@KochFoundations Koch Brothers Dump Mound of Oil Waste Rising Over Detroit

http://freakoutnation.com/2013/05/18/koch-brothers-dump-a-black-mound-of-canadian-oil-waste-which-is-rising-over-detroit/

One of America's biggest polluters, the Koch brothers, control a company which has produced, "A three-story black mountain of petroleum coke which is covering an entire city block on the other side of the Detroit River." Charles and David Koch are wealthy industrialists who back a number of conservative and libertarian causes including activist groups that challenge the science behind climate change. It doesn't get better than that.

Image: New York Times

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Z Woof from Daily Kos breaks it down:

Petroleum coke is a byproduct of refining Canadian oil sands bitumen. According to an article in the New York Times, Kerry Satterthwaite, a petroleum coke analyst at Roskill Information Services, said, ""It is worse than a byproduct," Ms. Satterthwaite said."It's a waste byproduct that is costly and inconvenient to store, but effectively costs nothing to produce."

The waste byproduct is purchased by Koch Carbon and sold as fuel in Mexico and China. The EPA (the agency the Koch brothers want to dismantle) no longer allows any new licenses permitting the burning of petroleum coke in the United States.

…

Lorne Stockman, who recently published a study on petroleum coke for the environmental group Oil Change International, says, "It's really the dirtiest residue from the dirtiest oil on earth."

Koch Carbon is controlled by Charles and David Koch, wealthy industrialists who back a number of conservative and libertarian causes including activist groups that challenge the science behind climate change. The company sells the high-sulfur, high-carbon waste, usually overseas, where it is burned as fuel.

The New York Times reports:

What is really, really disturbing to me is how some companies treat the city of Detroit as a dumping ground," said Rashida Tlaib, the Michigan state representative for that part of Detroit. "Nobody knew this was going to happen." Almost 56 percent of Canada's oil production is from the petroleum-soaked oil sands of northern Alberta, more than 2,000 miles north.

The Koch brothers are libertarians who many of their supporters tout as patriotic entities upholding the Constitution, etc, etc. When business interests collide with our ground, air and water, then it's safe to say there is no  love for America from the two billionaire siblings. These guys are like the Lex Luthors of politics. This latest episode is befitting of a prison sentence.

More at  Daily Kos. 

rest http://freakoutnation.com/2013/05/18/koch-brothers-dump-a-black-mound-of-canadian-oil-waste-which-is-rising-over-detroit/

@SenatorReid tweets "Where was @GOP outrage when IRS targeted NAACP and Greenpeace during Bush admin?"

from https://twitter.com/SenatorReid/status/334383697388265472?refsrc=email

Senator Harry ReidVerified account @SenatorReid

Where was GOP outrage when IRS targeted NAACP and Greenpeace during Bush admin? Let's address IRS abuse by passing DISCLOSE Act.

Voters trust Clinton over GOP on Benghazi

http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/main/2013/05/voters-trust-clinton-over-gop-on-benghazi.html

PPP's newest national poll finds that Republicans aren't getting much traction with their focus on Benghazi over the last week. Voters trust Hillary Clinton over Congressional Republicans on the issue of Benghazi by a 49/39 margin and Clinton's +8 net favorability rating at 52/44 is identical to what it was on our last national poll in late March. Meanwhile Congressional Republicans remain very unpopular with a 36/57 favorability rating.

Voters think Congress should be more focused on other major issues right now rather than Benghazi. By a 56/38 margin they say passing a comprehensive immigration reform bill is more important than continuing to focus on Benghazi, and by a 52/43 spread they think passing a bill requiring background checks for all gun sales should be a higher priority.

While voters overall may think Congress' focus should be elsewhere there's no doubt about how mad Republicans are about Benghazi. 41% say they consider this to be the biggest political scandal in American history to only 43% who disagree with that sentiment. Only 10% of Democrats and 20% of independents share that feeling. Republicans think by a 74/19 margin than Benghazi is a worse political scandal than Watergate, by a 74/12 margin that it's worse than Teapot Dome, and by a 70/20 margin that it's worse than Iran Contra.

One interesting thing about the voters who think Benghazi is the biggest political scandal in American history is that 39% of them don't actually know where it is. 10% think it's in Egypt, 9% in Iran, 6% in Cuba, 5% in Syria, 4% in Iraq, and 1% each in North Korea and Liberia with 4% not willing to venture a guess.

At any rate what we're finding about last week's Benghazi focus so far is that Republicans couldn't be much madder about it, voters overall think Congress should be focused on other key issues, and Hillary Clinton's poll numbers aren't declining on account of it.

Full results here

rest http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/main/2013/05/voters-trust-clinton-over-gop-on-benghazi.html

Benghazi Leaked Emails Were Edited to Make Obama Look Bad

http://www.politicususa.com/jake-tapper-destroys-republican-benghazi-conspiracy-turns-emails-paraphrased.html

Turns out the press got played again by Republicans. Jake Tapper has the smoking gun of the original email from the Obama administration which differs significantly from the "leaked emails" ABC ran with.

In an exclusive for CNN, Tapper reveals that CNN has the original email sent by a top Obama aide, regarding the administration's reaction to the Benghazi attacks. Tapper reported, "The actual email differs from how sources characterized it to two different media organizations."

"The actual email from then-Deputy National Security Adviser for Strategic Communications Ben Rhodes appears to show that whomever (sic) leaked it did so in a way that made it appear that the White House primarily concerned with the State Department's desire to remove references and warnings about specific terrorist groups so as to not bring criticism to the department," Tapper concludes (my bold).

The email was sent on Friday, September 14, 2012, at 9:34 p.m. and was obtained by CNN from a U.S. government source. Ironically, the email points out that there is a "ton of wrong information" coming from Congress and people who are not particularly informed (waving hello to Congressional Republicans and Mitt Romney):

"Sorry to be late to this discussion. We need to resolve this in a way that respects all of the relevant equities, particularly the investigation.

