By Tal Axelrod @ TheHill.com, Sept. 17
New Jersey leaders announced Thursday they are implementing a new millionaire’s tax as the Garden State works to recover from the economic fallout of the coronavirus pandemic.
Gov. Phil Murphy (D) was joined by state leaders at a press conference in Trenton to announce that lawmakers have agreed to raise the tax rate on residents earning over $1 million from 8.97 percent to 10.75 percent. The agreement also includes a maximum $500 tax rebate for middle-class and low-income working families with at least one dependent child for single parent households earning $75,000 or married couples making under $150,000.
The rebate checks will start to go out in summer 2021. Murphy said the effort will help as many as 800,000 families in New Jersey. People in the state earning over $5 million are already taxed at the higher rate [....]
'There's not a comparable year': Homicides are up 52% in Chicago amid COVID-19, with majority involving people of color
By Grace Hauk @ USAToday.com, Sept. 17
CHICAGO – The nation's second-largest county has recorded more homicides this year than in all of 2019, the majority of which – 95% – were people of color, the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office announced this week.
Chicago accounts for most of the deaths, with much of the violence occurring in a handful of neighborhoods on the city's south and west sides.
The Windy City – like others across the country – has seen an uptick in violent crimes this summer amid the coronavirus pandemic, mass layoffs and nationwide unrest. Murders and shootings are up 52% from the same time last year, according to police data, and dozens of children under 10 years old have been shot, some fatally.
In July, the city saw its largest mass shooting in recent memory, when 15 people were shot at a funeral on the city's South Side.
"Facing illnesses, facing deaths, facing also the higher rates of unemployment and loss of income in our communities has also, unfortunately, played a role in the levels of violence we've seen throughout the year," Katya Nuques, executive director of a community organization in the predominantly Latino Little Village neighborhood, said during a press conference Wednesday [....]
A heavily criticized recommendation from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last month about who should be tested for the coronavirus was not written by C.D.C. scientists and was posted to the agency’s website despite their serious objections...t he White House writing scientifically inaccurate statements such as ‘don’t test all contacts’ on C.D.C.’s website is like someone vandalizing a national monument with graffiti.”
Ok, how do we fix this? The schools aren't going to do it. We need to get on TikTok or wherever this age group is and make videos FOR them. Making them watch Schindler's List isn't going to work against the short attention span theater of the internet. https://t.co/hcyRzAARnH
— Zach D Roberts (@zdroberts) September 17, 2020
by Matt Naham @ LawandCrime.com, Sept. 16
Ticked Off Federal Judge Orders Acting SDNY U.S. Attorney to Make Prosecutors Read Opinion Exposing Misconduct
read it, it's a good easy-to-read summary for laymen of the legal arguments involved
Oh look, all p.o.c. don't all think alike and aren't sworn to uphold the BLM movement. Who knew?
Libertarians' been making those suggestions over @ Reason magazine for decades.
By Erika Marie @ hotnewhiphop.com, Sept. 15
[....] "I think that the protesters that have been, for months, out there now, I among them, should be saying we are not anti-police and we are certainly not for killing or shooting police," said Al Sharpton on MSNBC's Morning Joe. "We are there saying that police should not be wrongfully killing or shooting civilians, particularly in the Black community. And for people to try to associate us with murder and ambushing and death is doing more to hurt the cause than anything else. Some, I suspect in my own way of thinking, could be planted in order to hurt us because that is so extreme from our position."
"Let me be real clear, I pray for the lives of those two officers just like I pray for Jacob Blake who was shot in the back seven times in Kenosha, Wisconsin and I pray for the family of George Floyd," Sharpton added. "And I pray for all of them in the same prayer. I don't have separate prayers for police victims and for police that are victimized. The same prayer: that we stop this senseless violence and this senseless lawlessness. This is where we must be. This is Dr. King's tradition. This is what Nietzsche wrote about. John Lewis. Anyone on the other side whether they claim that they're left or right are wrong, that's what they are." Watch Rev. Sharpton's MSNBC clip below [....]
By Sylvan Lane @ TheHill.com, Sept. 15
The World Trade Organization (WTO) said Tuesday that President Trump’s tariffs on more than $400 billion in Chinese goods violate international trade regulations.
In a Tuesday report, a panel of three WTO adjudicators ruled that the U.S. was unable to prove its tariffs on Chinese products were necessary to level the global trade playing field. The ruling does not obligate the U.S. to scrap the tariffs, but finds that the Trump administration “has not met its burden of demonstrating that the measures are provisionally justified.”
Starting in 2018, the Trump administration imposed tariffs [....]
