Author Archives: Mary Turck

A Republican minority in Wisconsin has seized control of the legislature and won’t let go. Instead, they threaten a baseless impeachment of a newly-elected Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice, voted to remove the nonpartisan Wisconsin Elections Commission administrator, and passed a last-minute redistricting bill that they falsely claim follows the successful “Iowa model,” but that actually would allow them to maintain minority rule.

In 2022, Republicans in Wisconsin got 200,000 fewer votes than Democrats. Republicans lost every state-wide race. But gerrymandering won the day: despite massive popular vote losses, Republicans maintain absolute control of the Wisconsin legislature, with a two-thirds majority in the Senate and 64 of 99 seats in the Assembly. 

I grew up in a rural community, living on a farm near a small town. I know that small towns can be havens of neighborly ties and community support. They can also turn into police states under the corrupt reign of lawless officials. Sometimes that leads to tragedy, as it did this week in Marion, Kansas. 

I read about the police raid on newspaper editors, publishers, and reporters last night, and thought I would wait until today to write about it.  Then I woke up to the report of the death of the 98-year-old co-owner of the newspaper. Heather Cox Richardson’s daily newsletter began: 

“In Marion, Kansas, yesterday morning, four local police officers and three sheriff’s deputies raided the office of the Marion County Record newspaper; the home of its co-owners, Eric Meyer and his 98 year old mother, Joan Meyer; and the home of Marion vice mayor Ruth Herbel, 80. They seized computers, cell phones, and other equipment. Joan Meyer was unable to eat or sleep after the raid; she collapsed Saturday afternoon and died at her home.”

By this afternoon, the New York Times had picked up the story. 

This morning, I thought I would skip writing this blog post. After all, the New York Times covered the story. And Heather Cox Richardson did even better, giving the historical context of the assassination of abolitionist editor Elijah Lovejoy in Illinois in 1837. But then I thought: maybe even one person who reads my blog will read the story here for the first time. Maybe even one person will pass this story on to someone else who has not read it and does not know the vital importance of defending free press and free speech, of resisting even the small tyrannies of small towns. 

The Marion County Record managed to publish its own story online—they don’t know when they will be able to publish on paper because of all the equipment seized from the newspaper.

“Stressed beyond her limits and overwhelmed by hours of shock and grief after illegal police raids on her home and the Marion County Record newspaper office Friday, 98-year-old newspaper co-owner Joan Meyer, otherwise in good health for her age, collapsed Saturday afternoon and died at her home.

“She had not been able to eat after police showed up at the door of her home Friday with a search warrant in hand. Neither was she able to sleep Friday night.

“She tearfully watched during the raid as police not only carted away her computer and a router used by an Alexa smart speaker but also dug through her son Eric’s personal bank and investments statements to photograph them. Electronic cords were left in a jumbled pile on her floor.

“Joan Meyer’s ability to stream TV shows at her home and to get help through her Alexa smart speakers were taken away with the electronics. 

“As her home was raided, other officers descended upon the Record office, forcing staff members to stay outside the office for hours during a heat advisory. They were not allowed them to answer the phone or make any calls.

“Marion police chief Gideon Cody forcibly grabbed reporter Deb Gruver’s personal cell phone out of her hand, reinjuring one of her fingers, which previously had been dislocated.

“Officers seized personal cell phones and computers, including the newspaper’s file server, along with other equipment unrelated to the scope of their search.”

There’s more, and you can read it at the newspaper’s website. (You can also support the Marion County Record by subscribing.)

Of course, the raid and seizures were illegal. Federal law strictly limits the circumstances under which any law enforcement official may search or seize material from news media. None of those criteria were met.

Moreover, the search warrant was supposedly based on an affidavit alleging probable cause to believe that identity theft had been committed—but the affidavit is missing and was never filed with the court. So what was really going on? Before his mother’s death, Eric Meyer explained to the Kansas Reflector: 

“Eric Meyer, owner and publisher of the newspaper, said police were motivated by a confidential source who leaked sensitive documents to the newspaper, and the message was clear: ‘Mind your own business or we’re going to step on you.’

