Politics What is happening????

Baraka_Guru · Jun 11, 2014

Well, you don't want to become like Scandinavia.

rogue49 · Jun 11, 2014

Baraka_Guru said: ↑

Well, you don't want to become like Scandinavia.
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How so? Do tell.

ASU2003 · Jun 11, 2014

The unions got greedy compared to the other low income workers who vote and resent the benefits others get. The unions didn't do a good job explaining that this is what the future would look like without the unions. The anti-union conservatives did paint a picture of a future without unions as one where you would get a little raise and be able to switch jobs.

And yet nobody is around now to show that it is the owners that got a huge pay increase and the workers are fighting Hunger Games style to keep their jobs.

There are some teachers that gave the opposition plenty of ammunition too. If there is no way to fire a teacher for not doing their job, then they will use that as an excuse to bring down the entire system...

Baraka_Guru · Jun 11, 2014

rogue49 said: ↑

How so? Do tell.
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I was being ironic. I was referring to the fact that Scandinavian workers are unionized at a percentage above the G8 average, some countries by more than double. The U.S.? About half.

Sweden, for example, has over 80% unionized workers, plus stronger teacher tenure than the U.S., yet it remains in the top 20 for education. Also, I wouldn't be surprised if other Scandinavian countries had stronger tenure as well.

rogue49 · Jun 11, 2014

Baraka_Guru said: ↑

I was being ironic. I was referring to the fact that Scandinavian workers are unionized at a percentage above the G8 average, some countries by more than double. The U.S.? About half.

Sweden, for example, has over 80% unionized workers, plus stronger teacher tenure than the U.S., yet it remains in the top 20 for education. Also, I wouldn't be surprised if other Scandinavian countries had stronger tenure as well.
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Well, that's what I was saying then...sure there are benefits and then some.
But the US has a large & influential segment of society that wants to submarine the Unions, it interferes with certain powers. (and income)

And when the Unions go overboard, then they feed right into the agenda of abuse that their opposition touts and leverages against them.

I'm sure you know the US has an ambiguous corporate oligarchy, which does not hesitate to support it's own gains.
This has been around for decades...there is a reason even Eisenhower cautioned against the Military-Industrial complex.
It's just that now, it's gone beyond that and the original Manufacturing base...Utilities, Media, Tech, Pharma, Telecomm, etc and so on...

And during the Nixon, Reagan and GWB years and during recessions and especially The Great Recession,
they have empowered their position and agendas...undermined entities that contradicted them like Unions...and leveraged their influence thru law.
The "at will" clause that many states are now allowing, gives even more strength to them and chokes the Unions even more.

Now, at the same time, I will say, there have some good benefits...America has kept chugging and then some
but I'm also not unaware of the slow whittling of power and priv loss of the avg. citizen.

Between the recent SCOTUS rulings and previous law enacted...there does need to have a new "Bill of Rights" established
and another which clarifies and opens the dynamics of voting.

But this is not going to happen while the GOP is in power, they know it's against their base and ability to influence.
They know who butters their bread.
Not that Dems are uncorrupted...they are and then some...but they aren't the jail bitches that the GOP has become.
The Dems problem is they are unorganized, spineless and indecisive. (or at least the great mass of them are...there are some with spine)

Unions will only gain back influence, if the corporate powers that be overstep their own, go overboard and lose influence due to that.
What's the flavor of the day??

rogue49 · Jun 19, 2014

China is starting to show more indicators of a pending avalanche. (Example - Link)
Maybe in a year or so their bubble will pop.

It's not just real estate...there's movement also by the higher ranks to CYA...get their families out of certain investments.

After the bubble pops, it will be significantly weakened...and there will be some big players in jail or executed.

redravin · Jun 22, 2014

The problem was never that the unions went overboard, it's that they forgot where their power came from and for a while sided with the wrong side.
The very people who are now ripping them down.
The problem is not that the unions have too many benefits,it's that they have what everyone should have.
The union's are the only political block big enough to fight the Koch brothers et.al.
If the unions get any weaker this country will fail.

rogue49 · Jun 23, 2014

redravin said: ↑

The problem was never that the unions went overboard, it's that they forgot where their power came from and for a while sided with the wrong side.
The very people who are now ripping them down.
The problem is not that the unions have too many benefits,it's that they have what everyone should have.
The union's are the only political block big enough to fight the Koch brothers et.al.
If the unions get any weaker this country will fail.
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The Great Recession killed any real momentum of the unions, which were heading downhill anyway.
And the GOP which gained power in the States and Governors, attempted to put a nail in its coffin.
To "save" the economy, generate income and supposedly "create" and "save" jobs...government gave leeway to the corporations.
"At will" laws to allow immediate termination, even "work-arounds" if they want to remove you because of the classic restrictions (race, creed, handicap, etc...)

Also laws not allowing unions within the govt's own jurisdiction and staff.

I disagree with you...they went overboard, leveraged their position at times of advantage to build their own coffers
and get the members benefits that went too far...often making them a target in times of need and lack of resources.
I've been in unions myself...some are good and necessary...some are bloated.
They aren't a target just because the GOP is opposed to them...they're also a target too because of their own excesses.
And their members benefits are a target because of a lack of ability to support them or they see a pool of money.

Which is not to say I disagree with them and I do see the very important need for them.
You need to protect the staff, but you also can't anchor and drown the company.
There is a balance.

The Dems have done a piss-poor job of messaging and their Dems own desire to make money
...and the GOP has gotten the upper-hand with the rhetoric and mindset.
If the Unions are going to save themselves...and the mission of actually helping the employees.
Then they are going to have to regain the message...and undermine the idea that businesses need EVERY advantage, including overloading their workers.

