Six on "our" Economy: the False Promise of Trump’s Tax Bill; "Be Recorder" by Carmen Giménez Smith; Terri Sewell, the Worst of the Black Caucus, Subverts $15 Wage Bill; Trump 'rodent' tweets ring true at Kushner-owned apartments; Facebook’s Audacious

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 Six on "our" Economy: the False Promise of Trump’s Tax Bill; "Be Recorder" by Carmen Giménez Smith; Terri Sewell, the Worst of the Black Caucus, Subverts $15 Wage Bill; Trump 'rodent' tweets ring true at Kushner-owned apartments; Facebook’s Audacious Pitch for a Global Cryptocurrency; FAIR - The NYT’s Six Percent Solution for Student Debt

A Decline in Capital Investment Reveals the False Promise of Trump’s Tax Bill

"With Donald Trump using his Twitter feed as a flamethrower on a daily basis, other significant developments, particularly policy ones, often don’t get the attention they deserve. Take last week’s G.D.P. report from the Commerce Department, which detailed a sharp slowdown in capital spending by American businesses during the second quarter of this year. To understand the full significance of this development, you need to go back to the first year of the Trump Administration.

In October, 2017, the White House Council of Economic Advisers published a white paper that claimed the Administration’s proposal to slash the tax rate on corporate profits would increase the average household income by at least four thousand dollars a year, and perhaps as much as nine thousand dollars. To say the least, it wasn’t entirely clear how presenting corporations with such a gift would generate this huge boost in living standards, but Kevin Hassett, a conservative economist who was the head of the council, suggested one possible route. “I would expect capital spending to really take off if the tax bill passes,” he told the Washington Post."

A Decline in Capital Investment Reveals the False Promise of Trump’s Tax Bill

A Decline in Capital Investment Reveals the False Promise of Trump’s Tax... The Administration claimed that companies would use their savings from corporate tax cuts to invest in their wor...

Terri Sewell, the Worst of the Black Caucus, Subverts $15 Wage Bill

Terri Sewell, the Worst of the Black Caucus, Subverts $15 Wage Bill | Black Agenda Report

Terri Sewell, the Worst of the Black Caucus, Subverts $15 Wage Bill | Bl... Selma, Alabama, has produced the most reactionary Black Congressperson in modern times, part of the Democratic P...

"Be Recorder" by Carmen Giménez Smith

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend                                         August 1, 2019   from Be Recorder   Carmen Giménez Smith

after Pedro Pietri’s “Puerto Rican Obituary”   they work their fingers to the soul their bones to their marrow they toil in blankness inside the dead yellow rectangle of warehouse windows work fingers to knots of fires the young the ancients the boneless the broken the warehouse does too to the bone of the good bones of the building every splinter spoken for she works to the centrifuge of time the calendar a thorn into the sole dollar of working without pause work their mortal coils into frayed threads until just tatter they worked their bones to the soul until there was no soul left to send worked until they were dead gone to heaven or back home for the dream to have USA without USA to export USA to the parts under the leather sole of the boss they work in dreams of working under less than ideal conditions instead of just not ideal conditions work for the shrinking pension and never dental for the illusion of the doctor medicating them for work-related disease until they die leaving no empire only more dreams that their babies should work less who instead work more for less so they continue to work for them and their kin they work balloon payment in the form of a heart attack if only that’ll be me someday the hopeless worker said on the thirteenth of never hollering into the canyon of perpetual time four bankruptcies later three-fifths into a life that she had planned on expecting happiness in any form it took excluding the knock-off cubed life she lived in debt working to the millionth of the cent her body cost the machine’s owner Yolanda Berta Zoila Chavela Lucia Esperanza Naya Carmela Celia Rocio once worked here their work disappearing into dream-emptied pockets into the landfill of work the work to make their bodies into love for our own            Copyright © 2019 Carmen Giménez Smith. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 1, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.  About This Poem   “I’ve always loved the music and voice in Pedro Pietri’s work, and I wanted to commemorate the important contribution ‘Puerto Rican Obituary’ has been to contemporary poetry and to me as a poet of color. My hope is that I synthesized what he did with my own music, like a remix as a long poem in my forthcoming book, Be Recorder. I began writing it by reading his poem hundreds of times, then by reimagining his critique of the ‘American Dream’ in relation to my own mother’s experiences in the marketplace. I hope I’ve done both of them—all of the folks represented in both poems—justice.” —Carmen Giménez Smith   Carmen Giménez Smith is the author of six poetry collections, including Be Recorder, forthcoming from Graywolf Press in August 2019. She is a professor of English at Virginia Tech and lives in Blacksburg, Virginia. Photo Credit: Adam Fitzgerald

