Time To End The Conservative Nanny State for America’s Tax-Dodging Corporations

Time To End The Conservative Nanny State for America’s Tax-Dodging Corporations

A judicious writer avoids adjectives like “mindblowing,” especially when covering political or economic issues. But no other word seems to describe the stunning reality of corporate taxation in modern America, which cries out for the italics-heavy, exclamation-point-driven format made famous by Ripley’s Believe It or Not.

Stylistic overkill? Read these thirteen facts and you may change your mind.

1. We’re told we can’t “afford” full Social Security benefits, even though closing corporate tax-haven loopholes would pay for Obama’s “chained CPI” benefit cut more than ten times over!

Abusive offshore tax havens cost the US $150 billion in lost tax revenue every year (via FACT Coalition). That’s $1.5 trillion over the next ten years.

The “chained CPI” cut, proposed by President Obama and supported by Republicans, is projected to “save” a total of $122 billion to $130 billion over the same time period by denying benefits to seniors and disabled people.

It’s true. “Serious” politicians and pundits are demanding that ordinary people sacrifice earned benefits, while at the same time allowing corporations to avoid more than ten times as much in taxes.

2. Corporate tax rates are near their 60-year low, even though profits are at a 60-year high!

Need we say more?

(Source: Americans for Tax Fairness.)

3. Wells Fargo got $8 billion in tax breaks, even as executives at its subsidiary Wachovia avoided indictment for laundering money for the Mexican drug cartels!

That’s right. Wells Fargo paid a negative tax rate of -1.4 percent between 2008 and 2010 while Wachovia, a Wells Fargo subsidiary, admitted to laundering more than $378 billion for Mexican drug gangs.

We’re talking about crazed killers like “El Loco” and gangs like “Los Zetas” – gangs who cut people’s heads off and toss them out onto disco dance floors or display them in the town square.

Wachovia bankers ignored repeated warnings from law enforcement officials, and continued to launder money for cartels that have murdered tens of thousands.

And yet no criminal indictments were handed down because, as a Senate investigator told Bloomberg News, “”There’s no capacity to regulate or punish them because they’re too big to be threatened with failure.”

4. Some other huge corporations paid less than nothing, too.

Pepco Holdings (-57.6% tax rate)
General Electric (-45.3%)
DuPont (-3.4%)
Verizon (-2.9%)
Boeing (-1.8%)
Honeywell (-0.7%)

(Source: Citizens for Tax Justice)

5. The amount of money US corporations are holding offshore is an estimated one trillion dollars!

Rather than tax these profits the way other countries do, corporate politicians are promoting a tax “repatriation” break that would let corporations “bring this money home” while paying even less than their currently low rates.

They tried that in 2004 and it didn’t create any jobs. In fact, corporations took the tax break and then fired thousands of people. What “repatriation” did do is line a lot of wealthy investors’ pockets.

So, naturally, they want to do it again.

6. One building in the Cayman Islands is the official location of 18,857 corporations!

According to the Government Accountability Office, a five-story building called “Ugland House” is home to nearly twenty thousand corporations. That’s impressive, especially for such a small edifice. (Perhaps it has supernatural half-floors and space-time defying “mind tunnels” like the office in Being John Malkovich.)

While impressive, Ugland House’s distinction pales next to that of 1209 North Orange Street in Wilmington, Delaware. According to one investigation, that address is home to 217,000 corporations.

That’s because Delaware has very generous tax rules – and, as a result, is home to more than half of all the corporate subsidiaries in the United States.That’s startling, since only 1/342th of the nation’s population lives in that state (917,092 residents, out of a national total of 313,914,040, according to the latest census results).

7. Conservatives complain about the “official” corporate tax rate in this country, but corporations actually pay roughly one-third of the official rate in actual taxes.

The official, or “statutory,” corporate tax rate is 35 percent. But the actual rate paid by American corporations is only 12 percent, less than that paid by many middle-class Americans.

(Source: The FACT Coalition.)

In fact, US Corporations pay less tax as a percentage of the GDP than corporations in Canada. Or Japan …

… or South Korea. Or Norway. Or Luxembourg, New Zealand, Israel, the Czech Republic, Sweden, Belgium, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Denmark, Finland, and Italy.

(Source: OECD StatsExtract interactive database.)

8. Corporations used to pay 30 percent of Federal taxes, and now they pay less than 7 percent!

That’s because the corporate tax rate has plunged since Dwight D. Eisenhower was President and is now the lowest it’s been in modern history.

(Source: FACT Coalition.)

9. Big corporations paid $216 million to Congress and got $223 billion in tax breaks!

As Citizens for Tax Justice and USPIRG reported, 280 large and profitable corporations contributed $216 million to Congressional campaigns over four election cycles and got nearly a quarter of a trillion dollars in tax breaks.

That’s a terrific investment for them – a return of more than a thousand to one – but it’s a bad deal for the American people.

10. We don’t even know who owns some corporations, even though that makes it easier to evade taxes, dodge creditors, avoid paying alimony or child support, and even fund terrorism!

Here are some examples of investments that might represent a terror threat. Corporate interests are blocking disclosure rules that would help protect our national security.

11. Bank of America committed foreclosure fraud, was bailed out by the government, and then paid no taxes on $4.4 billion in profit!

That’s right. In 2010, while BofA was negotiating a sweet settlement deal for its foreclosure fraud, it paid nothing in taxes. (Source: FACT Coalition.) Zero, on $17.2 billion in offshore earnings. (Source: Americans for Tax Fairness.)

Its $4.1 billion tax break came on the heels of the bank’s taxpayer-funded bailout, immunity from prosecution for its criminal employees, and a cushy government settlement for its foreclosure fraud.

Now David Dayen reports that the bank has apparently continued to defraud customers in violation of its government settlement. Whistleblowers have stated in affidavits that they were “told to lie” to customers, continued to deceive homeowners before foreclosing on them, and flipped customers to new servicing companies to invalidate previous homeowner agreements.

12. What they call “tax reform” would actually prevent our elected representatives from giving businesses financial incentives to improve our lives!

The word “reform” is an honorable one that’s been put to some dishonorable uses lately. “Entitlement reform,” for example, is merely a euphemism for gutting Social Security and Medicare.

Similarly, corporate-backed politicians are pushing a formula for permanent corporate tax breaks and calling it “tax reform.” They insist their “reform” be “revenue neutral” and say it will “broaden the base while lowering the rate.”

Here’s an English translation: The current, unsustainably low rates for corporations would be made permanent, while eliminating many tax deductions in the name of “simplification.”

Here’s what that really means: The domestic tax credit for creating jobs? Gone. Tax breaks for protecting the environment with clean energy, rather than harming other people’s health and leaving a mess for the rest of us to clean up? Gone.

All in all we’d lose dozens of important policies that make our lives better, while permanently fixing corporate taxes at today’s cushy giveaway rates.

“Reform”? Ripoff is more like it.

13. Despite their greed, mismanagement, and freeloading, tax-dodging corporations are using shell organizations like “Fix the Debt” and “the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget” to tell ordinary Americans they have to sacrifice even more to preserve corporate wealth!

