How to make $27.5 billion and pay no taxes

You Pay Taxes -- Why Doesn't General Electric?
By Frank Clemente 

You pay your fair share of taxes. Small businesses do too. It's the price we pay to educate our kids, protect our communities and have some security in retirement. Why shouldn't some of Americas largest corporations pay their fair share too?

Corporations are making record profits. But 111 profitable Fortune 500 companies paid zero federal income taxes in one or more of the past five years, according to a recent report by Citizens for Tax Justice. What's worse -- 26 of them, including Boeing, General Electric and Verizon, paid nothing over the entire five-years. Astoundingly, they got tax refunds instead.

General Electric, which in the past has been the focus of media attention because of its record of paying an extremely low income tax rate, provides a vivid example. GE earned a whopping $27.5 billion in profits between 2008 and 2012, but claimed $3 billion in tax refunds -- a federal income tax rate of negative 11 percent.

Put another way, GE paid less in federal income taxes than you paid over five years.

Campaign Finance Deforms

The side effects of pumping even more money into elections

Brian McFadden in The Nib 

Click here to see what you have to look forward to (thank you, Supremes)

Astronomy Picture of the Day

Massive Nearby Spiral Galaxy NGC 2841 

From NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day

It is one of the more massive galaxies known. A mere 46 million light-years distant, spiral galaxy NGC 2841 can be found in the northern constellation of Ursa Major.

This sharp view of the gorgeous island universe shows off a striking yellow nucleus and galactic disk. Dust lanes, small, pink star-forming regions, and young blue star clusters are embedded in the patchy, tightly wound spiral arms. 

In contrast, many other spirals exhibit grand, sweeping arms with large star-forming regions. 

NGC 2841 has a diameter of over 150,000 light-years, even larger than our own Milky Way and captured by this composite image merging exposures from the orbiting 2.4-meter Hubble Space Telescope and the ground-based 8.2-meter Subaru Telescope. X-ray images suggest that resulting winds and stellar explosions create plumes of hot gas extending into a halo around NGC 2841.

VIDEO: Day-O, we have no bananas

Get Ready to Say Goodbye to Bananas

By Susan Bird, Care2, in ENN.com. More from this Affiliate 

Who doesn't love a nice banana? They're tasty portable snacks, they make a great daiquiri, and they’re wonderful additions to a green smoothie or bowl of oatmeal. Well, eat your fill now, because if history is any indicator, global banana production may soon be in serious jeopardy.

The culprit is disease. Specifically, a strain of a tropical fungus is targeting the most popular form of banana, and there is currently no effective treatment.

Governor's race: Dems lay out plans for the environment, Republicans don't even show up

By ecoRI News staff

PROVIDENCE — The four Democratic candidates for governor laid out their plans on how they would 

prepare Rhode Island for climate change during a 90-minute forum April 24 hosted by the Environment Council of Rhode Island (ECRI) and ecoRI News and held in Brown University’s List Auditorium. Republican candidates Ken Block and Cranston Mayor Alan Fung declined to participate.

The forum opened with presentations by two climate change experts, John King, professor of oceanography at the University of Rhode Island, and J. Timmons Roberts, professor of environmental studies and sociology at Brown. Their presentations outlined the scientific consensus regarding the rapid increase in carbon dioxide emissions and translated that data into expected local impacts, including sea-level rise, temperature increases, warming urban centers, loss of coastal habitats, increased frequency of extreme weather events, ocean acidification and the potential for species extinction at a level rarely recorded in Earth’s history.

Companion Animal of the Week

Meet Cassie

Hi, I am Cassie, a young beagle mix who will warm your heart. Being part beagle and a puppy yet means I am a bundle of energy, so I'd love to find a forever home with lots of room to run and companions who take me out for lots of walks and games of catch. 

I'm not all playtime though, once I have gotten a good workout I am ready to relax alongside my new family. 

Can I be a new part of your family?  I will undoubtedly bring a whole new level of excitement and love if you give me a chance.  Thanks!

Please stop by our shelter located at 506B Curtis Corner Road in Peace Dale or call 401-783-7606 for more information about cute Cassie or our many other adoptable pets waiting for their new forever homes. You can also visit our new website at www.arlsri.org.

VIDEO: We deserve a break

Why the Minimum Wage should really be raised to $15 an hour

By Robert Reich

Momentum is building to raise the minimum wage. Several states have already taken action  — Connecticut has boosted it to $10.10 by 2017, the Maryland legislature just approved a similar measure, Minnesota lawmakers just reached a deal to hike it to $9.50. A few cities have been more ambitious — Washington, D.C. and its surrounding counties raised it to $11.50, Seattle is considering $15.00

Senate Democrats will soon introduce legislation raising it nationally to $10.10, from the current $7.25 an hour.

