Dispatches

FOX CAN CLAIM TAX WRITEOFF FOR DOMINION SETTLEMENT. Fox News will be able to deduct at least part of the $787.5 million payout to settle defamation claims by Dominion Voting Systems as the cost of doing business. Lever News estimated that Fox could reap as much as $213 million in tax savings.

Fox Corporation reported $1.2 billion in net income in 2022, so the $787 million Dominion settlement is equivalent to about two-thirds of the company’s profits last year.

The IRS has repeatedly affirmed that for major corporations, paying out settlements is just part of the cost of doing business, Lever reported (4/19).

(There are some exceptions, including for cases involving accusations of sexual harassment or abuse with nondisclosure agreements; Fox News has paid out settlements involving those in the past.)

“If your business model is to tell lies so that you’ll get viewers and have lots of advertising revenues, then, odious though this business model may be, the tax system’s job is to tax you on the profits that you actually make from it,” Daniel Shaviro, a professor of tax law at NYU, told Lever. “And those profits are indeed reduced when you are successfully sued by the victims of your malicious falsehoods.”

Brian Nick, Fox Corporation’s chief communications officer, told Lever that “I can confirm tax deductibility but not the amount.”

REPUBLICANS MOVE TO BLOCK BALLOT INITIATIVES ON ABORTiON RIGHTS. Last year, after the US Supreme Court ended the federal right to abortion, voters in Kansas, California, Michigan, Vermont, Kentucky, and Montana used the ballot initiative process to show their support for reproductive freedom, both by defeating GOP-backed anti-abortion measures and approving constitutional amendments aimed at preserving abortion access.

Those losses for anti-abortion Republicans and their wealthy backers have led the party to ramp up its attacks on the ballot initiative process itself in several states, Jake Johnson noted at CommonDreams (4/24).

As the New York Times reported (4/23), “The biggest and most immediate fight is in Ohio, where a coalition of abortion rights groups is collecting signatures to place a constitutional amendment on the ballot in November that would prohibit the state from banning abortion before a fetus becomes viable outside the womb, at about 24 weeks of pregnancy.”

“Organizers were confident that the measure would reach the simple majority needed for passage, given polls showing that most Ohioans—like most Americans—support legalized abortion and disapprove of overturning Roe,” the newspaper continued. “But Republicans in the state legislature are advancing a ballot amendment of their own that would raise the percentage of votes required to pass future such measures to a 60% supermajority. The measure has passed the Ohio Senate and is expected to pass the House this week.”

The Republican initiative—which is backed by right-wing special interest groups such as the Buckeye Firearm Association, Ohio Right to Life, the Center for Christian Virtue, and the American Center for Law & Justice—would require just a simple-majority vote to pass, and it is expected to appear on the ballot in August.

The special election will mark a dizzying reversal for Ohio Republicans, who moved to effectively eliminate August elections last year due to their high costs and extremely low turnout.

The GOP attack on direct democracy in Ohio, where abortion is heavily restricted, resembles efforts underway across the country. In January alone, Missouri Republicans introduced a dozen bills aimed at undercutting the ballot initiative process and weakening citizen lawmaking.

Democracy Docket noted that two of the Republican-authored resolutions in Missouri would, like the proposed amendment in Ohio, “raise the threshold to approve constitutional amendments to 60%.”

According to the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center (BISC), at least 139 bills that would impact the ballot initiative process have been introduced in state legislatures this year.

While efforts to limit the ballot initiative process succeeded in some states last year, they failed elsewhere. As Common Dreams reported, South Dakota voters overwhelmingly rejected a proposed constitutional amendment that would have raised the threshold for passage of most ballot measures from a simple majority to 60%.

In Michigan, Republican lawmakers attempted to have an abortion rights ballot initiative tossed even though organizers collected a record-shattering number of signatures from state residents. The GOP sabotage effort was blocked in court, and Michigan voters ultimately approved the proposition in November by a decisive margin.