“The city’s entire five-officer police force and two sheriff’s deputies took ‘everything we have,’ Meyer said, and it wasn’t clear how the newspaper staff would take the weekly publication to press Tuesday night.

“The raid followed news stories about a restaurant owner who kicked reporters out of a meeting last week with U.S. Rep. Jake LaTurner, and revelations about the restaurant owner’s lack of a driver’s license and conviction for drunken driving.”

Coincidentally (?), the newspaper was also investigating separate allegations of misconduct by the town’s police chief. It had not published any story about either investigation because—as good journalists do—the staff was still investigating and fact-checking to be sure that they had all the facts before publishing anything at all. 

Meyer knows the crucial importance of local newspapers. The Kansas Reflector reported:

“Meyer, whose father worked at the newspaper from 1948 until he retired, bought the Marion County Record in 1998, preventing a sale to a corporate newspaper chain.

“As a journalism professor in Illinois, Meyer said, he had graduate students from Egypt who talked about how people would come into the newspaper office and seize everything so they couldn’t publish. Those students presented a scholarly paper at a conference in Toronto about what it has done to journalism there.

“’That’s basically what they’re trying to do here,’ Meyer said. ‘The intervention is just like that repressive government of Egypt. I didn’t think it could happen in America.’” 

Small towns can be havens of neighborly ties and community support. They can also turn into police states under the corrupt reign of lawless officials. When everybody knows everybody else, that means the sheriff and the judge and the police chief also know everybody. And that’s when they can issue a dangerous, even deadly, message: “Mind your own business or we’re going to step on you.”

My sister Kathy went to New College in September 1970. Kathy was queer, which made life in our small town difficult. She found welcome and home at New College for a brief time. She studied with Robin Morgan, who edited the groundbreaking anthology of the women’s movement published in 1970, Sisterhood is Powerful. She rode a motorcycle, wrote poetry, and edited a feminist newsletter at the college. 

New College really was new then, founded only ten years earlier. A private college for academically talented students, New College offered openness, academic freedom, and respect for students as they stretched their intellectual wings. 

The 1970s were a tough decade. Kathy didn’t make it through them. New College almost went under, but was saved by a deal that made it part of the Florida university system. Even as part of that system, New College remained a welcoming, open setting. 

My memory of Kathy’s time there makes reading about New College today all the more painful. This year, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis appointed new, highly conservative trustees, announcing plans to remake New College into something like the private, Christian, right-wing Hillsdale College. The new trustees promptly fired the college’s president and installed DeSantis ally and Florida education commissioner Richard Corcoran as president, despite his complete lack of education experience or credentials. Trustee Christopher Rufo tweeted, “We are organizing a ‘hostile takeover of a liberal college.’” This month, he boasted that 36 faculty members have left since the takeover. 

Rufo and DeSantis are leaders in a rightwing movement that aims to destroy not only academic freedom in universities, but schools and education at all levels. Their foot soldiers—in Florida and across the country—ban books, threaten teachers, and defund libraries. They want to ban mention of sex or gender in AP psychology classes. (Freud, anyone?) One Florida district forbids assigning Shakespeare plays because of concern over sexual content—only excerpts can be assigned for study, not entire plays. Racism is never far from the surface of this movement. In Texas, a trustee (local school board member) said a child “was traumatized by a poster showing different colored children holding hands and had to switch classrooms.”  

This week, New College moved to abolish its gender studies program, on orders from the board of trustees. Rufo bragged:

“The mission of New College of Florida is to restore classical liberal education and to revive the pursuit of transcendent truth—a mission ultimately incompatible with the disciplines of gender studies and queer theory, which are explicitly opposed to the classical conceptions of the true, the good, and the beautiful.” 

Not too hard to extrapolate from that: the study, the literature, the art, the lives of LGBTQ+ people are the opposite of “the true, the good, and the beautiful.” As are the study, the literature, the art, and the lives of women—or at least of those women who do not fit into the “classical conceptions” of their roles and nature. 

