Category Archives: wind power

GOP Gov. Pat McCrory just signed a bill that limits his successor’s powers.

by LaureneRagsdale Posted on December 16, 2016

In his final press conference of 2016, President Obama — in his usual, staid tones — fielded question after question about Russia’s alleged election interference.

But Obama also reminded us that at the heart of Russia’s economic interests and relative power is its backward status as a petrostate.

“They are a smaller country; they are a weaker country; their economy doesn’t produce anything that anyone wants to buy except oil and gas and arms,” he said. “They don’t innovate. But, they can impact us if we lose track of who we are. They can impact us if we abandon our values.”

The Washington Post calls Trump’s relationship with Russia “the most obscure and disturbing aspect of his coming presidency.” Trump’s choice of Exxon’s Rex Tillerson for Secretary of State only underlines this: At Exxon, Tillerson had deals worth billions of dollars with Russia, some of which can only move forward if the U.S. lifts sanctions on the country.

These deals are only worth billions, though, if fossil fuels maintain their value. The idea that there is a “carbon bubble,” and fossil fuel companies are dangerously overvalued, is a threatening proposition to a petrostate. And, most likely, a Trump administration.

View the original here:  

GOP Gov. Pat McCrory just signed a bill that limits his successor’s powers.

Posted in alo, Anchor, Casio, FF, GE, InsideClimate News, LG, Naka, ONA, OXO, PUR, Radius, Ringer, solar, solar power, Uncategorized, wind power | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on GOP Gov. Pat McCrory just signed a bill that limits his successor’s powers.

Here are three reasons the world didn’t completely suck this week.

by OrenAmaral Posted on December 16, 2016

In his final press conference of 2016, President Obama — in his usual, staid tones — fielded question after question about Russia’s alleged election interference.

But Obama also reminded us that at the heart of Russia’s economic interests and relative power is its backward status as a petrostate.

“They are a smaller country; they are a weaker country; their economy doesn’t produce anything that anyone wants to buy except oil and gas and arms,” he said. “They don’t innovate. But, they can impact us if we lose track of who we are. They can impact us if we abandon our values.”

The Washington Post calls Trump’s relationship with Russia “the most obscure and disturbing aspect of his coming presidency.” Trump’s choice of Exxon’s Rex Tillerson for Secretary of State only underlines this: At Exxon, Tillerson had deals worth billions of dollars with Russia, some of which can only move forward if the U.S. lifts sanctions on the country.

These deals are only worth billions, though, if fossil fuels maintain their value. The idea that there is a “carbon bubble,” and fossil fuel companies are dangerously overvalued, is a threatening proposition to a petrostate. And, most likely, a Trump administration.

Original article: 

Here are three reasons the world didn’t completely suck this week.

Posted in alo, Anchor, Casio, FF, GE, InsideClimate News, LG, Naka, ONA, PUR, Radius, Ringer, solar, solar power, Uncategorized, wind power | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Here are three reasons the world didn’t completely suck this week.

California Set a Bunch of Drug Offenders Free—and Then Left Them Hanging

by BurtonBrookshir Posted on December 16, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

California’s experiment with releasing thousands of drug offenders from its prisons—a major step in the fight against mass incarceration—has run up against a big problem: Once they’re out, there aren’t enough social service programs to help these offenders overcome addictions and restart their lives.

At least 13,500 inmates have been freed in California since 2014, when voters passed a measure called Proposition 47 that reclassified simple drug possession as a misdemeanor rather than a felony. But the state has not yet invested enough money in treatment programs, according to a seven-month investigation by journalists at the Desert Sun, the Ventura County Star, the Record Searchlight, and the Salinas Californian. The end result: Thousands of addicts and mentally ill people have gone from incarceration to the streets, without a safety net to help them deal with substance abuse.

“Prop 47 was not a cure-all. It’s not a panacea,” Michael Romano, a Stanford law expert who helped draft the proposition, told the reporters. It succeeded in getting drug offenders out of overcrowded prisons and jails, he says, but that’s just “one piece in an extraordinarily complicated puzzle.”

