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Twitter's "Country Withheld Content" Policy

2012-01-27T15:23:00.002-05:00

I have to thank @MettaFilms via Twitter for pointing this out. This policy (and policy area) is so new to me that I don't know how to begin to think about it. But it obviously exists, so I thought I'd do what my Twitter friend did for me — point it out.

Twitter has a country-specific censorship policy. Who knew?

Here's the main part (my emphasis):

Country Withheld Content

Why Might Content Be Withheld?

If you have encountered a Tweet or an account that has been marked as withheld, you may be wondering what that means and why that may have happened. With hundreds of millions of Tweets posted every day around the world, our goal is to respect our users' expression, while also taking into consideration applicable local laws.

Many countries, including the United States, have laws that may apply to Tweets and/or Twitter account content. In our continuing effort to make our services available to users everywhere, if we receive a valid and properly scoped request from an authorized entity, it may be necessary to reactively withhold access to certain content in a particular country from time to time.

We have found that transparency is vital to freedom of expression. Upon receipt of requests to withhold content we will promptly notify affected users, unless we are legally prohibited from doing so, and clearly indicate to viewers when content has been withheld. We have also expanded our partnership with Chilling Effects to include the publication of requests to withhold content in addition to the DMCA notifications that we already transmit.

The page goes on to talk about how they love transparency and free expression. Of course.

So I clicked on Chilling Effects and saw their current list of "take down this Tweet" complaints. At the time I looked, all were DMCA-related (there's a SOPA and PIPA element to this; DMCA is the Digital Millenium Copyright Act).

This is from a random complaint. A law firm writes:

The tweet references sheet music of copyrighted compositions written by our clients Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, and alerts Twitter users of a pirate site distributing the sheet music without authorization.

So three points:

1. I have no idea how long this policy has been in effect. Weeks? Years? Most of my mayfly Twitter life? Dunno.

2. It's apparently "illegal" to distribute links; not pirated material, just links.

Is it really illegal? I seriously doubt it, since the link is just a pointer to something, not the thing itself. But the Feds are acting like it is. (More from an earlier pre–Super Bowl instance here.)

Regardless, Twitter is acting as though every lawyer with a suit and an IP complaint can put the kabosh on ... tweets. Guess there's money at stake, and even at Twitter, CEOs must have needs.

3. While this looks like it's just a greedy property-rights squeeze ("My client wants the last dime off the last table in the last room his song is being played") — there's an obvious political angle.

Do the Saudis censor tweets related to, oh, solar power? Anti-Wahhabi teachings? Comments unfriendly to a certain widespread kingly family?

And what are our take-down practices, here in the land of freedom? Twitter again:

Upon receipt of requests to withhold content we will promptly notify affected users, unless we are legally prohibited from doing so...

Wasn't it part of the (delightfully named) PATRIOT Act that when the Feds do stuff to you, you can't be told about it? I lose track of how much freedom I've lost; it changes day by day. Maybe that was in another country, where rule of law's not dead.

This implications of this policy clearly need more investigation, but the policy itself is not in dispute. So here's my due diligence to you — be aware.

By the way, if you'd like to risk your own Internet freedom and follow me on Twitter, I'd be glad to share the risk with you.

Yours in 140 [grayed out] characters,

GP

Ron Paul allegedly signed off on racist newsletters

2012-01-27T13:59:00.000-05:00

Wash Post:

[P]eople close to Paul’s operations said he was deeply involved in the company that produced the newsletters, Ron Paul & Associates, and closely monitored its operations, signing off on articles and speaking to staff members virtually every day.

“It was his newsletter, and it was under his name, so he always got to see the final product. . . . He would proof it,’’ said Renae Hathway, a former secretary in Paul’s company and a supporter of the Texas congressman.

3% GDP growth last quarter

2012-01-27T12:48:00.002-05:00

That's very good. But there still are concerns that the slowdown in Europe may bring us back down.

