NORTH CAROLINA OPEN THREAD for Sunday, October 27, 2019
232nd Weekly Edition
This is a weekly feature of North Carolina Blue. We hope this regular platform gives readers interested in North Carolina politics a place to share their knowledge, insight and inspiration as we work on taking back our state from some of the most extreme Republicans in the nation. Please join us every week as we try to Connect, Unite, Act with our North Carolina Daily Kos community. You can also join the discussion in four other weekly State Open Threads.
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“It’s a horrible story” — Officials, advocates decry the hazards of PFAS at N.C. summit
The chemicals that corporate titans Chemours, DuPont and 3M are manufacturing today will likely outlive you.
They will most certainly outlive everyone who attended this week’s summit on per-fluorinated and poly-fluorinated compounds. Collectively known as PFAS, there are thousands of these compounds, and the few that researchers studied have proven to be toxic to humans, with links to thyroid disorders, testicular and kidney cancer, depressed immune system, low birth weight, high cholesterol, and high blood pressure during pregnancy.
PFAS don’t degrade. They remain in the environment for decades, generations even, tainting everything they touch.
“I can’t think of any environmentally persistent chemicals that were benign,” said Patrick Breyesse, director of the National Center on Environmental Health, a part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “They move into one of our most critical resources: water. It affects our whole society.”
The two-day event was co-sponsored by a think tank, the Research Triangle Environmental Health Collaborative, and the NCPFAST Network, six universities whose research is funded by the state legislature through the NC Policy Collaboratory.
Petty Tyrants: Tim Moore and the $775,000 per year desk job
The trick is to hire the people who will hire you:
Reginald “Reggie” Holley, the Republican lobbyist whose nomination was ultimately approved by the House, was asked by Moore to put his name forward and serve on the board, Jackson said — a fact Jackson said he learned from a conversation with Holley.
“How does a lobbyist — someone who depends on leadership for the movement of bills and policy — how do they say no when the Speaker of the House calls them and asks them to serve?” Jackson said. And how does the speaker, who has been rumored for months to be interested in the presidency of the 17-campus UNC system, not recuse himself from choosing the members of the Board of Governors who will ultimately make that decision? Jackson continued.
In a word--Hubris. We're talking about a man who made a joke about taking away powers from the Governor of NC. The term "ethics" is not in his vocabulary, making him the very last person who should be running the UNC System. Unfortunately, these people just don't think along the same lines as the rest of us.
North Carolina Republicans are working to cut this tax on businesses
The North Carolina Senate voted Thursday to reduce the franchise tax, a step toward eliminating it entirely.
The franchise tax is levied on corporations that do business in North Carolina. Republicans in the General Assembly want to eliminate the franchise tax, which they describe as a double property tax on businesses in North Carolina.
While Republicans touted their latest tax cut as being good for business and jobs, Democrats worried about the loss of tax revenue, which would be about $1 billion over five years. Sen. Paul Newton, a Mount Pleasant Republican, called the franchise tax, which would be reduced by a third over the next five years, a “job killer.”
The Republican-written state budget that was vetoed by the governor included reducing the franchise tax, but progress on the budget is stalled four months into the new fiscal year.
ANITA EARLS MAKES LIST OF POTENTIAL U.S. SUPREME COURT NOMINEES UNDER DEM PRESIDENT
Anita Earls has been on the North Carolina Supreme Court less than a year, but some political insiders are already eyeing a bigger role for her: A seat on the United States Supreme Court. A group called Demand Justice recently published a “shortlist” of 32 progressive lawyers who it says would be good nominees for a Supreme Court seat after the 2020 elections, if a Democrat defeats Republican President Donald Trump and if a seat opens up on the nation’s highest court.
On its website, Demand Justice says Trump did a good job of rallying conservative voters in 2016 with a Supreme Court shortlist of his own. The group — which is led by 2016 Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s campaign press secretary — said whichever Democrat wins the 2020 primary to face Trump should copy that strategy, and should consider “unabashedly progressive lawyers and legal thinkers, who have all too often been pushed aside.”
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