Corporate Japan passes on tax cuts to help national recovery

Interesting. Can you imagine the selfish ones in the US ever dreaming of helping the country like this? Think about how the bankers had their entire lifestyle rescued and maintained and how they investing heavily in blocking all reform of their irresponsible activities. The Chamber of Commerce would rather be dead than help America like this.

Japan's top business lobby gave the government the green light to scrap a planned cut in the corporate tax rate and urged firms to look at shifting production to western Japan as the nation grapples with its worst crisis since World War Two.

Hiromasa Yonekura, chairman of the Japan Business Federation, said the influential lobby would not fight the government if it decided to shelve a plan to lower the corporate tax rate, which at around 40 percent is among the highest in the industrialized world.

Economics Minister Kaoru Yosano suggested last week the government should reconsider the planned tax cut of 5 percentage points from April to prioritize spending on reconstruction and prevent the country's already massive debt pile from growing.

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I'm not convinced America can afford war #3

The President spoke tonight about Libya. Ambinder has a good write up. I was going to link to the NYT's piece, but as I have no idea if my links to them are now subject to their rather expensive fire wall, I'm going to avoid linking if possible, until I'm sure. Ambiguity is not helpful.

In his speech Tuesday night, President Obama did not answer one key question on the mind of Americans—"When does this thing end?"—but he made a workmanlike effort to answer the central one: "Why did the United States decide to intervene in Libya—and why did it do so in the way it did?"

The short answer: because America could, and the benefits outweighed the potential costs. "There will be times ... when our safety is not directly threatened but our interests and values are," the president said.

I'm usually quite interventionist. But I worry about getting into yet another war when we're already in two, neither of which seems to be going all that well. I'm having a very difficult time believing that we can afford this action. I feel sorry for the Libyans. But if we are truly facing a national debt crisis in this country - which the GOP has alleged, and the President has sadly hopped on board - then we shouldn't spending billions in yet another (this makes 3) foreign war of convenience. We've lived with Qaddafi for decades. Yeah, he sucks. But unless there's something we're not being told, he's not any more dangerous today than he was a year ago. Wars cost a lot of money. We don't have it.

And there's another thing. I remember sitting on a Moroccan train several years ago and being forced to defend our actions in Afghanistan to Moroccan intellectuals who were accusing us of imperialism, of oppressing Arabs, etc. In Afghanistan? Excuse me? I gave the couple a good piece of my mind, including asking why the US was spending money and manpower helping to free Muslims when the rest of the Muslim world wasn't doing squat, other than sending men and money to help Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

We don't get credit anymore for the good we do internationally. I simply can't fathom any move we make, in this crisis or any other, that would lead the Arab street to truly give us credit. They're ticked at us when we support the bad guys, and they're ticked at us when we intervene to get rid of the bad guy. All the while, we're wasting a trillion bucks. It's not the only factor that should enter our decision making processs, but still... Read the rest of this post...

Why won't Donald Trump release his long-form birth certificate?

UPDATE: It's confirmed. Trump tried to fool the voters, did not produce his real birth certificate.
________________________

Fair is fair. What is the Donald hiding?

The background: Trump has been complaining for weeks that President Obama has refused to release his birth certificate, even though Obama did in fact release his birth certificate 3 years ago - I'll be posting it below. Trump even suggested today that Obama was possibly not even born in the US. And in order to further buttress his false claims, Trump released his own birth certificate today.

Here is where it gets interesting. The crazy right is now claiming that the birth certificate Obama released a few years ago is only the "short form" (as if anyone has two birth certificates). They want to see the supposed "long form." Which is funny, because the birth certificate that Donald Trump released today via Newsmax is just as short as Obama's - in fact, it's the exact same information, except that Obama's birth certificate actually has more information than Trump's.

See for yourself:

Trump's (courtesy of Newsmax):


Obama (courtesy of Snopes - note that Snopes has concluded that it's real):


President Obama's birth certificate clearly contains more information than Donald Trump's. If Trump thinks that Obama's information is woefully lacking, then Trump's own information is even worse. Why is Donald Trump hiding his long form birth certificate?

