Windfalls for the rich. Here's the lowdown on who gets what from the Bush annual tax cut, Special 2003 Iraq Edition, in America's favorite capitalist newspaper (Wall Street Journal, sub. req'd):

Bill Gates owns 1.19 billion shares of Microsoft stock. Without the [legislative] change, his tax bill on Microsoft's 16-cent dividend would be roughly $73.4 million. After the change: $28.5 million, a savings of $44.9 million.

One needn't be the richest man in America to get a windfall. Sanford Weill will see his tax bill for dividends on Citigroup stock cut by about $4 million. Michael Eisner's bill for Disney dividends will drop by $692,000.

In contrast, the typical American* with earnings between $50,000 and $100,000 had $855 in dividend income in 2001, according to the Tax Foundation, a nonpartisan** group in Washington that monitors tax policy. That household's dividend tax savings would be just over $200. The typical $50,000 a year household would save about $100.

*Lie #1: There is no typical American. Half of Americans own stocks, half don't. So who is typical? The ones without stocks and therefore without any newly tax-free dividend income?

**Lie #2: The Tax Foundation is not nonpartisan: it is a fanatically partisan and ideological group that subsists on financial support from the usual right wing suspects, a cadre of foundations bearing the names Scaife, Bradley, Olin, Koch, and the rest of the miserly misanthropes.

Considering the unreliable source of the figures, even the ridiculous $100 to $200 savings that an imaginary "typical" American would receive are a lie, an exaggeration, or both at once.

{ 8:49 AM }

.

You go, girl! Martha fights back.

{ 1:36 PM }

.

Martha's blow job. The case being made against Martha Stewart's trade of ImClone stock is very reminiscent of the case made against another famous Democrat back in 1998 (Washington Post):

"This case is about lying, lying to the FBI, lying to the SEC and lying to investors," [U.S. Attorney Jim] Comey said. "Martha Stewart is being prosecuted not because of who she is but because of what she did."

It's always about "lying." Clinton was not charged with having been fellated, and Stewart is likewise not charged with criminal insider trading — only conspiracy, obstruction, and making false statements.

Once again, we are being distracted from anything substantive with a legal sideshow. This is all pure bullshit meant to make voters forget Enron, Halliburton, Harken, Chevron, and all of the other real insider crimes being committed.

Previous posts about Martha Stewart here and here.

{ 8:27 AM }

.

More fakery from the Dept. of Homeland Security. Whoops! Turns out a high-ranking career official in the Homeland Security Department apparently obtained her doctorate from a Wyoming diploma mill:

Laura L. Callahan, now senior director in the office of department CIO Steven Cooper, states on her professional biography that she “holds a Ph.D. in Computer Information Systems from Hamilton University.” Callahan, who is also president of the Association for Federal IRM and a member of the CIO Council, is commonly called by the title “Dr.”

Callahan’s resume says she began her civil service career in 1984. Before joining HSD, she was deputy CIO at the Labor Department.

Hamilton University, according to an Internet search, is located in Evanston, Wyo. It is affiliated with and supported by Faith in the Order of Nature Fellowship Church, also in Evanston. The state of Wyoming does not license Hamilton because it claims a religious exemption. Oregon has identified Hamilton University as a diploma mill unaccredited by any organization recognized by the U.S. Department of Education.

Link via Boing Boing.

{ 7:51 AM }

.

Illinois gets progressive. Nathan Newman looks at how progressive Illinois has become, thanks to attentive Democrats in high places. Link via Matthew Iglesias.

{ 4:12 PM }

.

One of the weirder ways corporate malfeasance funds the right wing. The right didn't get as powerful as it now is without one magical ingredient — cash. What is perhaps less obvious is that much of that cash was stolen from employees, shareholders, and the public trust.

Like Enron, Tyco has been embroiled in a financial scandal the likes of which have only appeared since the triumph of Republican power. Now, one enabling member of the Tyco dysfunctional family is revealed to be a funding source for another group of right wing fanatics in religious disguise (Laura P. Cohen in The Wall Street Journal, sub. req'd.):

In July 2000, Mark Belnick, then the top in-house lawyer at Tyco International Ltd., received a $2 million payment toward a $12 million bonus. For Mr. Belnick, it was the latest reward in a meteoric legal career that ran from some of the highest-profile business cases of the 1980s and 1990s to Tyco, a hugely successful conglomerate and Wall Street darling.

Today prosecutors say that payment bought Mr. Belnick's silence about the looting of Tyco by its extravagant former chief executive, L. Dennis Kozlowski. Mr. Belnick, facing criminal charges, has become one of the most celebrated casualties of the recent wave of corporate wrongdoing.

