As we are aiding and arming the Saudi-led coalition against Yemen, we are a party to genocide:
Seven million people are on the brink of famine in the country, which is in the grips of the largest cholera outbreak in modern history.
An estimated 130 Yemeni children are dying every day and an estimated 400,000 children will need treatment for acute malnutrition this year, the charity said.
Promoted as needed relief for the middle class, the Senate Republican tax overhaul actually would increase taxes for some 13.8 million moderate-income American households, a nonpartisan analysis showed Monday.
Suppose that instead of paying income taxes each year, corporations were required to turn over a portion of their stock to the government, let’s say 25 percent, in the form of non-voting shares.
The rule would be that these shares are treated just like other shares of the company’s stock. If the company pays a $2 a share dividend to holders of its regular shares, it also pays a $2 dividend on each of the government’s shares. If the company buys back 10 percent of its outstanding shares at $100 per share, it would also buy back 10 percent of the government’s shares at $10 each. If another company wants to take over the company, buying up shares at $150 each, the company also has to buy the government’s shares at $150 each.
The only difference between the shares owned by the government and the stock held by other shareholders is that the government would have no voting power associated with its shares. This is not an effort to get government control over the means of production. It is simply an inescapable route to its tax revenue.
This should be a path that both liberals and conservatives can embrace, even if they disagree on the best tax rate. Under the current system, or the Republican proposal, companies can achieve large tax savings by gaming the system. As a result, they spend tens of billions of dollars on tax lawyers and accountants who develop sophisticated schemes to limit their tax liability.
Everyone agrees this is a complete waste of resources. From an economic standpoint, we don’t want to see highly skilled people waste their efforts trying to find ways to circumvent the tax code. Nor do we want the IRS to have to spend large amounts of resources trying to prevent this sort of gaming. It would be much better if these people’s skills were used towards some productive end that made people’s lives better.
Lake Michigan water rates have been surging throughout the Chicago region in recent years, squeezing low-income residents and leaving them with little, if any, recourse, a Tribune analysis shows.
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And the financial pain falls disproportionately on majority-African-American communities, where residents’ median water bill is 20 percent higher for the same amount of water than residents pay in predominantly white communities, the Tribune’s examination revealed.
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Through it all, little accountability exists, both in the rates they set and how well the communities maintain their systems. In the past two years, two towns — Harvey and Maywood — have been singled out for mismanagement or fraud.
Unlike other utilities such as electricity and natural gas, and unlike other states’ policies, Illinois allows the local officials who collect the water revenue also to set rates.
Good, quick primer.
...We wrote about the slipperiness of often-conflated terms like "antifa," "antifascism," and "black bloc." On college campuses, those terms — and the differences among them — matter. (Consider the amount of money colleges spend on security for an appearance by a far-right speaker: They expect antifascist activists to show up, and they worry about the prospect of black-bloc violence.)
So we asked several scholars, including Mr. Bray, for their definitions.
...It was a pattern of behavior; it included an alleged violent assault; the women involved had far more credible evidence than many of the most notorious accusations that have come to light in the past five weeks. But Clinton was not left to the swift and pitiless justice that today’s accused men have experienced. Rather, he was rescued by a surprising force: machine feminism. The movement had by then ossified into a partisan operation and it was willing—eager—to let this friend of the sisterhood enjoy a little droit de seigneur.
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When more than a dozen women stepped forward and accused Leon Wieseltier of a serial and decades-long pattern of workplace sexual harassment, he said, “I will not waste this reckoning.” It was textbook Wieseltier: the insincere promise and the perfectly chosen word. The Democratic Party needs to make its own reckoning of the way it protected Bill Clinton. The party needs to come to terms with the fact that it was so enraptured by their brilliant, Big Dog president and his stunning string of progressive accomplishments that it abandoned some of its central principles. The party was on the wrong side of history and there are consequences for that. Yet expedience is not the only reason to make this public accounting. If it is possible for politics and moral behavior to coexist, then this grave wrong needs to be acknowledged. If Weinstein and Mark Halperin and Louis C.K. and all the rest can be held accountable, so can our former president and so can his party, which so many Americans so desperately need to rise again.
But university research is in trouble, and so is an economy more dependent on it than many people understand. Federal funding for basic research—more than half of it conducted on university campuses like this one—has effectively declined since 2008, failing to keep pace with inflation. This is before taking into account Trump administration proposals to slash the National Science Foundation (NSF) and National Institutes of Health (NIH) budgets by billions of dollars more.
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While private institutions are better shielded from funding cuts by huge endowments, Midwestern public universities have much thinner buffers. The endowments of the universities of Iowa, Wisconsin, and Illinois and Ohio State, which together enroll nearly 190,000 students, add up to about $11 billion—less than a third of Harvard’s $37.6 billion...
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These universities have served as bulwarks against a decades-long trend of economic activity fleeing smaller cities and the center of the country for the coasts. Since the 1980s, deregulation and corporate consolidation have led to a drastic hollowing out of the local industries that once sustained heartland cities. But a university can’t just be picked up and moved from Madison to New York in the way a bank, an insurance company, or even a factory can be.
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Meanwhile, global economic rivals have continued to approach and even surpass the level of American research output. The U.S. share of all research and development funding worldwide dropped from more than a third to barely a quarter from 2003 to 2013, the most recent period for which the figures are available. China could catch up by 2030 based on current trends. Last year, Chinese researchers for the first time filed more patents applications in the life sciences than their U.S. counterparts. The historical global leader in science and technology, the United States is now ninth among the nations of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in the proportion of gross domestic product spent on research.
Because basic science can take decades to translate into new drugs or products, the consequences of this won’t be immediately visible. That makes it hard to argue for renewed investment in research in a political system that doesn’t prioritize long-term thinking. Nor does private industry always want to invest in the years of research it can take to translate fundamental discoveries into the kind of marketable commodities that drive the American economy—and that often originate at universities.
Trump’s personalization of foreign policy makes credible commitment next to impossible. If Trump is the only spokesperson, then his idiotic tweets matter, no matter how much his chief of staff, John Kelly, pretends they don’t. Trump wants to rally all of Asia around him to confront North Korea to coax Pyongyang into negotiations. It is extremely difficult to make that sale, however, if the sole person who matters keeps speaking erratically on the subject (or any subject). It also makes it next to impossible for North Korea to entertain negotiating with Trump.
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There is a reason every time Trump tries to flesh out his grand strategy, he fails miserably. His mixture of erratic security pledges, mercantilist economic policy and transactional values is less appetizing to the rest of the world than he realizes.
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As always, the primary success of Trump’s overseas trip is that he did not start World War III. Beyond that, anyone who is describing his Pacific Rim trip as a success is relying on the soft bigotry of low expectations.