IRS Whistleblowers: Agency Executives Behind Multibillion-Dollar Corporate Tax Giveaways

Thursday, 23 October 2014 00:00
By Nafeez Ahmed, Truthout | Report

A veteran Internal Revenue Service attorney demands a congressional audit of the IRS to investigate the agency's alleged role in allowing US corporations to illegally avoid paying billions of dollars in taxes even as it cracks down on individuals and small businesses.

A 10-year veteran Internal Revenue Service (IRS) attorney has demanded a congressional audit of the IRS to investigate the agency's alleged role in allowing US corporations to illegally avoid paying billions of dollars in taxes even as it cracks down on individuals and small businesses.

In a letter to Treasury secretary Jacob Lew, IRS commissioner John A. Koskinen and IRS chief counsel William Wilkins, Jane J. Kim, an attorney in the IRS Office of the Chief Counsel in New York, accused IRS executives of "deliberately" facilitating multibillion-dollar tax giveaways. The letter, dated October 19, will add further pressure on the agency, which is under fire for allegedly targeting conservative and Tea Party groups.

Paul Krugman: Plutocrats Against Democracy

It’s always good when leaders tell the truth, especially if that wasn’t their intention. So we should be grateful to Leung Chun-ying, the Beijing-backed leader of Hong Kong, for blurting out the real reason pro-democracy demonstrators can’t get what they want: With open voting, “You would be talking
to half of the people in Hong Kong who earn less than $1,800 a month. Then you would end up with that kind of politics and policies” — policies, presumably, that would make the rich less rich and provide more aid to those with lower incomes.

So Mr. Leung is worried about the 50 percent of Hong Kong’s population that, he believes, would vote for bad policies because they don’t make enough money. This may sound like the 47 percent of Americans who Mitt Romney said would vote against him because they don’t pay income taxes and, therefore, don’t take responsibility for themselves, or the 60 percent that Representative Paul Ryan argued pose a danger because they are “takers,” getting more from the government than they pay in. Indeed, these are all basically the same thing.

Dark Money and Our Looming Oligarchy

Michael Tomasky 

Hundreds of millions of untraceable donations are flowing to candidates, and at some point soon untraceable ‘dark money’ will likely overtake the system.

 

There is something obscene in looking at the raw numbers, is there not? More than $500 million being spent on House races, and north of $300 million on Senate contests. A half-billion dollars! In the House! Where, as of yesterday, the Cook Political Report was counting a mere 17 contests as toss-ups, with 19 others as vaguely competitive. [This paragraph originally said $300 billion, which was incorrect.]


But the gross (double entendre intended) amounts aren’t the money story of this campaign. The money story of this campaign is that undisclosed money is starting to overtake the system and overtake our politics, and that at the heart of this corruption sits a lie peddled to us by the Supreme Court when it handed down the Citizens United decision. Whether it did so naively or cynically, I honestly do not know. But let’s just say that if it was naïve, it was almost too naïve to believe, Steve.

David Bromwich, American Exceptionalism and Its Discontents

[...]

The Importance of Being Exceptional
From Ancient Greece to Twenty-First-Century America
By David Bromwich
The origins of the phrase “American exceptionalism” are not especially obscure. The French sociologist Alexis de Tocqueville, observing this country in the 1830s, said that Americans seemed exceptional in valuing practical attainments almost to the exclusion of the arts and sciences. The Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, on hearing a report by the American Communist Party that workers in the United States in 1929 were not ready for revolution, denounced “the heresy of American exceptionalism.” In 1996, the political scientist Seymour Martin Lipset took those hints from Tocqueville and Stalin and added some of his own to produce his book American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword. The virtues of American society, for Lipset -- our individualism, hostility to state action, and propensity for ad hoc problem-solving -- themselves stood in the way of a lasting and prudent consensus in the conduct of American politics.

Now Congressional Republicans Are Digging Through Scientists' Grant Proposals

—By Tim McDonnell | Fri Oct. 17, 2014 5:22 PM EDT

When scientists across the country need money for research projects, one place they often turn is the National Science Foundation. The NSF is an independent federal agency with an annual budget of about $7 billion, which it doles out to fund about a quarter of all federally supported science research.

