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Ok, Just i thought i saw you say you didn't think his mother would be in favor of him going and also that someone in his family would likely have given their ok. I thought that would have to be one of mom or dad. Trump's reaction would just as likely be feigned as true.
That's why i wonder that so many articles suggest he's a danger
to both parties. That equivalence idea raises it's ugly head again.
Just meant in the debate. Would he lean to one or the other candidates. Guess it would have to be Trump.
Surely you guys are right. What about him could suck a Biden voter in.
Father would have been in favor. That's one. Barron, guess maybe two as if
he is curious at all it would be an interesting experience just to be there once.
LOL I pictured him as short, but that's stretching it.
On that i guess you have me beat. Course you've been, by the sound of it, in many more large buildings than i have.
If so it's at least one thing i could appreciate him for.
Still awhile away. If he is there which way would he lean?
May 15, 2024 - RFK Jr. becomes presidential debate X factor
https://www.axios.com/2024/05/15/trump-biden-debate-rfk-jr-cnn
Whom do you think he is going to take the most votes away from?
Guess it really doesn't matter as in which states. Which of the important
five, or however many it's going to be that will decide the election.
They came from what must have been Interesting sexual communications
offspring of fallen angels and humans .. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nephilim
They'll cost me until/unless i give in, and even if they will always be fallen in my eyes
Can you beat, most of my life.
Hope they show it live up above.
Poor sense of direction, eh. Took me ages to find my car in a parking lot once.
LOLOL If the cut stays Jon Rahm missing out will dent a few egos.
LOL, Had no idea .. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nephilim
Aberg let me down, those two days anyhow. Day 3 for my squad is a new Day.
Oh, and i'm still happy to be sticking with pure PGA. I know i'm fighting with an arm behind
my back, yet still, come what may, am feeling better about not having a hybrid team. LOL
livefree_ordie, Much appreciated, some interesting content. And i'm not just saying that as evidence that your
"I respect this board too much to comment my diatribe to the below news links being provided for Mr. Linarkoni
here on this prestigious board. I provide them so you can see the news you do not read or don’t want to know."
last sentence there is terribly wrong, but just because it's the truth as we here know it. I also believe the
earlier of yours there is true, so will add, i'm sorry you had to spoil your post with the misguided last bit.
Your first link just one of many i guess in which a lawsuit over wrongful dismissal is won by the complainant ..
https://www.yahoo.com/news/socal-district-pay-360k-teacher-231550793.html . According to the article
she was dismissed after a complaint about her social media posts which in light of your freedom
of speech laws doesn't sound right. Looks she deserved to win her case, so it's good she did.
Your 2nd link leads to a couple of questions. There is no evidence given as to why that, Eduardo Sarabia,
an alleged serial rapist is deemed an illegal immigrant. Nothing is said about the guy actually ..
https://www.yahoo.com/news/serial-rapist-illegal-migrant-rape-173900572.html ..
other than what he has been charged with. i wonder how many Eduardo Sarabias there are in America.
One here for example .. Eduardo Sarabia: La casa que nos inventamos
LOL Agree on hap, now you won't believe this, or you will, haha, of course you will 'cuz it's me telling you:
lol, your article i had c/ped and was the next one i was going to post. My lead was to be something like
Election Fraud, Republican again
Your link now -- https://www.rawstory.com/michigan-gop-infected-fake-signatures/
How did you manage to grab it from me like that .. LOLs.
hap0206, Why do you insist on denying the charges. On distorting the facts. On misleading our readers. Everyone of any worth who has expressed any interest in the case has agreed from the onset that gaining a unanimous verdict on the crimes Trump has committed would not be easy.
"We shall see what the jury decides, but the fact is Trump was reimbursing an employee for an expenditure made on his behalf -- Bragg has a big problem -- he has to name that expenditure as an election crime -- violations of the fed election laws can only be prosecuted by the feds -- I'll get the link -- so we wait for the decisions"
Fact is Trump was reimbursing an employee for an expenditure made on his behalf in order to illegally influence an election campaign. Why bring in federal election laws. As far as i understand it's NY state law the case is being bought under.
Was better before, '70-Reagan's '80s --- Profits Without Prosperity
"I think one of the problems of the average citizen is when they read the corp is doing it for it's shareholder, they think shareholders like them, small accounts and usually known only to the corps by street name or broker total counts per broker. "
William Lazonick
From the Magazine (September 2014)
Summary.
Though corporate profits are high, and the stock market is booming, most Americans are not sharing in the economic recovery. While the top 0.1% of income recipients reap almost all the income gains, good jobs keep disappearing, and new ones tend to be insecure and underpaid.
One of the major causes: Instead of investing their profits in growth opportunities, corporations are using them for stock repurchases. Take the 449 firms in the S&P 500 that were publicly listed from 2003 through 2012. During that period, they used 54% of their earnings—a total of $2.4 trillion—to buy back their own stock. Dividends absorbed an extra 37% of their earnings. That left little to fund productive capabilities or better incomes for workers.
Why are such massive resources dedicated to stock buybacks? Because stock-based instruments make up the majority of executives’ pay, and buybacks drive up short-term stock prices. Buybacks contribute to runaway executive compensation and economic inequality in a major way. Because they extract value rather than create it, their overuse undermines the economy’s health. To restore true prosperity to the country, government and business leaders must take steps to rein them in.
VIDEO
Five years after the official end of the Great Recession, corporate profits are high, and the stock market is booming. Yet most Americans are not sharing in the recovery. While the top 0.1% of income recipients—which include most of the highest-ranking corporate executives—reap almost all the income gains, good jobs keep disappearing, and new employment opportunities tend to be insecure and underpaid. Corporate profitability is not translating into widespread economic prosperity.
The allocation of corporate profits to stock buybacks deserves much of the blame. Consider the 449 companies in the S&P 500 index that were publicly listed from 2003 through 2012. During that period those companies used 54% of their earnings—a total of $2.4 trillion—to buy back their own stock, almost all through purchases on the open market. Dividends absorbed an additional 37% of their earnings. That left very little for investments in productive capabilities or higher incomes for employees.
The buyback wave has gotten so big, in fact, that even shareholders—the presumed beneficiaries of all this corporate largesse—are getting worried. “It concerns us that, in the wake of the financial crisis, many companies have shied away from investing in the future growth of their companies,” Laurence Fink, the chairman and CEO of BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, wrote in an open letter to corporate America in March. “Too many companies have cut capital expenditure and even increased debt to boost dividends and increase share buybacks.”
Why are such massive resources being devoted to stock repurchases? Corporate executives give several reasons, which I will discuss later. But none of them has close to the explanatory power of this simple truth: Stock-based instruments make up the majority of their pay, and in the short term buybacks drive up stock prices. In 2012 the 500 highest-paid executives named in proxy statements of U.S. public companies received, on average, $30.3 million each; 42% of their compensation came from stock options and 41% from stock awards. By increasing the demand for a company’s shares, open-market buybacks automatically lift its stock price, even if only temporarily, and can enable the company to hit quarterly earnings per share (EPS) targets.
As a result, the very people we rely on to make investments in the productive capabilities that will increase our shared prosperity are instead devoting most of their companies’ profits to uses that will increase their own prosperity—with unsurprising results. Even when adjusted for inflation, the compensation of top U.S. executives has doubled or tripled since the first half of the 1990s, when it was already widely viewed as excessive. Meanwhile, overall U.S. economic performance has faltered.
If the U.S. is to achieve growth that distributes income equitably and provides stable employment, government and business leaders must take steps to bring both stock buybacks and executive pay under control. The nation’s economic health depends on it.
