Tag: TMC News

Cross posted from The stars Hollow Gazette

With thousands still without electricity or even homes, the east coast from  is being hammered with a northeaster that is bring rain, sleet, snow, plummeting temperatures, high winds and warnings of coastal flooding.

This was a storm with no name but another huge, impossible-to-miss footprint on the weather maps. Its white swirl was smaller than the hurricane’s but still looked ferocious, and it promised to be tenacious, with a chilly brew of rain and wet snow. Road crews feared it would bring annoying slush and, later on, treacherous ice to hard-luck places where debris from the hurricane was still being cleared away. [..]

Gov. Chris Christie warned that the northeaster could set back the recovery effort. He said that many people could lose electricity again.

“I can see us actually moving backwards,” Mr. Christie said at a news conference at a firehouse on Long Beach Island, the barrier island that suffered some of the heaviest damage in last week’s storm. Long Beach Island had been reopened to residents, but the governor said he was cutting off access again.

Mr. Christie said that 369,000 homes in the state were still without power, down from a peak of 2.76 million. Consolidated Edison said early Wednesday that about 79,000 customers were still in the dark, including 15,000 in Brooklyn, 13,000 in Queens and 41,000 in Westchester County.

Staten Island still has 3,205 “customers” without power and high winds are expected to take down more overhead lines. As with Sandy, coastal flooding is expected:

As happened with the Halloween hurricane, this nor’easter will begin doing its work here just as today’s afternoon tide comes in on Staten Island. High tide in The Narrows, measured at Fort Wadsworth, is at 1:24 p.m. That could mean wind-driven tidal surges 3 to 4 feet above normal high-tide levels in some areas – plenty to further damage already compromised low-lying coastal areas.

On Staten Island, those storm surges are expected to be around 2 feet above normal. [..]

According to (Brian) Edwards, (a meteorologist with AccuWeather), “A north to northeasterly wind means that the most significant coastal flooding will occur along the coast of Delaware, central to northern New Jersey, the western end of the north shore of Long Island, N.Y. and eastern Massachusetts.”

He said the worst of the coastal flooding and strongest winds are expected during two phases on Wednesday. The two times that are of utmost concern across the region are during high tide Wednesday afternoon and a second high tide late Wednesday night/early Thursday morning.

Evacuations have been ordered in New York and New Jersey:

After Sandy killed 40 people in New York City, Bloomberg ordered evacuations of low-lying, hard-hit areas such as the Rockaways section of Queens and the south shore of Staten Island. Residents of at least two coastal New Jersey towns were also told to leave.

While FEMA said it was working with state and local authorities and was “ready to deploy additional resources if needed to respond to the Nor’easter,” the [FEMA centers were closed today “due to the weather”]:

They fly into disaster areas, but flee from raindrops.

FEMA disaster recovery centers in Hurricane Sandy-ravaged sections of the city that were supposed to provide assistance to hurricane victims went MIA Wednesday morning, posting signs saying that they were closed due to the approaching Nor’easter.

The temporary shuttering of the facilities, which help victims register for disaster relief, as well as city food distribution centers come even as many of those still reeling from the monster storm were not told that they had to leave the battered areas.

Cross posted fromThe Stars Hollow Gazette

This is where I live and work. I have spent most of my life training for, and dealing with, disasters around the world. Little did I ever expect to be in the middle of one in my own backyard. I am here for my family, my neighbors, my community and my first home city. I am here to try to make order out of chaos, to heal, comfort and console, starting with one life at a time.

As most of New York City inches toward normality, it’s becoming clear the scale of devastation is particularly bad in one part of the city: Staten Island.

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has confirmed that least 37 New Yorkers died as a result of Hurricane Sandy-19 on Staten Island alone. Days after the superstorm slammed through the region-leaving a trail of destruction, power outages and flooding its wake-residents of Staten Island accused government agencies of responding much slower to their plight than to that of wealthier parts of the city. Many Staten Islanders are currently without electricity.