These organizations are using the heads of failed banks – people like Chase’s Jamie Dimon and Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs – to dispense “advice on the economy.” That’s like getting navigation tips from the captain of the Exxon Valdez.

(Tax breaks for Exxon Mobil: $4.1 billion between 2008 and 2010. The company paid no taxes at all in 2009.)

These executives and their paid spokespeople tell the rest of us we need to “sacrifice” and “tighten our belts” so that their party can go on forever. And too often they’re treated as credible sources, rather than as corrupting influences on our public life.

It’s all true – and there are many more astonishing facts to be found in the world of corporate taxation. To fix the economy more people will need to learn about them – and demand that they be changed.

The writer and analyst in me wants to apologize for all the italicizing and all those exclamation points. But the American citizen in me wants to shout the truth out for all the world to hear – believe it or not!

Richard (RJ) Eskow is a well-known blogger and writer, a former Wall Street executive, an experienced consultant, and a former musician. He has experience in health insurance and economics, occupational health, benefits, risk management, finance, and information technology. Richard has consulting experience in the US and over 20 countries.

Yet conservatives and libertarians keep telling us, over and over again, that if we just lower taxes and let corporations pay people a dollar an hour, they'll be able to afford to hire everyone who wants a job. That vision of America is not much better than the plantation model of the Antebellum South. How many Americans want to live their lives on corporate plantations. How is that capitalism or the incentive to work hard and get ahead. The game is rigged where low and moderate income Americans cannot get ahead. Conservatives like it that way because they want all the power in the hands of the elite, and in the U.S. money equals power.

Today's Links For Patriots

The IRS "Scandal" Was A Scam

Monday's revelation that progressive as well as conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status had been singled out for review by the Internal Revenue Service left one pressing question: Why [[then]] did the inspector general's report detailing improper scrutiny only mention conservative groups?

Last night we got the answer: The IG only reported on conservative groups because that's what Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), the notoriously partisan chairman of the House Oversight Committee, told him to do.

The Pay of Corporate Executives and Financial Professionals is Evidence of Rent Seeking in Top 1 Percent Incomes. Rent seeking is a kind of modern conservative form of feudalism.

This decision didn't make the headlines, Conservatives on Supreme Court Serve A Legal Blow to Sustainable Development

Conservatives On Supreme Court Steal Voting Rights From Millions of Americans

Wendy Davis Showed Texas' GOP Boys How to Respect Women

Conservative Ohio Thugs Are Using Their State Budget To Try To Restrict Abortion And Redefine Pregnancy. As soon as Ohio governor Kasich grows a uterus he can have dictatorial control of women's bodies.

Anti-American Conservative Freaks at Fox News Ignore Fact That IRS Scrutinized All Political Groups

Anti-American Conservative Freaks at Fox News Ignore Fact That IRS Scrutinized All Political Groups

Fox News selectively covered new reports on the IRS' targeting of political groups, raising questions about how the network will handle the new revelations in future reports.

According to an internal IRS document obtained by The Associated Press, the IRS targeted groups seeking tax exempt status by screening for terms that are not unique to tea party and conservative groups. Terms such as "Israel," "progressive" and "occupy" were also used by the agency to further scrutinize certain organizations.

On the June 24 edition of Fox News' Special Report with Bret Baier, host Bret Baier failed to mention the memo obtained by the Associated Press and instead suggested that the new information extended targeting to only religious groups, saying, "You can add Jewish and other religious groups to the agency's hit list." Fox's chief political correspondent Carl Cameron pointed out that "other religious groups" were targeted, and acknowledged that "as for those conservative groups that were targeted, they weren't just tea partiers and they included other type of policy groups." However, both Baier and Cameron neglected to mention that the words associated with left-leaning groups like "occupy" or "progressive" were also used in targeting.

On Fox Business' Lou Dobbs Tonight, Dobbs also reported on new revelations in the IRS story but did not comment on the the Associated Press memo or the fact that left-leaning groups were also subject to improper scrutiny.

The Fox affiliated FoxNation.com also included an Associated Press story about the IRS' overreach, but focused on a conference call IRS commissioner Danny Werfel held with reporters in which he did not specify which terms were on the list of targeted words.

What day was it that evil became part of journalism. That was something that Fox News, which is nothing more than a fax machine for conservative propaganda, decided that journalism was to be. It is simple, you ut a lot of people in business attire, make them look like they might pass for respectable journalists, and use them to propel lies, half truths and rumors as news. Evil doesn't wear a red suit, have horns and pointed tail, it looks like the clowns in make-up at Fox News. They wrap their evil in the flag and the Bible, and pass their garbage out as patriotism.

Apparently Patriotism and Common Decency Are Dead in Norwood, Colorado

Apparently Patriotism and Common Decency Are Dead in Norwood, Colorado

A small Colorado town’s response to a 13-year-old’s violent hazing and sexual assault has driven the victim out of his school and his father out of his job, according to a startling Bloomberg News profile of what happened in Norwood, Colorado.

Three high school students held down the 13-year-old boy with duct tape on a school bus and sodomized him with a pencil. When the superintendent and school board did not report the incident for a month, the victim’s father, who was the school principal, reported it to the police himself. Yet another aspect complicated the situation: The attack happened outside a wrestling match, and two of the perpetrators are the wrestling coach’s sons.

The boys eventually received a one-day, in-school suspension and varying sentences of probation and community service. However, the victim’s peers would continue to bully him online, asking him “What’s been stuck up your butt today?” and wearing T-shirts that supported the attackers. And parents in the community were on board with the harassment, as well:

    A dozen students wore the T-shirts to school one Friday, and someone posted a sign with the same wording on the locker of the victim’s brother, according to the police report, which was reviewed by Bloomberg. Students who wore the t-shirts told police they wanted to support their friends. The victim told investigators he didn’t understand why his friends would support people who attacked him.

    When police visited parents of students involved in the T-shirt incident to warn them against intimidating the 13-year-old, who would be testifying against his schoolmates in a criminal case, they found the parents instead focused on attacking the principal.

Eventually, the father was put on paid leave from his position. Today, the family lives 200 miles away from Norwood in a new school district, while the wrestling coach (who was the school board president, too) stayed with the Norwood team after a reprimand for leaving the students alone.

States are responsible for establishing their own anti-bullying policies in public schools, but enforcement across the states is uneven. Colorado has one of the nation’s most comprehensive anti-bullying laws, with protections against anti-LGBT bullying, but only 37 percent of school districts actually follow it. Hazing and harassment has also been a particular problem in the world of sports. At the college level, Alfred University found 80 percent of college athletes experience some form of hazing.

This is the culture of conservatism at work; either they deny a sexual assault has taken place, or blame the victims for doing something that deserved to be punished with sexual assault, and/or finding ways to punish the victim for daring to name those cowardly criminals who perpetrated the attack. Why isn't the town of Norwood  demanding justice for the victim. Why are the parents of the criminals who perpetrated the crime being prosecuted for aiding and abetting criminals - the cowardly criminals they raised. Why aren't the kids doing the harassing being shunned by decent kids who know better. This is what happens when Americans worship at the altar of conservative morality. Standards of basic decency get all twisted around. The town is acting like George Bush and Dick Cheney, deny and deny their responsibility for the lies they told and the gross immorality they are guilty of, while simultaneously attacking those seeking simple justice.

