SUMMARY: A newly announced breach into the Marriott hotel chain’s reservation database is one of the biggest hacks in history, affecting half a billion customers in all. Amna Nawaz speaks with David Kennedy, co-founder of security firm TrustedSec, to understand what's unusual about this breach, whether companies are doing enough to safeguard data, and how individuals can protect their own information.
SUMMARY: In its latest major ruling affecting corporate America, the Supreme Court split 5-4 in upholding the practice of arbitration, a blow for workers' ability to take collective legal action against their employers. Marcia Coyle of The National Law Journal joins William Brangham to discuss what it means for the balance of power in the workplace.
SUMMARY: Who benefits most from the latest GOP tax plan? Who won -- and who lost -- in the last-minute changes? With the House poised to pass its tax bill on Tuesday, Lisa Desjardins joins Judy Woodruff to analyze its impact and some of the surprising details inside.
SUMMARY: Michael Bloomberg, former mayor of New York City and billionaire investor and business owner, wrote a column this week calling the tax bill a “trillion-dollar blunder." He tells Judy Woodruff why he thinks Congress and President Donald Trump put politics ahead of true tax reform.
SUMMARY: For Republican lawmakers, it's a day to celebrate. Cheers went up as the GOP tax overhaul received House passage, signaling the end of a legislative sprint to get the bill wrapped up by Christmas. Lisa Desjardins joins Judy Woodruff to discuss what ended up in the bill, a minor snag in the Senate, plus the prospects for passing a federal funding bill and avoiding a government shutdown.
SUMMARY: After a year in the majority marked by several legislative speed bumps and dead ends, Republicans are happy with the final tax bill that's poised to pass, according to Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) Judy Woodruff asks Thune about the long-term tax increase for the middle class, doubts that the tax cuts will spur the kind of growth predicted by the GOP plan and concerns about a ballooning deficit.
SUMMARY: The sweeping tax bill passed by Congress on Wednesday extends beyond what you file with the IRS. It also affects American health care by repealing Obamacare's [ACA] so-called individual mandate. John Yang learns more from Julie Rovner of Kaiser Health News about that and other health care matters on Congress’ agenda.
SUMMARY: Charities are concerned that the GOP tax overhaul disincentives giving. By doubling the standard deduction, fewer people may end up itemizing deductions, meaning fewer would take the charitable tax break. Judy Woodruff learns more from Stacy Palmer of The Chronicle of Philanthropy about the effects and gets advice from people who want to give.
SUMMARY: President Trump ran on a platform of job creation and drew support from many blue-collar workers concerned about employment and stagnant wages. So how is the president doing in keeping his promise to revitalize jobs in America? William Brangham talks to New York Times contributor Steven Greenhouse about American labor in the Trump era.
As one of their first orders of business, President-elect Donald Trump and Mike Pence, his vice president, helped strike a deal between the Indiana Economic Development Corporation (IEDC) and the Carrier Corporation to keep more than 1,000 jobs at Carrier's Indianapolis manufacturing plant.
The company had originally planned to send all but 300 research and headquarters jobs at the facility to Monterrey, Mexico, where workers reportedly earn $3 an hour. Carrier later decided to keep an additional 800 or so jobs in Indiana in exchange for a reported $7 million in tax breaks over 10 years.
Carrier was a frequent target of Trump during his presidential campaign, in which he promised to protect jobs and penalize companies for leaving the United States. After tweeting about a deal in the works with Carrier on Thanksgiving, Trump and Pence spent the next several days hashing out its parameters before the president-elect announced on Twitter on November 29 that they had reached an agreement. Trump took a victory lap at Carrier's plant in Indianapolis this week.
Mixed reactions
Though controversial, it's important to note that workers at Carrier have lauded the Trump-Pence deal. That's the case even though the actual terms and conditions of the deal, as it applies to workers who get to keep their jobs, have yet to appear in fine print and the union representing the plant was not involved in the negotiations.
Looked at as a whole, the Trump-Pence announcement has received mix reviews. Some have celebrated Trump's “art of the deal,” others have questioned whether this is a model that can be replicated as a way to keep jobs in the United States, while Bernie Sanders decried it as a bad deal for taxpayers and a potentially disastrous precedent moving forward.
Even Trump admitted his own sense of surprise at a press conference celebrating the agreement.
