RSN: Sanders Wins Wyoming, Are You Ready for President Paul Ryan? Why We Desperately Need a Plan C, Judge Denies Motions by Fossil Fuel Industry and Federal Government in Landmark Climate Change Case

Reader Supported News | 10 April 16

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Harvey Wasserman | Are You Ready for President Paul Ryan? Why We Desperately Need a Plan C 
 
Harvey Wasserman, Reader Supported News 
Wasserman writes: "The Democratic party is teetering on the brink. The green/peace/social justice community needs a Plan C. The Republicans have one. The Democrats don't. The impacts could be catastrophic." 
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Sanders Wins Wyoming 
Amanda Becker, Reuters 
Becker writes: "Bernie Sanders won the U.S. presidential Democratic nominating contest in Wyoming on Saturday, besting rival Hillary Clinton and adding to a string of recent victories as the two candidates gear up for a crucial matchup in New York." 
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Small Town Turns on Hastert as Details of Allegations Emerge 
Jason Keyser and Michael Tarm, Associated Press 
Excerpt: "The small town that boasted of the role it played in Dennis Hastert's ascent from high school wrestling coach to speaker of the U.S. House spoke bitterly of him on Saturday, a day after prosecutors detailed allegations that Hastert sexually abused several members of the team." 
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Former US House of Representatives Speaker Dennis Hastert. (photo: Jim Young/Reuters)

he small town that boasted of the role it played in Dennis Hastert's ascent from high school wrestling coach to speaker of the U.S. House spoke bitterly of him on Saturday, a day after prosecutors detailed allegations that Hastert sexually abused several members of the team.

The Illinois Republican's reputation for congeniality contrasts with the government's portrayal of him in a presentencing filing late Friday as a manipulator who exploited his mentor role to prey on young athletes. Prosecutors say he also lied to investigators about why he agreed to pay one alleged victim $3.5 million, falsely accusing the victim of trying to extort him.

The Hastert revelations have made Yorkville seem less idyllic, Mike Piatkowski, a 65-year-old retired UPS driver, said as he watched his grandson, a freshman at Yorkville High School, at a Saturday baseball practice.

"It's going to be hard to trust anybody, especially with the kids," he said.

Hastert pleaded guilty last fall to violating banking laws in how he structured his cash withdrawals. Prosecutors said they would have considered abuse charges, but the statute of limitations for bringing such charges expired decades ago.

The court documents detail sexual abuse allegations involving at least four boys that took place at a motel or in the boys locker room at Yorkville High School, where Hastert taught and coached from 1965 until 1981. It describes a "Lazyboy" style chair where Hastert often sat in the locker room with a direct view of the stalls where the boys showered.

An emailed statement from Hastert's lawyer, Thomas Green, on Saturday - as in earlier defense filings - refers only in general terms to past misconduct by Hastert.

"Mr. Hastert acknowledges that as a young man he committed transgressions for which he is profoundly sorry," Green wrote.

Hastert helped put Yorkville on the map during his eight years as House speaker, making his unmasking all the more painful, several residents said.

Bob Evans, a former school colleague and friend of Hastert's, recalled telling someone during a fishing trip in Canada years ago that he was from Yorkville and the person knowing it was the House speaker's hometown.

"It hurts even more because we were all so proud of him," he said of Hastert's fall from grace.

Now, Evans said he and many others in town are asking themselves the same question: "All this time together, what the hell did I miss?"

Hastert left Yorkville High School for the state Legislature in the early 1980s. He entered Congress in 1987 and became speaker in 1999, holding the spot until his retirement in 2007. He now lives near Yorkville, in Plano.

In the court filing, prosecutors say Hastert "was so sure his secrets were safe that he apparently had no fears about entering a profession where one is subject to constant scrutiny and media attention."

Around 2010, one of the victims confronted Hastert about what he had done to him decades earlier, prosecutors contend. After the two agreed on a total payment of $3.5 million, Hastert managed to pay $1.7 million from 2010 to 2014. They stopped when the FBI questioned Hastert in late 2014 about his massive cash withdrawals. They had no inking abuse allegations had anything to do with the case when they first approached Hastert, Friday's filing said.

According to prosecutors, it was only shortly after that first interview that a Hastert lawyer got back to agents with an explanation: Hastert was being extorted by the former student, who is referred to in the filing as Individual A, on a contrived claim of sexual-abuse.