It costs about $20,000 to send someone through inpatient drug treatment, which typically lasts six months to a year. It costs three times more to keep him in jail or prison for a year. Under Prop 47, the millions of dollars saved in prison costs were supposed to be earmarked for rehabilitation programs to help inmates restart their lives. The reporters—who filed 65 records requests, pored over thousands of pages of public documents, and interviewed dozens of policymakers, police officers, and former felons for their investigation—found that not a single cent had been spent yet on these programs. An agency has been working to allocate the money for a year and a half, but it just started accepting bids last month to give out its grants. During this fiscal year, which started in October, the state plans to spend $34 million of its $67 million Prop 47 fund on programs to help the mentally ill, addicts, and youth offenders.

In the meantime, drug treatment programs are struggling with long waiting lists. “People die waiting to get treatment,” David Ramage, an administrator at Impact Drug and Alcohol Treatment Center in Pasadena, which has a 90-day wait list, told the reporters.

At the same time, when new offenders land in drug court, where they have a choice of either going through probation or rehab, fewer choose rehab now—because a misdemeanor offense may be a quicker ordeal and less restrictive. The longest-running drug court program in Los Angeles has seen its enrollment drop from 80 people to just 4, the reporters found. For more, check out the full investigation here.

See more here – 

California Set a Bunch of Drug Offenders Free—and Then Left Them Hanging

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta, wind power | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on California Set a Bunch of Drug Offenders Free—and Then Left Them Hanging

A St. Louis Suburb Jailed Nearly 2,000 People for Not Paying Fines

by LeighFrayne Posted on December 16, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

On Wednesday, a federal judge approved a $4.7 million settlement with nearly 2,000 people who were thrown in jail illegally in a St. Louis suburb, a practice legal advocates had likened to a “modern debtors’ prison.”

The plaintiffs in the class action lawsuit alleged that the city of Jennings, Missouri, had jailed people who were unable to pay municipal fines and fees, keeping them in overcrowded, unsanitary cells where they were routinely taunted by jail guards and staff. The settlement, preliminarily approved in July, comes more than a year after the Jennings municipal court signed a separate agreement to eliminate cash bail for nonviolent offenses, dismiss “failure to appear” charges and forgive fees in cases before March 12, 2011, and establish a way to assess a person’s ability to pay. It also agreed to use civil debt collectors to obtain payments from fines instead of issuing warrants and immediately release people on first arrest on bond.

Attorneys for the plaintiffs claimed that Jennings “built a municipal scheme designed to brutalize, to punish, and to profit.” According to the complaint, the city issued more than 2.1 arrest warrants per household in 2014 and nearly 1.4 for every adult, adding that if the rest of the St. Louis area generated revenue at the same rate as Jennings, cities would have made more than $670 million in five years.

In recent years, civil rights groups have taken cities to court to compel changes to their operation of so-called debtors’ prisons, where those who cannot afford to pay fines are jailed until their debts are paid off. The practice was first barred under federal law in 1833. In 1983, the Supreme Court ruled that the act of imprisoning someone unable to settle their debt unconstitutional. Yet lawsuits and a federal investigation into policing and court practices in Ferguson following the death of Michael Brown shed light on how municipal courts locked up poor residents who couldn’t pay off their debts as a way to generate revenue. Beyond Jennings, federal lawsuits are under way against Ferguson and 13 other cities in the St. Louis area over the alleged operation of modern-day debtors’ prisons.

“One thing that has been revealed over and over again in the Ferguson investigation and these lawsuits is that the worst practices tend to arise when courts and other officials perceive a financial necessity in funding their operation through fees and fines,” says Larry Schwartztol, executive director of Harvard University’s Criminal Justice Policy Program. “That creates conflicts of interest and distorts the justice system.” William Maurer, an attorney for the Institute for Justice, told Mother Jones in July that small towns around urban areas “have municipal infrastructure that can’t be supported by the tax base, and so they ticket everything in sight to keep the town functioning.”

Here’s a look at some similar recent cases across the country:

Biloxi, Mississippi: In a complaint filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in last October, attorneys alleged that poor residents in Biloxi who couldn’t take care of their debt were “routinely” arrested and tossed in jail without receiving a court hearing to determine whether they would be able to pay such penalties. The lawsuit alleged that the city relied on the fines and fees for a substantial portion of its budget and enlisted the help of for-profit probation companies to collect the money. In March, the two sides agreed on a settlement and adjusted it in September. The city agreed to stop using private probation companies to collect payments, to adopt a “bench card” for judges as a reminder of how to not send people to jail who are unable to pay, and to provide alternatives to debt repayment, such as payment plans, job training programs, mental-health counseling, and community service. The city, its police chief, and a district judge named in the complaint also admitted no wrongdoing as part of the resolution.

