Saturday Morning Male Beauty

 

Large Corporations: The True Welfare Queens

As the Biden administration's infrastructure plan is debated, Republicans continue their obstruction and adamantly oppose any increase in the corporate tax rate even as data shows  that corporations pay a pathetic percentage of federal tax revenues, with some corporations paying no taxes despite billions in revenue each year.  Meanwhile, the working class and middle class pay far more in taxes even as they struggle to survive financially. The hypocrisy of Republicans' sudden concerns about deficits is underscored by their defense of the 2017 $1.5+ trillion in tax give away to the super rich and corporations and their silence as Donald Trump drastically increased the federal deficit. One can only hope that Democrats get their messaging right and educate the public on the reality that it is not welfare queens that Reagan bloviated about but instead large corporations that are the true freeloaders in America in 2021. A piece in the Washington Post looks at the damning reality of how little corporate America pays to support the nation.  Here are excerpts:

Republicans are in a brutal political position right now. They’re struggling to find an attack on President Biden’s jobs plan that will land, and their leading option — that raising taxes will kill jobs — is forcing them to defend their hideously unpopular 2017 corporate tax cuts, which Democrats want to partially undo.

A new data presentation from Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) should make this even worse for Republicans. It vividly illustrates why the status quo on corporate taxation is so hard to defend: It shows how little we collect in corporate tax revenues as a percentage of the economy, how bad the future outlook is and how miserably this compares to other countries.

Right now, Politico reports, Republican senators are developing a game plan for the coming battle. A handful are working on an alternate infrastructure plan, which would spend far less than Biden’s and appears designed to entice Democrats into bipartisan negotiations.

NBC reports that even the few Republicans inclined to support such a thing can’t agree on the size of a smaller expenditure. What’s more, the rub is how this would be paid for.

Republicans adamantly oppose raising corporate tax rates to fund even this smaller bill, and instead want to rely on something like raising the gas tax, which Democrats oppose, because it’s regressive, whereas corporate tax hikes are progressive.

This is making Democrats wary that Republicans are laying a trap, Politico reports:

Some Democrats privately argue that they shouldn’t allow Republicans to throw their weight behind a popular infrastructure bill without requiring their engagement on the more divisive debate over how to pay for it. 

That’s not something Democrats should let Republicans get away with. Which is where Wyden’s new presentation comes in.

The data from Wyden, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, places the corporate tax status quo in a larger context. This status quo, importantly, was created in part by the 2017 GOP tax cut, so it shows what Republicans want to maintain, and what Democrats want to change.

Relying on information from the Congressional Budget Office, Wyden’s staff calculates the following:

• From 2000 to 2016, corporate tax receipts averaged around 1.7 percent of total gross domestic product (which Wyden’s office calls the “modern average”).
• Immediately after GOP passage of the 2017 tax bill, corporate tax revenues as a percentage of GDP dropped nearly 40 percent below that modern average.
• In 2018, the first year after the GOP tax cuts passed, the United States was last in corporate tax revenues as a share of GDP of all countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

That’s a striking indictment of the status quo, notes Steve Rosenthal, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, who says his own calculations roughly confirm Wyden’s.

“In 2017, Republicans slashed corporate tax rates, which decimated corporate tax receipts,” Rosenthal told me. “U.S. corporations avail themselves of the benefits of the U.S. economy — infrastructure, workforce and the like — but contribute very little to it.”

“Republicans’ red line on corporate revenue is completely unreasonable," Wyden told us in a statement. “Corporations have never contributed less to federal revenues than they do now — thanks to Republicans’ tax giveaway.”

What’s more, the Biden plan wouldn’t just raise corporate tax rates. Such a hike would likely fall to some extent on corporate profits generated by market power, or monopoly rents. Democrats would also try to close loopholes that enable multinational corporations to reduce tax bills with international profit-shifting trickery.

Shouldn’t the new working-class GOP we keep hearing about, particularly those Republicans who preen around on Fox News as populist scourges of woke, elite, globalist corporate domination, support such measures?

As it is, polls show that raising corporate tax rates has broad public support, both generally and in its specifics. If Democrats can press this case about the indefensibility of the status quo, the Republican position should get even harder to sustain.