Despite being bigger than some of America’s biggest cities, like Boston and San Francisco, Staten Island is often overshadowed by its sister boroughs Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Manhattan. MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell shined a light on this quieter part of New York City in Thursday’s Rewrite segment on The Last Word:

   To see Staten Island-all of it-would be to rewrite your understanding of New York City. It is the place in New York City where wild deer run across roadways. It is not the New York you know. It is a place apart from New York City, five miles over the water on the ferry from Manhattan-and, in many ways, it might as well be a world away. Staten Island has almost everything that the rest of New York City has except skyscrapers. But it has much more.

   Wherever you live in America, Staten Island has a street that looks like a street in your town. Rich-looking, suburban streets with mansions, small town streets with handsome, humble homes that families hold onto for generations. If you got lost in the middle of the island, you could be in a spot that you might mistake for Vermont or West Virginia. It is America’s biggest small town.

I have sporadic internet connection and I’m connecting now through an satellite connection, as I was in Haiti and Gaza. I have taken to using Skype to connect with my family, friends and colleagues because cell service has been anywhere from nonexistent to barely useable it all depends on if you’re in an area where you have power and cell sites.

I’ve had a few flashbacks but I have a lot of good support in this boat. Just don’t anyone stand up and rock it, we would be hard pressed to deal with a capsize.

Thanks to Lawrence O’Donnell for telling the nation about our “little” island in the heart of New York City.

As you all must have noticed at this point ek hornbeck & I have been absent for the last few days. The good news is that we and our families are safe, sound & dry. That’s about it for the good news.

The bad news is that due to the extensive damage to the power grid here in the tri-state, ek hornbeck has been without power for the last few days and of course no internet. The last we were able to speak by phone, that’s an big problem as well, he expected to have power sometime late tonight but unknown if he would have an internet connection.

I have power but internet and cell phone service has been very nearly nonexistent. I am currently sitting in my car in front of a Barnes & Noble with a cup of coffee and my trusty side-kick, Minibook. Not exactly the way I usually spend Samhain.

This is the first night I’ve had off since the storm hit, so I thought I would take the advantage to let our loyal readership know, we hadn’t washed out to sea or blown away.

I’ll try to post some of out regular features as best I can and we hopefully be back to entertain you very shorty. Meanwhile, we ask that you make your own fun and we’ll be back.  

Up with Chris Hayes host Chris Hayes discusses what we have learned this week with his panel guests Richard Kim, contributor at The Nation; Ana Marie Cox, contributor at The Guardian; Michael Brendan Dougherty, The American Conservative; and Sophia Nelson, The Grio columnist.

CEO to employees: ‘Help yourself’ by donating to Romney

The CEO of a Florida-based software firm has repeatedly solicited his more than 1,300 employees not only to support Mitt Romney, but to donate up to the maximum $2,500 to Romney’s presidential campaign, suggesting that their jobs may be at stake if Romney doesn’t win, according to emails obtained exclusively by Up w/ Chris Hayes.

Arthur Allen, the CEO of ASG Software Solutions – a $375 million company, according to Forbes magazine – sent an email to his employees on August 27th, the day before the scheduled start of the Republican National Convention, asking them to give up to the maximum individual donation to the Romney campaign in order to help the company stave off financial ruin and save employees’ jobs.

“I am encouraging everyone to go to the Romney for President web site and contribute as much as you can to his campaign for President, up to the maximum of $2500.00 per person,” Allen wrote to his domestic employees. “I am also encouraging you to contact all of your friends and relatives and ask them to support Romney and to go to the polls and vote on election day.”

Allen, a longtime donor to Republican campaigns, also noted that ASG had recently “tripped a bank leverage covenant” and would face new restrictions from its lenders as a result, but blamed reckless government spending for the financial state of the company.

Plan for hunting terrorists signals U.S. intends to keep adding names to kill lists

by Greg Miller, The Washington Post

Over the past two years, the Obama administration has been secretly developing a new blueprint for pursuing terrorists, a next-generation targeting list called the “disposition matrix.”

