, and now 2012. Simultaneously, the pay gap between CEOs and workers has also broken records, as the average CEO in 2012 earned 354 times more than the average worker.

During the recession, some companies changed their compensation formulas to incorporate more stock as a way to tie executives’ salaries to the company’s performance. As the stock market enjoys all-time highs, CEO pay has also soared. Yet the stock market’s rally has not been felt by most middle and low income families, as the housing market recovers in fits and starts. As a result, income inequality has been exacerbated in the first two years of the recovery.

Skyrocketing executive salaries since deregulation in the 1980s helped the top 1 percent of Americans expand their share of income, even as worker pay has stagnated. .......................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/average-ceo-salary-reached-new-record-high-97-million-2012

Global Capital and the Nation State
Monday, May 20, 2013


As global capital becomes ever more powerful, giant corporations are holding governments and citizens up for ransom — eliciting subsidies and tax breaks from countries concerned about their nation’s “competitiveness” — while sheltering their profits in the lowest-tax jurisdictions they can find. Major advanced countries — and their citizens — need a comprehensive tax agreement that won’t allow global corporations to get away with this.

Google, Amazon, Starbucks, every other major corporation, and every big Wall Street bank, are sheltering as much of their U.S. profits abroad as they can, while telling Washington that lower corporate taxes are necessary in order to keep the U.S. “competitive.”

Baloney. The fact is, global corporations have no allegiance to any country; their only objective is to make as much money as possible — and play off one country against another to keep their taxes down and subsidies up, thereby shifting more of the tax burden to ordinary people whose wages are already shrinking because companies are playing workers off against each other.

I’m in London for a few days, and all the talk here is about how Goldman Sachs just negotiated a sweetheart deal to settle a tax dispute with the British government; Google is manipulating its British sales to pay almost no taxes here by using its low-tax Ireland subsidiary (the chair of the Parliamentary committee investigating this has just called the do-no-evil firm “devious, calculating, and unethical”); Amazon has been found to route its British sales through a subsidiary in low-tax Luxembourg, and now receives more in subsidies from the British government than it pays here in taxes; Starbucks’ tax-avoidance strategy was so blatant British consumers began boycotting the firm until it reversed course. ................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://robertreich.org/post/50890974932

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/22/american-citizens-drone-strikes_n_3321950.html


WASHINGTON -- Attorney General Eric Holder says four American citizens have been killed in drone strikes since 2009.

The attorney general said that in conducting U.S. counterterrorism operations against al-Qaida and its associated forces, the government has targeted and killed one American citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki.

In a letter to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, Holder says the U.S. is also aware of three other American citizens who have been killed in such counterterrorism operations over the same time period.

Global Capital and the Nation State
Monday, May 20, 2013


As global capital becomes ever more powerful, giant corporations are holding governments and citizens up for ransom — eliciting subsidies and tax breaks from countries concerned about their nation’s “competitiveness” — while sheltering their profits in the lowest-tax jurisdictions they can find. Major advanced countries — and their citizens — need a comprehensive tax agreement that won’t allow global corporations to get away with this.

Google, Amazon, Starbucks, every other major corporation, and every big Wall Street bank, are sheltering as much of their U.S. profits abroad as they can, while telling Washington that lower corporate taxes are necessary in order to keep the U.S. “competitive.”

Baloney. The fact is, global corporations have no allegiance to any country; their only objective is to make as much money as possible — and play off one country against another to keep their taxes down and subsidies up, thereby shifting more of the tax burden to ordinary people whose wages are already shrinking because companies are playing workers off against each other.

I’m in London for a few days, and all the talk here is about how Goldman Sachs just negotiated a sweetheart deal to settle a tax dispute with the British government; Google is manipulating its British sales to pay almost no taxes here by using its low-tax Ireland subsidiary (the chair of the Parliamentary committee investigating this has just called the do-no-evil firm “devious, calculating, and unethical”); Amazon has been found to route its British sales through a subsidiary in low-tax Luxembourg, and now receives more in subsidies from the British government than it pays here in taxes; Starbucks’ tax-avoidance strategy was so blatant British consumers began boycotting the firm until it reversed course. ................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://robertreich.org/post/50890974932

from the Freep:


A citizen-led measure would prohibit Michigan health insurance plans from covering elective abortion unless individuals or businesses buy a supplemental policy.

A group called No Taxes for Abortion Insurance soon plans to start gathering signatures for the proposal. If the Republican-led Legislature doesn't approve the measure within 40 days of being certified, it goes on the November 2014 ballot.

Right to Life of Michigan is forcing the issue after Gov. Rick Snyder vetoed similar legislation in December. ............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.freep.com/article/20130517/NEWS15/305170034/

from Consortium News:


Stuck in a Job at the End of the World
May 22, 2013

Very little sympathy is felt for Air Force personnel assigned to fire nuclear missiles that could end all life on the planet. But their grim, boring and existentially absurd job has eroded staff morale so much that their collapsing competence has added to the world’s risk, explains John LaForge.

By John LaForge


Some of the Air Force’s self-styled nuclear “missileers” — sitting at launch controls in Minot, North Dakota — recently earned a “D” on their intercontinental ballistic missile firing (ICBM) skills. More than 10 percent of the Minot Air Force Base’s 91st “Missile Wing” was declared incompetent and was stripped of launch-duty clearances.

The Air Force removed 17 of Minot’s 150 missile launch officers in April, over what commander Lt. Col. Jay Folds called “such rot” that, according to The AP on May 8, “even the willful violation of safety rules — including a possible compromise of launch codes — was tolerated.”