Colorado Springs, Colorado: Hundreds of impoverished people in Colorado Springs who were fined for a minor infringement of the city’s ordinance had a choice: Pay the debt in full, or settle it for time in jail at $50 a day. Last October, the ACLU of Colorado sent a letter to the city’s attorney and a municipal court judge, alleging that the court had ordered the “pay or serve” sentence in more than 800 cases since January 2014. In May, the city agreed to pay $103,000 to 66 impoverished residents, or $125 for each day they were behind bars. Municipal judges and city-contracted attorneys also underwent training on the rights of indigent citizens.

Jackson, Mississippi: For impoverished Jackson residents, the Colorado Springs case sounds familiar. Those arrested for misdemeanor cases were forced to navigate Jackson’s “pay or stay” system, according to complaint filed last October. If someone failed to pay all or a large portion of their debt at the time of their hearing, they were sent to jail in Hinds County. Once behind bars, they “were told they could ‘work off’ their fines at the rate of $58 per day,” according to the complaint. Those who couldn’t work were left to “sit out” their fines at $25 a day. In June, the city of Jackson settled and created an alternative monthly payment of $25 or an hourly credit for community service. The city also eliminated a requirement for people to post a money bail when arrested for a misdemeanor and to instead be released on the condition they appear for a future court appearance.

Benton County, Washington: A woman named Jayne Fuentes was sent to county jail for more than three months to work off $3,229 in “legal financial obligations” from 2010 and 2011. A complaint filed last October by the ACLU alleged that people like Fuentes who couldn’t pay off their debt were either sent to jail or forced to work on the county’s work crew as part of “partial confinement.” In June, the county and ACLU reached a resolution. The county agreed to stop issuing warrants to arrest those who didn’t pay off their debts. Beyond that, district court judges were also required to ask about a person’s ability to pay at hearings, and county public defenders and prosecutors would receive training on the assessment and collection of court-imposed fines.

Read original article:

A St. Louis Suburb Jailed Nearly 2,000 People for Not Paying Fines

Posted in Citizen, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta, wind power | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on A St. Louis Suburb Jailed Nearly 2,000 People for Not Paying Fines

Trump Hates Renewable Energy—Unless It’s Powering One of His Hot New Hotels

by HubertGreaves Posted on December 16, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

At a rally in Pennsylvania in August, Donald Trump had some complaints about wind power. “The wind kills all your birds,” he told supporters. “All your birds: killed.”

It was typical Trump: The president-elect hates wind turbines. He derides them as colossal eyesores. “It looks like a junkyard,” he said in October, referring to wind farms outside Palm Springs, California—”a poor man’s version of Disneyland.” And, he says, they’re unreliable: “Half of them are broken. They’re rusting and rotting.” He spent years battling to prevent a wind farm from being built off Scotland’s coast; his company called the project a “dangerous experiment with wind energy” that would spoil the view from his golf course. (Trump lost—though he’s far from letting the issue go.)

But in at least one major business venture, Trump’s organization embraced wind power big league.

In August 2010, one of the real estate mogul’s most exclusive new hotels—the glassy Trump SoHo in downtown Manhattan—boasted that it would be investing in 100 percent clean power. Specifically, it would be purchasing electricity from wind.

According to one of the deal’s main architects, the move to purchase wind energy was spearheaded by Donald Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, and potentially saved the hotel hundreds of thousands of dollars in energy costs.

“Ivanka was the one that wanted the 100 percent green requirement,” said Bill Cannon, who helped broker the deal when he worked as a senior vice president for Choice Energy Services, a Houston-based energy advisory and brokerage firm. (Ivanka Trump and the Trump Organization did not respond to a request to be interviewed or to written questions.)

Trump SoHo hotel condominium in New York City. Alec Perkins/Wikimedia Commons

Purchasing green energy can actually be pretty complicated. Much of the electricity produced in New York State comes from fossil fuels, so unless a hotel straps turbines or solar panels to its roof, there’s no way to pick and choose the “green” electrons that power a building. So the key to the Trump SoHo deal was the purchase of “renewable energy certificates”—RECs—a tradable financial instrument designed to represent the environmental benefit of energy produced by clean sources, such solar or wind. In other words, the hotel buys energy in one market, but the actual renewable energy is produced elsewhere.