The unions can't rely on the Dems anymore, they are unreliable. (spineless, wishy-washy, disorganized and money hungry themselves)
They need to re-surge themselves...change the mindset.
Now is the time to strike...the "story" is now starting to lean to the abuses and excesses of the corporations.
But it's up to them.

And they need to check themselves...

Baraka_Guru · Jun 23, 2014

Only 1 in 10 U.S. workers belongs to a union, half of what it was thirty years ago. (And even then it was still only a quarter of the union membership of Sweden.)

Unions are already powerless in the wider economy. They only have power in certain sectors, where they are much maligned.

Bloated or dysfunctional unions as an argument against unions is kind of like bloated/dysfunctional corporations and political parties as arguments against business and government. The world would kind of suck without business and government, so you take the bad with the good and you try to improve things.

The same goes for unions. Bad things can happen to workers who aren't unionized.

What are unions? They're essentially a political counterpoint for workers against companies and government. Companies may say they serve their employees, and governments may say they serve their constituents, but let's face it: Companies and governments care more about each other than about the individual working constituent. This is because most of the power belongs between the two.

This is where unions come in. They give political power where it may be absent or severely lacking.

I once heard a good way of considering the existence of unions: "Unions are the result of bad management." If businesses and governments were doing such a good job regarding the needs of workers and constituents, there would be no need for unions.

redux · Jun 23, 2014

A good, but not great, day for the environment today with the Supreme Court upholding most of the EPA's program to regulate emissions.

While not a total victory, a 7-2 vote keeps the major polluters on the hook to clean up their act, With a warning from the Court to the EPA not to overdo it and ruling 5-4 that smaller polluters cant be held to the same stringent standards (but can still be regulated).

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday largely upheld the Obama administration’s authority to curb greenhouse gases from major emitters like power plants and refineries in a ruling that nonetheless exempted some smaller sources from the regulation.
On a 7-2 vote, the court rejected an industry-backed argument that most emitting facilities should not be regulated for greenhouse gases under one particular air pollution program of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

But industry could claim a partial win because the court ruled on a 5-4 vote that some facilities the government had wanted to regulate will be exempted. Some landfills, pulp and paper facilities, electronics manufacturing plants, chemical production plants and beverage producers are among the small industrial sources likely to be exempted, an EPA spokesman said.
"It bears mention that EPA is getting almost everything it wanted in this case," Justice Antonin Scalia, who wrote the majority opinion, read from a statement in court.

The ruling brought an end to what started out as a broad legal challenge to the Obama administration's first suite of greenhouse gas regulations issued in 2009 and 2010. The administration won on every count except in the mixed ruling announced on Monday.

full story: Top court mostly upholds Obama bid to curb carbon emissions.
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Next up later this week - Hobby Lobby and the ACA contraception mandate. I dont think it will fare so well.

rogue49 · Jun 30, 2014

Yep - and when companies force you to resign...they have you sign an agreement for your ~2 weeks residual pay. (which you NEED now)
There's a confidentially clause...where if you say ANYTHING, you will have to repay back your money.

Coverups, Corporate CYA is the long-time thing to do for them.

This is global...not just the US, but America has made a specialty of it.

Workplace secrecy agreements appear to violate federal whistleblower laws
By Scott Higham and Kaley Belval - June 29 at 6:36 PM

In November 2012, the U.S. Department of Energy asked contract employees at the Hanford plutonium processing plant in Washington state to take an unusual oath.

The DOE wanted them to sign nondisclosure agreements that prevented them from reporting wrongdoing at the nation’s most contaminated nuclear facility without getting approval from an agency supervisor. The agreements also barred them from using any information for financial gain, a possible violation of federal whistleblower laws, which allow employees to collect reward money for reporting wrongdoing.

Donna Busche reluctantly signed the agreement.

“It was a gag order,” said Busche, 51, who served as the manager of environmental and nuclear safety at the Hanford waste treatment facility for a federal contractor until she was fired in February after raising safety concerns. “The message was pretty clear: ‘Don’t say anything to anyone, or else.’ ”

The company that fired Busche, URS, has said her termination was unrelated to her whistleblowing. Busche and another employee testified before Congress in March at a hearing called by Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) to examine the handling of whistleblowers at Hanford.

An Energy spokesman denied that the nondisclosure agreements violated federal law.

“The DOE fully complies with the law,” Brendan Daly said. “We not only encourage but require contractors to report waste, fraud and abuse, with no retaliation.”

Lawyers who represent whistleblowers like Busche say they are seeing a rise in the use of overly restrictive nondisclosure agreements, which prevent employees from reporting fraud, even to government investigators. The agreements incorporate language that goes beyond those that had traditionally protected proprietary information, the attorneys said. In recent months, agreements criticized as overly restrictive have surfaced at Kellogg, Brown and Root, one of the nation’s largest defense contractors, and International Relief and Development, a nonprofit organization in Arlington County, Va. The nonprofit collected more than $1 billion in tax dollars for war-related projects funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development.

The Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating the agreements at KBR, and the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction is examining the agreements used by IRD. Both companies have denied wrongdoing, and IRD changed the wording of its agreements after they were written about in The Washington Post.

Fear of retaliation for reporting fraud in the workplace is on the rise, according to surveys of federal employees and workers on Wall Street. The U.S. Office of Special Counsel is investigating reports that the Department of Veterans Affairs retaliated against 37 workers who had come forward with allegations of wrongdoing. Some of those employees had tried to report problems with the VA’s medical appointment scheduling system, which is now the subject of a growing national controversy.

The federal government has been encouraging whistleblowers to come forward and trying to protect them since the Civil War, when Congress passed the False Claims Act to punish war profiteers. Under the act, whistleblowers are entitled to collect a percentage of the fraud they uncover. In one of the largest such cases, American banker Bradley Birkenfeld reported secret deposits by U.S. citizens in the Swiss bank UBS. In 2012, he collected a $104 million bounty.