From Value Creation to Value Extraction
For three decades I’ve been studying how the resource allocation decisions of major U.S. corporations influence the relationship between value creation and value extraction, and how that relationship affects the U.S. economy. From the end of World War II until the late 1970s, a retain-and-reinvest approach to resource allocation prevailed at major U.S. corporations. They retained earnings and reinvested them in increasing their capabilities, first and foremost in the employees who helped make firms more competitive. They provided workers with higher incomes and greater job security, thus contributing to equitable, stable economic growth—what I call “sustainable prosperity.”
This pattern began to break down in the late 1970s, giving way to a downsize-and-distribute regime of reducing costs and then distributing the freed-up cash to financial interests, particularly shareholders. By favoring value extraction over value creation, this approach has contributed to employment instability and income inequality.
As documented by the economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, the richest 0.1% of U.S. households collected a record 12.3% of all U.S. income in 2007, surpassing their 11.5% share in 1928, on the eve of the Great Depression. In the financial crisis of 2008–2009, their share fell sharply, but it has since rebounded, hitting 11.3% in 2012.
Since the late 1980s, the largest component of the income of the top 0.1% has been compensation, driven by stock-based pay. Meanwhile, the growth of workers’ wages has been slow and sporadic, except during the internet boom of 1998–2000, the only time in the past 46 years when real wages rose by 2% or more for three years running. Since the late 1970s, average growth in real wages has increasingly lagged productivity growth. (See the exhibit “When Productivity and Wages Parted Ways.”)
When Productivity and Wages Parted Ways
From 1948 to the mid-1970s, increases in productivity and wages went hand in hand.
Then a gap opened between the two. ...
Not coincidentally, U.S. employment relations have undergone a transformation in the past three decades. Mass plant closings eliminated millions of unionized blue-collar jobs. The norm of a white-collar worker’s spending his or her entire career with one company disappeared. And the seismic shift toward offshoring left all members of the U.S. labor force—even those with advanced education and substantial work experience—vulnerable to displacement.
To some extent these structural changes could be justified initially as necessary responses to changes in technology and competition. In the early 1980s permanent plant closings were triggered by the inroads superior Japanese manufacturers had made in consumer-durable and capital-goods industries. In the early 1990s one-company careers fell by the wayside in the IT sector because the open-systems architecture of the microelectronics revolution devalued the skills of older employees versed in proprietary technologies. And in the early 2000s the offshoring of more-routine tasks, such as writing unsophisticated software and manning customer call centers, sped up as a capable labor force emerged in low-wage developing economies and communications costs plunged, allowing U.S. companies to focus their domestic employees on higher-value-added work.
These practices chipped away at the loyalty and dampened the spending power of American workers, and often gave away key competitive capabilities of U.S. companies. Attracted by the quick financial gains they produced, many executives ignored the long-term effects and kept pursuing them well past the time they could be justified.
A turning point was the wave of hostile takeovers that swept the country in the 1980s. Corporate raiders often claimed that the complacent leaders of the targeted companies were failing to maximize returns to shareholders. That criticism prompted boards of directors to try to align the interests of management and shareholders by making stock-based pay a much bigger component of executive compensation.
Given incentives to maximize shareholder value and meet Wall Street’s expectations for ever higher quarterly EPS, top executives turned to massive stock repurchases, which helped them “manage” stock prices. The result: Trillions of dollars that could have been spent on innovation and job creation in the U.S. economy over the past three decades have instead been used to buy back shares for what is effectively stock-price manipulation.
Good Buybacks and Bad
Not all buybacks undermine shared prosperity. There are two major types: tender offers and open-market repurchases. With the former, a company contacts shareholders and offers to buy back their shares at a stipulated price by a certain near-term date, and then shareholders who find the price agreeable tender their shares to the company. Tender offers can be a way for executives who have substantial ownership stakes and care about a company’s long-term competitiveness to take advantage of a low stock price and concentrate ownership in their own hands. This can, among other things, free them from Wall Street’s pressure to maximize short-term profits and allow them to invest in the business. Henry Singleton was known for using tender offers in this way at Teledyne in the 1970s, and Warren Buffett for using them at GEICO in the 1980s. (GEICO became wholly owned by Buffett’s holding company, Berkshire Hathaway, in 1996.) As Buffett has noted, this kind of tender offer should be made when the share price is below the intrinsic value of the productive capabilities of the company and the company is profitable enough to repurchase the shares without impeding its real investment plans.
But tender offers constitute only a small portion of modern buybacks. Most are now done on the open market, and my research shows that they often come at the expense of investment in productive capabilities and, consequently, aren’t great for long-term shareholders.
Companies have been allowed to repurchase their shares on the open market with virtually no regulatory limits since 1982, when the SEC instituted Rule 10b-18 of the Securities Exchange Act. Under the rule, a corporation’s board of directors can authorize senior executives to repurchase up to a certain dollar amount of stock over a specified or open-ended period of time, and the company must publicly announce the buyback program. After that, management can buy a large number of the company’s shares on any given business day without fear that the SEC will charge it with stock-price manipulation—provided, among other things, that the amount does not exceed a “safe harbor” of 25% of the previous four weeks’ average daily trading volume. The SEC requires companies to report total quarterly repurchases but not daily ones, meaning that it cannot determine whether a company has breached the 25% limit without a special investigation.
Further Reading
The Price of Wall Street’s Power
Feature Gautam Mukunda
The financialization of the economy has serious downsides.
https://hbr.org/2014/06/the-price-of-wall-streets-power/ar/1
Despite the escalation in buybacks over the past three decades, the SEC has only rarely launched proceedings against a company for using them to manipulate its stock price. And even within the 25% limit, companies can still make huge purchases: Exxon Mobil, by far the biggest stock repurchaser from 2003 to 2012, can buy back about $300 million worth of shares a day, and Apple up to $1.5 billion a day. In essence, Rule 10b-18 legalized stock market manipulation through open-market repurchases.
The rule was a major departure from the agency’s original mandate, laid out in the Securities Exchange Act in 1934. The act was a reaction to a host of unscrupulous activities that had fueled speculation in the Roaring ’20s, leading to the stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression. To prevent such shenanigans, the act gave the SEC broad powers to issue rules and regulations.
During the Reagan years, the SEC began to roll back those rules. The commission’s chairman from 1981 to 1987 was John Shad, a former vice chairman of E.F. Hutton and the first Wall Street insider to lead the commission in 50 years. He believed that the deregulation of securities markets would channel savings into economic investments more efficiently and that the isolated cases of fraud and manipulation that might go undetected did not justify onerous disclosure requirements for companies. The SEC’s adoption of Rule 10b-18 reflected that point of view.
Debunking the Justifications for Buybacks
Executives give three main justifications for open-market repurchases. Let’s examine them one by one:
1. Buybacks are investments in our undervalued shares that signal our confidence in the company’s future.
This makes some sense. But the reality is that over the past two decades major U.S. companies have tended to do buybacks in bull markets and cut back on them, often sharply, in bear markets. (See the exhibit “Where Did the Money from Productivity Increases Go?”) They buy high and, if they sell at all, sell low. Research by the Academic-Industry Research Network, a nonprofit I cofounded and lead, shows that companies that do buybacks never resell the shares at higher prices.
Where Did the Money from Productivity Increases Go?
Buybacks—as well as dividends—have skyrocketed in the past 20 years.
(Note that these data are for the 251 companies that ...
Once in a while a company that bought high in a boom has been forced to sell low in a bust to alleviate financial distress. GE, for example, spent $3.2 billion on buybacks in the first three quarters of 2008, paying an average price of $31.84 per share. Then, in the last quarter, as the financial crisis brought about losses at GE Capital, the company did a $12 billion stock issue at an average share price of $22.25, in a failed attempt to protect its triple-A credit rating.
In general, when a company buys back shares at what turn out to be high prices, it eventually reduces the value of the stock held by continuing shareholders. “The continuing shareholder is penalized by repurchases above intrinsic value,” Warren Buffett wrote in his 1999 letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders. “Buying dollar bills for $1.10 is not good business for those who stick around.”