Goldman Sachs and their partnership with Romney

2012-01-27T11:16:00.000-05:00

While it's not surprising that a high earner like Romney has deep personal links to Goldman, it's still a concern and something to watch out for in the future. He has a lot to personally gain - blind trust or not - by making life easy for Goldman Sachs. NY Times:

DealBook perked up when it saw that many of the assets described in Mr. Romney’s returns were held in blind trusts managed by Goldman Sachs. As beneficiaries of a blind trust, Mr. Romney and his wife, Ann, would not have picked the individual stocks contained in their trusts’ portfolios. But by examining the trusts’ 2010 returns, a picture emerges of how the Romneys have benefited from – and been hurt by – Goldman’s investment decisions. In that year, two Romney trusts – the Ann and Mitt Romney 1995 Family Trust and the W. Mitt Romney Blind Trust – made nearly $2.8 million in combined capital gains from their Goldman investments, according to the trusts’ filings. Almost all of those gains, nearly $2.7 million, were long-term gains made by selling securities that the trusts had owned for more than a year.

Newt's Contract "scam"—How Contract with America co-opted Perot voters into advancing the MoveCon project

2012-01-27T09:15:00.006-05:00

Rick Perlstein has started writing columns again, this time for Rolling Stone, and the results have been excellent. His most recent piece is on Newt Gingrich and the Contract for America "scam." It makes fascinating reading.

He starts (my emphasis & paragraphing; we have narrower columns here at the casa):

Newton Leroy Gingrich is one wily mothertrucker. He's calling his presidential platform this year a "21st Century Contract With America."

It's a wingnutpalooza, naturally, endorsing such “timeless American values” as seeking to "establish English as the official language of government," and reducing the corporate tax rate to 12.5 percent and the capital gains rate to zero; and featuring such "Day One Executive Orders" as the cancellation of all "immigration-related lawsuits against states" and a renewal of "President Ronald Reagan's policy ... to stop taxpayer dollars from being used to fund or promote abortions in foreign country." . . .

The title, of course, refers to the Contract With America, which 367 Republican congressional candidates signed on the Capitol steps in September of 1994. When, two months later, the GOP took over Congress for the first time since 1952, making its architect, Newt Gingtrich, the Speaker of the House, all the world proclaimed that the electorate had just delivered a historic mandate for conservatism.

Well, not really. The Contract With America was a hustle from start to finish. It never really was about conservatism at all – practically the opposite.

Perlstein walks through the process that Gingrich used to focus-group, co-opt, and strip clean all the Perot-voter-issues he could use, in order to repackage himself and his posse as their next-gen faux-non-partisan saviors.

And it worked. Remember, Perot got 16% of the popular vote in 1992. That's a huge pile of voters; rube-ify them and they're yours. The article shows, in laser-like fashion, how he did just that.

The piece is a well-told tale, a nice cohesive story, so I'll add just one more morsel, the part where the rug got pulled (again, my reparagraphing):

An extraordinary but obscure political science monograph by Ronald Rapoport and Walter Stone, Three's a Crowd: The Dynamics of Third Parties, Ross Perot, and Republican Resurgence, reconstructed through interviews, surveys, and documents how Gingrich devised a document micro-tailored to turn at least 70 percent of Perot voters, however fleetingly, into Republicans in time for November of 1994.

"Republicans knew," Stone and Rapoport write, "that the traditional Republican congressional campaign" – which is to say, conservatism – "would be insufficient to get this support." This realization was the genesis of the Contract for America. ... The final product comprised 44 percent "reform" issues, almost identical to the 41 percent in Perot United We Stand checklist (they had made up only 14 percent of the 1992 Republican platform).

Then, Contract in hand, the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee got to work identifying Perot voters in districts where he had done well in 1992, blitzing them with direct mail, phone calls, and door-knocking.

Once Newt gained office, the carefully worded outsider "reformist" document was rebranded the Republican Contract With America ...

... as a straight-up electoral endorsement of conservatism – "the third leg of the conservative revolution in post-World War II America" that began with Barry Goldwater and the Heritage Foundation, which had been in on the planning all along.

I guess that makes us all rubes — the nation's been buying the Republican co-option of Perotian dissent ever since. (Most of us, in fact, have forgotten Perot — wasn't he from Argentina or something?)

A personal note — I called this the MoveCon (Movement Conservative) "project" in the headline, but it's really the Movement Conservative coup, isn't it.

It starts, in modern times, with people like journalist Edith Efron, Justice Lewis Powell, and Nixon Treasury secretary William Simon; plus documents like the Lewis Powell memo (same link; search on "Powell's contribution"). You may remember Powell. He was one of the Yes votes on Buckley v Valeo, which Midas-like turned money into speech.

There's a straight line from Nixon's rise and fall, through the mislabeled Reagan "revolution" (actually counter-revolution) to Bush II and his dream of permanent Republican rule.

