"An educated electorate is a prerequisite for a democracy."
Mon, March 22, 2021, 3PM (CT). POSSIBLE TOPICS: Voting info; TX DMV announces end date for waiver of vehicle title, registration ; Tax Day for individuals extended to May 17: Treasury, IRS extend filing and payment deadline; Asian women say shootings point to relentless, racist tropes; River Oaks Theatre likely to close despite further negotiations; The Texas rent relief program has been open for a month. It’s made just 3 payments.; Rent is cheap, vacant space is everywhere: Retailers seize the moment to open stores; What Happens When a Slogan Becomes the Curriculum; Evidence in Capitol attack investigation trending toward sedition charges, departing chief says; ‘An all-hands moment’: GOP rallies behind voting limits; Democrats want ‘illegal aliens and child molesters’ to vote, Ted Cruz says – report; The Government Just Admitted It Doesn’t Really Try to Collect Rich People’s Taxes; US ranks last in worker benefits among developed countries: data; MORE. Guest: [AUDIO/VIDEO] #KPFTHouston 90.1FM
This program was recorded on SUNDAY, March 14. Due to Covid-19, shows are being prerecorded beginning March 13, 2020 and until further notice. We miss our live call-in participants, and look forward to a time we can once again go live.Thinkwing Radio with Mike Honig(@ThinkwingRadio), a listener call-in show airing live every Monday from 3-4 PM (CT) on KPFT-FM 90.1 (Houston). My co-host and Editor is Andrew Ferguson.
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For the purposes of this show, I operate on two mottoes:
An educated electorate is a prerequisite for a democracy.
You’re entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts.
“There’s a reason why you separate military and police. One fights the enemy of the State. The other serves and protects the People. When the military becomes both, then the enemies of the State tend t become the People.” ~ Commander Adama, “Battlestar Galactica” (“WATER”, Season 1 episode 2, at the 28 minute mark.)
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Next Election: May 01, 2021 – Uniform Election. Early Voting: April 19th – April 27th
If you are denied your right to vote any place at any timeat any polling place for any reason, ask for (or demand) a provisional ballot rather than lose your vote.
Fill out a declaration at the polls describing a reasonable impediment to obtaining it, and show a copy or original of one of the following supporting forms of ID:
A government document that shows your name and an address, including your voter registration certificate
Current utility bill
Bank statement
Government check
Paycheck
A certified domestic (from a U.S. state or territory) birth certificate or (b) a document confirming birth admissible in a court of law which establishes your identity (which may include a foreign birth document)
This week we’ll be discussing local, state, and national stories.
In the first part of the show, we’ll discuss hate crimes against Asian-Americans. We’ll also talk about tax season, disaster assistance, renter’s aid, and the River Oaks Theater.
Next Election: May 01, 2021 – Uniform Election. Early Voting: April 19th – April 27th
States may have different filing deadlines for state and local taxes.
Winter storm disaster relief for Louisiana, Oklahoma and Texas: Earlier this year, following the disaster declarations issued by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the IRS announced relief for victims of the February winter storms in Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana. These states have until June 15, 2021, to file various individual and business tax returns and make tax payments. This extension to May 17 does not affect the June deadline.
The above information applies to IRS/Federal taxes ONLY. It is strongly advised that you go to the IRS.gov website and verify for yourself. For State and local taxing authorities, deadlines may be unchanged from usual, or not. You are urged to check with your accountant, tax preparer or for yourself at your City, County, and State taxing authorities.
For Christine Liwag Dixon and others, the bloodshed in Georgia — six Asian women among the dead, allegedly killed by a man who blamed his “sexual addiction” — was a new and horrible chapter in the shameful history of Asian women being reduced to sex objects.
“I’ve had people either assume that I’m a sex worker or assume that, as a Filipino woman, I will do anything for money because they assume that I’m poor,” said Dixon, a freelance writer and musician in New York City. “I had an old boss who offered me money for sex once.”
Tuesday’s rampage at three Atlanta-area massage businesses prompted Asian American women to share stories of being sexually harassed or demeaned. They say they’ve often had to tolerate racist and misogynistic men who cling to a narrative that Asian women are exotic and submissive. …
The suspect in the shootings, a 21-year-old white man, considered the women inside the spas “sources of temptation,” police said.
Grace Pai, a director of organizing at Chicago’s Asian Americans Advancing Justice branch, called that characterization of the attacks “a real slap in the face to anyone who identifies as an Asian American woman.”
“We know exactly what this racialized misogyny looks like,” Pai said. “And to think that someone targeted three Asian-owned businesses that were staffed by Asian American women … and didn’t have race or gender in mind is just absurd.” …
Stereotypes of Asian women as “dragon ladies” or sexually available partners have been around for centuries. From the moment Asian women began to migrate to the U.S., they were the targets of hypersexualization, said Ellen Wu, a history professor at Indiana University.