But few people know just what he did with that $2 million. Almost immediately, he gave most of it to a small Catholic college in California and to the Culture of Life Foundation, a Catholic pro-life group in Washington, according to e-mails to and from Mr. Belnick at the time and interviews with people involved with the donations.

Three months earlier, Mr. Belnick, formerly an observant Jew, had quietly converted to Catholicism and become an active supporter of Opus Dei, a conservative group within the church. While prosecutors accuse his boss, Mr. Kozlowski, of taking millions from Tyco to buy artwork and posh homes and to entertain friends in Sardinia, Mr. Belnick was using some of his allegedly unlawful Tyco haul for an entirely different purpose. In addition to his donations to the Catholic college and foundation, he gave money to a Catholic television network, two parishes and an Opus Dei bookstore and information center. It was all part of a midlife transformation that Mr. Belnick, the former president of a suburban Westchester, N.Y., synagogue, long kept secret from most of his friends and even his own family.

For Mr. Belnick, two journeys intersected at Tyco: He became embroiled in one of the messiest corporate scandals ever, and simultaneously pursued a sudden conversion and devotion to Catholic philanthropy.

The article goes on to describe Belnick's background, including his role in the US Senate investigation into the Iran-Contra affair. But the call of corporate life was too great, because "In his three years and nine months at Tyco, Mr. Belnick made $37.2 million, not including $14 million in no-interest loans from the company." Such capital rapidly converts an ex-Jew not into a Catholic but into a Catholic VIP, and indeed in 2001 he got his private chapel mass with the Pope in Rome.

Perhaps the most fascinating character in the long article is the recruiter:

Father [C. John] McCloskey, who has an economics degree from Columbia, worked as a stockbroker for Merrill Lynch & Co. in the late 1970s, before joining the priesthood in 1981. His official job is running the Catholic Information Center of the Archdiocese of Washington. But he is best known for shepherding prominent people into the church. "The Holy Spirit uses me as a conduit," says the priest, whom many refer to by his first initial and middle name.

"C. John is the most effective converter of high-profile people in the country," says Dr. Nathanson, who, decades before his 1996 conversion from Judaism, had helped start the organization now known as the National Abortion Rights Action League. "He wants to bring well-educated, affluent people to the Pope."

Some of the others the priest has helped through the conversion process are conservative publishing executive Alfred Regnery and financier Lewis Lehrman. Father McCloskey says that his Wall Street experience, as well as church postings in Manhattan, Princeton, N.J., and now Washington "put me in a circle I wouldn't otherwise be in."

This story, although extremely strange in its particulars, demonstrates the banality of corporate evil as leveraged by concentrated wealth. Unlike your routine televangelist or Hare Krishna captain, cult leader McCloskey recruits from a richer caste of sad people to staff his army of functionaries.

Besides what's happening in faith-based government initiatives, the net effect of the theocratization of the Tycos of America is that the money from your 401(k) — already a quasi-privatization of retirement funding — has been siphoned off to assist radical religious groups.

The story is another example of criminal lying and theft with a secret agenda — the chief characteristic of corporate omnipotence.

{ 8:54 AM }

.

Harassment of Martha Stewart continues. With the threat of indictment now imminent, Martha Stewart is being turned into a public example of corporate insider wrongdoing, despite the fact that her alleged "crimes" are literally thousands of times smaller than those of prominent administration officials or their supporters. The insider trades of the former Secretary of the Army, Thomas White, whose documented connections to Enron were obscenely profitable, dwarf anything Martha Stewart did with respect to her ImClone trades. So far she has lost in the vicinity of $400 million for a trade that gained her $228,000. The triviality of her ImClone profit relative to the billions made by the Enron cabal should remind us that justice is not being served.

Regardless of what Martha Stewart has done wrong, nobody was harmed, and if prosecutorial resources are to be wisely used, there are far bigger fish to fry. Her trial by media is another smokescreen meant to distract us from the real perpetrators of the unindicted CEO class: the Ken Lays and Jeff Skillings who roam free like dethroned zombies, having sucked the life out of the employees and shareholders who unwittingly provided sustenance to their executive evils.

UPDATE 6/4/03: The Smoking Gun provides Martha's indictment.

{ 12:30 PM }

.

