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Monthly Archives: November 2017

Conservative


We are all conservative according one or more definitions, I have listed two common ones below, one noun and one adjective. Each one of wants their lives to be good and steady and getting better as they advance in life but for some reason there are rifts that on the surface separate us. These rifts are what the electeds want and need . Any small opening to get separation is what was used  in Pre WWII Germany and during. For the sake of a discussion I believe there are few if any citizen who doesn’t want the best for their families. The political establishment (this includes big money donors and the people we have elected sometimes too often) sends the constant stream of messages that extol the virtues of their party and the lack of virtues of the opposition. The reality is that neither party is doing us any great service. The ideal group is a mix of both extremes (yes they are extremes) but folks who are actually working for us instead of telling us more dare I say “lies” solely designed to get them elected where they can do the work of their rich supporters. Example: current proposed “tax reform”, this “reform” will at once benefit most people who are on the high side of income. The so called middle and lower class will benefit not at all after several years. If you espouse conservatism as your mantle then you probably part of the problem as you are narrowly focused allowing the richest to keep theirs and take yours.

Con serv·a·tive
kənˈsərvədiv/
adjective
adjective: conservative

holding to traditional attitudes and values and cautious about change or innovation, typically in relation to politics or religion.
synonyms:
traditionalist, traditional, conventional, orthodox, old-fashioned, dyed-in-the-wool, hidebound, unadventurous, set in one’s ways; More
moderate, middle-of-the-road, buttoned-down.

noun: conservative; plural noun: conservatives

a person who is averse to change and holds to traditional values and attitudes, typically in relation to politics.
synonyms:
right-winger, reactionary, rightist, diehard; More
Republican.

Again I call your attention to 1930’s Germany and after. Lies were the basis of the war and it’s aftermath.

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What’s in the tax reform bill for Johnny Lunchbucket?


By Dana Milbank | The Washington Post
14 hours ago
Washington • Poor Johnny Lunchbucket. He’s been had.
President Trump promised to look out for the forgotten man and to fix a “rigged” tax system. Now he and congressional Republicans have proposed a tax cut that makes the rich richer and shifts the burden onto the working class.
The numbers don’t lie, but if you need more evidence? Consider this: Billionaires Sheldon Adelson, Todd Ricketts, and Charles and David Koch are paying tens of millions of dollars to persuade working-class Americans to support a tax bill that would net these billionaires even more billions. In a cynical twist, they’re not even arguing, primarily, about trickle-down or rising-tide economics. These plutocratic populists are actually claiming the tax cuts would go to the middle class.
“What’s in it for you?” asks a new ad, reportedly backed by $10 million, from the “45 Committee,” founded by Adelson and Ricketts.
“The Republican tax cut saves middle class families more than $1,200 a year, according to independent analysis. The first $24,000 of your income would be tax free,” the announcer says, over images of a factory floor. “It will simplify your taxes and close loopholes so everybody pays their fair share. More money in your pocket. A stronger economy. That’s what’s in it for you.”
Then there’s the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity ad in which a young woman speaks earnestly. “The powerful, the well-connected, the politicians — they’ll stop benefiting from a rigged system,” says this ad, paid for by the powerful and well-connected.
“It means everyday Americans will have more to spend on what’s important to them.”
Finally, we have American Action Network. It doesn’t disclose donors but big oil and big pharma acknowledge contributing.
Says a mom from her kitchen: “A simpler, fairer tax code with tax cuts for working families will give us some peace of mind, and closing loopholes means everyone pays their fair share.”
Fair? The proposal cuts corporate taxes by $1 trillion, gives $200 billion to the richest Americans in the form of estate-tax repeal, and tilts the other $300 billion in cuts in favor of the wealthy. And that doesn’t take into account the hit the working class would take eventually from reduced benefits — health care, education and the like — to pay for the up to $1.5 trillion the legislation would add in debt over a decade.
An analysis by the Tax Policy Center of an earlier version of the bill found that it would reduce taxes by $660 for the typical family, but the richest 1 percent would get an extra $129,000 a year, and the richest one-tenth of 1 percent would get an extra $723,000 — or about $1,100 for every dollar Johnny Lunchbucket gets. The share of taxes paid by the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans would shrink. The share rises for those in the middle.
If this works, we can surely expect these billionaires to try the same plutocrat-as-populist ruse on other matters. Let’s consider how the Adelson and Ricketts “What’s in it for you?” script could be adapted to try to trick working-class Americans into supporting other sops to the rich:
What’s in it for you? The Republican health care bill saves you from the inconvenience and wasted time of visiting doctors.
You hate medical visits — all that poking and prodding, and hard-to-swallow pills. Health care reform simplifies your life, because you know how to cure your illness. Not well-connected doctors. That’s what’s in it for you.
What’s in it for you? The Republican Social Security bill saves middle-class families from the shame of retirement. You don’t want to retire. You’ll be bored. Retirement relief, by removing your retirement benefits, will help you work longer. That’s what’s in it for you.
What’s in it for you? The Republican education bill saves middle-class families from more than 12 years of education. Education relief will put more workers into the workforce sooner. Less hifalutin stuff like “knowledge” and “skills.” More workers.
That’s what’s in it for you.
What’s in it for you? The Republican deregulation plan saves middle-class families from the humiliation of wearing hard hats and eye protection. Airplanes would arrive faster without air-traffic control, according to an independent analysis. If your coworker dies in a crane accident, there’s more work for you, and smaller crowds in the lunchroom. That, Johnny Lunchbucket, is what’s in it for you.

