Stephan: The Dominion story has been out of the U.S. news recently because it has been dominated by Republican scandals, grifts, and corruption. But that does not mean what is going on has stopped happening. Because we no longer have a functioning two-party legislative system, actual policy is increasingly being made through executive action and at the judicial level. The Dominion case is, I think, an example of this in process, as this report lays out.
A Dominion voting machine in Georgia. Last month Dominion filed a $1.6bn defamation suit against Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News, accusing it of trying to boost ratings by amplifying the bogus claims. Credit: John Bazemore/AP
Dominion has filed defamation lawsuits against several Trump allies for pushing election ‘radioactive falsehoods’ – could it triumph?
When Donald Trump and his allies pushed the “big lie” of voter fraud and a stolen election, it seemed nothing could stop them spreading disinformation with impunity.
Politicians and activists’ pleas fell on deaf ears. TV networks and newspapers fact-checked in vain. Social media giants proved impotent.
But now a little-known tech company, founded 18 years ago in Canada, has the conspiracy theorists running scared. The key: suing them for defamation, potentially for billions of dollars.
“Libel laws may prove to be a very old mechanism to deal with a very new phenomenon of massive disinformation,” said Bob Shrum, a Democratic strategist. “We have all these fact checkers but lots of people don’t care. Nothing else seems to work, so maybe this will.”
The David in this David and Goliath story is Dominion Voting Systems, […]
Stephan: If you have been reading SR for a while you know that for over a decade I have been talking about a major transformative trend that I see going on in the United States, a trend almost unique to America, because unlike Europe or Asia we are and always have been a nation primarily of immigrants and the descendants of immigrants. I am speaking about the fact that within the next 20 to 25 years the United States is going to become a majority-minority nation. No one racial group will be a dominant majority.
For many Americans, even most Americans, I hope, that isn't a big issue. Your physician may wel be Asian, your mayor a Black person. Look at the number of mixed-race couples you see on television series and in television advertising. But for a small but substantial group of White people, particularly White men, this is a huge issue that they see as growing larger with more threatening with each passing day. These are the Whites who find the change in the culture threatening, and who are resentful and fearful about what they see as a loss of status and privilege. White nationalism dominates what was once Christianity in this country. It is the power source of the Republican Party, and it was fully on display on the 6th of January.
Here is a very good report on this trend, which is going to be a growing source of violence unless we acknowledge it, and starting in schools defuse it.
When the political scientist Robert Pape began studying the issues that motivated the 380 or so people arrested in connection with the attack against the Capitol on Jan. 6, he expected to find that the rioters were driven to violence by the lingering effects of the 2008 Great Recession.
Hundreds of people in a pro-Trump mob breached the Capitol on Jan. 6. The political scientist Robert Pape set out to find what motivated them. Credit: Jason Andrew/The New York Times
But instead he found something very different: Most of the people who took part in the assault came from places, his polling and demographic data showed, that were awash in fears that the rights of minorities and immigrants were crowding out the rights of white people in American politics and culture.
If Mr. Pape’s initial conclusions — published on Tuesday in The Washington Post — hold true, they would suggest that the Capitol attack has historical echoes reaching back to before the Civil War, he said in an interview over the weekend. In the shorter term, he added, the study would […]
Stephan: The two economists with the best track record for analysis and solution recommendations, in my opinion, are Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz. I am not surprised they are both Nobel Laureates in economics.
Both men told us in the event that the trillion-dollar tax cut the Republicans were passing was was crap and would not do what Trump and the Congressional Republicans said it would. Now in 2021 Krugman has taken a look at the results. And what does he see? Here are some of the highlights. Stiglitz and Krugman were right, of course. The tax cut did nothing but make the rich richer.
Nobel Laureate Economist Paul Krugman
President Joe Biden has proposed a corporate tax hike as a way to pay for his ambitious infrastructure plan, and some Republicans are objecting vehemently — insisting that the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 was a raging success. But liberal economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman disagrees, slamming the Trump-era GOP tax cuts as a “dismal failure” in a Twitter thread posted on April 5.
Passed when Donald Trump was president and Republicans controlled both branches of Congress, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act lowered the United States’ corporate tax rate from 35% to 21% — and Biden has proposed increasing it to 28%. Many Democrats have emphasized that the Republican tax cuts of late 2017 did precious little for the American middle class and greatly increased the federal deficit.
Krugman, in his Twitter thread, writes, “I’ve been a bit surprised to see some Republicans opposing Biden’s plans by claiming that the Trump tax cut for corporations was a big success. I thought they’d gone into hiding given […]
Stephan: America has the worst wealth inequality of the 37 nations that make up the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, basically the most developed nations in the world. There are several reasons for this, but the manipulation of the tax laws to favor the rich and corporations is a major factor. The results are absurd, as this report bears witness.
A person holds a sign urging lawmakers to “Tax the Rich” at a protest in New York City on March 29, 2021. Credit: Erik McGregor/LightRocket/Getty
For millions of ordinary people in the U.S., 2020 was a painful year in which loved ones and jobs were lost as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic and its devastating economic repercussions. But for many of the country’s major corporations, last year was a lucrative one—particularly if they were among the 55 companies that paid $0 in federal income taxes on a combined $40.5 billion in profits, as a new study shows.
“We should be asking bigger questions about a tax system so flawed that it asks next to nothing of profitable corporations that derive great benefit from our economy.” —Matthew Gardner, ITEP
Released Friday, the report is based on the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy’s (ITEP) analysis of 2020 financial reports filed by the country’s largest publicly traded corporations.
Instead of paying a collective $8.5 billion in federal income taxes on last year’s profits of $40.5 billion, as mandated by the statutory 21% rate, the […]
Stephan: Let me say upfront, I am a Planckian. I think the experimental evidence is overwhelming that consciousness is causal and fundamental, and that there is a continuity of consciousness. The nonlocal aspect of your consciousness, what religions the world over call the soul existed before you incarnated, and will continue after your corporeal death.
Reincarnation is a part of this continuity, and this article presents the research, which gets very little attention, pretty well. In the interest of full disclosure, I have known all the researchers mentioned, as well as the critics, for decades. The piece fairly represents their positions, the author is trying to be objective and cites both the deniers and the proponents. The problem with this piece is that in trying to be fair the author does not explicitly state that the denier side of the argument is a false equivalency.
Credit: VICE
The nightmares began when Ryan Hammons was 4 years old. He would wake up clutching his chest, telling his mother Cyndi that he couldn’t breathe and that his heart had exploded in Hollywood. But they didn’t live in Los Angeles; Hammons’s family resided in Oklahoma.
A few months prior, in early 2009, Ryan had started talking about going home to Hollywood and pleaded with Cyndi to take him to see his other family. He would yell, “Action!” and pretend to direct films when he played with friends; he knew scenes from a cowboy movie he had never watched; and said a cafe reminded him of Paris, where he had never been. He talked about his child, worldly travels, and his job at an agency where people changed their names. Cyndi didn’t think much of it until the nightmares set in and Ryan started describing death.
Hoping to figure out what he was talking about, Cyndi went to the public library and checked out a few books about Hollywood. She was flipping through one of them when Ryan got […]