The "Movement Conservative project" — power they never give up. Wonder if the national Republicans are watching the Republican War in the States ... or that cute little coup in Hungary.

Perlstein now writes regularly for Rolling Stone. Well worth checking out.

As for you, Newt — your place is secure.

GP

Romney falsely claimed he didn’t know he profited from mortgage crisis

2012-01-27T08:00:00.000-05:00

Romney claimed against at last night's debate that he had no idea his "blind trust" had invested in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and made a tidy sum of money from the mortgage lenders as they were foreclosing on Americans across the country. In other words, Romney profited from the mortgage crisis. National Journal did the fact check, and found out Romney wasn't telling the truth. I won't quote it because it's not very long, go read it for yourself. Bottom line: Romney claimed the investments were in a blind trust (something he's criticized before) and they weren't.

Unemployment in Spain hits 15 year high at 22.9%

2012-01-27T06:27:00.002-05:00

And yes, it will get worse in Spain.

Spain’s unemployment rate rose to 22.9 percent, the highest in 15 years, increasing pressure on Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy to change labor rules and deliver on his election pledge to create jobs in a shrinking economy. The unemployment rate rose in the fourth quarter from 21.5 percent in the previous three months, the National Statistics Institute in Madrid said today. That’s more than twice the euro- region average and exceeds the median estimate of 22.2 percent in a Bloomberg survey of seven analysts. Spain is home to a third of the euro region’s unemployed, according to the European Union’s statistics office, which estimates that half of young Spaniards are out of work. The People’s Party government, which won the Nov. 20 election after a campaign focused on jobs, has promised to overhaul labor and wage rules in the next two weeks to prompt companies to hire.

Newt’s SuperPAC launches another video going after Romney titled "Blood Money"

2012-01-27T01:05:00.000-05:00

Blood money! Get the popcorn.

Video: Finnair celebrates India’s "Republic Day" on flight to Delhi

2012-01-26T22:45:00.000-05:00

While we’re waiting for the GOP debate to end, there’s... Dogs Against Romney

2012-01-26T20:52:00.000-05:00

http://www.dogsagainstromney.com

Video: French prankster arrested for pretending to automatic radar gun on highway

2012-01-26T19:50:00.001-05:00

I'm not even sure how to describe this video. It's cute. Especially when he targets the French cops right at the end of the video, and they arrest him.

PS There's yet another GOP debate at 8pm on CNN. I'll be watching and tweeting about it. You might prefer this French comedian though.

Flip-flop Romney now defender of "life" and "marriage"

2012-01-26T18:24:00.000-05:00

Mind you, he was pro-choice and more pro-gay than Ted Kennedy. But I guess that was inconvenient when running for the head of a party that's gone a tad nuts. So now Romney is the great defender of the unborn and the great chastiser of the gay. From RightWingWatch:

Romney: I think he is detached from reality when he says that he wants to ‘reclaim American values.’ There has been in my view an assault on American values since the beginning of his administration. Clearly from the beginning the assault on life with his abandonment of the Mexico City Policy and with the Vice President being sent to China and saying we understand the one-child policy there and of course the abuses associated with that policy are alarming and disturbing, and then on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade just a couple of days ago he said that the wonderful thing about Roe v. Wade is that it provides an equal opportunity for girls to equal boys, meaning that they don’t have to have a child anymore, if they become pregnant they can get rid of the child and therefore have an equal opportunity. The disregard for the sanctity of human life is absolutely appalling.

Then of course there’s the assault on religion. I think a lot of people were surprised that he felt that the government should be able to determine who is and who is not a minister and fortunately the Supreme Court disagreed with him on that, but now he’s gone forward and said that religious institutions, universities, hospitals and so forth, religious institutions have to provide free contraceptives to all their employees, even if that religious institution is opposed to the use of contraception, as in the case of the Catholic Church. Even in that regard, fighting to eliminate the conscience clause for health care workers who wish not to provide abortion services or contraceptives in their workplace, in their hospital for instance. It’s an assault on religion unlike anything we have seen.

There’s been an assault on marriage. I think he is very aggressively trying to pave the path to same-sex marriage. I would unlike this president defend the Defense of Marriage Act. I would also propose and promote once again an amendment to the constitution to define marriage as a relationship between a man and a woman.

