Leftward Spin!

[JackLuis]

US incomes soaring, poverty falling and gender pay gap shrinking to a new record low

Each year in September, the U.S. Census Bureau releases a report showing how income and poverty have changed over time. The most recent report, which came out on Sept. 13, was filled with great news.

Compared with the previous year, average inflation adjusted income soared 5.2 percent. The U.S. poverty rate fell 1.2 percentage points, resulting in 3.5 million fewer people living in poverty. Even the number of people without health insurance fell by 4 million people in the past year.

While these statistics got the headline attention they deserve, there is one piece of great news in the report that hasn’t attracted as much attention but is just as important. The gap between women’s and men’s earnings shrank to a new record low. The median woman working a full-time year-round job now earns 80 percent of the median earnings given to men working full-time.

Each election season we see the government/Parties spin the news to make it sound like everything is hunk-dory. Somehow the economy always gets better at the end of an Administration. Funny i'dnit? But it is a slanting of the truth.

From 1960 to 1980, there was little change in the ratio of earnings. However, starting in 1980, the ratio of women’s earnings to men’s began to increase. Then in the early 2000s, the pay gap became stuck at 77 percent for a decade. The most recent data suggest the upward trend has resumed.

Parity, where women earn the same as men, is a key government goal starting with the Equal Pay Act of 1963. If the trend seen in the graph continues, the U.S. will reach parity in roughly 35 more years.

Is there a downside?

It should be noted, however, that there is a potential downside to the reduction in the wage gap if women’s gains are coming at the expense of men’s wages. The median earnings for full-time year-round male workers have not increased in decades after adjusting for inflation.

So basically we are stuck in the same old spiral, inflation eats up what ever gains we make and the 1% gets all the gravy.

The Government reports 'adjusted numbers' and the actual state of the Union is deeper in debt and no new revenue is expected.

 

[JackLuis]

Did you ever wish you could fuck with the FBI and get away with it?

Jason Chaffetz Made FBI ADMIT That They Covered Up Hillary’s LIES On LIVE TV

Chafftz schools the FBI! Classic Political power play.

 

[JackLuis]

Wall Street Journal get snippy with Hillz.

The Clinton Subpoena Dodge
Two witnesses take the Fifth and one fails even to honor a subpoena.

WSJ can be so mean girl!

The Clinton entourage is known for their faulty memories under oath, but Bryan Pagliano is setting a new standard. The former Clinton aide chose Tuesday to ignore a congressional subpoena.

The House Oversight Committee held a hearing to dig into some of the issues surrounding Hillary Clinton’s private email server. Mr. Pagliano, who worked as an IT specialist for Mrs. Clinton’s 2008 campaign and set up the private server in her New York residence in 2009, was issued a subpoena compelling attendance.

Mr. Pagliano’s lawyers replied in a letter to the committee that their client couldn’t be bothered. They said that since he’d previously appeared before a different House committee and asserted his Fifth Amendment rights, any effort to make him appear again “furthers no legislative purpose and is a transparent effort to publicly harass and humiliate our client for unvarnished political purposes.”

Two other witnesses who helped maintain Mrs. Clinton’s server— Paul Combetta and Bill Thornton of Platte River Networks—did show up. But then they took the Fifth as well.

By the way, Mr. Pagliano has no legal reason to take the Fifth because he has been granted immunity by the Justice Department as part of the FBI probe into Mrs. Clinton’s mishandling of classified information. He can tell his story without fear of prosecution. A fair conclusion is that his refusal is politically motivated to deny the truth to the public and presumably to protect Mrs. Clinton.

The House could issue a contempt citation, but Mr. Pagliano may figure Justice would refuse to take it up as it did the one against former IRS official Lois Lerner. This is what comes from the Obama Administration’s contempt of Congress, and it’s a dispiriting sign that a Clinton Administration would be no better.

 

[JackLuis]

Not exactly Left-Spin but Bernie is correct.

Wells Fargo’s Business Model is Fraud

Let’s be clear, the business model of Wall Street is fraud. In my view, there is no better example than the recently-exposed illegal behavior at Wells Fargo.
The CEO of Wells Fargo admitted today that he knew in 2013 the bank was scamming customers, but he took no action to fire or reprimand the senior executives in charge of supervising this activity. Instead, they were given millions in bonuses, while the value of the stock that the CEO owned shot up in value by more than $200 million.
Wells Fargo’s abuse of its customers is not an aberration. In April, the bank reached a $1.2 billion settlement with the Department of Justice for ‘reckless’ and ‘shoddy’ underwriting on thousands of home loans from 2001 to 2008. In 2012, Wells Fargo was fined $175 million to settle claims of discriminatory and predatory subprime lending in black and Hispanic neighborhoods.
We have got to end the two-tier justice system – one for the poor and working class and one for Wall Street and the wealthy – that has existed for far too long in this country. The American people cannot understand how major banks paid more than $200 billion in fines and settlements since 2008, but not one Wall Street executive was prosecuted. That has got to change. ‘Equal Justice Under Law’ cannot just be words engraved on the entrance of the Supreme Court. It must be the standard that applies to all Americans, including the CEO of Wells Fargo and other financial executives.