UnAmerican Culture of Conservatism Exposed at Morally Corrupt Bank of America

UnAmerican Culture of Conservatism Exposed at Morally Corrupt Bank of America

Just when we thought the big banks couldn’t hit a new low, they did.

Six former employees of Bank of America have come forward, alleging that the big bank intentionally denied eligible homeowners mortgage loan modifications, and lied to those homeowners about the status of their mortgage payments and documents.

Bank of America allegedly used these dirty tactics to lead homeowners into foreclosures and in-house loan modifications, both of which helped reap massive profits for BOA’s bottom-line.

The employees who have come forward have also said that the big bank rewarded customer service representatives with hefty cash bonuses and gift cards to popular stores when they foreclosed on homes.

According to a lawsuit filed in federal court, a Bank of America employee who placed ten or more mortgage accounts into foreclosure a month could get up to a $500 bonus.

The lawsuit also alleges that the bank punished representatives who did not hit foreclosure target numbers or who objected to the bank’s tactics. In some cases, those employees who didn’t foreclose on enough people were fired.

This latest jaw-dropper out of Bank of America comes just days after it was revealed that the bank was also using deceptive mailers and sales pitches to sell consumers on mortgage refinancing plans that could actually add tens of thousands of dollars to the cost of a borrower’s loan.

Despite these latest revelations about foreclosure targets, lies and dirty tactics, nobody at Bank of America is worried about going to jail.

That’s because our elected lawmakers in Washington, particularly Republican lawmakers, are scared straight by the idea of going after the big banks and going after corporate America.

Yet, these same lawmakers are just fine going after the big bad government, especially when it comes to things like the IRS controversy.

But, let’s look at the parallels between the IRS controversy and the latest news coming out of Bank of America.

With the IRS controversy, IRS agents deliberately went after and applied higher scrutiny towards potentially political organizations, liberal and conservative, applying for 501c3 tax-exempt status.

At Bank of America, employees allegedly intentionally denied eligible homeowners loan modifications, and pushed them into foreclosure to get a bonus.

With the IRS scandal, one IRS official took the fifth when testifying before Congress, but is the subject of both a criminal and an internal investigation.

At Bank of America, it’s alleged that customer service representatives were rewarded for lying to homeowners about the status of their mortgage payments and documents.

Despite the obvious similarities between these two scenarios, only one is being investigated loudly and publicly by Congress; The IRS controversy.

So, why is Congress willing to go to the ends of the earth to get to the bottom of the IRS scandal, but refusing to lift a finger when it comes to investigating America’s big banks?

Could it be that employees of the IRS do not make multimillion dollar campaign contributions to members of Congress?

Could it be that employees of the IRS don’t spend hundreds of millions of dollars on lobbying?

And even the media, which is supposed to be an impartial and unbiased source of news and information, is afraid to go after big banks when they commit crimes.

The media would rather drag on ad nauseum about manufactured witch hunts like the IRS controversy, than discuss how the big banks, which American taxpayers have already saved once, are back up to their same old dirty tricks, and threatening to bring down the entire American economy once again.

 One of the reasons the banks are likely to get off is that to do so would appear to be anti-business. Ever hear the word pro-business from conservative Republicans and conservative Democrats. That is code for letting big business do whatever it wants. If you are pro regulation that protects consumers, tax payers and small investors - in this conservative culture you are defined as a raging commie. How did that framing of issues happen. Most of the media is owned by big corporations. The media gets it's revenue from big corporations. So the media never or at least seldom ever holds a politicians accountable for what they mean when they claim that regulations which protect ordinary Americans is somehow anti-business.

Radical UnAmerican Conservatives on Supreme Court Protects Mega-Corporations From Responsibility For Their Actions

President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Simple Truths message to Congress (April 29, 1938). "Unhappy events abroad have retaught us two simple truths about the liberty of a democratic people. The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic State itself. That, in its essence, is fascism — ownership of government by an individual, by a group or by any other controlling private power.
The second truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if its business system does not provide employment and produce and distribute goods in such a way as to sustain an acceptable standard of living. Both lessons hit home. Among us today a concentration of private power without equal in history is growing." Radical UnAmerican Conservatives on Supreme Court Protects Mega-Corporations From Responsibility For Their Actions

In case it wasn’t clear already, the U.S. Supreme Court hammered home Thursday morning that it will protect the rights of corporations to force arbitration over the individuals’ access to the court system at any expense.

In a 5-3 ruling with Justice Sonia Sotomayor recused, Justice Antonin Scalia eviscerated almost any opportunity small merchants have to challenge alleged monopolistic practices by American Express in their credit card agreements.

Sound familiar? Earlier this term, the court turned back on procedural grounds a lawsuit alleging monopolistic practices by Comcast. A week after that, they turned back the claims of workers to challenge employer practices as a class. And in 2011, they issued one of the worst blows to consumer rights in years when they held that consumers challenging $30 fees could not sue together as a class. In each of these cases, the court’s procedural rulings mean the parties may never get to argue about whether these corporations actually violated the law. And as a consequence, these corporations may never be held accountable.

With Thursday’s ruling, the court added small businesses to the list of aggrieved parties whose access to the courthouse has been foreclosed by boilerplate contracts that prohibit parties from filing their challenge as a class, or from otherwise alleviating the immense cost of filing their claims individually. This time, the litigants were small businesses taking on American Express, and their lawyer was none other than conservative powerhouse Paul Clement. Clement has argued many of the major conservative court wins of the past few years, and his argument on the side of the plaintiffs was probably the last best shot at curbing the Roberts Court’s total perversion of the Federal Arbitration Act.

As in the AT&T case, the plaintiffs here argued that the only way they could challenge the policy of mega-corporation American Express was by banding together as a class and pooling their resources. But consumers’ claims in AT&T were struck down on a different rationale, that their state law claims were preempted by the Federal Arbitration Act. This time, the plaintiffs argued that because their antitrust claims are federal , they are protected by the principle of “effective vindication,” meaning that where an arbitration clause effectively immunizes otherwise meritorious federal claims, plaintiffs are entitled to vindication of their actual rights. To show that that the arbitration clause would make any challenge prohibitively expensive, they deployed formal affidavits by economists attesting to the immense cost of these claims — “’at least several hundred thousand dollars, and might exceed $1 million’,” while the maximum recovery for an individual plaintiff would be $12,850, or $38,549 when trebled,” meaning they could not afford to launch their claims without the ability to file them together.

No matter, said the majority. In AT&T, “[w]e specifically rejected the argument that class arbitration was necessary to prosecute claims ‘that might otherwise slip through the legal system’.” This case is about federal law vindication and AT&T was about state law preemption, but as Justice Elena Kagan wrote in dissent, “to a hammer everything looks like a nail.” Joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, Kagan explains the case this way:

    Here is the nutshell version of this case, unfortunately obscured in the Court’s decision. The owner of a small restaurant (Italian Colors) thinks that American Express (Amex) has used its monopoly power to force merchants to accept a form contract violating the antitrust laws. The restaurateur wants to challenge the allegedly unlawful provision (imposing a tying arrangement), but the same contract’s arbitration clause prevents him from doing so.