That fits right in with Florida’s new Black history curriculum for grade schools and high schools, which completely distorts and devalues Black history and Black lives. The curriculum requires that teachers instruct students about “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.” Popular Information’s Judd Legum notes that, despite immediate denunciation across a broad political spectrum, DeSantis continued to insist on this distortion of history:

“That provision was blasted by Black Republicans. ‘There is no silver lining in slavery,’ Senator and presidential candidate Tim Scott (R-SC) said. ‘Slavery was really about separating families, about mutilating humans and even raping their wives. It was just devastating.’ Congressmen Byron Donalds (R-FL) and John James (R-MI) also spoke out against the curriculum. DeSantis responded by attacking the three Black Republicans, claiming they accepted Democrats’ ‘false narratives’ and ‘lies.’”

The same “hostile takeover” underway at New College threatens all public education, from grade school to grad school. In an essay about book banning, author Stephen King wrote:

“There are people out there who are deciding what your kids can read, and they don’t care what you think because they are positive their ideas of what’s proper and what’s not are better, clearer than your own. Do you believe they are? Think carefully before you decide to accord the book-banners this right of cancellation, and remember that they don’t believe in democracy but rather in a kind of intellectual autocracy. If they are left to their own devices, a great deal of good literature may soon disappear from the shelves of school libraries simply because good books — books that make us think and feel — always generate controversy.”

What he wrote about books applies equally to lesson plans and history curriculums. The job of education is opening minds, not closing them. 

If we care about the future of our children, grandchildren—or country—then it’s time to stand up and fight back. Caring means keeping your eyes and mind open and paying attention to the news, even when that keeps you up at night. Caring means voting against those who want to ban books and distort history.

Caring means sorting fact from fiction and truth from lies. Caring also means asking tough questions of candidates who are running for school board or library board or county commissioner. Caring might mean running for school board. It might mean talking to your neighbor or your niece, writing a letter to the editor, or baking cookies for a community meeting. Caring means action of whatever kind you can take. Inaction is not an option. 

The Other America shook the country in 1962. With a carefully researched non-fiction book, Michael Harrington laid open the wounds of poverty in the United States as dramatically as muckrakers like Upton Sinclair had in novels published half a century earlier. The paperback edition of The Other America sold over a million copies and is often credited with inspiring and making possible the War on Poverty that brought us Medicare, Medicaid, the food stamp program, Head Start, and dozens of lesser-known programs. 

In Poverty, by America, Matthew Desmond exposes the systematic nature of poverty and racism and their historic and contemporary interconnection in the United States. His careful research backs up his insistence that we can and must abolish poverty, that the cost of doing so is well within the realm of the possible.  

Even if multi-millionaires simply pay what they owe, they will still not be paying what they should. (And, as I noted in yesterday’s post, multi-millionaires are the biggest tax evaders and the least likely to be audited.) Deductions, exemptions, lower tax rates on capital gains, tax shelters available only to those with a lot of money: these all combine to reduce the amount of income on which taxes are paid. But that’s not all: low marginal tax rates and inequitable rules on social security contributions are big factors in lowering taxes for high-income earners. This happens in two ways: 

First, the highest-income earners do not have to pay Social Security and Medicare taxes on most of their income. 

Second, the marginal tax rate on the highest incomes has been slashed over the past 80 years. 

Besides these problems with individual taxes, large, profitable corporations got a massive tax break in the Trump years and still managed to keep the loopholes that help many avoid paying any taxes.

The Social Security problem

Employers and employees each pay 6.2 percent of wages up to the taxable maximum of $160,200 (in 2023).  Self-employed people pay 12.4 percent. Add to that the Medicare tax of 1.45 percent on employees and 1.45 percent on employers, and 2.9 percent for self-employed individuals. That’s a combined payroll tax of 15.3 percent on the first $160,200 of earnings.  

This starts out as a flat tax: if you earn $5,000, you pay 15.3 percent in Social Security and Medicare taxes. If you earn $100,000, you pay the same 15.3 percent. That’s in addition to any income taxes that you pay. 

