How the plutocrats get out of paying taxes

This provides good explanations of their favorite current schemes.

With taxes due this week, it’s an apt time to consider some of the ways our federal tax code favors America’s wealthiest, and how a subset of those fortunate folks will use every trick in the book to game the system even further to their advantage.

Much of it revolves around the way the IRS taxes long-term investment profits—a.k.a. capital gains. President Joe Biden is asking people to pay a lot more on these profits. For decades, after all, the tax code has rewarded investors, particularly those at the very top of the nation’s wealth and income distributions, with very favorable rates. This policy is based on the long-debunked notion that the benefits of giving rich people even more money to invest will eventually trickle down and lift up the masses via job creation and so forth...

In other words, the tax code favors passive investment gains over actual work. This stands in opposition to the longstanding—perhaps mythical—American ideal that not only is hard work honorable, something to be encouraged and rewarded, but that all Americans should have equal opportunities. In fact, most Americans own little to no stock, while asset ownership soars as one moves up the wealth and income ladders. A proprietary analysis published by Goldman Sachs last year estimated that, as of late 2019, the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans owned a staggering 56 percent of all public and private equity held by US households. Since March 2020, meanwhile, America’s billionaires, despite the pandemic—and also because of it—have seen their collective wealth grow by more than $1.6 trillion.

The disparity in tax rates for work earnings versus investment earnings, which Biden hopes to eliminate, has been a major factor in the rapid growth of the wealth and income gap in recent decades. The disparity also drives financial behavior by wealthy individuals and corporations alike. - Mother Jones

The big "backlash" vs. tech has unfortunately gone nowhere

There needs to be a lot more, and much better focused, effort.

After three and a half years, the U.S. backlash against tech's biggest firms has failed to dent or daunt them.

The big picture: Today, Google, Apple, Amazon and Facebook are massively richer, more powerful and more determined to push their products and services deeper into our lives than they were in January 2018, when Axios first used the term "techlash."

Since then, the companies have run a gauntlet of withering criticism and government complaints that they violate users' privacy, dull kids' brains, cheat their competitors, and undermine American democracy. - Axios

Big Meat's big Covid-19 con

I should have suspected this all along, though I didn't.

Last year, as the meatpacking industry’s frontline workers were infected with Covid-19 and the industry pushed claims of a meat shortage, companies in the U.S. exported more than $22 billion in meat products, continuing an upward trend in foreign sales since 2016.

Trade data from the U.S. Census Bureau shows that in 2020 the value of American meat exports reached its highest level since 2014. Companies exporting meat products from the Midwest also fared well, increasing sales by about $500 million from 2019 to 2020. - In These Times

Where the VA is at

Trump & Co. didn't get too far with their heinous effort to open the Veterans Administration to being strip-mined for profit by the greedheads, aka "privatization." But that doesn't mean everything's cool. This is a comprehensive recent overview.

Denis McDonough, the new secretary of Veterans Affairs, is only the second nonveteran to take the helm of the VA since it became a Cabinet-level department in 1988 and only the second person whom Congress did not confirm unanimously for the post.3 He will have his work cut out for him. Not only does Secretary McDonough have to manage a large and complex organization, but he is also facing a series of unprecedented challenges—all compounded by the fact that the VA’s top leadership is in turmoil following the Trump administration, which had five deputy secretaries4 during the former president’s four-year term.

Secretary McDonough’s challenges may be placed into seven categories:

- Addressing the ballooning VA budget
- Expanding veterans’ access to disability benefits
- Reducing the veteran suicide rate
- Slowing the privatization of veterans’ health care
- Prioritizing the women and LGBTQ people who have and still serve in the military
- Rebuilding the department’s infrastructure and staffing
- Helping veterans transition into civil society - Center for American Progress

Care work needs to be treated as as important as it gets

The way things are now is not indicative of a well-functioning economy or society.

Care isn’t a burden for women and families to shoulder alone. It’s the foundation of our economy, and it deserves to be treated as such. For the tens of millions of workers with care responsibilities related to, for example, young children or elderly parents, having stable, high-quality care services available is what makes it possible for them to hold a job. Put simply, care services are needed for the functioning of our modern labor market.

Workers with care responsibilities need a strong care system in place in order to participate in the workforce. As it stands, our care infrastructure is fragmented and inadequate, which cuts off opportunities for millions of workers. The burdens of our inadequate care infrastructure disproportionately fall on women, who still perform the bulk of care work in this country. Those care burdens are a primary cause of low labor force participation among prime age women in the U.S. relative to our peer countries around the world, even before the pandemic. Poor care infrastructure comes at great economic costs.

While workers with caregiving needs rely heavily on care services, care jobs are historically underpaid and undervalued. And because of things like occupational segregation, discrimination, and other labor market disparities related to structural racism and sexism, women and people of color are concentrated in these jobs. - EPI

Regarding the "worker shortage"

This provides excellent historical context.