    That term imposes a variety of procedural bars that would make pursuit of the antitrust claim a fool’s errand. So if the arbitration clause is enforceable, Amex has insulated itself from antitrust liability—even if it has in fact violated the law. The monopolist gets to use its monopoly power to insist on a contract effectively depriving its victims of all legal recourse.

    And here is the nutshell version of today’s opinion, admirably flaunted rather than camouflaged: Too darn bad.

    That answer is a betrayal of our precedents, and of federal statutes like the antitrust laws.

Today’s ruling was yet another point in the Chamber of Commerce’s remarkable tally of wins before the Roberts Court, and another chance for the most business-friendly justices in 65 years to side with their friends.

It is neither hyperbole or name calling to say that American Express and the Chamber of Commerce are simply proto-fascists. Their mission is not good old business - competing to see who can sell good and services for a fair price. No, their agenda is to take as much power away from the people, individual Americans as they can.

Why Doesn't Anti-American Fox News Report That IRS Did Not Target Conservatives

Why Doesn't Anti-American Fox News Report That IRS Did Not Target Conservatives

For weeks, Fox News has promoted selective clips of interview transcripts leaked by House Republicans to promote their baseless claim that the White House engineered the Internal Revenue Service's improper screening of conservative groups seeking non-profit status.

Such claims were always speculative. The IRS' inspector general has said that while employees used "improper criteria" to scrutinize conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status, that behavior was "not politically biased" and was not driven by the White House. Subsequent testimony leaked by House Republicans has suggested that high-ranking IRS officials in Washington were at first unaware of the improper behavior and stopped it when they learned of it. 

The House Oversight Committee's Democrats have now released the full transcript of an interview with another IRS witness which further undermines claims that the White House was at the center of the process. According to the interview subject, a self-described conservative Republican who worked in the IRS' Cincinnati office, an agent he supervised flagged the first Tea Party application that came under scrutiny, asking for guidance on the case.The interview subject denied having had contact with senior IRS officials or the White House about the targeting. According to The Washington Post's Greg Sargent:

    In the testimony, the screening manager says that he first became aware of the initial Tea Party application when an "agent who worked for me" asked for "guidance concerning a case for him." The manager testified that in this case he agreed with the agent that "there was not enough information" to figure out whether to grant the group tax exempt status.

    "I told him at that point in time I agreed with his thinking," the manager testified, adding that he informed the agent that he would "elevate that issue to my area manager."

    "This was the first case that came in that was brought to my attention," the manager continued.

    The manager further testified that the Tea Party groups were deliberately grouped together so that they would receive consistent treatment. "There was a lot of concerns about making sure that any cases that had, you know, similar-type activities or items included, that they would be worked by the same agent or same group," the manager testified.

    In the testimony, the screening manager also flatly stated he had no reason to believe there was White House involvement.

    [...]

    The screening manager also testifies that he never had any conversation with Lois Lerner, the former director of the Exempt Organizations Division, or former IRS commissioner Douglas Schulmanm about the "screening of Tea Party cases."

It remains to be seen how Fox News will react to statements that so strongly undermine their conclusion. But we have some precedent - on June 9, Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland, the ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, released excerpts from this interview, and said that it showed that "the case is solved" and that the White House had not been involved in the improper behavior. Fox responded by airing his conclusion that "the case is solved" and hosting conservatives to criticize that claim, without laying out Cummings' evidence.

Fox News and their sheeple viewers need not worry, conservatives love playing victim so much they will invent or exaggerate another faux-scandal so they can whine themselves to sleep at night. Fox News seems to lack the fundamentals of American values like truth and fairness. Thus they are contributing to the degradation of American society as conservatism has done throughout history.

Why Does Florida’s Criminal Governor Rick Scott (R) Hate America and American Workers

Why Does Florida’s Criminal Governor Rick Scott (R) Hate America and American Workers

Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) signed a bill on Friday that blocks local governments from implementing paid sick leave legislation, the Orlando Sentinel reports. He made his decision quickly, only taking four of the 15 days he legally had to review the bill before he signed it.

In signing the bill, Scott sided with big business interests including Disney World, Darden Restaurants (owner of Olive Garden and Red Lobster), and the Florida Chamber of Commerce. The bill is part of a national effort to pass so-called “preemption bills” that would block paid sick leave legislation that is backed by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a right-wing group that coordinates conservative laws across states. The state’s House Majority Leader, Steve Precourt (R), who was instrumental in putting forward the preemption bill, is an active ALEC member.

The bill has made moot a 2014 referendum in Orange County that would have decided whether to require paid sick leave. More than 50,000 voters had tried to get the measure on the November 6 ballot but the County Commission voted it off. It made it on the ballot in 2014 thanks to a three-judge panel.

Florida follows a rash of preemption bills in the states, which cropped up in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Mississippi. These bills are part of ALEC’s efforts to weaken wage and labor standards: Since 2011, 67 such ALEC-affiliated bills have been introduced in state legislatures, 11 of which had been signed into law before Scott signed this bill.

Big business stood in opposition to the Orange County effort on paid sick leave because it claimed such a bill would drive up costs. Yet a study of San Francisco, which enacted a paid sick leave policy in 2007, showed that a majority of businesses saw either no impact or a positive one on profitability. Other research has shown such policies to be good for business and job growth.

Like the a majority of conservatives Rick Scott believes that evil is a positive value. He thinks it is a good to steal billions, yet wrong to have paid sick leave - a benefit that workers earn by making lazy millionaires like him very wealthy. Scott's policies are not new, they are the policies of feudal lords and fascists.

Patriotic Americans Wander Why Congress is Not Investigating Snowden Employer Booz Allen Hamilton

Patriotic Americans Wander Why Congress is Not Investigating Snowden Employer Booz Allen Hamilton

Military contractor Booz Allen Hamilton of McLean, Virginia, has shot into the news recently over two of its former employees: Edward Snowden, the whistleblower who has just revealed the extent of US global spying on electronic data of ordinary citizens around the world, and James Clapper, US director of national intelligence.

Clapper worked as vice-president at Booz Allen from 1997 to 1998, while Snowden did a three-month stint at their offices in Hawaii in spring 2013 as a low-level contract employee. Both worked on intelligence contracts, which are estimated to make up almost a quarter of the company's $5.86bn in annual income. ....

.....Core values? Let's examine Booz Allen Hamilton's track record.

In February 2012, the US air force suspended Booz Allen from seeking government contracts after it discovered that Joselito Meneses, a former deputy chief of information technology for the air force, had given Booz Allen a hard drive with confidential information about a competitor's contracting on the first day that he went to work for the company in San Antonio, Texas. US air force legal counsel concluded (pdf):

"Booz Allen did not uncover indications and signals of broader systemic ethical issues within the firm. These events caused the air force to have serious concerns regarding the responsibility of Booz Allen, specifically, its San Antonio office, including its business integrity and honesty, compliance with government contracting requirements, and the adequacy of its ethics program."