"There is a ton of wrong information getting out into the public domain from Congress and people who are not particularly informed. Insofar as we have firmed up assessments that don't compromise intel or the investigation, we need to have the capability to correct the record, as there are significant policy and messaging ramifications that would flow from a hardened mis-impression.

"We can take this up tomorrow morning at deputies."

Read the full email here.

Tapper notes how ABC and the Weekly Standard covered the leaked emails, which were "paraphrased" "inaccurately" and "inventing the notion" that the White House tried to protect the State Department:

Whoever provided those quotes and paraphrases did so inaccurately, seemingly inventing the notion that Rhodes wanted the concerns of the State Department specifically addressed. Nuland, particularly, had expressed a desire to remove mentions of specific terrorist groups and CIA warnings about the increasingly dangerous assignment. Rhodes put no emphasis at all in his email on the State Department's concerns.

Previous reporting also misquoted Rhodes as saying the group would work through the talking points at the deputies meeting on Saturday, September 15, when the talking points to Congress were finalized. While the previously written subject line of the email mentions talking points, Rhodes only addresses misinformation in a general sense.

Tapper condemned the leaker as having the agenda to make the White House look like they were protecting the State Department.

This is why we do not run with these stories when they first come out. Consistently over Obama's first term, we found that when the facts come out later (as I pointed out in the new shiny ball IRS scandal story), it has turned out that the stories were being planted in the press. The information was wrong. There was an agenda afloat.

What is even worse for Republicans is that the real email expresses dismay at the uninformed spreading bullcrap. The only people screaming bullcrap about Benghazi were Republicans who sought to use it to win an election.

Another day, another conspiracy debunked. Now, when will the press stop falling for this crap? Note to the media, the next time a "Republican congressional aide" or unnamed source has a smoking gun OMG!!11!!! Nixon Bush scandal, you might want to find a back up source, and get the original documents before being Breitbarted by edited emails/videos/etc.

Will the media apologize to Obama and Clinton? Will the leaker be outed? Will an investigation be set up to find out who misled the public on such a serious matter? We await House Republicans investigating themselves to stop the misinformation leaks.

Update 7:44PM EST: Jonathan Karl, who wrote the original ABC story in which he claimed to have reviewed the actual emails, now admits that he did not read the actual emails, but rather was "quoting verbatim a source who reviewed the original documents and shared detailed notes." As Media Matters notes, Karl's original report read, "White House emails reviewed by ABC News suggest the edits were made with extensive input from the State Department." The emails were not actually reviewed by ABC News.

rest http://www.politicususa.com/jake-tapper-destroys-republican-benghazi-conspiracy-turns-emails-paraphrased.html

heat trapping gas in atmosphere reaches milestone: 400 parts per million

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/11/science/earth/carbon-dioxide-level-passes-long-feared-milestone.html?_r=0

The level of the most important heat-trapping gas in the atmosphere, carbon dioxide, has passed a long-feared milestone, scientists reported Friday, reaching a concentration not seen on the earth for millions of years.

Scientific instruments showed that the gas had reached an average daily level above 400 parts per million — just an odometer moment in one sense, but also a sobering reminder that decades of efforts to bring human-produced emissions under control are faltering.

The best available evidence suggests the amount of the gas in the air has not been this high for at least three million years, before humans evolved, and scientists believe the rise portends large changes in the climate and the level of the sea.

"It symbolizes that so far we have failed miserably in tackling this problem," said Pieter P. Tans, who runs the monitoring program at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that reported the new reading.

Ralph Keeling, who runs another monitoring program at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, said a continuing rise could be catastrophic. "It means we are quickly losing the possibility of keeping the climate below what people thought were possibly tolerable thresholds," he said.

Virtually every automobile ride, every plane trip and, in most places, every flip of a light switch adds carbon dioxide to the air, and relatively little money is being spent to find and deploy alternative technologies.

China is now the largest emitter, but Americans have been consuming fossil fuels extensively for far longer, and experts say the United States is more responsible than any other nation for the high level.

The new measurement came from analyzers atop Mauna Loa, the volcano on the big island of Hawaii that has long been ground zero for monitoring the worldwide trend on carbon dioxide, or CO2. Devices there sample clean, crisp air that has blown thousands of miles across the Pacific Ocean, producing a record of rising carbon dioxide levels that has been closely tracked for half a century.

Carbon dioxide above 400 parts per million was first seen in the Arctic last year, and had also spiked above that level in hourly readings at Mauna Loa.

But the average reading for an entire day surpassed that level at Mauna Loa for the first time in the 24 hours that ended at 8 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time on Thursday. The two monitoring programs use slightly different protocols; NOAA reported an average for the period of 400.03 parts per million, while Scripps reported 400.08.

Carbon dioxide rises and falls on a seasonal cycle, and the level will dip below 400 this summer as leaf growth in the Northern Hemisphere pulls about 10 billion tons of carbon out of the air. But experts say that will be a brief reprieve — the moment is approaching when no measurement of the ambient air anywhere on earth, in any season, will produce a reading below 400.

"It feels like the inevitable march toward disaster," said Maureen E. Raymo, a scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, a unit of Columbia University.

From studying air bubbles trapped in Antarctic ice, scientists know that going back 800,000 years, the carbon dioxide level oscillated in a tight band, from about 180 parts per million in the depths of ice ages to about 280 during the warm periods between. The evidence shows that global temperatures and CO₂ levels are tightly linked.

For the entire period of human civilization, roughly 8,000 years, the carbon dioxide level was relatively stable near that upper bound. But the burning of fossil fuels has caused a 41 percent increase in the heat-trapping gas since the Industrial Revolution, a mere geological instant, and scientists say the climate is beginning to react, though they expect far larger changes in the future.