Other famous whistleblowers include Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon’s secret history of the Vietnam War to the New York Times; Karen Silkwood, who reported safety issues at a nuclear facility run by Kerr-McKee and died in a mysterious car crash; and A. Ernest Fitzgerald, an Air Force official during the Nixon administration who blew the whistle on widespread fraud at the Pentagon, including $400 hammers and $600 toilet seats.

Increased protection

Pressure to bolster whistleblower laws and provide more protection for those who come forward mounted after reports of fraud in the banking and financial services industries that led to the Great Recession of 2007-09. In 2010, Congress passed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which established the Office of the Whistleblower at the SEC. The law also created a bounty program at the SEC to pay whistleblowers.

On June 16, the new SEC whistleblower office announced that it had filed its first civil case, involving a whistleblower who accused a hedge fund of retaliation after the whistleblower reported improper trading activity. The hedge fund settled by paying a $2.2 million fine.

Nondisclosure agreements traditionally have been used to prevent employees from going to competitors and taking trade secrets with them. But lawyers for whistleblowers say they are seeing a dramatic increase in the number of potentially illegal agreements employees are being asked to sign since the Dodd-Frank law went into effect.

“Corporate America is becoming far more sophisticated and aggressive in its efforts to discourage people from coming forward and reporting externally,” said Jordan A. Thomas, who helped to establish the SEC’s whistleblower office as an assistant director there and now works for a New York law firm, Labaton Sucharow. One of his clients is the hedge-fund whistleblower.

Thomas said he has other clients who work for Wall Street firms that are under investigation by the SEC and were asked to sign overly restrictive nondisclosure agreements that prohibit or discourage them from cooperating with federal investigators.

Whistleblower experts say corporations are trying to shield themselves after the Dodd-Frank law by creating rigid internal reporting rules, such as requiring people to report wrongdoing to their supervisors at work before going to outside investigators. Companies are also asking workers to sign agreements that bar them from speaking out or benefiting from the bounty program.

“We are seeing a marked increase in an effort by employers to prevent their employees from speaking to regulators,” said David J. Marshall, a partner at Katz, Marshall & Banks, a whistleblower law firm in Washington. “As these whistleblower programs have grown more prominent, we have seen a growth in the number of types of agreements. They have a truly chilling effect on employees coming forward.”
‘Deeply troubling’

SEC officials say they are taking the reports seriously.

“I’m very concerned about these kinds of agreements,” said Stephen L. Cohen, associate director of the Division of Enforcement at the SEC. “It is likely that a lot of people are not coming to us because of these agreements. Anything that inhibits a person’s desire to come forward to tell us about violations of the law is deeply troubling.”

The SEC prohibits corporations from preventing workers from communicating with the agency about possible securities-law violations, “including enforcing, or threatening to enforce, a confidentiality agreement,” according to agency regulations.

Sen. Charles E. Grassley, (R-Iowa), a leading advocate for whistleblowers, said he has discovered that most federal agencies have been failing to comply with anti-gag provisions of the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act. Under the 2012 act, federal agencies are required to notify employees that they are obligated to report fraud allegations, even if they have signed nondisclosure agreements.

Grassley’s office surveyed 15 Cabinet-level departments covering much of the federal workforce and found that most have not made that message clear to their workers.

“More than ever I’m hearing from whistleblowers about nondisclosure agreements being forced upon them by federal agencies.” Grassley said. “It’s a disturbing trend because federal law protects their right to make protected disclosures to Congress and inspectors general, among others. These agreements only serve to silence whistleblowers for fear of retribution.”

After the passage of Dodd-Frank and an earlier reform bill, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, which imposed strict financial disclosure requirements on companies and improved protections for whistleblowers, U.S. corporations found themselves in uncharted legal territory, employment law experts say.

Many corporate executives say the Dodd-Frank legislation will discourage employees from reporting problems within their own companies to cash in on the SEC bounty program. And it could inspire employees to concoct fraudulent allegations, the executives say.

Employment lawyers say those fears may be unfounded.

“What we’ve seen is a siege mentality at corporations, where there is a fear that there will be a rush of people running to the authorities,” said Donna Boehme, the former chief compliance officer for BP who is now a leading national expert in the corporate compliance field. “Companies that care, they want people to come forward and they want people to feel safe. Companies that don’t care, they intentionally create a chilling effect.”

Boehme cited the nondisclosure agreements at KBR as a significant case study for corporate compliance officers and whistleblower lawyers.

In 2005, KBR contract employee Harry Barko, who was based in central Iraq, came forward to say he had witnessed fraud in a multibillion-dollar program awarded to the company to provide support services on U.S. military bases in Iraq. After Barko complained internally, he said his computer was confiscated at the request of the company’s legal department in Houston. He said KBR then tried to transfer him from the Al Asad Air Base to Baghdad.

“I was in the cross hairs,” Barko said in a recent interview.

He said he left Iraq, contacted a Washington law firm that specializes in whistleblower cases and filed a lawsuit against KBR and its parent company at the time, Halliburton. The companies are no longer affiliated. KBR has denied wrongdoing and is seeking to have Barko’s lawsuit dismissed.

Earlier this year, during a deposition in the lawsuit, KBR’s vice president of legal affairs disclosed the existence of a three-paragraph nondisclosure agreement the company had been using for internal fraud investigations.

The agreements prohibited employees seeking to report fraud from discussing their allegations without authorization from KBR’s general counsel. Employees also were warned that violations of the agreements could result in “termination of employment.”