It should be noted that Booz Allen reacted swiftly to the government investigation of the conflict of interest. In April that year, the air force lifted the suspension – but only after Booz Allen had accepted responsibility for the incident and fired Meneses, as well as agreeing to pay the air force $65,000 and reinforce the firm's ethics policy.

Not everybody was convinced about the new regime. "Unethical behavior brought on by the revolving door created problems for Booz Allen, but now the revolving door may have come to the rescue," wrote Scott Amey of the Project on Government Oversight, noting that Meneses was not the only former air force officer who had subsequently become an executive in Booz Allen's San Antonio office.

"It couldn't hurt having [former AF people]. Booz is likely exhaling a sigh of relief as it has received billions of dollars in air force contracts over the years."

Booz Allen has also admitted to overbilling the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) "employees at higher job categories than would have been justified by their experience, inflating their monthly hours and submitting excessive billing at their off-site rate." The company repaid the government $325,000 in May 2009 to settle the charges (pdf). Incidentally, both the Nasa and the air force incidents were brought to light by a company whistleblower who informed the government.

Nor was this the first time Booz Allen had been caught overbilling. In 2006, the company was one of four consulting firms that settled with the Justice Department for fiddling expenses on an industrial scale. Booz Allen's share of the $15m settlement of a lawsuit under the False Claims Act was more than $3.3m.

The incidents described above could be dismissed as aberrations. What is worthy of note, however, is that Ralph Shrader, the chairman, CEO and president of Booz Allen, came to the company in 1974 after working at two telecommunications companies – Western Union, where he was national director of advanced systems planning, and RCA, where he served in the company's government communications system division.

Today, those names may not ring a bell, but these two companies took part in a secret surveillance program known as Minaret in the 1970s when they agreed to hand over to the National Security Agency (NSA) all incoming and outgoing US telephone calls and telegrams. In an interview with the Financial Times in 1998, Shrader noted that the most relevant background for his new position of chief executive at Booz Allen was his experience working for telecommunications clients and doing classified military work for the US government.

          ....Finally, Congress would also do well to investigate Clapper, Booz Allen's other famous former employee, for possible perjury when he replied: "No, sir" to Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon in March, when asked:

"Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?"

 This is not about any of those mythical compromises to supposedly keep us safe, it is the massive abuse of power. They can do it so they do. Is everyone who thinks they "have nothing to hide" absolute sure these obviously corrupt private contractors will not use that information to hurt you.

Spying Program Doesn’t Make Us Safer, and Spying Leaks Don’t Harm America

Spying Program Doesn’t Make Us Safer, and Spying Leaks Don’t Harm America

America’s top national security experts say that the NSA’s mass surveillance program doesn’t make us safer … and that whistleblowers revealing the nature and extent of the program don’t harm America.

The top counter-terrorism czar under Presidents Clinton and Bush – Richard Clarke – notes:

    The just-revealed surveillance stretches the law to its breaking point and opens the door to future potential abuses

    ***

    I am troubled by the precedent of stretching a law on domestic surveillance almost to the breaking point. On issues so fundamental to our civil liberties, elected leaders should not be so needlessly secretive.

    The argument that this sweeping search must be kept secret from the terrorists is laughable. Terrorists already assume this sort of thing is being done. Only law-abiding American citizens were blissfully ignorant of what their government was doing.

    ***

    If the government wanted a particular set of records, it could tell the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court why — and then be granted permission to access those records directly from specially maintained company servers. The telephone companies would not have to know what data were being accessed. There are no technical disadvantages to doing it that way, although it might be more expensive.

    Would we, as a nation, be willing to pay a little more for a program designed this way, to avoid a situation in which the government keeps on its own computers a record of every time anyone picks up a telephone? That is a question that should have been openly asked and answered in Congress.

The author of the Patriot Act and chairman on the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, Homeland Security, and Investigations – Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner – says:

    Lawmakers’ and the executive branch’s excuses about recent revelations of NSA activity are “a bunch of bunk”

    The government has gone far beyond what the Patriot Act intended, and that section 215 of the act “was originally drafted to prevent data mining” on the scale that’s occurred

    Whistleblower Edward Snowden is not a traitor, and Sensenbrenner would not have known the extent of abuse by the NSA and the FISA court without Snowden’s disclosures

    The Patriot Act needs to be amended to protect Americans’ privacy

The former head of the NSA’s global digital data gathering program, William Binney:

    Confirms Snowden’s allegations about the mass surveillance program

    Says that revealing the details of the spying program will not harm national security … and that government officials are only mad because it exposes their overreaching

    Says that massive surveillance doesn’t work to make us safer

    Says that he set up the NSA’s system so that all of the information would automatically be encrypted, so that the government had to obtain a search warrant based upon probably cause before a particular suspect’s communications could be decrypted. But the NSA now collects all data in an unencrypted form, so that no probable cause is needed to view any citizen’s information. He says that it is actually cheaper and easier to store the data in an encrypted format: so the government’s current system is being done for political – not practical – purposes.  Binney’s statements have been confirmed by other NSA whistleblowers...

But hey I have nothing to hide so what's the big deal. It has nothing to do with whether individuals do not care if the NSA listens to your phone calls or reads your e-mail. Whether you personally care about your rights and how they relate to the 4th Amendment and democracy, has nothing to do with hiding something. It has to do with a basic right to privacy. Anyone who loves big brother and does not think such programs should be closely monitored and have become excessive, by all means move to the 24 or so authoritarian regimes in the world, they love cooperate sheep like you. Are They Allowed to Do That? A Breakdown of Selected Government Surveillance Programs

Video Proof That Sean Hannity Should Be Deported For Being a Shameless UnAmerican Hypocrite

Sean Hannity is warning that data mining and surveillance are "very clear violation[s] of the Fourth Amendment," a drastic change for the Fox News host, who was a loud defender of National Security Agency surveillance during the Bush administration. Media Matters offers a look at Hannity on NSA surveillance, then and now.

Patriotic Americans should demand that this Orwellian puppet of Roger Ailes and Proto-fascist Rupert Murdoch be stripped of his citizenship ( has anyone seen Hannity's birth certificate) and deported from the country. Sean would love living in his ideological homeland, China.

Where Are The Patriots in Elwood, Indiana A Town That Has Embraced Rape Culture

Where Are The Patriots in Elwood, Indiana A Town That Has Embraced Rape Culture

Several high-profile cases of sexual assault have shown the consequences of rape culture: From Rehtaeh Parsons’ suicide to the Steubenville rape trial, these girls were re-victimized by the harassment and public shaming that followed the sexual assault.

Now, a 14-year-old in Elwood, Indiana who is eight months pregnant faces ongoing harassment simply because her neighborhood sees her as a very young pregnant girl. But a reporter at the Indianapolis Star writes that her town does not know the full story of the 17-year-old boy who physically overpowered her after she told him “no.” On Tuesday, he faces sentencing for three counts of child molestation.

