04.20.10
Items starred in my RSS last week
This hits close to home, You Have the Right to an (Adequate) Attorney.
Recently, 62 former prosecutors — including Robert Morgenthau, who was Manhattan’s District Attorney for more than 30 years — joined a brief authored by the Brennan Center for Justice, calling on New York’s highest court to allow a lawsuit to go forward that demands that the state fix how it provides defense services for those who can’t afford to provide for their own defense. In the underlying case, the plaintiffs describe deeply troubling deficiencies in how five New York counties, including Suffolk, defend the poor. The suit — Hurrell-Harring v. State, which was brought by the New York Civil Liberties Union — claims that people often lack counsel at bail hearings and other significant proceedings.
Are Americans Stupid, Brainwashed or Just Ignorant of Facts Regarding Federal Taxes?
Republicans Resurrect “Welfare” Charge for Tax Day
(Click here for full size image)
If you want to know what life in the Third World is like, just ask Lisa Pack, an administrative assistant who works in the roads and transportation department in Jefferson County, Alabama. Pack got rudely introduced to life in post-crisis America last August, when word came down that she and 1,000 of her fellow public employees would have to take a little unpaid vacation for a while. The county, it turned out, was more than $5 billion in debt — meaning that courthouses, jails and sheriff’s precincts had to be closed so that Wall Street banks could be paid.
As public services in and around Birmingham were stripped to the bone, Pack struggled to support her family on a weekly unemployment check of $260. Nearly a fourth of that went to pay for her health insurance, which the county no longer covered. She also fielded calls from laid-off co-workers who had it even tougher. “I’d be on the phone sometimes until two in the morning,” she says. “I had to talk more than one person out of suicide. For some of the men supporting families, it was so hard — foreclosure, bankruptcy. I’d go to bed at night, and I’d be in tears.” Read on…
(Click below there’s much more in the extended entry)
Should the White House want a controversial Supreme Court nominee?
The fact is that for a generation we have built our economy on a lie — that we can have a low-wage, high-consumption society and paper over the contradiction with cheap credit funded by our foreign trading partners and financial sector profits made by taking a cut of the flow of cheap credit.
Robert Rubin: Amoral, Blundering … And Still Influential in Washington
To call Robert Rubin an overpaid riverboat gambler would be to do a disservice to riverboat gamblers. To be sure, Rubin’s salesmanship, arrogance, and cold lack of remorse fit the mold. But no card sharp ruined as many lives as the former Treasury Secretary and Citigroup executive has done, and nobody of that despised class ever had as much political influence - even now.
There’s no substitute for seeing Rubin questioned in person, as I did at last week’s Angelides Commission hearings. Rubin’s hauteur and utter lack of remorse were breathtaking. He began by saying “I hope my experience … can be helpful to this inquiry.” But his appearance wasn’t a chance for Commissioners to bask in his wisdom: It was a perp walk. And his “nobody saw it coming” defense made the blood run cold. He all but said “gosh, fellas, sorry I’m not psychic.”
Free event worth checking out, ‘Texas financial transparency’ topic of April 23 forum in Austin.
Federal Income Taxes on Middle-Income Families at Historically Low Levels
What Perry and Abbott are fighting so hard against, Texas Children: The Real Winners of Health Care Reform.
For Texas’ 1.4 million uninsured children—21 percent of Texas children, the highest child uninsured rate in the nation—health care reform delivers what families need: affordable, reliable health care coverage that won’t disappear if they lose a job or get sick.
Democrats Batter Mitch McConnell For Standing With Wall Street
Common ground on abortion: pivoting to the states
The Truth About the Tea Party (the Original One)
I hope Tax Notes won’t mind too much if I reprint a great piece by tax historian Joseph Thorndike here. Since the original Boston tea party is the subject of so much mythology, which animates many latter day tea partiers to this day, it’s important to set the record straight. As Thorndike correctly explains, the Boston tea party was not a revolt against high taxes, but, ironically, a protest against a tax cut.
Deficit Reductions Are Indeed Going To Be Painful
The Republican Strategy on Financial Reform: Make Democrats Look Like Patsies for the Street
Senator McConnell Is Wrong, Senator Kaufman Is Right. Any Questions?
Americans increasingly cutting cable TV service
Public suspicion of Big Ag growing
Rachel Maddow Interviews Elizabeth Warren: Main Street or Wall Street (Video)
Health Care Reform: It’s Our Turn, Texas!
The Catholics — and church - we know and love
Larry Gonzales, Bought to You by Bob Perry
Reflections on the Tea Party Movement: Voices of the Angry Privileged
Andrew Sullivan’s Take on the Tea Party