Hastert even agreed to let investigators record his phone conversations with Individual A in March 2015, saying the calls would prove his extortion claim. They didn't.

On the contrary, prosecutors concluded that Individual A never threatened Hastert and that he pushed their agreement to be formalized in documents drawn up by lawyers. It was Hastert who wanted no one else involved, they said.

Prosecutors recommended Friday that Hastert get up to six months in prison when he is sentenced on April 27. Defense lawyers have asked for probation, citing what they described as the already steep price he's paid in public shame.

The lingering good will for Hastert even after the May 2015 indictment was unsealed now seems to have largely dissipated in Yorkville.

Russ Scholl, 70, said he didn't want to believe the allegations at first. Now, he says, Hastert needs to go to prison and "pay for what he did."

Tony Graff, Yorkville's former police chief, said that although the Hastert scandal has left the town with a black eye, locals have always had other things to be proud of, including a tradition of community service.

"The pride is still there," he said. "The community will get through this."

http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/36238-small-town-turns-on-hastert-as-details-of-allegations-emerge

Detroit Public Schools Claims the State Is Violating Students' Civil Rights in Federal Lawsuit 
Casey Quinlan, ThinkProgress 
Quinlan writes: "After months of public uproar over the poor condition of Detroit schools, Detroit Public Schools filed a federal lawsuit against the state." 
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It's Amazing What America Could Do With the Money the Rich Hide Overseas 
Max Ehrenfreund, The Washington Post 
Ehrenfreund writes: "The Washington Post has not reviewed the Panama Papers or verified their authenticity, but what seems certain is that wealthy people all over the world - and in the United States - pay much less in taxes by moving their income and assets to foreign countries." 
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Panama City, home to the law firm Mossack Fonseca, from which the confidential documents 

known as the Panama Papers were taken. (photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

he documents known as the "Panama Papers" have created a global scandal around the ways the world's rich conceal their wealth from the authorities. The prime minister of Iceland offered his resignation after the papers reportedly revealed that he and his wife had a fortune on paper hidden away in the British Virgin Islands. British Prime Minister David Cameron is taking criticism as well, and he acknowledged that he profited from a secret family trust.

The Washington Post has not reviewed the Panama Papers or verified their authenticity, but what seems certain is that wealthy people all over the world — and in the United States — pay much less in taxes by moving their income and assets to foreign countries.

In the United States, the Treasury would collect about $124 billion a year in additional taxes — $36 billion from individual taxpayers and $88 billion from multinational corporations — if it weren't for such schemes, according to estimates by Gabriel Zucman, an economist at the University of California at Berkeley.

That's a lot of money — and we're all paying for it, Zucman said.

When the wealthy pay less in taxes, the rest of the population bears the burden. Either the government spends less money, providing fewer public services, or ordinary citizens pay more to make up the cost.

"The taxes that are evaded at the top have to be compensated by higher taxes for the middle class," Zucman said.

Alternatively, the government borrows the money, and interest rates increase as ordinary people have to compete with the government to get loans.

To get an idea of how much money is at stake, here is a list of a few things Congress could do with $124 billion a year.

1. Feed the poor

The money that Americans avoid paying in taxes by shifting their wealth abroad would be more than enough to feed tens of millions of people for a year.

The number of Americans receiving food stamps increased from 26 million in 2007 to 48 million in 2013. While that number has decreased as the economy has improved — falling to 45 million at the end of last year, according to federal data — helping all these people put food on the table is a huge expense all the same, and this expansion has been controversial.

Even in 2013, though, the cost of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — the technical term for food stamps — totaled less than $80 billion.

2. Pay the troops

In fact, all the money at stake in international tax shifting would be enough to pay every uniformed member of the U.S. armed forces. Excluding housing and health care, the Pentagon's personnel costs totaled $116 billion in 2014, according to the Congressional Budget Office, which is less than Zucman's estimate of $124 billion. (That's counting retirement pay as well as compensation for reservists and the National Guard. Housing was another $19 billion, and the Department of Veterans Affairs is asking Congress for $182 billion this year.)

Another source of controversy in the federal budget has been the cost of the Pentagon's F-35, a new warplane that military leaders hope will be more versatile and resilient than past aircraft. While the F-35 is intended to replace several planes currently in use, the Government Accountability Office pointed out in a recent report that the cost of the program will be twice that of four legacy aircraft combined.

