MSNBC has the story Komen backs off decision on funding cuts .

According to the Associated Press, which first reported Tuesday that Komen had adopted criteria excluding Planned Parenthood from grants, the original move was made solely to penalize the agency.

The AP reported that a source with direct knowledge of decision-making at Komen’s headquarters said the grant-making criteria were adopted with the deliberate intention of targeting Planned Parenthood. The criteria’s impact on Planned Parenthood and its status as the focus of government investigations were highlighted in a memo distributed to Komen affiliates in December.

According to the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of repercussions, a driving force behind the move was Karen Handel, who was hired by Komen last year as vice president for public policy after losing a campaign for governor in Georgia in which she stressed her anti-abortion views and frequently denounced Planned Parenthood.

Brinker, in an interview with MSNBC, said Handel didn’t have a significant role in the policy change.

At a special board meeting late on Thursday, the Komen organization agreed in principle to issue an apology and change the language of the organization’s funding criteria, board member John Raffaelli told Reuters.

“Our policy was that in our original board meeting (on the funding) and it didn’t come out very clearly,” Raffaelli said. “It got screwed up.”

I am glad to see the credibility of Komen restored.  Yeah, right.  That source with direct knowledge must have been mistaken.  Just because Komen adopted this policy that any baseless investigation would stop funding, and just because Planned Parenthood was the only recipient to be cut off, most assuredly the policy was not adopted to have the single outcome that it did.  Moreover, since they adopted the policy and then saw the consequences, they were powerless to change their minds until a groundswell of criticism reached them.

Business Week is carrying the Bloomberg News story, Komen Says Criticism Over Planned Parenthood Unfounded.

Talking about the investigation into Planned Parenthood that is the Komen Foundation’s excuse for withdrawing funding, the article states:

The foundation cited a probe by Representative Cliff Stearns, a Florida Republican and chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee, into whether New York-based Planned Parenthood is illegally using government money for abortions.

No other group has been told it won’t be receiving grants under the new criteria, though some “probably do” provide abortions, Brinker said. “We ask a lot of questions” of grantees, “but that’s not one of them.”

Mollie Williams, a former managing director for community health programs, resigned in January, according to her LinkedIn profile, a move that occurred after the board decided in December to withdraw the Planned Parenthood funds.

The last paragraph is probably just an unrelated incident that the news service has chosen to include here just to hype the story.  Well, that is plausible.

Talking about some donors that have stepped into the void to replace the funds removed by Kome, the article goes on to say:

The donation from the Fikes foundation was made “so that their health centers across the country can continue to put the real needs of women ahead of right wing ideology,” according to a statement on the group’s website. Lee Fikes didn’t return a call to the offices of Bonanza Oil seeking comment.

“Politics has no place in health care,” Bloomberg, the New York mayor, said in the statement about his donation. “Breast cancer screening saves lives and hundreds of thousands of women rely on Planned Parenthood for access to care. We should be helping women access that care, not placing barriers in their way.” Bloomberg is the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg News parent Bloomberg LP.

So, given what Mayor Bloomberg has to say, (just coincidentally the founder of Bloomberg News), what is this story doing on a politics blog?  Maybe Komen’s denials about the relationship between their actions and politics is just so very hard to believe.  Does it add to an organizations credibility to stick to a story that is so hard to believe?  I wonder if they can recognize a public relations disaster when they see one.

Probably another unlikely coincidence that Bloomberg News has chosen to insert into the article is:

Some of the political context has centered on the Komen group’s April hiring of Karen Handel as senior vice president of public policy. Handel joined the organization after an unsuccessful Republican campaign for governor in Georgia.

In that race, Handel wrote on her blog that she would eliminate any state grants for organizations such as Planned Parenthood which, she wrote, “I do not support.”

Of course having read RichardH’s previous post, Diversion–Highway Fatalities and Lemons, you all “know the difference between correlation and causality”.

Daily Show co-creator mocks Komen charity’s Karen Handel is the headline on this Raw Story article about the interview from Current TV.

Lizz Winstead, co-creator of The Daily Show, on Wednesday mocked Karen Handel of the Susan G. Komen for the Cure after the charity cut off all grants to Planned Parenthood.

I think the Komen Foundation will soon find out which of the two organizations people really support. Komen won’t be the winner.

MoveOn has revealed the truth about this withdrawal of funding, Susan G. Komen’s VP Indicates Her Real Motives In Awful Twitter Retweet.