RECs can be controversial (more on this below). In theory, they allow consumers to support the production of renewables even when the actual power they use comes partly from fossil fuels. By purchasing the RECs, Trump could claim to offset the carbon pollution released by the plants powering his new hotel.

Under the deal, the hotel agreed to purchase 5.5 million kilowatt hours of wind energy annually from Green Mountain Energy, a renewable energy retailer owned by the electricity giant NRG. A press release issued at the time by Green Mountain claimed that the arrangement would offset 4.6 million pounds of carbon dioxide emissions each year. According to Green Mountain, this would be the equivalent of 1.3 million houses turning off all their lights for a day. Citing client confidentiality, Green Mountain declined to confirm any details regarding its relationship with the hotel beyond the publicly released information about the 2010 deal.

The deal apparently made financial sense, too, allowing the hotel to lock in low retail electricity rates and avoid market fluctuations. Cannon estimates the upscale building, managed by Trump’s hotel chain, would have enjoyed annual savings in the ballpark of $120,000, compared to regular commercial usage via ConEd, the New York City utility. Cannon says the deal was renewed at least once before he left Choice Energy Services. (Choice did not respond to emails. Cannon now works for a boutique energy brokerage in New York City.)

“Everybody won,” Cannon said, adding that the top brass at the Trump Organization was involved in every step of the decision to invest in renewables. “I was constantly being told, ‘This is a requirement, this is a requirement, this is a requirement,'” he said of Trump’s business people.

Trump SoHo spokeswoman Nicole Murano told Mother Jones that the hotel has since switched energy vendors. She said the hotel still uses renewable energy, but she didn’t provide any further information.

Donald J. Trump and Ivanka Trump at a 2007 news conference announcing the sale of condominium units in the Trump Soho tower Richard B. Levine/Levine Roberts/NC via ZUMA

The effectiveness of RECs is often disputed by critics such as Daniel Press, a professor of environmental studies at the University of California-Santa Cruz. Press argues that RECs do little to reduce emissions in the real world because they have become too cheap to shift energy markets or incentivize businesses to build new turbines or solar panels. Often, RECs can be purchased for far less than what it actually cost to produce the renewable power that they supposedly represent.

“You’re still buying electrons that are generated from a coal plant or from a natural gas plant,” Press told me. “So you didn’t cause the wind turbines to be built, because no one can build a wind farm for 10 cents on the dollar.”

Even so, Auden Shendler, a sustainability expert and a vice president at Aspen Skiing Company, which prides itself on its climate activism, commends Trump SoHo’s 2010 efforts. Shendler, who is generally not a fan of RECs, sees the deal as a step in the right direction. “While experts dispute the value of RECs, clearly the Trump Organization was trying to do the right thing given the knowledge they had at the time,” said Shendler. “This was the right, well-intentioned thing to do, and you can’t blame them for not being a weirdo expert on these things.”

While “it probably doesn’t move the industry much, RECs are a piece of a movement towards more clean power,” he added. “It does help a little bit. This is a kind of crack of light.”

No matter the environmental impact, top Trump executives were thrilled: “We regard this as a wise business decision on all levels,” said the then-general manager of the hotel, David Chase, in the press release announcing the deal. He added that the move “respects the values of our guests who are as concerned as we are about protecting and caring for the environment.”

The 2010 deal stands in stark contrast to much of Trump’s energy rhetoric. Anti-wind Twitter rants are one weapon in Trump’s anti-climate arsenal.

His cabinet picks are another weapon. They are uniformly pro-fossil fuel and anti-regulation—and some are unabashed climate change deniers. Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, picked by Trump to run the Energy Department, claims climate scientists have “manipulated data.” Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt has repeatedly sued the EPA—the agency he’s been selected to lead—to block environmental regulations.

And just days before signing on to lead Trump’s Energy department transition, former Koch Industries lobbyist Tom Pyle penned a memo predicting that the new administration would take a “closer look at the environmental impacts” of the wind industry. “Trump has been concerned about the harms to wildlife from wind turbines such as bird and bat deaths,” wrote Pyle. “Unlike before, wind energy will rightfully face increasing scrutiny from the federal government.”

But just six years ago, Trump was singing a very different tune, as his hotel executives touted his renewable energy purchase as a business coup. As Cannon puts it, the SoHo wind deal gave the company another commodity that is precious in the Trump universe: “bragging rights.”