2. Buybacks are necessary to offset the dilution of earnings per share when employees exercise stock options.
Calculations that I have done for high-tech companies with broad-based stock option programs reveal that the volume of open-market repurchases is generally a multiple of the volume of options that employees exercise. In any case, there’s no logical economic rationale for doing repurchases to offset dilution from the exercise of employee stock options. Options are meant to motivate employees to work harder now to produce higher future returns for the company. Therefore, rather than using corporate cash to boost EPS immediately, executives should be willing to wait for the incentive to work. If the company generates higher earnings, employees can exercise their options at higher stock prices, and the company can allocate the increased earnings to investment in the next round of innovation.
3. Our company is mature and has run out of profitable investment opportunities; therefore, we should return its unneeded cash to shareholders.
Some people used to argue that buybacks were a more tax-efficient means of distributing money to shareholders than dividends. But that has not been the case since 2003, when the tax rates on long-term capital gains and qualified dividends were made the same. Much more important issues remain, however: What is the CEO’s main role and his or her responsibility to shareholders?
Companies that have built up productive capabilities over long periods typically have huge organizational and financial advantages when they enter related markets. One of the chief functions of top executives is to discover new opportunities for those capabilities. When they opt to do large open-market repurchases instead, it raises the question of whether these executives are doing their jobs.
A related issue is the notion that the CEO’s main obligation is to shareholders. It’s based on a misconception of the shareholders’ role in the modern corporation. The philosophical justification for giving them all excess corporate profits is that they are best positioned to allocate resources because they have the most interest in ensuring that capital generates the highest returns. This proposition is central to the “maximizing shareholder value” (MSV) arguments espoused over the years, most notably by Michael C. Jensen. The MSV school also posits that companies’ so-called free cash flow should be distributed to shareholders because only they make investments without a guaranteed return—and hence bear risk.
Why Money for Reinvestment Has Dried Up
Since the early 1980s, when restrictions on open-market buybacks were greatly
eased, distributions to shareholders ...
But the MSV school ignores other participants in the economy who bear risk by investing without a guaranteed return. Taxpayers take on such risk through government agencies that invest in infrastructure and knowledge creation. And workers take it on by investing in the development of their capabilities at the firms that employ them. As risk bearers, taxpayers, whose dollars support business enterprises, and workers, whose efforts generate productivity improvements, have claims on profits that are at least as strong as the shareholders’.
The irony of MSV is that public-company shareholders typically never invest in the value-creating capabilities of the company at all. Rather, they invest in outstanding shares in the hope that the stock price will rise. And a prime way in which corporate executives fuel that hope is by doing buybacks to manipulate the market.The only money that Apple ever raised from public shareholders was $97 million at its IPO in 1980. Yet in recent years, hedge fund activists such as David Einhorn and Carl Icahn—who played absolutely no role in the company’s success over the decades—have purchased large amounts of Apple stock and then pressured the company to announce some of the largest buyback programs in history.
The past decade’s huge increase in repurchases, in addition to high levels of dividends, have come at a time when U.S. industrial companies face new competitive challenges. This raises questions about how much of corporate cash flow is really “free” to be distributed to shareholders. Many academics—for example, Gary P. Pisano and Willy C. Shih of Harvard Business School, in their 2009 HBR article “Restoring American Competitiveness” .. https://hbr.org/2009/07/restoring-american-competitiveness/ar/1 .. and their book Producing Prosperity .. https://hbr.org/product/producing-prosperity-why-america-needs-a-manufacturing-renaissance/an/10345E-KND-ENG —have warned that if U.S. companies don’t start investing much more in research and manufacturing capabilities, they cannot expect to remain competitive in a range of advanced technology industries.
Retained earnings have always been the foundation for investments in innovation. Executives who subscribe to MSV are thus copping out of their responsibility to invest broadly and deeply in the productive capabilities their organizations need to continually innovate. MSV as commonly understood is a theory of value extraction, not value creation.
Executives Are Serving Their Own Interests
As I noted earlier, there is a simple, much more plausible explanation for the increase in open-market repurchases: the rise of stock-based pay. Combined with pressure from Wall Street, stock-based incentives make senior executives extremely motivated to do buybacks on a colossal and systemic scale.
Consider the 10 largest repurchasers, which spent a combined $859 billion on buybacks, an amount equal to 68% of their combined net income, from 2003 through 2012. (See the exhibit “The Top 10 Stock Repurchasers.”) During the same decade, their CEOs received, on average, a total of $168 million each in compensation. On average, 34% of their compensation was in the form of stock options and 24% in stock awards. At these companies the next four highest-paid senior executives each received, on average, $77 million in compensation during the 10 years—27% of it in stock options and 29% in stock awards. Yet since 2003 only three of the 10 largest repurchasers—Exxon Mobil, IBM, and Procter & Gamble—have outperformed the S&P 500 Index.
The Top 10 Stock Repurchasers 2003–2012
At most of the leading U.S. companies below, distributions to shareholders were well in excess of net income. These ...
Reforming the System
Buybacks have become an unhealthy corporate obsession. Shifting corporations back to a retain-and-reinvest regime that promotes stable and equitable growth will take bold action. Here are three proposals:
Put an end to open-market buybacks.
In a 2003 update to Rule 10b-18, the SEC explained: “It is not appropriate for the safe harbor to be available when the issuer has a heightened incentive to manipulate its share price.” In practice, though, the stock-based pay of the executives who decide to do repurchases provides just this “heightened incentive.” To correct this glaring problem, the SEC should rescind the safe harbor.
A good first step toward that goal would be an extensive SEC study of the possible damage that open-market repurchases have done to capital formation, industrial corporations, and the U.S. economy over the past three decades. For example, during that period the amount of stock taken out of the market has exceeded the amount issued in almost every year; from 2004 through 2013 this net withdrawal averaged $316 billion a year. In aggregate, the stock market is not functioning as a source of funds for corporate investment. As I’ve already noted, retained earnings have always provided the base for such investment. I believe that the practice of tying executive compensation to stock price is undermining the formation of physical and human capital.
Rein in stock-based pay.
Many studies have shown that large companies tend to use the same set of consultants to benchmark executive compensation, and that each consultant recommends that the client pay its CEO well above average. As a result, compensation inevitably ratchets up over time. The studies also show that even declines in stock price increase executive pay: When a company’s stock price falls, the board stuffs even more options and stock awards into top executives’ packages, claiming that it must ensure that they won’t jump ship and will do whatever is necessary to get the stock price back up.
In 1991 the SEC began allowing top executives to keep the gains from immediately selling stock acquired from options. Previously, they had to hold the stock for six months or give up any “short-swing” gains. That decision has only served to reinforce top executives’ overriding personal interest in boosting stock prices. And because corporations aren’t required to disclose daily buyback activity, it gives executives the opportunity to trade, undetected, on inside information about when buybacks are being done. At the very least, the SEC should stop allowing executives to sell stock immediately after options are exercised. Such a rule could help launch a much-needed discussion of meaningful reform that goes beyond the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act’s “Say on Pay”—an ineffectual law that gives shareholders the right to make nonbinding recommendations to the board on compensation issues.
But overall the use of stock-based pay should be severely limited. Incentive compensation should be subject to performance criteria that reflect investment in innovative capabilities, not stock performance.
Transform the boards that determine executive compensation.
Boards are currently dominated by other CEOs, who have a strong bias toward ratifying higher pay packages for their peers. When approving enormous distributions to shareholders and stock-based pay for top executives, these directors believe they’re acting in the interests of shareholders.