I'm starting to wonder if he was even born here. (After all, his not-a-birth-certificate he just released clearly says he was born in a Jamaican hospital!)

And his accent is a bit exotic.

Bet he's not even circumcised. Read the rest of this post...

How US products are helping Middle East despots oppress their people

In all fairness (and I'm not being sarcastic), every country in the world does this. They sell what they can to whomever they can. I'm not saying it's right. I am saying that the US is hardly alone (oftentimes the foreign-based "demonize America first" crowd forgets that we didn't invent unscrupulousness), everyone does commerce with someone nasty. Again, doesn't make it right, but also doesn't make it a uniquely American problem.

WSJ:

As Middle East regimes try to stifle dissent by censoring the Internet, the U.S. faces an uncomfortable reality: American companies provide much of the technology used to block websites.
McAfee Inc., acquired last month by Intel Corp., has provided content-filtering software used by Internet-service providers in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, according to interviews with buyers and a regional reseller. Blue Coat Systems Inc. of Sunnyvale, Calif., has sold hardware and technology in Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar that has been used in conjunction with McAfee's Web-filtering software and sometimes to block websites on its own, according to interviews with people working at or with ISPs in the region.

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Video: College kid takes pic a day of his beard growing while walking on campus - sounds lame, is totally cool

EMBED-Year Of The Beard Read the rest of this post...

Freeloading banks trying to weaken Dodd-Frank even more

As if it wasn't already a neutered piece of legislation. Enough is never really enough for the bankers. Sure the American public saved them and is now suffering because of their shameful behavior. But hey, that was then and today is a new day. CNBC:

But now financial companies are trying to get around the law by manipulating a carve-out for "qualified residential mortgages." Lawmakers punted on the definition of a qualified residential mortgage when the law was written, charging regulators with deciding what mortgages are safe enough to avoid the risk-retention rules. Obviously, many financial firms would like to see an expansive definition that would reduce their need to retain risk.

On Tuesday, the board of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation will hold a open meeting to discuss the rule and the carve-out.

The very first companies to begin agitating for an exemption from risk-retention were Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Lobbyists argued that mortgages that mortgages backed by either Fannie or Freddie should automatically be included as qualified mortgages.

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Plutonium found outside of reactor in Japan

Some of it is old from previous nuclear testing and some of it is new. I'm not sure either is very comforting at this point. MSNBC.com:

Experts had expected traces would be detected once crews began searching for it, because plutonium is present in the production of nuclear energy.

Plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. said the amounts found at five sites during testing last week were very small and were not a risk to public health.

TEPCO official Jun Tsuruoka said only two of the plutonium samples were believed to be from a leaking reactor. The other three samples were from earlier nuclear tests, he said. Years of weapons testing in the atmosphere have left trace amounts of plutonium in many places around the world.

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Minions of ALEC strike back – Wisconsin Republicans want to search critic's emails

We wrote here about ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council), a hard-right, corporate-funded, members-only group of Republican state lawmakers who gather to write laws they could all take back to their states.

Well, the legislators don't actually write the laws; the corps do that for them. That's what "Exchange" in the title means. Billionaires (like the Koch Brothers) and corporations hand over pre-written laws and money in exchange for state-by-state policy support.

The part where the laws are taken back to the states is correct though; the lawmakers eagerly spread that legislation on their return. Case in point, the Browns-to-Prison-for-Profit law, Arizona Immigration bill SB-1070, was drafted by private prisons corporation CCA "at an ALEC conference last year."

In that article, I mentioned William Cronon, a distinguished Wisconsin professor who has started writing about the Wisconsin wickedness and ALEC.

Well, ALEC may or may not have struck back, but its minions sure have, through their agent, Wisconsin Republicans. Paul Krugman:

And what happened next? Wisconsin Republicans have demanded access to his personal email records.

Yes, personal. Cronon has a wisconsin.edu email address — but nobody, and I mean nobody, considers such academic email addresses something specially reserved for university business. Actually, according to Cronon he has been especially careful, maintaining a separate personal account — but nobody would have considered it out of the ordinary if he mingled personal correspondence with official business on the dot edu address. ...

