Washington's War on Poor Grad Students

Sunday, November 26, 2017 By Jill Richardson, OtherWords | Op-Ed

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/42712-washington-s-war-on-poor-grad-students

The Republican tax plan winding its way through Congress includes a special middle finger to the nation's graduate students.

It's a little bit wonky, so stay with me here. I'll explain how it affects me, since I'm an actual graduate student.

Going to grad school would've been entirely out of reach for me if I had to pay full tuition for my education. Getting a PhD takes at least five years and often more. I don't have a spouse, trust fund, or parents to cover my cost of living or my tuition.

If I had to pay for my own education, it would've been simply out of the question. This is hardly uncommon.

How many adults do you know can forego five or more years of income while simultaneously paying thousands of dollars in college tuition each year?

Since the answer to that question is "not many," universities employ graduate students as poorly paid labor in exchange for an education, health insurance, and a very low wage.

In my case, I've worked as a teaching assistant for the past three years while also attending classes at University of Wisconsin-Madison. Other students worked as research assistants. A lucky few got funding that allowed them to pursue their own research. The rest of us had to work.

Forbes mentions some magical places where graduate students are given stipends up to $50,000 per year. At Wisconsin, we weren't so lucky.

My take home pay was about $1,300 per month, nine months of the year. The other three months (summer) I got nothing. No, it wasn't enough to live on. I'm deeply in debt with student loans.

Then there's the matter of tuition. Graduate students like me often don't have to pay it.

If a school charges $20,000 per year in tuition but waives it for graduate students who work as teaching or research assistants, the new Republican tax plan wants to count that as $20,000 in taxable income.

You do the math: If a student is living on a tiny stipend and maybe some loans, how on earth can he or she afford to pay thousands of extra dollars in taxes?

You may not care about graduate students. It affects 3 million of us, but you may not be one yourself.

Odds are, however, that you're affected by graduate students. Graduate students do a lot of the grunt work in universities while working on their doctorate degrees. They teach students, do research, and develop new technologies.

And they go on to become professors and experts themselves.

Without graduate students, we won't have scientists. Every PhD scientist was once a graduate student.

Without graduate students, we won't have professors. If you have an associate's or a bachelor's degree, that was only possible because your professors were able to get a graduate education.

Gut graduate education in America and you'll gut education as a whole.

Ignoring Washington’s Role in Yemen Carnage, 60 Minutes Paints US as Savior

November 20, 2017

Adam Johnson

http://fair.org/home/ignoring-washingtons-role-in-yemen-carnage-60-minutes-paints-us-as-savior/

In one of the most glaring, power-serving omissions in some time, CBS News’ 60 Minutes (11/19/17) took a deep dive into the humanitarian crisis in Yemen, and did not once mention the direct role the United States played in creating, perpetuating and prolonging a crisis that’s left over 10,000 civilians dead, 2 million displaced, and an estimated 1 million with cholera.

Correspondent Scott Pelley’s segment, “When Food Is Used as a Weapon,” employed excellent on-the-ground reporting to highlight the famine and bombing victims of Saudi Arabia’s brutal two-and-a-half year siege of Yemen. But its editors betrayed this reporting—and their viewers—by stripping the conflict of any geopolitical context, and letting one of its largest backers, the United States government, entirely off the hook.

As FAIR has previously noted (10/14/16, 2/27/17), US media frequently ignore the Pentagon’s role in the conflict altogether. Pelly did not once note that the US assists Saudi Arabia’s bombing campaign with logistical support, refueling and the selling of arms to the tune of $400 billion.  The US also routinely protects Saudi Arabia at the UN from condemnation—a shield that may have vastly prolonged the war, given that it signals the support of the most powerful country on Earth.

Meanwhile, Iran’s involvement in the conflict—which, even by the most paranoid estimates, is far less than the United States’—is placed front and center as one side of the “war.” The conflict is framed in hackneyed “Sunni vs Shia” terms, with Saudi Arabia unironically called the “leader of the Sunni world” and Iran the “leader of the Shia world.” A reductionist narrative that omits that Sunnis have fought alongside the Houthis, and the fact that Saudi bombs kill members of the marginalized, mostly Sunni Muhamasheen caste, who are neither “led” by Saudi Arabia nor part of the “Shia world.”

This cartoon dichotomy is the extent of the context. Saudi Arabia is rightly singled out as the primary aggressor (though a dubious comparative body count of 3,000 killed by Saudis vs. 1,000 by Houthis is proffered that is far lower than the UN’s January 2017 estimates of 10,000 total civilians killed), but who the Saudis’ primary patrons are—the United States and Britain (and Canada, too)—is simply not mentioned. One would think, watching Pelley’s report, it was a purely regional conflict, and not one sanctioned and armed by major Western superpowers to counter “Iranian aggression.”

To compound the obfuscation, 60 Minutes doesn’t just omit the US role in the war, it paints the US as a savior rescuing its victims. The hero of the piece is American David Beasley, the director of the UN’s World Food Programme, the organization coordinating humanitarian aid. “The US is [the World Food Programme]’s biggest donor, so the director is most often an American. Beasley was once governor of South Carolina,” Pelly narrates over B-roll hero shots of Beasley overseeing food distribution.

Beasley, in his sit-down interview, bends over backwards to downplay Saudi responsibility, insisting at every turn that “all parties” are to blame:

You see it’s chaos, it’s starvation, it’s hunger, and it’s unnecessary conflict, strictly man-made. All parties involved in this conflict have their hands guilty, the hands are dirty. All parties.