Continue reading here – 

Trump Hates Renewable Energy—Unless It’s Powering One of His Hot New Hotels

Posted in Bragg, FF, GE, green energy, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, solar, solar panels, Uncategorized, Venta, wind energy, wind power | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Trump Hates Renewable Energy—Unless It’s Powering One of His Hot New Hotels

Cooks, Illustrated: Why So Many Chefs Have Tattoos

by HWWSabinardfi Posted on December 16, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

When it was time for sailor and cook Mandy Lamb to get a tattoo, she decided on two arrows arranged in an “X” on her forearm. They remind her, she says, of a painful lesson learned on her first boat: “Don’t fall in love with the captain.”

Fishing-boat cook Mandy Lamb

Lamb’s is one of more than 65 illustrated vignettes (and probably my favorite) on display in the artful book Knives and Ink: Chefs and the Stories Behind Their Tattoos, by BuzzFeed books editor Isaac Fitzgerald and prolific illustrator and graphic journalist Wendy MacNaughton, who appeared on our latest episode of Bite. The duo previously worked together on the 2014 book Pen and Ink, which was inspired by their popular Tumblr blog of the same name and portrayed tattooed people of all professions.

But for Knives and Ink, they zeroed in on cooks and chefs, a breed well known for sporting body art. Fitzgerald, who had a short stint as a sushi chef in San Francisco, says one reason for the propensity for tattoos is that chefs want a symbol for their “dedication to the craft.” Some chefs feel they’ve landed in a career perfectly suited to their talents—and that getting a tattoo is a way of publicly dedicating their lives to the craft. Fitzgerald explains:

For a very long time, being a chef is one of the very few industries where you could just be covered head to toe, tattoos on your face, it didn’t matter as long as what you were making is good. It’s this idea of, ‘If I tattoo my neck, if I tattoo my knuckles, I can’t just walk away from this and start selling cars or just go work in a business or put on a suit or sit in a cubicle. This is going to be my life.’

Personal Chef Roze Traore; Chef Timmy Malloy

MacNaughton, who learned to cook while working on a cookbook project a few years ago, points to another reason for kitchen tattoos: “Chefs are preparing food for a lot of people, but it is about their distinct dishes and their distinct flavors and they’re expressing themselves in everything they do,” she says. “I think that the marks on their body are also manifestations of the same thing, the stories and experiences that are meaningful to them.”

The tales in Knives and Ink range from sentimental to flippant, sometimes revealing deep truths about a chef’s past, sometimes simply revealing her favorite seasoning. When asked about the most popular tattoo inked by the cooks they interviewed, Fitzgerald and MacNaughton were unequivocal: the pig. “It seems to be the official or unofficial logo of professional chefs,” MacNaughton says. Sure, the quintessential butchering diagram showing a quartered hog is a favorite, but Fitzgerald found fascinating the extent to which some chefs had “tried to one-up this classic pig tattoo design” with neck tattoos of pig skulls or a gory image of a zombie ripping up a pig from the inside. If that isn’t a reason to check out this delightful book, you’re sure to enjoy the recipes or artistic renderings of favorite ingredients accompanying many of the portraits.

Sous Chef Catherine Doyle

Bite is Mother Jones‘ new food politics podcast, out every other Friday. Listen to all our episodes here, or by subscribing in iTunes or Stitcher or via RSS. Please rate us and write us a review—it helps get the word out!

Originally posted here: 

Cooks, Illustrated: Why So Many Chefs Have Tattoos

Posted in FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta, wind power | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Cooks, Illustrated: Why So Many Chefs Have Tattoos

Saving for Retirement Is a Struggle—Unless You’re a CEO

by GayleClaypool Posted on December 16, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

President Barack Obama has called runaway income inequality the “defining issue of our time.” The disparity between exploding corporate profits and stagnating paychecks fueled Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign and continues to grow. Currently, the United States has a wider gap between the very rich and everyone else than at any time since the late 1920s. And according to a new study from the Institute for Policy Studies, that spells disaster for Americans trying to save enough to retire.