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The Truth About Women and White Supremacy


Charlottesville
August 13, 2017
6:32 pm
By
Laura Smith

When James Alex Fields Jr.’s mug shot was released after he drove his Dodge Challenger through a counterprotest in Charlottesville on Saturday, no one was surprised by what the image revealed: a young, white man with a neo-fascist undercut. “Alt-right” figures like Richard Spencer absorb nearly all the media glare on white nationalism, creating the impression that this is a single-sex movement, and as many have pointed out, the white supremacists who rallied on Saturday were mainly men.
When it comes to identifying the perpetrators of racial hatred in this country, it is tempting to comfort ourselves with gender tropes. But women have always played a determining role in white-supremacist movements.

While the march in Charlottesville occurred in reaction to the proposed removal of a statue of a Confederate general, women were responsible for the erection of many of these Confederate statues across the country at the turn of the 20th century. In the 1920s, women composed the most influential arm of the KKK. And lest we forget the election that emboldened these modern white supremacists: More than half of white women voted for Trump. To overlook the comprehensive picture of who makes up the extreme right is to seriously underestimate its reach.

To overlook the comprehensive picture of who makes up the extreme right is to seriously underestimate its reach.
When we think of the Klan — one of this country’s most notorious and instantly recognizable hate groups — we imagine male faces under the pointed white hoods. But a historical examination of that organization’s most effective period tells a different story. The 1920s were a boom time for the Klan. Membership was roughly 4 million — a number that dwarfs the fringe organization that it is today — and carried no stigma.
While William Joseph Simmons was the founder of that era’s Klan, a woman was the mouthpiece and arguably its most influential member. According to historian Kathleen Blee’s book Women of the Klan, Elizabeth Tyler was “the first major female leader” of the 1920s Klan. In the midst of financial turmoil, the Klan hired Tyler to publicize and recruit new members. One of her most important contributions was galvanizing the KKK’s base by expanding the list of targeted Klan enemies beyond Black people: Catholics, Jews, immigrants, and communists. Under her leadership, the Klan underwent “a dramatic reversal of fortune.” An estimated 85,000 new members joined. At one point, insurgent Klansmen argued that she was the actual head of the Klan and that Simmons was just a figurehead. A congressional investigation agreed.
Tyler’s role could have been chalked up to an anomaly were it not for what happened next. Tyler spearheaded the Women of the Klu Klux Klan, the all-women, autonomous arm of the KKK that had roughly half-a-million members during the 1920s. As I wrote in a Timeline piece on the WKKK, the organization was savvier than its male counterpart because “they were better than the men’s group at hiding their white supremacist mission behind a facade of social welfare.” The group helped to normalize the terrorism of the men’s KKK. Pamphlets from the time read, “Are you interested in the Welfare of our Nation? As an Enfranchised woman are you interested in better government?” Through picnics, lunches, and cross burnings, these white women rallied around racist immigration laws, anti-miscegenation, and segregation.
Due to infighting scandal and the Klan’s general loss of momentum, the WKKK died out by the end of the decade. But there’s no doubt that the Klanswomen channeled their xenophobia into other spheres — the classroom, the school board, local and national politics.
There may be fewer of them marching with lit torches, but rest assured women are playing a powerful role wherever they can.
Undergirding this troubling belief that women aren’t central to racist movements is another: That racism occurs in a vacuum. Those who think white supremacy is a “white guys’ thing” must ask themselves about the nature of the fantasy they have constructed. Do we really believe the men holding torches in these photographs live in some sort of single-gendered society, or that the women they interact with hold no sway in their communities? There may be fewer of them marching with lit torches, but rest assured women are playing a powerful role wherever they can enact their agendas. If the 1920s Klan showed us anything, it’s that racist ideologies are nurtured in communities — not in isolation — and woven into a society’s very fabric. We will never understand the mechanisms that enact racism until we understand the whole societies from which they spring.
Take the “alt-right,” for example. Figures like Anne Coulter have been touting Trumpian ideas long before Trump made any moves toward the White House. Lauren Southern has become, according to Vice, the alt-right’s “not-so-secret weapon.” As a Harper’s feature recently highlighted, a group of “self-made female pundits” with a white-nationalist agenda are seeking to amplify their voices. Across Europe, a wave of women leaders promoting an anti-immigrant, white-populist hard-line are trying to galvanize women voters.
The women within these movements have warned of the foolishness of ignoring them. Not long after Donald Trump was elected, Lana Lokteff, a woman member of the “alt-right” gave a speech intended to galvanize other women. She told the crowd, “Our enemies have become so arrogant that they count on our silence.” After all, as Lokteff said, “When women get involved, a movement becomes a serious threat.”

