Tag: current-events

#Loophole that allows @jeffBezos #Amazon get away with NO #TAXES

Jeff Bezos 2018 Richest billionaire on the list

Jeff Bezos  – Amazon –  $112 billion doesn’t pay taxes

https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2018/03/06/jeff-bezos-unseats-bill-gates-forbes-2018-richest-billionaires-list/398877002/

and he uses Philanthropy for more tax write offs.

Davos 2019: Historian Rutger Bregman berates billionaires at World Economic Forum over tax avoidance

Trump tax cuts to surge debt past 90% of GDP by 2024, says IMF report

Why This ‘Patriotic’ Millionaire Wants to Raise Taxes on the Rich | NowThis

BUSINESS, BANKS, POLITICIANS HAVE BUILT A 170 BILLION DOLLAR TAX HAVEN

Historian Rutger Bregman
Industry had to “stop talking about philanthropy and start talking about taxes”, he said, and cited the high tax regime of 1950s America as an example to disprove arguments by business people at Davos such as Michael Dell that economies with high personal taxation could not succeed. “That’s it,” he says. “Taxes, taxes, taxes. All the rest is bullshit in my opinion.”
Winnie Byanyima, an Oxfam executive director, took up the fight and said high employment was not a good thing in itself because many people found themselves in exploitative work. She cited the example of poultry workers in the US who had to wear nappies (diapers) because they were not allowed toilet breaks.
“That’s not a dignified job,” she said. “those are the jobs we’ve been told about, that globalisation is bringing jobs. The quality of the jobs matter. In many countries workers no longer have a voice.
Addressing Goldman, she said: “You’re counting the wrong things. You’re not counting dignity of people. You’re counting exploited people.”
Billions of dollars were leaked by tax avoidance every year which should instead be going to alleviate poverty in the developing world, she added.
#Davos
#WorldEconomicForum
#RutgerBregman

“The vast majority of Americans for years and years now … including Fox News viewers and including Republicans are in favor of higher taxes on the rich — higher inheritance taxes, higher top marginal tax rates, higher wealth taxes — it’s all really mainstream,” Bregman said. “But no one’s saying that at Davos just as no one’s saying that on Fox News. And the explanation for that’s quite simple, it’s that most of the people in Davos, as well as most of the people on this channel, have been bought by the billionaire class. You’re not meant to say these things.”

1993  politician paid policy initiative to constrain CEO pay was actually a loophole to not pay taxes.

1993, Bill Clinton and congressional Democrats tried to stop the growing pay inequality of Reagan-era America — Section 162(m) of the US Tax Code.

“Revenue that is paid out to employees as salaries and benefits is not profits, and thus doesn’t get taxed. But section 162(m) created an exception to that rule — any salary of over $1 million paid to top executives would not be deductible for tax purposes.

This was supposed to stop  outrageous 1% executive compensation packages.

Except there was an exception to the exception

compensation that took the form of stock options or stock grants would still be deductible and

the loophole incentivize companies to use a lot of stock-based compensation for their executives.

WHAT STOCK BYBACK ACTUALLY MEANS

A company like AMAZON could give stock-based compensation by taking money out of Jeff Bezos’ bank account and  using it to buy back shares on the open market and pay his executives with shares but no… that would involve using his real money.

Any company,  just churns out shares of their  stock anytime it wants to, kind of like an ICO of some cryptocurrency. This costs Amazon shareholders (or holders of andy crypto) where creating new shares  devalues the existing ones, but it doesn’t really cost the company anything at all.

What a game!

This policy loop hole allowed AMAZON to get away with NO  corporate income tax in 2018 despite the huge surge in profits.

AMAZON got away without paying any tax by giving executives stock-based compensation packages  and the

Securities and Exchange Commission form 10(k) shows it recorded about $1 billion in deductions for stock-based compensation

eliminating what would otherwise have been a non-zero tax liability.

and

  1. research and development tax credit
  2. Trump tax bill included a temporary provision allowing companies to take a 100 percent tax deduction for investment in equipment.

  3. 2018 is the fact that companies can deduct the cost of stock-based compensation from their taxable earnings even though it doesn’t actually cost companies any money to hand out shares of their own stock to employees. The more your share price rises, the bigger the deduction for handing out shares.

see

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Me: Yes.
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Me: It finds and fixes problems in JavaScript.
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►  Tim Bray · Google Memory Loss is ongoing – google isn’t coughing it up anymore / they don’t waste their effort going back to get what you are looking for – this has become the worst search engine to use.

Bill Browder Head of Global Magnitsky Justice campaign explains why Putin is our enemy.

Who Is Bill Browder?

