When Your 'White Privilege' Runs Out: Cliven Bundy Ordered Held — Defiance of Court Orders Cited

The gun-packing racist rancher was called "lawless and violent'' by prosecutors

Cliven Bundy was completely discredited (among non-racist people) when he suggested African Americans were "better off as slaves."

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Judge orders Cliven Bundy held, citing 'ongoing defiance of federal court orders'

By Maxine Bernstein
A federal judge Tuesday ordered Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy to remain in custody pending trial on a complaint stemming from his 2014 standoff with federal agents trying to round up his cattle grazing on public land.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Janice M. Stewart found Bundy, 69, remains a danger to the community and a risk to flee, citing his "ongoing defiance of federal court orders.''

Bundy is expected to return to Nevada for his next court appearance, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office in Nevada.

He was arrested by FBI agents last Wednesday night after he flew into Portland International Airport.

Bundy had come to Portland intending to protest against the continued detention of his sons, Ammon Bundy, 40, and Ryan Bundy, 43, and their co-defendants, stemming from their armed takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. He also planned to travel to the refuge outside of Burns to support four occupiers still there. That changed when FBI agents swept in and took him into custody at the airport shortly after he landed at 10:10 p.m.

A six-count federal complaint out of Nevada charges Cliven Bundy with conspiracy to commit an offense against the United States, assault on a federal law enforcement officer, obstruction of justice, interference with commerce by extortion and two counts of carrying a firearm in relation to a crime of violence.

The complaint alleges that Bundy and four unnamed co-conspirators organized and led a massive armed assault against federal officers in and around Bunkerville, Nevada, in April 2014 to thwart them from seizing and removing 400 cattle on public land.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Steven W. Myhre argued that Cliven Bundy is "lawless and violent,'' drawing supporters to his ranch to prevent federal officers from doing their job.

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Capitalism is NOT Patriotism: Drug Maker Pfizer Merges With Ireland-Based Corp to Avoid Billions in US Taxes

Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer has sealed a more than $150 billion merger with fellow drug maker Allergan, marking one of the largest takeovers in the history of the healthcare industry. Because Allergan is headquartered in Ireland, the deal will allow Pfizer to avoid billions in U.S. taxes. It’s believed to be the largest example to date of a so-called tax inversion – where a U.S. firm acquires a firm based overseas in order to dodge U.S. taxes.—DemocracyNow

Illustration by David Goehring

By Beth Mole
In what’s called a “reverse-inversion,” Allergan, a small Dublin-based drug company that makes products such as Botox, will technically buy the US-based pharmaceutical behemoth Pfizer, which makes products such as Viagra and Lipitor.

The $160 billion merger, officially announced Monday, will allow Pfizer to move its executive offices to Ireland, thus lowering its tax rate, while also morphing into the world’s largest drug maker.

Such inversions, which are said to cost the American government billions in lost tax revenue, have drawn scorn from the Obama Administration and the Treasury Department. Last year, President Obama referred to the deals as “unpatriotic” loopholes and proposed to close them. And last week, the Treasury announced new rules to make such deals more difficult.

But Pfizer’s reverse-inversion skirts the rules, in part by keeping ownership split somewhat evenly between the two companies. After the deal is complete, current shareholders of Allergan, which has the majority of its operations in the US, will own 44 percent of the mega company. The remaining 56 percent will be owned by current Pfizer shareholders.

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Al Sharpton: He Has Tax Problems That Would Have Destroyed Other Public Figures — So Whose Got His Back?

As Sharpton Rose, So Did His Unpaid Tax Bills

Al Sharpton at a voting rights march in 2011. (Photo by Michael Fleshman)

Actor Wesley Snipes was given a three-year jail sentence for failing to file federal tax returns, a misdemeanor.  Singer Lauryn Hill was sentenced to three months for failing to file federal tax returns. The New Times claims Sharpton and his organizations owe millions — yet no jail time for Sharpton. The only other folks with Sharpton-style immunity are the executives on Wall Street who deliberately crashed the global economy in 2008.—Ronald David Jackson

By Russ Buettner
The Rev. Al Sharpton, who came to prominence as an imposing figure in a track suit, shouting indignantly at the powerful, stood quietly on a stage last month at the Four Seasons restaurant, his now slender frame wrapped in a finely tailored suit, as men in power lined up to exclaim their admiration for him.