George Soros on "the coming U.S. class war"

2012-01-26T16:23:00.007-05:00

George Soros is one of the smartest investors in the world. Here's a taste:

You know George Soros. He’s the investor’s investor—the man who still holds the record for making more money in a single day’s trading than anyone. He pocketed $1 billion betting against the British pound on “Black Wednesday” in 1992, when sterling lost 20 percent of its value in less than 24 hours and crashed out of the European exchange-rate mechanism. No wonder Brits call him, with a mix of awe and annoyance, “the man who broke the Bank of England.”

The article goes on to note that Soros "doesn’t make small bets on anything." There's quite a lot here, and it's a really good read.

But I want to focus on this (my paragraphing):

Sitting in his 33rd-floor corner office high above Seventh Avenue in New York, preparing for his trip to Davos, he is more concerned with surviving than staying rich. “At times like these, survival is the most important thing,” he says, peering through his owlish glasses and brushing wisps of gray hair off his forehead.

He doesn’t just mean it’s time to protect your assets. He means it’s time to stave off disaster. As he sees it, the world faces one of the most dangerous periods of modern history—a period of “evil.”

Europe is confronting a descent into chaos and conflict. In America he predicts riots on the streets that will lead to a brutal clampdown that will dramatically curtail civil liberties. The global economic system could even collapse altogether.

That's as stark a statement as I've read from anyone with near his credibility. Go back (you who have strong stomachs) and read that again. No sentence was spoken at random.

He adds:

“I am not here to cheer you up. The situation is about as serious and difficult as I’ve experienced in my career,” Soros tells Newsweek. “We are facing an extremely difficult time, comparable in many ways to the 1930s, the Great Depression. We are facing now a general retrenchment in the developed world, which threatens to put us in a decade of more stagnation, or worse. The best-case scenario is a deflationary environment. The worst-case scenario is a collapse of the financial system.”

Note the quotes; Soros is speaking in his own voice, unparaphrased by the writer.

Three short notes, then I'll leave you to your thoughts:

■ We've been warning on these pages about the risk of deflation for a while. It's likely that no one reading this has experienced such a world. To get a sense of life in a deflationary world, try this.

■ About the euro, is this why it bounced off of $1.26 and sits at $1.31 at the moment? (Euro chart here.)

■ About civil liberties and the mental "state of the nation," I offer this thought experiment.

Imagine that there were a second big terrorist attack sometime during Bush II's reign, in 2005 or 2006 for example. The response would have been to shut down the country even further. The experiment — how much further? If the "authorities" wanted to institute exit visas, for example, would the country have objected?

The point is this — the degree of loss of liberty we could experience is not a function of what the American people will tolerate. The American people tolerated Bush v Gore. It's a function of how much loss of liberty the "authorities" (Our Betters) are interested in imposing.

So what is that extent? What's the lower limit to the shutdown, in a world gone into the streets — Occupyers, homeless; browns and blacks; criminals, druggies, the terminally unemployed — in other words, all the Unpeople we have within us?

Again, I'll leave you to your thoughts. Me, could be having a wide-awake night chez moi. (Yet another of George Soros' sins. Thank you, sir.)

GP

Enough with the bashing of the Federal Reserve

2012-01-26T14:55:00.001-05:00

I am tired of all the ignorant Fed-bashing. Sure, they do some things that aren't what some of us might have chosen, but without their actions over the past 4 years we would be up the creek without a paddle. Ben Bernanke may not be a progressive, but neither is he anything like a movement conservative. He is, in fact, a nerd who has spent almost his entire life studying monetary policy.

A little history will help here. I don't think most people who go around hating the Fed know why it was created in the first place. Back about a century ago we had a financial panic (1907 to be exact). That meant everyone was selling financial assets like crazy out of fear that the financial system would collapse and then they wouldn't be worth anything. It wasn't that most banks were actually unable to survive in the long term - they just couldn't survive everyone withdrawing their money at the same time because if they tried to sell their financial assets to cover the withdrawals they would be selling them into a panicked market for way less than they were really worth.

With no Fed on the scene the whole system was in danger of collapse. The savior of the day was none other than JP Morgan. Yes, that JP Morgan, who was the only person around with enough cash to buy all those financial assets so that banks could remain solvent. He bought up all those assets at rock bottom prices, was hailed as a hero and then sold them after the panic was over for far, far more than he paid for them.