During the presidential campaign, in which he made an example of the Carrier plant as the dark side of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Trump told the public that he would use his business prowess to force Carrier and companies like it to keep jobs in the United States. If not, Trump said, there would be economic hell to pay.
But in his speech in Indianapolis, he said his campaign promise to bring Carrier jobs back was a “euphemism,” not an actual promise to cut a deal at that particular plant. With Pence uniquely situated to help foster a deal through the IEDC, though, the stars aligned and the deal was cut. (Pence chairs the IEDC board.)
Workers at a nearby plant in Huntington, Indiana, however, may not be as lucky.
That facility, which is also owned by Carrier's parent company, will soon lay off 700 workers. Many of them made the two-hour drive south to Indianapolis to protest. They held signs that read, “What about our jobs?”
“All of our jobs are leaving. Why isn't he saving some of our jobs if not all of them?” asked Bill Davis, president of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 983. “I'd love to keep the whole facility, but even if we can keep some of our jobs – because I think some of the people would be glad to retire and some of the younger ones stay – so I think our membership could be satisfied even if it was just 50 percent that got to stay.”
Offshoring jobs and taxes
Missing in the many media stories that have tackled the Carrier deal is the fact that Carrier's parent company—United Technologies—isn't just in the business of offshoring U.S. jobs. It also likely skirts paying its share of federal and state income taxes by maintaining offshore tax havens. Carrier, itself, is incorporated in the domestic tax haven of Delaware.
Though a company with taxable income at the level of United Technologies has a corporate tax rate of 35 percent at the federal level, United Technologies only paid an 11 percent tax rate between 2008-2012, according to numbers crunched by Citizens for Tax Justice. It has done so while also securing billions of dollars of U.S. government contracts and receiving hundreds of millions of dollars in state and federal tax subsidies.
Matthew Gardner, a senior fellow at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, who has critiqued the Trump-Pence Carrier deal in a series of blog posts, told In These Times he sees this entire saga as an example of Carrier “gaming the system” for its own ends on the backs of taxpayers.
“Companies competing with United Technologies that haven't as brazenly threatened to move jobs offshore will have to pay higher tax rates than United Technologies,” says Gardner. “And, of course, in the balanced-budget setting of state budgets, every tax break for a specific company ultimately has to be paid for by the rest of us, including smaller businesses and working families. This deal is a poke in the eye for the many business and individuals who already pay their fair share.”
Like Sanders, Gardner sees Carrier as a worrisome case moving forward in the sense that if it can be repeated or modeled at other workplaces in other cities and states, it will only harm working-class communities.
“The more such deals are carved out, the more unfair—and unsustainable—the tax system becomes,” says Gardner. “From a broader economic development perspective, and from the perspective of the public interest, there's nothing to cheer about here and certainly nothing to replicate.”
SUMMARY: When Hulk Hogan won $140 million in court from millionaire Nick Denton's Gawker Media after it published video of him having sex, the verdict raised serious questions about journalistic ethics. Hogan's suit was funded by Peter Thiel, the billionaire founder of PayPal who Gawker outed as gay a decade earlier. Hari Sreenivasan talks to Wired's Jason Tanz for more on the case and its implications.
HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour): So, let's go over just basics of what happened in this case, because most people aren't following Hulk Hogan's sex tape saga too closely.
JASON TANZ, Editor-At-Large, WIRED: Sure.
So, a few years ago, Gawker published an article that included a video of a sex tape that Hulk Hogan had made, actually was made without his knowledge. They declared it was in the public interest because Hulk Hogan was a public figure and he had gone on record talking about how he had not had sex with this woman, and they had proof that he had. So they published it, somewhat gleefully, which has always been Gawker's kind of stock and trade.
They have been very forward in their — in what they declare to be in the public interest. And they thought this was. Hulk Hogan didn't see things that way. He brought a lawsuit against them. The jury found against Gawker to the tune of $140 million, which was a pretty shocking about.
Gawker has appealed the case and they're waiting to see how that plays out.
HARI SREENIVASAN: So, how does Peter Thiel get involved in this? He — there's no love lost between the founder of Gawker, Nick Denton, and Peter Thiel.
JASON TANZ: Nick Denton had suspected that there was actually somebody funding Hulk Hogan's lawsuit, because the way Hogan was prosecuting the suit, he was making decisions that, if he were interested in making money, game theory suggests that he would have done something differently.