KBR officials said the agreements were designed to protect the integrity of the internal review process, not to cover up wrongdoing. They also noted that KBR employees are encouraged to report allegations of fraud.

Since the agreements surfaced in February, Barko’s lawyer, Stephen M. Kohn, has been trying to force KBR to disclose all reports of fraud the company received relating to the logistics contract. KBR attorneys argued that those reports were protected by attorney-client privilege and should not be released.

A federal judge ruled earlier this year that the agreements were not protected, but a three-judge appellate court panel on Friday sided with KBR. Kohn said he plans to appeal.

Subtle changes

While the KBR agreements use direct language, others that have been surfacing in the workplace are more subtle, whistleblower lawyers say. Some instruct employees to report wrongdoing to the company before alerting an outside agency. Others tell employees that they cannot collect monetary awards for fraud they uncover.

“There has been a shift from the traditional, sweeping gag orders to more disingenuous variations of these agreements,” said Tom Devine, legal director of the Government Accountability Project, which represents numerous whistleblowers, including former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden. “The techniques are becoming much more sophisticated, but they have the same chilling effect.”

Cohen, the SEC enforcement official, said his agency is paying attention to the kinds of nondisclosure agreements employees are being asked to sign.

“We have our eyes wide open,” Cohen said.
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Evil comes in all shapes & forms.
Probably the only way to do anything without damaging yourself, is to anonymously warn regulatory bodies.
But often they won't followup...or because it's ambiguous, they won't see the "proof" until it's huge and obvious.
And by that time, much damage has been done.
And there are many who won't witness or "can't"
So there is no true teeth to any settlement or penalty.

BTW...if corporations are people.
Then leadership should be going to jail crime done by intent. (or encouragement)
All's fair.

redux · Jun 30, 2014

Hobby Lobby decision announced: 5-4 against the ACA employer-provided contraception mandate.

But not as bad as it could be.

The Court holds that corporations (including for-profit corporations) are "persons" for purposes of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. The additional question was whether corporations can have a religious "belief" within the meaning of RFRA. On that question, the Court limited its holding to closely held corporations, leaving for another day whether larger, publicly traded corporations have religious beliefs.

So Hobby Lobby and similar family owned or closely held corporations can refuse to include contraception coverage in their employer-sponsored plans. But large, publicly traded corporations still have the mandate.

Kennedy, with the majority, provided a suggested remedy in his separate opinion....that the government (taxpayers) could provide the contraception coverage where those closely held corporations opt out on religious grounds.

Or that is how I read it.

rogue49 · Jul 10, 2014

Will the Players finally pay their fair share??

Sure, they have more angles, opportunities and write-offs than most everyone else...all to reduce their tax burden.
Real Estate, Capital Gains, etc...
Subsidies, Incorporating in areas with less tax rates (even if they don't live or do business there), etc...
Tax lawyers and accountants to make sure every nook & cranny is not missed.

And yet...some decide that's NOT enough.
They want it all...and more.
The nation and its resources should be for free (or less) and everything they make should be for themselves alone.

This is not just a US thing...but a global issue.

I don't mind if people are rich...hey, wash in your money...whatever.
I do mind if you're not paying your share. As agreed to by law.

Now, most of those "unpatrioting" are typically citizens that truly have lives in other nations.
So effectively they are double-taxed.
And that I understand, they're using the resources over there, not here. It's bad law that hasn't changed...and should.
But more, at least in volume of money, are keeping it just "because".

Question is will they enforce it??
My bet...they will, the Obama administration has a habit of enforcing laws on the books.
(only one I know they're "ignoring" is pot-laws, but that is put on hiatus as they've formally asked the FDA to put its status on review )
Oh well, just another thing the richies and their supporters to be pissed off at Obama for.

From what this says, other countries are moving forward too...there may be no where to hide soon.
Unless they all want to live in some tiny country.

Landmark tax evasion law quietly kicks in
By: Rachael Bade - July 9, 2014

One of President Bill Clinton’s most controversial acts was a last-minute pardon to infamous tax evader and oil king billionaire Marc Rich, listed among the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted for years.

To many, forgiveness for the man hiding out in Switzerland, encouraged by then-Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder, was a sign that Uncle Sam wasn’t worried about tax evasion — particularly when it came to protecting deep-pocketed campaign contributors, such as Rich.

But the days of the U.S. turning a blind eye to offshore tax dodging are quickly fading as a landmark U.S. law kicked in this month with little fanfare.

The little-known Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, tucked into a 2010 jobs bill, requires every foreign bank and insurance company and other financial institutions with U.S. ties to help sniff out American tax dodgers. It’s inspired other countries to follow, triggering the biggest worldwide effort to chase down international tax cheaters.

The Treasury has been laying the groundwork for years — issuing regulations and striking deals with other countries and banks — and most of its most stringent provisions started July 1.

Backers call it a long-needed response to wealthy Americans hiding billions offshore. Opponents cry American imperialism. But both sides say it is historic.

“The scale of FATCA has significantly broadened from what Congress originally envisioned. … It’s become a ‘law of the globe’ rather than a ‘law of the land,’” said Russ Sullivan, former Senate Finance Committee staff director to one of the law’s authors, then-Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.).

Foreign banks complain the IRS is saddling them with billions in compliance costs. The law is cited as a major factor in a record number of Americans renouncing their citizenship and has incited several legal challenges.

The law’s reach is especially impressive, given that the bill went from idea to passage in about half a year — without a single vote, markup or official cost-benefit analysis.

FATCA requires foreign financial institutions to hand over account information on their American clients. Institutions that refuse will be slapped with a 30 percent withholding tax on U.S.-source income such as dividends and capital gains, a tough penalty considering America’s vast economic reach.