Further Reading
Capitalism for the Long Term
Corporate Governance Feature
Dominic Barton
Steps for making capitalism stronger, more resilient, more innovative, and more equitable.
https://hbr.org/2011/03/capitalism-for-the-long-term/ar/1
That’s a big part of the problem. The vast majority of shareholders are simply investors in outstanding shares who can easily sell their stock when they want to lock in gains or minimize losses. As I argued earlier, the people who truly invest in the productive capabilities of corporations are taxpayers and workers. Taxpayers have an interest in whether a corporation that uses government investments can generate profits that allow it to pay taxes, which constitute the taxpayers’ returns on those investments. Workers have an interest in whether the company will be able to generate profits with which it can provide pay increases and stable career opportunities.
It’s time for the U.S. corporate governance system to enter the 21st century: Taxpayers and workers should have seats on boards. Their representatives would have the insights and incentives to ensure that executives allocate resources to investments in capabilities most likely to generate innovations and value.
Courage in Washington
After the Harvard Law School dean Erwin Griswold published “Are Stock Options Getting out of Hand?” in this magazine in 1960, Senator Albert Gore launched a campaign that persuaded Congress to whittle away special tax advantages for executive stock options. After the Tax Reform Act of 1976, the compensation expert Graef Crystal declared that stock options that qualified for the capital-gains tax rate, “once the most popular of all executive compensation devices…have been given the last rites by Congress.” It also happens that during the 1970s the share of all U.S. income that the top 0.1% of households got was at its lowest point in the past century.
The members of the U.S. Congress should show the courage and independence of their predecessors and go beyond “Say on Pay” to do something about excessive executive compensation. In addition, Congress should fix a broken tax regime that frequently rewards value extractors as if they were value creators and ignores the critical role of government investment in the infrastructure and knowledge that are so crucial to the competitiveness of U.S. business.
Instead, what we have now are corporations that lobby—often successfully—for federal subsidies for research, development, and exploration, while devoting far greater resources to stock buybacks. Here are three examples of such hypocrisy:
Alternative energy.
Exxon Mobil, while receiving about $600 million a year in U.S. government subsidies for oil exploration (according to the Center for American Progress), spends about $21 billion a year on buybacks. It spends virtually no money on alternative energy research.
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Meanwhile, through the American Energy Innovation Council, top executives of Microsoft, GE, and other companies have lobbied the U.S. government to triple its investment in alternative energy research and subsidies, to $16 billion a year. Yet these companies had plenty of funds they could have invested in alternative energy on their own. Over the past decade Microsoft and GE, combined, have spent about that amount annually on buybacks.
Nanotechnology.
Intel executives have long lobbied the U.S. government to increase spending on nanotechnology research. In 2005, Intel’s then-CEO, Craig R. Barrett, argued that “it will take a massive, coordinated U.S. research effort involving academia, industry, and state and federal governments to ensure that America continues to be the world leader in information technology.” Yet from 2001, when the U.S. government launched the National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI), through 2013 Intel’s expenditures on buybacks were almost four times the total NNI budget.
Pharmaceutical drugs.
In response to complaints that U.S. drug prices are at least twice those in any other country, Pfizer and other U.S. pharmaceutical companies have argued that the profits from these high prices—enabled by a generous intellectual-property regime and lax price regulation—permit more R&D to be done in the United States than elsewhere. Yet from 2003 through 2012, Pfizer funneled an amount equal to 71% of its profits into buybacks, and an amount equal to 75% of its profits into dividends. In other words, it spent more on buybacks and dividends than it earned and tapped its capital reserves to help fund them. The reality is, Americans pay high drug prices so that major pharmaceutical companies can boost their stock prices and pad executive pay.Given the importance of the stock market and corporations to the economy and society, U.S. regulators must step in to check the behavior of those who are unable or unwilling to control themselves. “The mission of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission,” the SEC’s website explains, “is to protect investors, maintain fair, orderly, and efficient markets, and facilitate capital formation.” Yet, as we have seen, in its rulings on and monitoring of stock buybacks and executive pay over three decades, the SEC has taken a course of action contrary to those objectives. It has enabled the wealthiest 0.1% of society, including top executives, to capture the lion’s share of the gains of U.S. productivity growth while the vast majority of Americans have been left behind. Rule 10b-18, in particular, has facilitated a rigged stock market that, by permitting the massive distribution of corporate cash to shareholders, has undermined capital formation, including human capital formation.
The corporate resource allocation process is America’s source of economic security or insecurity, as the case may be. If Americans want an economy in which corporate profits result in shared prosperity, the buyback and executive compensation binges will have to end. As with any addiction, there will be withdrawal pains. But the best executives may actually get satisfaction out of being paid a reasonable salary for allocating resources in ways that sustain the enterprise, provide higher standards of living to the workers who make it succeed, and generate tax revenues for the governments that provide it with crucial inputs.
A version of this article appeared in the September 2014 issue of Harvard Business Review.
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William Lazonick is president of the Academic-Industry Research Network and professor of economics emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.
https://hbr.org/2014/09/profits-without-prosperity
Could be, just unfair to him to consider it seriously without knowing for sure.
A jerk if there ever was one.
LOL, just now saw a tv news mention of it, i thought hang on, he played, so searched and read one article ..
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-05-17/scottie-scheffler-handcuffed-outside-pga-championship/103864228 ..
just now, then opened your post to see .. heh.
Hard to understand how Scheffler could have misunderstood the officer's direction.
Have him on my Diehard team this week, so freaked a tiny on first seeing the news.
Thought it may have been after the 2nd round and that he'd have to withdraw. LOL
Yes, should always remember that corporations first obligation is to their shareholders. And corporations tell us it's good to use credit because it is good for their shareholders. It is good for the economy too, eh. Small businesses wouldn't exist if consumers didn't spend.
And of course we know most all those who build wealth do it on borrowed money. So some get into trouble by overextending their means. And most of us are conditioned to want either more money or more material stuff, that's what makes our economies work. And that's where advertising comes in too.
And yes, governments and corporations generally drive trends in how transactions in general will be handled.
i mean i didn't get a mobile phone until the age of 80, and until i was basically forced into it by them putting the landline onto the internet. Then if my internet was down my phone was too. And without a mobile how then was i to call my internet provider to help me get back online. I couldn't. So had to get a mobile. Then, lol, my phone was 3G and now can only use voice on it with WhatsApp (or others there must be), so now am back where i started as far as getting back online if my net goes down. Fingers crossed it doesn't before somehow i graduate lol to a newer phone. LOL
Thing is he doesn't have any answers that would have any chance of success. Do you think he is an active participating member of any of any number of citizen groups in his neighborhood who are working to have an influence on any of the problems that exist. I reckon no. He's like a child complaining about the lack of adequacy of his birthday presents.
You mean he couldn't record the payments in accordance with the law,
or he would have been advertising the fact he had committed a crime.
You mean the only way Trump could have satisfied the law. He isn't being prosecuted for failing to satisfy Bragg. Seems to me your
"Well, the criminal charge is recording the payments to cover up a crime— obviously the only way Trump could have satisfied Bragg would have been to record them as “payments to cover up a crime” — any thing else would be a coverup"
is just agreeing with me, so we come back to why were you suggesting the way it was recorded was of any real interest. I can only see it was a mistake of yours to see it as important.
hap0206, As a matter of fact, didja know, I did about eight months with Price Waterhouse then, when considering
whether or not fixing books for a living could be for me. Decided nope, would rather be reading other types.
Back to the Bragg case: Who cares how the payments to Cohen were recorded. Whether ""severance pay", advice from a trusted friend, general legal services, 'scratch my back i'll do yours, or miscellaneous, i don't see why you place any real importance on how they were falsely recorded. Unless it all was recorded for what it actually was it would have been falsifying business records to exert illegal influence on an election outcome. Seems to me.
"So Mr. chief accountant how do you record such payments -- I would have called them "severence pay" for services rendered -- but when the TrumpCompany got the first invoice from Cohen (now apparently a practicing attorney) it was for a "retainer" for legal services -- retainers are for legal services to be rendered -- so the accountant recorded them as a legal expense -- obviously wrong -- they were for employee services already rendered"
At this stage at least, i don't see what you say there affects in any way the crux of the prosecution's case.