Friday Morning Male Beauty

 

Is The Blue Wall of Silence Starting to Crack?

Years ago I had a run in with certain Norfolk police officers who took great sport in harassing me for being gay.  They abused their power and acted in an abusive despicable manner, laughing it up in the process.  I filed an complaint with internal affairs and it quickly became obvious that all the internal affairs office sought to do was exonerate the police officers.  While one young officers did break ranks and changed his testimony from the official story line, the rest lied to protect the officer chiefly responsible.  If this is what happens when the party filing the complaint is a white male attorney, one can imagine what happens if a poor young black male were to file a complaint.  The entire experience made me very untrusting of police officers to this day even though I know the majority of officers are decent individuals.  It made me realize what we see over and over again: the police protect their own often at the expense of the truth and justice itself.  A column in the New York Times suggests that just maybe this mind set is beginning to change.  Much more change, of course is needed.  Here are column highlights:

I was driving around the other day when I realized that the license tabs on my car had expired. I didn’t panic, because I didn’t have to. If the cops pulled me over, I could feel assured as a white male: My life would not be in danger.

It was expired registration tags that led the police to pull over Daunte Wright, the young Black man killed by Officer Kim Potter in suburban Minneapolis this month. (It has been described by local authorities as a deadly accident, although his family finds that implausible.) And it was temporary license plates that prompted a chain of events that ended with police in rural Virginia pepper-spraying Caron Nazario, a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army Medical Corps, who is Black and Latino.

“I’m actively serving this country, and this is how you’re going to treat me?” Lieutenant Nazario told the officers. Race is the only explanation for this loathsome assault. The blue wall of silence, the code that calls on cops to protect one another against charges of brutality and criminality, compounded the attack: The two officers filed “near identical” misstatements about what happened, according to a lawsuit filed by Lieutenant Nazario.

But even as we condemn another round of horrific and excessive state violence directed at Black Americans, there’s actually a ray of hope on the police reform blotter.

The blue wall may be starting to crack. It was broken in the Derek Chauvin trial.

It’s no small thing that several Minneapolis police officers, including Chief Medaria Arradondo, took the stand against Mr. Chauvin in his trial over the death of George Floyd. Fourteen officers in the same department signed an open letter last year saying Mr. Chauvin “failed as a human and stripped George Floyd of his dignity and life.”

Maybe these acts of courage are isolated — mere dents in a wall that is institutional and pervasive. It will take far more than a few cops in a nation-shattering case of racist murder-by-authority to do structural damage to that edifice.

Cops protecting bad cops is ingrained in the system. Many officers feel that only a brother or sister in blue knows the peril they face — and has their backs. . . . . Too many police officers act as if being the face of the law makes them above the law.

Some years ago, I wrote a book called “Breaking Blue,” about what had been called the oldest actively investigated homicide case in the United States. It involved a killing in 1935, and a powerful cop running a fencing scheme was suspected of the crime. Three generations of police officers protected the accused in uniform. When Anthony Bamonte, a sheriff in eastern Washington State, finally appeared to solve the crime in 1989, he ran into fresh resistance from the inside.

“You never badmouth a brother,” a former police officer wrote him in a threatening letter.

Smashing the blue wall is one thing that has to happen to fix the lethal flaws in modern law enforcement. Another will be just as hard, if not more so: acknowledging that racism, like the code of silence, runs deep in police ranks.

Defunding the police is not the answer. It’s an absurd idea. . . . . “Defund the police” is even worse as a political slogan; the idea is supported by only 18 percent of Americans, according to one poll from last month. Politically, all the slogan will do is hurt the cause of reform, as it appeared to drag down Democrats in last year’s congressional elections.

Reinventing the police, a far better idea, got a start in New Orleans in 2016, with a program that teaches officers to intervene when they see fellow officers doing something bad. It’s about to get another go in Maryland, now that lawmakers just overrode a veto and passed sweeping police reform legislation.

We need every cop to wear a body camera. We need to curb the power of police unions, the biggest protectors of the blue wall. And we need officers of all stripes to back the words of those 14 in Minneapolis. They said, “This is not who we are.” Now prove it.   