Theoretically, such a law could have helped U.S. authorities learn earlier about Rich — indicted in the 1980s on more than 50 counts of fraud, racketeering and evading tens of millions of dollars in income taxes. That’s because the foreign banks he used would have been turning over his account information to the IRS. His wife, a well-connected Democratic donor, and other Rich allies with White House connections were accused of using their leverage to get Rich pardoned, a decision Clinton later regretted.

Despite a promise from Treasury to be flexible as banks adapt in year one, detractors are still fighting.

Attorney James Bopp Jr., who helped Citizens United in its historic campaign finance Supreme Court win, is gearing up to challenge the law because he says it violates Congress’ “treaty power.” The administration didn’t submit dozens of FATCA agreements with other countries for Senate ratification. He’ll also argue that turning over U.S. account information to the IRS violates Fourth Amendment prohibitions against unreasonable search and seizure.

Other skeptics, like former Deputy IRS Commissioner Mark Matthews, say the law is misguided because the bulk of uncollected U.S. taxes comes from small businesses in the U.S. — not Americans hiding money offshore.

“We need a reality check here and to focus on the problem — not that tax evasion isn’t bad, but the resource allocation is way off,” the Caplin & Drysdale lawyer said. “There has been a serious lack of focus on the cost benefit between the long-term return to the Treasury versus the enormous compliance cost abroad and even in the U.S.”

Inspiration for the law came from several dramatic congressional hearings in the mid- to late-2000s, highlighted by one featuring former UBS banker-turned-whistleblower Bradley Birkenfeld. After he described exotic techniques he used to help Americans dodge taxes, including smuggling diamonds in toothpaste tubes, the Swiss bank became the first in a wave to admit it helped Americans evade taxes, paying a $780 million fine and turning over thousands of U.S. account holder names.

Around the same time, policymakers looking for extra money during the financial crisis came up with the idea of going after tax avoiders.

In October 2009, Baucus and the Ways and Means Committee’s then-Chairman Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) drafted FATCA — expected to bring in as much as $8 billion to $10 billion in unpaid taxes over a decade, Sullivan said.

It had the backing of President Barack Obama, who proposed similar changes in his budget that year and had, as a senator, co-sponsored an anti-tax cheat bill with Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.). Last week, Levin, a major proponent of hardball tactics combating tax dodging, called FATCA’s start “a big win for hardworking, honest Americans who are sick and tired of picking up the tab for tax dodgers hiding money offshore.”

But as one Democratic staffer at the time put it, FATCA went after the entire world rather than just focusing on tax havens. Republicans like Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, who supported cracking down on tax cheats, wouldn’t sponsor it for fear it was too expansive, former aides said. They were, however, also leery of speaking against it and being labeled sympathetic to tax evaders.

The provision eventually was buried in a “substitute amendment” to help fund the Hiring Incentives to Restore Employment (HIRE) Act, which passed in March 2010.

At the time, most people were focused on the core of the HIRE act, which gave tax breaks to employers who hired the long-term unemployed.

Few knew what FATCA was; most lawmakers still don’t.

Some who worked on the legislation said they did not foresee that Treasury would interpret the law so broadly.

“Congress did not believe it was creating an international regime that would require all of our allies and adversaries and financial institutions worldwide to change their tax and privacy laws or report to the IRS,” said Sullivan, now a tax attorney with McGuireWoods.

It wasn’t long before Congress was inundated with complaints from foreign institutions saying they didn’t have systems in place and needed more time.

The cost of compliance — data system upgrades, retraining workers, “verifying U.S. persons” — has become critics’ biggest complaint. The European Banking Federation and International Bankers Association projected it will cost $10 to identify and document each account under FATCA, reaching hundreds of millions of dollars for some larger institutions. The 30 largest non-U.S. banks are projected to spend $7.5 billion complying with the law.

Still, compliance is the lesser of two evils for most international institutions because of how interwoven they are with the U.S. dollar. Almost 80,000 have reluctantly signed up with the IRS because, without it, they could lose clients, credibility and a ton of money, said Carlos Somoza, an international tax expert with the accounting firm Kaufman Rossin.

“Before, it was possible for them to dig their head into the sand. … Now it really isn’t,” he said.

Financial institutions that have held out have started canceling services for millions of Americans living abroad to avoid the penalty, prompting some to give up their citizenship. Many believe that, combined with the steep financial penalties awaiting those who are just now reporting foreign income, is what’s contributed to the record number of Americans giving up citizenship.

Despite the complaints, FATCA appears off to a strong start, with almost 100 countries promising through intergovernmental agreements to get their financial institutions to comply, including the world’s biggest economies.

Treasury recently snagged an agreement with China, a wild card that held out until the last minute.

And even before the law took effect, 45,000 tax dodgers came clean with the IRS, paying $6.5 billion in back taxes and penalties.

Matthews, the former IRS official, scoffs at the total, pointing out that small businesses in the U.S. dodge more than $100 billion in taxes each year because they report only about half their income, according to an IRS tax gap study.

Where FATCA once created serious foreign relations headaches, some countries have now followed the U.S. model.

And the G-20 is working on a FATCA-inspired global standard of exchanging tax data, which even includes well-known tax havens like Switzerland — and other countries promising to reform their ways.

Knowing this, Treasury declared victory in a statement last week, calling FATCA the “global standard in combating international tax evasion and promoting transparency.”

Brian Kindle of the Association of Certified Financial Crime Specialists said that although FATCA is “flawed” in its strong-arm approach with foreign banks, the benefits outweigh the costs since it will root out corruption, Ponzi schemes and illicit money laundering.

Even if future administrations change FATCA, or courts strike down pieces of the law, he says it’s already set the world on an anti-tax evasion path that’s irreversible: “For the time being, you’ll be able to get away with continuing to hide your money. … But a decade from now, we’ll reach the point where it’s very, very difficult for an individual to evade taxes with an offshore account.”

