I can't believe my eyes! "Photo and Poll" at Huffington Post of Hillary Clinton's clothing at the APEC Ministerial meeting in Singapore. For Christ's sake, she's the Secretary of State. Why is HuffPost doing this sort of sexist thing at all, let alone to her? This is just offensive.

You can't be "all things to all people" and still be progressive. Why HuffPost is trying for the former I can't understand.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/11/16/hillary-clintons-singapor_n_359349.html

TPM today published this article http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/news/2009/11/obama_eyes_domestic_spending_freeze.php?ref=fpa in which the President is considering a domestic spending freeze or even a 5% cut for federal agencies. Has he lost his mind? The economy is still losing jobs and he is setting himself up for a repeat of 1937.If he wants to cut red ink, he should bring home troops from Iraq (as he promised during the campaign) and Afghanistan, and crack down on tax cheats (as he also promised during the campaign), and pass health care with a public option. These will all reduce red ink.

And he should stop worrying about red ink, anyway, and pass a jobs bill with no extraneous amendments. People seem to underestimate the Right: it doesn't matter how loony they are in 2010, if we fail, we'll lose.

Paul Krugman's blog today (http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/06/why-not-a-wpa/#comments) muses about whether we should have some direct employment programs like the Depression-era Works Progress Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps. He fears it might not be politically feasible, though some of the commenters make persuasive arguments on why it could be.

My father-in-law was in the CCC. My wife remarks about how bad the streets are in St. Louis. The point is there are numerous infrastructure projects that need doing; much of what the CCC created is still with us today in, for instance, the national parks system. Just doing repairs, like the potholes, would be beneficial to the country economically as well as providing jobs. And we could cut out the middleman or, as Krugman puts it, have a "public option" in the stimulus. We could have created a lot of jobs for $700 billion if we had spent it directly on CCC/WPA-type prorams. Let's do the math: this money covers 2 years, so that's $350 billion a year, enough for 10 million $35,000/year jobs for two years, more than covering the 7 milliion jobs lost in this recession. By contrast, what we've actually gotten is 600,000-1 million jobs.

Just sayin'.

Here are links to two videos explaining the Financial Secrecy Index (not the same as tax havens, necessarily, though there is a lot of overlap) and how the US/Delaware tops the list.

http://taxjustice.blogspot.com/2009/11/blog-post.html

http://taxjustice.blogspot.com/2009/11/financial-secrecy-index-usa-tops.html

Enjoy!

I worry the guy might start to get the big head, but as long as he keeps kicking the Republicans where it hurts, I'm sure gonna help him get re-elected. Today's the day, everyone!

Why didn't the skeleton cross the road? Because, unlike Grayson, he's got no guts! (Sorry, bad St. Louis Halloween joke)

Well, well, what a surprise! A new Tax Justice Network report states that the US, led by Delaware, is the top financial secrecy jurisdiction in the world. What does this mean? Data on financial flows is available only on a national basis, not a state-by-state basis, and the US took in almost double the offshore financial flows Switzerland did in 2007 ($2.6 trillion vs. $1.45 trillion); but it is Delaware that has the most opaque secrecy laws within the US. Delaware has no physical presence requirements (just like the Cayman Islands office building then-Senator Obama excoriated as "either the biggest building or the biggest tax scam on record"), no tax on profits earned outside the state, and no requirement to identify the true owner of a corporation established there.

It's time for the US to get off its high horse, stop the abuses within our borders, and put an end to tax deferral until profits are repatriated.

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/news/2009/11/delaware_beats_switzerland_as_most_secretive_finan.php?ref=fpa

http://www.secrecyjurisdictions.com/ explains the TJN project in detail.

http://taxjustice.blogspot.com/2009/10/from-fina.html

Hopefully, someone will soon put up some commercials in Connecticut. A Jon Stewart-like montage of Lieberman proposing the public option in 2004, lauding it in 2006, and stabbing us in the back in 2009. When Move On or whomever is ready to launch, I'm ready to donate. The rest of my post is unprintable (or at least, can't be said on TV).

Here is some truly disturbing news. The Obama administration, which came into office pledging to end the endless deferral of corporate income tax on income not repatriated to the US, has now quietly given up on this.

Why is this important? First, tax deferral costs an estimated $20 billion a year to the Federal treasury. $200 billion over 10 years is more than 20% of the cost of the health care bill.

Second, deferral means that the money stays overseas and creates jobs abroad rather than creating jobs in the US.

One more broken promise. This just stinks.

http://wonkroom.thinkprogress.org/2009/10/13/no-corporate-tax-reform/

Optimism on the public option is being fueled by a steady drumbeat of apparently good polls directly asking about the public option. According to DK/R2K, a majority of voters in Arkansas support the public option. But then what about this?

http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/pdf/PPP_Release_AR_825.pdf

According to PPP, Obama's health care plan has only 29% support in Arkansas, and 60% opposition. Yes, it's over a month old and pretty much all the news since then has been good for the President, but that is a gigantic hole to get out of. You can be sure that Blanche Lincoln and her staff are looking at all the polls, including this one. I've got to wonder  if she's gettable for cloture; it's obvious she voted against all the public plan amendments in the Senate Finance Committee.