#Putin, #KGB #Russians #Browder, #Magnitsky, #Trump, #Rohrabacher, #Mercer , #Billionairs, #Brexit #Propaganda #Panama Papers, #Offshore,  #Marcus Ranum
https://twitter.com/Billbrowder
billbrowder.com
Hedge fund manager Bill Browder, once the largest foreign investor in Russia, estimates Russian President Vladimir Putin’s wealth at $200 billion — which would make him by far the richest man in the world.
“After 14 years in power of Russia, and the amount of money that the country has made, and the amount of money that hasn’t been spent on schools and roads and hospitals and so on — all that money is in property, Swiss bank accounts, shares, [and] hedge funds managed for Putin and his cronies.” Bill Gates is considered the world’s richest man with a net worth of $79 billion. Putin, a former KGB lieutenant colonel,  became Russian prime minister in August 1999 and president in May 2000. Browder notes that the “first eight or 10 years about reign over Russia was about stealing as much money that he could.”
Browder’s full interview 
2015 Putin is one of the richest man in the world, or one of the richest men in the world, with hundreds of billions of dollars of wealth that was stolen from Russia.

Magnitsky Justice Campaign
http://www.billbrowder.com/sergei-magnitsky
Putin “understands he could one day be targeted by the Magnitsky Act” if he ever loses power. The Panama Papers showed Putin was part of the tax fraud scheme uncovered by Magnitsky. If targeted, assets would be frozen. See Projects
Natalia Veselnitskaya, Rinat Akhmetshin and their campaign need to  lift Magnitsky sanctions so that Putin can get his hands on the 200 billion dollars of dark money his hides away in off shore accounts.

IT IS GOP REP DANA ROHRABACKER THAT GETS IN THE WAY OF THE MAGNITSKY JUSTICE CAMPAIGN 

GOP REP Dana Rohrabacker Got Direction From Moscow, Took It Back to D.C.

After being given a secret document by officials in Moscow, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher sought to alter sanctions legislation and tried to set up a virtual show trial on Capitol Hill.

<snip>

When GOP Rohrabacher returned to the United States, he delayed the passage of the Global Magnitsky Act by holding it up in committee and tabled an amendment to remove Magnitsky’s name from its title, citing several of the claims found in the Russian document.

Next, Rohrabacher and Behrends, with the help of Rinat Akhmetshin, a Soviet army veteran and lobbyist who was also present at the June 9 Trump Tower meeting, put together a subcommittee event with witnesses including Veselnitskaya and Nekrasov, the director of the movie.
When Royce, the chair of the foreign relations committee, got wind of the hearing, he nixed Rohrabacher’s plan and offered instead to hold a full committee hearing on Russia relations. House aides conceded that he did so, in part, to avoid Rohrabacher staging an event that could have embarrassed the Republican Party—and Congress. </>
 
Robert Mercer
Revealed: how US billionaire helped to back Brexit Robert Mercer, who bankrolled Donald Trump, played key role with ‘sinister’ advice on using Facebook data
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/26/us-billionaire-mercer-helped-back-brexit
The UK’s privacy watchdog is launching an inquiry into how voters’ personal data is being captured and exploited in political campaigns, cited as a key factor in both the Brexit and Trump victories last year.  The intervention by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) follows revelations in last week’s Observer that a technology company part-owned by a US billionaire played a key role in the campaign to persuade Britons to vote to leave the European Union.

To have a foreign billionaire’s fingerprints left all over such a seismic moment in British history is deeply concerning and requires urgent further investigation as to whether electoral law was broken.”

A 2015 presentation by one of Cambridge Analytica’s analysts, until recently available on YouTube, explained how it had used “Facebook likes … as an input to machine-learning models.”
In the US, companies are free to use third-party data without seeking consent. But Gavin Millar QC, of Matrix Chambers, said this was not the case in Europe. “The position in law is exactly the same as when people would go canvassing from door to door,” Millar said. “They have to say who they are, and if you don’t want to talk to them you can shut the door in their face.That’s the same principle behind the data protection act. It’s why if telephone canvassers ring you, they have to say that whole long speech. You have to identify yourself explicitly.”
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/mar/04/cambridge-analytics-data-brexit-trump
and
*Follow the data: does a legal document link Brexit campaigns to US billionaire? We reveal how a confidential legal agreement is at the heart of a web connecting Robert Mercer to Britain’s EU referendum*
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/14/robert-mercer-cambridge-analytica-leave-eu-referendum-brexit-campaigns
Mr Baker set out how Vote Leave had worked out how to use front organisations to get around these spending limits.   He wrote: ‘It is open to the Vote Leave family to create separate legal entities, each of which could spend £700,000: Vote Leave will be able to spend as much money as is necessary to win the referendum.’
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3451588/Pat-McFadden-reports-leading-Brexit-campaigner-Steve-Baker-police-plot-break-spending-limits-EU-referendum.html
Using your personal data is now second nature for politicians
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/may/08/personal-data-politicians-election
The core focus of big data electioneering is identifying marginals – key demographic groups or geographical areas that could go either way, with enough combined weight to pull the overall result in their direction.