© 2014 POLITICO LLC
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redux · Jul 11, 2014

Big move by the FCC today to make wifi more accessible to schools and libraries, but still a long way to go. And, of course, the Republicans on the Commission opposed.

Regulators have just approved a big package of federal aid for schools and libraries so that they can upgrade their WiFi networks, as part of a larger effort to modernize the way educators connect their charges to the Web.

In a 3-2 vote along party lines Friday, the FCC greenlit a plan to spend $2 billion over the next two years on subsidies for internal networks. The move also begins a process to phase out some subsidies under the federal program, known as E-Rate, for services and equipment that are on the decline, such as pagers and dial-up Internet service.

"No responsible business would stick with an IT plan developed in 1998," said FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler. "We owe the same rigorous self-examination to our schools and libraries."

The original plan called for spending $5 billion on WiFi over five years, in line with a push by the Obama administration to bring next-gen broadband and WiFi to 99 percent of students over the same period. Those funds would have partly come from savings as a result of transitioning away from supporting legacy technologies.

The proposal would also have eliminated an existing requirement that E-Rate funds be spent first on broadband services before being applied to WiFi. In past years, the cost of broadband service meant that money was rarely left over for upgrading WiFi connections.

But the FCC's proposal was ultimately scaled back late Thursday amid Republican objections that the ERate program can't afford the changes.

The final proposal's twoyear, $2 billion commitment accounts for the money the FCC has already set aside for WiFi upgrades, but it does not commit the FCC to funding WiFi upgrades at that same rate for the following three years.

Earlier this week, talks broke down between the commission's Democrats, some of whom want the program dramatically expanded, and its Republicans, who've warned that the $5 billion-over-five-years plan would eat into funding for broadband subsidies.

"The numbers for the WiFi plan just didn't add up and would've blown a $2.7 billion hole in E-Rate's budget, slashing funds for Internet connectivity," said Commissioner Ajit Pai. Pai criticized the finalized order as a half-measure, saying it does little to simplify the drawn-out E-Rate application process that's been the source of some delays.

The commission's other Republican, Michael O'Rielly, has called for matching any increases in E-Rate spending with reductions elsewhere. On Friday, O'Rielly warned that the FCC's plan could lead to "a funding cliff for schools and libraries, or higher phone rates" for taxpayers, who pay into the E-Rate program through a line item on their phone bills.

Democrats such as Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel not only want to see more money allocated to WiFi within E-Rate, but also for E-Rate to receive greater annual funding overall. The program is currently capped at roughly $2.4 billion a year — which is little changed from when the E-Rate program was created in the mid-1990s — but according to the FCC, demand for E-Rate funds is about double that figure.

"We can’t expect to compete if we educate the next generation with a support system frozen in the age of dial-up," said Rosenworcel.

Wheeler vowed to consider lifting the cap on E-Rate's budget, but said that changes to the program's structure would have to come first.

"Let me be clear: It would be a mistake to simply add money to a program that was set in the 20th century," Wheeler said.

The FCC is overhauling how it subsidizes WiFi for schools and libraries - The Washington Post
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rogue49 · Jul 13, 2014

interesting...and spot on IMHO.

The World According to Maxwell Smart, Part 1
Thomas L. Friedman - JULY 12, 2014

IN the 1960s, there was a popular sitcom — “Get Smart” — about a hapless secret agent named Maxwell Smart, played by Don Adams. Smart went by the code name “Agent 86.” “Get Smart” famously introduced the shoe phone to American audiences, but the show also introduced something else: its own version of the bipolar world. Do you remember the name of the intelligence agency Maxwell Smart worked for? It was called “Control.” And do you remember the name of Control’s global opponent? It was called “Kaos” — “an international organization of evil.”

The creators of “Get Smart” were ahead of their time. Because it increasingly appears that the post-post-Cold War world is cleaving into the world of “order” and the world of “disorder” — or into the world of “Control” and the world of “Kaos.”

How so? First, we said goodbye to imperialism and colonialism and all their methods of controlling territory. Then we said goodbye to the Cold War alliance system, which propped up many weak and newly independent states with money to build infrastructure and to buy weapons to control their borders and people — because the stability of every square in the global chessboard mattered to Washington and Moscow.

And, lately, we’ve been saying goodbye to top-down, iron-fisted monarchies and autocracies, which have been challenged by massively urbanized, technologically empowered citizens.

So, today, you have three basic systems: order provided by democratic, inclusive governments; order imposed by autocratic exclusivist governments; and ungoverned, or chaotically governed, spaces, where rickety failed states, militias, tribes, pirates and gangs contest one another for control, but there is no single power center to answer the phone — or, if they do, it falls off the wall.

Look around: Boko Haram in Nigeria kidnaps 250 schoolgirls and then disappears into a dark corner of that country. The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, a ragtag jihadist militia, carves out a caliphate inside Syria and Iraq and boasts on Twitter of beheading opponents. NATO decapitates Libya’s regime and sets loose a tribal-militia war of all against all, which, when combined with the crackup of Chad, spills arms and refugees across African borders, threatening Tunisia and Morocco. Israel has been flooded with more than 50,000 Eritreans and Sudanese refugees, who crossed the Sinai Desert by foot, bus or car looking for work and security in Israel’s “island of order.”

And, just since October, the U.S. has been flooded with more than 50,000 unaccompanied children from Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras. “They’re fleeing from threats and violence in their home countries,” noted Vox.com, “where things have gotten so bad that many families believe that they have no choice but to send their children on the long, dangerous journey north.”