Karen Handel, a former GOP candidate who ran on a pro-life platform, shows her true colors. She just happens to be Susan G. Komen’s Vice President of Public Policy now.

Ecuador Creating Alternative to Neo-Liberal Model is an interview from The Real News.

Jayati Ghosh: Ecuador raising taxes on wealthy, higher royalties on oil companies and making large social investments
.
.
.
Dr. Jayati Ghosh is Professor of Economics and currently also Chairperson at the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Educated at Delhi University, Jawaharlal Nehru University and the University of Cambridge, England, her research interests include globalization, international trade and finance, employment patterns in developing countries, macroeconomic policy, and issues related to gender and development.

What is interesting about Equador is the chance to learn from their experiment. If only the U.S. would keep its grubby paws off of Equador.

I still don’t know why the model that they are eschewing is called Neo-Liberal, I think it is just plain Non-Liberal.

The Atlantic article, Have Democrats Succeeded in Pre-Destroying Romney?, has the teaser,

Inside the left’s little-noticed, relentless, brutally effective campaign to tear down the Republican front-runner in advance of the general election.

Further down in the article is the quote,

“The key date for us is in November,” he said. “What we’re doing is educating the community to the positions that this candidate, Mitt Romney, was taking as he sought our votes. Mitt Romney’s going to find this little anchor placed around his neck getting heavier and heavier.”

Here is a video referenced in the article,

I am just disappointed that, as a Democrat, nobody told me about this wonderful plan. I have been telling a certain Senatorial campaign that they need to be educating the public, and all I get is flak for making my comments.

Mitt Romney payed less than 15% on his REPORTED income. What if his REPORTED income is actually far less than his real income, and it is all legal?

When Romney donates an appreciated asset to charity, he gets to deduct the full value from his income in the calculation of his net income. That means he gets to deduct what he paid for the asset plus whatever capital gain has occurred while he owned it.

He is not required to declare the appreciation in the asset as income and he has never paid taxes on that appreciation. However, he is allowed to use that appreciation to cut his taxes on his REPORTED income.

In other words, he has far more income than he is legally required to REPORT, and he gets to use that unreported, untaxed income to cut his taxes on his reported income. This is in effect a negative tax rate. The more the asset appreciates (the more he earns) the less he pays in taxes.

So not only does he tell you about his unfair lower tax rate than the tax rate paid by the ordinary, middle-class tax payer, he also has to report far less of his income than does the ordinary, middle-class taxpayer. Even Warren Buffet, who tells you it is unfair that he pays a lower tax rate than his secretary does, doesn’t tell you the full story of how much less he pays.

This is just another trick played on the middle-class by the very wealthy. You can use this trick too, but I am not sure if any of my readers can make millions of dollars a year, year after year, using this trick.

What do you think of a candidate who uses these tricks and yet pretends to the voters that they do not exist and that he doesn’t know about them?

The middle-class voter knows that she or he is being ripped off, but they don’t know the half of it. Would they appreciate a candidate that told them about the half they don’t know?

This is the same issue I mentioned in Comparing Taxes Paid By Past Presidents and Presidential Candidates. The facts about how to use this tax trick are documented in Donate Appreciated Assets.

I repost this because I think this way of stating it has far more impact than the description in my previous post. The headline is more catchy, too.

If you don’t listen to this interview with Marisa DeFranco, you won’t know what you are missing for a candidate for U.S. Senate. Yes, you think you are perfectly happy with Elizabeth Warren. What if there were a better candidate, but you refused to listen? How would you feel if you found out later that you got second best?

In the interview below, you have to go through a couple of minutes of talk before Marisa DeFranco comes on. Please don’t let this deter you.

The interview will actually start faster if you click on this fast start link than if you click the play button in the fancy graphic below.

Candidate for U.S. Senate from Massachusetts, Marisa DeFranco, is still fighting. The Dem field quickly winnowed with the sudden fame and fund-raising success of Elizabeth Warren, but not Defranco. She’s a solid progressive and an activist immigration attorney. Expect to see her going head to head in the race toward the Dem primary. She updates her on her campaign.

Here is a snippet, Elizabeth Warren on her Super PAC pact and a plan to sell IBM stock ‘in a heartbeat’ if elected, of Elizabeth Warren’s appearance on The War Room with Jennifer Granholm.