More Thursday Male Beauty

 

The Ongoing GOP-Big Business Divorce

The Republican Party has claimed for many decades that it is the party of business even though over more recent decades the economy has done better under Democrat presidents and the budget deficits have soared the most under Republican regimes - think Reagan, George W. Bush and Trump.  Now, with the GOP controlled by far right Christians best defined by hatred of others and white supremacists, the GOP has become a threat to what big business want most: social stability with diverse populations getting along and predictability.  Today's GOP is consumed with pressing wedge issues, demonizing elements of the nation's population and its unofficial news outlet, Fox News, is disseminating hatred and white supremacist talking points through the likes of Tucker Carlson.  Many of the far right "Christian" leaders are little better.  Their combined efforts to suppress voting rights and attacks on transgender youth may be rallying the evangelicals but it is alienating corporate CEO's.  America's demographics are changing and so are the values and goals of big business want social stability and peaceful co-existence among the labor force. A piece in Politico Magazine looks at how the GOP is driving away big business.  Here are excerpts:

When a marriage falls apart, the fights are never really about what they appear to be. Another late night at the office isn’t about the workload; it’s a statement about your priorities. Anger over the takeout order isn’t about the food; it’s about the fact that you don’t understand what your spouse actually likes.

So it is with the crumbling, century-long marriage of the Republican Party and the business community.

The recent spat between leading Republicans and major corporations like Delta, Coca-Cola and Major League Baseball criticizing Georgia’s restrictive new voting law isn’t just about voting rights; it’s the sign of a deeper breakup that has been years in the making. For anyone confused about how Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell could admonish big companies to “stay out of politics,” after building a career on corporate donations and business-friendly policies, this deeper breakup tells the story.

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a legendary business professor and associate dean at the Yale School of Management, has watched this split grow in recent years, and has heard it from CEOs he knows and works with. What the GOP cares about and what major businesses care about are, increasingly incompatible, he says.

“The political desire to use wedge issues to divide—which used to be fringe in the GOP—has become mainstream,” Sonnenfeld says. “That is 100 percent at variance with what the business community wants. And that is a million times more important to them than how many dollars of taxes are paid here or there.”

Over the weekend, Sonnenfeld hastily organized a Zoom conference with roughly 100 major corporate executives to talk through the voter restrictions being considered by state legislatures throughout the country, and about the way top Republicans like McConnell and Ted Cruz are responding with attacks on businesses that speak up in opposition.

Most of the CEOs on the call were Republicans; . . . The CEOs “ranged from amused to outraged” in their reaction to the GOP attacks on businesses, says Sonnenfeld. “Their comments ranged from talk about ‘taxation without representation’ to the paradox of ‘cancel culture’: It’s OK if they speak out, but only as long as they stay on script?”

As the GOP tries to position itself as the home of “working-class values,” capturing loyalty with a steady campaign against the perceived excesses of progressive culture, it’s running afoul of a business community that can’t simply silo off “culture war” topics. In the eyes of major corporations, issues like voting rights, immigration and transgender-inclusive restrooms have economic impact, too. The millions of people alienated by those fights aren’t just their future customers, many of whom expect to support brands they believe in, they’re the companies’ employees.

“The bad news for Republicans is that they seem to have a 1920s view of who Big Business’ workforce is,” says Sonnenfeld. “That workforce is, at a minimum, highly diverse—and they get along. Trying to stir that up is misguided.”

“Basically, business leaders believe that it’s in the interest of society to have social harmony. ... Divisiveness in society is not in their interest, short term or long term.”

If the marriage between the Republican Party and the business community is on the rocks, what does that mean for politics? What do we misunderstand about what really matters to CEOs? And why aren’t business executives more afraid of boycott threats from the right?

For answers to all of that and more, POLITICO Magazine spoke with Sonnenfeld this week.

90 actual CEOs and business leaders showed up, and 120 people were on the call, including the various election and legal experts. . . . Georgia was not the focus; that was just the warning shot. The volley over the bow is that we had business leaders from Texas saying, “You don’t know what bad is,” and looking at this spread [of voting rights restrictions] to 47 state legislatures. Michael Waldman, the head of the Brennan Center, gave an analysis of how bad [the proposals are] in these different states.