Why is this happening now? Well, just as I’ve argued that “average is over” for workers, now “average is over for states,” too. Without the Cold War system to prop them up, it is not so easy anymore for weak states to provide the minimums of security, jobs, health and welfare. And thanks to rapid advances in the market (globalization), Mother Nature (climate change plus ecological destruction) and Moore’s Law (computing power), some states are just blowing up under the pressure.

Yes, we blew up Iraq, but you can’t understand the uprising in Syria unless you understand how a horrendous four-year drought there, coupled with a demographic explosion, undermined its economy.

You can’t understand Egypt’s uprising without linking it to the 2010 global wheat crisis and soaring bread prices, which inspired the anti-Hosni Mubarak chant: “Bread, Freedom, Dignity.” You also can’t understand Egypt’s stress without understanding the challenge that China’s huge labor pool poses in a globalized world to every other low-wage country. Go into a souvenir shop in Cairo, buy a Pyramids ashtray and turn it over. I’ll bet it says, “Made in China.” Today’s globalization system rewards countries that make their workers and markets efficient enough to take part in global supply chains of goods and services faster than ever — and punishes those who don’t more harshly than ever.

You can’t understand the spread of ISIS or the Arab Spring without the relentless advance in computing and telecom — Moore’s Law — creating so many cheap command-and-control Internet tools that superempower small groups to recruit adherents, challenge existing states and erase borders. In a flat world, people can see faster than ever how far behind they are and organize faster than ever to protest. When technology penetrates more quickly than wealth and opportunity, watch out.

The combined pressures of the market, Mother Nature and Moore’s Law are creating the geopolitical equivalent of climate change, argues Michael Mandelbaum, author of “The Road to Global Prosperity,” and “some familiar species of government can’t survive the stress.”

So, please spare me the “it’s all Obama’s fault.” There are plenty of reasons to criticize Obama, but everything is not about what we do. There are huge forces acting on these countries, and it will take extraordinary collaboration by the whole world of order to contain them. I’ll address this on Wednesday.
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Welcome to the world of unintended consequences and Chaos Theory

I asked you not to tell me that...

rogue49 · Jul 19, 2014

Nice to be not eating poison for a change...
And nice the web can be put to a good use too.

Seriously...while I'm not very sensitive to what I eat...I do appreciate some discretion.
I don't think it's bad to make the food industry leap thru hoops a bit
and I don't mind making them respect what they are feeding us more.

God forbid you should want your customers to be healthier...and not gross...or grossed out.
Not uber-healthy...just don't put gobs of "questionable" stuff in our food.
This is not the time for short-term gain & profit.

Food fight: Consumers revolt online
By: Helena Bottemiller Evich - July 19, 2014

Sitting at her kitchen table in Houston, Bettina Siegel, a corporate lawyer-turned-school lunch blogger and mom of two, had no idea she had the power to spark a massive consumer uprising with her laptop.

But that’s exactly what she did. In March 2012, her petition on Change.org asking the Agriculture Department to stop serving “pink slime” to school kids drew nearly 260,000 signatures. The social media fire, fanned by ABC News and dozens of other media outlets, led retailers and schools across the country to drop the product, formally known as lean finely textured beef, or LFTB, from their ground beef.

Siegel’s petition was one of the early examples of social media dramatically influencing the food system and, ultimately, food policy. But now these online consumer revolts are a norm that’s upending the power dynamic between corporations and consumers.

In the two years since the frenzy over LFTB, online petitions have helped pressure Starbucks to drop red dye made from crushed bugs from its strawberry Frappuccino. Kraft has removed artificial dyes from some of its children’s mac & cheese products. Chick-fil-A removed high fructose corn syrup and certain additives from its buns and sauceswhile pledging to source poultry from birds raised without antibiotics by 2019. Chipotle has posted a list of its ingredients that contain GMOs on its website. And just last month, Anheuser-Busch and MillerCoors for the first time disclosed ingredients for some of their beers online.

In a different era, a stern letter from an angry customer might be answered by a corporate form letter, and that would be the end of it. But now consumers can leverage hundreds of thousands of like-minded people in a short amount of time, and companies are finding that it’s smart business — and politics — to respond quickly and decisively.

“I think pink slime changed the way people saw the power of social media, the power of a single mom’s voice,” said Melissa Musiker, vice president of nutrition policy at APCO Worldwide, a public relations firm that has helped food and beverage companies navigate social media crises. “People didn’t take Bettina Siegel seriously. They just thought she was some random mom. It doesn’t work that way anymore.”

The phenomenon spans beyond just nutrition — Bank of America recently gave up a plan for debit card fees, and Change.org helped propel publicity for Trayvon Martin — but food and beverage companies have been a particularly hot target. Three of the top seven most popular petitions of all time on Change.org are related to animal welfare in meat production, and more than two dozen food-related petitions have each earned tens of thousands of signatures, many of them hundreds of thousands.

“Food is definitely one of the most popular topics on the site,” said Megan Lubin, a Change.org spokeswoman, who noted that such petitions have been increasing in recent years due, in part, to the “deep media saturation” that Siegel’s petition achieved.

For the food industry, accustomed to a slow-moving regulatory process, the social media revolts are causing nothing short of whiplash. The pink slime furor, for example, grabbed national attention and changed federal policy in a matter of days.

“I’d never started a petition about anything in my life,” recalled Siegel. But when she learned that the USDA was purchasing millions of pounds of the ammonia-treated beef for the National School Lunch Program, she was outraged. She got to nearly a quarter of a million signatures in six days. By day nine, the USDA announced it would allow states to opt out of purchasing ground beef containing the finely textured product. The story was splashed across every major media outlet.

Beef-state Republican Govs. Rick Perry of Texas, Sam Brownback of Kansas and Terry Branstad of Iowa ate LFTB-burgers to try to bolster support. They even gave out “Dude it’s beef” T-shirts.