But when you earn more than $160,200, then you pay less. Actually, it’s even worse than that. The income tax rate applies only to “taxable income,” which is income after subtracting deductions and exemptions. Social Security and Medicare tax applies to every single dollar you earn in wages or self-employment income. 

You may have heard the refrain that “Social Security is going broke.” I started hearing that when I was in 8^th grade, about 50 years ago, so I’m not entirely convinced that it is true. But even if it is true, there’s an easy solution: just make the highest earners keep on paying Social Security and Medicare taxes, instead of giving them a pass after they hit the $160,200 earning mark. That would make Social Security and Medicare solvent forever. 

The Maximum Tax Rate is Too Low

This gets a little complicated, but it’s worth the effort to understand. 

The marginal tax rate is the rate paid on different levels of taxable income. That’s income after all deductions and exemptions—and remember that those deductions and exemptions already drastically reduce the amount of income that counts as taxable income for the highest earners. Here’s the table showing current marginal tax rates:

(For a more detailed explanation of tax rates, tax brackets, effective and marginal tax rates, etc., see Investopedia’s excellent article on marginal tax rates.)

Here’s how marginal tax rates work. A single taxpayer with a taxable income of $50,000 in 2022 would pay:

• 10 percent of the $10,275 in taxable income that falls in the lowest tax bracket. That’s $1,027.50. 

• 12 percent of the $31,500 in taxable income that falls in the next tax bracket. That’s $3,780. 

• 22 percent of the $8,225 that falls in the next tax bracket. That’s $1,809.50. 

Now, what happens if someone has a taxable income of a million dollars? Like the taxpayer with $50,000 in taxable income, the million-dollar earner still pays 10 percent on the first $10,275 of taxable income, 12 percent of income between $10,275 and $41,775, and 22 percent of income between $41,775 and $89,075. 

The tax brackets keep on going up to the highest: 37 percent of taxable income in excess of $539,900 for a single taxpayer with no dependents. 

Is 37 percent a high tax rate? No. Historically, that’s a low marginal tax rate. Back in 1940, the highest marginal tax rate was 81 percent. During World War II, that increased to 94 percent. In the Republican years of the Eisenhower presidency, the highest marginal tax rate remained at 91 percent. In the mid-1960s the tax rate on the wealthiest U.S. taxpayers started going down, bottoming out at 28 percent in 1988. (For the complete history, see this table from the Tax Policy Center.)

Remember: Nobody pays an income tax rate of 37 percent on their income. The highest rate is ONLY paid on (1) that income that is considered “taxable income” AND (2) the portion of taxable income that is in excess of $539,900 for a single taxpayer with no dependents. 

Pro Publica analyzed how much—or how little—the 25 wealthiest taxpayers in the United States pay:

“On average, they paid 15.8% in personal federal income taxes between 2014 and 2018. They had $86 billion in adjusted gross income and paid $13.6 billion in income taxes in that period.

“That’s lower than the rate a single worker making $45,000 a year might pay if you include Medicare and Social Security taxes.”

And that’s why I think the highest marginal tax rate should be MUCH higher than 37 percent. 

Corporations Evading Taxes

And then there’s the corporate income tax. Corporations pay a flat rate of 21 percent on their profits. Remember—only on their profits. That means they can deduct every penny of million-dollar executive salaries and every penny of their “doing business” expenses, depreciation, etc. from their income before reporting the taxable profits.

The 21 percent rate went into effect with the Trump tax cuts of 2017. Before that, corporations paid tax on profits at an official rate of 35 percent. 

But wait—that’s only the official tax rate. Corporate tax loopholes mean the actual rate is much lower. Investopedia reports:

“The difference between the 21% statutory corporate income tax rate and the effective rate based on the cash taxes companies actually pay is the result of generous tax breaks doled out by U.S. Congress.

“The 379 profitable Fortune 500 companies paid an average effective federal income tax rate of 11.3% on their 2018 income.”

In fact, the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that many large and profitable corporations pay no income taxes.

