Kevin Drum gets results!

Disney will no longer ban the Los Angeles Times from advance screenings of its movies following a backlash from critics groups, news outlets and journalists, who were boycotting those same screenings in protest.

OK, fine, it didn’t have anything to do with me:

The lifting of the blackout follows an outpouring of solidarity for the Times after the paper’s film coverage was blacked out by Disney due to a story that examined the business relationship between the company’s flagship Californian theme park, Disneyland, and the city of Anaheim….On Monday, entertainment sites like The A.V. Club and Flavorwire, as well as a pop culture writer for the Washington Post, said they would skip the screenings until the ban on the Times was lifted….The New York Times joined the growing boycott on Tuesday afternoon, not long before the reversal of the ban was announced.

Good for them. If we could just get political journalists to show the same kind of moxie toward the daily briefing, we’d really be cooking.

You can’t really go wrong with a lovely yellow rose. This one was blooming in our garden last spring, and I figure I ought to put it up before spring comes again. Feel free to meditate on this as the election results from Virginia come in.

Yesterday, as I was searching for some data on corporate use of tax havens, I clicked on the wrong link at Gabriel Zucman’s site. What I got instead was a slide presentation about the personal use of tax evasion among rich Scandinavians. Here’s one chart from the presentation:

If you look solely at tax evasion caught by audits (red dots), the rich have a higher rate of tax evasion than the poor, but not by a huge amount. However, it you include the use of offshore tax havens (blue dots), it turns out that the super rich avoid a lot of taxes. Here’s the result:

At the very tippy top, tax payments actually become regressive. The super-duper rich pay lower rates than the merely super-rich.

Now, maybe you don’t care about this. It’s Scandinavia, after all. And if the top 0.01 percent has declared war on the top 1 percent, maybe we should just get out the popcorn and watch the show.

But it’s a good bet that Americans use tax havens just as much as Scandinavians, and there’s increasing evidence about the power and influence that the super-duper rich exercise over politics. This is especially true in the post-Citizens United era. The Koch brothers are already famous for their spending, and the Mercers are now in the spotlight too. Tom Steyer is spending his money running ads urging the impeachment of President Trump. More and more billionaires are willing to fund their favored candidates almost without limit. That’s how we end up with this:

.@RepChrisCollins (R-NY) on tax reform: “My donors are basically saying, ‘Get it done or don’t ever call me again.'”

— Cristina Marcos (@cimarcos) November 7, 2017

For more on this, check out the New York Times today, which has a lengthy piece about how the Paradise Papers reveal exactly how the ultra-rich use tax havens to avoid paying taxes. It’s bracing stuff.

What’s really behind the skyrocketing problem of opioid addiction? The obvious culprit is the fact that in the early 90s doctors began prescribing opioid painkillers like Percocet and Oxycontin at much higher rates:

This chart seems pretty conclusive, but if you dive a little deeper things get more complicated. The main reason prescriptions went up is that doctors really had been undertreating pain for a long time. And it turns out that the biggest problem with high rates of opioid prescription don’t come from pain patients anyway. Addiction rates among pain patients are actually fairly low: anywhere from 0.1 percent to less than 8 percent, and very few pain patients ever move on to heroin or other drugs. Rather, the biggest part of the problem comes from people who score opioid painkillers elsewhere. And where do they get them? From leftovers sitting around their parents’ medicine chests. From friends. From the black market.

In other words, if we really want to address the opioid epidemic, our best strategy is not to focus all our attention on prescriptions among legitimate pain patients. Nor is it to refight the war on drugs yet again. Instead, we need to:

• Get better at screening people with previous (or current) addictions.
• Prescribe fewer pills after surgeries, but make it easy to get refills. The idea here is to limit the number of leftover pills lying around, but to do it without making things difficult for pain patients.
• Crack down on pill mills and on shipments plainly bound for the black market—but without making doctors live in fear of the DEA knocking on their door if they treat their pain patients properly.
• Get tougher on misleading pharmaceutical marketing.
• Fund much more research on pain management and alternative pain strategies.