B402, For one, we have settled on the fact you lied about being an independent.
For two, Your anti-dem thing is another sickness, as nothing you say there is true.
There is noting more to say on you, or to you, at this stage.
Hung jury would not surprise at all. Everyone has said that from the start. All your rest is garbage. You offer zip new.
hap0206, Are you saying that the money paid back to Cohen to compensate him for the money he paid to Stormy is not that at all but in fact it is part of a severance package between Cohen and Trump? Is that what you say here:
"That is all BS except for the 12 invoices COHEN rendered to Trump beginning in Feb 2017– I went over these — He was terminated in Jan 2017 and they worked out a severance package of $420k paid in 12 payments of$35k monthly — COHEN called them “retainer for legal services” — they were recorded as for legal services"
That all those who know it was the Stormy money are wrong. That all those payments were just part of a severance package. Is that what you are saying?
Since you know more than all the prosecutors who have been
involved over years, you really should have gone into law.
Your meat is the cheapest of all bologna.
"And you've made no bones about it publicly, dems just want to get trump....."
And that of yours is just another crook conservative talking point. It totally
misrepresents the law of your country going after a serial lawbreaker.
B402, Dems have done it in wrong ways, and should have done it right ... wash, rinse, repeat, wash, rinse, repeat.
How many times have you repeated that new mantra of yours. And every time just empty words, no meat.
Exactly how have Dems done it wrong. And exactly how should they have done it right. Tell us simply in your own words.
Your link gives us nothing at all to add any substance to your empty words.
Fact-Checking Trump’s Remarks in the Hush Money Trial
"Att: hap0206/B402, flashback Day 1, Kirschner knows -
Trump’s attorneys fail MISERABLY in court on first official trial date"
Each day before and after court proceedings, the former president stepped out in front of the cameras and offered his version of the case.
Former President Donald J. Trump speaking outside the courtroom in New York on Friday. Dave Sanders for The New York Times
By Linda Qiu
Reporting from Washington
April 27, 2024
All links
Donald J. Trump spent the bulk of the past week in a Manhattan courtroom, standing trial as the first American president to face criminal prosecution.
He is accused of falsifying business records to cover up an affair with a porn actress ahead of the 2016 election.
Even though he did not take the stand as opening statements got underway, he took to the cameras to argue his case each day the court was in session.
Here’s a fact check.
What Was Said
“He puts in an invoice, or whatever, a bill. And they pay it and they call it a legal expense. I got indicted
for that. What else would you call it? Actually nobody’s been able to say what you’re supposed to call it.”
— in remarks after the trial on Monday
False. Mr. Trump is referring to 11 monthly invoices that are at the heart of the case. Whether or not Mr. Trump or the jury agrees with the assessment of prosecutors, they have been able to characterize those invoices.
According to prosecutors .. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/04/04/nyregion/trump-indictment-annotated.html , Mr. Trump’s former fixer, Michael D. Cohen, paid $130,000 to a porn star, Stormy Daniels, who was shopping around a story of an affair with Mr. Trump. Mr. Cohen says the payment, made just before the 2016 election, was issued at Mr. Trump’s direction. Mr. Cohen then sent 11 monthly invoices to the Trump Organization for legal services beginning in 2017.
Prosecutors have characterized Mr. Cohen’s payment as an illegal campaign contribution, and the invoices as reimbursement intended to falsify business records.
What was Said
“Also the things that he got in trouble for were things that had nothing to do with me. He got in
trouble. He went to jail. This had nothing to do with me. This had to do with the taxi cab company.”
— in remarks after the trial on Monday
False. Mr. Cohen pleaded guilty in 2018 to five counts of personal tax evasion, one count of bank fraud and two counts of campaign finance violations. The tax evasion counts pertained to Mr. Cohen’s concealment of income derived from taxi medallions he owned and leased out. The campaign finance violations were related to his hush money payments to women at Mr. Trump’s behest. Mr. Cohen faced a maximum of 65 years in prison, with the two counts related to Mr. Trump each carrying a maximum of five years. He was ultimately sentenced to three years in prison.
What was Said
“Federal Elections took a total pass on it. They said essentially nothing was done wrong
or they would have done something about it.”
— in remarks after the trial on Monday
False. The Federal Election Commission — which is made up of three Republican-aligned commissioners and three Democratic-aligned commissioners — did drop its case .. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/06/us/politics/trump-michael-cohen-fec.html .. looking into Mr. Trump’s hush money payments after a deadlock vote. But it did not absolve him of wrongdoing.
In fact, the commission issued an internal report from the Office of General Counsel in December 2020. The report said that Mr. Trump, Mr. Cohen, the Trump campaign and the Trump Organization “knowingly and willfully” .. https://www.fec.gov/files/legal/murs/7313/7313_19.pdf#page=68 .. violated federal election law.
But in February 2021, two Republican commissioners voted to dismiss the case .. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/06/us/politics/trump-michael-cohen-fec.html .. while two Democratic commissioners voted to proceed. (There was one recusal and one absence.) The Republican commissioners wrote pursuing the case “was not the best use of agency resources” given that Mr. Cohen had been punished and that there was a backlog of hundreds of other cases.
What was Said
“I’m not allowed to defend myself, and yet other people
are allowed to say whatever they want about me.”
— in remarks after the trial on Tuesday
This is exaggerated. Justice Juan M. Merchan, the judge presiding over the case, did impose a gag order on Mr. Trump, but Mr. Trump is overstating what that bars him from saying.
Under the order, Mr. Trump cannot make statements about witnesses concerning their participation in the investigation and court proceedings; about prosecutors, court staff members or their families if the comments are intended to interfere with the case; or any statements about jurors.
In his ruling approving the gag order, Judge Merchan wrote that Mr. Trump’s statements “went far beyond defending himself” against attacks and rather were “threatening, inflammatory, denigrating,” and targeted toward private individuals as well as public figures.
What was Said
“Alvin Bragg is backed by Soros.”
— in an interview with Newsmax on Thursday
This needs context. A financial link does exist between Alvin L. Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney bringing the case against him, and George Soros, the billionaire and Democratic megadonor. But Mr. Soros’s support was not explicitly earmarked for Mr. Bragg.
Mr. Soros donated to a liberal group that endorses progressive prosecutors and supports efforts to overhaul the criminal justice system — in line with causes that he has publicly supported for years. That group used a significant portion of the money to support Mr. Bragg in his 2021 campaign. A spokesman for Mr. Soros previously told The New York Times .. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/23/us/politics/alvin-bragg-george-soros-trump.html .. that the two men had never met, nor had Mr. Soros directly given money to Mr. Bragg’s campaign.
What was Said
“Look at all the crime we have. And yet they have a big portion
of their office sitting there over absolutely nothing.”
— in the Newsmax interview
This is exaggerated. The Manhattan district attorney’s office employs about 550 assistant prosecutors and another 1,000 staff members, according to its website. In the Newsmax interview, Mr. Trump estimated .. https://www.newsmax.com/newsmax-tv/donald-trump-newsmax-supreme-court/2024/04/25/id/1162491/ .. that Mr. Bragg had anywhere from “12, 14, 18, 20 people from his office” on the hush money case. (Mr. Bragg has assembled six lawyers for the prosecution team .. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/22/nyregion/trump-prosecution-hush-money-trial.html .)
What was Said
“This is all a Biden indictment. It’s in order to try and win an election.”
— in remarks after the trial on Friday
This lacks evidence. Mr. Trump again accused President Biden of orchestrating the legal woes he faces, offering no evidence to support that claim.
