Thursday, January 30, 2014

CBS Chair and CEO Leslie Moonves is the highest paid American; Tom Perkins Apologizes on Bloomberg TV

"...[David Simon] is no longer the highest paid American. The title now goes to CBS Chair and CEO Leslie Moonves, who’s getting a salary of $60 million, and will always be remembered by us as the man who said of rampant political spending, 'Super PACs may be bad for America, but they’re very good for CBS.'"

Advice to Perkins: Time to Shut Up!
January 30, 2014
by Bill Moyers and Michael Winship
Moyers and Company

There’s a rule of thumb in cyberspace etiquette known as Godwin’s Law, named after Mike Godwin, the Internet lawyer and activist who first came up with it. A variation of that law boils down to this: He who first compares the other side to Nazis loses, and the conversation is at an end. Unless you’re billionaire Tom Perkins, who seems dedicated to digging a deeper and deeper hole for himself.

By now you’re probably heard about Perkins’s infamous letter to The Wall Street Journal (whose editorial page is the rich man’s Pravda of class warfare) in which he wrote, “I would call attention to the parallels of fascist Nazi Germany to its war on its ‘one percent,’ namely its Jews, to the progressive war on the American one percent, namely the ‘rich…’ This is a very dangerous drift in our American thinking. Kristallnacht was unthinkable in 1930; is its descendant ‘progressive’ radicalism unthinkable now?”

It’s astonishing how ignorant (not to mention crude and cruel) the very rich can be. Surely, one of his well-paid retainers could have reminded Mr. Perkins that Kristallnacht was the opening salvo in Hitler’s extermination of the Jews, the “night of broken glass” in 1938 Germany and Austria when nearly a hundred Jews were murdered, 30,000 were sent to concentration camps, and synagogues and Jewish-owned business were looted and destroyed, many of them burned to the ground. If Perkins thought his puny point survived the outrageous exaggeration, he was sadly mistaken.

Nonetheless, after a stunned world responded, venture capitalist Perkins went on Bloomberg TV to apologize for using the word “Kristallnacht” but not for the sentiment of his letter. “I don’t regret the message at all,” he said. “Anytime the majority starts to demonize the minority, no matter what it is, it’s wrong and dangerous and no good comes from it.”

Perkins also said that he has family “living in trailer parks,” but bragged like some cackling James Bond villain that he owns “an airplane that flies underwater” and a wristwatch that “could buy a six-pack of Rolexes.” That watch, on prominent display during the Bloomberg interview, is a Richard Mille, a charming little timepiece that can retail for more than $300,000. At that price, a watch shouldn’t just tell you the time, it should allow you to travel through it, perhaps back to the Gilded Age or Versailles in 1789, just as the tumbrils rolled in. Here in the office, our $85 Timex and Seiko watches have crossed their hands over their faces in shame.

That Richard Mille watch triggered TV producer David Simon’s comment on Moyers & Company (full show airing next week) that it should be sold and used to open drug treatment centers in Baltimore, the city where Simon was a crime reporter and which served as the backdrop and central character of his classic HBO series The Wire. You can watch the complete excerpt here:

By the way, the other David Simon to whom ours refers is no longer the highest paid American. The title now goes to CBS Chair and CEO Leslie Moonves, who’s getting a salary of $60 million, and will always be remembered by us as the man who said of rampant political spending, “Super PACs may be bad for America, but they’re very good for CBS.”

Tuesday, January 28, 2014

Choose to take the 'for sale' sign off our democracy

Choose to take the 'for sale' sign off our democracy
Overturning Citizens United
Jan. 28, 2014
People For the American Way

Choose to take the 'for sale' sign off our democracy!

Citizens United

...[T]he problem of big money in elections is so bad, we must amend the Constitution to fix it. The Supreme Court, with decisions like Citizens United v. FEC, has left us no choice.

That's why I'm asking you to support PFAW's Government By the People campaign by renewing your 2014 membership with a much-needed contribution today.

The choice is yours, but I hope you choose to be part of this growing national movement by supporting our work.

16 states and hundreds of localities have passed resolutions supporting an amendment to save our democracy and get big money out...
Now, we're organizing students across the country to pass similar resolutions on their campuses...
And our efforts have already helped get nearly 150 members of Congress to endorse the amendment strategy...

It's incredibly important that we keep up this progress towards our ultimate goal of a constitutional amendment.