The Trump team’s move was to hire Cambridge Analytica. It was a natural fit – Trump’s trusted adviser Steve Bannon was formerly a board member and his friend and supporter, the billionaire Robert Mercer, is said to be a major shareholder. Their methods involve building up detailed psychological profiles of individuals based on up to 5,000 data points per person.

 

Just Follow the Slime-Trail by Marcus Ranum

@mjranum
<snip>
“Money can’t buy everything,” they say – but, then, why do the rich hunger after more, more, more? Once you’ve got a few tens of millions stashed away, you can spend the rest of your life in a blur of luxury, sex, drugs, fast cars and rock ‘n roll, if that’s your thing.
But, as Epicurus says, some people want money and power to protect themselves from the vicissitudes of life; others get confused and see the money as an end in itself. There are others who see it as a portable form of power, and will not hesitate to use that tool for whatever it is they want. When the wealthy person wants rock ‘n roll, you may get something wonderful. But when the wealthy person has an authoritarian political agenda that they want to promote – then we see the great flaw in modern pseudo-democratic oligarchies: one extremely wealthy asshole can unilaterally distort the political landscape.
I was surprised but not shocked to learn that Robert Mercer, who was one of the forces behind Trump’s ascent to power, also helped the “Brexit” movement. Because, it’s his right, as a rich oligarch, to spend his money tinkering with politics. It’s not news that Mercer interfered with England’s internal affairs, like it would be if the FSB did it, but he was another factor of many that helped bring about something that is going to be extremely damaging to England and Europe.
Whew, well, thank godless it wasn’t the Russians! It was just a random billionaire. Too bad he didn’t just give a load of money to start a jazz festival, or something, it sucks being you, England!

Cambridge Analytica, an offshoot of a British company, SCL Group, which has 25 years’ experience in military disinformation campaigns and “election management”, claims to use cutting-edge technology to build intimate psychometric profiles of voters to find and target their emotional triggers. Trump’s team paid the firm more than $6m (£4.8m) to target swing voters, and it has now emerged that Mercer also introduced the firm – in which he has a major stake – to Farage.

Thank goodness it was just bog-standard political manipulation and public relations, not Fake News. Oh, wait, it was Fake News. Sorry.

longstanding friendship between Nigel Farage and the Mercer family led Mercer to offer his help – free – to the Brexit campaign because of their shared goals.

Their shared goals being “rich people do whatever the fuck they want?”
<continue reading>

Nick Lachey Could Be the Next Billionaire Weed Kingpin

You might remember Nick Lachey from the band 98 Degrees, but it’s even more likely you’ll remember him as Jessica Simpson’s ex-husband and a star on MTV’s show Newlyweds: Nick and Jessica. What you might not know about Nick is that he is a huge proponent for the legalization of weed in his conservative home state of Ohio.
It turns out the former boyband singer co-owns a 29-acre weed farm just outside of Akron, along with a couple financial executives and a car dealership owner from Texas according to The Washington Post. He along with several other celebrities including designer Nanette Lepore, NBA legend Oscar Robertson, the NFL’s Frostee Rucker, President William Howard Taft’s great-great-grandnephews  Brothers Woody Taft, a private equity investor, and Dudley Taft Jr., a noted local musician, expressed support Wednesday for the ResponsibleOhio ballot initiative for a constitutional amendment and several others collectively own Ohio’s 10 farms designated for weed production. It is reported each ownership had to put up $4 million to underwrite the ballot campaign and an addition $10 million to purchase farmland and get their farms up and running.
Lachey, along with the rest of the co-owners, all stand to become very wealthy if a certain law passes today in the state of Ohio. Today, the state must vote on a ballot issue 3 which calls for the legalization of marijuana. However, the ballot specifies that a group of 10 farmers would have exclusive rights to weed farming. Basically, all official dispensaries would have to buy their weed from Lachey or one of the other nine farms. So, while pot legalization sounds great, the weed production would be left in the hands of a select few wealthy executive and celebrities which has so far left many torn. If the law passes, one study predicts that these 10 farms would be selling $1.1 billion of pot a year within four years.

http://www.complex.com/music/2015/11/nick-lachey-could-get-very-rich-off-new-ohio-weed-law