BMBS

Fordham University political science professor Costas Panagopoulos and a team of researchers have done a fascinating study of the people at the “Occupy Wall Street” protest in New York’s Zuccotti Park. Some media have tried hard to cast the protestors in negative terms, such as spoiled-brat kids who are too lazy to get jobs.

Several conclusions based on interviews of 300 of the protesters:

• While 60 percent of protesters said they voted for Barack Obama in 2008, 73 percent said they disapprove of how Mr. Obama is handling his job as president.
• Not unexpectedly, given Occupy Wall Street’s assertion that the US political system is adversely affected by an improper distribution of political power, nearly all (97 percent) of those surveyed disapprove of how Congress is handling its job.
• Nevertheless, only 42 percent of the protesters said they will vote for the Democratic candidate for the US House for their district. Fewer than 2 percent of those surveyed said they’d vote for the Republican.
• 75 percent view the tea party movement unfavorably.

The average age of the protestors is 33. “That means for every college student you have a mid-career professional in their 40s,” Panagolopoulus says.

A report by two nonprofit groups — Citizens for Tax Justice and the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy — has uncovered yet more evidence that many of our biggest companies pay no federal takes and even get credits from the government that their lobbyists work assiduously to undermine.

(Below the jump is a chart with a small portion of the list.)

The report demonstrates that 30 of the 280 companies they looked at paid zero taxes or used loopholes to wind up with negative tax rates. Washington’s Pepco Holdings paid the lowest rate of all the firms investigated, clocking in at nearly minus 58 percent.  Forty percent pay less than half of the established rate of 35 percent about which some politicians complain so much. Continue reading →

The markets slipped another 300 points yesterday, more bombs killed Americans in Afghanistan, and the House last night reaffirmed our “national motto” — In God We Trust.

The debate reportedly was quite rich, such as this soliloquy by an Arizona Republican:  “Is God God? Or is man God? In God do we trust, or in man do we trust? …  If there isn’t [a God], we should just let anarchy prevail because, after all, we are just worm food.  So indeed we have the time to reaffirm that God is God and in God do we trust.”

The “motto” is already guaranteed by an Act of Congress in 1956 and was reaffirmed in a Resolution in 2002.

Do they know something we don’t?  Is this our nation’s most important business?

On the deficit/debt issue, are the Republicans just posturing or are they really serious?

In the so-called “Super Committee,” Democrats have worked hard to cut programs, offering a $3.2 trillion compromise.  But their proposal was instantly rejected by Republicans on the panel … because it included new tax revenues.

The Republicans apparently think that their wealthy base — the only ones who don’t use or need government programs — will reward them for this, but it’s a risky proposition to enter negotiations with a no-negotiation attitude.

The Bertelsmann Stiftung Foundation of Germany has published a study entitled “Social Justice in the OECD — How Do the Member States Compare?” It analyzed some metrics of basic fairness and equality among Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development countries.  (OECD is the 34-member Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.)

It ranked America among the ones at the bottom — between Spain and Greece but far below a lot of countries that we popularly consider inferior or “socialist” such as France, Canada and even Britain.

According to this report, we rank very badly on poverty and poverty prevention and poverty among children and senior citizens.  In the Gini Index on income inequality, only Mexico, Turkey and Chile are worse than we are.

A New York Times editorial points out:  “The vast majority of criminal cases are resolved by plea bargains: 94 percent in state courts, 97 percent in federal. For defendants, accepting a prosecutor’s plea deal is less risky than going to trial and possibly being convicted on a more serious charge with a stiffer sentence.”

The system seems to work … as long as defendants Sixth Amendment rights — that a plea is legitimate only if a defendant has had assistance of counsel while considering it — are respected.

When 16 police officers were arraigned at State Supreme Court in New York City yesterday, more than 100 of their uniformed colleagues loudly denounced their prosecution and held a protest in the courthouse.

The unsealed indictments contained more than 1,600 criminal counts, the bulk of them misdemeanors having to do with making tickets disappear as favors for friends, relatives and others with clout. But they also outlined more serious crimes, related both to ticket-fixing and drugs, grand larceny and unrelated corruption. Four of the officers were charged with helping a man get away with assault.

Are the police confusing their power to enforce the law with some self-arrogated right to be above the law?

When a truck driver was pulled over on I-95 near here, he had no idea why.  Police found a body on top of the tractor trailer.

Maryland State Police say a driver saw a man “fall” over a pedestrian overpass and land on top of the trailer on Tuesday afternoon. The driver called 911 and police in Virginia pulled the truck over near Lorton.  The medical examiner has ruled the death a suicide.

The truck was hauling garbage.

Atlantic Monthly has reported on a report that shows that since California enacted its current death-penalty statute in 1978, the state’s taxpayers have spent more than $4 billion on only 13 executions, or roughly $308 million per execution.

As of 2009, prosecuting death-penalty cases cost upwards of $184 million more each year than life-without-parole cases. Housing, health care, and legal representation for California’s current death-row population of 714 — the largest in the country — account for $144 million in annual extra costs.

What lesson to draw – be more like Texas, where it’s surely a lot cheaper to carry out capital punishment, or save money with life-without-parole?

From news reports:

Stamped mail is the category that has declined most steeply in the last decade — 47 percent since 2001. “Standard” mail, the official euphemism for junk mail that until 1996 was called third class, dropped only 8 percent over the same period.

The decline in mail volume has been accompanied by widening losses: $8.5 billion for 2010, and a projection of nearly $10 billion for 2011.