Trump 'rodent' tweets ring true at Kushner-owned apartments - SFGate

Trump 'rodent' tweets ring true at Kushner-owned apartments

Trump 'rodent' tweets ring true at Kushner-owned apartments BALTIMORE (AP) - Davon Jones doesn't have to look far to see the irony in President Donald Trump's tweets that B...

Facebook’s Audacious Pitch for a Global Cryptocurrency

"Facebook, of course, has a history of playing fast and loose with personal information, and there is little reason to believe that the data generated from Calibra will not be shared with the company. “Why should we trust Facebook?” Waters asked Marcus at the hearing. He conceded that “we have made mistakes.” Facebook says that it will not share data between Calibra and Facebook without customer consent. But, historically, consent has offered little protection from Facebook’s willingness to exploit users, either by embedding consent provisions in lengthy and obscure “privacy” policies, or ignoring users’ preferences altogether. It is also easy to imagine those unbanked people in countries where Facebook is the Internet having no choice but to use Calibra, if they want to access the benefits of Libra. What is the meaning of consent for them?"

Facebook’s Audacious Pitch for a Global Cryptocurrency

Facebook’s Audacious Pitch for a Global Cryptocurrency Libra promises a frictionless way for the unbanked people “who need it most” to move money across the world, but...

The NYT’s Six Percent Solution for Student Debt view post on FAIR.org by Jim Naureckas Why are Democratic candidates going on about student loan debt? Why, the problem is practically solved already! That’s the message of a piece in The Upshot (7/24/19)—the New York Times‘ project aimed at “examining politics, policy and everyday life in new ways”—written by Kevin Carey, who directs education policy at the New America foundation. (New America’s higher education program is largely funded by Bill and Melinda Gates.) According to the New York Times‘ Upshot (7/24/19), Democratic candidates are proposing solutions to a student debt problem that has largely already been solved. “It’s Easy to Forget, but a Program to Forgive Student Loans Already Exists,” is the headline. The subhead clarifies: “Democrats are campaigning to fix an issue that is already starting to resolve itself for many teachers and other public servants.” After outlining proposals by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren for large-scale forgiveness of student loans, Carey writes: What’s strange about the new crop of proposals is that the Department of Education already has a public service loan forgiveness program, called PSLF, which President George W. Bush signed into law in 2007. Sure, Carey admits, almost no one who applies for this program has their debts forgiven: In the 18 months after borrowers with a decade of service in government or nonprofit jobs first became eligible in 2017, 73,554 people applied to have their student loans wiped out. And 73,036 were turned down—a rejection rate of 99.3 percent. But that’s a problem that’s going to work itself out over time, Carey explains at great length—applicants will figure out over time how to make themselves eligible for this extremely convoluted program. The bottom line, writes Carey: Nearly half of the $870 billion in outstanding Direct Loans — the kind that are eligible for loan forgiveness — is being repaid through income-driven plans, the kind that are eligible for loan forgiveness. And one in four American workers is in a job eligible for the forgiveness program. So nearly half of $870 billion in debt is eligible for loan forgiveness, and one in four workers have jobs that qualify them for that program. If you do the math, that’s very roughly $100 billion that could theoretically be forgiven—or about 6 percent of the $1.6 trillion in outstanding student debt. The upshot, according to Carey: What are these candidates belly-aching about? Democrats competing to help teachers and other public servants with loans may be about to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to fix a problem that is already on the way to being solved. Or 6 percent of it, anyway. You can send a message to the New York Times at let...@nytimes.com (Twitter:@UpshotNYT). Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave copies of your messages in the comments thread. Featured image: New York Times depiction (7/24/19) of Bernie Sanders at a student debt rally with indebted former student Pamela Hunt. (Photo: J. Scott Applewhite/AP)

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