By Jessica Corbett/Common Dreams

As corporations and wealthy individuals across the United States are slated to benefit from massive tax breaks thanks to the GOP’s latest tax legislation, a Bloomberg analysis published Thursday found that chief executives of American companies already make 265 times the amount of money an average worker is paid – the largest CEO-worker income gap in the world.
“CEOs of the biggest publicly traded U.S. companies averaged $14.3 million in annual pay, more than double that of their Canadian counterparts and 10 times greater than those in India,” according to Bloomberg. While India ranked second on Bloomberg’s CEO pay-to-average income ratio, Indian chief executives made about a tenth of their American counterparts’ incomes, averaging $1.46 million annually.

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Posted on December 29, 2017

By The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists

Dear Steve,
Here we are, the final e-mail from ICIJ for the year – and what a year it has been!
Today we have our latest piece of Paradise Papers coverage for you – reflecting the groundswell of action ICIJ’s projects on offshore secrecy have created. We’re hoping it continues in the new year!
We also calculated how much money tax authorities across the world have recouped since we published the Panama Papers in April last year – more than $500 million (and counting!)
And in true holiday spirit, we have insight into what our team members (though maybe not me!) are doing this holiday season.

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Posted on December 28, 2017

By The City Of Chicago Office Of Inspector General

The City of Chicago Office of Inspector General Audit and Program Review section has published its 2018 Audit Plan. APR supports the OIG mission by conducting independent, objective performance analysis and evaluation of municipal programs and operations, issuing public reports of findings and making recommendations to strengthen and improve the delivery of public services.
In addition to summarizing work completed in 2017 and work currently in progress, the 2018 APR Audit Plan identifies 23 new audit topics to initiate in the coming year, which will answer the following questions, among others:

• Has the City implemented the recommendations made by the Mayor’s Tax Increment Financing (TIF) Reform Task Force?
• Does the Chicago Police Department manage and maintain dashboard cameras and footage effectively?

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Posted on December 22, 2017

By Norman Solomon/Common Dreams

Movie critics are already hailing The Post, directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Meryl Streep as Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham. Millions of people will see the film in early winter. But the real-life political story of Graham and her newspaper is not a narrative that’s headed to the multiplexes.
The Post comes 20 years after Graham’s autobiography Personal History appeared and won enormous praise – including the Pulitzer Prize. Read as a memoir, the book is a poignant account of Graham’s long quest to overcome sexism, learn the newspaper business and gain self-esteem. Read as media history, however, it is deceptive.

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Posted on December 21, 2017

By Robert Reich

The Republican tax plan to be voted on this week is likely to pass. “The American people have waited 31 long years to see our broken tax code overhauled,” the leaders of the Koch’s political network insisted in a letter to members of Congress, urging swift approval.
They added that the time had come to put “more money in the pockets of American families.”
Please. The Koch network doesn’t care a fig about the pockets of American families. It cares about the pockets of the Koch network.
It has poured money into almost every state in an effort to convince Americans that the tax cut will be good for them. Yet most Americans don’t believe it.
Polls shows only about a third of Americans favor the tax plan. The vast majority feel it’s heavily skewed to the rich and big businesses – which it is.
In counties that Trump won but Obama carried in 2012, only 17 percent say they expect to pay less in taxes, according to a recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll. Another 25 percent say they expected their family would actually pay higher taxes.
Most Americans know that the tax plan is payback for major Republican donors. Gary Cohn, Trump’s lead economic advisor, even conceded in an interview that “the most excited group out there are big CEOs, about our tax plan.”
Republican Rep. Chris Collins admitted “my donors are basically saying, ‘Get it done or don’t ever call me again.'”
Senator Lindsey Graham warned that if Republicans failed to pass the tax plan, “the financial contributions will stop.”

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Posted on December 19, 2017

By Jake Johnson/Common Dreams

In “further proof that the Republican tax bill is a massive giveaway to the largest corporations in the country,” a new report prepared for Sen. Bernie Sanders and published on Monday found that 15 of America’s most profitable corporations would receive a combined $236 billion tax cut if the GOP plan becomes law.
Released as Republicans gear up for a final vote on their tax bill as early as Tuesday, the report notes that “[o]ver the last 30 years, 15 of the largest U.S. corporations have accepted $3.9 trillion of corporate welfare in the form of subsidies, tax credits, and bailouts, and another $108 billion in government handouts in the form of federal contracts.”
“On top of this $4 trillion boondoggle,” the analysis adds, “Republicans want to give these corporations an additional $236 billion tax cut.”

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Posted on December 18, 2017

By Michael Golden

The 2018 midterms are likely to be the most closely watched congressional elections in U.S. history! Swing District will follow one of the most competitive House races in the country, Arizona’s 1st, while also exploring the reasons why Congress has become increasingly unpopular with American voters. Watch!

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Posted on December 15, 2017

By Andre Perry/The Hechinger Report

Charter schools didn’t create segregation but the charter school movement isn’t helping to end it either.
When Martin Luther King Jr. said, “We must never adjust ourselves to racial segregation,” he wasn’t suggesting that black kids need white kids and teachers in the classroom with them to learn. King was acutely aware that segregation sustains racial inequality in schools and other institutions. Education reform without an explicit attempt to dismantle the sources of inequality isn’t a moon shot toward justice; it is simply a maladjustment to injustice.
A recent Associated Press analysis of national school enrollment data found that “as of school year 2014-2015, more than 1,000 of the nation’s 6,747 charter schools had minority enrollment of at least 99 percent, and the number has been rising steadily.”

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Posted on December 14, 2017

By Jake Johnson/Common Dreams

That governments deploy undercover law enforcement officers to infiltrate, gather information on, and subvert protest movements has long been common knowledge. Less well-known, however, is the extent to which some of the world’s most profitable businesses have hired private spies to keep tabs on political movements they perceive as a threat to their power and profits.
Hundreds of pages of newly leaked documents – reported on for the first time Tuesday by the Guardian and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism – provide an unprecedented glimpse into this mysterious world of “corporate spies,” who have been hired by major companies like the German carmaker Porsche, the U.S.-based manufacturing giant Caterpillar, and the Royal Bank of Scotland, to monitor anti-war demonstrations, protests against the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories, and environmental campaigns against the destruction of the planet.

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Posted on December 13, 2017

By The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists

Dear Steve,
This week our reporter Will Fitzgibbon offers a bit of insight into what it’s like being an investigative reporter on the Paradise Papers. Will, along with several of ICIJ’s partners, traveled to Bermuda in the months leading up to our project release. But he received a bizarre phone call when he returned to D.C.

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Posted on December 11, 2017