Of course, the agency doesn't just give money away to anyone who asks. Proposals have to survive a rigorous review process that includes close scrutiny by a panel of top scientists in the relevant field. Competition is fierce: Of the 49,000 proposals submitted in 2013, only a fifth were ultimately funded. So as far as most scientists are concerned, an NSF grant is about the highest mark of scientific legitimacy a research project can get.

States Ease Interest Rate Laws That Protected Poor Borrowers

By Michael Corkery, October 21, 2014 8:55 pm

Lenders have come under fire in Washington in recent years. Yet one corner of the financial industry — lending to people with poor credit scores — has found sympathetic audiences in many state capitals.

Over the last two years, lawmakers in at least eight states have voted to increase the fees or the interest rates that lenders can charge on certain personal loans used by millions of borrowers with subpar credit.

Shocking New Report: Superrich Have Grabbed Half the World's Assets

By Lynn Stuart Parramore
October 21, 2014  |  According to a new report, the richest one percent have got their mitts on almost half the world's assets. Think that’s the end of the story? Think again. This is only the beginning.

The “Global Annual Wealth Report [3],” freshly released by investment giant Credit Suisse, analyzes the shocking trend of growing wealth inequality around the world. What the researchers find is that global wealth has increased every year since 2008, and that personal wealth seems to be rising at the fastest rate ever recorded, much of it driven by strong equity markets. But the benefits of this growth have largely been channeled to those who are already affluent. While the restaurant workers in America struggled to achieve wages of $10 an hour for their labor, those invested in equities saw their wealth soar without lifting a finger. So it goes around the world.

Major breakthrough could help detoxify pollutants

Scientists at The University of Manchester hope a major breakthrough could lead to more effective methods for detoxifying dangerous pollutants like PCBs and dioxins. The result is a culmination of 15 years of research and has been published in Nature. It details how certain organisms manage to lower the toxicity of pollutants.

The team at the Manchester Institute of Biotechnology were investigating how some natural organisms manage to lower the level of toxicity and shorten the life span of several notorious pollutants.

Vote all you want. The secret government won't change.

The people we elect aren’t the ones calling the shots, says Tufts University’s Michael Glennon

By Jordan Michael Smith | October 19, 2014

The voters who put Barack Obama in office expected some big changes. From the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping to Guantanamo Bay to the Patriot Act, candidate Obama was a defender of civil liberties and privacy, promising a dramatically different approach from his predecessor.

But six years into his administration, the Obama version of national security looks almost indistinguishable from the one he inherited. Guantanamo Bay remains open. The NSA has, if anything, become more aggressive in monitoring Americans. Drone strikes have escalated. Most recently it was reported that the same president who won a Nobel Prize in part for promoting nuclear disarmament is spending up to $1 trillion modernizing and revitalizing America’s nuclear weapons.

Paul Krugman: Amazon’s Monopsony Is Not O.K.

Amazon.com, the giant online retailer, has too much power, and it uses that power in ways that hurt America.

O.K., I know that was kind of abrupt. But I wanted to get the central point out there right away, because discussions of Amazon tend, all too often, to get lost in side issues.

For example, critics of the company sometimes portray it as a monster about to take over the whole economy. Such claims are over the top — Amazon doesn’t dominate overall online sales, let alone retailing as a whole, and probably never will. But so what? Amazon is still playing a troubling role.

US Treasury and Transportation Departments Hold a Privatization Party

Thursday, 16 October 2014 10:05
By Ellen Dannin, Truthout | News Analysis

The infrastructure investment summit held last month by the Departments of the Treasury and Transportation appears likely to provide a boost to the privatization industry, ironically, just as privatized infrastructure is filing for bankruptcy.

Chances are, whatever you were doing on September 9, 2014, (births and deaths excluded) will not affect your life as much as that summit, "Expanding Our Nation's Infrastructure Through Innovative Financing," did.