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Jake Tapper


This is a good read and excellent advice for all of us. MA

2017 Commencement Address by Jake Tapper ’91
June 11, 2017  by Office of Communications

The award-winning journalist delivered Dartmouth’s 2017 commencement address.

President Hanlon, Board of Trustees, distinguished faculty, fellow honorees;
Magnificent alumni including and especially my dad, Class of 1961;
My wife, Jennifer … and with her in mind …
Members of the admissions committee for the Dartmouth Classes of 2029 and 2032, who are right now for the first time hearing the names Alice Tapper, age 9, and Jack Tapper, age 7;
Friends of mine from the Class of 1991—Hillman, Scully, Haber, Kessler, Miller, Groq, Barts, Edison—most of whom I met 30 years ago this fall in the Choates, which I’m still not convinced is not a psychological experiment by Dartmouth Housing. They are here today, because if you want it to happen, friendships formed here can last for the rest of your lives;
Rejoicing families;
And most importantly, you—glorious, brilliant, ambitious, determined members of the Dartmouth College Class of 2017.
A proud member of the class of 1925 once wrote:
“The more that you read
The more things you will know
The more that you learn
The more places you’ll go.”
This is from a book that probably all of you have received as a gift this week. And it’s true that the more that you read and the more that you learn, the more places you may very well go.
But while I revere Dr. Seuss, by necessity he left a few things out.
He didn’t tell you that there are a lot of unread and uninquisitive – but well-connected – heathen going very far and doing very well. In the real world, not only is the Lorax still battling the Once-ler—he also has to deal with the Once-ler’s Super PAC. And his nasty, nasty tweets.
Dr. Seuss often depicted the world as he wished it, with endings that were just and lessons that were learned. But that is not the world you are about to enter. The world outside of Hanover can be cold. Not “walking from the River Cluster to Dartmouth Hall in February to make a 7:45 a.m. language drill” cold, but cold.
It has been said, “He who stays the longest learns the most.” Actually, that wasn’t actually said by anyone; it was once carved on the wall in the basement bathroom of Alpha Chi. But it is true! Though no doubt some of you after all are way smarter than I am – many of you, probably – especially you with the glasses in the third row—I have picked up a few things along the way.
“He who stays the longest learns the most.”
Wise words from someone who probably had his pants down.
I wonder if whoever took that little knife and carved that into the Alpha Chi basement bathroom wall ever imagined that one day it would be invoked in a commencement address?
Whatever the case, it has truth. It speaks to the wisdom one accrues merely by continuing to exist and paying a modicum of attention.
So, what tangible advice do I have to share, having departed from this campus 26 years ago?
First, let me offer the quick and easy stuff. OK?
Always write thank-you notes.
Be a big tipper.
Always split Aces and Eights.
Floss.
Call your folks.
Invest in a good mattress.
Shine your shoes.
Don’t tweet, post, Instagram, or email anything you wouldn’t feel comfortable seeing on the front page of The New York Times.
Be nice to seniors.
Be nice to children.
Remember birthdays.
Never miss an opportunity to charge an electronic device.
Use two-step verification.
Shake it off. Shake it off.
Stretch before exercising.
Stretch after exercising.
Exercise.
Never play keno.
Never drink airplane coffee.
Never pay $200 for a pair of jeans.
Never wear jean shorts; and
No one has ever had fun on a paddleboat.
You can get that from YouTube later. Those are the easy ones. But there are a few harder-fought lessons into which I would like to delve a bit further.
The first one is about you, right now. For you, my dearest Class of 2017. Even if you have jobs or grad school lined up, you are no doubt stressing a bit about the question: What are you going to do with the rest of your life?
And my first serious bit of advice to you is: Do not worry if you do not know what you want to do with the rest of your life; it is OK if you take years to figure it out. Wall Street, Silicon Valley, law school—they ain’t going anywhere.
I did not become a full-time journalist until I was almost 29. It took me a little time to figure out where my particular qualities of annoying persistence, uncomfortable observations, and curiously rooted self-regard might best be suited.
Now, our society worships the prodigies. The Mozarts. To paraphrase Tom Lehrer, it is a sobering thought to consider that when Mozart was my age he had been dead for twelve years.
But to measure success by how old you are when you achieve it is silly. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer wasn’t published until Mark Twain was 41.
