Sunday, January 6th, 2013
ANDREW CHAMBERLAIN, - Tax Foundation
Stephan: As the Hurricane Sandy catastrophe has made clear some states are 'donors' and some are 'takers.' Put another way, generally speaking, although with some exceptions, Blue value states are donors and Red value states are takers. This data is somewhat dated in its details, but still accurate overall.
Click through to see the map and the chart, which you'll find very helpful.
This morning we released our famous annual analysis of federal taxing and spending by state-popularly known as the ‘giving and receiving states’ report. Here’s a map from the study, illustrating which states received the most and least federal spending per dollar of tax paid.
So what explains the distribution of federal taxing and spending? As you can see from the map, states that get the ‘worst deal’-that is, have the lowest ratio of federal spending to taxes paid-are generally high-income states either on the coasts or with robust urban areas (such as Illinois and Minnesota). Perhaps not coincidentally, these ‘donor’ states also tend to vote for Democrat candidates in national elections. Similarly, many states that get the ‘best deal’ are lower-income states in the mid-west and south with expansive rural areas that tend to vote Republican.
News reports commonly interpret this to mean that ‘red state’ lawmakers are more successful at bringing home federal spending than ‘blue state’ lawmakers. It’s often suggested that the way to correct this imbalance is for ‘blue state’ lawmakers to step up efforts to capture additional spending for their states, and for ‘red state’ lawmakers to pare back their voracious appetite for ever-growing pork-barrel spending.
This […]
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Sunday, January 6th, 2013
IAN MILLHISER, - Think Progress
Stephan: Here is yet another way conservatives seek to rig the election process. There are so many fronts to this war that I think most of the corporate media see only the individual trees, and not the forest, the collective enterprise. All of this is a concerted carefully planned, and well-financed decades long attempt by the uber-rich, and their corporate structures, using principally the vehicle of the Republican Party to take over the United States. It is a kind of slow-motion fascist coup.
The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution expressly provides that nearly anyone born in the United States is a citizen, regardless of the immigration status of their parents. Yet, despite the Constitution’s clear command, Rep. Steve King (R-IA) wants to ignore our founding document and prevent the children of undocumented immigrants from becoming citizens:
It’s the first week of the 113th Congress, and one House member is already trying to stop children born in the United States to undocumented parents – whom he calls ‘anchor babies
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Sunday, January 6th, 2013
Brendan Fischer, - Truthout.org
Stephan: Here is yet another aspect of the Republican Party's attempt to rig America's election process in order to keep themselves in the game at the national level. They have a very effective state strategy, and are using it to maintain national influence. All of this arises because, at the at the base level the party is regional, Southern, and made up of aging Whites particularly males, in a country that is going majority minority with astonishing rapidity.
All of this, the voter suppression, the gerrymandered congressional districts, and this attempt to rig the electoral college bespeak a contempt for the processes of democracy, a deep commitment to holding on to power, and a subservience to corporate masters who fund these efforts.
The only way to stop this is to vote these people out of office. A country gets the kind of government its people vote for -- until the special interests become so powerful they can eliminate a fair vote. However I don't think that is going to happen, so I see all this as part of the Great Schism Trend, in which power descends to states and regions.
Social values will create two or perhaps five functional 'countries' under a Federal umbrella. The fight that is coming, I believe, is the one between the 'donor' and 'taker' states -- of which more below.
Despite Wisconsin residents overwhelmingly voting for Democrats in the 2012 elections — sending progressive powerhouse Tammy Baldwin to the U.S. Senate and reelecting President Barack Obama by 6.8 points — five of the state’s eight newly-drawn congressional districts voted out of sync with the majority of Wisconsinites and went for GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney. This is largely because the GOP reworked congressional maps to their party’s benefit during the redistricting process that followed the 2010 census and elections. Now, Republicans in Wisconsin are discussing plans to allocate the state’s electoral college votes according to these new Congressional districts, giving the GOP a chance for victory in a state that has elected Democrats in each of the past seven Presidential elections.
Gov. Scott Walker recently expressed support for awarding presidential elector votes by Congressional district rather than statewide totals, incoming Assembly Speaker Robin Vos has sponsored legislation to make such a change in past sessions, and Republican legislators introduced a bill to do this in 2011. As Mother Jones reported, Pennsylvania Republicans considered similar legislation last year, and are again considering such a plan to rig the electoral college. Republican legislators in Michigan also plan to introduce legislation.
All three states voted […]
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Sunday, January 6th, 2013
TRACY CLARK-FLORY, Staff Writer - Salon
Stephan: A very interesting take on the war on women that is going on not just in the U.S., but around the world. Well worth a read. As I have said many times: In the 21st century two of the major definers of a society's health will be gender equality and the assimilation of minorities.
Women’s bodies have become a global battlefield. The brutal New Delhi gang rape case, and the fierce protests it sparked, is just one example. From education of Afghan schoolgirls to veiling in France, female sexuality and freedom has come to symbolize a global conflict ‘over the nature of the self,
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Saturday, January 5th, 2013
KWEI QUARTEY, - Asia Times (Hong Kong)
Stephan: The Chinese are interested in raw materials, and not in creating culture in other countries. This is what the emerging multipolar world is going to look like. It is a world where the old solutions and triumphalist attitudes will not serve us.
Ghana held its general elections on December 7 and 8, 2012, re-electing incumbent President John Dramani Mahama. However, Nana Akufo-Addo, flag-bearer of the opposition New Patriotic Party, is challenging Mahama’s narrow win and intends to contest the result in court, a legal process that is sure to be prolonged. The verdict could potentially challenge Ghana’s generally stable and peaceful political environment. What will not change are the country’s close economic ties to China.
On my trip to Ghana in 2011, I observed Chinese foremen at the construction sites of the now completed George W Bush Highway. The massive Ministry of Defense building in Ghana’s capital, Accra, was constructed with a US$50 million Chinese grant. The Bui Hydroelectric Dam is a collaborative project of the government of Ghana and SinoHydro, a Chinese construction company. In 2012, China invested in a new Ghanaian airline that serves domestic routes, and it is likely that the China Airports Construction Corporation (CACC) will be involved in building Accra’s new international airport.
Ghana is not the only African country in which China operates. Indeed, China is the largest financier on the entire continent. Chinese corporations, financial institutions, and the government have invested billions of dollars in large new […]
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