But then, we know perfectly well what’s going on here. Republicans aren’t looking for some abuse of Cronon’s position; they’re hoping to find some statement that can be quoted out of context to discredit him. At the very least, they hope that other academics will henceforth feel intimidated. And somehow, we can be sure that people like, say, Richard Vedder of Ohio University wouldn’t be subject to equivalent scrutiny.

As usual, the nakedness of the thing is what’s surprising.

I'll be writing more about ALEC in the future, including some startling information about their funding. (Hint: It isn't the lawmakers' dues that keeps them afloat.)

GP Read the rest of this post...

Krugman: The GOP prescription for decreasing unemployment — increase unemployment

There are almost no words for this kind of propagandistic ignorance. The Professor elucidates:

Wow. The GOP prescription for higher employment is actually quite spectacular — it’s a thing of many levels, an ignorance wrapped in a fallacy.

The idea is this: we’ll lay off government workers; this will raise unemployment, putting downward pressure on wages; and lower wages will lead to higher employment.

Wow indeed. And War is Peace, and Ignorance is Strength.

Krugman adds:

[T]he argument ... says that by reducing demand, you cut the price, which increases demand, which means that you end up selling more than before. Um, no — that’s the kind of answer that, in Econ 101, has you suggesting that the student get special tutoring.

Doublethink in George Orwell's 1984 is the ability to say the opposite of what is true, and also to believe it. Looks like a win-win for the GOP, at least by that measure.

Think maybe that "downward pressure on wages" is the real goal? Me too. Near the end of this post, I asked if the rich and their retainers aren't trying to kill the cow they're milking. Or have we stopped being that cow?

So which is it? Have the super-rich decided they don't need America any more? Or are they just so in love with Supply Side Jesus that they don't know they're burning the house down with them inside?

In other words, when this country becomes a faltering second-world economy with a useful first-world military, have the super-rich prepared their financial escape? Do the rich really need the rest of us?

In my opinion, that's still the right next question.

GP Read the rest of this post...

More on GOP trying to destroy prof who dared to criticize WI Gov Walker

NYT:

As Wisconsin’s capital continued to echo with debate over the controversial legislation that strips public unions of collective bargaining rights, a history professor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison publicly joined the conversation last week with his first post on a new blog.

Two days later, on March 17, while attending a conference of historians, Professor Cronon learned that a public records request had been filed by a state Republican Party official demanding access to months of messages on his university e-mail account that referred to certain politicized words and names, including the governor and a number of legislators.

Big surprise, the Republicans are "troubled" that anyone would dare question their move.

Professor Cronon, who wrote an Op-Ed article in The New York Times this week criticizing the actions of Wisconsin Republicans, discussed the records request on his blog on Friday.

Mark Jefferson, executive director of the Republican Party of Wisconsin, said that he would not detail why the records request was filed and said it was inappropriate for Professor Cronon to question his motives. “I find this troubling,” Mr. Jefferson said. “Like anyone else filing a public records request, I don’t have to give a reason.”

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GOP now demonizing high-speed rail same way they demonized health care reform

Yes, let's ensure that our country doesn't enter the 21st century until the 22nd century. God forbid our technology advanced a little and caught up with Europe and Japan. France had high speed rail in the early 80s. Will the US ever get it? Not if Republicans have their way. They're now demonizing high speed rail projects simply because the President wants them. It's disturbing behavior to say the least. I can see them having a true intellectual disagreement about a policy issue (though, their objections to health care reform were never real - they made most of it up). But trying to stop the country from finally improving its antiquated rail system?

It's a dangerous move from the GOP, it hurts our country, and it's sadly what they always do. Republicans want to win at all costs, not because they think they're right on an issue, but rather because they think it will hurt Democrats to lose. So even if an issue is a good thing, the GOP will try to block it, will lie about it (think death panels and global warming), simply because it benefits them politically, even if it hurts the country.

Republicans like to think they're the patriotic party. They're the America-firsters. They're destroying this country, as the rest of the world passes us by.

PS It might have been nice for The Hill to put a little balance in their story, rather than simply parroting every GOP lie and then quoting no one rebutting them. Yes, the Hill quotes some sources lamenting the controversy. How about actually telling us whether the GOP accusations are true or false? How about quoting someone actually rebutting the accusations with facts? Read the rest of this post...