Indirect measurements suggest that the last time the carbon dioxide level was this high was at least three million years ago, during an epoch called the Pliocene. Geological research shows that the climate then was far warmer than today, the world's ice caps were smaller, and the sea level might have been as much as 60 or 80 feet higher.

Experts fear that humanity may be precipitating a return to such conditions — except this time, billions of people are in harm's way.

"It takes a long time to melt ice, but we're doing it," Dr. Keeling said. "It's scary."

Dr. Keeling's father, Charles David Keeling, began carbon dioxide measurements on Mauna Loa and at other locations in the late 1950s. The elder Dr. Keeling found a level in the air then of about 315 parts per million — meaning that if a person had filled a million quart jars with air, about 315 quart jars of carbon dioxide would have been mixed in.

His analysis revealed a relentless, long-term increase superimposed on the seasonal cycle, a trend that was dubbed the Keeling Curve.

Countries have adopted an official target to limit the damage from global warming, with 450 parts per million seen as the maximum level compatible with that goal. "Unless things slow down, we'll probably get there in well under 25 years," Ralph Keeling said.

Yet many countries, including China and the United States, have refused to adopt binding national targets. Scientists say that unless far greater efforts are made soon, the goal of limiting the warming will become impossible without severe economic disruption.

"If you start turning the Titanic long before you hit the iceberg, you can go clear without even spilling a drink of a passenger on deck," said Richard B. Alley, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University. "If you wait until you're really close, spilling a lot of drinks is the best you can hope for."

Climate-change contrarians, who have little scientific credibility but are politically influential in Washington, point out that carbon dioxide represents only a tiny fraction of the air — as of Thursday's reading, exactly 0.04 percent. "The CO₂ levels in the atmosphere are rather undramatic," a Republican congressman from California, Dana Rohrabacher, said in a Congressional hearing several years ago.

But climate scientists reject that argument, saying it is like claiming that a tiny bit of arsenic or cobra venom cannot have much effect. Research shows that even at such low levels, carbon dioxide is potent at trapping heat near the surface of the earth.

"If you're looking to stave off climate perturbations that I don't believe our culture is ready to adapt to, then significant reductions in CO₂ emissions have to occur right away," said Mark Pagani, a Yale geochemist who studies climates of the past. "I feel like the time to do something was yesterday."

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 10, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated the amount of carbon dioxide in the air as of Thursday's reading from monitors. It is .04 percent, not .0004 percent.
rest http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/11/science/earth/carbon-dioxide-level-passes-long-feared-milestone.html?_r=0

MSNBC Host Confronts Rubio For Hypocrisy Over IRS Claims

http://thinkprogress.org/media/2013/05/16/2021331/msnbc-host-confronts-rubio-for-hypocrisy-over-irs-claims/

photo: taxpayer-funded police guarding Koch Bros retreat where they planned to funnel mils $$ into 2012 election

from http://wallstreetonparade.com/2013/05/today%E2%80%99s-irs-scandal-dates-back-to-1959/

taxpayer-funded police guarding a billionaires' gathering to keep the public in the dark about the hundreds of millions of dollars they planned to funnel into the 2012 election — much of it through "social welfare" organizations.

Riverside County Sheriff officers guard the entrance to a Rancho Mirage, California luxury resort where the Koch brothers held their January 2011 political strategy confab. Photo courtesy of Michael Cline, ClineFoto.com

IRS scandal: avg citizen cannot compete with flood of money flowing in from Koch funded 501(c)(3)'s

from http://wallstreetonparade.com/2013/05/today%E2%80%99s-irs-scandal-dates-back-to-1959/

To rational folks, the real scandal at the IRS is that corporate front groups – who want to bust unions, pollute the water and air with impunity, and kill Social Security in order to eliminate the corporate match of the Social Security tax – are allowed to register with the IRS as social welfare organizations, receive tax-exempt status, and then funnel tens of millions of dollars into political attack ads in order to elect candidates sympathetic to their corporate deregulatory agenda. These so-called social welfare organizations are allowed to do all this while drawing a black curtain around the names of their corporate donors.

On April 9, 2013, the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) filed a petition with the IRS that mapped out the real scandal taking place at the IRS – the scandal that right wing media don't want you to think about as they work to spin the IRS story into Watergate – without the break-ins.

As CREW outlines to the IRS in their petition to correct the rules, in the Revenue Act of 1913, Congress provided a tax exemption for organizations "operated exclusively for the promotion of social welfare." Under the many recodifications over the years, Congress maintained that pivotal word "exclusively." The current version of the code reads as follows:

"Civil leagues or organizations not organized for profit but operated exclusively for the promotion of social welfare…and the net earnings of which are devoted exclusively to charitable, educational, or recreational purposes."

Before 1959, the IRS enforced its rules in line with the law and Congressional intent. But even though the law did not change in 1959, the IRS changed its interpretation of what that law actually meant. It wrote regulations that removed the "operated exclusively for the promotion of social welfare" requirement and flipped it on its head to mean "primarily engaged."

Today, every manner of corporate front group is interpreting that loophole to mean they can spend up to 49 percent of their total expenditures in a tax year on political campaign activities. At the same time, these tax exempt groups, known as 501(c)(4) organizations, do not have to publicly disclose the names of their donors.

The next corporate coup came in 2010 when the U.S. Supreme Court enshrined unlimited spending in political campaigns by corporations with its Federal Elections Commission v Citizens United decision.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Karl Rove's Crossroads GPS – structured as a 501(c)(4) "social welfare" organization spent $70,968,744 on political activities in the 2012 election cycle. Four 501(c)(4) organizations dominated outside spending in the 2012 election cycle and not one was backing a progressive candidate.