Do not stress if you have no idea what you want to do with the rest of your life. View these years, where your responsibilities are relatively few, as a journey, as an adventure. Adventures are not seamless trips from point A to point B; they have ups and downs and obstacles. And every crappy internship, every rude boss, every remedial chore that makes you wonder, “Why did I bother working so hard to get into Dartmouth and graduate from Dartmouth?”—it is all part of this voyage.
Every step of my trip to this stage today taught me something and guided me to here. The fall after graduation, I went to film school. I could not have been more unhappy. Flash forward a few years, more misery in Washington, DC, as the worst public relations flunky in the history of relating to the public. These were periods of ennui, angst, sturm undt drang, and many other words only the Europeans could have come up with. I felt like a complete and utter failure.
All part of the adventure. Do not take these moments that you will someday soon experience as failings or even as wrong turns. Public relations and my ineptitude in it steered me away from the world of spin, but it also showed me how PR executives spin, which gave me insight into how to cut through it. And, more importantly, it was while supporting myself as a PR flunky that I began writing freelance newspaper stories.
And that led me to my first full-time job as a reporter at Washington City Paper, a tiny free weekly newspaper, with an editor who was like a one-man journalism school, who saw in me a young man who did not take mistakes and errors seriously enough and browbeat that attitude out of me. If I had not worked under that man at that free weekly newspaper, I would not be on this stage right now.
At the risk of sounding like Oprah, embrace this adventure. Throw yourself into it.
Now. How to get started?
You know how your parents used say when you were younger that the world doesn’t revolve around you? You’re about to find out what they meant.
Because, believe it or not, until now, crudely speaking, the academic worlds in which you’ve been safely ensconced have been all about you—your teachers and your coaches, professors and advisers, from UGAs to President Hanlon—they have been focused on not only your education but your experience and your personal growth.
You are about to leave a warm and nutritious womb. Freshman trips, freshman groups, sophomore summer, tea at Sanborn, the Phys Ed requirement, all the rest… this incredible support system, these teams of people whose job it has been to turn you into an adult with skills and smarts and tools – caring about your mixers, about your happiness, about your comfort, about your birth control needs, about whether or not you drink responsibly, whether you’re doing okay, making sure you go to the dentist. I’m sorry to say, that ends tomorrow. You now have to do that for yourselves, and for each other.
Now, my little baby birds, you are expected to fly. Coach. Last row, middle seat.
There will be no UGA down the hall in your first apartment, and if there is one, that’s not really a UGA; that’s just a creepy dude trying to get on your Wi-Fi.
Now I’m not saying you should be scared about what tomorrow might bring. The real world’s a cool place. There are plenty of nice and kind people. There’s live music, fresh juices, hotels that don’t charge for the minibar. But the real world, unlike what you’ve experienced here, is a place of transaction.
What does that mean? Practically speaking, it means you can no longer rely on people in positions of power to do things for you because they care about you. The people you’re going to meet whom you need to help you get a job, or an apartment, or a loan, or advice—the people to whom later you will point to and say, “Hey, she gave me my first break!”—those people are looking for something in return.
What is that something? It can be tricky to figure out. It might be your loyalty, your respectability, that you have a diploma from Dartmouth, your brains, your cleverness, or your politeness. Different people are going to want you for different reasons, but your first boss and every boss you ever will have will want something very simple: your hard work and your good attitude.
Now, the transactional nature of the world might sound harsh but it isn’t necessarily.
Put it this way: A screenwriter sells her idea to a studio. The studio wants to make her movie. They start conducting screen tests. In this parable you’re, say, Vin Diesel. You audition. You have to. No one is going to give you that job out of the kindness of their hearts. They need to have confidence that you will be Fast and Furious. So they can sell $380 million worth of movie tickets.
But here is the exquisite bit of good news, for those of you paying attention: Now you know this; now you know that it all comes down to you figuring out what you can offer them. It’s a lesson it took me several years to learn—maybe even more than that, maybe a decade or two—but once I did it was invaluable.