The politicians of the day thought this was a bad idea for two reasons. First, there might not always be a JP Morgan around to save the day. Second, in a democracy it is a bad idea to give that much power (not to mention profit) to a single person or entity. The Federal Reserve was created to perform the function JP had performed. So when markets panicked and we needed to buy up shaky assets at a low price, and hold them until they matured, or until the panic was over, we could count on our own public institution to do it. In fact, the public institution could do it better because, unlike JP, the profits from buying panic-sale assets and holding them wouldn't go to a private individual. And more importantly, the Fed has unlimited ability to buy-up shaky bonds since they run the printing presses for money.

Lets be clear what is going on in a panic. Large speculators are making a bet that the system will go down. They are selling, selling, selling in hopes that the system will collapse and they can buy everything back cheaper later on. The Fed's job is to stomp all over this bet and make sure that the speculators lose money trying it. In short, the Fed is saying to the speculators: "Mine is bigger than yours, and if you mess with me I will ruin you."

As an aside, this is precisely the problem in Europe. The European Central Bank doesn't have the power to act as a lender of last resort, so the speculators may well be right that they can sell Euro denominated assets and win against the central bank. If the ECB could buy up all those, e.g., Italian government bonds, all the speculators would get burned and the ECB would have a portfolio of Italian bonds worth far more than they paid for them.

So what would happen if we eliminated the Fed? There are really two possibilities. One is that the next time there is a financial panic the system will simply collapse, and we really will have a reprise of the Great Depression. The second (and probably equally likely) possibility is that a modern day JP Morgan will step into the vacuum, save the day, and make obscene profits while vaulting into undisputed control of our financial system. I'll bet Goldman Sachs would be a likely candidate. How would you feel about that?

So don't get me wrong. I wouldn't do a bank bailout the same way the Republicans under Bush did it. If it were me, we would have nationalized the banks, fired the management, and restructured them as we sold them back into the market. But we would still need a Federal Reserve.

Romney’s standing plummets among independent voters

2012-01-26T13:30:00.000-05:00

Washington Post:

A new Washington Post-ABC News poll highlights the damage Romney has sustained. By a margin of more than 2 to 1, independent voters have an unfavorable impression of the former governor. Two weeks ago, more independents had a favorable opinion of him than an unfavorable view. In contrast, 51 percent of independents have a favorable impression of the president, compared with 45 percent who have an unfavorable view — his highest rating since April.

Romney’s losses since a Post-ABC poll conducted between the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary are not limited to independents. The number of Democrats viewing him unfavorably is up 10 percentage points, and among his fellow Republicans, negative ratings have jumped from 18 to 32 percent. (Prior to his Iowa performance, Romney’s unfavorable number had been higher than 18, but hadn’t been in the 30s among Republicans since early 2008.)

A more optimistic take on the Schneiderman task force

2012-01-26T12:10:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I was somewhat sour on the chances of the mortgage fraud task force that Eric Schneiderman will co-chair of succeeding in producing positive results. I think the reasons for caution remain, but David Dayen reports on a number of new facts which could make positive outcomes much more likely.

In short, Dayen and his sources suggest that, first, Schneiderman's entry into the task force was in no way dependent on his assent to a national settlement deal - he still opposes it. Second, Schneiderman's role in the task force has been constructed to allow maximum flexibility for him to pursue what he thinks is the most fecund avenue for bank prosecutions - the fraud connected to the creation of residential mortgage backed securities (recall that it is securitization fraud which created the need to cover up such frauds through ongoing robosigning criminal behavior). Third, Dayen's sources say if he can't get prosecutions out of this task force, Schneiderman "walk away in the most showy, public manner possible, letting everyone know who was responsible for the lack of prosecutions."

Other positive things worth noting include that Delaware AG Beau Biden remains committed to conducting his own prosecutions and remaining outside the settlement, while California AG Kamala Harris's office reiterated her opposition to the current settlement as "inadequate." While there were many positive statements from liberal groups yesterday, Color of Change and Russ Feingold's Progressives United put out much more skeptical statements. And the New York Times published an editorial where they demanded a meaningful investigation that finally, at long last, held banks accountable for their behavior.

In short, the conditions for success may be better than they first looked, but people are going to be watching this task force closely to see if it actually produces prosecutions of banks and bank executives at a high level. This should be clearly relatively quickly, given the voluminous evidence of bank fraud and other criminal behaviors. Hopefully we don't have to wait long for this new initiative to produce results - and if they are not forthcoming, then we will know that our initial fears were realized.

