Saturday, August 15, 2015
Wednesday, August 12, 2015
Purchasing more money: After Massive Contribution To Scott Walker, NBA Owner Will Get $250 Million In Tax Dollars For New Arena
After Massive Contribution To Scott Walker, NBA Owner Will Get $250 Million In Tax Dollars For New Arena
Wisconsin Governor and Republican presidential candidate Scott Walker will sign a bill Wednesdayfinalizing his controversial plan to spend $250 million in state, county and city funds — plus tens of millions more in interest and future tax breaks — on a new basketball arena for the Milwaukee Bucks.
Walker has characterized the plan to replace the existing 27-year-old NBA arena as beneficial to taxpayers, arguing that the state would lose even more money if they declined to do so. But voices from across the political spectrum are blasting the plan, saying that pouring money into private sports stadiums is a terrible investment, and arguing the team’s Wall Street billionaire owners should shoulder the burden, since they’ll be reaping the profits.
“Government shouldn’t be in the business of financing private sports stadiums,” said the Koch brothers-backed group Americans for Prosperity Wisconsin. “The current deal is based on fuzzy math, complicated accounting and millions of taxpayer dollars. Whether it comes from the state, the county, the city or other authority, these are taxpayer dollars.” The Libertarian CATO Instituteadded: “Any presidential candidate who believes that taxpayer-subsidized stadiums are ‘a good deal’ shouldn’t be anywhere near the federal Treasury.”
The fact that the current Bucks arena is still $20 million in debt only bolsters their arguments.
Originally, Walker attempted to insert the $250 million arena deal into the massive two-year state budget that happened to cut $250 million from the University of Wisconsin, among othercontroversial provisions. But after outcry from both sides of the aisle, it was introduced as a separate bill, which passed after an intense barrage of lobbying.
Now, the generous public financing is raising questions about conflicts of interest.
On the very day that Walker began pushing for taxpayers to foot much of the bill for the new arena, one of the team’s owners donated $150,000 to his super PAC. The investor, Jon Hammes, has donated directly to Walker’s past campaigns, as well, to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars, and this year, Walker hired him as his national finance co-chairman. Another Bucks owner, Ted Kellner, gave $50,000 to Walker’s Super PAC.
Aides to Walker have denied any pay-for-play connection, noting that other Bucks owners havedonated to Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
Though the state bill will become law this week, the economically depressed city of Milwaukee has yet to vote on its own portion of the financing. Workers in the city, who were unable to secure provisions in the state bill guaranteeing living wages and local hiring policies at the new arena, will now turn the pressure on both the City Council and the Bucks owners.
“There’s a real chance to make a breakthrough,” Peter Rickman with Milwaukee’s Good Jobs Alliance told ThinkProgress. “No one trusted the state government to take on this critical issue, since we’ve seen an unbroken string of five years of attacks on working class and poor people, unions, and wages. But there are still a wealth of decisions to be made the local level regarding investment in parking and infrastructure, land permits, and the surrounding commercial properties. And when public money is going to be invested in things like these large-scale projects, we need to ask, ‘Is it going to make the good jobs crisis worse, or is it going to make it better? Is it going to only create poverty-wage service sector jobs?'”
Rickman’s coalition is not only calling for an agreement that gives workers at the new stadium a living wage and the right to unionize, they’re pushing for a promise that the jobs will go to the people who live in the impoverished neighborhoods surrounding Milwaukee’s downtown.
“This used to be one of the best places in the country for African Americans families, because of the good union jobs in factors and foundries,” he explained. “Those jobs weren’t always good; workers fought to make them good. But when those jobs disappeared they were largely replaced with low-wage service sector jobs. Our fight right now is to continue the history of turning bad jobs into good jobs.”
Saturday, August 8, 2015
Friday, August 7, 2015
Election Fraud vs. Voter Fraud
A mathematician may have uncovered widespread election fraud, and Kansas is trying to silence her
Kansas loves them some voter fraud hysteria. From going to the Supreme Court to try and make doubly-sure that non-citizens can’t vote in their elections to setting up a voter fraud website where citizens can report every kind of voter fraud except the kinds that have actually happened in the state, Kansas is on the forefront of voter fraud readiness and protection.
Except, perhaps, when it comes to the machines they use to record their votes.
According to the Wichita Eagle, Wichita State mathematician Beth Clarkson has found irregularities in election returns from Sedgwick County, along with other counties throughout the United States, but has faced stiff opposition from the state in trying to confirm whether the irregularities are fraud or other, less-nefarious anomalies.
Analyzing election returns at a precinct level, Clarkson found that candidate support was correlated, to a statistically significant degree, with the size of the precinct. In Republican primaries, the bias has been toward the establishment candidates over tea partiers. In general elections, it has favored Republican candidates over Democrats, even when the demographics of the precincts in question suggested that the opposite should have been true.
Clarkson’s interest in election returns was piqued by a 2012 paper released by analysts Francois Choquette and James Johnson showing the same pattern of election returns, which favor establishment Republican candidates in primaries and general elections. The irregularities are isolated to precincts that use “Central Tabulator” voting machines — machines that have previously been shown to be vulnerable to hacking. The effects are significant and widespread: According to their analysis, Mitt Romney could have received over a million extra votes in the 2012 Republican primary, mostly coming at the expense of Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich. President Obama also ceded significant votes to John McCain due to this irregularity, as well.
You can read the paper in full here.
While Clarkson has found the same statistical irregularity in a number of localities, her efforts to confirm whether they amount to fraud have been centered on Sedgwick County, Kansas, due to the locality’s use of Real Time Voting Machine Paper Tapes, which provide a paper trail that other localities don’t have. However, her efforts to verify Sedgwick County’s election returns have been repeatedly shut down.
She first requested a recount of the 2013 election, but the timeframe in which a recount could have been requested had passed. She then requested the machines’ computer records from the Sedgwick County registrar, which told her to kindly shove off and sue Secretary of State Kris Kobach if she wanted the records so badly.
When Clarkson initially filed her lawsuit requesting the paper records from the voting machines, her suit was denied because a judge ruled that the paper records constituted ballots, shielding them from the state’s open records law. This ruling is suspect at best, given that the paper records do not have voters’ names assigned to them; they only record when and how a ballot was cast for recount purposes.
She then sought a court order giving her access to a sample of voting records in order to check voting machines’ error rates. This order was ignored by the Secretary of State’s office, despite their being legally required to respond to her within 30 days. The office later said that they didn’t realize they had received her request.
Given Kansas’s professed diehard commitment to combatting election fraud, one would think that they would be all for analysis into whether the integrity of their elections have been compromised. Apparently you’d be wrong.
Wednesday, August 5, 2015
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)