The matrix contains the names of terrorism suspects arrayed against an accounting of the resources being marshaled to track them down, including sealed indictments and clandestine operations. U.S. officials said the database is designed to go beyond existing kill lists, mapping plans for the “disposition” of suspects beyond the reach of American drones.

Although the matrix is a work in progress, the effort to create it reflects a reality setting in among the nation’s counterterrorism ranks: The United States’ conventional wars are winding down, but the government expects to continue adding names to kill or capture lists for years.

Among senior Obama administration officials, there is a broad consensus that such operations are likely to be extended at least another decade. Given the way al-Qaeda continues to metastasize, some officials said no clear end is in sight.

“We can’t possibly kill everyone who wants to harm us,” a senior administration official said. “It’s a necessary part of what we do. . . . We’re not going to wind up in 10 years in a world of everybody holding hands and saying, ‘We love America.’ ”

That timeline suggests that the United States has reached only the midpoint of what was once known as the global war on terrorism. Targeting lists that were regarded as finite emergency measures after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, are now fixtures of the national security apparatus. The rosters expand and contract with the pace of drone strikes but never go to zero.

Let Detroit Go Bankrupt

by Mitt Romney, op-ed in The New York Times on 11/18/2008

IF General Motors, Ford and Chrysler get the bailout that their chief executives asked for yesterday, you can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye. It won’t go overnight, but its demise will be virtually guaranteed.

Without that bailout, Detroit will need to drastically restructure itself. With it, the automakers will stay the course – the suicidal course of declining market shares, insurmountable labor and retiree burdens, technology atrophy, product inferiority and never-ending job losses. Detroit needs a turnaround, not a check.

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette.

U.S. Stocks Fall Sharply

by Nathaniel Popper, New York Times

The Dow Jones industrial average finished the day down 1.8 percent, or 243.36 points, to end at 13,102.53, its worst performance since June. The losses added to the big declines on Friday, and dropped leading indexes to their lowest levels since early September, before the Federal Reserve announced its latest monetary stimulus program.

Since the Standard & Poor’s 500 index hit this year’s high of 1,465.77 on Sept. 14, the benchmark index has fallen 3.6 percent. It finished Tuesday down 1.4 percent, or 20.71 points, to 1,413.11.

Share futures were falling even before the opening bell because of disappointing financial results from American companies. The chemical maker DuPont said Tuesday morning that its revenue was down 9 percent in the third quarter from a year ago, and that it would eliminate 1,500 jobs. The company’s stock ended down 9.1 percent.

Thomson Reuters said Tuesday that 63 percent of the companies that have reported earnings so far have given revenue figures for the third quarter that were lower than what analysts expected.

Stock Market Suffers Worst Day In Months On Bernanke Separation Anxiety

by Mark Gongloff, Huffington Post

The stock market is freaking out like Bill Paxton’s panicky marine in “Aliens,” yelling “Game over, man! Game over!” All because it’s afraid of losing Ben Bernanke.

Late in the trading day on Tuesday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was down more than 200 points, on track for its worst one-day loss since June. What had it in such a tizzy? There were lots of good reasons — third-quarter corporate earnings have been kind of awful, and Europe’s endless debt crisis continues.

But the main catalyst, according to Wall Street‘s best and brightest, are a couple of New York Times stories today, one by the well-sourced Andrew Ross Sorkin, suggesting that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke probably won’t sign up for another term when his second term as Fed Chairman ends in January 2014. Binyamin Appelbaum runs through a handful of the possible replacements in a Mitt Romney administration, and at least one of them — Stanford’s John Taylor — is known to be opposed to Bernanke’s easy-money policies.

Of course the idea that Bernanke might be leaving should shock nobody, really. After eight years of riding herd on the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, all the while being accused of treason and threatened with old-fashioned Texas lynchings, did anybody really expect that Ben would want another four years of this?