According to the CREW petition to the IRS, Rove's Crossroads GPS, "Americans for Prosperity, founded by the Koch brothers; Americans for Tax Reform, founded by Grover Norquist; and the American Future Fund, founded by Nick Ryan, a longtime political advisor to former Republican Iowa Congressman Jim Nussle," all formed as 501(c)(4)s, and together with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a 501(c)(6) trade association, spent $295 million on political activities since the beginning of 2011.

It is impossible for the average citizen to compete with corporate money in elections; to have their voice heard above the cacophony of corporate funded attack ads. To allow corporate front groups to masquerade as social welfare organizations is nothing less than Orwellian.

The IRS should act quickly on CREW's petition and conform its rulemaking to the law.

————-

To give you an idea of where the country is headed under Citizens United and the IRS recognizing corporate political fronts as social welfare organizations, we asked photographer Michael Cline of ClineFoto.com if we might use one of his photos taken outside the posh resort in Rancho Mirage, California during the January 2011 secret political strategizing conference held by billionaires Charles and David Koch – majority owners of one of the largest private corporations in the world, Koch Industries, and each worth $34 billion according to Forbes. Mr. Cline has graciously allowed us to publish this photo of taxpayer-funded police guarding a billionaires' gathering to keep the public in the dark about the hundreds of millions of dollars they planned to funnel into the 2012 election — much of it through "social welfare" organizations.

Riverside County Sheriff officers guard the entrance to a Rancho Mirage, California luxury resort where the Koch brothers held their January 2011 political strategy confab. Photo courtesy of Michael Cline, ClineFoto.com

rest at http://wallstreetonparade.com/2013/05/today%E2%80%99s-irs-scandal-dates-back-to-1959/

Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS is structured as a 501(c)(4) “social welfare” organization? IRS scandal is a non scandal.

from http://wallstreetonparade.com/2013/05/today%E2%80%99s-irs-scandal-dates-back-to-1959/

To rational folks, the real scandal at the IRS is that corporate front groups – who want to bust unions, pollute the water and air with impunity, and kill Social Security in order to eliminate the corporate match of the Social Security tax – are allowed to register with the IRS as social welfare organizations, receive tax-exempt status, and then funnel tens of millions of dollars into political attack ads in order to elect candidates sympathetic to their corporate deregulatory agenda. These so-called social welfare organizations are allowed to do all this while drawing a black curtain around the names of their corporate donors.

On April 9, 2013, the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) filed a petition with the IRS that mapped out the real scandal taking place at the IRS – the scandal that right wing media don't want you to think about as they work to spin the IRS story into Watergate – without the break-ins.

As CREW outlines to the IRS in their petition to correct the rules, in the Revenue Act of 1913, Congress provided a tax exemption for organizations "operated exclusively for the promotion of social welfare." Under the many recodifications over the years, Congress maintained that pivotal word "exclusively." The current version of the code reads as follows:

"Civil leagues or organizations not organized for profit but operated exclusively for the promotion of social welfare…and the net earnings of which are devoted exclusively to charitable, educational, or recreational purposes."

Before 1959, the IRS enforced its rules in line with the law and Congressional intent. But even though the law did not change in 1959, the IRS changed its interpretation of what that law actually meant. It wrote regulations that removed the "operated exclusively for the promotion of social welfare" requirement and flipped it on its head to mean "primarily engaged."

Today, every manner of corporate front group is interpreting that loophole to mean they can spend up to 49 percent of their total expenditures in a tax year on political campaign activities. At the same time, these tax exempt groups, known as 501(c)(4) organizations, do not have to publicly disclose the names of their donors.

The next corporate coup came in 2010 when the U.S. Supreme Court enshrined unlimited spending in political campaigns by corporations with its Federal Elections Commission v Citizens United decision.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Karl Rove's Crossroads GPS – structured as a 501(c)(4) "social welfare" organization spent $70,968,744 on political activities in the 2012 election cycle. Four 501(c)(4) organizations dominated outside spending in the 2012 election cycle and not one was backing a progressive candidate.

According to the CREW petition to the IRS, Rove's Crossroads GPS, "Americans for Prosperity, founded by the Koch brothers; Americans for Tax Reform, founded by Grover Norquist; and the American Future Fund, founded by Nick Ryan, a longtime political advisor to former Republican Iowa Congressman Jim Nussle," all formed as 501(c)(4)s, and together with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a 501(c)(6) trade association, spent $295 million on political activities since the beginning of 2011.

It is impossible for the average citizen to compete with corporate money in elections; to have their voice heard above the cacophony of corporate funded attack ads. To allow corporate front groups to masquerade as social welfare organizations is nothing less than Orwellian.

The IRS should act quickly on CREW's petition and conform its rulemaking to the law.

————-

To give you an idea of where the country is headed under Citizens United and the IRS recognizing corporate political fronts as social welfare organizations, we asked photographer Michael Cline of ClineFoto.com if we might use one of his photos taken outside the posh resort in Rancho Mirage, California during the January 2011 secret political strategizing conference held by billionaires Charles and David Koch – majority owners of one of the largest private corporations in the world, Koch Industries, and each worth $34 billion according to Forbes. Mr. Cline has graciously allowed us to publish this photo of taxpayer-funded police guarding a billionaires' gathering to keep the public in the dark about the hundreds of millions of dollars they planned to funnel into the 2012 election — much of it through "social welfare" organizations.

rest at http://wallstreetonparade.com/2013/05/today%E2%80%99s-irs-scandal-dates-back-to-1959/

REAL IRS scandal - non social welfare orgs with intent to bust unions and lobby with millions of $$$ pose as tax exempt

from http://wallstreetonparade.com/2013/05/today%E2%80%99s-irs-scandal-dates-back-to-1959/

To rational folks, the real scandal at the IRS is that corporate front groups – who want to bust unions, pollute the water and air with impunity, and kill Social Security in order to eliminate the corporate match of the Social Security tax – are allowed to register with the IRS as social welfare organizations, receive tax-exempt status, and then funnel tens of millions of dollars into political attack ads in order to elect candidates sympathetic to their corporate deregulatory agenda. These so-called social welfare organizations are allowed to do all this while drawing a black curtain around the names of their corporate donors.