He could have taken reportedly about a $10 million settlement. He also withdrew a part of the lawsuit that would have required a payout from Gawker's insurance. They actually just withdraw that, so that Gawker would be on the hook and not the insurance company.
So, that indicated maybe there was something else going on. In 2007, Gawker had — and, specifically, its site Valleywag had outed Peter Thiel as a gay man. Thiel at the time swore his revenge. And now, nine years later, he is getting it. He had a team of lawyers who were looking for various plaintiffs who could file suits that they could fund, and apparently they found more than one. Supposedly, there a couple of other suits out there that he's prepared to bring against Gawker as well.
With more than 300 days of sunshine a year, Nevada seems like the perfect place for rooftop solar.
And with the help of state and federal incentives, the amount of rooftop solar in the state has exploded, increasing by more than 400 percent from 2014 to 2015. But the future of the rooftop solar industry in this state is now very cloudy after a decision late last year by the state’s Public Utility Commission to change the rates for customers with solar panels.
At stake is a system known as “net metering,” which allows rooftop solar customers to get credit for the excess energy they send back to the grid when it’s sunny.
Versions of ‘net metering’ are on the books in more than 40 states and the effect for many rooftop solar customers is a dramatically reduced electric bill. But in lowering their bill, utilities and regulators around the country have been trying to determine if solar customers are paying their fair share of the electric grid’s operating costs.
In Nevada, the Public Utility Commission ruled that there was a cost-shift from non-solar customers to solar customers.
“The customers who are participating in net metering were not sharing in the costs of the utility’s distributions and transmission system – the pipes and the wires that get the electricity to your home,” said Anne-Marie Cuneo, Staff Director of Regulatory Operations for the Nevada Public Utilities Commission.
In December, the Public Utility Commission increased the basic connection fee and reduced the value of the credit that homeowners receive for excess energy to help close the gap between non-solar and solar customers, which utility NV Energy calculated to be about $16 million a year.
Solar advocates say the change threatens the whole industry and many companies said they were moving operations out of the state, including SolarCity, which laid off 550 workers in January. Advocates argue that utilities have been pushing for changes in ‘net metering’ rules because they see solar as a threat to their business model.
“Solar is becoming real,” said Marco Krapels, Executive Vice President for Strategy and Structured Finance at Solar City. “The utility monopolies are saying, ‘well wait a minute, we’ve got to crush it before it gets too big.’ And that’s what’s happening now.”
USA Discounters has undergone a makeover.
The Virginia-based retailer was the focus of a ProPublica investigation in July into its lending practices to service members. The company still sells high-priced furniture, electronics and appliances outside military bases across the country, but it has adopted a new name for its stores, USA Living, and says it has made reforms to its collections processes.
As before, USA Living advertises that active military customers, regardless of their financial histories, are "always approved" for credit. But it has traded in the USA Discounters' tagline, "Your incredible credit store," for a new USA Living tagline, "Credit for the life you want."
Hannah Arnold, a company spokeswoman, said the name change was made to avoid confusion. "[T]he company is not a discount store," she wrote in an email.
Despite the name change, USA Living continues to make loans much the same way it did as USA Discounters.
ProPublica's story, published with the Washington Post, detailed how USA Discounters has filed thousands of lawsuits in two local Virginia courts against borrowers who defaulted on their loans. Relying on a clause in its contracts, the company filed suits in those courts regardless of where service members bought the items or where they were based. Because the service members frequently didn't show up in court, the company easily obtained judgments and could garnish the debtors' wages. Department of Defense payroll data obtained by ProPublica showed that USA Discounters seizes the pay of more active-duty service members than any company in the country.
USA Discounters will still be filing lawsuits in those local courts, but said in a press release that it will take a number of steps to inform borrowers they have an option to be sued closer to home. The company said it only files suit after borrowers fall several months behind and as a last resort.
Service members who take out loans from USA Living are now provided with a " Notification of Jurisdiction and Customer Rights." The notice reiterates that the company has the right under the contract to sue the borrower in Virginia, but adds that if that does happen, the borrower can request to have the suit moved to another court and the company "will honor that request." Borrowers are required to sign the notice as acknowledgment.
Arnold, the company spokeswoman, said that if borrowers do fall behind, they will again be notified that they have the option to transfer any lawsuit to a local court.