The Page Act of 1875 prohibited women coming to the U.S. from anywhere for “immoral purposes,” but the law was largely enforced against Chinese women.
“As early as the 1870s, white Americans were already making this association, this assumption of Asian women being walking sex objects,” Wu said. …
[Catherine Ceniza Choy, a University of California, Berkeley, professor of ethnic studies and a Filipino American woman, said,] “In American society, Asian Americans are not seen and listened to. We are seen in specific ways at times, as model minorities, as projections of white, male fantasy, but we are not seen as full-fledged Americans. We are not seen as full human beings. It’s a kind of erasure and dehumanization.”
“After lengthy negations [sic], Landmark Theatre and Weingarten were not able to reach an agreement. Therefore, Landmark Theatre has no choice but to close its doors effective next week. No definitive date has been set. Landmark Theatres would like to thank the Houston community for their years of support,” the March 19 statement [From Weingarten Realty] reads.
A day earlier, the Los Angeles-based theater firm said it had conceded some ground to Weingarten, which owns the property at 2009 W. Gray St. …
“… Weingarten insists that during a substantial period of the extension term that Landmark pay the same rent prior to the pandemic. The pre-COVID rent reflects a different world that does not address the realities of today or the foreseeable future. Landmark has also offered to pay an additional percentage rent to allow Weingarten to come close to the pre-covid rent,” it said.
Weingarten has said the theater has missed rent payments for a year but offered Landmark the option to pay back the balance over two years.
“We’ve paid three payments which is better than none but is way too few,” Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs director Brooke Boston said on a Friday Zoom call. “We had some major system issues happen and so it’s really only been maybe, like, 14 days that we’ve been fully in our new system.” …
“This is a $1 billion rental assistance program that the State of Texas is standing up completely from scratch. While the funding will be extremely helpful to many thousands of Texans, it did not come with program guidelines or mechanisms for delivery,” Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs spokesperson Kristina Tirloni said in an email.
The Texas rent relief program opened Feb. 15. Tenants and landlords quickly complained about the program’s accessibility. Among the top issues: The website would not allow applicants to enter their phone numbers, no one answered the phone number provided and people could not check their application status.
MIKE: I’ve been on the site. It may be working better now. It’s worth trying.
After the break, we’ll be talking about cheap retail space thanks to Covid, what it means to tinker with history curricula, Capital sedition, and attempted voter suppression.
For the first time in years, retailers plan to open more stores than they close.
From Ulta Beauty and Sephora to Dick’s Sporting Goods, Five Below and TJ Maxx, businesses are rebounding from the Covid pandemic and looking to expand.
Many businesses see an opportunity to sign shorter leases, which can allow them to experiment with different formats.
Year to date, retailers in the U.S. have announced 3,199 store openings and 2,548 closures, according to a tracking by Coresight Research. …
Following a tsunami of store closures in 2020, the retail real estate landscape is fraught with vacancies. Mall and shopping center owners across the country are looking for tenants to fill that space quickly. Meanwhile, some retailers are more optimistic, having made it through the dark days of the pandemic. They’re looking to take advantage of a market where they largely hold more power over their landlords when they sign new deals or bring negotiations to the table. …
What Happens When a Slogan Becomes the Curriculum – A curriculum inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement is spreading, raising questions about the line between education and indoctrination. By Conor Friedersdorf, Staff writer at The Atlantic | COM/IDEAS | March 14, 2021
Last month, a public-school district that serves mostly elementary and middle-school students in Evanston, Illinois, held its third annual Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action—using a curriculum, created in collaboration with Black Lives Matter activists and the local teachers’ union, that introduces children as young as 4 and 5 to some of America’s most complex and controversial subjects. For example, parents of kindergartners in District 65 were asked to spend time at home discussing a book on race that teachers had read aloud to their children. …
In Evanston, parents are asked to quiz their kids on whiteness and give them approachable examples of “how whiteness shows up in school or in the community.” In its focus on “whiteness” and its invitation to readers to challenge racism by interrogating and rejecting it, the worldview of Not My Idea is similar to that of Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility, now a staple of diversity-and-inclusion programs and anti-racism training. Not My Idea is also a jarringly didactic assignment for kindergartners.