Click here to make a secure online renewal contribution now and I will put your generous gift to work immediately to support these efforts and more.

The Koch brothers and Tea Party groups are already on the air in key battleground states trying to use lies about Obamacare to smear Democratic incumbents. They've spent tens of millions of dollars on the 2014 races already, and we're still in the first month of the year.

We'll fight right-wing extremists every step of the way, and work to defeat Tea Party Republicans at the polls, but we also must keep up intense and sustained efforts to get big money OUT of our elections.v Will you support this work with a donation to renew your PFAW membership right now?

Whether it's with a picket sign in the streets of Chicago, marching against the influence of corporate lobbyists, sending activists to town halls and asking members of Congress to pledge their support in our fight to get big money out of our democracy, or with a clipboard, going to door to door to get a state resolution passed, we're not stopping.

We must restore the power in our democracy to where it belongs: with the voter.

Thank you for all that you have done and will continue to do.

Sincerely,

Michael B. Keegan signature
Michael Keegan, President

P.S. Supreme Court watchers are waiting for the next decision day in a few weeks to see if the Court's decision in McCutcheon v. FEC is essentially "Citizens United II." Thanks to arguments filed by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, it's possible that the Court could dismantle what few remaining campaign finance restrictions we have. You can imagine how earth-shattering that result would be -- eliminating any barriers to elected officials being wholly owned, bought and paid for, by ultra-wealthy donors.

With a right-wing majority Court set on undermining our democracy, we must look to constitutional remedies. And we need your help to get there.

Monday, January 13, 2014

Rich GOP Donor Gets Lawmaker to Draft a Bill to Lower His Child Support Payments

In 2010, Eisenga donated $10,000 to Kleefisch and his wife, Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch, according to the Journal Sentinel. Eisenga also donated $15,000 to Republican Gov. Scott Walker.

Rich GOP Donor Gets Lawmaker to Draft a Bill to Lower His Child Support Payments
By Molly Redden
Mother Jones
Jan. 13, 2014

After Michael Eisenga, a wealthy GOP donor and Wisconsin business owner, failed to convince several courts to lower his child support payments, he came up with an inventive plan B—he recruited a Republican state legislator to rewrite Wisconsin law in his favor.

A set of documents unearthed Saturday by the Wisconsin State Journal shows Eisenga and his lawyer, William Smiley, supplying detailed instructions to Republican state Rep. Joel Kleefisch on how to word legislation capping child support payments from the wealthy. Kleefisch began work on the legislation last fall, weeks after an appeals court rejected Eisenga's attempts to lower his child support payments.

For example, in a September 13 letter, a drafting lawyer with Wisconsin's legislative services bureau complained to a Kleefisch aide, "It's hard to fashion a general principle that will apply to only one situation."

According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Eisenga's current child support payments for the three children he has with his ex-wife are set at $216,000 a year. (Per the couple's prenuptial agreement, the divorce settlement left his $30 million in assets untouched.)

Current law instructs judges to calculate child support as a percentage of income, with no cap and the option to include assets. Under Kleefisch's bill, which making its way through the Wisconsin statehouse, payments would top out at $150,000 annually, and judges would be prohibited from taking assets into account when determining child support. The bill also includes language that would allow Eisenga to restart court proceedings over his child support payments, as it requires courts to slash such payments if they are 10 percent higher than they would be under the new cap.

In 2010, Eisenga donated $10,000 to Kleefisch and his wife, Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch, according to the Journal Sentinel. Eisenga also donated $15,000 to Republican Gov. Scott Walker.

The drafting documents, available on the Wisconsin legislature's website, leave little not doubt that the bill was written to Eisenga's specifications. According to the documents, on September 5, Eisenga's lawyer briefed him on changes he was suggesting to a draft of Kleefisch's bill. "We focused only on the portion that would require the court to modify your child support order based solely on the passage of the bill," Smiley wrote. Eisenga then forwarded that letter to Kleefisch and one of his aides, saying, "Please have the drafter make these SPECIFIC changes to the bill." The next day, Kleefisch's aide forwarded the letter to the legislative lawyer drafting the bill.

A hearing for the bill is scheduled Wednesday before the Assembly Family Law Committee.

Eisenga and Smiley declined to speak to local news outlets about their emails with Kleefisch. On Saturday, Kleefisch told the Journal, "I do a gamut of legislation with the help and assistance of many, many constituents, and whether they gave a contribution or not has not made a difference."