Mr. Bragg’s predecessor began investigating the hush money payments in 2018, years before Mr. Biden took office in 2021. As president, Mr. Biden has publicly emphasized the independence of the Justice Department. Moreover, news outlets including The Times have reported that Mr. Biden’s campaign strategy is to say nothing about Mr. Trump’s legal woes .. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/09/us/politics/biden-trump-indictment-documents.html . Federal prosecutors in New York who work for the Justice Department have also declined to file charges against Mr. Trump.
Linda Qiu is a reporter who specializes in fact-checking statements made by politicians and public figures. She has been reporting and fact-checking public figures for nearly a decade. More about Linda Qiu
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/27/us/politics/trump-trial-fact-check.html
Common knowledge, both get corporate $$$s. On the other hand -- Trump, allies are laying the groundwork to contest potential election loss
By Nathan Layne and Alexandra Ulmer
May 16, 20248:52 PM GMT+10Updated 12 hours ago
May 16 (Reuters) - Donald Trump and his allies are laying the groundwork to contest a potential loss in November, stoking doubts about the election's legitimacy even as opinion polls show the Republican presidential candidate leading in battleground states.
In recent interviews, Trump has refused to commit to accepting the election results. At his rallies, he has portrayed Democrats as cheaters, called mail-in ballots corrupt and urged supporters to vote in such large numbers to render the election "too big to rig."
He also backed a new Republican-sponsored bill aimed at keeping foreigners from voting, seeking to link his false election fraud claims with the issue of illegal immigration, even though voting by non-citizens is already unlawful and studies show it is exceedingly rare.
Trump's tactics are an intensified version of the strategy he used during the 2020 election, when his baseless voter fraud claims inspired his supporters to assault the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in an attempt to overturn his election defeat.
Rather than being cowed by looming criminal trials over his conduct in the wake of the 2020 election, Trump is repeating the falsehoods that polls show resonate with his supporters while readying the legal firepower needed to launch a similar challenge to the validity of the vote this year.
His critics worry he is setting the stage for another turbulent post-election period by conditioning his supporters to once again believe the system is rigged against him. Trump has refused to rule out the potential for violence after November's election, telling Time magazine in April in response to a question about that prospect: "If we don't win, you know, it depends."
Trump has instructed the Republican National Committee, now led by his daughter-in-law and a close ally, to prioritize building out a team of poll watchers and lawyers to monitor the vote and litigate potential post-election challenges, according to a person familiar with the matter. As part of that effort, the RNC announced in April that it will recruit 100,000 volunteers and attorneys - double the figure promised during the 2020 cycle. It called the effort "the most extensive and monumental election integrity program in the nation's history."
------
INSERT: joyceschoice, Yep, Flynn should be there, with Trump, Leo, Rufos et al. He had slipped from attention:
...Trump security adviser Flynn resigns after leaks suggest he tried to cover up Russia talks
[...]And Flynn is a friend of the worst political conspiracies.
The Digital General
How Trump Ally Michael Flynn Nurtured — and Profited From — the QAnon Conspiracy Theory
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=173481752
[...]
In February, Flynn stood in a burger joint in Orlando, Florida, to announce The America Project’s most public initiative, “Operation Eagles Wings,” the goal of which is to mobilize and train poll watchers and precinct captains, and to drive get-out-the-vote efforts.
P - [Umm, seems probably to be somehow connected with -- lol, remember also, Cleta --
NEVER FORGET -- Remember also Trump's ongoing anti-democratic plan was always to replace non-Trump people with 'election was stolen'
Trump loyalists in electoral offices nationwide. The name of the woman he put in charge...
[...]Another name i'd forgotten - The Man Who Made January 6 Possible [Johnny McEntee]
[...]AHAHAHA! Got the bitch.
Lawyer Who Plotted to Overturn Trump Loss Recruits Election Deniers to Watch Over the Vote
Cleta, i'll never forget again, chuckle .. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=173322259 .. Mitchell.]
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=173667316
------
RNC lawyers already have filed dozens of lawsuits since last year aimed at limiting the window for counting mail-in ballots and other voting rules seen as giving Democrats an advantage.
"We are working around the clock to ensure it is easy to vote and hard to cheat," an RNC spokesperson said.
[Insert: Should read, ...to ensure it is made as difficult as possible for those likely to vote Democrat to vote.]
Democrats have criticized the recruitment plan as unrealistic and an attempt to intimidate voters, while also building up a legal team.
President Joe Biden, Trump's Democratic rival in the Nov. 5 election, called the prospect of Trump not honoring the election results "dangerous."
"This is absolutely the same play book that he ran before the 2020 election," said Olivia Troye, a former aide to Vice President Mike Pence who became a vocal critic of Trump. "The potential for anger, division, political violence -- all of that groundwork is being laid out again."
A spokesperson for Trump rejected such concerns without directly addressing Reuters' questions about the prospect of Trump contesting election results or the specter of political violence.
"President Trump has always advocated for free and fair elections where every legal vote is counted and any instance of fraud is rooted out," said Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung. "Democrats are the real existential threat to democracy."
STIRRING ELECTION FEARS
Some of Trump's most prominent allies are helping plant seeds of doubt about the election in the minds of his supporters.
Congress's top Republican, House of Representatives Speaker Mike Johnson, last week unveiled the bill aimed at prohibiting noncitizens from voting in federal elections. The legislation, likely to be dead on arrival in the Democratic-led Senate, was a clear attempt to aid the Trump campaign, which has falsely claimed Democrats are allowing migrants into the country to boost their electoral support.
Earlier this month, two of Trump's potential running mates – Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina and North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum – declined in TV interviews to commit to accepting the results in November.
Another, Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio, said in an interview with CNN on Sunday that he would honor the outcome if the election was "free and fair" but said Republicans should be ready to pursue any problems.
One Republican donor told Reuters he was worried the RNC was putting too much emphasis on so-called election integrity initiatives over get-out-the-vote efforts where the party has fallen behind Democrats.
In the midst of a staff overhaul at the RNC earlier this year, the new leadership asked some employees whether they believed the 2020 election was stolen, in what the employees viewed as a kind of litmus test, a person familiar with the questions said.
[Want to keep your job? Lie.]
RNC officials have denied using litmus tests and said questions were asked to test critical thinking about alleged problems with voting in battleground states in 2020.
The loudest voice on the issue is Trump's. Far from being deterred by the two criminal cases he faces for his alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election, Trump has urged his supporters to "go into" Democratic-run cities to "guard the vote" and portrayed 2024 as the "final battle" for his base.
Opinion polls point to a very close race against Biden, with some surveys giving Trump an edge in the seven swing states expected to determine the election's outcome.
At a rally on Saturday in Wildwood, New Jersey, Trump said the only thing Biden was good at was cheating on elections and called Democrats fascists while promising he was "not going to allow them to rig the presidential election in 2024."
For many of his supporters, Trump's messages go beyond mere rhetoric and are taken literally, said Tim Heaphy, the lead investigator on the House committee that conducted a deep probe into the Jan. 6 Capitol attack.
A majority of Republican voters believe Trump was robbed of a second White House term due to systemic voter fraud, Reuters/Ipsos polling shows.
"So when he talks about cheaters and he talks about a rigged election, that is influential," said Heaphy, a partner at law firm Willkie Farr & Gallagher. "As we saw on Jan. 6, there are people out there that will act upon his words."
Former U.S. National Security Adviser John Bolton, who served in Trump's White House but is now one of his fiercest critics, thinks it will be harder for Trump to mount a challenge to the 2024 results.
Unlike in 2020, he will not be the sitting president with the government at his disposal. And after dozens of Trump's allies were indicted for trying to overturn his loss, Bolton says he believes others will be less inclined to do the same this time around.
Adam Kinzinger, one of two Republicans who served on the committee to investigate the Capitol attack, said he was still worried about the possibility that Trump's allies would try to help him overturn a loss, stoking chaos or violence.
"We are in a dangerous moment," said Kinzinger, who retired from Congress last year.