Apparently so. The market indeed seems shocked and horrified by the idea that it will no longer be able to depend on what’s come to be known as the “Bernanke Put” — the implied promise that Bernanke won’t let the stock market fall too far before riding to the rescue with another helicopter-load of money.

Sounds like a combination of the continued recession at the bottom of the economic stratus is trickling up to the top, at last, and the poor dears on Wall St. are concerned that they’re losing their “sugar daddy”. Tell me again why they hate Obama?

Native American activist, Russell Means, 72, died early yesterday of advanced esophageal cancer at his ranch in Porcupine, S.D., on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Mr. Means, an Oglala Sioux, was born in Pine Ridge and raised in the San Francisco bay area where his family relocated to escape the poverty of the reservation when he was three. He was a troubled youth, graduating high school but never finishing college. After his father’s death, he returned to living on reservations and found his niche in the American Indian Movement (AIM) in Minneapolis. In his 1995 autobiography, Where White Men Fear to Tread, Mr. Means recounts his journey from rage to healing.

He had become active for Native American rights in California where in 1964 he participated, along with his father, in the occupation of Alcatraz, reclaiming the abandoned island for the Sioux nation. He rose to national attention in 1970 with the occupation of the Mayflower II replica in Boston Harbor and a year later, he was one of the leaders of the take over of Mount Rushmore.

But it was in 1973, along with Dennis Banks and Charles Camp, that Mr. Means got the most national attention when he became the spokesman for the occupation of Wounded Knee S.D., site of the 1890 massacre of some 350 Lakota men, women and children in the last major conflict of the American Indian wars. The armed occupation by Native Americans and white sympathizers, lasted 71 days with thousands of shots fired, two deaths and a federal agent left paralyzed.

Mr. Means and his fellow protest leader Dennis Banks were charged with assault, larceny and conspiracy. But after a long federal trial in Minnesota in 1974, with the defense raising current and historic Indian grievances, the case was dismissed by a judge for prosecutorial misconduct.

Mr. Means was also an active politician, running for nomination of President of the United States under the Libertarian Party in 1987, losing to Ron Paul, whom he endorsed this year for president. He became involved in the international movement to protect the rights of indigenous people, working  with the United Nations to establish the offices of the International Indian Treaty Council in 1977. In 1985 and 1986, he went to Nicaragua to support indigenous Miskito Indians whose autonomy was threatened by the leftist Sandinista government. He reported Sandinista atrocities against the Indians and urged the Reagan administration to aid the victims. Millions in aid went to some anti-Sandinista groups, but a leader of the Miskito Indian rebels, Brooklyn Rivera, said his followers had not received any of that aid.

Starting in 1992, Mr. Means, a ruggedly handsome man with a scarred face, dark eyes and raven braids that fell ti his waist, turned to acting. In his most famous roles, he played chief “Chingachgook” in The Last of the Mohicans, and in Natural Born Killers, among others for television and videos.

A few months before receiving his cancer diagnosis, in a gesture of what he called mourning for the Lakota nation, Mr. Means cut off his braids explaining “the hair holds memories, and mourners often cut it to release those memories, and the people in them, to the spirit world.”

Mr. Means was married five times; the first four marriages ended in divorce. He was married to his fifth wife, Pearl Means until his death. He had a total of ten children and adopted many others in the Lakota tradition.

In their statement announcing Mr. Means’ passage to the spirit world his family extended an invitation to honor his life:

October 22, 2012…Porcupine, SD USA

Honoring the Life of Russell Means

The family of Russell Means invites you to join us in “Honoring the Life of Russell Means”.  The honoring will highlight his life, leadership and the eternal fire that he re-ignited throughout Indian Country.

October 24, 2012, begins at 10:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m. MST, at Little Wound High School Gymnasium in Kyle, South Dakota USA, on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.

Russell Means, a self-described “Oglala Freedom Fighter”, began his journey to the spirit world at 4:44 am, with the Morning Star, at his home and ranch in Porcupine.