This November, for the first time in American history, [major business leaders] worked to guarantee millions of workers paid time off to vote. We've never had that before—and that's a bypass around government, with its inability to make Election Day a national holiday. So they created their own workarounds. But on top of that, they were really proud that they managed to have—these particular companies—over a million workers with a full day off not only to vote, but to help fortify elderly voting-site volunteers who were at risk for Covid and [had to handle] the tidal wave of ballots. . . . . And to have [the election] condemned [by Republicans] after the companies put so much into ensuring that, they're pretty upset.

The CEOs were across the political spectrum. But one thing they were unified about was their right to have a voice, and the importance of fortifying each other when they get out in front on an issue.

The business community’s interests are not to be xenophobic. It’s not in their interests to be isolationist. It’s not in their interests to be protectionist. And the GOP, those haven’t been their positions, at least since the 1950s. But now they are.

They’re interested in free markets—whether or not that’s product markets, financial markets or labor markets. It’s about the image and reality of America: “Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses,” Emma Lazarus’ poem on the Statue of Liberty. That’s the spirit of it. But it’s also this: If the U.S. is not seen as a comfortable, attractive magnet for the world’s best talent, we’re in trouble. We don’t want all this technological expertise to be siphoned away to our trading partners, and that’s starting to happen.

[Business leaders] are upset about immigration policies. . . . and say, “You can’t condemn us for outsourcing this work to China or India if we can’t bring these highly skilled workers here. We’re already now leasing space in Vancouver and Toronto, and we’re working on wiring the infrastructure so this will be on U.S. time zones. If we can’t get [these skilled workers] into the U.S., we’re still going to function as a North American company with the talent we need.”

They have different priorities [than the Republican Party seems to think]. They’re upset about the [anti-LGBTQ] “bathroom bills.” They’re upset about gun violence; hundreds of companies severed ties with the NRA or stopped dealing in semiautomatic weapons—from Walmart to Dick’s Sporting Goods. As we talk about “regulatory rollbacks” during the Trump administration, they were almost entirely EPA-directed; nobody was lobbying for that in corporate America. With the automakers, it became the entire industry fighting the [Trump-era] EPA, saying, “We like working with California. We think that in addition to what we’re doing with hybrids and [electric vehicles], we are pretty sure that we can get a 50-mile per gallon efficiency in the old-fashioned internal combustion engine. Don’t stop us.”

With these [anti-transgender] “bathroom bills,” the companies that led the charge against the euphemistic “religious freedom” acts in Arkansas, Indiana, North Carolina and Texas — amazingly — were AT&T, UPS and Doug McMillon [the CEO] of Walmart. They were out front.

There's much more.  I don't see the GOP changing and reverting back toward sanity.  The death grip of the Christofascists and white supremacists is simply too tight. With luck big business will be further alienated by the GOP and its demise will come about all the sooner.

Thursday Morning Male Beauty

 

Republican Obstruction on Infrastructure

I recall a few years ago being in France and the UK with a politically conservative friend who marveled at the Metro in Paris and the Undergrond in London, not to mention both countries' passenger rail systems.  This individual questioned why America doesn't have equally good systems and infrastructure to which I responded "because don't want to pay taxes and will not fund them."  That pretty much ended the conversation, but underscore what we see playing out in Washington, D.C. as Republicans make excuses for not supporting the Biden administration's so-called American Jobs Plan which would benefit countless numbers of their constituents.  The hypocrisy - something these politicians share with their evangelical supporters - is that they have supported elements of the proposal in the past and seemingly hope their party base is too stupid to figure out they are getting screwed yet again so that the very wealthy and large corporations can pay lower, or in some cases, no federal income tax.  As a former Republican notes in a column in the Washington Post, the GOP's talking points are crumbling.  Here are highlights: 

President Biden and his advisers have begun to engage with lawmakers on his American Jobs Plan. Biden met with a bipartisan group of lawmakers on Monday, and he and aides have been on the phone with both Democrats and Republicans in Congress. The clear message from the administrations is that ideas and negotiations are welcome. The only nonstarter is doing nothing.

Meanwhile, Republicans sound as though they’re all over the map. Despite claims to be the newly populist party of working men and women, Republican leaders on Capitol Hill have been predicting economic doom should corporations be forced to pay any more than they presently are in federal taxes (which, in the case of more than 50 companies, amounted to zero last year).