On April 9, 2013, the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) filed a petition with the IRS that mapped out the real scandal taking place at the IRS – the scandal that right wing media don't want you to think about as they work to spin the IRS story into Watergate – without the break-ins.

As CREW outlines to the IRS in their petition to correct the rules, in the Revenue Act of 1913, Congress provided a tax exemption for organizations "operated exclusively for the promotion of social welfare." Under the many recodifications over the years, Congress maintained that pivotal word "exclusively." The current version of the code reads as follows:

"Civil leagues or organizations not organized for profit but operated exclusively for the promotion of social welfare…and the net earnings of which are devoted exclusively to charitable, educational, or recreational purposes."

Before 1959, the IRS enforced its rules in line with the law and Congressional intent. But even though the law did not change in 1959, the IRS changed its interpretation of what that law actually meant. It wrote regulations that removed the "operated exclusively for the promotion of social welfare" requirement and flipped it on its head to mean "primarily engaged."

Today, every manner of corporate front group is interpreting that loophole to mean they can spend up to 49 percent of their total expenditures in a tax year on political campaign activities. At the same time, these tax exempt groups, known as 501(c)(4) organizations, do not have to publicly disclose the names of their donors.

rest at http://wallstreetonparade.com/2013/05/today%E2%80%99s-irs-scandal-dates-back-to-1959/

Colleges Are Providing More Financial Aid To Rich Kids Than Poor Kids

http://www.businessinsider.com/colleges-are-providing-more-financial-aid-to-rich-kids-than-poor-kids-2013-5?nr_email_referer=1&utm_source=Triggermail&utm_medium=email&utm_term=Business%20Insider%20Select&utm_campaign=Business%20Insider%20Select%202013-05-16&utm_content=emailshare

Neat fact: If the federal government were to take all of the money it pours into various forms of financial aid each year, it could go ahead and make tuition free, or close to it, for every student at every public college in the country. 

Will it ever happen? Ha. Not unless Bernie Sanders somehow leads a Latin American-style coup down Pennsylvania Avenue.

But one of the reasons I argued for the idea a couple of months back was that it would allow us to finally stop burning money subsidizing obscenely expensive tuition at dubiously worthwhile private institutions. At the time, I singled out the for-profit college industry, which has been rightfully savaged for devouring federal aid dollars while charging poor students backbreaking prices. 

Today, though, I'd like to apologize to the University of Phoenix and its kin. It seems there are plenty of traditional, non-profit colleges leeching off the system as well. 

For proof, see the demoralizing report released this week by Stephen Burd of the New America Foundation on the state of financial aid in higher ed. It documents the obscene prices some of the poorest undergraduates are asked to pay at hundreds of educational institutions across the country, even as these same schools lavish discounts on the children of wealthier families in order to lure them onto campus.  

And here's the key bit: Many colleges, he argues, appear to be playing an "elaborate shell game," relying on federal grants to cover the costs of needy students while using their own resources to furnish aid to richer undergrads. 

"With their relentless pursuit of prestige and revenue," Burd writes, "the nation's public and private four-year colleges and universities are in danger of shutting down what has long been a pathway to the middle class for low-income and working-class students."

Give to the Rich, Overcharge the Poor

Burd's paper isn't an indictment of the entire higher ed establishment — just a startlingly large portion of it. Many of the worst offenders he identifies are small, private colleges with meager financial resources, or public schools concentrated in a handful of states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina that have moved to what's called a "high tuition, high aid," model. The theory was that, in a time of tight state budgets, charging wealthy students exorbitantly would allow them to charge poorer students reasonably. 

It hasn't worked out that way. Unlike twenty years ago, Burd explains, it is now more common for colleges to hand out aid packages based on "merit" rather than financial need. And "merit" is often a rather nebulous concept.

U.S. Department of Education, New America Foundation

Sometimes, colleges (and states) really are just competing to outbid each other on star students. But there are also economic incentives at play, particularly for small, endowment-poor institutions. "After all," Burd writes, "it's more profitable for schools to provide four scholarships of $5,000 each to induce affluent students who will be able to pay the balance than it is to provide a single $20,000 grant to one low-income student." The study notes that, according to the Department of Education's most recent study, 19% of undergrads at four-year colleges received merit aid despite scoring under 700 on the SAT. Their only merit, in some cases, might well have been mom and dad's bank account.

There's nothing inherently wrong with handing out tuition breaks to the middle class, or even the rich. The problem is that it seems to be happening at the expense of the poor. At 89% of the 479 private colleges Burd examined, students from families earning less than $30,000 a year were charged an average "net price" of more than $10,000 annually — "net price" being the full annual cost of attendance minus all institutional and government aid. Less technically, it's what students can actually expect to pay. At 60 percent of private colleges, that net price was more than $15,000. 

In other words, low-income families are routinely being asked to fork over more than half of their annual income for the privilege of sending their child off to campus for a year. 

Feeding Off the Government

Many these institutions didn't just soak poor students; they also enrolled them in droves, collecting taxpayer dollars in the process. Burd identified 287 private colleges where more than a quarter of the student body received federal Pell Grants, which go to undergrads from low-income and working class families. These schools charged families earning under $30,000 a median net price, again, of more than $15,000. 

