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Biden Administration Aims to Close Guantanamo Bay Prison

 

The White House announced Friday that President Biden hopes to shut down the prison at the Naval Station Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, a tall task that the Obama administration failed to do nearly a decade ago.

 

The Guantanamo Bay Detention Center, also known as GTMO or "Gitmo," became identified with the mistreatment of prisoners in the early years of the Global War on Terror campaign. It first opened its doors to terrorism suspects in 2002, and the following year the prison held almost 680 inmates suspected of having ties with al-Qaida and the Taliban, the Associated Press reported. Today, there are only 40 people left behind bars. Among those incarcerated at the prison are five men charged with planning and supporting the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001. Proceedings for these men have been delayed at the pretrial state for years.

 

But the closure of the detention facility will take time, National Security Council spokeswoman Emily Horne told NPR.

 

"We are undertaking an NSC process to assess the current state of play that the Biden administration has inherited from the previous administration, in line with our broader goal of closing Guantanamo," she said. 

 

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This is exactly the kind of garbage that gets people all upset about nothing. The title makes it sound like the average person's taxes will go up under Biden. When you look at the details all the tax increases are to very high wage earners - you know the 1 to 3%. The rest will not have our taxes go up at all. 

 

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/8-reasons-taxes-may-increase-120045148.html

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Democrats unveil bill to end tax break for investment managers

 

A group of House Democrats announced Tuesday that they are reintroducing legislation to end the carried interest tax break that is beneficial for investment managers.

 

The bill was rolled out by Reps. Bill Pascrell (D-N.J.), Andy Levin (D-Mich.) and Katie Porter (D-Calif.). The lawmakers say that the bill would make the tax code fairer at a time when many Americans are struggling because of the coronavirus pandemic.

 

"This year, millions of Americans are struggling to survive and are entitled to a fairer tax system," Pascrell, chairman of the House Ways and Means Oversight Subcommittee, said in a news release. "This loophole has survived too long and we are going to push hard to see that it is finally closed.”

 

The carried interest tax break allows investment managers, such as private-equity and hedge-fund managers, to pay capital gains tax rates on compensation they receive for providing the service of managing firms' assets. The top capital gains rate is significantly lower than the the top rate for ordinary income.

 

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THE “FOR THE PEOPLE ACT” WOULD MAKE THE U.S. A DEMOCRACY

 

SINCE THE 117TH Congress was convened on January 3, over 2,000 bills have been introduced in the House and Senate. But the very first legislation proposed by the Democratic Party majorities in both chambers — making it both H.R.1 and S.1 — is the “For the People Act” of 2021.

 

This is appropriate, because the For the People Act is plausibly the most important legislation considered by Congress in decades. It would change the basic structure of U.S. politics, making it far more small-d democratic. The bill makes illegal essentially all of the anti-enfranchisement tactics perfected by the right over the past decades. It then creates a new infrastructure to permanently bolster the influence of regular people.

 

The bill’s provisions largely fall into three categories: First, it makes it far easier to vote, both by eliminating barriers and enhancing basic outreach to citizens. Second, it makes everyone’s vote count more equally, especially by reducing gerrymandering. Third, it hugely amplifies the power of small political donors, allowing them to match and possibly swamp the power of big money.

 

There’s a popular, weary American aphorism (often attributed to the anarchist Emma Goldman, although she apparently did not say it): “If voting could change anything, it would be made illegal.” The meaning is always taken to be that voting is pointless.

 

However, the past decades of U.S. politics demonstrate that this saying is accurate — but in fact its meaning is exactly the opposite. We can gauge how much voting can change important things by the lengths to which America’s conservatives have gone to make voting difficult for the wrong people.

 

The For the People Act would require states with voter ID requirements to allow people to vote without identification if they complete a sworn statement attesting that they are who they say they are. It would make it impossible for states to engage in bogus purging of voter rolls. States could no longer stop people with felony convictions from voting after they’ve served their time — and would be required to inform them in writing that they now can vote again.

 

The act would then create what the U.S. has never had: a functioning, modern voting infrastructure. America is almost alone in its bizarre, two-step process in which citizens must register to vote, and then vote. And only two-thirds of the U.S. voting age population is in fact registered. In comparable countries, voting registration is automatic: You don’t have to do anything first, you just show up and vote. The For the People Act would make voter registration near-automatic here too, and anyone who fell through the cracks would be able to register and vote on Election Day.

 

The bill would also require states to allow a minimum of two weeks of early voting, for a minimum of 10 hours a day. All eligible voters could vote by mail for any reason. And to ensure voters can be confident that elections are secure and that their votes will count, all states would be required to conduct elections via paper ballot.

 

Thanks to Republican success at creating gerrymandered congressional districts, Democrats can win the majority of the popular congressional vote in many states while only garnering a minority of the state’s seats in the House of Representatives. With the once-every-10-years redistricting coming, and the GOP’s 2020 success in state legislatures that control redistricting, the situation is set to become even more lopsided and fundamentally unfair. If nothing changes, it’s almost certain that Democrats will lose the House majority in the 2022 midterms, even if they get the most votes.

 

The For the People Act would head this off at the pass, requiring states to create independent commissions to conduct redistricting.

 

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5 minutes ago, Jumbo said:

over and under on length of time before fox news or other rw media labels biden's  foreign policy statements (on now) as "apology tour #2"?

 

Not sure the length of time but my guess is after his first major foreign trip. They will find something in that trip to take out of context and spin into an apology. You know like telling Germany we don't actually hate them.  Or daring to treat others with respect. Oh the horrors! 

 

But I do agree it will happen.  

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9 minutes ago, goskins10 said:

 

Not sure the length of time but my guess is after his first major foreign trip. They will find something in that trip to take out of context and spin into an apology. You know like telling Germany we don't actually hate them.  Or daring to treat others with respect. Oh the horrors! 

 

But I do agree it will happen.  

 

they'll be doing it by the time this speech is over :) if it's not already being tweeted

 

they'll also talk about prompter-reading 

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