Topic: Poisonous rhetoric and media coverage of immigration issues like the caravan. People: Bill, Rachel, and Nate. Recorded: Nov 25th 2018.
Episode 250 (29 min):
AFD 250
– AFD 250 Links and Notes (PDF)
RSS Feed: Arsenal for Democracy Feedburner
iTunes Store Link: “Arsenal for Democracy by Bill Humphrey”
Stitcher Link: Arsenal for Democracy on Stitcher
Music by friend of the show Stunt Bird.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
Pretty weird how many non-Millennials who support Clinton have decided to attack Millennials for their presidential voting preferences when Millennials are literally the only age demographic with more than 50% support for Clinton across most polling. Maybe first go figure out why 35-48% of your own generations are voting for the candidate of the white supremacists and *then* come back and talk to us about this / apologize. (If you’re 50 years or older, more of your peers outright plan to vote for Trump than for Clinton, by varying margins by generation.) This attitude is not a productive way to garner Millennial votes … or even get young voters to show up for any of our candidates this November.
Anyway, folks, Arsenal for Democracy is back in production — because the entire rest of political media is hostile to our generation.
Arsenal Bolt: Quick updates on the news stories we’re following.
I reacted very negatively to Secretary Clinton’s bizarre debate anecdote about the 2009 Copenhagen climate talks, but I couldn’t quite remember all the details, other than my generalized and deep disappointment about the results of those talks at the time. This post filled my memory gap in…
“Hillary Clinton Is Living in a Climate Change Fantasy World” – Slate.com
About midway through the [first 2016 Democratic presidential] debate, Clinton staked her climate record on what’s widely perceived to have been one of the biggest diplomatic failures in recent history — the Copenhagen climate summit in 2009. After years of anticipation, the meeting of world leaders ended in disarray, with Obama and his aides famously wandering around the convention center, looking for the leaders of China, India, Brazil, and other key nations. The toothless deal struck at the last minute was called a “grudging accord” by the New York Times the next day. Yes, Obama—and Clinton, then his secretary of state—were instrumental to that deal, but it’s hardly something Hillary should be proud of.
So it was pretty strange to hear her comments on Tuesday night. In her first answer on climate change, Clinton said, “I have been on the forefront of dealing with climate change starting in 2009 when President Obama and I crashed a meeting with the Chinese and got them to sign up to the first international agreement to combat climate change that they’d ever joined.”
In reality, the sour legacy of Copenhagen has haunted international climate negotiations ever since. It’s now widely believed that the U.S. never wanted a legally binding climate deal in Copenhagen at all—even though the Democrats controlled the Congress at the time and may have been able to successfully ratify the treaty—opting instead for a mostly empty pledge of billions of dollars in aid to developing nations. Among environmentalists, Clinton has retained only a mediocre reputation on climate change as a result.
Her Copenhagen comment wasn’t just a poor choice of wording, because she brought it up again later in the debate.
[…]
In her expanded version of the story, Clinton and Obama were roaming Copenhagen “literally … hunting for the Chinese.” Once they found them, she said, “We marched up, broke in, and said, ‘We’ve been looking all over for you. Let’s sit down and come up with what we need to do.’” That all sounds very Jason Bourne, but it’s not a good substitute for effective climate policy.
By far the top quality I look for in a potential president is competence, followed, surprisingly distantly, by how much I agree with them. Followed yet more distantly by whether or not I trust them, and eventually by how much I like them. Which is a roundabout way of saying I’m still in Hillary’s soulless, depressing camp.
A new Citizens for Tax Justice / US PIRG study of IRS/SEC filings indicates that 358 of the 500 largest companies in the United States are stashing $2.1 trillion in legal tax havens.
The lost U.S. tax revenue from just 57 of them who admitted the difference in what they would have paid on those profits without havens versus what they actually paid (legally!) was $184.4 billion in total. The report then extrapolates that the lost U.S. tax revenue from the full Fortune 500 due to offshore tax avoidance may be around $620 billion total, or $90 billion yearly over the period in which the untaxed offshore stash was earned.
The tax haven countries themselves often have yearly GDPs smaller than the profits supposedly being “earned” in those countries by the “subsidiaries” of US megacorporations “based” in those countries.
Also:
Between 2008 and 2014, the study added, the amount of offshore cash holdings for American multinationals doubled.
Ah, I guess big U.S. firms can’t hire more people or pay better wages (duly earned through higher productivity!) because they “only” have over $2 Trillion in offshore savings. You see, it’s very tough as American megacorporations to pay living wages when you’re collectively only avoiding $90 billion a year in taxes.
Meanwhile, a major Democratic Party candidate for president wants to give tax breaks to big firms to pay workers more fairly, even though they already legally skip $90 billion annually in taxes now.
This is ludicrous. You don’t pay companies to do things they need to do anyway. You really don’t do it when they’re effectively stealing tax revenue now. As the head of the World Bank just said, legal tax avoidance schemes are a form of corruption. This needs to end. It just does.
There are many ways that the very wealthy already benefit financially from U.S. government policies (which is frustrating to me), but opposing zero-tuition public colleges because rich kids might get to go to public colleges for free seems like a strange position.
Clinton hits Sanders on his tuition free college plan: "I am not in favor of making college free for Donald Trump’s kids."
— Dan Merica (@danmericaCNN) October 5, 2015
What are the odds that Hillary Clinton’s implied scenario of a flood of ultra-wealthy students will suddenly decide to enroll in public universities because the tuition is free now? Won’t they overwhelmingly just continue to go to elite schools where tuition is still charged? (Just like how they tend to go to private school for K-12 even though it is freely available to them in public form.)
And, as a side note about her overall plan (means-testing plus work-study), why should the poorest kids who’ve probably had to struggle the hardest to get to college also then have to work on the side to qualify for tuition coverage under her plan? Why don’t we just make it so everyone, regardless of means, has the right to go to college for free without working in addition to concentrating on their studies — and let the chips fall where they may? Why do we have to make these policies so complicated for no apparent reason? Just offer them to everyone and whoever takes it, takes it. It’s not that expensive.
It’s going to be weird to see how gendered conspiracy theories deal with Hillary Clinton. It’s a bit harder to claim this one’s the Antichrist.