This scatterplot graph of private colleges (interactive version here) reveals the extent of the problem. The dots in blue show schools where more than 15 percent of students received Pell Grants, and students from low-income families were charged a net price of more than $10,000 a year. In total, these troublesome institutions make up 80 percent of the private colleges Burd analyzed.

Tableau

A quick perusal of this list from The New York Times shows that many of these "high-Pell, high-net-price" schools, as Burd calls them, do in fact hand out generous amounts of merit aid to undergrads. For example:

• At Georgia's Berry College, 30 percent of students receive Pell Grants, and low-income students pay an average net price of $16,174. Yet 25 percent of its freshmen also receive merit aid, averaging more than $10,000 a piece.

• At Wabash College in Indiana, 28 percent of students receive Pell Grants, and low-income students pay an average of $15,480. Yet 12 percent of its freshmen get merit aid, averaging $15,393 each.

• At Case Western Reserve, one of the better known institutions among the high-pell, high-net-price schools, 23 percent of students receive Pell Grants grants, and low-income undergrads pay $18,381 on average. And yet 19 percent of freshmen also receive merit aid, averaging $18,359 each. 

These schools are accepting government money meant to make college accessible for low-income Americans, yet still charge them extravagantly. Meanwhile, they continue to hand aid off to wealthier students, either because they score higher on the SAT or bring in extra revenue. It's hard to imagine a more surefire way that colleges could undermine the public trust. 

Hard to Justify

It is possible that some of these institutions are charging their low-income students less than the data suggests. Net-price takes into account the cost of room and board, and at some schools, needier undergrads may be choosing to commute to campus. A survey by student lender Sallie Mae suggested that 40 percent of four-year private college students lived at home. But if the theoretical cost of housing really is artificially inflating their net cost data, it's up to college presidents to make that case persuasively. 

Otherwise, it's hard to think of a justification for their behavior. Could it be that their prices are worth it, that the educations they provide justify the eye-popping cost? It's hard to say definitively. But I'm hoping to put that possibility to the test in the coming week by matching Burd's data against graduation and student loan default rates. In the meantime, the preponderance of evidence seems to suggest that many private colleges are either undercutting the intent of the Pell program, if not abusing it outright.

As a general rule, this problem seems to be much less severe at public colleges. At roughly three-quarters of the state schools Burd examined, low-income students paid a net price of under $10,000. Almost half of those where they paid more were located in just eight states, where the experiments with the "high tuition, high aid" model seem to have gone awry. 

When we sufficiently fund our public institutions of higher ed, in other words, it really does keep prices low for the students who need it. Something to consider.

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these "pro immigration" orgs must speak out against Heritage assertions otherwise its implicit endorsement

http://thinkprogress.org/immigration/2013/05/14/2007231/anti-immigration-groups-refuse-to-condemn-heritage-authors-racism/

When the Heritage Foundation released its report claiming that the new immigration legislation – erroneously called amnesty in the report – would cost taxpayers $6.3 trillion, they probably didn't expect it to go over as poorly as it did.

Not only did conservative politicians, think tanks, and economists (not to mention progressives) fight back against the "data" in the report, it also came to light that the report's author Jason Richwine previously insisted that non-white immigrants, particularly Latinos, have a genetically lower IQ than their white counterparts. Such blatant support for a racism-based argument against immigration chased away most remaining champions of the Heritage-Richwine report. The backlash was so intense that Richwine "resigned " his position from the conservative think tank.

And yet, the John Tanton Network of anti-immigrant organizations has not condemned Richwine who appears to be an old school eugenicist. The three main organizations associated with Tanton – NumbersUSA, Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), and Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) – all include as part of their mission statements the assertion that they are pro-immigrant or supportive of legal immigrants. Based on their collective reaction to Richwine, however, this claim is categorically untrue.

Since Richwine's resignation, NumbersUSA has maintained its blog posts on the Heritage report, has left up tweets supporting and promoting it, and has not spoken out against Richwine or the ideals he holds.

NumbersUSA insists that it supports immigration and immigrants but is against illegal immigration. That position is suspect given founder and president Roy Beck's history of work with white nationalist publications like The Social Contract and VDARE. It seems like condemning Richwine's IQ argument would be a good way to prove that the organization is not, in fact, anti-immigrant.

It appears as though the Federation for American Immigration Reform's original post about the report on FAIRus.org has been scrubbed down to simply say "Heritage Foundation: Amnesty to cost taxpayers $6.3 trillion!" One can assume that the original url did not display a page so bereft of language, graphics, or any opinion whatsoever.

FAIR has not commented on Richwine's history of writing anti-Latino policy prescriptions, even though its website insists that "FAIR believes America can and must have an immigration policy that is nondiscriminatory." FAIR's post on Facebook is still up and circulating among its supporters and their initial tweet promoting the report is still live.

Center for Immigration Studies' (CIS) president Mark Krikorian tweeted links to the Heritage report and CIS retweeted him, but other than this small Twitter effort the organization was silent on the report and the subsequent controversy. Krikorian is a frequent contributor to National Review Online but while he has not come out in support of or against Heritage or Richwine, his colleague (and former McCain campaign staffer) economist Douglas Holtz-Eakin did write a takedown of the Heritage report at NRO.

CIS bills itself as "low-immigration, pro-immigrant" but still doesn't see itself as pro-immigrant enough to officially state that it is repugnant to say that immigrants are genetically inferior to white Americans.

If these organizations are truly pro-immigrant, they must speak out against Richwine's assertions. Not doing so is an implicit endorsement of those sentiments.

