Today’s comic by Matt Bors is Obama's last hurrah:
• California legislature hires Eric Holder to battle Donald Trump:
Girding for four years of potential battles with President-elect Donald J. Trump, Democratic leaders of the California Legislature announced Wednesday that they had hired Eric H. Holder Jr., who was attorney general under President Obama, to represent them in any legal fights against the new Republican White House. [...]
“Having the former attorney general of the United States brings us a lot of firepower in order to prepare to safeguard the values of the people of California,” Kevin de León, the Democratic leader of the Senate, said in an interview. “This means we are very, very serious.”
• Mass murderer Charles Manson said to be seriously ill, transferred to hospital.
• Rick Perry as governor handed out $19 billion a year in “incentives” to companies for creating jobs:
In theory, companies receiving Enterprise Fund grants were accountable for their job-creation pledges and had to make refunds when they fell short. In practice, the numbers proved hard to quantify and few companies had to make refunds. The watchdog group Texans for Public Justice determined that by the end of 2010, companies had created barely more than a third of the jobs promised, even with Perry’s administration having lowered the standard for counting jobs. And in 2014, the state auditor found that $222 million had been given out to companies that hadn’t even formally applied for funds or made concrete promises for job creation. “The final word on the funds is that they were first and foremost political, to allow [Perry] to stand in front of a podium and say that he was bringing jobs back to Texas,” said Craig McDonald, the director of Texans for Public Justice. “From the very start those funds lacked transparency and accountability.”
• From the Economic Policy Institute’s Top Charts of 2016:
[W]age gaps between workers of different races have widened at the same time that economy-wide productivity and wages for typical workers overall have diverged. In short, what has caused sluggish wage growth for the vast majority of all workers is the rise of inequality that has redistributed income toward the very top of the income distribution.
The figure shows that between 1979 and 2015, median hourly real wage growth fell far short of productivity growth—a measure of the potential for pay increases—for men as well as for women and for both black and white workers. And white workers are not losing income to their black counterparts. Median hourly wages of black men fell 5.7 percent, compared with a 1.0 percent decline for white men. Median hourly wages of white women grew 31.6 percent, compared with 15.2 percent for black women.
What this figure does not show is that black workers already start out with a big pay disparity.
• Former Sierra Club executive director Carl Pope has 10 questions for Scott Pruitt and Rex Tillerson:
The media has focused around their opposition to action on climate, Tillerson saying "suck it up and endure climate chaos," Pruitt being a denialist. But it has not yet told the story of their full threat to our environment, our health, our economy and our national security.
1. Mr. Tillerson, Lee Raymond, your predecessor, made clear that he didn't view ExxonMobil as a U.S. company and didn't "make decisions based on what is good for the U.S." Your have stated that you signed oil leases that undercut U.S. foreign policy in Iraq because "I had to do what was best for my shareholders."
Q: Can you explain where, specifically, the interests of the oil industry might diverge from those of the average American? What advice you would give the president to ensure that the interests of the U.S. prevailed over those of oil companies?
• Obama administration sold more weapons than any other since World War II. $94 billion to Saudi Arabia alone.
• On today’s Kagro in the Morning show, Greg Dworkin & Joan McCarter are back for 2017, to recount the OCE shenanigans (and why it matters), Gop “plans” for Obamacare and a Russia “investigation.” We turn back to Trump pal & legitimate businessman, Joseph “Joey No Socks” Cinque.
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