All this is fine as far as it goes. But we need to be more ambitious. We should be raising the federal minimum to $15 an hour.

Here are seven reasons why:

Hate, hate, hate

Power to the Plutocracy

By Bill Day

Click here to read the hater's primer.

Explain this!

Science Skeptics

By Adam Zyglis

Click here to learn why you can't trust scientists.

"The Most Massive Woman Wins"

URI students, graduates perform in play that explores body image for women

Elizabeth Rau, URI

KINGSTON, R.I. – April 3, 2014 – If you’re a woman chances are you’ve looked in the mirror and fretted that you're overweight. Or maybe you’ve worried that your hips are too wide or your legs too thick.

Help is on the way. The “Out Loud Theatre’’ group is touring throughout the state with a show that helps women of all shapes and sizes learn how to accept and, ultimately, embrace their bodies.

How do you like your burger?

Hamburger hazards and emotions

by Marc Abrahams, Improbable Research 

Comes news about how some people in some places react to hypothetical questions about photographs of hamburgers. The study, freshly published online, is:

“Hamburger hazards and emotions,” Nina Veflen Olsen, Elin Røssvoll, Solveig Langsrud, Joachim Scholderer, Appetite, vol. 78, 1 July 2014, pp. 95–101. (Thanks to @Neuro_Skeptic for bringing this to our attention.) The authors, at Nofima, Oslovn, Norway and Aarhus University, Denmark explain:

“Previous studies indicate that many consumers eat rare hamburgers and that information about microbiological hazards related to undercooked meat not necessarily leads to more responsible behavior.

Saying ‘no’ to not drugs

Industrial hemp and marijuana law reform

By Dave Fisher in Rhode Island’s Future

When the RI General Assembly passed a law prohibiting smoking in public places, it made our restaurants and bars healthier places for their patrons and employees. Sure was a step in the right direction, but what was not a widely publicized fact after the law passed was that the following year, organizations like Save the Bay and Keep America Beautiful noticed a distinct uptick in the amount of cigarette butts cleaned up from our beaches and waterways. 

As it happens, when you make people smoke outside, they tend to throw their cigarette butts on the ground.

Anyone with a basic understanding of, well, life in general, is familiar with unintended consequences. They are the unforeseen hiccups and downright disasters that accompany all decisions made. Most of the time, they are quite bad, but sometimes they can be good. The law of unintended consequences certainly rears it’s head when laws get passed without adequate scrutiny, but there is a very serious positive aspect to legalizing, taxing, and regulating marijuana use that no one has mentioned in the debate.

In Memoriam: Barry Greever

Pioneer in research techniques for community organizing

Barry Greever (photo circa 1980 by Will Collette)

By Will Collette

A few days ago, I learned that an old friend of mine, Barry Greever, had died. Barry’s name is hardly a household word, but within community and labor activists of a certain age, Barry is known as a pioneer of an important craft, that of strategic and tactical research. 

His 1970s pamphlet, “Tactical Investigations for People’s Struggles,” influenced a generation of organizers by providing a vocabulary and a framework for how to do research that increases the ability of an organization to fight and win.

Before Barry, unions and community groups would collect information during the course of a campaign, but often without any precision or planning, leading groups to rely almost exclusively on turning out as many people as possible and having them yell as loud as possible.

Now, turn-out and loudness are still essential elements, but what Barry introduced was a way to be more focused and disciplined by adding intelligence gathering to the picture. That factor added greatly to the ability of people to gain some measure of power and control over their lives.

Supreme stupidity

Get your words' worth

By Jen Sorenson

Click here for a new way to think about golden tongues.

Astronomy Picture of the Day

Orion Nebula in Surrounding Dust 

From NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day

What surrounds a hotbed of star formation? In the case of the Orion Nebula -- dust. The entire Orion field, located about 1600 light years away, is inundated with intricate and picturesque filaments of dust. 

Opaque to visible light, dust is created in the outer atmosphere of massive cool stars and expelled by a strong outer wind of particles.

The Trapezium and other forming star clusters are embedded in the nebula. The intricate filaments of dust surrounding M42 and M43 appear gray in the image below, while central glowing gas is highlighted in brown and blue.

Over the next few million years much of Orion's dust will be slowly destroyed by the very stars now being formed, or dispersed into the Galaxy.