I joined ABC News in 2003. In the 2004 presidential race, I was not assigned a candidate to cover. I can still list the reporters who were, by the way. I remember every one of them. I got nothing.
So I did the only thing I could do. Complain? No. I worked so hard in those intervening years to establish myself as a good and tireless political reporter, so hard they HAD to assign me a candidate in 2008, for their own good. It worked, and in 2008 I was finally assigned a candidate. My goal then became to be the White House correspondent. And I knew, again, there was only one way I would get that job. I had to be so skilled and tough and industrious and vigilant that, if my bosses at ABC News made anyone else the White House correspondent, they would look like idiots. I had to force them to give it to me out of their own best interests.
Now, I’ve come up with a lot of bad strategies and made a lot of bad decisions in my life. I’ve made enough bad decisions to fill five other commencement addresses. But this was a good one.
Have something that they want. And show it to them—over and over, every day. Make them need you. Work twice as hard as the job requires. Make sure they know that you will show up and act like a professional, that you don’t feel entitled to anything.
Make them hire you for their own good, not yours.
Now, a word on the inevitable rejections that may soon shower upon you like a monsoon. Dr. Seuss’s first book, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, was rejected 27 times before he found a publisher. As a young man, Robert Frost, class of 1896, received a rejection letter from the poetry editor of the Atlantic Monthly with the note: “Our magazine has no room for your vigorous verse.”
In other words: Not every expert is expert.
Quite a few of them are going to be wrong about you.
Some of them will be downright idiots.
When my classmate Shonda Rhimes first pitched Grey’s Anatomy to a room full of older men, they told her that nobody was going to watch a show about a woman who has casual sex and threw a guy out the night before her first day of work—that that was completely unrealistic and that nobody wanted to know that woman. Shonda sat in that pitch meeting and thought, “Wow they don’t know anything about what’s going on in the world right now.”
Forgetting the critical, financial, and popular success of the show for a moment, Shonda can’t even keep track of how many young women have told her that they were inspired to become doctors because of Grey’s Anatomy.
Keep going.
There might be a lot of rejection. Most of it you should not take personally. People making decisions are often wrong. Even the faculty of Dartmouth can get it wrong! Connie Britton, Class of ‘89, perhaps the best known and most critically acclaimed actress to have ever graduated from Dartmouth College, was not able to convince the Drama Department here to sponsor her to send to the League Auditions.
David Benioff, Class of ‘92, acclaimed novelist and screenwriter and co-creator of HBO’s Game of Thrones, he didn’t get into English 80—three times.
But some of the rejection you should take personally. Some of it will be because of things you could be doing better. Try to figure out what those things are. Because you always can be doing something better.
To be honest, this never ends. The best and most successful people are constantly striving to be better. If you think that at 48 I think I’ve got it all figured out, kindly allow me to disabuse you of that notion. And I can provide multiple sources for that scoop.
And I can do that because I know it’s important to surround yourself with people who love you and respect you enough to tell you the truth. And it is important to listen to them. Many people you will see rise to a level of success on which it becomes difficult to find people to challenge them and their ideas. And whether politicians or generals, news anchors, or CEOs, that inevitably leads to their downfall.
Look at what’s going on in Washington, DC, right now. Tell me there aren’t people you can think of whose own careers would not be improved if they heeded the suggestions of a tough but loving staff of critics willing to share hard truths.
At my job at CNN, I am lucky enough to be surrounded by people who challenge me every day. From the top, to the side, to the bottom of the ladder. They make me better by sanding away my worst impulses. Class of 2017, get people like that around you. No matter how high you rise, do not get rid of them.
You’re going to have friends who are willing to criticize you, and maybe you don’t want to hear it, and your impulse may be to show them the door; but if you spend the rest of your twenties amidst only the sycophantic and the shallow, you will wake up at 30 with a friendship hangover worse than a month of Jägermeister shots.