Carolyn Carter, director of advocacy at the National Consumer Law Center, said the changes were an improvement, but not by much. "They're still planning to sue consumers in Virginia even though most consumers have no contact or connection with Virginia," she said. They have made a bad practice "a little less bad," she said, by giving borrowers the option to have a suit transferred.
The company's makeover does not seem to have slowed the pace of its lawsuits in local Virginia courts. In the last two weeks, for example, the company filed 28 lawsuits in Virginia Beach General District Court. Only one of the defendants had a Virginia address. The others all had addresses either on or near military installations around the country, including Fort Hood and Fort Bliss in Texas, Fort Benning and Fort Gordon in Georgia, Fort Bragg in North Carolina, Fort Carson in Colorado and Fort Campbell in Kentucky.
It is illegal under federal law for debt collectors to sue consumers in a remote court no matter how many disclosures are provided. But the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act does not apply to a lender like USA Discounters filing suit on its own behalf. After ProPublica's story ran, a group of senators sent letters to two different federal regulators asking them to close that loophole and investigate USA Discounters' practices.
The Federal Trade Commission's response to one of those letters confirmed the existence of the loophole in the debt collection act, but hinted that USA Discounters might be in violation of a different federal law.
Under the FTC Act, the FTC has the power to combat "unfair or deceptive acts or practices" by a wide array of companies, FTC Chairwoman Edith Ramirez wrote in a letter to Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., one of the six senators who wrote the commission. Ramirez cited a case where the FTC found that it was, in fact, unfair for a company to sue borrowers in a remote court.
In that case, the FTC took action against a company that offered online payday loans through a company located on a tribal reservation in South Dakota. Much like USA Discounters, the company's contracts declared that consumers could be sued in the local tribal court, regardless of where they lived. The FTC brought suit against the company, charging that the practice violated the law. The FTC, however, has not, as of yet, taken any action against USA Discounters.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau announced a settlement with USA Discounters in August over unrelated issues. The settlement, which centered on a $5 fee that the company charged service members in its contracts, did not preclude further action by the CFPB. A spokesman said that the agency, which also has broad power to combat unfair business practices, had not yet replied to the senators' letter, but "remains focused on protecting our nation's servicemembers in the financial marketplace."
More than two dozen of the nation’s biggest corporations, including the five major oil companies, are planning their future growth on the expectation that the government will force them to pay a price for carbon pollution as a way to control global warming.
The development is a striking departure from conservative orthodoxy and a reflection of growing divisions between the Republican Party and its business supporters.
A new report by the environmental data company CDP has found that at least 29 companies, some with close ties to Republicans, including ExxonMobil, Walmart and American Electric Power, are incorporating a price on carbon into their long-term financial plans.
Both supporters and opponents of action to fight global warming say the development is significant because businesses that chart a financial course to make money in a carbon-constrained future could be more inclined to support policies that address climate change.
But unlike the five big oil companies — ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, Chevron, BP and Shell, all major contributors to the Republican party — Koch Industries, a conglomerate that has played a major role in pushing Republicans away from action on climate change, is ramping up an already-aggressive campaign against climate policy — specifically against any tax or price on carbon. Owned by the billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch, the company includes oil refiners and the paper-goods company Georgia-Pacific.
The divide, between conservative groups that are fighting against government regulation and oil companies that are planning for it as a practical business decision, echoes a deeper rift in the party, as business-friendly establishment Republicans clash with the Tea Party.
Tom Carnac, North American president of CDP, said that the five big oil companies seemed to have determined that a carbon price was an inevitable part of their financial future.
“It’s climate change as a line item,” Mr. Carnac said. “They’re looking at it from a rational perspective, making a profit. It drives internal decision-making.”
Companies do not know what form a future carbon price would take. Congress could one day vote to directly tax emissions. President Obama is moving forward with plans to regulate carbon pollution from coal plants, with or without action from Congress — and states could carry out those regulations by taxing carbon polluters. At climate change talks at the United Nations, State Department negotiators have pledged that the United States will cut its carbon emissions 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020, and 80 percent by 2050.
Mr. Carnac said: “Companies see that the trend is inevitable. What you see here is a hardening of that understanding.”
Other companies that are incorporating a carbon price into their strategic planning include Microsoft, General Electric, Walt Disney, ConAgra Foods, Wells Fargo, DuPont, Duke Energy, Google and Delta Air Lines.