The study, titled “A Tale of Two Retirements,” found that in 2015 just 100 CEOs had retirement funds worth $4.7 billion—equivalent to the entire retirement savings of the least wealthy 41 percent of American families, or 116 million people. That figure is even more staggering when broken down by race: Those 100 execs’ retirement funds are worth as much as the entire retirement savings of the bottom 44 percent of white working-class families, the bottom 59 percent of African American families, and the bottom 75 percent of Latino families.

if(“undefined”==typeof window.datawrapper)window.datawrapper={};window.datawrapper”J5er5″={},window.datawrapper”J5er5″.embedDeltas=”100″:544,”200″:394,”300″:339,”400″:312,”500″:312,”600″:312,”700″:312,”800″:285,”900″:285,”1000″:285,window.datawrapper”J5er5”.iframe=document.getElementById(“datawrapper-chart-J5er5″),window.datawrapper”J5er5″.iframe.style.height=window.datawrapper”J5er5″.embedDeltas[Math.min(1e3,Math.max(100*Math.floor(window.datawrapper”J5er5″.iframe.offsetWidth/100),100))]+”px”,window.addEventListener(“message”,function(a)if(“undefined”!=typeof a.data”datawrapper-height”)for(var b in a.data”datawrapper-height”)if(“J5er5″==b)window.datawrapper”J5er5″.iframe.style.height=a.data”datawrapper-height”b+”px”);

Look at it another way. Those 100 CEOs have nest eggs large enough to generate a retirement check of more than $250,000 per month for the rest of their lives. Meanwhile, the average American fortunate enough to have a 401(k) plan has socked away only enough to receive a monthly check of just $101. And those are the lucky ones: 37 percent of all US households have no retirement savings at all. Neither do 51 percent of African American families and 66 percent of Latino families. Things are also particularly bleak for millennials, as Americans younger than 40 have saved 7 percent less for retirement than similarly aged boomers.

The hollowing out of workers’ retirement benefits punishes female retirees, in particular: Median incomes for women 65 and older are 45 percent lower than men’s. And since women live longer than men, on average, they must stretch their retirement savings even further.

So who are these rapacious retirees? Many of them head companies that have been cutting back on worker pensions and retirement funds for years. John Hammergen, the CEO of the pharmaceutical giant McKesson, holds nearly $150 million in retirement assets. Shortly after joining the company in 1996, he closed its pension fund to all new employees. Yet Hammergen found enough money to set up a retirement account that has furnished him with assets worth more than $20,000 for every day he’s spent at the company’s helm.

Walmart CEO Doug McMillon already had $67.8 million stashed in an untaxed, deferred compensation account in 2015, despite having only held his post since 2014. His predecessor, Michael Duke, retired with more than $140 million in deferred compensation. In contrast, fewer than two-thirds of Walmart’s 1.5 million employees have a company-sponsored retirement account. Those who do have an average balance of less than $24,000, enough for a monthly retirement check of $131—not even 0.04 percent of what McMillon can expect to take home every month.

Jeff Immelt, the CEO of General Electric, has more than $92 million in retirement assets. Between 1987 and 2011, the company contributed not one penny to employee pension plans, counting on rising stock prices to offset its expected contribution. After the economy crashed in 2008, Immelt froze pensions and closed them to new participants. The company has only funded 67 percent of its outstanding pension obligation to workers and its pension deficit has grown by $5 billion since 2011. During the same time, Immelt’s company-sponsored retirement assets have swelled from $53 million to $92 million.

if(“undefined”==typeof window.datawrapper)window.datawrapper={};window.datawrapper”8jUlp”={},window.datawrapper”8jUlp”.embedDeltas=”100″:635,”200″:538,”300″:538,”400″:511,”500″:511,”600″:511,”700″:511,”800″:511,”900″:511,”1000″:511,window.datawrapper”8jUlp”.iframe=document.getElementById(“datawrapper-chart-8jUlp”),window.datawrapper”8jUlp”.iframe.style.height=window.datawrapper”8jUlp”.embedDeltas[Math.min(1e3,Math.max(100*Math.floor(window.datawrapper”8jUlp”.iframe.offsetWidth/100),100))]+”px”,window.addEventListener(“message”,function(a)if(“undefined”!=typeof a.data”datawrapper-height”)for(var b in a.data”datawrapper-height”)if(“8jUlp”==b)window.datawrapper”8jUlp”.iframe.style.height=a.data”datawrapper-height”b+”px”);

So how has this happened? Simply, the tax rules are structured in favor of massive executive retirement packages. Ordinary workers face strict limits on how much pre-tax income they invested in tax-deferred plans like 401(k)s. (The current limit is $18,000.) CEOs may participate in regular employee plans, but they also get Supplemental Executive Retirement Plans, which Fortune 500 companies set up with unlimited tax-deferred compensation. Since more than half of executive compensation is tied to stock price, CEOs have direct incentives to cut back on worker retirement benefits to pad their balance sheets. The money saved by those cost-cutting measures goes straight back into executives’ pockets, often tax-free: Corporations may deduct unlimited amounts of executive compensation from their federal taxes so long as it’s “performance based.”