But it was too late. Beef Products Inc., the South Dakota-based maker of LFTB, once used in 70 percent of the nation’s ground beef, quickly lost most of its customers, forcing it to shutter two of its three plants and lay off nearly 700 people.

Companies are now trying to ensure their products are not the next pink slime, even if they are usually hesitant to acknowledge that any changes in ingredients or corporate policy are the direct result of an online petition.

“The impact [of these petitions] cannot be underestimated. It’s something we watch very carefully on behalf of our clients,” said Josh Morton, director of corporate communications, crisis and issues management at GolinHarris, a public relations firm based in Chicago. But each petition needs to be put into the context of a larger social media conversation — and sometimes a mommy blog post is just as important as a petition itself, he added.

When it comes to petitions, it’s often less about the number of signatures — which often only require a click — and more about the audience as well as the trajectory of the petition, explained APCO’s Musiker.

Companies are not helpless. They and their PR consultants use sophisticated social media monitoring, or “listening” tools, including things like word clouds, maps and graphs designed to give companies a better idea of who is talking about their brands and what they are saying. Nestlé, the world’s largest food company, has its own central command post in Geneva, Switzerland, that eavesdrops on consumers engaged on social media across the globe.

Interestingly, on Change.org, users who sign food-related petitions are much more engaged than other users, signing on average more than three times as many petitions, according to company data provided to POLITICO. Food petition signers are also overwhelmingly female and skew much older than the average Change.org user. They’re more likely to be between the ages of 45 and 65, versus 25 and 45.

The Food Babe and her army

The woman behind many of the highest-profile food-related petitions is a blogger named Vani Hari, known to her followers as “Food Babe.” Hari, who was inspired partly by Siegel’s success, started on Change.org and has since built her own petition site, foodbabe.com. She has amassed her own virtual army of food petition signers, tweeters and facebookers who rally behind her calls to action. They get results, sometimes in a matter of days.

Recently, Hari targeted Anheuser-Busch and MillerCoors, asking them to disclose all their ingredients online. She said she initially approached the companies that make her husband’s favorite beers because she wanted to know what was in their products, and alcohol companies are not mandated to list ingredients or nutrition facts. When the companies declined to give her a list, telling her it was proprietary information, Hari summoned her army.

The next day — after the petition generated media attention and a mountain of signatures — Anheuser-Busch started posting ingredients online, and the CEO invited Hari to visit the headquarters and meet their head brewmasters. MillerCoors soon followed suit.

Hari, who left management consulting to blog and advocate full time, thinks taking on the private sector directly is the faster and more effective route to take.

“Petitioning the government takes much longer. It’s more effective to go directly to the companies and ask,” said Hari, who is now a paid consultant for a handful of food companies to retool their ingredients.

The flood of petitions is keeping the food industry on its toes, but with each revolt concerns grow, too, that the masses are seizing on misinformation to force companies to ditch ingredients that are not actually harmful — and social media doesn’t exactly foster a nuanced debate about the science. Scientists have raised concerns about stoking chemophobia.

Many in the beef industry say the demonization of LFTB, for example, was an ignorant response to a technology that brought revolutionary improvements to food safety.

Hari and her “Food Babe” army have recently come under fire, too, for her sensational approach and use of pseudoscience. One doctor recently called her the “Jenny McCarthy of the food industry,” comparing her platform to the anti-vaccine movement.

Hari recently told her followers, for example, to avoid microwaves because they can cause “severe health issues.” When she targeted Subway, demanding the company remove azodicarbonamide, a common dough conditioner, from its breads, she actually took a bite of her yoga mat to bring home the point that the chemical is used both in baking and yoga mat-making.

Azodicarbonamide is used in more than 500 products by 130 brands, according to the Environmental Working Group. Regardless, Subway announced in February that it would stop using the chemical.

© 2014 POLITICO LLC
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redux · Jul 30, 2014

Happy 49th anniversary to Medicare/Medicaid - the nation's first public health insurance signed into law on July 30, 1965.

Despite all your faults, abuses, and room for improvement, you remain one of the most successful and efficient social programs in US history -- costs have risen more slowly that private health insurance while providing far greater financial protection and higher patient satisfaction.

Soon there will be day when all Americans will benefit from a similar health care delivery system....the ACA is just the first step.

redux · Jul 30, 2014

The House did something right today by overwhelmingly passing a compromise veterans health bill in response to the recent VA scandals.

In addition to hopefully shortening the wait time for veterans seeking treatment by adding more doctors and medical and allowing veterans to go outside the VA for treatment under some circumstances, it has reasonably tough provisions to hold VA employees accountable for cover ups and incompetence.

Many Tea Party types who initially opposed any expansion of VA services w/o offsets came around to support "one of the biggest expansions of government since the GOP takeover of the House."

One of the biggest expansions of government since the GOP takeover of the House, the bill would direct $10 billion towards launching a program to allow veterans to seek medical care if they have unreasonable wait times or if they live more than 40 miles from a facility. It also would include $5 billion for additional doctors and nurses and other upgrades and authorize the VA to sign leases for 27 new major health care facilities.
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The bill should pass the Senate and be signed by Obama by the end of the week.

rogue49 · Jul 30, 2014

redux said: ↑

The House did something right today by overwhelmingly passing a compromise veterans health bill in response to the recent VA scandals.
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Yep, and I'm now getting calls galore from contractors looking to bid and win.
Man, they're a bunch of whores...or is it pimps and I'm the whore.

Street Pattern · Jul 30, 2014

rogue49 said: ↑

Yep, and I'm now getting calls galore from contractors looking to bid and win.
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The more the merrier, no?

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