This Honoring will be the first of four opportunities for the people to honor his life.  The next three Honorings are tentatively scheduled as follows:  2nd Honoring at Wounded Knee ’73 Occupation Memorial (Feb 2013); 3rd Honoring at Wind Cave State Park, SD (June 2013); 4th Honoring on Russell’s birthday (Nov 10, 2013) at location to be determined. [..]

Contributions of star quilts, blankets and food to feed the people will be appreciated, and may be brought on Wednesday, October 22, directly to Little Wound High School, Kyle, South Dakota.

Financial contributions to advance the visionary work of Russell Means can be sent to:

TREATY Total Immersion Educational Endowment Fund

Administrative Office

P.O. Box 110

San José, NM 87565

Paypal contributions can be made at: www.treatyschool.org

“Don’t blame me, I voted for McGovern” was the bumper sticker on my car on the day that President Richard M. Nixon resigned from office in disgrace. I proudly campaigned and voted for Senator George McGovern in 1972 who campaigned against the war in Viet Nam, as war the Richard Nixon had said he would end and hadn’t. It wasn’t the only reason, I voted for him but it was the main one.

Can you imagine a world without yellow ribbons?

Senator McGovern died early this morning after being admitted to a hospice in Sioux Falls, SD last week.

His family has requested that in lieu of flowers donations be made to Feeding South Dakota.

May the Goddess guide him on his journey to the Summerlands. May his family and friends and the world find Peace.

The Wheel Turns. Blessed Be.

Saturday morning on Up with Chris Hayes, Up host, Chris Hayes discussed what we have learned this week with panel guests Amy Davidson, senior editor at the New Yorker; Goldie Taylor, contributor to Grio.com and MSNBC; Michael Hastings, contributing editor to Rollingstone; and Michael Moynihan, cultural news editor for Newsweek and the DailyBeast.

Is BofA’s Foreclosure Review Really Independent? You Be the Judge

by Paul Kiel at Pro Publica

Late last year, the country’s bank regulators launched a massive program to evaluate millions of foreclosure cases and compensate homeowners who fell victim to the banks’ flawed or illegal practices. Regulators dubbed it the “Independent Foreclosure Review” to emphasize that the banks would not be making key decisions about loans they had made or serviced.

But a raft of evidence – internal Bank of America memos and emails obtained by ProPublica, interviews with two bank staff members who have worked on the review, and little-noticed documents released late last year by a federal banking regulator – throw the independence of the review into serious doubt. Together, they indicate that Bank of America – the financial giant with the largest number of homeowners eligible for the program – is performing much of the work itself.

Mitt Romney, On 60 Minutes, Cites Emergency Room As Health Care Option For Uninsured

by Amanda Terkel and Sam Stein at Huffington Post

Downplaying the need for the government to ensure that every person has health insurance, Mitt Romney on Sunday suggested that emergency room care suffices as a substitute for the uninsured. [..]

This constitutes a dramatic reversal in position for Romney, who passed a universal health care law in Massachusetts, in part, to eliminate the costs incurred when the uninsured show up in emergency rooms for care. Indeed, in both his book and in high-profile interviews during the campaign, Romney has touted his achievement in stamping out these inefficiencies while arguing that the same thing should be done at the national level.

Report Describes How Armstrong and His Team Eluded Doping Tests

by Ian Austen at The New York Times

An explanation emerged Wednesday, when the United States Anti-Doping Agency released its dossier on Armstrong, citing witness testimony, financial records and laboratory results. Armstrong was centrally involved in a sprawling, sophisticated doping program, the agency said, yet he employed both cunning and farcical methods to beat the sport’s drug-testing system.

The report also introduced new scientific evidence that the agency said suggested Armstrong was doping the last two times he competed in the Tour de France.

Mitt Romney’s Bain Made Millions On Big Tobacco In U.S., Russia

by Jason Cherkis and Zach Carter at Huffington Post

As the Soviet Union splintered in the early-1990s, Sushovan Ghosh packed his colleagues into a van and chugged across the collapsing nation, hitting depressed towns and famished cities, busted up factories and lonely kiosks. In each ragged destination, they stopped long enough to interview cigarette smokers.