Living through the era of Jamie Dimon's "creative" financing might rightly make people suspicious of "innovation." Indeed, rational people might want to return to the tried and true processes and relationships that, for decades, have provided our roads, bridges and other transportation infrastructure instead of the "innovations" that now privatize the roads that were the poster children of privatization into bankruptcy, through a process that highway expert Randy Salzman recently exposed. That complex process uses the tax and bankruptcy codes and assumptions that private is always better than public to place as much as 97 percent of the costs on the public.

Paul Krugman: What Markets Will

In the Middle Ages, the call for a crusade to conquer the Holy Land was met with cries of “Deus vult!” — God wills it. But did the crusaders really know what God wanted? Given how the venture turned out, apparently not.

Now, that was a long time ago, and, in the areas I write about, invocations of God’s presumed will are rare. You do, however, see a lot of policy crusades, and these are often justified with implicit cries of “Mercatus vult!” — the market wills it. But do those invokingthe will of the market really know what markets want? Again, apparently not.

America's Wealthiest Are Just Too Damn Rich to Have a Functioning Society

By Sam Pizzigati

October 16, 2014  |  Imagine yourself part of the typical American family. Your household would have, the Federal Reserve reported [3] in September, a net worth of $81,200.

That’s not a whole lot of money. But half of America’s households would actually have less wealth than you do.

Now imagine that your net worth suddenly quadrupled, to about $325,000. That sum would place you within the ranks of America’s most affluent 20 percent of income earners. You would be “typical” no more. On the other hand, you still wouldn’t be rich, or even close to possessing a grand fortune.

Following the Charter Dollars

This cogent analysis is cross posted from the website of the Louisiana School Boards Association. Don Whittinghill has been a LSBA consultant since 2000, responsible for production of the quarterly journal, The Louisiana Boardmember, for editorial content of the LSBA web site, and is a former reporter for the Times-Picayune.

Who benefits financially from the pro-market charter school movement?

The charter school reform emerged in part out of a progressive effort to promote innovation that could be used to improve all public schools, and to open up discus­sion on the relationship between school and community, particularly in urban areas. It was a movement initiated by Ray Budde, a professor at the University of Massachusetts and envisioned as a school that would gain freedom to try different methods of teaching that could be transferred to all public schools.

However, a funny thing happened along the way. Free-market zealots (with riches) realized that over $600 billion is spent in the U.S. on public schools. A whole new frontier leading to stable profits was recognized.

A Trade Storm Is Brewing 

At the beginning of the year, we warned you about the upcoming trade tsunami. Well hold on to your hats everyone, because another “trade” storm is heading our way.

Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) negotiators are meeting in Australia this month and are aiming to finish the massive 12-country “trade” agreement.

Despite mounting evidence that the TPP should not be completed — including the leak of another part of the top-secret text earlier this week — President Barack Obama wants the TPP done by November 11. That is when he will be meeting with other TPP-country heads of state in China at the Asia-Pacific Economic Conference.

Humble spud poised to launch a world food revolution

Dutch team is pioneering development of crops fed by sea water

Tracy McVeigh

In a small army field-hut Dr Arjen de Vos shows off his irrigation machine with pride. Pipes lead out to several acres of muddy field, where only a few stragglers from the autumn harvest of potatoes, salads, carrots and onions are left. The tubes are lined with copper to stop corrosion because – in a move that defies everything we think we know about farming – de Vos is watering his plants with diluted sea water.

Last week the project beat 560 competitors from 90 countries to win the prestigious USAid grand challenge award for its salt-tolerant potato. “It’s a game changer,” said de Vos. “We don’t see salination as a problem, we see it as an opportunity.”

The Shell Game of Contingent Employment

By Darlene Lombos, Sarah Leberstein, and Elvis Mendez, on September 1, 2014

When subcontractors, freelancers, and independent contractors get hurt or abused on the job, these workers are finding it harder to hold employers accountable. This is no accident—it’s a direct result of a neoliberal labor agenda.

In 2011, Host Hotels & Resorts, Inc., a corporate partner of the Marriott hotel chain, used a general contractor that it had hired to renovate guest rooms at the Host-owned Copley Marriott in Boston. A convoluted web of subcontractors emerged, as the general contractor subcontracted the work to several other companies, and some of that subcontracted work was then further subcontracted, with more than a dozen firms working on the same project.

