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Pot Legalization Foe Getting Rich off the Drug War. The lobbyist who helped kill California's Proposition 19, the 2010 ballot measure that would have legalized recreational marijuana, has constructed an entire business model around keeping pot illegal. While fighting against the proposed law, lobbyist John Lovell accepted nearly $400,000 from a wide array of police unions, some of which he also represented in attempting to steer millions of federal dollars toward California's marijuana suppression programs. The revelation, reported yesterday by the Republic Report's Lee Fang, illustrates how Prop. 19 threatened the paychecks of some of its biggest foes. Police departments stood to lose lucrative federal grants like a $550,000 payment in 2010 to police departments in three Northern California counties that covered 666 hours of police overtime spent eradicating marijuana.

And Lovell would have presumably lost a job as a guy who helped land those kinds of grants. Police Weapons Pepper-spray. (2) Twitter / Home. h7jpwgoj Shared by Nouriel. It's the Inequality, Stupid. Want more charts like these? See our charts on the secrets of the jobless recovery, the richest 1 percent of Americans, and how the superwealthy beat the IRS. How Rich Are the Superrich? A huge share of the nation's economic growth over the past 30 years has gone to the top one-hundredth of one percent, who now make an average of $27 million per household. The average income for the bottom 90 percent of us? $31,244. Note: The 2007 data (the most current) doesn't reflect the impact of the housing market crash.

In 2007, the bottom 60% of Americans had 65% of their net worth tied up in their homes. Winners Take All The superrich have grabbed the bulk of the past three decades' gains. Download: PDF chart 1 (large) PDF chart 2 (large) | JPG chart 1 (smaller) JPG chart 2 (smaller) Out of Balance A Harvard business prof and a behavioral economist recently asked more than 5,000 Americans how they thought wealth is distributed in the United States. Download: PDF (large) | JPG (smaller) Capitol Gain. IRS Buckled To GOP Pressure On Secret Donations, Lawyer Says. The Internal Revenue Service succumbed to pressure from Republican members of Congress last month when it suddenly shut down its examinations into whether five large donors had violated the law by not declaring their contributions to political 501(c)(4) groups as gifts, a lawyer representing progressive donors alleged Monday.

The IRS initially defended the examinations after their existence was made public, saying they had been initiated by career civil servants, and were not political in nature. But noting the historic lack of enforcement of the provision, six Republican members of the Senate Budget Committee, led by Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), and House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp (R-Mich.), accused the IRS of pursuing a Democratic political vendetta. And on July 7, the IRS shut everything down until further notice. The five donors have never been identified. The agency, however, had been on solid legal ground in pursuing those cases, said Marcus S. Why Unions Matter: The Numbers. A few months ago I wrote a piece for the magazine arguing that the decline in unionization over the past three decades has been a key factor in the decline of the American left over the same period.

But it's a hard case to prove because there are so many moving parts to it. So I was intrigued earlier this week when my colleague Josh Harkinson linked to a new study that attempts to quantify the effects of unionization on income inequality using a rigorous regression analysis of census data. The study comes from Bruce Western and Jake Rosenfeld and was published this month in the American Sociological Review. The authors use a model that accounts for both individual membership in unions as well as overall unionization rates in specific industries and regions. Once their model was in place, Western and Rosenfeld could manipulate their variables to estimate what income inequality would look like if union density had remained at its 1973 level.

So what did they find?

Corporate Malfeasance

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