This is what President Trump ought to be doing as part of his “public health emergency” over opioid deaths.

Would you like to meet with CIA Director Mike Pompeo? It's easier than you think! Just show up on Fox News and claim that Hillary Clinton personally hacked the DNC's email and then tried to blame it on Trump and the Russians. He'd love to hear from you.Jeff Malet/Newscom via ZUMA

So what’s the CIA been up to lately under the guidance of “the most openly political spy chief in a generation”? Keeping tabs on the Russians? Inflitrating the Taliban? Conducting cyber-sabotage on North Korea? Ken Dilanian of NBC News says he’s been meeting with Bill Binney:

CIA Director Mike Pompeo met last month with a former U.S. intelligence official who advocates a fringe theory that the hack of the Democrats during the election was an inside job and not the work of Russian intelligence…Binney left the agency in 2000 and has become a self-styled whistleblower, making unsupported claims that the CIA is collecting and storing nearly every U.S. communication. His meeting with Pompeo was first reported by The Intercept, an internet news site.

….Making the meeting even more noteworthy is the fact that Binney, 74, has made frequent appearances on RT, Russia’s state-funded broadcasting and internet news agency — which the CIA recently accused of acting as a propaganda arm for Russia, with the goal of undermining confidence in American democracy.

And why is Pompeo meeting with this conspiracy theorist? Here’s the Intercept:

In an interview with The Intercept, Binney said Pompeo told him that President Donald Trump had urged the CIA director to meet with Binney to discuss his assessment that the DNC data theft was an inside job. During their hour-long meeting at CIA headquarters, Pompeo said Trump told him that if Pompeo “want[ed] to know the facts, he should talk to me,” Binney said.

….It is possible Trump learned about Binney and his analysis by watching Fox News, where Binney has been a frequent guest, appearing at least 10 times since September 2016. In August, Binney appeared on Tucker Carlson’s Fox show to discuss his assessment that the narrative of Russia hacking the DNC during the 2016 campaign is untrue.

….The meeting raises questions about Pompeo’s willingness to act as an honest broker between the intelligence community and the White House….Pompeo’s decision to meet with Binney raises the possibility that right-wing theories aired on Fox News and in other conservative media can now move not just from conservative pundits to Trump, but also from Trump to Pompeo and into the bloodstream of the intelligence community.

I’m running out of polite ways to say WTF. I have no idea if Pompeo took Binney seriously or just met with him in order to humor the boss, but does it matter? There’s a lot of real stuff going on in the world, but Trump continues to be obsessed with trying to prove that the Russians didn’t interfere with the 2016 election. Is this because he knows that his campaign colluded with the Russians and he desperately wants to change the subject? Or is it just because he hates the idea that maybe it was the Russians who put him over the top on Election Day? Given the size and fragility of ego, the latter is entirely possible.

Someday, kids, this will all be yours. And completely tax free! Who's your daddy now?

The Republican tax bill is a gift that keeps on giving. Literally. I keep finding new nuggets in it that—go figure!—weren’t in the brief talking points that Republicans handed out last week. But if you dig through the bill, there they are.

Here’s the latest: the Republican bill eliminates the estate tax. That’s not news. But it retains the step-up in capital gains. That is news. It hasn’t been a part of previous attempts to kill off the estate tax.

If you’re not following what this means, here’s an example. Suppose you’re uber-rich and you buy $1 billion in Apple Stock. By the time you die it’s worth $3 billion. Your heirs, lucky ducks that they are, don’t have to pay estate tax on that $3 billion. But they do have to pay normal capital gains on the $2 billion appreciation in the Apple stock. At 20 percent that comes to $400 million.

However, the Republican bill eliminates that too. Not only does it eliminate the estate tax completely, but it allows you to “step up” the value of the estate and avoid capital gains taxes entirely. In our example, you literally get $3 billion free and clear, and you owe taxes in the future only on the appreciation above $3 billion.