“In each year from 2014 to 2018, about half of all large corporations had no federal income tax liability. For the purposes of this report, GAO considers “large corporations” to be those that filed Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Schedule M-3. This form is required for corporations with $10 million or more in assets. Among profitable large corporations, on average, 25 percent had no tax liability.“

The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy got specific, detailing 55 large, profitable corporations that paid no income tax in 2020:

“The companies avoiding income taxes in 2020 represent very different sectors of the U.S. economy:

“Food conglomerate Archer Daniels Midland enjoyed $438 million of U.S. pretax income last year and received a federal tax rebate of $164 million.

“The delivery giant FedEx zeroed out its federal income tax on $1.2 billion of U.S. pretax income in 2020 and received a rebate of $230 million.

“The shoe manufacturer Nike didn’t pay a dime of federal income tax on almost $2.9 billion of U.S. pretax income last year, instead enjoying a $109 million tax rebate.

“The cable TV provider Dish Network paid no federal income taxes on $2.5 billion of U.S. income in 2020.

“The software company Salesforce avoided all federal income taxes on $2.6 billion of U.S. income.” 

Solutions

Four simple steps could go a long way toward funding what we need to do as a nation, from sustainable energy to infrastructure to education to universal health care. Those four steps:

1) Fund the IRS to go after high-income tax cheats.

2) Increase the marginal tax rate for the highest earners. How much? Just for the sake of argument, how about midway between today’s 37 percent and the Eisenhower-era 91 percent? That would set the highest marginal tax bracket at 64 percent. 

3) Remove the cap on Social Security and Medicare taxes so that the wealthiest earners keep on paying these. 

4) Make corporations pay their fair share. 

For more, see

Making Millionaires Pay Their Fair Share: Part I

and

Making Millionaires Pay Their Fair Share: October 2023 Update

High-income tax cheats have stolen billions from the rest of us. The IRS is finally going after them. In the past few months, it has collected $38 million from about 175 high-income tax cheats, and that’s just a start. 

Chasing wealthy tax cheats takes more skill, time, and money than auditing low-income or middle-income taxpayers.  That’s why the Biden administration got more money for the IRS this year, and why the Republicans in Congress are howling about it and demanding that the IRS return to a starvation diet that will keep it from going after the big bucks. 

As a group, high-income earners deliberately hide far more of their income than lower-income earners. One study found that “under-reported income as a fraction of true income rises from about 7% in the bottom 50% of the income distribution to 21% in the top 1%.”  

While I am working on a post, I sometimes schedule it for future publication. Unfortunately, when I save it, WordPress sends out a notice to subscribers that I have published a new post. I have not figured out a way to change that — sorry!

I was four years old when 14-year-old Emmett Till was brutally tortured and lynched. He was just a child, a Chicago boy visiting Mississippi. His cousin, Reverend Wheeler Parker, Jr., was 16. He remembers his cousin, whom they called Bobo. Bobo stuttered a lot, a result of childhood polio, and was a goof-off and a prankster. All these years later, Reverend Parker recalls exactly what happened back then:   

“He loved to have pranks, so he whistled. He gave her the wolf whistle. When he did that, we could have died. Nobody said, ‘Let’s go.’ We just made a beeline for the car.  …

“He was joking. He wanted to make us laugh. When he saw that we didn’t laugh and we were scared, he’s frightened now. And we jumped in the car, and we’re going on this gravel road. And there’s a car coming behind us. Dust is flying everywhere. And someone said, ‘They’re after us, they’re after us.’ And of course, we jumped out of the car and into the cotton field, and the car went on by. …

And a few nights later, white men came for Emmett Till. 

“I heard them talking at 2:30 in the morning. They said: ‘You got two boys here from Chicago.’ And, of course, when I hear this, I’m thinking — I said, man, we’re getting ready to die. I said, these people finna kill us. …

“I’m shaking like a leaf on the tree in the dark of a thousand midnights. It’s so dark, you can’t see your hand before your face. So, when they came in with the gun in one hand and a flashlight in the other, I closed my eyes to be shot. Horrible feeling. Horrible, horrible feeling. …

“Then they aroused him. And I think they told him to put his shoes on, and he wanted to put his socks on. It was just pure hell over there. Emmett had no idea who he was dealing with. He had no idea what was about to happen to him. He had no way of knowing because he didn’t know that way of life. And he left, and that’s the last time we saw him alive.”