A state-led, multi-agency investigation found that 15 contractors on the project committed a wide array of labor law violations. Workers from a church-sponsored rehabilitation project in Philadelphia were paid only four dollars an hour—just half the state minimum wage—and no overtime, though they were required to work 12-hour days and more than 60 hours per week. All told, contractors failed to report or pay taxes on more than $1 million in wages, and at least one of them failed to maintain workers’ compensation insurance policies for the hazardous work. They misclassified many of the workers as independent contractors, thus evading tens of thousands of dollars more in unemployment insurance taxes, workers compensation premiums, and employer-side taxes, while stripping workers of basic workplace rights.

Breaking Up Fortunes

by Nick Tabor

The rich have too much. Hiking the estate tax would be a powerful tool in a broader anti-inequality campaign.

Forbes recently released the latest installment of its “Where Not to Die” guide, an annual public service to geriatric one-percenters. The magazine knows that millionaires, as maximizers of rational utility, commonly decide where to spend their golden years based on projections of how much of their money the government will seize once they’re no longer around to use it themselves. This year’s news is good for the millionaires and bad for everyone else.

The guide helpfully includes a map that marks in bold colors all the oppressive states that impose an estate or inheritance tax, drawing particular attention to Maryland and New Jersey, which have both kinds. Eight states have decided to reduce or eliminate these taxes in the near future, and a similar proposal is now gaining ground in New Jersey, as the governor scrambles to impress tea partiers ahead of a possible presidential bid. Tennessee will wipe out its estate tax by 2016; five other states have done the same since 2010

“I’m not going away”: James Risen unloads to Salon about his government foes

In historic legal fight to protect sources, embattled reporter James Risen tells Salon how he plans to fight back

Elias Isquith

James Risen, the New York Times reporter responsible in part for the 2005 Times bombshell on the Bush administration’s use of warrantless surveillance — which is widely seen as one of the seminal pieces of journalism of its era — has plenty of experience when it comes to battling the federal government. Not only in his celebrated investigative reports but, perhaps more prominently, in the courts, where for years he’s held his ground in refusing government demands that he reveal a confidential source.

For Risen, in other words, fighting the post-9/11 national security state is a full-time job, albeit one for which he never truly applied. But while he may be at a profound disadvantage when it comes to defending himself (and, some would say, his profession) in our federal courts, “Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War,” his new exposé of the malfeasance and waste behind the war on terror, offers ample evidence that he’s still a Pulitzer Prize winner when it comes to combat on the page. Salon spoke with Risen this week to discuss his book, seeing counterterrorism from a broader perspective and how much history will blame President Obama for the war on terror and the damage it’s done. Our conversation is below and has been edited for clarity and length.

A Red State Privatization Horror Story 

Wednesday, 15 October 2014 15:47
By The Daily Take Team, The Thom Hartmann Program | Op-Ed

Conservatives and libertarians have been saying for a long time that if we just get rid of government and replace it with the private sector, everything will run a whole lot better.

The idea is that since the main goal of all private corporations is to make money, they’ll be much more willing than the government is to cut costs and eliminate waste.

The Neocons — Masters of Chaos

October 17, 2014

Exclusive: America’s neoconservatives, by stirring up trouble in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, are creating risks for the world’s economy that are surfacing now in the turbulent stock markets, threatening another global recession, writes Robert Parry.

By Robert Parry

If you’re nervously watching the stock market gyrations and worrying about your declining portfolio or pension fund, part of the blame should go to America’s neocons who continue to be masters of chaos, endangering the world’s economy by instigating geopolitical confrontations in the Middle East and Eastern Europe.

Of course, there are other factors pushing Europe’s economy to the brink of a triple-dip recession and threatening to stop America’s fragile recovery, too. But the neocons’ “regime change” strategies, which have unleashed violence and confrontations across Iraq, Syria, Libya, Iran and most recently Ukraine, have added to the economic uncertainty.