Mayor Bill de Blasio and Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo hailed him as a civil rights icon. President Obama sent an aide to read a message commending Mr. Sharpton’s “dedication to the righteous cause of perfecting our union.” Major corporations sponsored the lavish affair.

[...]

Records reviewed by The New York Times show more than $4.5 million in current state and federal tax liens against him and his for-profit businesses.

RELATED STORY: Al Sharpton Was Accused of Trying To Lead the FBI To Exiled Activist Assata Shakur — Shakur Was Recently Placed on the FBI's 'Most Wanted Terrorist' List

And though he said in recent interviews that he was paying both down, his balance with the state, at least, has actually grown in recent years. His National Action Network appears to have been sustained for years by not paying federal payroll taxes on its employees.

With the tax liability outstanding, Mr. Sharpton traveled first class and collected a sizable salary, the kind of practice by nonprofit groups that the United States Treasury’s inspector general for tax administration recently characterized as “abusive,” or “potentially criminal” if the failure to turn over or collect taxes is willful.

Mr. Sharpton and the National Action Network have repeatedly failed to pay travel agencies, hotels and landlords. He has leaned on the generosity of friends and sometimes even the organization, intermingling its finances with his own to cover his daughters’ private school tuition.

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The IRS Is Seizing Bank Accounts Based On Suspicion — No Crime Required: Account Snatched Because Deposits Were 'Too Small'

Photo by Simon Cunningham.

By SHAILA DEWAN
For almost 40 years, Carole Hinders has dished out Mexican specialties at her modest cash-only restaurant. For just as long, she deposited the earnings at a small bank branch a block away — until last year, when two tax agents knocked on her door and informed her that they had seized her checking account, almost $33,000.

The Internal Revenue Service agents did not accuse Ms. Hinders of money laundering or cheating on her taxes — in fact, she has not been charged with any crime. Instead, the money was seized solely because she had deposited less than $10,000 at a time, which they viewed as an attempt to avoid triggering a required government report.

“How can this happen?” Ms. Hinders said in a recent interview. “Who takes your money before they prove that you’ve done anything wrong with it?”

The federal government does.

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Controversy Erupts Over Burger King’s Move To Canada: Purchase Rival to Move to Canada to Avoid US Taxes and Wage Increases

Some Are Calling for a Boycott of Burger King

Photo by Mike Mozart.

By Richard Davies
Burger King is facing a grilling from critics of U.S. companies that move overseas to cut their tax bills.

RELATED STORY: Capitalism is NOT Patriotism - These Are the Companies
Abandoning the U.S. to Dodge Taxes

“I’ve eaten my last Whopper,” is among the many comments on Burger King’s Facebook page.

The company announced on Tuesday that it would buy the popular Canadian coffee and doughnut chain Tim Hortons for more than $11 billion. The corporate headquarters of the combined firm will be in Canada — a move that stands to help lower Burger King’s corporate taxes.

RELATED STORY: Capitalism is Not Patriotism - Caterpillar Corp Uses Swiss Subsidiary to Avoid Billions in Taxes

Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, is calling for U.S. consumers to boycott Burger King. Democrats have been calling for legislation to limit these so-called tax inversions.

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The 1% May Be Even Richer Than You Think, Research Shows — Wealth Hidden by Tax Shelters and Non-response to Questionnaires

By Jeanna Smialek
The 1 percent is literally rich beyond measure, depriving nations of billions in tax revenue and obscuring shifts in global inequality.

Research conducted separately by European Central Bank economist Philip Vermeulen and London School of Economics’ Gabriel Zucman show the wealth of the super-affluent -- hidden by tax shelters and nonresponse to questionnaires -- is undercounted. Correcting for similar lapses in income data almost erases progress made from 1988 to 2008 in narrowing the gap between the world’s rich and poor, World Bank research found.

“We always suspected there was some low-balling of the top 1 percent,” said Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel-prize winning economist and author of “The Price of Inequality. “There’s a growing sense that our system is rigged and unfair.”

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Capitalism is NOT Patriotism: These Are the Companies Abandoning the U.S. to Dodge Taxes

A List of Companies
And Where They Are Running To

Courtesy the Washington Post.

How the 1% Does Business. . . And Screws America: Renaissance Corp Stole $6 Billion From US — Avoided Taxes by Pretending It Didn't Own Stocks It Traded

Photo by Cory Doctorow.