GOP to decide Florida election rules after Florida votes

2012-01-26T10:43:00.001-05:00

The Florida 2000 election will always be remembered as the one where the GOP and five hacks on the Supreme Court prevented the votes being counted. The 2012 Florida Primary may well end up as the one where the Republicans didn't decide how to count the vote until after the election.

Seeing the drawn out contest between Obama and Clinton in the primaries as giving the winner an advantage against McCain, the RNC designed their nomination contest rules to prevent any candidate getting an early win. According to the RNC rules, states that vote early must allocate delegates using a proportionate system. Only states voting after April 1st are allowed to use winner takes all rules.

The Florida GOP decided to ignore the rules and hold its primary early, causing the party cutting their allocation of delegates from 99 votes to 50. It is also being held as a winner takes all fight. But this is subject to challenge in the weeks immediately prior to the convention.

Two weeks ago Romney had the nomination in the bag and the question of which delegates would be seated was purely hypothetical. The difference between 50 votes and 'some' may now decide the race.

The RNC is left with an even worse choice than the one the Democrats might have faced if Clinton had come close enough to beat Obama. Threatening to disqualify the votes of the largest swing state was an idiotic threat, everyone knew that the delegates would have to be seated whether their numbers made a difference or not. The choice between following state law or the party rules is much more subjective.

The country is in trouble if the Republicans get to run the country with the abject incompetence that they run their elections. Oh wait a second, they already did that for eight years.

US CEO’s at Davos give cold reception to Obama’s tax increase for ultra-rich

2012-01-26T09:15:00.002-05:00

Asking the American CEO's at Davos what they think about tax increases for themselves is like asking Mitt Romney - poster boy for a horrendous tax code - what he thinks about paying his fair share. Of course they're all going to have it and talk about how is starts conflict. Little do they know, the conflict was started by their own crowd when they lobbied to get these tax rates.

The current model of taxes for the ultra-rich is no longer sustainable and it never was in the first place. Spare me the "class warfare" talk because the 99% have been living with it since the Reagan years. Proving yet again how hopelessly out of touch Davos really is.

“We all have to find a better-evolved model than what we have today, and we all have to ensure that capitalism is better connected to society than it has been so far,” Muhtar Kent, chief executive of Coca-Cola, told CNBC Wednesday. He added that he has a “great respect” for the president and the current administration. “By creating that type of conflict I think it's really going to polarize where the US is today. I hope we can get the rhetoric and get onto the real substantive issues that will really have some long-term effect on the country,” Dennis M. Nally, chairman of PricewaterhouseCoopers International, told CNBC.

Romney gave $100 million to his sons and paid zero gift tax

2012-01-26T08:00:00.001-05:00

Mitt Romney has released his 2010 tax return and the inestimable David Cay Johnston, who has had questions all along, got some answers.

If I understand the following correctly, Johnston confirmed with Romney's lawyer that the Romneys paid no taxes on $100,000,000 (that's $100 million) by passing it to their sons as a gift.

Here's Johnston, quoted in a Kevin Drum article at Mother Jones (my emphasis):

Johnston: The Romneys gave $100 million to their sons and paid not one penny of gift tax. They were able to take assets they have that are producing enormous income and, under the law, give that money to their children and not pay any taxes on it.

Sambolin [the interviewer]: Is that something you specifically found in what has been released to you?

Johnston: Yes. I have suspected this and written about it in my column that this is what happened, and last night, Brad Malt, the attorney for the Romneys, confirmed to Reuters that we were correct. They have not paid a penny of gift tax.

That's because Congress allows a very tiny group of people — the Romneys by their income are in the top 1% of the top 1% — to not count as having any value the real source of their income, something called carried interest, if they give it to their children.

Later in the interview, Johnston says that, on a $100 million gift, most Americans would pay $35 million. The Romneys again, pay "zero."

Here's the entire CNN interview:

Drum adds:

The Romney kids will have to pay taxes when they start taking income from the trust their father set up for them — at the usual 15% rate paid by millionaires, of course — but the inheritance itself is blissfully tax free.

Needless to say, I want some too.

Care to have fun for yourselves? Here's a link to that Romney 2010 return (pdf; thanks to GottaLaff at The Political Carnival via Twitter).