Our guest blogger is Melinda Warner, a Senior Advisor with Fernandez Advisors where she directs their research initiatives.

rest http://thinkprogress.org/immigration/2013/05/14/2007231/anti-immigration-groups-refuse-to-condemn-heritage-authors-racism/

@gop wants to court Latinos but still swear by Heritage study saying they're basically low IQ drains on economy

http://thinkprogress.org/immigration/2013/05/14/2008511/anti-immigrant-house-republicans/

At a press conference Tuesday, the key House Republicans working against immigration reform outlined their central arguments against the bipartisan bill moving through the Senate. While other House Republicans have embraced a path to citizenship, Reps. Steve King (R-IA) , Louie Gohmert (R-TX), Paul Gosar (R-AZ), Mo Brooks (R-AL), John Fleming (R-LA), Steve Stockman (R-TX), Lou Barletta (R-PA) and Lamar Smith (R-TX), have come out firmly against it.

Six congressman spoke Tuesday, touting the Heritage Foundation's report on the costs of immigration reform, which was coauthored by a man who once argued Hispanics have a lower IQ. The co-author Jason Richwine has since resigned from Heritage.

But their arguments against the bill did not end with citing a discredited study. Here were their worst points:

1. King and Brooks cite Heritage, which has been panned by the right: "At no stage in their lives does the universe of those who would receive amnesty make a net financial contribution to this country, not a single stage, all those years," King said. "That's off Heritage Foundation report which many of you are familiar with." Later, Brooks cited the core talking point from the study, that reform "costs American tax payers a 50-year net tax loss of $6.3 trillion."

2. King thinks he could do Secretary Janet Napolitano's job better: "I can tell you I could secure this border with the resources that we have in less than five years if you gave me Janet Napolitano's job and a president that didn't tie my hands." The border is actually more secure than ever before.

3. Gohmert doubles down on his assertion that radical Islamists come across the border by adopting "Hispanic-sounding names": "For those who made fun of me for commenting that we had radical Islamists that came across our borders trying to blend in with Hispanics, all they needed to do was get off their lazy rears and do a little research and find out the director of the FBI previously testified before our committee that you had radical Islamists who adopted Hispanic-sounding names, would go to places like Mexico, get identification papers, then try to blend in as if they were Latin Americans or Hispanic Americans and come across our border."

4. Gohmert suggests 11 million undocumented immigrants may be a threat to national security. However, the Gang of Eight bill mandates background checks: "[D]o you think the system would be better if we add 11 million more people all of a sudden instantaneously for the FBI to check out and make sure they are not going to be a threat? There will be threats involved in that just as we saw in Boston when we had people who were linked to either terrorists or terrorism that were questioned."

5. Gosar ignores legal immigration from the rest of the world: "We have to be sure we are embracing proper legal immigration. I'm a product of legal immigration. Both my grandparents came from Europe through Ellis Island. So we are a great melting pot of people."

6. Brooks argues only rich immigrants should be allowed to arrive to the U.S.: America must limit immigrants to net tax producers, i.e., those people who we have confidence in who will generate more in taxes than they consume." It is a myth that working class immigrants are "takers;" immigrants consume less in public resources and contribute taxes and to the labor force.

rest http://thinkprogress.org/immigration/2013/05/14/2008511/anti-immigrant-house-republicans/

@gop under George W. Bush IRS went after the NAACP, Greenpeace and even a liberal church

http://www.salon.com/2013/05/14/when_the_irs_targeted_liberals/

While few are defending the Internal Revenue Service for targeting some 300 conservative groups, there are two critical pieces of context missing from the conventional wisdom on the "scandal." First, at least from what we know so far, the groups were not targeted in a political vendetta — but rather were executing a makeshift enforcement test (an ugly one, mind you) for IRS employees tasked with separating political groups not allowed to claim tax-exempt status, from bona fide social welfare organizations. Employees are given almost zero official guidance on how to do that, so they went after Tea Party groups because those seemed like they might be political. Keep in mind, the commissioner of the IRS at the time was a Bush appointee.

The second is that while this is the first time this kind of thing has become a national scandal, it's not the first time such activity has occurred.

"I wish there was more GOP interest when I raised the same issue during the Bush administration, where they audited a progressive church in my district in what look liked a very selective way," California Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff said on MSNBC Monday. "I found only one Republican, [North Carolina Rep. Walter Jones], that would join me in calling for an investigation during the Bush administration. I'm glad now that the GOP has found interest in this issue and it ought to be a bipartisan concern."

The well-known church, All Saints Episcopal in Pasadena, became a bit of a cause célèbre on the left after the IRS threatened to revoke the church's tax-exempt status over an anti-Iraq War sermon the Sunday before the 2004 election. "Jesus [would say], 'Mr. President, your doctrine of preemptive war is a failed doctrine,'" rector George Regas said from the dais.

The church, which said progressive activism was in its "DNA," hired a powerful Washington lawyer and enlisted the help of Schiff, who met with the commissioner of the IRS twice and called for a Government Accountability Office investigation, saying the IRS audit violated the First Amendment and was unduly targeting a political opponent of the Bush administration. "My client is very concerned that the close coordination undertaken by the IRS allowed partisan political concerns to direct the course of the All Saints examination," church attorney Marcus Owens, who is widely considered one of the country's leading experts on this area of the law, said at the time. In 2007, the IRS closed the case, decreeing that the church violated rules preventing political intervention, but it did not revoke its nonprofit status.

And while All Saints came under the gun, conservative churches across the country were helping to mobilize voters for Bush with little oversight. In 2006, citing the precedent of All Saints, "a group of religious leaders accused the Internal Revenue Service yesterday of playing politics by ignoring its complaint that two large churches in Ohio are engaging in what it says are political activities, in violation of the tax code," the New York Times reported at the time. The churches essentially campaigned for a Republican gubernatorial candidate, they alleged, and even flew him on one of their planes.

