Crooked Media - What A Day: Parl of wisdom

It’s time to get down to brass tacks on the American Jobs Plan: Democrats have begun to hammer out the details of a corporate tax hike, while Republicans proffer a Hot Wheels definition of infrastructure and argue that corporate taxes should be a tool for gutting democracy ONLY. All important steps!
 

• In her first major address on Monday, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen called for a global minimum corporate tax rate to help prevent companies from fleeing overseas when the Biden administration raises their taxes to pay for kooky liberal wishlist items like “clean drinking water.” Yellen said the Biden administration would work with the G20 countries to set a new minimum. At the same time, an on-brand President Biden said he’s not worried about a mass corporate exodus: “You’re talking about companies in the Fortune 500 that haven’t paid a single penny in tax for three years. Come on, man.”
   
• Just in case, though, Senate Democrats are tinkering with the tax code to make that option as unappealing as possible. Sens. Ron Wyden (D-OR), Mark Warner (D-VA), and Sherrod Brown (D-OH) have released a new proposal to overhaul the way the U.S. taxes multinational corporations, by raising the global minimum tax included in Donald Trump’s 2017 tax law, changing how it’s applied to corporate income earned in other countries, and creating incentives for companies to invest in U.S. research and manufacturing. That plan could potentially raise hundreds of billions of dollars in additional tax revenue. 
   
• How much to raise taxes on corporations to pay for Biden’s jobs plan will be a point of contention among Democrats. Perpetual Problem-Haver Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) has announced his Problem with Biden’s proposed increase of the corporate tax rate from 21 percent to 28 percent, saying he would support a hike to only 25 percent. Warner said he’s also shared some unnamed concerns about the spending package with the White House. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki indicated on Monday that Biden’s open to negotiation about the size of the package and how to pay for it.

Meanwhile, Republicans are bitterly opposed to any tax increase on corporations whatsoever—unless it’s a punishment for deviating from the GOP script. 
 

• Republicans have coalesced around the (hypocritical, nonsense) talking point that the American Jobs Plan contains too many things that aren’t Real Infrastructure, i.e., roads, bridges, things a baby can point to in a Richard Scarry book. On Sunday, Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO) urged the White House to cut the $2 trillion infrastructure plan down to $615 billion, while Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell reiterated on Monday that the populist heroes of the GOP won’t support a plan that relies on corporate tax hikes.
   
• Demonstrating his stunning, balletic flexibility, McConnell also released this statement threatening companies that have spoken out against voter-suppression laws: “Corporations will invite serious consequences if they become a vehicle for far-left mobs to hijack our country from outside the constitutional order.” In other words, toe the GOP line or pay up. Hours after the CEO of Delta finally came out in opposition to Georgia’s new law, Georgia Republicans tried to pass a retaliatory last-minute bill repealing a tax break on jet fuel, and Republican senators have started pushing to strip MLB of its antitrust exemption for its crime of pulling the All-Star Game out of Atlanta . 
   

Unlike the coronavirus-relief package, Biden’s jobs plan has no built-in hard deadline for passage, which could mean a longer period of more fraught negotiation. Thanks to Republicans’ immediate pledge to remain clowns—and the Senate parliamentarian’s extremely good blessing on a third budget-reconciliation bill this year—Democrats can at least skip straight to finding agreement among themselves. 

Investors have been rapidly buying up single-family homes to rent or flip, driving up housing prices for ordinary families. Young couples looking to buy a house for the quaint purpose of “having a place to live” are now in competition with yield-chasing investors who are prepared to buy up whole subdivisions to turn into rentals. John Burns Real Estate Consulting estimated that in many of the country’s top housing markets, roughly one out of every five houses sold is purchased by someone who never moves in: “That’s going to make U.S. housing permanently more expensive.” Investors snapping up the limited housing supply could create another mid-aughts-style home price bubble: The consulting firm expects prices to go up 12 percent this year, on top of last year’s 11 percent rise, and increase at least six percent in 2022. The mechanics of that boom were different, but it’s hard to imagine this one ending a whole lot differently.

• The Supreme Court has ruled in Google’s favor against Oracle in a decade-old copyright dispute over the software used in Android. In a separate decision, the Court dismissed a lawsuit over Donald Trump’s Twitter account, which is mostly notable for Justice Clarence Thomas’s very cool opinion suggesting that social-media companies don’t have a First Amendment right to moderate content on their platforms.
   
• Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) has issued an executive order banning the use of vaccine passports in Florida, since vaccinated Floridians can simply show proof of their political donation to Ron DeSantis.
   
• Meanwhile, in non-made-up problems, a central Florida reservoir containing millions of gallons of contaminated wastewater has sprung at least one leak. Hundreds of residents were ordered to evacuate over the weekend, and officials have been pumping the contaminated water into Tampa Bay, which could have serious ecological consequences.
   
• About half of Republican voters believe that the January 6 attack was largely a peaceful protest or the work of Antifa provocateurs trying to make Trump look bad, according to a new Reuters poll. Another chilling victory for right-wing disinformation!
   
• White-evangelical vaccine hesitancy could become a major obstacle to herd immunity. Of the roughly 41 million white-evangelical adults in the U.S., about 45 percent said in late February that they would not get vaccinated.
   
• Amazon illegally fired two workers who were involved in labor activism, according to the National Labor Relations Board.
   
• More than 1,000 women have sued Johnson & Johnson for covering up a link between its baby powder and ovarian cancer.
   
• The Trump campaign scammed supporters into making recurring donations and additional payments in the leadup to the election, resulting in 530,000 refunds worth $64.3 million to online donors in the last two and half months of 2020.
   
• A moment of appreciation for White House Easter Bunny Longevity, and the triumphant return of his Very Ugly Vest.

A Facebook group has sprung up to replace a hollowed-out local newspaper in Pennsylvania, with...limited success. After a 160-year-old newspaper serving Beaver County, PA, was drastically downsized by its new corporate overlords, the News Alerts of Beaver County Facebook group sought to fill the void as a forum for timely, relevant information. It hasn’t devolved into an outright conspiracy theory swamp, but it does have a misinformation problem, with trusted neighbors sharing false alarms in good faith amid legitimate updates. Sometimes that misinformation fuels community-wide panics about things like non-existent loose murderers, which spiral out of control before moderators or authorities can set the record straight. It’s a glimpse of what communities across the country could be stuck with as local newspapers die off en masse—an extinction that Facebook has accelerated.

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Gov. Asa Hutchinson (R-AR) (!) has vetoed an Arkansas bill that would ban gender-affirming health care for trans youth. The state legislature could still override that veto with a simple majority, but the veto is a hugely important win, and the fight is still on.

The Municipal Court of Philadelphia has issued an order requiring landlords to apply to the city’s rental assistance program and enroll in a mediation program before filing a formal eviction, turning eviction into a last-resort option instead of a knee-jerk threat.

More good news from Pfizer’s six-month vaccine study: The vaccinated group had zero coronavirus hospitalizations, and the vaccine provided solid protection against the concerning variant that’s dominant in South Africa.

Volunteer groups (and computer-savvy individuals) have helped secure thousands of vaccine appointments for vulnerable Americans across the country.