But Republicans elsewhere are plowing ahead. The Times reported (4/23) that “the North Dakota legislature this month approved a bill boosting the signature requirement for proposed constitutional amendments and requiring them to win approval in both primary and general elections.”

“And in Arkansas, after voters last fall soundly rejected a constitutional amendment proposed by the legislature stiffening the requirements to get a measure on the ballot, the legislature simply passed new requirements as state law. Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed the law last month.”

The Arkansas law more than tripled the number of counties where signatures must be collected for a citizen initiative to qualify for the ballot.

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, tweeted (4/23) that Republicans are attacking the ballot initiative process because “they know that the American people will vote to ensure access to reproductive care.”

SUPREME COURT ALLOWS STATES AND CITIES TO SUE OIL COMPANIES IN STATE COURTS FOR CLIMATE DAMAGES. Environmental advocates celebrated after the US Supreme Court rejected five appeals from major fossil fuel companies hoping to shift climate liability cases from state to federal court, where polluters are more likely to prevail, Jessica Corbett noted at Common Dreams (4/24).

“Big Oil companies have been desperate to avoid trials in state courts, where they will be forced to defend their climate lies in front of juries, and today the Supreme Court declined to bail them out,” said Center for Climate Integrity president Richard Wiles.

“The high court’s decision is a major victory for communities across the country that are fighting to hold Big Oil accountable and make them pay for the climate damages they knowingly caused,” he continued. “Now it’s time for these polluters to face the evidence of their deception in court.”

The new denials come after the nation’s highest court handed fossil fuel giants a narrow win two years ago. They involve lawsuits brought against several companies—including BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell, Suncor, and Sunoco—in recent years by the state of Rhode Island as well as municipalities across California, Colorado, Hawaii, and Maryland.

“This was the right decision, and it is time to prepare for trial,” declared Sara Gross, chief of the Baltimore City Department of Law’s Affirmative Litigation Division in Maryland.

“Since we filed this case nearly five years ago,” she noted, “the climate crisis has worsened, the costs to Baltimore taxpayers are skyrocketing, and the defendants have pocketed trillions of dollars in profits while trying to dodge accountability for their deception.”

Boulder County Commissioner Ashley Stolzmann said that her community is “thrilled,” adding that “our lawsuit against Exxon and Suncor should be determined in Colorado state court—where the actions of these companies are negatively impacting our residents.”

“Communities like ours are exposed to destructive climate change impacts caused by the actions of fossil fuel companies while they reap record profits,” she stressed. “These companies need to pay their fair share to deal with the climate chaos they’ve created and take responsibility for the climate impacts. Local governments cannot shoulder the price tag of climate change alone.”

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR. SAYS HE’LL CHALLENGE BIDEN’S RE-ELECTION. Robert Francis Kennedy Jr. announced he would challenge President Joe Biden in the Democratic primary next year, after former Trump strategist Steve Bannon spent months recruiting Kennedy to run against Biden as a “useful chaos agent” who could help stoke anti-vax sentiment around the country, Robert Costa reported for CBS News (4/5), as Kennedy filed a statement of candidacy with the Federal Election Commission. He formally announced his candidacy 4/19 in Boston.

Kennedy’s campaign to challenge incumbent President Joe Biden for the Democratic nomination is a long shot. Self-help author Marianne Williamson is also running in the Democratic race.

The nephew of President John F. Kennedy and son of JFK’s slain brother Robert F. Kennedy, was once a bestselling author and environmental lawyer who worked on issues such as clean water.

But more than 15 years ago, he became fixated on a belief that vaccines are not safe. He emerged as one of the leading voices in the anti-vaccine movement, and his work has been described by public health experts and even members of his own family as misleading and dangerous, the Associated Press noted.