This is breathtaking. In the past, even hardcore Republicans have agreed that you need to have one or the other: either an estate tax or a normal capital gains tax on investments that you pass along to your heirs. No more. When the super-rich die, their capital gains liabilities are wiped out and their heirs pay no estate tax. This all but eliminates income tax of any kind on the mega-wealthy.

Ivanka and the grandkids must be licking their chops over this. It’s beyond outrageous. WILL ANYONE PAY ATTENTION IF I SAY IT IN ALL CAPS? No? I didn’t think so.

Last night I showed you some estimates from ITEP about how many households were likely to face a tax hike thanks to the Republican tax bill. As it happens, ITEP also has estimates for each state, so I took a look at the numbers for middle-class households with incomes between $40-65,000. That’s smack in the middle of the income spectrum. Here are the top ten and bottom ten states:

The light bars are for 2018 and the dark bars are for 2027. Naturally, most of the states in the top ten are blue states. The states in the bottom ten are all red states except for Vermont. By 2027, a full third of the households of Maryland will be paying higher taxes thanks to the Republican tax bill, and several other states aren’t far behind.

These aren’t the highest numbers in the report, by the way. These are solely numbers for the middle-middle-class. But take a look at the upper middle class in California: 34 percent will get an immediate tax hike in 2018, and a whopping 55 percent will get a tax hike by 2027. In Maryland the numbers for the upper middle class are 41 percent and 62 percent.

I hope this teaches you all a lesson. Next time you’d better vote for Trump.

Here’s another estimate of who gets what from the Republican tax plan. This one is from the Institute on Taxation and Public Policy:

This is fairly close to the estimate from the Joint Committee on Taxation with the exception of the far-right bar in 2027. ITEP estimates that millionaires will retain a pretty fat 2.5 percent tax cut by then. JCT estimates it would be about half that.

ITEP also provides an estimate of the number of households that would see a tax increase under the Republican plan:

By 2027, ITEP figures that over a quarter of middle-class taxpayers will see their taxes increase under the Republican plan. This number is considerably higher in blue states like California and New York, and considerably lower in red states like Florida and Texas. It’s all part of this bill’s targeted punishment of taxpayers in states that don’t support Republicans.

Lovekin/Rex Shutterstock via ZUMA

Just in case you thought the Harvey Weinstein story couldn’t get any worse, here is Ronan Farrow in the New Yorker:

In the fall of 2016, Harvey Weinstein set out to suppress allegations that he had sexually harassed or assaulted numerous women. He began to hire private security agencies to collect information on the women and the journalists trying to expose the allegations. According to dozens of pages of documents, and seven people directly involved in the effort, the firms that Weinstein hired included Kroll, one of the world’s largest corporate intelligence companies, and Black Cube, an enterprise run largely by former officers of Mossad and other Israeli intelligence agencies.

….The explicit goal of the investigations, laid out in one contract with Black Cube, signed in July, was to stop the publication of the abuse allegations against Weinstein that eventually emerged in the New York Times and The New Yorker. Over the course of a year, Weinstein had the agencies “target,” or collect information on, dozens of individuals, and compile psychological profiles that sometimes focussed on their personal or sexual histories. Weinstein monitored the progress of the investigations personally.

This beggars belief. It beggars my belief anyway. But then, I’ve never spent any time around men like this. I hope I never do.

A few months ago Saudi Arabia more-or-less declared war on Qatar. Today they’ve more-or less declared war on Lebanon (because Hezbollah exists) and Iran (because Yemen shot a missile at them). And of course they’re already at war for real against Yemen. That’s a lot of countries to be at war with.

I don’t really have anything special to say about this, other than the fact that all four of these conflicts are actually fights or proxy fights with Iran. Apparently Saudi Arabia is getting a lot more serious about this, and President Trump seems to be all for it.