The BL at School movement is gaining momentum in Democratic strongholds around the country, where millions have felt impelled to respond to the high-profile police killings of Black Americans and the inequities that such incidents expose. Parents and educators in these enclaves are largely united in believing that Black lives matter, and that schools should encourage students of all ages to reject racism and remedy its injustices, much as previous generations of schoolchildren were taught to “Just Say No to Drugs” and to “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.” …
Indeed, with the educational resources it creates and curates, the national BLM at School coalition unapologetically aims to create a new generation of allied activists. And that influence shows in Evanston, where, starting in the spring of 2019, the District 65 Educators’ Council––the local teachers’ union––proposed to work with administrators to develop a local BLM at School curriculum. By autumn, the school board had approved a week of lessons. The curriculum—which district leaders say aligns with Illinois social-studies standards and guidelines—draws on the materials and guiding principles of the national initiative while also adding texts such as Not My Idea, which doesn’t appear on the national BLM at School’s current list of recommended books. …
The committee that formulated the current national BLM at School classroom resources is chaired by Christopher Rogers, a veteran of organizing work in the Philadelphia public-education system who is now pursuing a doctoral degree in literacy studies at the University of Pennsylvania.. …
The Black Lives Matter movement is within its rights to focus exclusively on Black people killed by police—regardless of whether one believes, as I do, that Americans should also know names such as Daniel Shaver, a white man killed by police in 2016. Speeches by Black Lives Matter activists need not include the disclaimer that white men are far more likely to be killed by police than Black women are. But the public-school system should tell the whole truth to those in its care, even if it undermines a narrative that activists champion. …
[E]ducators should not be neutral as to the question “Should my students be taught what to think, or how to think?” Schools should do the latter. They should promote truth seeking and diversity of thought. They should recognize the imperative in a pluralistic democracy of understanding others’ beliefs and the importance of subjecting one’s own beliefs to scrutiny, given society’s complexity and the fallibility of well-intentioned judgments. And they should understand the folly of treating profound disagreements as if they foreclosed the possibility of cooperation. …
Former interim U.S. attorney Michael R. Sherwin, of Washington, reiterated Sunday that he thinks charges of seditious conspiracy could be brought against certain defendants in the Jan. 6 Capitol breach, a rarely invoked charge for those who use violence to hinder the execution of federal law. …
Federal law makes conspiring to overthrow, or oppose by force federal authority, including the use of violence to prevent, hinder or delay the execution of law, punishable by up to 20 years in prison.
On an invitation-only call last week, Sen. Ted Cruz huddled with Republican state lawmakers to call them to battle on the issue of voting rights.
Democrats are trying to expand voting rights to “illegal aliens” and “child molesters,” he claimed, and Republicans must do all they can to stop them. If they push through far-reaching election legislation now before the Senate, the GOP won’t win elections again for generations, he said.
Asked if there was room to compromise, Cruz was blunt: “No.” …
Cruz’s statements, recorded by a person on the call and obtained by The Associated Press, capture the building intensity behind Republicans’ nationwide campaign to restrict access to the ballot. From statehouses to Washington, the fight over who can vote and how — often cast as “voting integrity” — has galvanized a Republican Party in search of [a] unifying mission in the post-Trump era. For a powerful network of conservatives, voting restrictions are now viewed as a political life-or-death debate, and the fight has all-but eclipsed traditional Republican issues like abortion, gun rights and tax cuts as an organizing tool. …
[Said Jessica Anderson, executive director of Heritage Action, an influential conservative advocacy group in Washington ], “It kind of feels like an all-hands-on-deck moment for the conservative movement, when the movement writ large realizes the sanctity of our elections is paramount and voter distrust is at an all-time high. We’ve had a bit of a battle cry from the grassroots, urging us to pick this fight.”
Several prominent groups have recently entered the fray: Anti-abortion rights group, the Susan B. Anthony List, has partnered with another conservative Christian group to fund a new organization, the Election Transparency Initiative. FreedomWorks, a group formed to push for smaller government, has initiated a $10 million calling for tighter voting laws in the states. It will be run by Cleta Mitchell, a prominent Republican attorney who advised former President Donald Trump. …
[T]he Democratic-led Senate will soon consider an array of voting changes. The package, known as H.R. 1, would require states to automatically register eligible voters, as well as offer same-day registration. It would limit states’ ability to purge registered voters from their rolls and restore former felons’ voting rights. Among dozens of other provisions, it would also require states to offer 15 days of early voting and allow no-excuse absentee balloting. Democrats, who are marshaling their own resources behind the bill, argue it is necessary to block what they describe as voter suppression efforts in the states. …
The focus on voting is visible across the conservative movement, even among groups with no clear interest in the voting debate. At a televised town hall in February, leading Christian conservative Tony Perkins fielded several questions about voting before tackling topics on the social issues his Family Research Council typically focuses on.
Perkins answered the question by recalling how voting laws were made stricter in his native Louisiana after a close 1996 Senate race won by Democrats. He noted that the state now votes solidly Republican.
“When you have free, fair elections, you’re going to have outcomes that are positive,” Perkins said before urging viewers to push state lawmakers to “restore election integrity.”