I am a little nervous about this pact now that I hear the penalty is a contribution to a charity. The effectiveness depends on the size of the required penalty. If a third party were to air an ad at a certain cost and the penalty were the cost of producing and airing the ad, then it might be sufficient to drain the coffers of the candidate’s campaign by an equal amount. Anything less and it might still be beneficial to the third parties and the associated campaign to run these ads.

The other problem with the pact is that if Warren supporters feel like she is running an ineffective campaign, they are now powerless to help her. Shades of Martha Coakley refusing to take advice from her friends.

Robert Reich has a very insightful piece The Biggest Risk to the Economy in 2012, and What’s the Economy For Anyway?.

The crisis of American capitalism marks the triumph of consumers and investors over workers and citizens. And since most of us occupy all four roles – even though the lion’s share of consuming and investing is done by the wealthy – the real crisis centers on the increasing efficiency by which all of us as consumers and investors can get great deals, and our declining capacity to be heard as workers and citizens.
.
.
.
Yet these great deals increasingly come at the expense of our own and our compatriots’ jobs and wages, and widening inequality. The goods we want or the returns we seek can often be produced more efficiently elsewhere around the world by companies offering lower pay, fewer benefits, and inferior working conditions.

I look at this as another example of the paradox of our ability to do harm from our individual actions, but our inability to correct the problem unless we take action as a group.

No individual’s refusal to forgo a deal is going to help bring back jobs to this country or improve the working conditions of people in another country.  Thus, there is no incentive for the individuals to refuse the deal in sufficient numbers to change the situation.

Rules can be changed so that such great deals that depend on the disadvantage of others are no longer allowed.  However, changing the rules is not something an individual can do.  This is something that society must organize to do.

If we take a look at the macro view, getting rid of the “great deal” could raise our costs and our incomes by equal amounts so that there was no actual change in our living standards.  There would be no change in the amount of goods and services bought and sold.  There would be no increase in employment. So where would an improvement in our living standards and employment levels actually come from?

I think the change has to come in the fraction that the middle-man sucks out of the process without providing a commensurate societal benefit.  This middle-man is management particularly at the very top end.  It is not that they provide no service.  It is that the rewards are outsized compared to the service provided.  This comes about by concentrations of wealth and power that allows these people to get the rules  changed to skew the market into providing these people with outsized rewards.

Some of the rules changes allow vulture capitalists to use a company’s own cash to finance a leveraged buy-out.  Then the vultures  suck that cash out of the company for their own benefit.  Even worse, they cause the company to go deep in debt to further enhance the vulture’s rewards.  The company goes bankrupt leaving the workers and the investors in the lurch while the vultures walk away fat and happy.

Other rules changes allow banks to fraudulently create mortgages that are then sold to investors with lies about their safety.  When the bubble bursts, the mortgage borrowers lose their homes, the investors lose their money,  the homes go to waste, and the bankers go away fat and happy.

So both kinds of behavior problems, racing to the bottom as workers and earners, and deregulating to allow fraud must be fixed by an organized society.  Frequently we call that government.

There is no use crying about government growing so large.  The non-government forces, international businesses, have grown large.  We cannot expect those players to be controlled by tiny, disorganized governments.  Governments have to work across international borders to put controls on businesses that work across international borders.

From the Washington Post, we have the article Iran, perceiving threat from West, willing to attack on U.S. soil, U.S. intelligence report finds

U.S. intelligence agencies believe that Iran is prepared to launch terrorist attacks inside the United States in response to perceived threats from America and its allies, the U.S. spy chief said Tuesday.

This may be what the U.S. intelligence chief may be saying to the public, but we know from past history that this may bear little resemblance to what the intelligence analysts actually believe.  I am waiting for Seymour Hersch or Gareth Porter to come out with a report on what the intelligence experts really think.

Actually, this perceived threat seems to be our government’s fondest hope.  They seem to be desperately looking for an excuse to attack Iran.  Perhaps if they can escalate the threats to Iran, they can get Iran to act on those threats and try to do a preemptive first strike on us.

If Iran refuses to attack us by midyear in time for Israel to launch an attack on Iran, perhaps we can just make up an attack on us.  Latest reports (see Israeli Officials: Attack on Iran Must Come ‘By Summer’) have Israel afraid that if they wait too long, Iran will have all its nuclear facilities underground and safe from Israeli attacks.  How many Americans is Obama ready to kill so that he can have the Bush excuse for attacking Iran?