At the same time the girl has encountered vicious public shaming from her community, she and her mother Kristy Green have spoken out because they worry her assailant will walk free in juvenile court:

    “I can’t walk out the door without someone calling me a whore or slut,” the girl said. “I used to have a lot of friends, or people I thought were my friends, but as soon as this happened I just isolated myself.”

    The repeated vandalism incidents at the family’s home — including the words “whore” and “slut” scrawled on the garage doors — were reported to police. But Green said no charges were filed because there were no witnesses to the acts.

    Her daughter also has been the target of mean-spirited rumors and speculation that her pregnancy is the result of promiscuous behavior.


This ordeal is all too common for victims of sexual assault — a reality that affects not just U.S. teens in school, but also pervades military and sports culture. The Chicago Tribune Editorial Board recently noted that “it’s still news when a rape victim stands in front of the cameras to state what ought to be obvious, which is that she has nothing to be ashamed of.”

But the people in Elwood — lacking the details of the rape due to privacy in the juvenile court system — reverted to alienating the teen for her pregnancy because they assumed she must have been “promiscuous.” That’s true for many teen moms across the country, who are often on the receiving end of this stigma precisely at the time they most need support. Public awareness campaigns attempting to prevent teen pregnancy often put inordinate focus on “slut-shaming” abstinence over comprehensive sexual health resources.

A patriotic American town would not allow this kind of harassment to happen. They would form citizen patrols, they'd be finding ways to help that girl and her family. They'd be shaming the rapist, not the victim. Patriots never defend rape and make victims feel like they have done something wrong. Rape culture is part of conservative culture, one that believes, oh well, men will be men.

Real Patriots Should Reject Conservative Propaganda About The Minimum Wage

Real Patriots Should Reject Conservative Propaganda About The Minimum Wage

With seven strikes of fast food workers in eight weeks, demanding $15/hour and the right to a union, a discussion of raising the minimum wage has begun to stir up the predictable frenzy of pro-market mythology.

As in every previous discussion of raising the minimum wage, it has been asserted that such a move would increase unemployment, be harmful to the most underprivileged workers, bad for small businesses, and indeed, disastrous for the wider economy. In this same narrative, low-wage jobs are stepping stones, and hard work and higher education are reliable paths to middle class employment.

Is any of this true?

Who Are Low-Wage Workers?

Let's start with a useful benchmark of a low-wage job as one that keeps a full-time worker and their family of four at or below the federal poverty threshold - $23,005 per year, or $11.06/hour in 2011.

Contrary to the myths, the working poor are an ever-expanding contingent of America's labor force, while the middle class has been steadily shrinking. Over 25 percent of all workers qualify as low-wage workers.

Lest we think this is an issue only in Tennessee and Alabama, nearly 20 percent of Washington workers qualify as low-wage workers, with an additional 40 percent living within what is known as the supplemental poverty measure.

The road of higher education also increasingly leads nowhere. Low-wage workers are better educated than ever before, with over 26 percent having had some college education. Low-wage workers now carry sizable sums of student debt.

Conditions have deteriorated even more rapidly since the Great Recession began. Low-wage jobs comprised about 35 percent of jobs lost in 2008 and 2009, yet they accounted for 76 percent of net job growth in 2010.

Minimum Wage Already Too High in Washington?

It is true that Washington is currently the only state with a minimum wage above $9.00/hour.

What this demonstrates, however, is not a lavishness of wages here, but rather the abysmal standard of living faced by tens of millions of hardworking people nationwide. A full-time job at Washington’s minimum wage fetches about $18,000, clearly far less than necessary to meet basic expenses.

A more useful benchmark is a living wage. The Alliance for a Just Society defines living-wage jobs for Washington state, assuming full-time hours, as $16.13/hour or $33,544 annually for a single adult. Those figures would rise to $28.71/hour or $59,715 a year for a household of one adult and one child, and $29.42/hour or $61,188 a year for a family of four with one adult working. Keep in mind, many low-wage workers are unable to get full-time employment.

What Would the Fallout of $15/Hour Be?

Much is made of the impact a higher minimum wage would have on small businesses. But what about Starbucks, McDonald's, Subway, Pizza Hut and the vast array of huge corporations whose mega profits rest on the poverty wages of their workforce?

The CEO of YUM! Brands (KFC, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell) made $20.5 million last year. The average worker in one of the stores made $7.50/hour. Restaurant chains spent nearly a million dollars in 2006 to fight minimum-wage increases in six states.

The past several decades have seen worker productivity skyrocket, and wages for most stagnate. Where did the balance go? It went to the top one percent. If minimum wage had kept pace with productivity, it would be approximately $22/hour. If it had grown at the same pace as the income to the one percent, it would be around $33/hour.

Increasing the minimum wage to $15/hour is surely reasonable in the face of the massive siphoning of income to the very top. Should those who work hard every day have to struggle to pay for rent and groceries?

Research does show that a minimum wage increase can initially pose difficulty to some small businesses. However, this can be addressed by increasing taxes on big business (which are at historically low rates) and eliminating corporate welfare to subsidize small businesses, along with cutting B&O and property tax burden on small businesses.

But the main danger facing working people and small businesses is the continued proliferation of low wages. The economy is reeling with over 20 million people unemployed or underemployed, a low-wage workforce, a collapse of the housing bubble, and staggering consumer and student debt. Raising wages is a vital measure to break out of the depressionary spiral.

Statistical studies show a positive impact of wage increases on jobs. When working people have more income, their spending power goes up, which in turn boosts sales, which further increases jobs and overall spending power, and so on.

The idea that raising the wage would harm the most disadvantaged workers is a fig leaf to justify anti-worker policymaking. In fact, increasing the minimum wage raises the bargaining power of all workers, and has the effect of raising wages across the board.

The Great Recession has left in tatters the idea that capitalism works. It works well for the billionaires, but for the rest of us, it has meant fast eroding standards of living. The American middle class was created on the edifice of courage and sacrifice of a mobilized labor movement. Let us support the workers demanding $15/hour. They are a sign of the times.

(reprinted here for educational purposes)

There is no CEO at any company in the USA or Western Europe who is worth millions of dollars a year, absolutely zero CEOs anywhere in the world do millions of dollars worth of work, intellectual or otherwise. As profits roll in they take what they want, and let some of the crumbs trickle down to the workers who create the profits. CEO is another name for leech. No CEO should be paid more than three times their highest paid hourly employee.

Beyond Rebates, How Much Are Consumers Saving from Obamacare Medical Loss Ratio Provision?

Beyond Rebates, How Much Are Consumers Saving from Obamacare Medical Loss Ratio Provision?

Most of the conversation around the Affordable Care Act’s Medical Loss Ratio (MLR) provision has centered on the requirement that insurers issue consumer rebates when they fall short of spending a certain portion of premium dollars on health care and quality improvement expenses.  This makes sense as rebates are one of the more tangible ways consumers have benefited from the law so far, and it likely contributes to the MLR provision being among the more popular aspects of the health reform law.