Reporting by Alexandra Ulmer and Nathan Layne, additional reporting by David Morgan, writing by Nathan Layne Editing by Colleen Jenkins and Claudia Parsons
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-allies-are-laying-groundwork-contest-potential-election-loss-2024-05-16/
Ccmmon knowledge, both are. On the other hand -- Trump, allies are laying the groundwork to contest potential election loss
By Nathan Layne and Alexandra Ulmer
May 16, 20248:52 PM GMT+10Updated 12 hours ago
May 16 (Reuters) - Donald Trump and his allies are laying the groundwork to contest a potential loss in November, stoking doubts about the election's legitimacy even as opinion polls show the Republican presidential candidate leading in battleground states.
In recent interviews, Trump has refused to commit to accepting the election results. At his rallies, he has portrayed Democrats as cheaters, called mail-in ballots corrupt and urged supporters to vote in such large numbers to render the election "too big to rig."
He also backed a new Republican-sponsored bill aimed at keeping foreigners from voting, seeking to link his false election fraud claims with the issue of illegal immigration, even though voting by non-citizens is already unlawful and studies show it is exceedingly rare.
Trump's tactics are an intensified version of the strategy he used during the 2020 election, when his baseless voter fraud claims inspired his supporters to assault the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in an attempt to overturn his election defeat.
Rather than being cowed by looming criminal trials over his conduct in the wake of the 2020 election, Trump is repeating the falsehoods that polls show resonate with his supporters while readying the legal firepower needed to launch a similar challenge to the validity of the vote this year.
His critics worry he is setting the stage for another turbulent post-election period by conditioning his supporters to once again believe the system is rigged against him. Trump has refused to rule out the potential for violence after November's election, telling Time magazine in April in response to a question about that prospect: "If we don't win, you know, it depends."
Trump has instructed the Republican National Committee, now led by his daughter-in-law and a close ally, to prioritize building out a team of poll watchers and lawyers to monitor the vote and litigate potential post-election challenges, according to a person familiar with the matter. As part of that effort, the RNC announced in April that it will recruit 100,000 volunteers and attorneys - double the figure promised during the 2020 cycle. It called the effort "the most extensive and monumental election integrity program in the nation's history."
------
INSERT: joyceschoice, Yep, Flynn should be there, with Trump, Leo, Rufos et al. He had slipped from attention:
...Trump security adviser Flynn resigns after leaks suggest he tried to cover up Russia talks
[...]And Flynn is a friend of the worst political conspiracies.
The Digital General
How Trump Ally Michael Flynn Nurtured — and Profited From — the QAnon Conspiracy Theory
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=173481752
[...]
In February, Flynn stood in a burger joint in Orlando, Florida, to announce The America Project’s most public initiative, “Operation Eagles Wings,” the goal of which is to mobilize and train poll watchers and precinct captains, and to drive get-out-the-vote efforts.
P - [Umm, seems probably to be somehow connected with -- lol, remember also, Cleta --
NEVER FORGET -- Remember also Trump's ongoing anti-democratic plan was always to replace non-Trump people with 'election was stolen'
Trump loyalists in electoral offices nationwide. The name of the woman he put in charge...
[...]Another name i'd forgotten - The Man Who Made January 6 Possible [Johnny McEntee]
[...]AHAHAHA! Got the bitch.
Lawyer Who Plotted to Overturn Trump Loss Recruits Election Deniers to Watch Over the Vote
Cleta, i'll never forget again, chuckle .. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=173322259 .. Mitchell.]
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=173667316
------
RNC lawyers already have filed dozens of lawsuits since last year aimed at limiting the window for counting mail-in ballots and other voting rules seen as giving Democrats an advantage.
"We are working around the clock to ensure it is easy to vote and hard to cheat," an RNC spokesperson said.
[Insert: Should read, ...to ensure it is made as difficult as possible for those likely to vote Democrat to vote.]
Democrats have criticized the recruitment plan as unrealistic and an attempt to intimidate voters, while also building up a legal team.
President Joe Biden, Trump's Democratic rival in the Nov. 5 election, called the prospect of Trump not honoring the election results "dangerous."
"This is absolutely the same play book that he ran before the 2020 election," said Olivia Troye, a former aide to Vice President Mike Pence who became a vocal critic of Trump. "The potential for anger, division, political violence -- all of that groundwork is being laid out again."
A spokesperson for Trump rejected such concerns without directly addressing Reuters' questions about the prospect of Trump contesting election results or the specter of political violence.
"President Trump has always advocated for free and fair elections where every legal vote is counted and any instance of fraud is rooted out," said Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung. "Democrats are the real existential threat to democracy."
STIRRING ELECTION FEARS
Some of Trump's most prominent allies are helping plant seeds of doubt about the election in the minds of his supporters.
Congress's top Republican, House of Representatives Speaker Mike Johnson, last week unveiled the bill aimed at prohibiting noncitizens from voting in federal elections. The legislation, likely to be dead on arrival in the Democratic-led Senate, was a clear attempt to aid the Trump campaign, which has falsely claimed Democrats are allowing migrants into the country to boost their electoral support.
Earlier this month, two of Trump's potential running mates – Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina and North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum – declined in TV interviews to commit to accepting the results in November.
Another, Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio, said in an interview with CNN on Sunday that he would honor the outcome if the election was "free and fair" but said Republicans should be ready to pursue any problems.
One Republican donor told Reuters he was worried the RNC was putting too much emphasis on so-called election integrity initiatives over get-out-the-vote efforts where the party has fallen behind Democrats.
In the midst of a staff overhaul at the RNC earlier this year, the new leadership asked some employees whether they believed the 2020 election was stolen, in what the employees viewed as a kind of litmus test, a person familiar with the questions said.
[Want to keep your job? Lie.]
RNC officials have denied using litmus tests and said questions were asked to test critical thinking about alleged problems with voting in battleground states in 2020.
The loudest voice on the issue is Trump's. Far from being deterred by the two criminal cases he faces for his alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election, Trump has urged his supporters to "go into" Democratic-run cities to "guard the vote" and portrayed 2024 as the "final battle" for his base.
Opinion polls point to a very close race against Biden, with some surveys giving Trump an edge in the seven swing states expected to determine the election's outcome.
At a rally on Saturday in Wildwood, New Jersey, Trump said the only thing Biden was good at was cheating on elections and called Democrats fascists while promising he was "not going to allow them to rig the presidential election in 2024."
For many of his supporters, Trump's messages go beyond mere rhetoric and are taken literally, said Tim Heaphy, the lead investigator on the House committee that conducted a deep probe into the Jan. 6 Capitol attack.
A majority of Republican voters believe Trump was robbed of a second White House term due to systemic voter fraud, Reuters/Ipsos polling shows.
"So when he talks about cheaters and he talks about a rigged election, that is influential," said Heaphy, a partner at law firm Willkie Farr & Gallagher. "As we saw on Jan. 6, there are people out there that will act upon his words."
Former U.S. National Security Adviser John Bolton, who served in Trump's White House but is now one of his fiercest critics, thinks it will be harder for Trump to mount a challenge to the 2024 results.
Unlike in 2020, he will not be the sitting president with the government at his disposal. And after dozens of Trump's allies were indicted for trying to overturn his loss, Bolton says he believes others will be less inclined to do the same this time around.
Adam Kinzinger, one of two Republicans who served on the committee to investigate the Capitol attack, said he was still worried about the possibility that Trump's allies would try to help him overturn a loss, stoking chaos or violence.
"We are in a dangerous moment," said Kinzinger, who retired from Congress last year.
Reporting by Alexandra Ulmer and Nathan Layne, additional reporting by David Morgan, writing by Nathan Layne Editing by Colleen Jenkins and Claudia Parsons
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-allies-are-laying-groundwork-contest-potential-election-loss-2024-05-16/
Whew --- Cumberland Council’s book ban has been overturned, but what is really happening in Australian libraries?