Much of this is the result of Reagan-era policies that worked to prioritize corporate profits and undo the power of unions. Under Reagan, companies began to adopt 401(k)s over pensions, shifting investment risk from employers to workers, as these plans required workers to deduct savings from their paychecks with no guarantee of future benefits. Companies have also reduced retirement benefits by converting workers’ pension assets to cash balance plans, freezing retirement plans, closing retirement plans to new hires, or terminating retirement plans altogether.

Might this get better under President-elect Donald Trump, whose economic message seemingly resonated with white-working class voters? Don’t count on it. If Trump and congressional Republicans cut the top marginal tax rate from 39.6 percent to 33 percent, Fortune 500 CEOs would stand to save $195 million when they withdraw cash from their tax-deferred retirement accounts, according to IPS.

Original link:

Saving for Retirement Is a Struggle—Unless You’re a CEO

Posted in Everyone, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta, wind power | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Saving for Retirement Is a Struggle—Unless You’re a CEO

Denver Isn’t the Only City Seizing Homeless People’s Gear

by Rich6968mhoql Posted on December 16, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

On Saturday, Denver’s mayor, Michael B. Hancock, announced that city police officers would be asked to stop seizing sleeping bags, blankets, tents, and other items that help homeless people keep warm in the winter. The announcement came after a video showing officers confiscating blankets in frigid weather provoked outcry. And while the announcement was a win for Denver’s homeless, Maria Foscarinis, executive director of the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, notes that the seizure or destruction of homeless people’s property is common practice in the United States.

Belongings are often seized under anti-camping laws or laws that prohibit sleeping in public—part of a larger trend of what Foscarinis calls “the criminalization of homelessness.” Earlier this year, her organization released a study tracking the phenomenon in 187 cities. It found that one-third of cities prohibit camping citywide, an increase of nearly 70 percent over a decade ago. But many courts have ruled such practices unconstitutional. Here’s a rundown of what’s happening in a few key cities.

Los Angeles: In March, lawyers sued on behalf of four homeless people whose property was destroyed by the city. One plaintiff, Judy Coleman, was hospitalized for pneumonia after her tent and blanket were taken. The judge in the case issued a preliminary injunction requiring the city to stop seizing homeless people’s belongings during arrests or clean-ups. The order also prohibits the city from storing seized items in a manner that makes them difficult to reclaim—a common problem, according to the Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty. A similar case from 2014 is in the process of being settled out of court.

Meanwhile, the Los Angeles City Council approved a law limiting the storage of items in parks, alleys, and sidewalks to what will fit in a 60-gallon container. Under the law, homeless people may also be cited or arrested if they fail to take down their tents between 6 a.m. and 9 p.m. An LAPD spokesman told me the department is no longer doing sweeps of homeless encampments. The current policy on seized possessions, he says, is to store the items, unless they are too wet or are deemed unsanitary—that determination is left to the officer’s discretion.

Denver: The mayor’s order only applies until April, when officers may resume seizures of bedding and camping gear. In the interim, police still intend to enforce the pubic camping ban—violators can face fines of up to $999. Back in August, a group called Denver Homeless Out Loud filed a class-action lawsuit arguing that the city’s sweeps are unconstitutional.

Seattle: The city’s regular raids on homeless camps have come under fire due to the loss of personal property and the city’s failure to give homeless residents proper notice. Seattle has been embroiled in an ongoing debate about how best to handle its sweeps, some of which have been halted by city civil rights monitors because the approved protocols were not followed.

San Francisco: Homeless sweeps are common in San Francisco. According to Mission Local‘s examination of the Department of Public Works records, the city only preserved 23 people’s seized belongings over a six-month period this year. On Tuesday, Bay Area civil rights groups filed a class-action lawsuit against the California Department of Transportation over the seizure of items such as stoves, tents, and bedding by Caltrans employees.