Ghosh plied the citizenry with free cigarettes and, sometimes, McDonald’s hamburgers. [..]

Ghosh’s work for cigarette companies was chaotic, unbridled and, ultimately, deadly. To Mitt Romney and his colleagues at Bain & Co., it was a chance to rake in money. Ghosh said he reported directly to Romney, who was excited about the Russian market. “He was my boss,” Ghosh said.

Saturday on Up with Chris Hayes, Up host Chris Hayes (@chrishayes) followed up on the”contentious exchange” he had with former New York City Mayor Rudolph Guiliani during this week’s presidential debate. After he joins panels Alexis Goldstein, (@alexisgoldstein) a former vice president at Merill Lynch and now an Occupy Wall Street activist; Dedrick Muhammad,Senior Economic Director at the NAACP; Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Prize winning economist, a professor at Columbia University, and author of the book “The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers Our Future;” and Avik Roy, (@aviksaroy) a member of Mitt Romney’s Health Care Policy Advisory Group, Senior Fellow at The Manhattan Institute and author of “The Apothecary”, the Forbes blog on health care and social insurance reform; discussing what they have learned this week.

Tweet along with Up with Chris (@upwithchris) during the show by following #Uppers

Tell us what you have learned this week.

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

Republicans aren’t the only ones in a bubble, Democrats, too, are “getting high on their own supply.”

What are we cheering for?

by Matt Stoller

Don’t let the conventions distract you from the real lesson of 2012: America is becoming increasingly undemocratic

Ultimately, we’re seeing that both parties are rotten. This rot is rooted in economics. Despite the bitter rhetoric, Obama and Romney are basically in agreement about how the country should be governed. Both Romney and Obama want to see the same core economic trends continue. These are, most significantly, a transition to an energy system based on hydro-fracking of natural gas and oil deposits (and some renewable energy), a large national security state, the sale of public assets to private interests, globalized financial flows, a preservation of the capital structure of the large banks, free rein of white-collar behavior and austerity in public budgets. This policy agenda is a reflection of the quiet coup that IMF chief economist Simon Johnson wrote about in 2010. [..]

Whether Romney wins or Obama wins, both Social Security and Medicare are on the table for deep cuts. Romney is explicit about this, whereas Obama couches this in terms that liberals will not understand. When he talks about popping a blister of partisanship by winning an election, what he means is cutting a deal with the Republicans to restructure these programs. Sen. Dick Durbin has been telling reporters that the Obama administration is going to give the entitlement-gutting Simpson-Bowles budget framework another try if he wins, and close Obama advisers are looking for a grand bargain on taxes and entitlement reform. Obama already tried to raise the Medicare eligibility age and cut Social Security benefits during the debt ceiling negotiations. Meanwhile, corporate titans and Democratic elites like Andy Stern and Steny Hoyer are already gathering to put this framework into place in the post-election environment, regardless of who wins.

As David Dayen at FDL News Desk pointed out, the Democrats have become the Party of Austerity: Still Seeking that Grand Bargain

There’s a fault line between the parties on this – particularly on Medicaid, where there’s a legitimate difference – but overall the fault line is not at all worthy of being called a “great debate.” One side (Republicans) wants to transform safety net programs and would probably get no further than cutting them; the other side (Democrats) wants to cut them and will use its power to force their allies along. Democrats have become the party of austerity, and they see the question as, bizarrely, one of credibility. You don’t earn your stripes in Washington unless you hurt a poor person, I guess. [..]

But Democrats have truly embraced this policy of fiscal austerity. What saved us from this once is the total intransigence on the part of Republicans to accept a good deal and provide the cover in the form of a modest tax increase. If Democrats let the Bush tax cuts expire, however, they can get what they term a modest tax increase through a tax cut bill, and layer on their spending austerity changes, including social insurance. So even if there’s no warp-speed “deal” after the elections, you would have to look out for one shortly thereafter.

