WASHINGTON – President Joe Biden will roll out a plan to raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans and their investments to fund about $1 trillion in childcare, universal pre-kindergarten education and paid leave for workers, sources familiar with the proposal said.
The plan, part of the White House’s push for a sweeping overhaul of the U.S. tax system to make the rich and big companies pay more, calls for increasing the top marginal income tax rate to 39.6% from 37% and nearly doubling taxes on capital gains to 39.6% for people earning more than $1 million, according to the sources this week.
That would be the highest tax rate on capital gains taxes, which are mostly paid by the top 1% of Americans, since the tax was introduced in 1913.
News of the proposal triggered sharp declines on Wall Street, with the benchmark S&P 500 index down 1% in early afternoon, its steepest drop in more than a month.
Any such hike would need to go through Congress, where Biden’s Democratic Party holds narrow majorities and is unlikely to win support from Republicans.
“If it had a chance of passing, we’d be down 2,000 points,” said Thomas Hayes, chairman and managing member at hedge fund Great Hill Capital LLC, referring to stock market indexes.
Sources said details would be released next week before Biden’s address to Congress. Tax details related to the plan, which has been in the works for months, were first reported by the New York Times on Thursday morning.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki said the president would discuss his “American Families Plan” during his speech to Congress next Wednesday, but declined to comment on any details.
Former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin will be sentenced on June 16 for murdering George Floyd last year, a Minnesota court announced Friday.
The sentencing will take place in Hennepin County at 1:30 p.m. central time.
Jurors found Chauvin, 45, guilty of second-degree murder, second-degree manslaughter, and third-degree murder in the May 25, 2020, death of Floyd, a man who was arrested for allegedly using a counterfeit $20 at a nearby store.
Floyd, 46, was restrained on the ground after resisting being placed into a patrol car. Chauvin knelt on his neck and back for over nine minutes. By the time an ambulance arrived, Floyd had stopped breathing.
Chauvin faces the prospect of 40 years in prison. Under Minnesota law, criminals only face jail time on their most serious crime if all charges are from a single act.
Experts believe Chauvin will be sentenced to a maximum of 30 years in jail. Sentencing guidelines (pdf) say that Chauvin, because he had no criminal history, would be sentenced to between 10 years and eight months and 15 years in jail.
Prosecutors want County Judge Peter Cahill to go higher because of potential aggravating factors, such as the fact that the crimes were committed while a child was present.
“We believe there are aggravating factors and the sentence should exceed the sentencing guidelines,” Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, a Democrat, said after Chauvin was convicted.
Chauvin’s attorney has not responded to requests for comment.
Former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin is shown in a combination of police booking photos after a jury found him guilty on all counts in his trial for second-degree murder, third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter in the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minn., on April 20, 2021. (Minnesota Department of Corrections via Reuters)
Cahill told the parties that they should present briefs about aggravating factors and he would review them before weighing in on the issue.
Leigh Dunda explains parallels between the rise of tyranny in Nazi Germany and the rise of tyranny in America in the name of public health.
In this speech delivered at a Health-and-Freedom rally in Orange County, California, human-rights attorney Leigh Dundas lights the fire of liberty in the hearts of her audience as she shows the parallels between the rise of tyranny in Nazi Germany under the banner of nationalism and the rise of tyranny in America under the banner of public health. Her passion is contagious, and you will be drawn to her call to action.
Ties that bind authoritarian powers grow as president advances their shared narrative of a U.S. in decline
ANALYSIS/OPINION:
While the Biden administration is focused like a laser on convincing Americans their country is systemically racist, the once murky post-Cold War world order is coming into specific relief. Our enemies are counting on us not having the guts to fight them. President Biden and most of official Washington are proving them correct.
Beijing is developing its own digital currency to compete with the dollar. China has committed $400 billion in oil purchases and other economic assistance to Iran. Russia’s military and espionage operations go beyond mere saber-rattling. China and Russia recently signed a new military cooperative masquerading as a joint lunar base program.
The ties that bind these authoritarian powers are growing, as President Biden’s weakness advances their shared global narrative of a U.S. in decline.
The U.S. foreign policy elite must acknowledge that a new world order has indeed taken shape pitting these brutal dictatorships against the free nations of the West in a clash that is far more dangerous than the one we dealt with 50 years ago.
This New Axis is far better positioned to advance their goals of global dominance than their failed 20th century forebearers. During the first Cold War, the combined economic power of the Soviet bloc nations was easily dwarfed by that of a surging U.S. economy and its allies harnessing the creative freedom and free markets of the post-war era.
