In the USA, the bottom 99% last year paid about 7.5% of their total wealth in taxes.

The top 0.001% paid about 3.2%.

‘How About a Counter-Argument Based on Fact?’: Warren Destroys CNBC Host Over Two-Cent Wealth Tax Criticism | Common Dreams News

 In the USA, the bottom 99% last year paid about 7.5% of their total wealth in taxes.

The top 0.001% paid about 3.2%.

‘How About a Counter-Argument Based on Fact?’: Warren Destroys CNBC Host Over Two-Cent Wealth Tax Criticism | Common Dreams News

 The European Union is “not fit for purpose” in the task of reducing poverty in Europe and Brexit risks exacerbating the problem, Prof Olivier De Schutter, the UN’s special envoy on human rights has said after a two-month investigation. One in five people – more than 92.4 million or 21.1% of the EU population – still experiences poverty, defined as having an income below 60% of national median income. A total of 19.4 million children, representing 23.1%, live in poverty across the bloc.

He said the EU’s “constitutional framework” was driving a race to the bottom in corporation and income tax and salary levels.

A lack of harmonisation on those issues, coupled with the 1997 stability and growth pact that imposes ceilings of 3% a year in national budget deficits and 60% of GDP on public debt, were major constraints on progress, he said. The internal competition to cut taxes and wages as member states sought to attract investment risked being further fuelled by Brexit, said De Schutter, as the UK sought to find a competitive advantage over the 27 member states of the EU.

The EU does not currently have a target for reducing poverty within its 27 member states. The previous target of taking 20 million people out of poverty by 2020 was missed by 8.7m people.

EU ‘not fit for purpose’ to reduce poverty in Europe, says UN envoy | European Union | The Guardian

 Toll

There’s not one hundred thousand Covid deaths,

But one personal death a hundred thousand times,

With tears the unit of grief. As frost rimes

The season still, so the count of last breaths

Continues unstaunched, with lockdowns unlocked

Only to be locked again and borders

Closed, as if virus observes such orders,

While politicians appear publicly shocked.

Inter-governmental squabbles have started,

Contending for vaccines. Should supplies stall,

A failure for one is a failure for all:

Common weal and common health can’t be parted.

If the free market’s promoted to decide,

What then the cost, how many will have died?

D. A.

 The UK has once again lost an international court case regards its claim of sovereignty over the Chagos Islands.

 Italy failed to protect the “right to life” of more than 200 migrants and refugees who died when the boat they were on capsized in the Mediterranean Sea.

The Human Rights Committee said on Wednesday that Italy “failed to respond promptly to various distress calls from the sinking boat, which was carrying more than 400 adults and children”. It also called on Italian authorities to “proceed with an independent and timely investigation and to prosecute those responsible” for the deaths.

Had the Italian authorities immediately directed its naval ship and coastguard boats after the distress calls, the rescue would have reached the vessel at the latest two hours before it sank.

Italy could have saved 200 drowning migrants: UN committee | Human Rights News | Al Jazeera

Biden’s executive orders are receiving much attention from the president-friendly media. But what are the real effect of them?

One such presidential order is to phase out the Department of Justice’s contracts with privately managed prisons.

Biden’s private prison executive order fails to scale back incarceration. The federal Bureau of Prisons — which makes up slightly more than 8 percent of the current U.S. penal population — but just 9 percent of the people incarcerated under the Bureau of Prisons are held in a private prison.

Biden has excluded the Department of Homeland Security, and therefore privately run immigration detention centers, from his order. In contrast to the small percentage of private prisons within the Bureau of Prisons, the majority of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facilities are currently under private contracts. Yet there is no indication that the Biden administration will extend the executive order to the Department of Homeland Security. There is so far no indication that the Biden administration will extend the executive order to the Department of Homeland Security, as the order is careful to only refer to “criminal” detention facilities in contrast to ICE’s “civil” detention facilities.

Rather than taking a step toward dismantling mass incarceration, Biden’s private prison executive order shores up the legitimacy of the state to imprison people. He could issue a moratorium on U.S. Marshals Service and ICE contracts with local jails and on the United States Department of Agriculture loan program, which finances jail expansion in the name of “community development,” and which together have been driving rural jail expansions. He could halt federal executions and commute the sentence of every person on federal death row. 

Biden could institute broad-based de-carceration by ending pre-trial federal detention and giving clemency to most people incarcerated in federal prisons. He could end federal policing initiatives that target sex workers. And he could champion the repeal of the 1994 Crime Bill, the law that helped build Biden’s political career.

The problem of private prisons is not that they are private but that they are prisons. This executive order is simply an act of moving chairs around the deck of the Titanic. When a private prison contract runs out, imprisoned people will be transferred to a different federal prison where they will still be subject to inadequate medical care, violence and premature death. 

 Leon Black is a very successful financier, co-founder of Apollo Global Management, a group that ranks among the most powerful on Wall Street. The billionaire attributes a sizeable part of his wealth to Jeffrey Epstein, estimating that as much as $2bn in benefits can be traced back to Epstein’s financial acumen. Epstein committed suicide in jail while awaiting trial on sex charges committed against underage girls.