However, as we’ve written before, rebates represent only a portion, albeit the most concrete portion, of the MLR rule’s savings to consumers.  The primary role of an MLR threshold is to encourage insurers to spend a certain percentage of premium dollars on health care and quality improvement expenses (80 percent in the individual and small group market and 85 percent in the large group market).  The MLR rebate requirement operates as a backstop if insurers do not set premiums at a level where they would be paying out the minimally acceptable share of premiums back as benefits.  Only if those thresholds are not met are insurers required to provide rebates to consumers or businesses. (You can read more about the MLR rule here).

Consumers and businesses, therefore, can realize savings in two ways as a result of the MLR requirement: by paying lower premiums than they would have been charged otherwise (as a result of lower administrative costs and profits), or by receiving rebates after the fact. So while insurers paid out considerable amounts for rebates – last year’s rebates totaled $1.1 billion – this is not the whole story for consumers.

Of course, it is hard to know with certainty what premiums would have been if the MLR rules were not in place: we cannot know for sure how insurers would have priced their products or what rates regulators would have allowed (to the extent that they reviewed rates prior to the ACA). It is also difficult to separate out the direct effects of the MLR provision from other aspects of the health reform law, particularly rate review, which works to moderate unreasonable premium increases and thus increase loss ratios.  There are also data limitations. For example, prior to new reporting requirements put in place to enforce the MLR provision, there were not good data sources that break out premiums and claims on a consistent basis for major medical coverage by all types of carriers. In the initial years this data became available (2010 and 2011), there were some issues with the quality of the data, particularly regarding expenses for quality improvement and other new categories of administrative expenses that are reported on the exhibit.

Within these limitations, we constructed an analysis that looks at the basic proportion of premiums that health plans paid out as claims for medical care over the three years since the ACA was passed, both before and after the MLR requirement went into effect for coverage in 2011.  These proportions do not include adjustments for quality improvement expenses, taxes or other factors that are used when determining whether or not rebates need to be paid; they simply represent the total payments for medical care as a proportion of premiums.  This is the traditional way medical loss ratios have been calculated.  Generally, if the proportion is rising, that means insurers are paying out more of each dollar they receive on enrollee health care, which in most cases would mean that enrollees are getting better value for the premiums they pay. We then quantify what the change in the traditional MLR means to enrollees by estimating how much they would have paid in premium if the observed MLR for 2010 (before the MLR requirement went into effect) were held constant for 2011 and 2012.1 This approach addresses the following question: If insurers had targeted the same claims to premium ratio for 2011 and 2012 as they achieved in 2010, would premiums have been higher or lower, and by how much?  In other words, it addresses how much consumers may have saved in lower premiums as a result of the MLR threshold in addition to receiving rebates.

Our analysis uses insurer data filed to state regulators and compiled by Mark Farrah Associates. These data (filed on the Supplemental Health Care Exhibit) suggest that the main beneficiaries of the MLR rule’s upfront premium savings are people who purchase insurance on their own.  The majority of plans sold to small and large businesses were already in compliance with their respective MLR thresholds before the law went into effect, and our analysis shows that traditional MLRs (claims divided by premiums) for group plans have stayed relatively flat over the past three years.  In the individual market, by contrast, fewer than half of plans were in compliance with the ACA’s MLR thresholds in 2010, and the average traditional MLRs in this market have been steadily increasing since the requirement went into effect. This means that individual market insurers are devoting a greater portion of premium dollars to health care claims and less to administrative costs and profits compared to before the ACA’s MLR rule went into effect.

This pattern is consistent with the idea that some insurers needed to improve their MLRs to comply with the new rebate requirements.  We know that the individual market MLR requirements in the ACA are higher than those that were in effect in many states, and there have been numerous reports that insurers worked to reduce their commissions and other administrative expenses to become more efficient.

So how might these changes have affected premiums?  As noted above, one way to address this question is to compute what these consumers would have paid in premiums in 2011 and 2012 had traditional individual market MLRs stayed at 2010 levels (the year before the provision went into effect). Looked at this way, premiums would have been $856 million higher in 2011, and premiums would have been $1.9 billion higher in 2012.

Adding to the premium savings the amount individual market consumers received in rebates yields a total savings of $1.2 billion for 2011. This year, individual market insurers are expecting to issue $241 million in rebates (based on our analysis of early estimates from insurers filed with state insurance departments), bringing the total estimated savings for 2012 to $2.1 billion.

There are some potential limitations to this approach. While the pattern of increasing MLRs over the three years makes sense given the incentives under the ACA and reports of insurer behavior, we do not have comparable data from earlier years to tell us whether or not the 2010 MLR was typical for the pre-ACA period (though the available evidence suggests that it was).2 Also, MLRs in 2011 and 2012 might be overstated because insurers simply underestimated how much health care expenses would rise following the recession, though increasing MLRs still means that consumers have been getting better value for their premium dollars. Finally, rebate amounts for 2012 are based on preliminary estimates filed on the Supplemental Health Care Exhibit to state insurance departments, and actual rebate amounts will be based on insurer filings with the Department of Health and Human Services, which were due June 1.

If insurers’ preliminary estimates hold true, this year’s rebates (at a total of $571 million across all markets) are expected to be about half the amount of last year’s $1.1 billion in insurer rebates. Smaller rebates, however, are not an indication that consumers are now saving less money as a result of the MLR provision, but rather that insurers are coming closer to meeting the ACA’s MLR requirements and that this provision is having its intended effect of consumers getting more value for the money they spend on premiums. In fact, in the individual market, the $241 million consumers are expected to receive in rebates for 2012 represents roughly one tenth of our estimate of the overall savings from the provision in that year. Perhaps ironically, when the MLR provision is working as intended and insurers set premiums to meet the thresholds, consumers save money but are less likely to get a check in the mail as tangible demonstration of those savings.

A bit wonky, insurance lingo combined with statistics, but it clearly shows that ordinary working Americans are already saving money and getting better insurance for their dollar because of the ACA (Affordable care Act) or Obamacare. Perhaps 11% of self insured will probably see their premiums go up a little. Though those people will also be entitled to rebates and tax credits to offset the expense. Of course conservative lie about "rate shock". Conservatives cannot have an honest debate because they lack the common decency required to have such a debate.

New York Post Columnist and Conservative Arthur Herman Hates Women and American Values

NY Post Columnist Calls Increase In Military Sexual Assaults A "Bogus Epidemic"

New York Post columnist Arthur Herman called the reported increase in military sexual assaults a "bogus epidemic" because the survey on sexual assaults included all "unwanted sexual contact." But experts have found that any sexual harassment can degrade military readiness and the survey results are consistent with widely used survey methodology.

The Department of Defense released its "Annual Report on Sexual Assault in the Military" which determined that up to 26,000 service members may have been the victim of some form of sexual assault. In a March 31 column published by The New York Post, columnist Herman claimed the report highlighted a "bogus epidemic." After acknowledging that sexual assault and rape are serious crimes, Herman attacked the parameters of the report, saying "no real solution to any problem can be built around flawed data":

    Yet that's precisely what's really going on here -- starting with that report. First off, it's far from comprehensive or authoritative. It's based entirely on a voluntary survey -- and it's wildly anti-scientific to extrapolate from a self-selected group. And only 22,792 service members opted to respond -- roughly 2.2 percent of a military that's 1 million strong.

