Promising, and then failing, to repeal the carried interest tax break is fast becoming a Democratic tradition, so much so that I'm beginning to wonder if not fixing this problem is an intentional move, designed to ensure that Democrats always have something to run on in election seasons.
In both the 2008 and 2012 election cycles, Barack Obama either decried the tax "trick" or overtly promised to close the loophole.
Obama's remarks about carried interest pretty much always sound exactly like Hillary's remarks this week. He gave a Rose Garden speech in 2011, in advance of his race against Romney, in which he rejected "the notion that asking a hedge fund manager to pay the same tax rate as a plumber or teacher is class warfare." But Obama and the Democrats never really did anything about the loophole, even when they had the power to do so.—Rolling Stone
The scope of “involuntary resettlement,” as the bank calls it, is vast. From 2004 to 2013, the bank’s projects physically or economically displaced an estimated 3.4 million people, forcing them from their homes, taking their land or damaging their livelihoods, ICIJ’s analysis of World Bank records reveals.
The true figure is likely higher, because the bank often fails to count or undercounts the number of people affected by its projects.
A team of more than 50 journalists from 21 countries spent nearly a year documenting the bank’s failure to protect people moved aside in the name of progress. The reporting partners analyzed thousands of World Bank records, interviewed hundreds of people and reported on the ground in Albania, Brazil, Ethiopia, Honduras, Ghana, Guatemala, India, Kenya, Kosovo, Nigeria, Peru, Serbia, South Sudan and Uganda.
In these countries and others, the investigation found, the bank’s lapses have hurt urban slum dwellers, hardscrabble farmers, impoverished fisherfolk, forest dwellers and indigenous groups — leaving them to fight for their homes, their land and their ways of life, sometimes in the face of intimidation and violence.—Huffington Post
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