Today's News

Gas Prices With gasoline prices rising rapidly, Sen. Bernie Sanders wants to see federal regulators follow the lead of Europeans and investigate oil and fuel price manipulation. He also proposed a 30-day deadline for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to curb excessive speculation in crude oil markets that can significantly increase oil and gas prices. Sanders said gasoline price hikes are coming at a time when U.S. inventories are at a three-decade high while demand is low, ABC 22 and Fox 44 reported.

Apple Skirts Taxes Apple avoided paying billions of dollars in U.S. income taxes. A Senate investigation found the tech giant shelters in overseas accounts about $102 billion of its $145 billion in cash, according to the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. “It is a total scam,” Sen. Bernie Sanders told Ed Schultz on Tuesday. “It’s not just Apple. Virtually every major multi-national corporation has used these offshore tax havens,” Sanders added. He has introduced legislation that would take away the tax breaks and yield $600 billion in revenue over a decade.

VA Claims Backlog “While the VA is processing more claims than ever before, it is absolutely unacceptable that veterans, in some cases, are waiting years for their claims to be processed. For whatever reason, the VA did not until 2009, begin doing what the entire corporate sector had done — move from paper to the digital world. Upon assuming his position at the VA, Secretary Eric Shinseki announced a very ambitious transformation of the system. His goal is that by the end of 2015, all claims will be processed within 125 days and with 98 percent accuracy. I intend to work with the secretary to make sure that goal is achieved,” Sanders said in a column for The Hill.

VA Hedges on Disability Backlog The Department of Veterans Affairs has systematically missed nearly all of its internal benchmarks for reducing a hulking backlog of benefits claims and has quietly backed away from repeated promises to give all veterans and family members speedier decisions by 2015. Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee Chairman Sanders asked VA Secretary Eric Shinseki at a hearing last month whether there were any benchmarks to show progress toward the VA's goals. Shinseki did not answer, according to the Center for Investigative Reporting.

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