For all that, the annual costs of the F-35 are projected to reach only $20 billion a year. If wealthy Americans and multinational corporations couldn't avoid paying taxes by shifting their income overseas, the Pentagon could pay for its F-35s six times over.

3. Send every kid to preschool

With just $90 billion a year, Congress could set up a national network of high-quality early-education programs open to all families, according to a recent analysis from economist Josh Bivens and his colleagues at the liberal Economic Policy Institute.

Their goal is to allow every family in the country to provide preschool and child care for infants and toddlers 4 and younger for no more than 10 percent of their incomes. The federal government would pick up the rest of the tab. The plan also calls for a staff of nurses to coach pregnant mothers and families with infants on child rearing.

Bivens, it's worth noting, says the plan would pay for itself over the long term, and that the government wouldn't need a windfall from money squirreled away in the Caribbean to make it happen. "The kids who grow up 10 to 20 years from now would be more likely to earn higher wages and avoid contact with the criminal justice system," he recently told Wonkblog.

4. Give working families cash

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) has proposed giving families an annual tax credit of $2,500 per child to help cover the cost of raising children, to replace the current credit of $1,000. Under Rubio's plan, the credit would be worth less for affluent families with more than $300,000 a year in joint income. It would reduce the taxes that families pay on their salaries and wages, so families that pay less than a certain amount in taxes because they are poorer would also receive less in credits.

The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center projects that Rubio's credit would cost $122 billion on average over the next decade. If Americans stopped avoiding taxes, Congress would have enough money to give parents a few grand every year while still having a couple of billions to spare.

Michael Strain, an economist at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, argued that policymakers shouldn't forget about workers who don't have children. President Obama and Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), the speaker of the House, have indicated that they'd like to expand a crucial bonus for this group of taxpayers known as the Earned Income Tax Credit. The cost of the plan they've discussed would only be about $6 billion a year.

5. Borrow less money

"I would use some of this to expand the Earned Income Tax Credit," Strain said. "I would use a big chunk of it to close the deficit."

The $124 billion in unpaid taxes would be enough to eliminate nearly a quarter of the annual deficit — the difference between what the government collects in taxes and the amount it spends, which the Congressional Budget Office projects will be $534 billion this year. That's money the government borrows.

Much of that deficit is due to Social Security's shortfall. The program's actuaries project that the New Deal program will no longer be able to pay retirees all of what they're owed beginning in about 20 years, when the trust fund will be exhausted and the program will be able to pay out no more than what it collects in taxes every month.

Strain's colleague Andrew Biggs estimates that making up Social Security's actuarial deficit would cost about $182 billion a year beginning now. The unpaid taxes could go a long way toward making up that money.

Jared Bernstein, who served as Vice President Biden's chief economist, did not agree that the money should be used to reduce the deficit. In a note to Wonkblog on Friday, he wrote that the government should work to pay down the national debt, but that now is not the time. The U.S. economy is still operating below its potential, he contends, and the goal should be stimulating the economy rather than saving money.

Bernstein wrote that the federal government should put more money toward maintaining and building the country's physical infrastructure. That includes highways, railroads, bridges, dams, levees, power lines and airports, but also public schools. Bernstein pointed to recent research that suggests the country should be spending an additional $46 billion a year or so keeping up the schools.

Zucman's estimate of $124 billion wouldn't be enough to fund the most ambitious plans for infrastructure, though. Bernie Sanders, the Democratic presidential candidate, has introduced legislation that would appropriate $200 billion a year for a period of five years. The centrist advocates at Third Way say the country needs to spend even more than that — about $240 billion a year over five years.

http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/36236-its-amazing-what-america-could-do-with-the-money-the-rich-hide-overseas

Migrants Clash With Macedonian Police at Greek Border 
Costas Kantouris and Nick Dumitrache 
Excerpt: "Migrants clashed with Macedonian police Sunday after trying to scale the fence separating Greece from Macedonia in the border town of Idomeni." 
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Judge Denies Motions by Fossil Fuel Industry and Federal Government in Landmark Climate Change Case 
Our Children's Trust, EcoWatch 
Excerpt: "U.S. Magistrate Judge Thomas Coffin of the Federal District Court in Eugene, Oregon, decided in favor of 21 young plaintiffs in their landmark constitutional climate change case against the federal government. Judge Coffin ruled Friday against the motion to dismiss brought by the fossil fuel industry and federal government." 
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