Honolulu: Though winter survival is less of a problem in Hawaii, Foscarinis points out that homeless people are also at risk in warm weather when their belongings are essential to keeping cool. In a survey of homeless residents by the Department of Urban Planning at the University of Hawaii-Manoa, nearly 60 percent reported losing personal identification, 40 percent lost tents, and 21 percent lost medicine in sweeps. The National Law Center on Poverty and Homelessness report stated, “The city has been transparent about its goal of removing Honolulu’s homeless population from view” and has proposed to “relocate homeless people to a separate island that previously served as a garbage dump and former internment camp during WWII.”

Continue reading: 

Denver Isn’t the Only City Seizing Homeless People’s Gear

Posted in FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Smith's, Uncategorized, Venta, wind power | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Denver Isn’t the Only City Seizing Homeless People’s Gear

Trump’s Newest National Security Staffer Once Suggested Obama Lied About Being Black

by BiancaConnah Posted on December 15, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

President-elect Donald Trump will tap Fox News’ Monica Crowley to be the senior director of strategic communications for the National Security Council, the transition team announced Thursday. In Crowley, Trump appears to have found a kindred spirit on issues ranging from from terrorism to Barack Obama’s eligibility to be president.

Crowley, who is also an author and a radio show host, will serve under retired US Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, Trump’s pick for National Security Adviser. (Flynn, who has an intense distrust of Muslims and a record of peddling debunked conspiracy theories, has been accused of “inappropriately” sharing classified information with foreign military officials.)

As the Daily Beast notes, the current US Deputy National Security Adviser for Strategic Communications Ben Rhodes is one of Obama’s key staff members and is in position to shape the US policy in profound ways. Crowley will join fellow Fox News alum K.T. McFarland, who was named as a deputy national security advisor in late November.

Crowley has worked at Fox News since 1998 as a “political and international affairs analyst,” according to her bio that previously appeared on the news outlet’s website. She also worked as foreign policy assistant to former president Nixon and later worked with NPR and MSNBC.*

Based on her public statements, Crowley will fit right in with Flynn and Trump. In June 2008, while guest-hosting Laura Ingraham’s radio show, Crowley cited a bizarre online “genealogy” (which she acknowledged she couldn’t “verify”) purporting to demonstrate that Obama is “not black African, he is Arab African.” She added: “And yet, this guy is campaigning as black and painting anybody who dares to criticize him as a racist. I mean that is—it is the biggest con I think I’ve ever seen.”

Crowley has also questioned whether Obama is really a “natural-born citizen,” and has said the “birth certificate issue” had “traction” because Obama’s policies are “un-American,” which “feeds into this idea that somehow, fair or not, Obama is not one of us.”

Neither the Trump transition team nor his spokesperson, Hope Hicks, responded to questions about Crowley’s past comments.

This story has been revised.

Correction: Due to an editing error, the original version of this story misstated when Crowley worked for former President Richard Nixon.

Continue reading:  

Trump’s Newest National Security Staffer Once Suggested Obama Lied About Being Black

Posted in alo, Citizen, FF, GE, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta, wind power | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Trump’s Newest National Security Staffer Once Suggested Obama Lied About Being Black

This man tried to sue the pants off the EPA, and now he’ll be running it.

by MatildaCrompton Posted on December 7, 2016

One of the five newly installed turbines off the shore of Block Island, Rhode Island, will be late getting spinning because someone at the General Electric factory in Saint-Nazaire, France, left a six-inch drill bit inside it, which damaged critical magnets.

Fortunately, the turbine is still under warranty, so it’s GE’s responsibility to pay for floating new 60-pound magnets out to the broken turbine, hoisting them 330 feet into the air, and repairing the turbine’s generator.

The Block Island Wind Farm is noteworthy not because offshore wind is new (Europeans have been doing it since the ’90s), but because, as the first such installation in the U.S., it could herald a whole lot of offshore wind development along the Atlantic coast. The region is a significant user of coal, oil, and natural gas, but it’s geologically well-suited for offshore wind and many of its residents and leaders are motivated to switch to clean energy by the already-visible effects of sea-level rise.

Block Island has been getting its electricity from diesel generators, but now it will be able to ditch them (except for one it’ll keep for backup). Three other offshore wind projects in the region are already in the works.

From: 

This man tried to sue the pants off the EPA, and now he’ll be running it.

Posted in alo, Anchor, Dolphin, Everyone, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Ringer, The Atlantic, Uncategorized, wind power | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on This man tried to sue the pants off the EPA, and now he’ll be running it.