Oppressed minorities

07/25/2022

How inevitable is a third consecutive nomination of Donald Trump? Partisan commentators, when it suits their purposes, tend to assume it is so.

05/03/2022

The IRS Decided to Get Tough Against Microsoft. Microsoft Got Tougher.

For years, the company has moved billions in profits to Puerto Rico to avoid taxes. When the IRS pushed it to pay, Microsoft protested that the agency wasn’t being nice. Then it aggressively fought back in court, lobbied Congress and changed the law.

Maruca built a team of about 60 — agents, attorneys and economists — with half recruited from outside the agency. For the IRS, this was a notable influx of talent.

In 2011, the IRS picked Samuel Maruca to lead the new unit. A partner at the prominent law firm Covington & Burling, Maruca had spent decades advising corporations on “transfer pricing,” as this area of tax is called, and facing off against the agency on audits. He came to the job, he said, to help fix a broken system.

For years, the company has moved billions in profits to Puerto Rico to avoid taxes. When the IRS pushed it to pay, Microsoft protested that the agency wasn’t being nice. Then it aggressively fought back in court, lobbied Congress and changed the law.

01/30/2022

Gun sales up, police budgets down. Shootings of burglary invaders up.

First-time gun buyers continued to flood into fi****ms stores last year, broadening the once male and white market with women, blacks, Asians, and Hispanics.

05/05/2021

How pandemic delivered humbling defeat for California’s struggling farmworkers union

The Supreme Court in 2018 dealt a big blow to organized labor by ruling that non-members cannot be forced, as they are in certain states, to pay fees to unions representing public employees.

United Farm Workers faces a membership decline and financial strains, including a pension in ‘critical status.’

04/24/2021

New Bill Would Restore Tax Deduction for Union Dues, Other Worker Expenses

House and Senate Democrats are introducing legislation to restore the income tax deductions for workers’ union dues and other unreimbursed job expenses that Republicans abolished in the 2017 package of tax cuts for the rich.

04/15/2021

Griego, a Pueblo Local 12 member known for his high energy, made himself even more visible.

He served on the county’s Planning & Zoning Commission. He also figured he had to knock on even more doors in the lead-up to last year’s Democratic primary.

Pueblo, Colo., Local 12 member Eppie Griego, right with black mask, being sworn into his seat on the Pueblo County Board of Commissioners during a January ceremony.

04/14/2021

"The Dictatorship of Woke Capital," Steve Soukup's explores the rise of progressivism as a cultural force and explains why corporations increasingly are taking sides in politics.

The first half of Soukup’s book is a high-intensity sprint through about a century and a half of intellectual history that name-checks everyone from Adam Smith and Karl Marx to Woodrow Wilson, Theodor Adorno, Saul Alinsky, and Milton Friedman. In Soukup’s telling, the shift began when Johns Hopkins University was founded in the image of Germany’s Heidelberg University in the late 19th century, and progressive political theory began to grow in popularity in the United States. The same trends later accelerated when a new generation of continental Marxism hit the US in the mid-20th century.

“Public servants should become active, informed, politically savvy agents of change,” as one of Waldo’s colleagues would later put it.

This is the recipe for what critics of big government have come to call a permanent governing class—civil servants with effective lifetime tenure, collaborating with like-minded activists outside of government, who place their own judgment ahead of that of the voters and their elected representatives.

Yet, the trend of enlightened university graduates turning institutions toward progressive goals wasn’t confined to government agencies. The same logic would eventually apply to the management of corporations as well.

How did corporate America, long considered one of the most conservative American institutions, become a stronghold of progressive activism? A new book explores the puzzle. 

04/11/2021

Personify Responds to Voting Legislation in Georgia and Texas

Personify’s Leadership Team wants to express how disappointed we are with the outcome of the Georgia voting legislation and similar legislation proposed in the state of Texas. In states that are home to two of our principal offices, the legislation will likely suppress voter turnout. The laws make voting less accessible and convenient especially for voting blocs comprised of individuals who are disproportionately affected by the voting legislation.

https://personifycorp.com/about-us/leadership

The Personify team is disappointed with the outcome of the Georgia voting legislation and similar legislation proposed in the state of Texas

04/10/2021

Amazon claimed a resounding win in its fight over unionization

On Friday, the National Labor Relations Board finished counting thousands of ballots from employees at Amazon’s fulfillment center in Bessemer, Alabama, who were voting on whether to join the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union. In the end, the workers voted 1,798-738 against unionizing, dealing a major blow to organized labor.

Amazon claimed a resounding win in its fight over unionization on Friday, and the vote will likely have larger implications.