[Peace-discuss] News from Neptune for November 9, 2018

[C G Estabrook]

[J. B. Nicholson]
Notes on News from Neptune #402
Another "Don't mention the war" edition
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9MEFlfVG2M

A list of links to items mentioned on the show.

Adolph Reed & Lynn Parramore on "Erasing Economics and Economic Policy from Politics: The Race and Xenophobia Sideshow"
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/…/erasing-economics-economi…

Floridian felons can vote now
https://www.vox.com/…/florida-amendment-4-felon-voting-righ…
https://www.economist.com/…/why-the-restoration-of-felons-v…
https://edition.cnn.com/…/pol…/florida-felons-voting-rights/
Related: "More felons regained right to vote in Florida than population of many states"
Scott Galloway's tweet:
The number of people who just got their voting rights restored in Florida is greater than the populations of Wyoming, Vermont, Alaska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Delaware, Rhode Island, Montana, Maine and New Hampshire.
https://www.politifact.com/…/more-felons-regained-right-vo…/
Ron Kim and Zephyr Teachout on "New York Should Say No to Amazon"
https://www.nytimes.com/…/opi…/amazon-new-york-business.html

Brent Taylor's death in Afghanistan
https://www.nytimes.com/…/utah-mayor-killed-afghanistan-bre…
https://edition.cnn.com/…/polit…/brent-taylor-facebook-trnd/

Tucker Carlson
RT points out the Antifa support -- https://www.rt.com/usa/443499-vox-cofounder-defends-antifa/
https://www.vox.com/…/tucker-carlson-demographics-immigrati…
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/…/protesters_mob_outside_…

Louis Proyect on "Why Democrats Are So Okay With Losing"
https://www.counterpunch.org/…/why-democrats-are-so-okay-w…/

Boilerplate nice-sounding text about Tom Steyer and the "Giving Pledge"
http://thenextgeneration.org/about/people/tom-steyer

Related: Regarding one way in which millionaires keep their money ("what you can do if you're rich" as David put it) reminds me of a recent segment on RT's "Redacted Tonight" based in part on an article from TruthOut.orgcovering money-laundering "charities" in which wealthy people get tax deduction for having given to charities they didn't actually give money to. How does this work?
https://truthout.org/…/how-the-rich-exploit-charitable-giv…/ and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXRKFTbvVpM tells the tale.

The wealthier a donor is, the more likely they are to claim a tax deduction for their giving. When 
they do, the public has a legitimate interest in where their gifts are going.

DAFs [donor-advised funds] are financial intermediaries that take in charitable gifts from donors and then grant the money to active charities designated by the donor. Donors claim their tax deduction up front when they donate to the DAF before deciding which public charities
the money should go to.

Originally a creation of community foundations, DAFs have been adopted with a vengeance by for-profit Wall Street firms like Fidelity Investments, Charles Schwab and Vanguard. And the lax rules around these giving vehicles are leaving DAFs ripe for abuse in this aggressive new market.

For every dollar a millionaire or billionaire gives to a donor-advised fund, the US taxpayer provides between 37 and 57 cents of the gift in the form of lost tax revenue, according to Boston College law professor and charitable-giving expert Ray Madoff […]

The folks giving to DAFs aren’t middle-income families. The average donor to a DAF makes more than $2 million annually, according to James Andreoni, a professor of economics at the University of California at San Diego. That puts them in the top one-tenth of 1 percent of
households.

Unlike private foundations, which must distribute 5 percent of their principal assets annually, DAFs can continue to re-invest their funds indefinitely, without ever distributing them to charity. So, by creating their own DAFs, Wall Street investment firms like Fidelity and Charles Schwab are enabling ultra-wealthy clients to collect a charitable tax break without necessarily supporting a charity.

Thomas Piketty's "Capital in the Twenty-first Century"
Book: https://dowbor.org/…/w…/uploads/2014/06/14Thomas-Piketty.pdf
Tax wealth, not income.

Trump calls CNN’s Jim Acosta a "rude, terrible person"
https://on.rt.com/9i3z

Paul Jay with Daniel Ellsberg
Links to part in the series of 8 interviews: https://therealnews.com/…/reality-asserts-itself-daniel-ell…
You will need to reload that URL to get the links to the newest parts as they are released.

Thomas Pynchon's Proverbs for Paranoids
From https://gravitys-rainbow.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php…
1. You may never get to touch the Master, but you can tickle his creatures.
2. The innocence of the creature is in inverse proportion to the immorality of the Master.
3. If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.
4.You hide, They seek.
5. Paranoids are not paranoids because they're paranoid, but because they keep putting themselves, fucking idiots, deliberately into paranoid situations.

-J

###