British TV channel investigation finds children 13 and younger picking coffee beans used by Starbucks and Nespresso. Let's just let the first sentence of paragraph 2 tell it: "Channel 4’s Dispatches filmed the children working 40-hour weeks in gruelling conditions, picking coffee for a daily wage little more than the price of a latte." Starbucks sure ain't converting low labor cost into lower coffee prices, amirite? And dig Nespresso's CEO asserting that "we’ve launched a thorough investigation" -- "to find out which farms were filmed and whether they supply Nespresso," banking, I guess, that Channel 4 won't be able to expand its investigation to other farms in the future.
Guardian investigation finds Texas closing 750 polling locations since 2012 -- and, guess what, "the overwhelming majority of closures came in areas that saw the largest increase in black and Latino residents." Why, even John Roberts might call that racist! Though he's disappointed me before. Texas replaced a lot of their polling places with "vote centers," which you might suspect they designed to work badly just from the name, which reeks of vagueness. (Do people vote there? Do people count votes there? It's like they don't want you to know!)
What is "The Latest Wildly Misleading Argument Against Taxing the Rich," according to Steve Wamhoff at ITEP? That they already pay a much larger percentage of their income in taxes -- when you leave out things like capital gains and dividends, which comprise most of rich folks' income but generally gets taxed at a considerably lower rate than income. When you add those in, surprise! The top 1% pay a lower percentage of their income in taxes than folks in the 6th to 20th percentiles. Also, too, a Junior Bacon Cheeseburger at Wendy's doesn't cost $199 to a customer who makes a hundred times what you and I make.
In a peripherally-related note, our Congressional Research Service finds that the 2017 tax "reform" did not, in fact, spur business investment or wage growth. Which you already knew, if you know that the way to spur corporations to spend money creating jobs is to threaten to tax their profits a lot harder than we do now, because they'll spend the damn money if they think we're going to tax it, and they're more likely to spend it making stuff and paying people to make the stuff. Still, good to have some data buttressing that knowledge. (And yes, that's Jonathan Chait writing the article. He's really not so bad.)
Finally, Chris Matthews abruptly resigns (or is fired, who knows or cares) from MSNBC's Hardball. And thus ends, for now at least, a long career of blustering on behalf of Our Glorious Elites. Seriously, though, imagine coming to the end of your life and realizing that's who you were -- a pretend "populist" who only showed courage and independence when it didn't matter and sucked up to power the rest of the time. And if you watch the clip of Steve Kornacki coming on right afterward and saying "that was a lot to take in, just now, I'm sure, and I'm sure you're still absorbing that," as if we should all be so emotionally-invested the second highest-rated show (out of three!) on cable news at 7pm, then you know they won't change a thing -- drama is what our media is all about.
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