The spin that the crisis is the fault of “all parties” is understandable from a US-funded de facto diplomat, charged with providing some cover for a major regional ally. But the premise that “all parties” are causing the famine is never challenged by Pelley. It’s taken as fact, and the piece moves on.

It’s part of a broader trend of erasing American responsibility for the conflict and resulting humanitarian disaster. The Washington Post ran an editorial last week (11/8/17) and an explainer piece Saturday (11/19/17) detailing the carnage in Yemen, neither one of which bothered to mention US involvement. American complicity in the war is so broad in scope, it merited a warning last year from the US’s own State Department they could be liable for war crimes—yet it hardly merits a mention in major media accounts. The war just is, a collective moral failing on the part of “all parties”—irrational sectarian Muslims lost in a pat “cycle of violence” caricature.

As momentum builds in Congress, animated by grassroots anti-war activists, to push back against the war and hold US lawmakers accountable, how the US contributes to the death and disease in the Arabian peninsula is of urgent political import. By erasing the US role in the war, CBS producers obscure for viewers the most effective way they can end the war: by pressuring their own lawmakers to stop supporting it. Instead, viewers are left with what filmmaker Adam Curtis calls “Oh, dearism”: the act of feeling distressed but ultimately helpless in the face of mindless cruelty—perpetrated, conveniently, by everyone but us.

'Paradise Papers' Reveal Tax Avoidance, Shady Dealings of World's Rich and Powerful

From multiple members of Trump's cabinet to the British Royal Family, document dump of offshore dealings shows how political leaders—joined by wealthy celebrities and the ultra-rich—shelter their assets, keep shady relationships secret, and game the tax systems of nations around the globe

By Jon Queally, staff writer

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2017/11/06/paradise-papers-reveal-tax-avoidance-shady-dealings-worlds-rich-and-powerful

Some of the world's wealthiest and most powerful people will be waking up on Monday to discover that some of their best kept secrets—how they hide their vast wealth and avoid paying taxes—are now being read about in newspapers across the world after the release of a trove of offshore legal and banking documents were leaked to journalists and published Sunday as a joint project called the 'Paradise Papers.'

"In all, the offshore ties of more than a dozen Trump advisers, Cabinet members and major donors appear in the leaked data.

First obtained by the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, the documents were then shared with scores of journalists and researchers associated with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and other media organizations, including the New York Times, BBC, and the Guardian.

"There is this small group of people who are not equally subject to the laws as the rest of us, and that's on purpose," said author and financial expert Brooke Harrington in response to the new insights about how these elites secretly manage their wealth.

As the ICIJ reports, the "trove of 13.4 million records exposes ties between Russia and U.S. President Donald Trump's billionaire commerce secretary, the secret dealings of the chief fundraiser for Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the offshore interests of the Queen of England and more than 120 politicians around the world." According to the ICIJ, the documents show how deeply the offshore financial system is entangled with the overlapping worlds of political players, private wealth and corporate giants, including Apple, Nike, Uber and other global companies that avoid taxes through increasingly imaginative bookkeeping maneuvers.

One offshore web leads to Trump’s commerce secretary, private equity tycoon Wilbur Ross, who has a stake in a shipping companythat has received more than $68 million in revenue since 2014 from a Russian energy company co-owned by the son-in-law of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

In all, the offshore ties of more than a dozen Trump advisers, Cabinet members and major donors appear in the leaked data.

At the center for the leak, explains the Guardian, is the law firm Appleby which has "outposts in Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, the British Virgin Islands, the Isle of Man, Jersey and Guernsey. In contrast to Mossack Fonseca, the discredited firm at the centre of last year's Panama Papers investigation, Appleby prides itself on being a leading member of the 'magic circle' of top-ranking offshore service providers."

But what exactly do the 'Paradise Papers' represent? This video explains:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=MkVV2hvuQdM

Paradise Papers, Says Sanders, Expose 'Rapid Movement Toward International Oligarchy'

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) says the trove of documents "shows how these billionaires and multinational corporations get richer by hiding their wealth and profits and avoid paying their fair share of taxes"

By Jessica Corbett, staff writer

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2017/11/06/paradise-papers-says-sanders-expose-rapid-movement-toward-international-oligarchy

"The major issue of our time is the rapid movement toward international oligarchy," Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) declared in a statement to the Guardian on Monday, which noted that "Sanders' intervention in the debate sparked by the Paradise Papers marks the most prominent political response to the leak in their opening 24 hours."

Decrying a world "in which a handful of billionaires own and control a significant part of the global economy," Sanders said the trove of more than 13 million leaked documents detailing offshore dealings "shows how these billionaires and multinational corporations get richer by hiding their wealth and profits and avoid paying their fair share of taxes."

Sanders said the documents expose a "major problem not just for the U.S. but for governments throughout the world." According to the Guardian, he also pointed the finger of blame for the flourishing of offshore holdings on both Congress and the Trump administration. He told the Guardian that Republicans in Congress were responsible for providing "even more tax breaks to profitable corporations like Apple and Nike."

The same tax breaks, he said, were being seized upon by super-wealthy members of Trump's cabinet "who avoid billions in U.S. taxes by shifting American jobs and profits to offshore tax havens. We need to close these loopholes and demand a fair and progressive tax system."

Sanders took to Twitter on Monday to call on Congress to investigate the Paradise Papers, adding his voice to growing demands for U.S. government action as several members of President Donald Trump's inner circle continue to be implicated in the leaked records and subsequent news reports.