If we just jail 100-200 CEO Banksters, things might change.

 

[JackLuis]

House Republicans’ IRS hearing doesn’t go as planned

Far-right House Republicans, ignoring their own congressional leadership, haven’t given up on their crusade to impeach IRS Commissioner John Koskinen. Their efforts don’t make a lot of sense, and there’s absolutely no way the impeachment drive will have any practical effect, but several GOP lawmakers see this as a useful electoral and fundraising tool – and so the gambit continues.

Last week, with the far-right threatening to force an impeachment resolution onto the House floor, Republicans reached an intra-party agreement: the House Judiciary Committee would hold a big hearing; the far-right would spend a couple of hours treating Koskinen like a rhetorical punching bag; conservatives would send out some fundraising letters; and the political world would move on.

And for a while, everything was going according to plan. Koskinen appeared on the Hill and explained that there’s no sane reason to impeach him, while assorted Republicans complained incessantly about the IRS controversy that was discredited years ago.

But the twist came when Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee made clear that this hearing could serve their political purposes, too.

Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-New York, asked if people under IRS audit are free to release their tax returns, a situation [Donald Trump] has asserted in refusing to release his forms. Koskinen said such taxpayers can release their returns.

Nadler also asked if someone can use money from a charitable foundation to buy a portrait or a football helmet autographed by former quarterback Tim Tebow or to pay fees from legal disputes. Reports have said money from the Donald J. Trump Foundation has been used for those purposes.

Koskinen said, generally, charitable money shouldn’t be used to benefit someone who runs a charitable foundation.

Democrats then went on to highlight some of the items that could prove problematic for Trump to disclose, such as his actual income, what he pays the government in taxes, clues to his actual net worth and records of his charitable giving. Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) wondered aloud if discovering payments by Russia might suggest a monetary – or even treasonous – motive for going soft on a U.S. rival.

 

[JackLuis]

This is what happens someone blows the whistle on the big banks.

Whistle Blowing is not allowed to interfere with profits!

Who brought the case to the surface?


Liz on the case!

 

[JackLuis]

Hillary Spins Left!

Clinton proposes 65 percent tax on billionaire estates

Clinton’s plan, posted on her campaign’s website, would raise the estate tax from the current 40 percent to 45 percent, the rate that existed in 2009. But the biggest estates would face rates of up to 65 percent for property valued at more than $500 million for a single person or $1 billion per couple, under her proposal, an update of an earlier plan.

Clinton’s proposed top rate of 65 percent would be the highest estate tax since the 1980s, and is in line with a proposal made during the Democratic primaries by her former rival for the party’s presidential nomination, U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders.

Fat Chance of it passing the Rethuglican House though, so she's safe.

Republicans want to eliminate estate taxes altogether because they believe the system penalizes families who want to pass down businesses, said U.S. Representative Kevin Brady, chairman of the tax-writing House of Representatives Ways and Means Committee.

Brady said in a statement that Clinton’s plan was “dead on arrival.”

 

[JackLuis]

Senators Ask Labor Department to Investigate Wells Fargo's Potential Violations of Fair Labor Standards Act

Any bets on if the Justice Department will actually investigate the Senior Management at Well Fargo? Or will they say it was too long ago to matter?

Washington, DC - United States Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), Jack Reed (D-R.I.), Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), Bernard Sanders (I-Vt.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), and Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) today sent a letter to Department of Labor (DOL) Secretary Tom Perez and Wage and Hour Division Administrator David Weil requesting that DOL investigate whether Wells Fargo violated the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) with respect to its account executives, bank tellers, branch managers, and customer service representatives. The senators' letter comes in the wake of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's (CFPB) recent $185 million settlement with Wells Fargo, and the company's related decision to fire over 5,000 employees for creating more than 2 million checking and credit card accounts that may not have been authorized by customers.

The senators explain in their letter that in addition to revealing this consumer fraud, the CFPB's investigation "uncovered a workplace characterized by stringent sales quotas and aggressive incentives imposed on its employees, and staggering neglect by management of the obvious consequences to consumers of those quotas and incentives." The letter details the lengths employees went in order to meet the bank's aggressive sales quotas, as they were faced with "threats of termination; mandated hours of unpaid overtime; harassment; and other forms of retaliation." The senators identified a series of employee complaints about possible violations of wage and hour protections dating back as far as 1999.