Media consolidation is bad for the left and the right. Corporate speech isn't free. Even that bible of leftism, The Wall Street Journal, is making noise about the big badness of the FCC's probable vote today in favor of further media consolidation. From today's column by Joe Flint (subscribers only):

Last month, Viacom President Mel Karmazin told the Senate Commerce Committee that network television is "not a very good business." A few weeks later, Viacom's CBS sold $2 billion in commercials to advertisers wanting to buy time on the network's fall schedule.

The record $9 billion that Viacom and the other broadcast networks took in last month in ad sales for the coming television season doesn't appear to have swayed the Federal Communications Commission, which is expected to approve further deregulation of the industry on Monday. The rollback of those rules not only will further pad the coffers of entertainment conglomerates; it also likely will lead to more homogenized television programming.

Network television executives and big broadcasters long have complained that regulators have tied their hands, and crimped their profits, by restricting the number of stations they can own. Those restrictions, they contend, have become obsolete in the age of cable and the Internet. And it's true that the broadcast networks face much greater competition than they did 20 years ago. Much of that competition, however, is owned by the very same broadcasters pushing for more deregulation.

Currently, broadcasters are allowed to own stations that reach no more than 35% of television households. If the measure before the FCC passes on Monday as expected, that limit will be eased to 45%. Rules that made it difficult for one company to own more than one television station in a city also are set to be relaxed. Under the revised guidelines, some companies will be able to own up to three television stations in big cities like Los Angeles and New York.

As big broadcasters expand their reach, the remaining smaller production companies willing to take risks in programming are likely to be squeezed out. That's because it's easier for conglomerates to make money by carrying programs they own themselves.

By owning two or more stations in a market, big broadcasters also will have more incentive to cut back on news operations. Although broadcasters tend to boast that such combinations mean more local news programming, they often lead to having reporters use the same material for two stations instead of one.

Ten years ago, the FCC began to ease longstanding rules that prohibited the broadcast networks from owning the shows they aired. With the barriers to vertical integration discarded, the networks often muscled out the middleman -- independent producers -- in favor of shows the networks could own, and profit from, outright. The impact has been undeniable: A decade ago, less than 20% of prime-time programming was owned by the networks. Today, that figure is close to 80%.

With no safeguards in place, networks are apt to favor shows they own over better ones owned by someone else. Already, independent production companies have gone the way of the horse and buggy. If pioneering television producer Norman Lear were to pitch "All in the Family" today, he would have to recast the entire show and turn over ownership to a network before it would have a chance to get on the air.

Radio has undergone a similar transformation. There, a handful of companies dominate the industry, generating stations and playlists that are virtually indistinguishable from one another across the country.

In making the case for deregulation, companies such as Mr. Karmazin's Viacom and Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. usually point to the explosion of media outlets, both in cable and the Internet, as evidence that the current restrictions are outdated. But these companies, along with AOL Time Warner, NBC parent General Electric and ABC parent Walt Disney, control some of the biggest and most successful cable networks, and have a big Internet presence as well. Aside from CBS, Viacom's holdings include MTV, Nickelodeon, VH1, Black Entertainment Television, Comedy Central and radio giant Infinity Broadcasting. AOL Time Warner, for its part, owns CNN, HBO, the WB Network, TNT, as well as cable systems reaching more than 10 million homes. Disney owns ABC, ESPN, the Disney Channel and has stakes in several other big cable networks, including Lifetime and A&E. NBC owns CNBC, MSNBC, Bravo, Telemundo ... you get the idea.

In moving to ease ownership restrictions, regulators are traveling a slippery slope. Already, the government is poised to approve News Corp.'s proposed takeover of satellite company DirecTV, a deal that would give the biggest owner of television stations in the country even more power in negotiating with the entertainment industry's few remaining independent suppliers of programming.

In his testimony before the committee, Tom Fontana, who created the groundbreaking dramas "Homicide" and "Oz" (for production companies, he noted, that no longer exist), he said that "sometimes by deregulating a big business, you can choke the life of a small one. And with that you lose energy, imagination and entrepreneurial spirit of that small business." Energy, imagination and entrepreneurial spirit -- everything that seems to be missing from television these days.

Energy, imagination and entrepreneurial spirit are just three of the things being choked out of existence by FCC Chairman Michael Powell and his two fellow Republican commissioners. Cultural diversity, artistic risk-taking and all stories of local interest will also disappear as a thin gruel of homogenized corporate spittle, determined by a vanishingly smaller group of people, dominate the landscape of news and entertainment.

Today is the last chance for you to tell the FCC what you think prior to the vote. Stop the FCC!

Lisa at RuminateThis has offered some of the most comprehensive coverage and commentary on this issue. See her many posts there.

{ 8:57 AM }

.