Radioactive iodine from Japan found in Massachusetts rainwater

I got a "BREAKING NEWS" alert yesterday from Boston.com informing me Low-level radiation from Japan had been found in rainwater in Massachusetts. It's not dangerous, but it's fascinating:

Low levels of radioactive iodine linked to the nuclear disaster in Japan were detected in a sample of rainwater in Massachusetts, state health officials announced yesterday.

The concentration of radioiodine-131 found in the sample is very low and did not affect the health of the state’s drinking-water supplies, said John Auerbach, commissioner of the Department of Public Health.

The rain sample was taken during the past week in Boston as part of regular monitoring by the US Environmental Protection Agency. No detectable increases in radiation were discovered in the air that was tested in the same location where the rainwater was collected, Auerbach said at a press conference yesterday at the William A. Hinton State Laboratory Institute in Jamaica Plain.

Small world, after all.

Again, public health officials keep stressing that these levels of radioactivity aren't dangerous. And, radioactive iodine has a half-life of eight days.

According to Gallup's latest polling on the environment, Americans do have serious, legitimate concerns about water:

At least three in four Americans surveyed in Gallup's 2011 Environment poll say they worry a great deal or a fair amount about contamination of soil and water by toxic waste, pollution of rivers, lakes, and reservoirs, pollution of drinking water, and the maintenance of the nation's supply of fresh water for household needs.

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Syrian troops patrolling streets following more violence

Whether the protests will spread throughout the entire country is still up for debate. For now though, Assad has his hands full. Al Jazeera:

Syria has deployed security forces to the northern city of Latakia after violent protests left there at least 12 people dead and more than 150 injured amid calls for reform.

Troops patrolled the streets of Latakia - a religiously diverse port city 350km northwest of the capital, Damascus - in force on Sunday, in response to a wave of unrest that has put president Bashar al-Assad under unprecedented pressure.

Syrian authorities have accused "armed groups" of seeking to incite sectarian strife in the city, which has seen violent clashes between pro-reform protesters, security forces and government supporters.

Dozens of pro-reform protesters have been killed in similar clashes in towns and cities across the country, including the city of Daraa and nearby Sanamin.

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Green Party celebrates success and prepare to run coalition in German state

This is quite a big jump for the Greens who won less than half of the votes in the previous election. Angela Merkel's center-right party still polled well but lost enough votes to fall out of control of the prosperous state of Baden-Wuerttemberg. Merkel's CDU had controlled the state since 1953. The nuclear issue was a contributing factor but voter fatigue with Merkel's policies was also an issue. The Guardian:

The chancellor's Christian Democratic Union party, or CDU, had ruled the region's state legislature for almost 58 years, but found itself on the wrong side of the nuclear debate following Fukushima. Even before the Japanese earthquake, the party was unpopular locally for sanctioning a multibillion euro project to build a railway station in Stuttgart.

Support for the CDU slumped from 44.2% in the 2006 state election to 39%, according to official results.

The state parliament's new leader would be Winfried Kretschmann, 62, a spiky-haired former science teacher. He is likely to become the Green party's first regional "minister president" after his party gained 25% of the vote; enough, when combined with the 23.1% for the centre-left Social Democratic party, to form a coalition. Minister presidents are powerful on a national as well as a regional level, because they have a vote in Germany's upper house, the Bundesrat, and can veto legislation.

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Japan corrects '10m' radiation level to 100,000

It's better than 10 million times over normal radiation, but it's hardly a comforting thought either at 100,000. Meanwhile yet another robust earthquake hit Japan though so far, no reports of injury or problems. BBC:

The Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) had said radiation levels were 10m times higher than normal before correcting the figure to 100,000 times.

Workers are battling to stop radiation leaks at the Fukushima plant, hit by a quake and tsunami over two weeks ago.

Meanwhile, Japan has lifted a tsunami warning that was issued after another earthquake off its northern coast.

The 6.5-magnitude quake struck at 0723 local time on Monday (2223 GMT Sunday), 109km (67 miles) east of the badly-damaged port city of Sendai.

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