By Zachary R. Mider
A Renaissance Technologies LLC hedge fund’s investors probably avoided more than $6 billion in U.S. income taxes over 14 years through transactions with Barclays Plc and Deutsche Bank AG, a Senate committee said.

The hedge fund used contracts with the banks to establish the “fiction” that it wasn’t the owner of thousands of stocks traded each day, said Senator Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat and chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. The maneuver sought to transform profits from rapid trading into long-term capital gains taxed at a lower rate, he said.

“It meant enormous profit for both the banks and the hedge funds,” Levin told reporters today in Washington. “Ordinary Americans had to shoulder a tax burden of billions of dollars, a burden that was shrugged off by those hedge funds.”

The panel urged the Internal Revenue Service to collect taxes from the fund’s investors at the higher rate that Americans pay on wages and salaries. It said Congress should remove legal obstacles to audits of hedge funds and other large partnerships, whose returns the committee said are rarely questioned.

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Is There a Connection Between CEOs' Narcissism and Corporate Tax-Dodging?

Over 20 years ago, Fortune 500 CEO Harold McInnes
saw the narcissism coming — into America’s executive
suites

By Sam Pizzigati
Narcissists don’t happen to be particularly nice people. They preen. They grab. And they never ever really feel our pain.

Narcissists, some fascinating new business school research reminds us, also don’t make for particularly effective corporate CEOs.

This new research — out of the University of Southern California and the University of Arizona — examines the impact of CEO narcissism on corporate tax policies. That impact turns out to be fairly robust. The corporations that America most narcissistic CEOs run seem to be prone to engaging in highly risky corporate tax-avoidance maneuvers.

How did the authors of this new research, Kari Joseph Olsen and James Stekelberg, identify the narcissists in America’s top CEO suites? They used a variety of yardsticks, everything from the pay gap between CEOs and their fellow execs to the prominence of CEO photos in corporate annual reports.

In the end, the two business school researchers had no problem finding a statistically significant subset of CEO narcissists within the Fortune 500. And that hefty number of narcissist CEOs begs a rather obvious question: Do narcissists just naturally gravitate to America’s corporate pay summit or do the incredibly cushy rewards at that summit turn otherwise normal people into narcissists?

Until fairly recently social scientists left that sort of question to philosophers. But recent years have brought a surge of research into the impact of affluence on behavior. Experiments and field observations have shown that upper-crust life may be breeding, as University of California-Berkeley psychologist Paul Piff puts it, “increased entitlement and narcissism.”

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Corporate Tax Dodging Another Capitalist Innovation — The 'Gods' of Wall Street Think Taxes Are Only for 'Mere Mortals' The Middle Class

Capitalism Is Not Patriotism

Book cover provided by lucyfrench123.

U.S. corporations are hiding an estimated $2 trillion in profits in offshore accounts, and the wealthy are avoiding $90 billion in federal taxes a year.

By Pete Dolack
Competition takes many forms in capitalism. Financial engineering by corporations to avoid paying taxes is one aspect of this competition — under the rigors of market competition, evading responsibility is an innovation to be emulated.

The magnitude of tax evasion on the part of multi-national corporations through one channel — the shifting of profits to countries and territories with low or nonexistent taxes — was quantified earlier this month by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group Education Fund and Citizens for Tax Justice. Their study, “Offshore Shell Games 2014,” reports that the 500 largest U.S.-based multi-national corporations have squirreled away almost US$2 trillion in profits that lie untouched.

An estimated $90 billion a year in federal income taxes are not paid through the creative use of subsidiaries set up in offshore tax havens.

The Cayman Islands and Bermuda are favored locations, although other tax havens such as Hong Kong, Ireland and Switzerland are frequently used. The report illustrated the preposterous number of corporations with sham “offices” in the Cayman Islands:

“Ugland House is a modest five-story office building in the Cayman Islands, yet it is the registered address for 18,857 companies. … Simply by registering subsidiaries in the Cayman Islands, U.S. companies can use legal accounting gimmicks to make much of their U.S.-earned profits appear to be earned in the Caymans and pay no taxes on them. The vast majority of subsidiaries registered at Ugland House have no physical presence in the Caymans other than a post office box. About half of these companies have their billing address in the U.S., even while they are officially registered in the Caymans.” [page 4]

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