The West has allowed Russia to blackmail Europe for decades over energy. We’ve placated the terrorists in Iran. An insatiable thirst for capital, cheap labor and cheap products has allowed China to become an economic powerhouse whose impact is now felt on every continent.
We’ve desperately clung to the foolish belief that with the first Cold War won, China, Russia and others would cast aside their tyrannical governments and imperial designs.
Anti-Trump impeachment witness Noah Feldman met with a Chinese Communist Party think tank, The National Pulse can reveal.
The Harvard Law professor, who was called to testify by the Democrats in former President Donald Trump’s first impeachment trial, visited the Shanghai Institutes of International Studies (SIIS) and met with leaders from the state-run think tank.
A previously unreported press release, published in 2016, describes Feldman’s’ SIIS meeting:
“March 21: SIIS President Yang Jiemian meets with Prof. Noah Feldman of Harvard Law School. Dr. Shao Yuqun, Executive Director of the Center for American Studies also attend the meeting. The two sides talk about the relation between China’s domestic governance reform and its foreign policy as well as Sino-U.S. relations. Afterwards, Prof. Feldman shares ideas about the trend of international politics with SIIS young research fellows and graduate students.”
The think tank has extensive ties to the Chinese Communist Party’s United Front Work Department, which aims “to co-opt and neutralize sources of potential opposition to the policies and authority of its ruling Chinese Communist Party” and “influence foreign governments and other actors to take actions or adopt positions supportive of Beijing’s preferred policies” according to the U.S.-China Security and Economic Review Commission.
Households around the globe have accumulated $5.4 trillion in additional savings compared with 2019’s spending patterns, Moody’s has said. That equates to more than 6% of global gross domestic product.
According to the rating agency, booming global consumer confidence suggests people will be willing to spend again as soon as shops, bars and restaurants reopen when coronavirus restrictions are eased.
“The combination of an unleashing of significant pent-up demand and overflowing excess saving will drive a surge in consumer spending across the globe as countries approach herd immunity and open up,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics.
The agency estimates that if consumers spend about a third of their excess savings, they will boost global output by just over two percentage points both this year and next.
VAERS data released today showed 86,080 reports of adverse events following COVID vaccines, including 3,186 deaths and 10,152 serious injuries between Dec. 14, 2020 and April 16, 2021.
Data released today by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on the number of injuries and deaths reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) following COVID vaccines showed a notable increase in reports of injuries and deaths compared with last week’s numbers.
VAERS is the primary government-funded system for reporting adverse vaccine reactions in the U.S. Reports submitted to VAERS require further investigation before a causal relationship can be confirmed.
Every Friday, VAERS makes public all vaccine injury reports received as of a specified date, usually about a week prior to the release date. Today’s data show that between Dec. 14, 2020 and April 16, a total of 86,080 total adverse events were reported to VAERS, including 3,186 deaths — an increase of 584 over the previous week — and 10,152 serious injuries, up 1,867 since last week.
Of the 3,186 deaths reported as of April 16, 26% occurred within 48 hours of vaccination, 17% occurred within 24 hours and 41% occurred in people who became ill within 48 hours of being vaccinated.
54% of those who died were male, 44% were female and the remaining death reports did not include gender of the deceased.
The average age of death was 75.9 and the youngest death reported was an 18-year-old. There are a few reported deaths in children under 18, including a 5-month old who died of a rare blood clot two days after the mother received her second dose of Pfizer vaccine and a 2-year-old, but these reports have not been confirmed.
Of the 820 cases of Bell’s Palsy reported, 55% of cases were reported after Pfizer-BioNTech vaccinations, 41% following vaccination with the Moderna vaccine and 24 cases (6%) of Bell’s Palsy were reported in conjunction with J&J.
New reports of blood clots as CDC panel votes to resume J&J vaccine
Blood clotting disorders have been reported following vaccination with Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca and J&J COVID vaccines. In the U.S., the J&J vaccine, marketed under the company’s Janssen subsidiary, was paused April 13 while U.S. health officials investigated reports of rare blood clots.
An internal government document obtained by Yahoo! News exposed a USPS surveillance effort involving analysts “trawling through social media sites” to look for “inflammatory” postings and then sharing that information across government agencies.
An internal government bulletin obtained by Yahoo News this week revealed that the law enforcement arm of the U.S. Postal Service is monitoring social media posts as part of a surveillance operation known as iCOP, a secretive program that sparked alarm among rights groups and civil liberties advocates.