The current blizzard of stories about a “worker shortage” across the U.S. may seem as though it’s about this peculiar moment, as the pandemic fades. Restaurants in Washington, D.C., contend that they’re suffering from a staffing “crisis.” The hospitality industry in Massachusetts says it’s experiencing the same disaster. The governor of Montana plans to cancel coronavirus-related additional unemployment benefits funded by the federal government, and the cries of business owners are being heard in the White House.

In reality, though, this should be understood as the latest iteration of a question that’s plagued the owning class for centuries: How can they get everyone to do awful jobs for them for awful pay?

Employers’ anxiety about this can be measured by the fact that these stories have erupted when there currently is no shortage of workers. An actual shortage would result in wages rising at the bottom of the income distribution to such a degree that there was notable inflation. That’s not happening, at least not now. Instead, business owners seem to mean that they can’t find people who’ll work for what the owners want to pay them. This is a “shortage” in the same sense that there is a shortage of new Lamborghinis available for $1,000.

To understand what’s truly going on, it’s necessary to look back at how this question has been settled in different ways through the history of capitalism. - The Intercept

How badly might the new NAFTA screw things up?

This is a comprehensive analysis.

Unfortunately, the now-paused trade negotiations with the U.K. and Kenya started from the flawed new NAFTA/TPP template. Tai and the Biden administration are right to pause and review these negotiations and should consult with civil society before developing an entirely new template for trade negotiations. In addition to the “worker-centric” approach that Tai has outlined, a new model must incorporate important principles that President Biden articulated in his Jan. 20, 2021 executive order on modernizing regulatory review.

Biden’s order has been called “game-changing” because instead of focusing review of regulations primarily to reduce business costs it calls for promoting “public health and safety, economic growth, social welfare, racial justice, environmental stewardship, human dignity, equity and the interests of future generations.” In a significant about-face, Biden’s regulatory reform order tasks the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) in the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) — which has been a primary force for deregulation and a roadblock to lifesaving regulations for decades — with proactively encouraging agencies to develop rules that benefit the public.

The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) should be a first stop on this regulatory review train. The new NAFTA is out of step with the Biden administration’s expressed priorities and cannot be the model for future agreements. Instead of promoting the interests of future generations, racial justice and environmental stewardship, the new NAFTA’s so-called “good regulatory practices” chapter increases opportunities for corporate meddling to slow down, weaken and roll back protective standards. Provisions throughout call for regulatory impact statements, cost-benefit analysis, a rush to market without safety studies, limited labeling of hazards and harmonization of standards with those of other countries or weak corporate-influenced international standards. While the text includes lip service to the importance of public interest regulations, the new NAFTA includes multiple deregulatory provisions that instead fuel a race to the bottom. - IATP

Maybe a harbinger of the Trump SCOTUS's plans

Or maybe not. I do think the far-right majority continues to serve the rich man, first and foremost, and that might - might- keep them from getting too out of control. But it will continue to be bad.

Take a walk with me inside the mind of Brett Jones. He was the plaintiff in Jones v. Mississippi, the United State Supreme Court case I told you about (April 26). In a 6-3 opinion, written by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the court rolled back two previous rulings regarding lifetime imprisonment without parole for minors. The previous rulings, called Miller and Montgomery, held that lifetime imprisonment for juvenile offenders was justified only in the worse of the worse cases—when a convict is "permanently incorrigible." In Jones, Kavanaugh said nah. Life in prison's fine even if corrigible.

I want you to take this walk with me to understand more fully the complex layers of cruelty in Kavanaugh's opinion. By understanding that his point is not punishment in the service of democracy and justice but instead punishment in the service of impunity and power, I hope you will understand the need for calling this barbarism instead of what we usually call it. Conservatism seems like something debatable. Barbarism isn't...

In this, the Supreme Court affirmed what every single survivor of childhood trauma secretly believes but fights every single day: the idea that the weak in this world are the playthings of the strong, and that democracy, equality, freedom, morality and all the rest have nothing to do with it. In deciding Jones, the court, led by Kavanaugh, said yeah, you're right. What matters began long before you came into being, so that Boy Kavanaugh can commit crimes with impunity while rising to the pinnacle of judicial power to sit in judgment of Boy Jones who can now only curse the day he was born. - AlterNet

Passing the PRO Act would be a good deal

As usual, these days, the obstacle is the Senate filibuster.

A coalition of over 40 progressive organizations on Saturday rallied online and in person to support the PRO Act—legislation that would strengthen workers' right to organize among other pro-worker provisions.

Groups behind the May Day actions include MoveOn, Indivisible, Democratic Socialists of America, and the Working Families Party...

In a fact sheet released in February, EPI summarized the proposal's benefits:

The Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act addresses many of the major shortcomings with our current law. Passing the PRO Act would help restore workers' ability to organize with their co-workers and negotiate for better pay, benefits, and fairness on the job. Passing the PRO Act would also promote greater racial economic justice because unions and collective bargaining help shrink the Black–white wage gap and bring greater fairness to the workplace.

EPI also joined Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the AFL-CIO, and the National Employment Law Project this week in releasing a document that "examines the challenges of unionizing in the U.S. and explains how the PRO Act would be a corrective." - Common Dreams