Illinois business: Ken Griffin calls Illinois tax incentives a form of cronyism

“The last election cycle I called a local CEO to talk to him about supporting a pro-business candidate … ,” Griffin, a billionaire and Republican hedge fund manager, told the Economic Club of Chicago. “And I asked straightforward and simple, and he said, ‘No. No. I’m not going write a check. You see, if Illinois is not hospitable to my business. We’re just going to move.’

“And then I learned what the word ‘hospitable’ meant. For a few weeks later, it was announced that his company received tens of millions of dollars in tax incentives. His silence was bought and paid for,” Griffin said.

via Illinois business: Ken Griffin calls Illinois tax incentives a form of cronyism – chicagotribune.com.

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Five questions on the IRS mess

Do we want a personnel outcome, a political outcome, or a policy outcome? Is the right endgame simply that some IRS employees get fired? That the Obama administration gets embarrassed? Or is that Congress tightens the language governing who does and doesn’t qualify for 501(c)4 status so that the IRS doesn’t have so much discretion — and career employees don’t resort to these confused tactics — when reviewing applications? Note that if we go the legislative route, we could either widen the 501(c)4 designation, making it clear that political groups qualify, or we could narrow it, making it clear that they don’t.

via Wonkbook: Five questions on the IRS mess.

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Hidden camera in package travels through the postal system

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Why FBI and CIA didn’t connect the dots

Rather than thinking of intelligence as a simple connect-the-dots picture, think of it as a million unnumbered pictures superimposed on top of each other. Or a random-dot stereogram. Is it a sailboat, a puppy, two guys with pressure-cooker bombs or just an unintelligible mess of dots? You try to figure it out.

via Opinion: Why FBI and CIA didn’t connect the dots – CNN.com.

Before we start blaming agencies for failing to stop the Boston bombers, and before we push “intelligence reforms” that will shred civil liberties without making us any safer, we need to stop seeing the past as a bunch of obvious dots that need connecting.

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Dens of Bureaucracy

It has been estimated that drug related crimes currently account for roughly one third of the U.S. prison population. At the same time, prescription drug sales continue to skyrocket, with a particularly sharp increase over the past decade (up by about 250 percent). The distinction between legal and illegal drugs (and the respective bureaucracies that flourished around it) has produced highly lucrative spheres: prisons overwhelmingly populated by drug offenders, a major (primarily U.S.) market for illegal drugs, and, at the same time, an ever-expanding arena of R&D, patenting, and marketing for pharmaceuticals (tested on those desperate enough to enter clinical trials, enjoyed by those able to afford them).

via Dens of Bureaucracy – The New Inquiry.

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