Kennedy’s push against the COVID-19 vaccine has linked him at times with far-right figures and groups. Kennedy has appeared at events pushing the lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen and with people who cheered or downplayed the insurrection at the US Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

A photo posted on Instagram showed Kennedy backstage at a July 2021 Reawaken America event with Trump ally Roger Stone, former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and anti-vaccine profiteer Charlene Bollinger. All three have promoted the lie about the 2020 election being stolen.

He has also taken his vaccine conspiracy theories to Fox News, telling Tucker Carlson “we have to love our freedom more than we fear a germ.”

His sister, Kerry Kennedy, who runs Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, the international rights group founded by their mother, Ethel, told the Associated Press in 2021 that her brother is “completely wrong on this issue [vaccines] and very dangerous.”

MONTANA R’S TRIED TO SILENCE TRANS REP. THEY FAILED. Republicans learned nothing from the unwanted attention Tennessee House Republicans brought upon the state when they voted to expel two Black representatives who were too boisterous in their support for gun reforms after a Nashville school massacre.

On April 20, Montana state Rep. Zooey Zephyr, D-Missoula, was censured by Republican lawmakers for speaking up against a bill that seeks to ban gender-affirming care to transgender children. Those Republicans demanded Zephyr be silenced after she told them if they voted to deny the rights of transgender children, she hoped “the next time there’s an invocation, when you bow your heads in prayer, you see the blood on your hands,” Walter Einenkel noted at Daily Kos (4/24).

This was followed by a lot of hand-wringing from Montana lawmakers and whining about Zephyr’s comments being inappropriate and disrespectful, as well as demands for an apology. The same GOP lawmakers proceeded to purposefully misgender Zephyr and the Republican House he would not recognize Zephyr to speak until she apologized. The Democratic minority stood both figuratively and literally with Zephyr, arguing that any disrespect Republicans perceived in Zephyr’s comments paled in comparison to the conservative disrespect aimed at the transgender community and the Montanans represented by the censured legislator.

Zephyr remained unrecognized by Republicans on Monday (4/24) when a very large crowd of protesters descended on Montana’s State Capitol building in Helena. With the crowd chanting, “Let her speak,” Zephyr stepped up to a makeshift podium. She told the crowd that after she heard the disparaging and dehumanizing language used by to debate the bill banning transgender care, she “did what I’ve always done, which is stand up and speak. Pick my words with precision. Speak with clarity. And call out the harm that these bills do.”

Zephyr has remained steadfast through all of this, telling KPAX-TV that Republican lawmakers cannot stop her from doing what she was elected to do. “I will continue to punch in on every bill that I feel like I need to speak on, on behalf of my constituents; and if the Speaker is willing to recognize me, I will speak on their behalf,” Zephyr said.

REPUBLICANS TARGET MEDICAID AFTER FAILING TO KILL OBAMACARE. Barely Speaker Kevin McCarthy got around to pitching his debt ceiling demands for budget cuts, Joan McCarter noted at Daily Kos (4/21). It was days late and $130 billion short. That’s how much he wants to cut government spending – an amount economists have warned would drive the country into a recession that could cause the loss of 2.6 million jobs.

McCarthy has a bogus answer for that, saying he wants to “lift Americans out of poverty” by making them jump through often insurmountable bureaucratic hoops to participate in things like food assistance and, especially, Medicaid with work requirements. McCarthy actually claims that this will “rebuild the workforce,” and even more obnoxiously “protect and preserve Medicare and Social Security. because more people will be paying into it.”

In reality, that’s nonsense.

Start off with the fact that among the tens of millions of people on Medicaid, 93% of the working-age people enrolled are employed, or they are caregivers, students, or unable to work due to illness. Just 7% of the non-working, non-elderly Medicaid population is unemployed. That includes people who can’t find work, or who have retired early because of care-giving duties, disability, or some other life reason.

Within that 7%, there are undoubtedly some people who just don’t want to work. But under this plan, the mechanisms states would be forced to set up to find these people and try to force them into jobs would cost far, far more than any potential savings. And there sure as hell aren’t enough of them to save Social Security and Medicare with their would-be payroll contributions.

