Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:30am (ET) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.
This Day in History
The Titanic sinks; President Abraham Lincoln dies; Jackie Robinson becomes first African American player in Major League Baseball; US launches air raid against Libya; Pol Pot dies.
Breakfast Tunes
Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac
The human foot is a masterpiece of engineering and a work of art.
Breakfast News
World Bank and IMF chiefs: tax dodging is grave concern for global economy
The leaders of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have warned that the industrial scale of international tax avoidance revealed by the Panama Papers represents a “great concern” for the global economy and is having a “tremendously negative effect on our mission to end poverty”.
Jim Yong Kim, the president of the World Bank, said the revelations that many of the world’s richest and most powerful people are avoiding paying millions in taxes by hiding money from the taxman in offshore havens is a “great, great concern” and “very, very damaging” to the bank’s “mission to end extreme poverty”.
“When taxes are evaded, when state assets are taken and put into these havens, all of these things can have a tremendous negative effect on our mission to end poverty and boost prosperity,” Kim said as he opened the Spring Meetings of the World Bank and IMF in Washington.
America’s 50 Biggest Corporations Are Hiding Over $1 Trillion Overseas
Corporate America’s accountants are having a tough week.
A government report revealed on Wednesday that a significant percentage of large, profitable U.S. corporations pay no federal taxes at all. A study released Thursday gives fresh insight into some of the practices that make those light tax burdens possible.
The 50 largest U.S. corporations currently stash about $1.4 trillion in offshore tax havens, according to the analysis by anti-poverty group OxFam America.
Between 2008 and 2014, these titans of big business — a group that includes Apple, Coca-Cola and Disney — together received approximately $27 in federal loans or similar aid for every $1 they paid in federal taxes, OxFam America calculated.
All together, the 50 biggest companies’ overseas tax avoidance techniques allowed them to pay an effective corporate income tax rate of 26.5 percent during those years, the nonprofit estimates. That is well below the official top rate of 35 percent.
Apple and FBI to clash again in Congress over encryption
Apple and the FBI will return to Congress on April 19 to testify before lawmakers about their heated disagreement over law enforcement access to encrypted devices, a congressional committee announced on Thursday.
Apple’s general counsel, Bruce Sewell, and Amy Hess, executive assistant director for science and technology at the FBI, will testify on separate panels before a house energy and commerce subcommittee on Tuesday, in addition to other law enforcement officials and technology experts.
FBI director James Comey appeared before a separate congressional committee last month to defend his agency’s pursuit of a court order to compel Apple’s assistance in unlocking an iPhone linked to one of the San Bernardino, California, shooters. Sewell also testified at that hearing.
The FBI has since abandoned the San Bernardino case, a surprising development that came after a still-secret third party helped the government hack into the iPhone.
Microsoft sues for right to tell customers when US government requests emails
Microsoft sued the US government on Thursday for the right to tell customers when authorities search their email inboxes.
In a federal complaint that names the US attorney general, Loretta Lynch, the company argues the government has taken advantage of the consumer trend for storing their private data on tech companies’ servers, rather than storing it on their own devices. This shouldn’t let the government search the digital equivalent of a person’s desk without telling them, Microsoft argues.
The government counters that doing so may tip off suspects of a criminal investigation.
Democrats Plan To Sue Over Arizona’s Primary Election Mess
National Democrats plan to file a lawsuit Friday on behalf of voters who were affected by cutbacks to Arizona voting sites for the state’s primary on March 22.
The state’s most populous county, Maricopa, cut the number of sites where voters could cast their ballots from 200 during the 2012 presidential primary to just 60, and by 85 percent since the 2008 presidential primary. Thousands of voters waited in line, some for up to five hours, as a result.
Now, the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and the Arizona Democratic Party are filing a joint lawsuit alleging that the state “needlessly disenfranchised” voters, and particularly voters of color, by reducing the number of voting sites so dramatically and by not counting provisional ballots cast. Hillary Clinton’s campaign, which is represented by Marc Elias, who does legal work on behalf of the committees, will also join the suit.
Breakfast Blogs
We Can’t Trust a Major American Police Department. That’s a Problem. Charles Pierce, Esquire Politics
FBI Has Been Not Counting Encryption’s Impact on Investigations for Over a Decade emptywheel aka Marcy Wheeler, emptywheel
The CIA Is Investing in Firms That Mine Your Tweets and Instagram Photos Lee fang, The InterceptThe Mortgage Fraudsters And Their Get Out Of Jail Free Card Ramona Grigg, Crooks and Liars
White House Threatens To Veto Bill Attempting To Gut Net Neutrality, Defang FCC Karl Bode, Techdirt