You know, it’s funny what sticks to your brain. I haven’t looked at the autographs in my high school yearbook since they were written in 1987, but I know that there’s one in there from a girl named Kate. She praised me for my cutting wit, but she also cautioned me to be careful about how I wielded that particular blade. And though I spent much of the next 20 years ignoring that lesson, much to my own detriment, I still remember that advice 30 years later because she was right.
Advice can sting. Ted Koppel once pulled me into his office after seeing an embarrassing TV pilot I was part of and told me that it was OK to tell my bosses “No.”
Charlie Gibson once told me to stop sending such pointed emails, that I would get a lot farther if I didn’t share every critical thought I had every moment I had it.
These were not easy criticisms to hear. But they were right. These were important people investing their time to try to make me better.
These kinds of lessons aren’t fun. No one enjoys hearing about how much of a jerk they are.
So let me also say while I prepare you for those moments: Absorb the lessons. Adapt accordingly. But do not be too hard on yourself. And listen to yourself, follow the better angel we all have in us steering us toward ways to be our best selves.
On October 3, 2009, I was sitting in my wife’s recovery room at a hospital in Washington, DC, holding our newborn son. On TV I saw a news story: That day, an outpost containing just fifty-odd US troops had been attacked by up to 400 insurgents. Combat Outpost Keating was built at the bottom of three steep mountains, the reporter said, in a particularly rough corner of Afghanistan just 14 miles from the Pakistan border. It was an ugly and brutal battle. The deadliest for the US that year. Eight American soldiers were killed.
And as I sat in the room that day holding my son, hearing about these eight other sons taken from their parents, from their wives, I wanted to know why. Why would anyone put an outpost in a such a dangerous place?
And more importantly, who were these people that were risking so much and sacrificing everything – people to whom I really didn’t pay all that much attention, to be honest. Sure, I covered debates over troop levels—ten thousand, forty thousand—but those were statistics; those weren’t people.
So, against the advice of a lot of people I knew, I decided to write a book about the men who fought and suffered and prevailed and died in that battle, about Combat Outpost Keating.
Writing that book was a long slog. Many doubters; many skeptics. And yet I felt compelled to tell the story of these troops and their families, people part of a world unfamiliar to me at the time, the world of the US military, of duty and sacrifice. In some cases, the ultimate sacrifice.
Hearing the stories firsthand of these men and women made me realize how little I had accomplished in the service of anyone other than myself.
“My God,” I told my wife one afternoon after I had been visiting with two Cavalry officers, Dave and Alex. “My God, these guys are amazing, and I am nothing. I have risked nothing and sacrificed nothing compared with these men.”
“But honey,” she said, “you can tell their stories. You can tell their stories.”
The book I wrote, The Outpost, remains the professional work I am proudest of. It is not what has resulted in the most Twitter memes, but it is the most meaningful. It was the one least about me; and it may be one professional achievement, maybe, perhaps, that has a chance of outlasting me.
That which you end up doing in the service of something greater than you – even if it means that you feel lesser, humbler, even worthless by comparison – by honoring the humanity of others, that will allow you to get in closer touch with your own.
And this is the most important thing I can tell you today, Class of 2017. Don’t just work hard at your job; work hard at everything. Work hard at being a friend. Work hard at being a partner, at being a son or a daughter, at being a grandchild, at being a steward in your community, at caring about people who have never had a day like the one you’re having today. At being the best YOU that you can be, Class of 2017, all of you, A to Z, from the best Alexander Abate to the best Jonathan Zuttah.
There are going to be moments like this one – a celebration of hard work well done, surrounded by family and friends. And then there are going to be moments when you feel alone and adrift, misunderstood, and hopeless.
Maybe right now it looks to you like someone like me effortlessly went from your seat to this stage. Let me assure you, there was effort. There was effort and there was pain and embarrassment and rejection and humiliation. False starts and false turns and mistake after mistake after mistake. But that’s OK. That’s all part of the adventure, and yours starts now.
Members of the Dartmouth College class of 2017 – you are already great. Now it’s up to you to become even greater.
Be bold. Be smart. Be brave. Be true.
Go forth and rock.
God bless you; God bless your families; God bless Dartmouth College of Hanover, New Hampshire; God bless the memory of EBA’s; and God bless the United States of America.
Thank you for the honor of a lifetime.