Enjoy. Several of those pages hold nice surprises, if you can read a tax return.

GP

Carnival Cruise billionaire CEO is MIA following Condordia shipwreck disaster

2012-01-26T01:45:00.000-05:00

His highly profitable arrangement after Hurricane Katrina was bad, but this is much worse. How can a CEO fail to show interest in one of the worst maritime disasters in years? Sending condolences from Miami is not cutting it. The Independent:

Angry consumer groups are demanding to know why Micky Arison, the billionaire head of Costa Cruise's Miami-based parent company, Carnival Corporation, has failed to make an appearance on the island of Giglio, where passengers' bodies are still being dragged out of the wrecked Costa Concordia. Kendall Carver, president of the US-based International Cruise Victims group, said: "The response, or lack of it, by Carnival is disgraceful. This is a PR disaster for the company." Meanwhile, yesterday, the La Repubblica newspaper, commenting on Mr Arison's low profile, asked: "Who is this mysterious boss and how has he managed to remain like a ghost since the tragedy?" One US lawyer specialising in maritime law, Jim Walker of Walker and O'Neill Partners, said on his blog that Carnival executives "were close behind the disgraced captain Francesco Schettino in trying to ruin their reputations".

Greek military overspending

2012-01-25T23:45:00.000-05:00

It seems to be common wisdom that government spending is the reason for the financial crisis in Greece. But overspending on what?

The graph shows military spending as a percentage of GDP using data from the World Bank [Google]. As you can see, Greece spends considerably more on its military than the other large EU countries, more than twice as much as Italy Germany or Spain and considerably more than France or the UK.

The excessive spending is even more apparent in terms of manpower. The Greek military has 177K active personnel with a population of approximately 2 million males fit for military service aged 15-49. Greece has almost the same percentage of its population engaged in military service as Israel.

I seem to see report after report castigating Greece for its allegedly profligate welfare system but no mention of military spending as waste. Meanwhile is it really a coincidence that Japan and Germany, the two industrial countries traditionally held out as economic role models have the lowest rates of military spending? Or that the Clinton boom coincided with the post cold war 'peace dividend' and the period of stagnation under Bush with two new wars?

Fidel Castro doesn’t like the Republican presidential candidates

2012-01-25T22:15:00.000-05:00

AP:

"The selection of a Republican candidate for the presidency of this globalized and expansive empire is — and I mean this seriously — the greatest competition of idiocy and ignorance that has ever been."

What could I possibly add to that.

Gingrich pledges to build moon base by his second term

2012-01-25T20:41:00.001-05:00

I'll fault Gingrich a lot of things. His love of science isn't one of them. Our country needs to start dreaming again. Planning for a future. The Republicans typically want to focus on war and tax cuts, when they're bashing gays or stopping vital stem cell research. Democrats want to help the poor, and that's fine, but it's not exactly shooting for the stars. Europe had its dream of unification. It may or may not be on the rocks with the issues surrounding the euro and the EU economy, but at least it was a vision, a dream, for the future. What's our national dream? Where do we want to be in 10, 20 years? (And "out of Afghanistan" and "out of debt" isn't a good enough answer.)

Romney: I’m worth "between 150 and 200 some-odd million." He’s not sure?

2012-01-25T18:40:00.005-05:00

Kind of like not knowing how many homes you own. NYT's Michael Shear:

Jorge Ramos, who interviewed Mr. Romney, pressed him on his wealth and on his taxes, and asked him directly how much money he had.

“Between 150 and 200 some-odd million,” Mr. Romney said, looking a bit uncomfortable and referring Mr. Ramos to the financial disclosure reports that his campaign has filed.

It's okay, John McCain didn't know how many homes he had (he said "at least four," in fact he had seven).

Obama puts Schneiderman on federal investigatory task force

2012-01-25T17:22:00.005-05:00

I'd really like to be enthusiastic about the announcement of a new federal investigatory task force looking at the foreclosure crisis.

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, much like Elizabeth Warren, has done enough to show his commitment to holding Wall Street accountable for their crimes to show that his motives are good and his decisions should be trusted. Schneiderman was effectively the first statewide elected official to champion investigating foreclosure fraud, robosigning, and securities fraud in connection to the housing crisis. His leadership is largely responsible for forestalling any bad settlement outcome. That means something in my eyes and so I am willing to trust that he and his staff truly believe that the resources and power that come from working on a federal task force will allow him to do even more to hold banksters accountable for breaking the law.