I should have learned the story of Emmett Till in my history classes. I never did. Even in the 1960s, as the civil rights movement appeared nightly on the television news, my high school history classes said not one word about Emmett Till, not one word about civil rights, not one word about anything connected to Black people that was more recent than the Civil War. 

That’s a crime. And it’s a crime that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and other history denialists are trying hard to repeat and perpetuate.

Mamie Till-Mobley, Emmett Till’s mother, knew that the ugly, deadly truth of racism must be uncovered. She insisted on an open casket funeral for her son, saying “Let the people see what I have seen.” 

People saw. The seeing and the telling of the story were fuel for the already-growing fire of the civil rights movement. 

People saw. We still need to see. 

This week, on what would have been Emmett Till’s 82^nd birthday, President Joe Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris established a national monument to honor and forever remember Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley.  

Reverend Wheeler Parker, Jr., was with them at the dedication, and he said:

“When I sat with my family on the night of terror — when Emmett Till, our beloved Bobo, was taken from us, taken to be tortured and brutally murder — murdered — back then, when I was overwhelmed with terror and fear of certain death in the darkness of a thousand midnights, in a pitch-black house on what some have called Dark Fear Road.  Back then in the darkness, I could never imagine a moment like this: standing in the light of wisdom, grace, and deliverance.“

History denialists don’t want us or our children to hear Emmett Till’s story. They don’t want us to hear Reverend Parker’s voice. We must fight back and insist that this history be taught and told in the full, awful light of day. 

At the dedication, Vice President Kamala Harris told it well: 
 
“The story of Emmett Till and the incredible bravery of Mamie Till-Mobley helped fuel the movement for civil rights in America, and their stories continue to inspire our collective fight for justice. …

“Our history as a nation is born of tragedy and triumph, of struggle and success.  That is who we are.  And as people who love our country, as patriots, we know that we must remember and teach our full history, even when it is painful — especially when it is painful.
 
“Today, there are those in our nation who would prefer to erase or even rewrite the ugly parts of our past; those who attempt to teach that enslaved people benefitted from slavery; those who insult us in an attempt to gaslight us, who try to divide our nation with unnecessary debates.
 
“Let us not be seduced into believing that somehow we will be better if we forget.  We will be better if we remember.  We will be stronger if we remember.
 
“Because we all here know: It is only by understanding and learning from our past that we can continue to work together to build a better future.”

President Biden’s speech at the dedication reiterated that truth:

“We can’t just choose to learn what we want to know.  We have to learn what we should know.  We should know about our country.  We should know everything: the good, the bad, the truth of who we are as a nation.  That’s what great nations do, and we are a great nation.  That’s what they do. 
 
“For only with truth comes healing, justice, repair, and another step forward toward forming a more perfect union.  We got a hell of a long way to go.” 

Yes. We’ve got a hell of a long way to go. 

“Race matters in the lived experience of Americans, even if legal barriers are gone,” wrote Justice Ketanji Brown-Jackson in her eloquent dissent from the Supreme Court decision ordering an end to affirmative action in higher education.

She denounced the Court’s cynical advocacy of “colorblindness.” That colorblindness takes U.S. law back to the days before the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling against school segregation.

This week’s announcement of federal funding to extend broadband internet access to underserved area—especially rural areas—reminded me of Dad and Grandpa’s stories of the REA and the arrival of electricity. 

Back in the 1930s, the lights came on in Henry Turck’s barn for the first time, spooking the milk cows. Electric lights were welcome, but the real improvement was electric milking machines. Dad recalled that his father made a deal with him. Dad would milk the cows, and that would leave Grandpa time for more trapping so he could earn enough money to purchase an electric milking machine.