 However, that red line is already getting smudged.  Appearing on CNN, Sen. Roger Wicker, a staunch conservative from Mississippi, declared, “I’m not ruling out some kind of pay-for, absolutely.” He went on: “If you’re going to spend, say, $600 billion over several years on an infrastructure program that’s much bigger than we’ve had before, absolutely. We have to be grown-ups and say it has to be paid for so we’re not going to be able to come up with that money out of thin air.”

Many Republicans seem wedded to quibbling over the definition of “infrastructure.” . . . In 2018, then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) was all in favor of a farm bill that included “conservation programs, outdoor recreation, and upgraded watershed and drinking water infrastructure.” He was so gung-ho about the bill that he praised inclusion of provisions that “enhance infrastructure investment in rural communities, on everything from local water projects to broadband internet to helping curb the drug epidemic in rural America.” . . . . If Biden changed his bill’s title to the “American Jobs, Farm and Energy Act,” would McConnell drop his aversion to including water, broadband and energy infrastructure provisions?

McConnell is far from the only Republican who previously favored components of the Biden bill — before Biden entered the Oval Office. Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) now objects to spending for items he doesn’t consider “infrastructure.” It was not always so. In the past, he has supported expanding water infrastructure and broadband infrastructure.

If Republicans not so long ago viewed broadband access, job training, pipelines and water projects — to name just a few — as worthwhile “infrastructure” investments, then perhaps they should drop the semantics and start debating over what we need, how much we need and how to pay for it. They might recall how much their own constituents want these items and then try legislating instead of polishing their talking points for right-wing media.

More Wednesday Male Beauty

 

The Democrat Establishment is Lining up Behind Terry McAuliffe

The dust has barely settled from the 2020 federal elections and Virginians - thanks to Virginia's election cycle with odd year elections - find themselves facing another round of elections for the Virginia General Assembly and the Commonwealth's top statewide offices. Jockeying is going on both sides of the aisle as Democrats and Republicans seek to select their nominees.  For governor, part of me hopes the Virginia Republican Party (which is truly detached from objective reality) manages to nominate the utterly delusional Amanda Chase who touts herself as "Trump in heels" given that the party convention route usually favors the most extreme far right candidates.  On the Democrat side, the so-called party establishment appears to be opting for a safer approach by lining up behind former Governor Terry McAuliffe who seeks a second term following incumbent Ralph Northam who cannot run for reelection.  Some are whining that the party should ignore the goal of political parties - which is to win elections - and seek a minority and/or woman candidate.  As the father of two strong and intelligent daughters, I am hardly anti-woman, but believe that winning in November 2021 is the number 1. priority.  Like the party establishment, I will be backing McAuliffe.   A piece in the Washington Post looks at the state of the Democrat nomination.  Here are excerpts:

From the Norfolk waterfront to the busy streets of Alexandria, Virginia’s Democratic establishment turned out in force this week to anoint their preferred candidate for governor in this fall’s election.

Many of them were female and Black leaders who have risen to power in the past four years and transformed the political landscape of this old Southern state. Social justice and racial equity were the themes of the day. But the candidate they and Gov. Ralph Northam all came out to endorse had a distinctly familiar look: Terry McAuliffe — a 64-year-old White man who already served a term as governor, ending in 2018.

For a state party that has won national acclaim for breaking new ground, the embrace of the tried and true McAuliffe brand seems like a throwback. After all, Virginia Democrats have a diverse set of candidates to choose from in the June 8 primary. Two offer the chance to make history by becoming the first Black woman to govern any state.

Today, about half the members of that caucus [Virginia Legislative Black Caucus] have endorsed McAuliffe — though neither Aird nor the caucus leader, Del. Lamont Bagby (D-Henrico), is endorsing any candidate.

When Northam was politically crippled in early 2019, McAuliffe came to the rescue during crucial elections for every seat in the General Assembly, campaigning and flexing his prodigious fundraising powers, much like a surrogate governor. And Democrats rode an anti-Trump wave to make unexpected gains, seizing majorities in the legislature for the first time in a generation.