Leon Black paid $158m to Epstein over a five-year period ending in 2017 during which the disgraced businessman served as Mr Black’s high-priced adviser on issues ranging from audits by the tax authorities, management of his yacht and private plane and a dispute over the ownership of a sculpture by Pablo Picasso.  They socialised or held meetings at Epstein’s Caribbean island and his other properties in New York, Paris, Florida and New Mexico.

Epstein was convicted in 2008 of soliciting sex from a minor that resulted in a lenient 13-month prison sentence. Rather than ending the business relationship after the conviction, Leon Black employed Epstein as an adviser in 2012. Black described himself as someone who “believes in . . . giving people second chances”. Black thought of Epstein as a ‘confirmed bachelor with eclectic tastes’. 

Epstein’s “most valuable” assignment was to design a trust structure that had been designed to allow Mr Black to transfer some assets to his heirs without paying estate or gift tax. One sleight of hand involved a series of loans between Black and some trusts. Epstein said that alone saved Black $600 million. On went the scams  from 2012 to 2017 

A report by law firm Dechert, which was hired by Apollo to probe Black’s ties to Epstein said, “It is clear that the compensation paid by Black to Epstein far exceeded any amounts Black paid to his other professional advisors,” despite Epstein’s lack of formal training in law or accounting. .

 “Paying tens of millions to a novice is beyond strange,” a lawyer at a top law firm said. “Maybe there’s some justification, but I’d love to see what it is.”

Black’s social relationship with Epstein deteriorated in 2017 over a dispute surrounding money Epstein said he was owed.  

Black stepped down this week as chief executive after an internal power struggle  following the firm’s inquiry into his relationship with Epstein. Black is staying on as chairman in what may prove to be little more than a ceremonial role.

 Bitcoin and the Dark Web – introduced by Paul Edwards, 27th November 2020

FAQ Special – the Speaker’s Test (Pt.2) – 2nd December 2020

 Anti-poverty agencies, programmes and others lobby and fight for attention by showcasing their own policy agendas, ostensible achievements and potential. Many believe that the more indicators they get endorsed by the ‘international community’, the more financial support they can expect to secure.

Collecting enough national data to properly monitor progress on the Sustainable Development Goals is expensive. Data collection costs, typically borne by the countries themselves, have been estimated at minimally over three times total official development assistance (ODA). With data demands growing, more pressure to measure has led to either over- or under-stating both problems and progress, sometimes with no dishonest intent. ‘Errors’ can easily be explained away as statistics from poor countries are notoriously unreliable.

Economists generally prefer and even demand the use of money-metric measures. The rationale often is that no other meaningful measure is available. Many believe that showing ostensible costs and benefits is more likely to raise needed funding. Using either exchange rates or purchasing power parity (PPP) has been much debated. Some advocate even more convenient measures such as the prices of a standard McDonald’s hamburger in different countries. Money-metrics imply that estimated economic losses due to, say, smoking or non-communicable diseases (NCDs), including obesity, tend to be far greater in richer countries, owing to the much higher incomes lost or foregone as well as costs incurred.

In 2000, the UN Secretariat drafted the Millennium Declaration. This, in turn, became the basis for the Millennium Development Goals which gave primacy to halving the number of poor. After all, who would object to reducing poverty. The poor were defined with reference to a poverty line, somewhat arbitrarily defined by the Bank. Presuming money income to be a universal yardstick of wellbeing, this poverty measure has been challenged on various grounds. Most in poorer developing countries sense that much nuance and variation are lost in such measures, not only for poverty, but also for, say, hunger.

Improving such metrics has thus become an end in itself, with little debate over such one-dimensional means of measuring progress. The consequent ‘tunnel vision’ has meant ignoring other measures and indicators of wellbeing. In recent decades, instead of subsistence agriculture, cash crops have been promoted. Yet, all too many children of cash-poor subsistence farmers are nutritionally better fed and healthier than the offspring of monetarily better off cash crop or ‘commercial’ farmers.

Meanwhile, as cash incomes rise, those with diet-related NCDs have been growing. While life expectancy has risen in much of the world, healthy life expectancy has progressed less as ill health increasingly haunts the sunset years of longer lives.

As poor countries get limited help in their efforts to adjust to global warming, rich countries’ focus on supporting mitigation efforts has included, inter alia, promoting ‘no-till agriculture’. Thus attributing greenhouse gas emissions implies corresponding mitigation efforts via greater herbicide use. Maximising carbon sequestration in unploughed farm topsoil requires more reliance on typically toxic, if not carcinogenic pesticides, especially herbicides. But addressing global warming should not be at the expense of sustainable agriculture. Similarly, imposing global carbon taxation will raise the price of, and reduce access to electricity for the ‘energy-poor’, who comprise a fifth of the world’s population. The UN proposed a Global Green New Deal (GGND) which included such cross-subsidisation by rich countries of sustainable development progress elsewhere. The 2009 London G20 summit succeeded in raising more than the trillion dollars targeted. But the resources mainly went to strengthening the IMF, rather than for the GGND proposal. 

Poor Lives Matter, but Less | Inter Press Service (ipsnews.net)