All that said, there are real questions about what bringing Schneiderman into the fold will actually do. Will there be quick indictments of senior level bankers? Or will the composition of the task force prevent Schneiderman from leveraging power in a constructive way? Abigail Field was the first to note how weak the composition is, identifying major problems with Schneiderman's co-chair and beyond:

Schneiderman isn’t chairing anything. He’s Co-Chairing. That’s a huge difference. If he’s Chair he’s in charge. If he’s Co-Chair he needs consensus. And who is he Co-Chairing with? Four people, starting with Lanny Breuer. That’s unacceptable.

The reason we want Schneiderman in charge of prosecuting is because Breuer, who heads the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, hasn’t done his job. If he had pursued these prosecutions we’d have a lot more justice in this country right now than we do. Why has Breuer failed to go after the people who committed “misconduct and illegalities that contributed to both the financial collapse and the mortgage crisis”? Is it because he’s an ex- (and likely future) Covington & Burling partner? Doesn’t matter. His track record speaks for itself. There is only one reason to have him co-chair with Schneiderman, and that’s to rein Schneiderman in.

Schneiderman’s also got to contend with Robert Khuzami, the SEC’s top law enforcer. Khuzami’s SEC can be called aggressive only when measured against Breuer’s Criminal Division. Having Khuzami on the committee gives the weak-enforcement lawyers two people to Schneiderman’s one. And Khuzami is deeply conflicted because he was Deutsche Bank’s CDO lawyer in 2006 and 2007, peak shadiness times.

David Dayen points out another complication relating to another member of the task force, Tony West, assistant attorney general in the DOJ's Civil Division: he's the brother-in-law of California AG Kamala Harris. Harris is currently sitting on the outside of the bank settlement talks and is the subject to a full-court press by the Obama administration to get back on board. Given that West has no real experience with financial fraud, it's hard to view his appointment to this task force as anything other than a cynical vehicle to put even greater pressure on Harris.

There's a petition on Whitehouse.gov to get Breuer, Khuzami and West removed from the task force. For what it's worth, if the administration wanted to strengthen their commitment to this investigation even more, they would replace those three with people like Nevada AG Catherine Cortez Masto, former SIGTARP Neil Barofsky, or even a prosecutor like Patrick Fitzgerald. These are people who, like Schneiderman, have shown real commitments to investigation and accountability in their jobs.
The whole point of raising these concerns is to help set the table to enable Schneiderman to succeed. If this committee ends up being a paper tiger, its creation will have served to disempower one of the few advocates for real investigations and accountability out there.

David Dayen raises another important and problematic consequence of the President putting Schneiderman on this task force:

More important, this announcement has collapsed the unified wall of objection on the left to a settlement. And I mean COLLAPSED. Just a day ago, activists were getting in the face of their AGs, warning them of the dangers of a weak settlement that provides little in the way of relief to homeowners. Now I have dozens of press releases in my inbox from liberal groups offering huzzahs to the President for this wonderful investigatory panel.
...
Only this isn’t a victory at all, at least not yet. Schneiderman may be trying to work from within, but he’s saddled with a panel full of co-chairs tied to banks with a history of obstructing accountability. The united front of Justice Democrats has been nicked. Kamala Harris, facing enormous pressure to go along with the settlement (she remains opposed at this point), now must contend with being the main big-state holdout AND having a family member co-chairing the investigation panel!

This is a classic Obama move, putting a threat or a rival inside the tent. It happened with Elizabeth Warren and David Petraeus and Jon Huntsman, and it’s happening again. It divides the coalition against a weak settlement, which will at the least shut down state and federal prosecutions on foreclosure fraud and servicing issues. It puts hopes in yet another investigation, one with little chance for success.

There is a real chance that Dayen is right. Of course, the best way to be proven wrong will be if this task force has teeth and starts producing indictments quickly. A good place to start, as Field notes, would be the 18 violations of the Servicemembers' Civil Relief Act which JP Morgan Chase admitted to in congressional testimony - each violation representing a wrongful foreclosure of a service member. These are criminal misdemeanors with up to a year in jail per offense which have never been prosecuted. It's a softball, but speedy indictments for these crimes would be a sign that the task force is going to, at long last, serious about investigating bankster criminality.