On the ALEC call, Cruz reportedly insisted Democrats’ “only objective” was “to ensure that [they] can never again lose another election, that they will win and maintain control of the House of Representatives and the Senate and of the state legislatures for the next century”.
Republicans have lost the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections, although the Electoral College system has placed their man in the White House after three such contests.
Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton in 2016 despite losing the popular vote by nearly 3m ballots. Last year, he lost to Joe Biden by more than 7m – and lost the Electoral College by the same score by which he won four years before.
Coming up: Under-auditing the rich, and US worker benefits worse than other industrialized countries.
By some estimates, the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans manage to avoid paying about a quarter-trillion dollars of owed taxes every single year. Now, new government data show that audits of the super-rich and large corporations have hit a new low, leaving billions of dollars of uncollected taxes at precisely a moment when lawmakers say new revenue is needed to fund infrastructure and climate investments.
In response, two progressive Democratic lawmakers have authored legislation cracking down on tax evasion.
The new Internal Revenue Service figures compiled by Syracuse University researchers show that in the last eight years, there has been a 72 percent drop in the number of audits of those making more than $1 million. In all, 98 percent of those making more than $1 million did not face an audit last year.
There has also been a 55 percent drop in the number of audits of America’s largest corporations. In 2012, almost all corporate giants were audited. In 2020, however, almost two thirds of those corporations were not subjected to audits. …
The situation is the result of both agency priorities and funding cuts.
A recent report from the Treasury Department’s inspector general concluded that at the IRS, “high-income taxpayers are generally not a collection priority, nor is there a strategy in place to address nonpayment by high-income taxpayers.” As evidence, the report showed that the agency failed to recover more than 60 percent of the $4 billion in back taxes owed by those making more than $1.5 million.
At the same time, overall enforcement has been hobbled by draconian budget reductions that have resulted in 43 percent fewer IRS revenue agents and 26 percent fewer IRS criminal investigators in the last decade, according to the Syracuse data.
Between 2010 and 2018, the IRS’s budget has been slashed by more than 20 percent, and its enforcement budget has been cut by 24 percent, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. …
A July 2020 report from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office found that increasing funding for IRS enforcement by $40 billion would boost revenues by more than $100 billion over the next decade. New York University tax law professor Chye-Ching Huang has noted that in 2013, the Treasury Department estimated “that each additional dollar dedicated to IRS enforcement results in directly recouping about $6 in taxes owed.”
To that end, Reps. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.)—both Congressional Progressive Caucus members—have recently introduced separate bills that would boost the IRS’s enforcement budget and audit rates.
Khanna’s legislation is the more aggressive of the two. The bill would increase IRS enforcement funding by $70 billion and require the agency to audit 95 percent of large corporations, 50 percent of individuals reporting more than $10 million of annual income, and 20 percent of individuals reporting more than $1 million of income.
Human Resources software company Zenefits compiled data on the U.S.’s workplace benefits systems and compared them to how international firms keep both employees and regulating agencies happy.
Looking at a range of benefits, from health care to retirement options, companies based in the U.S. rank lower than other comparable developed nations in terms of best benefits. …
The U.S., where health care is privatized, does not offer universal health care, and Zenefits notes that private hospitals also propagate treatment inequalities between individuals who can afford higher quality treatment and those who cannot.
Retirement benefits are another weak spot for the U.S.; older reports indicate that the U.S. comes in 16th place among the countries with the best retirement plans. …
This inequality in U.S. retirement planning extends to racial injustice as well. Some 24 percent of white family households are covered with an employee-sponsored retirement plan, compared to 16 percent of households of color.
Black and Latinx workers also report a lack of retirement savings, with 62 percent of Black and 69 percent of Latinx households reporting having no retirement plan. This is opposed to just 32 percent of white households.
Across the globe, the U.S. also came in 32nd place for highest life expectancy, averaging 78.5 years.
The U.S. is also notoriously stingy with its paid time off. Be it for sick leave, parental leave, or general work-life balance, the U.S. shows zero mandated paid holidays, whereas similar countries within the European Union average between 20-30 paid holidays for discretionary use.
Maternity leave is protected under U.S. labor laws, though, with 12 weeks of unpaid leave being the baseline for companies.
Other countries, such as Finland, Germany, Japan, and Canada give their employees more time, ranging from 161 weeks to 52 weeks.
This inequality in U.S. retirement planning extends to racial injustice as well. Some 24 percent of white family households are covered with an employee-sponsored retirement plan, compared to 16 percent of households of color.
Black and Latinx workers also report a lack of retirement savings, with 62 percent of Black and 69 percent of Latinx households reporting having no retirement plan. This is opposed to just 32 percent of white households.
Across the globe, the U.S. also came in 32nd place for highest life expectancy, averaging 78.5 years. …
Thinkwing Radio with Mike Honig 