Meanwhile, Citizens for Ethics in Washington filed two ethics complaints against a church in Minnesota. "You know we can't publicly endorse as a church and would not for any candidate, but I can tell you personally that I'm going to vote for Michele Bachmann," pastor Mac Hammond of the Living Word Christian Center in Minnesota said in 2006 before welcoming her to the church. The IRS opened an audit into the church, but it went nowhere after the church appealed the audit on a technicality.

And it wasn't just churches. In 2004, the IRS went after the NAACP, auditing the nation's oldest civil rights group after its chairman criticized President Bush for being the first sitting president since Herbert Hoover not to address the organization. "They are saying if you criticize the president we are going to take your tax exemption away from you," then-chairman Julian Bond said. "It's pretty obvious that the complainant was someone who doesn't believe George Bush should be criticized, and it's obvious of their response that the IRS believes this, too."

In a letter to the IRS, Democratic Reps. Charles Rangel, Pete Stark and John Conyers wrote: "It is obvious that the timing of this IRS examination is nothing more than an effort to intimidate the members of the NAACP, and the communities the organization represents, in their get-out-the-vote effort nationwide."

Then, in 2006, the Wall Street Journal broke the story of a how a little-known pressure group called Public Interest Watch — which received 97 percent of its funds from Exxon Mobile one year — managed to get the IRS to open an investigation into Greenpeace. Greenpeace had labeled Exxon Mobil the "No. 1 climate criminal." The IRS acknowledged its audit was initiated by Public Interest Watch and threatened to revoke Greenpeace's tax-exempt status, but closed the investigation three months later.

As the Journal reporter, Steve Stecklow, later said in an interview, "This comes against a backdrop where a number of conservative groups have been attacking nonprofits and NGOs over their tax-exempt status. There have been hearings on Capitol Hill. There have been a number of conservative groups in Washington who have been quite critical."

Indeed, the year before that, the Senate held a hearing on nonprofits' political activity. Republican Sen. Charles Grassley, the then-chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, said the IRS needed better enforcement, but also "legislative changes" to better define the lines between politics and social welfare, since they had not been updated in "a generation." Unfortunately, neither Congress nor the IRS has defined 501(c)4′s sufficiently to this day, leaving the door open for IRS auditors to make up their own, discriminatory rules.

Those cases mostly involved 501(c)3 organizations, which live in a different section of the tax code for real charities like hospitals and schools. The rules are much stronger and better developed for (c)3′s, in part because they've been around longer. But with "social welfare" (c)4 groups, the kind of political activity we saw in 2010 and 2012 is so unprecedented that you get cases like Emerge America, a progressive nonprofit that trains Democratic female candidates for public office. The group has chapters across the country, but in 2011, chapters in Massachusetts, Maine and Nevada were denied 501(c)4 tax-exempt status. Leaders called the situation "bizarre" because in the five years Nevada had waited for approval, the Kentucky chapter was approved, only for the other three to be denied.

A former IRS official told the New York Times that probably meant the applications were sent to different offices, which use slightly different standards. Different offices within the same organization that are supposed to impose the exact same rules in a consistent manner have such uneven conceptions of where to draw the line at a political group, that they can approve one organization and then deny its twin in a different state.

All of these stories suggest that while concern with the IRS posture toward conservative groups now may be merited, to fully understand the situation requires a bit of context and history.

Alex Seitz-Wald is Salon's political reporter. Email him at aseitz-wald@salon.com, and follow him on Twitter @aseitzwald.

rest http://www.salon.com/2013/05/14/when_the_irs_targeted_liberals/

@GOP ’s state director of Hispanic outreach resigns, leaves @gop, switches to Democrat

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2013/05/14/gops-problems-with-latinos-could-get-much-much-worse/

Given the current scandal-mania, it's no surprise this went under the radar, but in Florida, the GOP's state director of Hispanic outreach, Pablo Pantoja, has resigned his position, left the Republican Party, and changed his party identification to "Democrat."

His reasoning is straightforward: For all the focus on outreach to Latino communities, Pantoja believes that there is a "culture of intolerance surrounding the Republican Party." In a letter, he cites the recent revelations surrounding Jason Richwine, a former scholar at the Heritage Foundation, and his ideas on race and intelligence. "Although the organization distanced themselves from those assertions," writes Pantoja, "other immigration-related research is still padded with the same racist and eugenics-based innuendo."

And then there's also all the GOP rhetoric about immigration. It's not hard to find examples of prominent Republicans using racially-loaded terms like "anchor babies" and "illegals" to describe unauthorized Latino immigrants and their children. Indeed, the Republican presidential primaries were soaked with derogatory rhetoric towards immigrants, and one candidate — Texas Governor Rick Perry — began his slide to defeat after he expressed sympathy for the children of unauthorized immigrants.

Pantoja's departure from the Republican Party is instructive. Not only does it illustrate the dynamic of the last four years — where Latino voters responded to negative Republican rhetoric by going further into the Democratic camp — but the potential dynamic of the next decade. As Greg noted earlier this morning, conservative Republicans in the Senate are preparing to introduce a variety of "poison pill" amendments to the immigration bill — which is happening right now as we speak — designed to make the package unpalatable to supporters. Likewise, House Republicans have yet to offer their support to a comprehensive bill.

The combination of right-wing rhetoric and figures like Jason Richwine have created the perception of racialized opposition to immigration reform, where attempts to kill the legislation stem from anti-Hispanic bigotry. If the immigration bill fails, it could damage the GOP's relationship with Hispanic voters even further for another generation. Which means — for Republican supporters — that it has to pass. There's no other option.

The good news is that a bill is still possible, as key Republicans like Marco Rubio remain behind the proposal. But they still need to break through right-wing opposition, and so far, it's hard to see that happening.

Jamelle Bouie is a staff writer at The American Prospect, where he writes a blog.

rest at http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2013/05/14/gops-problems-with-latinos-could-get-much-much-worse/