You can be certain her Republican opponent will say she enabled the passage of Obamacare if she votes for cloture.

So, can anyone explain these wildly varied responses, and does anyone have any insight into Arkansas?

I ask this because my university (University of Missouri-St. Louis) just sent out a memo saying "We have had one case of H1N1 on our campus." I found this strange because two students in one of my classes have already told me they were diagnosed with it, and a third said she might have the flu and hasn't returned to class yet. This is out of 16 students in the class!

Now, if students don't report it to campus health services, that office won't know the real number, so no criticism of the memo. But the point is that there could be substantial under-reporting of H1N1 incidence in local areas or nationally, if cases don't get notified to the right people. So my question to TPM readers is what you're seeing on the ground.

I also have one policy question related to vaccine priorities. Although people under 24 are one of the main priority groups, university and school staffs, who are surrounded by under-24's on a daily basis, are not on the list at all, which seems strange to me. I think CDC should consider adding university and school staffs to the list.

Harold Meyerson of the Washington Post has a great article today on how badly the media has done on the ACORN controversy. You can find it here http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/23/AR2009092303679.html?referrer=emailarticle

And if you want to go direct to the study he references, it's here: http://departments.oxy.edu/uepi/acornstudy/

Instead of piling on with the faux outrage over ACORN, Stewart would do a lot better by sending someone into KPMG or other top accounting firms, and to tax havens, wearing a wire and hidden camera. It would be a lot more illuminating to see who took the bait of helping a prospective "client" set up an offshore account and give advice on illegal tax evasion than to see the penny-ante stuff ACORN workers did. Individuals are estimated by the Tax Justice Network to have $11.5 trillion (with a T) in offshore accounts, costing world governments about $250 billion a year in tax revenue. http://www.taxjustice.net/cms/front_content.php?idcat=103

Given what we know about 2006's and 2008's "voter registration fraud" baseless accusations, I am really surprised that Steward bit on this right-wing crap that illustrates nothing and may turn out to be more manipulation than reality.

And yes, I'm biased, ACORN was my first job out of college, June 1978-December 1979. But I'm still right.

According to the data from the CIA World Factbook, the richest country in the world in terms of gross domestic product (GDP) per capita is Liechtenstein, at an amazing $118,000 per person (adjusted to purchasing power parity, i.e., taking into account a country's overall price level). In fact the top 20 spots are dominated by tax havens, with a few oil exporters thrown in for good measure. Only three of the top 20 are neither, #10 United States, #18 Netherlands, and #20 Iceland, and the first two both have some tax-haven-like policies (think Delaware in the US case) Some of the tax havens also have a real economy, noted with a star below.

Tax havens: #1 Liechtenstein, #3 Luxembourg, #4 Bermuda, #6 Jersey, #9 Singapore *, #11 Ireland *, #12 Guernsey, #13 Cayman Islands, #14 Hong Kong *, #15 Andorra, #16 San Marino, and #17 Switzerland *.

Oil exporters: #2 Qatar, #5 Kuwait, #7 Norway, #8 Brunei, and #19 United Arab Emirates.

The CIA data is at https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2004rank.html, while the Government Accountability Office list of tax havens is at http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d09157.pdf.

Hiding others' assets is a lucrative business! And President Obama yesterday was playing golf with the chairman of the US branch of UBS, a notorious Swiss bank that has to turn over the names of several thousand US clients.

Ron Wyden is in the Gang of Six. Ron Wyden has proposed an exchange open to people who already have insurance. Ron Wyden wants to tax health care benefits. Does anyone understand just what his angle is?

Some possibilities: taxing health benefits and having a national exchange could be a stalking horse for single payer: make private plans more expensive, and the government plan will wind up enrolling everyone. But then why does his bill have so many Republican co-sponsors?

Wyden wants to separate health insurance from employment. Laudable if you like single payer (and I do), but there are some good systems out there with a strong employment/insurance link, like Germany.

Why the Gang of Six? Is he so convinced of the superiority of his own bill that he's willing to hand Obama (and labor) a defeat?

Any Oregonians or other out there who understand this guy? Thinking outside of the box is sometimes overrated.

The Swiss government is digging in its heels over the long tug-of-war between the IRS and the country's largest bank, UBS, reports the New York Times. The government is now threatening to seize the records of clients demanded by the IRS, rather than let the bank turn them over. UBS has already admitted to promoting tax fraud among its US clients and turned over records on 250 clients. However, despite a recent agreement by Switzerland with the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) that it would turn over information in tax evasion cases, the country has returned to its bogus distinction between tax fraud (criminal matter) and tax evasion (civil matter only) and would appear to be reneging on its commitment in this case.

In the article, the OECD notes that Luxembourg (like Switzerland, an OECD member with a bank secrecy/tax haven tradition) has gone a long way in actually complying with the new information exchange standard. If Luxembourg indeed caves, Switzerland is going to be very isolated, under pressure from the EU, US, and OECD.

Although the article doesn't mention it, we should not forget that the US is a guilty party on information exchange, too, most notably in Delaware, where it is still possible to incorporate without divulging the name of the actual owners of a company. We've got to lead by example! I'm sure we'll hear the Swiss bring it up before long.


http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/09/business/global/09ubs.html?_r=2