Robert Mercer, a prominent Trump backer, leaving hedge fund


It is well to remember that there are many big money folks who are leery of Trump’s presidency even if they do not make it known overtly. MA

Steve Peoples, Associated Press
Associated Press November 2, 2017
NEW YORK (AP) — Republican mega-donor Robert Mercer, a billionaire with close ties to President Donald Trump, is stepping down from his position as chief executive officer of the New York investment firm Renaissance Technologies. The 71-year-old Mercer is also selling his personal stake in the pro-Trump website Breitbart News to his daughters.
He announced his decision on Thursday in a letter to investors that also condemned white supremacists, distanced himself from former Trump strategist Steve Bannon, and declared he was mistaken for supporting alt-right hero Milo Yiannopoulos.
“I have decided to correct some of the misinformation that has been published about me,” wrote the 71-year-old Mercer, who cited “a great deal of scrutiny from the press.”
The notoriously private Mercer is considered one of the most powerful political benefactors in the Trump era.
After initially backing the presidential bid of Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, he and his daughter, Rebekah Mercer, poured resources into efforts to help elect Trump last fall. They are also major backers of Breitbart News, which is led by Bannon, Trump’s ex-chief strategist. The site has been criticized for encouraging white supremacists who make up the so-called “alt-right” movement.
“Of the many mischaracterizations made of me by the press, the most repugnant to me have been the intimations that I am a white supremacist or a member of some other noxious group,” Mercer wrote in his resignation announcement. “Discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, creed, or anything of that sort is abhorrent to me. But more than that, it is ignorant.”
On Bannon, who is now leading an effort to take down congressional Republican incumbents, Mercer wrote that their politics are not necessarily in lockstep.
“I have great respect for Mr. Bannon, and from time to time I do discuss politics with him. However, I make my own decisions with respect to whom I support politically. Those decisions do not always align with Mr. Bannon’s,” Mercer wrote.
At the same time, he condemned Yiannopoulos, one of Bannon’s protégés at Breitbart, who has inflamed racial tensions in a series of provocative speeches on college campuses across the nation.
“In my opinion, actions of and statements by Mr. Yiannopoulos have caused pain and divisiveness undermining the open and productive discourse that I had hoped to facilitate,” Mercer wrote. “I was mistaken to have supported him, and for several weeks have been in the process of severing all ties with him.”
The development comes as another Mercer-backed company, the data firm Cambridge Analytica, faces new scrutiny for possible links to the federal probe into Russia’s meddling in the 2016 president election.
Wikileaks editor Julian Assange told The Associated Press last week that Wikileaks received a “request for information” from Cambridge Analytica prior to the election. Assange would not specify the request, which he said was rejected, but The Daily Beast reported that the head of Cambridge Analytica reached out to Assange during the presidential campaign about the possible release of 33,000 of Hillary Clinton’s missing emails.
Those emails have never been publicly released.
Renaissance has also been locked in a years-long dispute with the IRS after a Senate investigation determined that the firm used complex financial instruments to avoid paying nearly $7 billion in taxes.
Mercer said he would formally step down from his leadership role at Renaissance Technologies on Jan. 1.

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Republicans Want to Make Corporate Tax Avoidance Even Easier


It should be apparent that the Dupublicans hiding behind the Tweet storm of the President are still seeking to bend us over – The tax reform is reform inn name only and will not help the average taxpayer at all. If you are disturbed by this then all you need to do is contact your representative. MA

 