It’s those gains that Democrats are eager to protect this year, when all 100 seats in the House of Delegates are on the Nov. 2 ballot, along with governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general. Northam, like all Virginia governors, is prohibited by the state constitution from seeking a second consecutive term.

In a normal election year, Fairfax might be seen as the favorite to succeed Northam — the lieutenant governor job being a traditional steppingstone, as it was for Northam. . . . . Instead, it’s McAuliffe who is positioning himself as the de facto successor to Northam in a field that also includes state Sen. Jennifer L. McClellan (Richmond), former delegate Jennifer Carroll Foy (Prince William) and Del. Lee J. Carter (Manassas).

Most elected party members are loath to say anything publicly about McAuliffe that might sound negative because of his powerful position. But tensions bubbled to the surface Tuesday in an extraordinary scene at the first televised debate featuring the five Democratic gubernatorial candidates.

Two days later, when Northam threw his weight behind McAuliffe with the House speaker, House majority leader and president pro tempore of the Senate by his side, McClellan called a hasty news conference in Richmond.

McAuliffe has not directly addressed questions about the racial dynamics of the contest, pointing to his record of job creation and expanding access to health care for all Virginians. “His record, ability to deliver results, and vision for the future have earned him the support of hundreds of Virginia leaders, including deep and overwhelming support from Black leaders, and Terry is incredibly proud of this strong and diverse coalition,” campaign manager Chris Bolling said.

Some Black Democrats say skin color has nothing to do with their pick for governor.

“It would make no difference who was in this race. I’ve known Terry for decades, I know he can deliver,” said Sen. L. Louise Lucas (D-Portsmouth), who as president pro tem of the Senate is arguably the most powerful Black woman in Virginia’s history.

But Democrats nationwide have wrestled with the fact that Black women have long been the stalwart base of the party but have historically been shut out of positions of leadership.

Bob Holsworth, a longtime Richmond political analyst, said he’s struck in particular by how many Black mayors around the state have come out for McAuliffe — including in Hampton, Newport News, Portsmouth, Norfolk and Richmond.

“There is a certain kind of conservative pragmatism that says, he’s won before, he can win again. That you’re better off with a proven candidate,” Holsworth said. Democrats might be particularly cautious this year, which is the first time they’ll have to test their newfound dominance without having Donald Trump in the White House to motivate blue voters.

Northam’s political adviser, Mark Bergman, essentially cast the governor’s endorsement of McAuliffe in pragmatic terms: “The governor feels that . . . progress could be washed away if we don’t win in this November’s election, so having a proven vote-getter, a proven candidate is good for the party and good for our ability to hold the majority in the House,” Bergman said.

He pointed out that Northam also endorsed Del. Jerrauld C. “Jay” Jones (D-Norfolk) for attorney general over Herring, the incumbent.

Jones, who is Black, said earning Northam’s nod was noteworthy.

“He endorsed a young, Black state legislator seeking to be the state’s chief law enforcement officer. I think that is important and symbolic and is lifting up voices that have traditionally been left out,” Jones said.

James E. “JJ” Minor III, head of the Richmond branch of the NAACP, credited McAuliffe with building genuine connections with Black communities — attending Black churches, knocking on doors.  “Not just during the campaign — he was doing it for the whole four years he was governor,” Minor said.

And he praised McAuliffe’s efforts as governor to restore voting rights for hundreds of thousands of convicted felons — a disproportionate number of whom were Black.

Even Democrats who privately grumble at McAuliffe’s entry into the race credit him for that effort and worry that his popularity is hard to counter as long as support for any other nominee is divided among multiple qualified alternatives.

“With three candidates that are seeking to get the Black vote against a White previous governor who does well with Black voters and Black elected officials, it is a real challenge,” said a Democratic official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive party matters.

That leaves them wringing hands in private that the others are highly qualified politicians but not ideal candidates — with worries that McClellan doesn’t show enough fire and Carroll Foy, who stepped down from her second term in the legislature to run for governor, doesn’t have enough experience.

“Can these two Black women get elected when competing with the Republicans? I’m not so confident with that,” said a Black Democratic official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to handicap the race.

Republicans have been mired in their own dysfunction, squabbling internally over how to stage a convention on May 8 to choose a nominee from a field of eight candidates.