The sensitive bulletin concerns the U.S. Postal Inspection Service’s (USPIS) recent surveillance of Facebook, Parler and Telegram posts related to the March 20 World Wide Rally for Freedom and Democracy, anti-coronavirus lockdown and anti-vaccine demonstrations organized by far-right groups.
“The federal government’s sprawling and clandestine surveillance apparatus manifests in a new way,” tweeted progressive activist Jordan Uhl. “These breaches of civil liberties largely go unchecked because, again, it targets right-wingers on Parler, but ultimately threatens everyone in the long run.”
Jana Winter of Yahoo News reported that the USPIS surveillance effort “involves having analysts trawl through social media sites to look for what the document describes as ‘inflammatory’ postings and then sharing that information across government agencies.”
Winter wrote on Twitter that USPIS would not answer questions about when the social media monitoring program began.
“Footnotes in the bulletin citing their authority say the attorney general can give more powers to the postmaster general,” Winter noted, “but [the Justice Department] wouldn’t tell me when that was either.”
USPIS broadly describes its mission as enforcing “federal statutes related to crimes that involve the postal system, its employees and its customers” and includes in its scope a range of illegal activities, from mail fraud to child exploitation. As Common Dreams previously reported, advocacy organizations have grown increasingly worried in recent years about the expanding reach of the Postal Service’s sprawling mail monitoring program.
In a statement to Yahoo News on Wednesday, the agency said that “in order to preserve operational effectiveness, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service does not discuss its protocols, investigative methods or tools.”
Rachel Levinson-Waldman, deputy director of the Brennan Center for Justice’s liberty and national security program, said USPIS surveillance of social media posts “seems a little bizarre.”
“Based on the very minimal information that’s available online, it appears that [iCOP] is meant to root out misuse of the postal system by online actors, which doesn’t seem to encompass what’s going on here,” Levinson-Waldman told Yahoo News. “It’s not at all clear why their mandate would include monitoring of social media that’s unrelated to use of the postal system.”
Levinson-Waldman went on to note that “if the individuals they’re monitoring are carrying out or planning criminal activity, that should be the purview of the FBI.”
“If they’re simply engaging in lawfully protected speech, even if it’s odious or objectionable,” she added, “then monitoring them on that basis raises serious constitutional concerns.”
Other civil liberties advocates were similarly baffled — and unnerved — by the covert USPIS program.
A woman who was selected as an alternate juror in the trial of Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis officer convicted in the death of George Floyd, admitted that public pressure in the case made her unsure whether she even wanted to be on the jury, stating, “I did not want to go through rioting and destruction again and I was concerned about people coming to my house if they were not happy with the verdict.”
Lisa Christensen told Lou Raguse of KARE 11 that her heart “broke a little” when the judge informed her she would only be an alternate juror, saying, “Number 96, you’re an alternate.”
Raguse asked, “Did you want to be a juror?” Christensen responded, “ I had mixed feelings. There was a question on the questionnaire about it and I put I did not know. The reason, at that time, was I did not know what the outcome was going to be, so I felt like either way you are going to disappoint one group or the other. I did not want to go through rioting and destruction again and I was concerned about people coming to my house if they were not happy with the verdict.”
Christensen also stated, “I would have voted guilty. … I feel like Chauvin is responsible for Mr. Floyd’s death.” She said that prosecution witness Dr. Martin Tobin “broke it down to where we could understand it. He had us demonstrate. We were all in the jury touching our necks and we could feel what he was trying to make us feel.”
It has now been 30 days since President Joe Biden announced on March 24 that he would be tasking Vice President Kamala Harris to lead the charge in discovering the root causes of the migrant crisis, to both curb the current flow of the migrants and implement long-term strategies. “Today would be a good day for Vice President Harris to visit the southern border,” House Judiciary GOP tweeted Friday.
Harris has yet to travel down to the border while Border Patrol facilities are being overcrowded with unaccompanied migrant children. According to Newsweek, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki dismissed any idea that Harris was in charge of the border crisis and has insisted she only is interested in the root causes.
On Tuesday, House Judiciary GOP ranking member Rep. Jim Jordan tweeted, “Vice President Kamala Harris visited North Carolina yesterday. She’s set to visit New Hampshire on Friday. When’s the ‘border czar’ going to visit the southern border?”
Despite Harris’ decision to visit other parts of the country rather than the southern border, White House aides have said Harris has talked with Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei and Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and plans to visit the regions. So far, no plans have been scheduled.