"OOps, Au. sad act - Sydney council bans same-sex parenting books from libraries for ‘safety of our children’"
Published: May 16, 2024 3.30pm AEST
Authors Lisa M. Given
Professor of Information Sciences & Director, Social Change Enabling Impact Platform, RMIT University
Sarah Polkinghorne
Research Fellow, Social Change Enabling Impact Platform, RMIT University
Disclosure statement
Lisa M. Given receives funding from the Australian Research Council and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. She is a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia and a former President of the Association for Information Science and Technology.
Sarah Polkinghorne has received funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. She has worked as a Collection Strategies Librarian at the University of Alberta, and is a former President of the Canadian Association for Information Science.
Partners RMIT University
RMIT University provides funding as a strategic partner of The Conversation AU.
View all partners
At Cumberland City Council in the western suburbs of Sydney, one man – Councillor Steve Christou – persuaded the council to ban books about same-sex parenting from the council’s libraries.
The change was short-lived. People fought back. More than 40,000 signed a petition to lift the ban.
Only two weeks later, the Council reversed its decision, voting decisively (13-2 .. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/article/2024/may/15/hate-is-not-a-family-value-protesters-clash-as-sydney-council-considers-rescinding-same-sex-parenting-book-ban ), following impassioned pleas by residents, and with many people protesting on the streets.
https://twitter.com/Leo_Puglisi6/status/1790869609236808049?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1790869609236808049%7Ctwgr%5Eb8ae9bdaf0dc138ef6bef16e2220ec26bf4358e5%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Ftheconversation.com%2Fcumberland-councils-book-ban-has-been-overturned-but-what-is-really-happening-in-australian-libraries-230111
Librarians under attack
Librarians are leaders in the fight against book bans. They have faced significant backlash for their efforts. Australian Library and Information Association CEO Cathie Warburton .. https://www.theage.com.au/culture/books/copycat-book-bans-how-us-activists-are-impacting-australian-libraries-20240509-p5jb5c.html .. has reported that
people are going into libraries, grabbing books off the shelves, reading them out loud and saying
“These shouldn’t be here”, calling librarians horrible names and threatening doxxing
and physical violence. It’s incredibly distressing.
Book banning efforts are often highly coordinated .. https://adventuresincensorship.com/blog/2022/6/4/hypocrisy-and-book-banners . People distribute lists of books that may (or may not) be in the collections of their local libraries. These culture-war attacks on libraries and librarians are often motivated by grievances against progress, such as LGBTQ+ visibility and acceptance, and other forms of diversity.
But they are also part of a wider reactionary movement. The issues extend beyond the specific content of individual books. Calls for book bans are evidence of a broader moral panic that presents a real danger to individuals and society at large.
Libraries and librarians are common targets because they are easy for the public to access, and because they represent (and foster) learning, ideas, imagination, equality, choice and barrier-free access to information for all.
Would-be book banners have very rarely read the books they challenge. When books are read, they are far less likely to be banned.
Histories of censorship
The Cumberland episode is only the latest in the global struggle for freedom of information access. Such censorship dates back at least as far as Shakespeare .. https://pen.org/censorship-history-book-bans/ . The first American book ban occurred in 1637, when Thomas Morton’s New English Canaan .. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-americas-first-banned-book-survived-and-became-an-anti-authoritarian-icon-180982971/ .. was suppressed for its criticisms of Puritanism.
[Insert: Yet today ratbag conservatives are turning history on
it's head by claiming cancel culture is a liberal thing. They are liars.]
The issue remains highly contentious in the United States. PEN America’s latest report shows a 33% rise in the number of book challenges in US public schools, with almost 6,000 instances of books banned since 2021.
The Alabama House of Representatives recently passed Bill HB385. If it passes the Senate, the bill will override libraries’ book challenge policies. Librarians would have seven days to remove contentious material or face criminal penalties.
Australia also has a long history of censorship. Many titles we now consider “classics” faced bans, including Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, James Baldwin’s Another Country and D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. As literary historian Nicole Moore documented, it was once “routine to have your suitcase searched [for obscene materials] on the way into Australia from another country”.
More recently, in March 2023, Maia Kobabe’s award-winning memoir Gender Queer was removed from a Queensland library .. https://theconversation.com/gender-queer-was-the-last-book-an-australian-council-tried-to-ban-its-still-being-appealed-in-federal-court-229026 , and faced many other challenges, globally. Bernard Gaynor, the conservative Catholic activist who led the call to ban the book, is taking the Minister for Communication and the Australian Classification Review Board to the Federal Court of Australia. The decision will come later this year.
Censorship remains a local – and global – concern.
In Australia, many titles we consider ‘classics’ were once banned. Lotus Studio/Shutterstock
Information access for all
Professional librarians have battled these kinds of challenges for decades. The American Library Association, founded in 1876, issued its first anti-censorship notice in 1939, in response to Nazi book burning .. https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2023/10/how-librarians-became-american-free-speech-heroes/ .. and other international attempts to suppress information.
In 1953, the American Library Association issued their Freedom to Read .. https://www.ala.org/advocacy/intfreedom/freedomreadstatement .. statement, with ongoing support for libraries challenging book bans across the United States.
In a joint statement, the Australian Library and Information Association and the Australian Public Library Alliance explain that libraries “defend equity of access to information” and “cater for all members of the library community”.
This position reflects global standards for information access upheld by libraries worldwide. It includes the key principle that the “perception that material may offend or cause controversy to a person or a group of people is not, of itself, a reason to limit purchase or provision of an item containing that material”.
The International Federation of Library Associations states that censorship .. https://repository.ifla.org/bitstream/123456789/2633/1/ifla_statement_on_censorship_2019.pdf .. “runs counter to Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights”. Libraries are expected to:
* provide collections and services that are free of intentional censorship
* base decisions on professional considerations (e.g., quality, currency, format, cost, etc.), rather than limiting based on political or religious considerations or cultural prejudice
* educate people on issues of censorship and encourage them to practise freedom of expression and freedom of access to information
* advocate for removal of censorship restrictions affecting libraries and society at large.
Policies and procedures
Librarians do more than handle attempts to ban books. They develop policies and procedures designed to ensure free access to information, for everyone. They are expert professionals, whose jobs often require difficult selection decisions and challenging conversations with angry or offended community members.
Libraries already have established processes to handle removal requests. They apply guidance from professional associations, including resources like the Selection & Reconsideration Policy Toolkit for Public, School, & Academic Libraries.
Requests to remove materials often start with informal conversations to address concerns and educate complainants about the library’s mandate for equitable access based on the whole community’s needs and interests. A formal process often requires a written submission. Library staff will then reconsider the book in light of the library’s collection policy.
Removing books from a collection does happen, as librarians must ensure the collection remains useful and relevant. Libraries routinely consult with community members and seek feedback to ensure collections match community needs. They also review materials to ensure outdated works (for example, older editions) are replaced with texts that include current information.
These are some of the routine, behind-the-scenes tasks, which collections librarian Scarlet Galvan .. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00987913.2019.1646080 .. explains are critical to ensure “collections are for use, not reinforcing assumptions”.
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The need for community involvement
Librarians rely on individuals and communities to stand up and oppose censorship, as residents did in Cumberland. Vocal community and government support for libraries is critical to battling book bans. Many other professions, such as journalism and teaching, also play critical roles in documenting censorship and countering book challenges.
So how can you help? By signing petitions, speaking up at council meetings, volunteering to serve on a library board, voting for candidates who support libraries, and borrowing books about diverse families to ensure they have a circulation record of being used and valued.
As the outcry over the short-lived Cumberland City Council ban shows, everyday Australians value libraries and the information they provide to their communities. Public support is needed to defend against future attacks and to send a message to governments that banning books is not acceptable.
https://theconversation.com/cumberland-councils-book-ban-has-been-overturned-but-what-is-really-happening-in-australian-libraries-230111