We have a vote, but not a voice.  

Up host Chris Hayes (@chrishayes) discuses what we have learned since last week with panel guests Jamilah King (@jamilahking), news editor for colorlines.com; Mike Pesca (@pescami), sports correspondent for National Public Radio; Joe Weisenthal (@thestalwart), deputy business editor at BusinessInsider.com; and Bill Fletcher, Jr., co-founder of the Center for Labor Renewal and author of “They’re Bankrupting Us! And 20 Other Myths about Unions.”

School reform’s propaganda flick

by Alexander Zaitchik

The guys behind “Won’t Back Down” stand to profit from education privatization. No wonder the movie hates on teachers unions

The first thing to know about Friday’s opening of the school-choice drama “Won’t Back Down” is that the film’s production company specializes in children’s fantasy fare such as the “Tooth Fairy” and “Chronicles of Narnia” series. The second thing is that this company, Walden Media, is linked at the highest levels to the real-world adult alliance of corporate and far-right ideological interest groups that constitutes the so-called education reform movement, more accurately described as the education privatization movement. The third thing, and the one most likely to be passed over in the debate surrounding “Won’t Back Down” (reviewed here, and not kindly, by Salon’s own Andrew O’Hehir), is that Walden Media is itself an educational content company with a commercial interest in expanding private-sector access to American K-12 education, or what Rupert Murdoch, Walden’s distribution partner on “Won’t Back Down,” lip-lickingly calls “a $50 billion sector in the U.S. alone that is waiting desperately to be transformed.”

‘Won’t Back Down’ Film Pushes ALEC Parent Trigger Proposal

by May Bottari and Sara Jerving

Well-funded advocates of privatizing the nation’s education system are employing a new strategy this fall to enlist support for the cause. The emotionally engaging Hollywood film Won’t Back Down — set for release September 28 — portrays so-called “parent trigger” laws as an effective mechanism for transforming underperforming public schools. But the film’s distortion of the facts prompts a closer examination of its funders and backers and a closer look at those promoting parent trigger as a cure for what ails the American education system.

While parent trigger was first promoted by a small charter school operator in California, it was taken up and launched into hyperdrive by two controversial right-wing organizations: the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and the Heartland Institute.

Romney ‘I Dig It’ Trust Gives Heirs Triple Benefit

by Jesse Drucker

In January 1999, a trust set up by Mitt Romney for his children and grandchildren reaped a 1,000 percent return on the sale of shares in Internet advertising firm DoubleClick Inc.

   If Romney had given the cash directly, he could have owed a gift tax at a rate as high as 55 percent. He avoided gift and estate taxes by using a type of generation-skipping trust known to tax planners by the nickname: “I Dig It.” […]

   While Romney’s tax avoidance is both legal and common among high-net-worth individuals, it has become increasingly awkward for his candidacy since the disclosure of his remarks at a May fundraiser. He said that the nearly one-half of Americans who pay no income taxes are “dependent upon government” and “believe that they are victims.” […]

   The Obama administration estimates that closing the loophole Romney used would bring the federal government almost $1 billion in the coming decade. [..]

That’s a “laughable” under-estimate, said Stephen Breitstone, co-head of the taxation and wealth preservation group at law firm Meltzer, Lippe, Goldstein & Breitstone LLP. A single billionaire could pay $500 million more in estate taxes if these trusts are shut down by the Obama administration, Breitstone said. [..]

Military’s Own Report Card Gives Afghan Surge an F

by Spencer Ackerman

The U.S. troop surge in Afghanistan ended last week. Conditions in Afghanistan are mostly worse than before it began.

That conclusion doesn’t come from anti-war advocates. It relies on data recently released by the NATO command in Afghanistan, known as ISAF, and acquired by Danger Room (pdf). According to most of the yardsticks chosen by the military – but not all – the surge in Afghanistan fell short of its stated goal: stopping the Taliban’s momentum.

What have you learned this week?