Justin Miller
October 25, 2017
An obscure provision in the Trump tax plan—the territorial system—would further encourage multinationals to shift profits to low (or no) tax
President Trump’s push to slash the corporate tax rate from 35 percent down to 20 percent and his ludicrous claim that doing so will give the average worker a $4,000 raise, has drawn a great deal of scrutiny—and rightfully so. It’s a trickle-down fabrication to build support for a bill that will further enrich CEOs and shareholders, and do nothing for ordinary Americans.
But the only colossal corporate giveaway in the plan includes more than the mere slashing of rates. Quietly, Republicans are also pushing a territorial taxation provision that would make it far easier for multinational corporations to avoid paying even a new 20 percent rate by providing further incentive to stash profits in offshore tax havens.
Currently, the federal government uses a “worldwide” taxation system for corporations, which taxes both domestic and foreign profits. This system is badly flawed because multinationals are able to indefinitely defer taxation on profits earned overseas and, through sophisticated accounting gimmicks, make it look on paper as if domestic profits are earned abroad.
This is why you hear about companies like Apple setting up subsidiaries in low-tax countries like Ireland to hold profits made, for instance, on patents, royalties, and other intellectual property and avoid paying taxes on them. The technology behemoth has parked more than $230 billion in profits abroad. Pfizer, the world’s largest pharmaceutical manufacturer, has 157 subsidiaries in tax havens holding nearly $200 billion in offshore profits.
According to a recent report by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy and the U.S. PIRG Education Fund, 73 percent of Fortune 500 companies have subsidiaries in a low-tax country. All told, American corporations have steered more than $2.6 trillion in earnings into offshore tax havens.
The specter of corporate profit-shifting has become more pronounced in recent years. The scale of revenue loss to the United States federal government has increased five-fold over the last decade, and now costs an estimated $100 billion in annual tax revenue. In short, the way that the United States deals with international taxation is in desperate need of an overhaul.
For decades, the Republican Party’s preferred policy—in sync with that of most multinationals—has been to shift to a territorial system that does not tax foreign profits at all. Republicans claim that this will align the United States with the other developed countries that use a territorial system; that it’s merely about leveling the playing field for American companies.
But as many taxation experts point out, the GOP’s push for a territorial system would only accelerate corporate profit-shifting and could lead to a crisis of offshoring operations—putting more and more of the tax burden on average Americans and more and more pressure on government services.
That’s especially true if the system doesn’t include strong provisions to curb rampant profit-shifting and to prevent American companies from packing up for tax havens. Republicans have made vague promises that they will prevent an erosion of the tax base and will set up guardrails that ensure that companies will not be able to easily move abroad. But so far it’s unclear precisely how they would make that happen. The only clear policy guardrail Republicans have included in the plan is a minimum tax that ostensibly would serve as a backstop, requiring companies to pay up if their tax rate falls below a given number. But policymakers have yet to disclose what that rate would be, giving experts reason to believe it won’t have much teeth. On top of that, Republicans are pushing for a minimum tax that applies to a company’s aggregate earnings worldwide, as opposed to on a per-country basis.
Kimberly Clausing, an economics professor at Reed College, warns that this will allow companies to easily game the system by earning profits in low-tax havens as well as high-tax countries, and thus more easily meet the minimum tax standard without actually stopping the tax avoidance. “You can basically use the flows of income in both the high- and low-tax countries to offset each other in order to avoid incurring the minimum tax,” Clausing told Law360. “So, it creates all these sorts of pretty easy profit-shifting opportunities between foreign affiliates. … The minimum rate becomes kind of a maximum rate from the perspective of multinational tax planners.”
Critics are skeptical, too, that Republicans would even want to construct strong guardrails.
“The thing to understand is those guardrails put in place probably won’t be very strong given the GOP’s views on corporate taxation generally,” says Alexandra Thornton, senior director for tax policy at the Center for American Progress. “But it’s also very hard to come up with those kinds of guardrails. Money is fungible and it’s impossible for the IRS to keep up with what corporations do on their books. A lot this is behind the corporate veil.”
As of now, the GOP’s territorial plan would only serve to accelerate profit shifting abroad and could further prompt businesses to begin moving tangible assets—operations and jobs—to other nations. “There will be companies who haven’t moved before who will have more incentive to do so in the future,” says Reuven Avi-Yonah, a professor of international tax law at the University of Michigan Law School.
And yet, top Republicans like House Speaker Paul Ryan and organizations like the Heritage Foundation claim that a territorial system will spark economic growth and increase wages for workers. Additionally, Ryan says that this will open the door to allow companies to bring back the trillions of dollars that have become “stranded” abroad, and use that money to invest in research, development, and jobs in the United States. The last time Republicans did this was during the George W. Bush administration in 2004—and it failed miserably. Despite passing a tax holiday bill that ostensibly required companies to invest in the United States, most of the foreign profits that were brought home were funneled into share buybacks and dividend payouts, not investment in jobs, new facilities, or new equipment.
While President Trump constantly harps about putting America first, he’s pitching a tax plan that would embolden American multinational companies to avoid domestic taxation and move operations abroad.
There are easier ways for the United States to curb corporate tax avoidance. The most direct is to simply end the deferral of corporations’ foreign profits and tax them annually like domestic profits. This would reduce the incentive to stash profits abroad. We could then use that new revenue to lower statutory rates a little bit and close lucrative loopholes.
That’s if the Republican Party was actually interested in comprehensive corporate tax reform. Trump could also simply reverse his delay of an Obama regulation that would limit corporate profit-shifting by cracking down on a common tax avoidance strategy called earnings-strippings. (Don’t hold your breath on that, though.)
Republicans are banking on the fact that international taxation is a complicated and esoteric issue that isn’t as easy to understand as, say, slashing the corporate tax rate. But its impact would be just as, if not more, consequential.

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