Air Force commanders told The AP they were concerned about an “attitude problem” among the ultimate bomb scare command. The Air Forces’ two-person crews work three-day shifts in underground Launch Control Centers and are supposed to be constantly at-the-ready to fire the 10 Minuteman IIIs under their control. Minot AFB is in charge of 150 ICBMs, 15 “flights” of 10 missiles each, with one launch control center for each flight.

Another 150 are on alert in Wyoming and 150 more out in Montana. All 450 of the relics are armed with a 300-kiloton “W-87” warhead. Three-hundred kilotons is a magnitude equal to 18 times the destruction that incinerated Hiroshima in 1945 killing 140,000 people. ......................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://consortiumnews.com/2013/05/22/stuck-in-a-job-at-the-end-of-the-world/

Local election officials are less likely to give basic information about voting requirements to Latinos, according to a study released this month.

Political science graduate students Julie Faller, Noah Nathan, and Ariel White at Harvard University sent thousands of emails to local officials from fictitious people asking for information about voting -- some with “putatively white” names and others with Spanish, Latino-sounding names.

The result, in the words of the authors:

Analyzing data from over 5,300 replies, we find clear evidence of bias against Latinos in the responsiveness of local election officials. While our design does not allow us to identify specific mechanisms responsible for this bias, we show that emailers with Latinos names were roughly five percentage points less likely to receive a reply to a question about voter ID requirements than non-Latino whites. This result is not driven by whether officials were elected or appointed, or by small towns where officials might know all of their constituents. We also find that the replies Latinos emailers do receive are less likely to convey accurate information about ID requirements.

The preliminary draft of the study, “What Do I Need To Vote? Bias in Information Provision by Local Election Officials,” was published May 10 and reported by the Washington Post’s Wonkblog Tuesday. .........................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/22/election-officials-latinos_n_3316010.html?ncid=txtlnkushpmg00000037&ir=Politics

from TomDispatch:




How America Became a Third World Country
2013-2023

By Mattea Kramer and Jo Comerford


The streets are so much darker now, since money for streetlights is rarely available to municipal governments. The national parks began closing down years ago. Some are already being subdivided and sold to the highest bidder. Reports on bridges crumbling or even collapsing are commonplace. The air in city after city hangs brown and heavy (and rates of childhood asthma and other lung diseases have shot up), because funding that would allow the enforcement of clean air standards by the Environmental Protection Agency is a distant memory. Public education has been cut to the bone, making good schools a luxury and, according to the Department of Education, two of every five students won’t graduate from high school.

It’s 2023 -- and this is America 10 years after the first across-the-board federal budget cuts known as sequestration went into effect. They went on for a decade, making no exception for effective programs vital to America’s economic health that were already underfunded, like job training and infrastructure repairs. It wasn’t supposed to be this way.

Traveling back in time to 2013 -- at the moment the sequester cuts began -- no one knew what their impact would be, although nearly everyone across the political spectrum agreed that it would be bad. As it happened, the first signs of the unraveling which would, a decade later, leave the United States a third-world country, could be detected surprisingly quickly, only three months after the cuts began. In that brief time, a few government agencies, like the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), after an uproar over flight delays, requested -- and won -- special relief. Naturally, the Department of Defense, with a mere $568 billion to burn in its 2013 budget, also joined this elite list. On the other hand, critical spending for education, environmental protection, and scientific research was not spared, and in many communities the effect was felt remarkably soon.

Robust public investment had been a key to U.S. prosperity in the previous century. It was then considered a basic part of the social contract as well as of Economics 101. As just about everyone knew in those days, citizens paid taxes to fund worthy initiatives that the private sector wouldn’t adequately or efficiently supply. Roadways and scientific research were examples. In the post-World War II years, the country invested great sums of money in its interstate highways and what were widely considered the best education systems in the world, while research in well-funded government labs led to inventions like the Internet. The resulting world-class infrastructure, educated workforce, and technological revolution fed a robust private sector. ...........................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175702/tomgram%3A_mattea_kramer_and_jo_comerford%2C_congress_tweeted_while_america_burned/#more

Apple Holds Billions of Dollars in Foreign Tax Havens
May 20, 2013 11:53 AM


Virtually None of Its $102 Billion Offshore Stash Has Been Taxed By Any Government

An analysis of Apple Inc.’s financial reports makes clear that Apple has paid almost no income taxes to any country on its $102 billion in offshore cash holdings. That means that this cash hoard reflects profits that were shifted, on paper, out of countries where the profits were actually earned into foreign tax havens.

How We Know Apple’s Offshore Cash is Largely in Tax Havens

Under current law, corporations can indefinitely defer paying U.S. income taxes on their offshoreprofits. Multinational corporations with offshore profits sometimes disclose in their financial reports the amount of tax they would pay if there were no “deferral” and their offshore profits were taxable in the United States. But this potential tax rarely amounts to the full 35 percent U.S. corporate tax rate, since these companies typically have already paid some foreign income taxes on these foreign profits when they were earned. Companies are allowed a “foreign tax credit” against their U.S. tax when and if the profits are subject to U.S. tax. So a company that has already paid (for example) a 25 percent tax rate on its unrepatriated offshore income would only pay the difference between that amount and the U.S. corporate tax rate of 35 percent (in this example, 10 percent) when that income is repatriated to the U.S.



The data in Apple’s latest annual report show that the company would pay almost the full 35 percent U.S. tax rate on its offshore income if repatriated. That means that virtually no tax has been paid on those profits to any government.

At the end of March 2013, Apple’s foreign subsidiaries had accumulated $102.3 billion in cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities. Based on more complete information provided in Apple’s latest full annual report, without “deferral” Apple would owe $35 billion in U.S. income taxes on this cash hoard. .................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://ctj.org/ctjreports/2013/05/apple_holds_billions_of_dollars_in_foreign_tax_havens.php#.UZzdqzcrTTq