The bill does not contain any assistance to states to set up the complicated systems necessary to track the tens of millions Americans who are on Medicaid. This bill would force all 50 states to implement massive amounts of new red tape without giving them any funding to do. They would have to either kick people out of the program who fail to jump all of the bureaucratic hurdles, or pick up the entire cost of their health care.

The end result, which Republicans are absolutely counting on, would be millions of people becoming uninsured. They have proof of concept for that in a Trump-era experiment in Arkansas. That state was allowed, briefly, to impose work requirements on the people who gained insurance through the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion provision.

Georgetown University Medicaid experts Joan Alker and Edwin Park explain what happened next: “In just a few short months, 18,000 Arkansans lost coverage which equated to 23% of the group affected.” They point out McCarthy’s bill “goes farther than the Arkansas policy in numerous ways including applying the work reporting requirement to the entire Medicaid population, not just the expansion group, and not exempting the medically frail and people with disabilities on SSI.”

Federal courts shut down the Arkansas experiment and the Biden administration revoked the federal waiver required for other states to implement it, but tremendous damage had already been done to Arkansans. A follow-up study by the New England Journal of Medicine found that “95% of persons who were targeted by the policy already met the requirement or should have been exempt.”

The real kicker? Every single study conducted found that it didn’t increase employment numbers at all. In fact, NEJM found that employment declined during the experiment “from 42.4% to 38.9% among Arkansans 30 to 49 years of age, a change of −3.5 percentage points.” Employment dropped in all the other age groups they looked at as well, from −2.9 to −5.7 percentage points.

It’s not about jobs. It’s not about the economy. It’s not about saving Social Security and Medicare. It’s about destroying Medicaid.

BIDEN AND VOTERS AGREE: RAISE THE DEBT CEILING. When President Joe Biden addressed the debt ceiling negotiations April 19 at a union event in Maryland, he uncharacteristically took Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy to task, calling House GOP demands “wacko” and “really dangerous.”

“We’ve never ever defaulted on a debt. It would destroy the economy,” Biden said at the International Union of Operating Engineers Local 77 in Accokeek. “America is not a deadbeat nation,” he added.

The White House and Democrats are on the right side of public opinion, Kerry Eleveld noted at Daily Kos (4/21). Navigator Research polling found that 64% of voters believe it would be worse to default on the nation’s debt than to raise the debt ceiling, while 36% say that raising the ceiling is worse than defaulting.

Biden was responding to the House GOP’s debt ceiling “plan,” which ties raising the ceiling (i.e., averting a global meltdown) to major budget cuts. For months, Biden has urged House Republicans to pass a “clean” debt ceiling increase while refusing to link the two matters.

Voters support raising the debt ceiling by a 10-point margin, 48%-38%, with 14% saying they weren’t sure. Those findings are in keeping with a PBS/NPR/Marist poll in February that found a 52% majority of voters supported raising the debt ceiling.

The notion that roughly half the nation supports a debt ceiling increase while fewer oppose it may seem less than reassuring, but that’s more than twice as much support for raising the limit than in 2011, when the same PBS/NPR/Marist poll found that just 24% of voters favored a ceiling hike.

Another way of looking at it is that, having been to this rodeo before, more voters drew similar conclusions to Biden: Quit messing around and just raise the damn ceiling already. In other words, Biden’s message on the topic should be one that resonates with most voters.

But recent polling on the matter reveals one other lesson: People need to understand that failure to raise the debt ceiling will result in default. While people steeped in the brinkmanship inherently understand that failing to raise the ceiling will trigger a default, many voters apparently don’t and are also hesitant to greenlight more government spending.

When CBS News asked respondents simply whether Congress should raise the debt ceiling, a narrow majority said no, with 46% favoring it while 54% opposed it.

However, when respondents were asked if Congress should raise the debt ceiling to avoid defaulting on its current debt, fully 70% support increasing the ceiling.

From The Progressive Populist, May 15, 2023

Populist.com