    Even more amazing, the survey never actually asked about sexual assault. Its questions centered on "unwanted sexual contact" -- which can include any number of behaviors, including trying to slap someone on the buttocks, which may be vulgar or inappropriate but hardly rape.

But the survey didn't measure rape, it measured sexual assault, a term that is given a broad definition by the military. For example, the Army Sexual Assault Prevention & Response Program answers the question "What is sexual assault" by including, among other things, "unwanted and inappropriate sexual conduct or fondling":

    Sexual Assault is a crime. Sexual assault is defined as intentional sexual contact, characterized by use of force, physical threat or abuse of authority, or when the victim does not or cannot consent. Consent should not be deemed or construed to mean the failure by the victim to offer physical resistance. Additionally, consent is not given when a person uses force, threat of force, coercion or when the victim is asleep, incapacitated, or unconscious.

    Sexual assault includes rape, nonconsensual sodomy (oral or anal sex), indecent assault (e.g., unwanted and inappropriate sexual contact or fondling), or attempts to commits these acts. Sexual assault can occur without regard to gender, spousal relationship, or age of victim.

This kind of sexual assault is having a significant effect not only on the victims, but on the military as a whole. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel called the assaults "a despicable crime" that is "a threat to the safety and the welfare of our people." General Martin Dempsey added that sexual assaults constitute a "crisis" in the military.  In a speech to U.S. Naval Academy graduates President Obama addressed the assaults, commenting that the "misconduct of some can have effects that ripple far and wide:

    "Those who commit sexual assault are not only committing a crime, they threaten the trust and discipline that makes our military strong," Obama said. "That's why we have to be determined to stop these crimes, because they've got no place in the greatest military on Earth."

Herman also criticized the survey methodology, claiming that having 22,792 service members respond was inadequate. However, the survey noted that the findings are consistent with a study prepared for the Air Force by Gallup, which had a significantly higher response rate. In fact, the report's research supervisor, Dr. David Lisak, worked with Gallup and the Air Force on the earlier study.

NOTE: Thomas Bishop is a current military officer who has served as an Equal Opportunity Leader in the Army Reserves.

Conservative Arthur Herman  must have never heard of statistical sampling. During elections pollsters do not ask every single individual who they are going to vote for, yet they are generally close ( within a few percentage points) of picking winners. So even if the survey is off by a little that still means a substantial number of sexual assaults are occurring. frequently with the perpetrator going unpunished. Herman hates women. Technically that is his right, but he is using a very large media platform to use his hate to persuade public opinion in a way that is harmful to women serving their country and a disgrace to patriotic values.

Remembering Sen. Frank Lautenberg's (D-NJ) Progressive Legacy

Real Patriots Would Not Tolerate This - The Walmart Family Are The Biggest Welfare Cheats in America

 Real Patriots Would Not Tolerate This - The Walmart Family Are The Biggest Welfare Cheats in America

Walmart wages are so low that many of its workers rely on food stamps and other government aid programs to fulfill their basic needs, a reality that could cost taxpayers as much as $900,000 at just one Walmart Supercenter in Wisconsin, according to a study released by Congressional Democrats on Thursday.

Though the study assumes that most workers who qualify for the public assistance programs do take advantage of them, it injects a potent data point into a national debate about the minimum wage at a time when many Walmart and fast food workers are mounting strikes in pursuit of higher wages.

The study uses Medicaid data released in Wisconsin to piece together the annual cost to taxpayers for providing a host of social safety net programs, including food stamps and publicly subsidized health care, to workers at one Supercenter in the state.

According to the report, Walmart had more workers enrolled in the state’s public health care program in the last quarter of last year than any other employer, with 3,216 people enrolled. When the dependents of those workers were factored in, the number of enrollees came to 9,207.

"When low wages leave Walmart workers unable to afford the necessities of life, taxpayers pick up the tab," the report says.

After accounting for the total number of Walmart stores and employees across the state and the per-person costs of BadgerCare, as the state’s health care program is known, the report's authors estimated that the cost of publicly funded health care comes to $251,706 per year for a 300-employee Supercenter.

The authors then added up the projected costs of other public-assistance programs available to families on BadgerCare, such as reduced-price school meals, Section 8 housing assistance, the earned income tax credit and energy assistance. Assuming all those workers avail themselves of those additional programs -- granted, an unlikely scenario -- the report extrapolates that the final tab would top $900,000.

In response to the report, Walmart spokeswoman Brooke Buchanan said the company was proud of the opportunities it provides for employees.

"Unfortunately there are some people who base their opinions on misconceptions rather than the facts," Buchanan said, noting that 75 percent of Walmart managers started as hourly employees. "Every month more than 60 percent of Americans shop at Walmart and we are proud to help them save money on what they want and need to build better lives for themselves and their families. We provide a range of jobs -- from people starting out stocking shelves to Ph.D.’s in engineering and finance. We provide education assistance and skill training and, most of all, a chance to move up in the ranks."

The report, entitled "The Low-Wage Drag on Our Economy," was produced by Democrats with the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, which is chaired by Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.). The committee says it chose Wisconsin because the state's data "appears to be the most recent and comprehensive." The paper is an updated version of an earlier report by the same committee in 2004, which at the time estimated that a 200-employee Walmart store could account for $400,000 in public assistance for workers.

"The labor policies of Walmart, and those of companies that emulate its low-road approach, end up leaving taxpayers holding the bag," Miller said in a statement.

Critics have long denounced Walmart for paying such low wages that many workers are forced to take advantage of public-assistance programs like food stamps or Medicaid. (Notably, many Democrats who lament this scenario are strong backers of such programs.)

In fact, many workers throughout the retail industry take advantage of these programs, though a 2004 study of Walmart workers in California estimated the chain's workers availed themselves of 38 percent more non-health, public-assistance money than workers at competing stores. (That report, by the University of California, Berkeley, had findings similar to the committee's 2004 study.)

many of Walmart's employees probably don't apply for those assistance programs just because there is such a stigma attached to receiving any help. So whether they collect those benefits or not, Walmart should be ashamed that most of its employees do not make a living wage, Walmart Heirs Have As Much Wealth As Bottom 40 Percent Of Americans Combined. One family hauls in as much income as 30 million American workers. This is why the economy cannot seem to fully recover and there is low demand for products and services. The people who are working are spending their money on the basic necessities like food, shelter and utilities. While Walmart continues to import over half its products.

Republican Erick Erickson ( who works for CNN and other media outlets) Believes the same things about women as a Fundamentalist Iranian Mullah. Conservatives and Iranian religious zealots have always had a lot in common.

Latest Fox Benghazi Conspiracy Crumbles. George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Condelezza Rice lied over 4,000 Americans to their deaths. They got another 20,000 maimed or wounded. But shameless, immoral conservative freaks are going to get to the bottom of this non-scandal.

Nope, the IRS doesn't need to keep an eye on radical anti-American conservative groups, Cigarette Maker Funded Dark-Money Conservative Groups