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Patriotic Millionaire Uses His Tax Returns to Destroy Fox Host
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Posted by Patriotic Millionaires on Tuesday, November 7, 2017
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With Syria’s intent to join the Paris climate agreement, the U.S. is set to become the world’s only holdout. November 8, 2017
Add your name: We, the people of the United States, sign on to the Paris Agreement: MoveOn.org/ParisAgreement
Syria to Enter Climate Agreement
With Syria’s intent to join the Paris climate agreement, the U.S. is set to become the world’s only holdout.
Posted by The Weather Channel on Tuesday, November 7, 2017
Joe Romm November 7, 2017
Downtown Houston flooding from Superstorm Harvey, August 28, 2017. CREDIT: AP/Jason Dearen
The massive climate report released by the Trump administration on Friday makes clear that the President’s climate policies will destroy every last bit of U.S. (and global) coastal property in the decades to come.
That means more than $1 trillion in U.S. coastal property will eventually be valueless. So the only question is “when” and not “if” that trillion-dollar housing bubble will burst.
The answer appears to be sooner, rather than later, for two reasons. First, the administration’s policies — to abandon the Paris climate deal while working to gut both domestic climate action and coastal adaptation programs — make the worst-case scenarios for climate change more likely while undermining any efforts to prepare for what’s coming. Second, the GOP tax reform bill will directly deflate coastal property values because it targets the tax breaks for the most expensive properties.
Climate change poses ‘nightmare scenario’ for Florida coast, Bloomberg warns
Let’s start with how Friday’s congressionally-mandated National Climate Assessment (NCA) makes clear Trump’s climate policies will destroy every last bit of U.S. (and global) coastal property in the coming decades.
The report, the “authoritative assessment of the science of climate change, with a focus on the United States” by scientists from 13 federal agencies — which the Trump administration reviewed and cleared before releasing Friday — paints a grim picture for our coasts.
The scientists can’t rule out eight feet of sea level rise by century’s end (the “extreme” scenario). But then, the Arctic sees upwards of 18°F warming in the 2071-2100 timeframe, so melting of the Greenland ice sheet will be off the charts.
The NCA looks at a variety of scenarios, including ones where the nation and world meet or even surpass the Paris climate targets to minimize total warming. But it also examines higher emissions scenarios where Paris fails. They reflect plausible worst-case scenarios on the business-as-usual path, which is the path that Trump’s policies keep us on.
In those “intermediate-high” and “high” scenarios, sea levels rise 4.9 to 6.6 feet respectively by century’s end. Significantly, they rise 1.4 to 1.8 feet by 2050, which is in the time frame of 30-year mortgages that banks will soon be considering. When banks stop providing those mortgages, property values will plummet.
Remember, the storm surge from future Harveys and Sandys will be on top of whatever sea level rise we see, which is why studies find that, in high emissions scenarios, Sandy-type storm surges occur every year or two by mid century.
NOAA: Warming-Driven Sea Level Rise To Make Sandy-Type Storm Surges The Norm On East Coast
The report also looks at the often neglected rate of sea level rise in the coming decades. In the “high” scenario, seas are rising 8 inches per decade by 2050, and 14 inches per decade by 2090. That rise continues to accelerate until it reaches a rate of 2 feet per decade early in the next century.
How exactly do coastal areas adapt to such rapid and accelerating sea level rise? How rapidly do you abandon places that you know will be repeatedly inundated by the combination of sea level rise and storm surge in the coming decades?
And for those who consider such rates of sea level rise unlikely, the NCA has some bad news. The United States is all but certain to see higher “relative sea level” [RSL] rise than the global average especially in the Northeast and the western Gulf of Mexico. In fact for “for high [Global Mean Sea Level] rise scenarios, RSL rise is likely to be higher than the global average along all U.S. coastlines outside Alaska.”
Moreover, the report warns that “climate models are more likely to underestimate than to overestimate the amount of long-term future change.” Again, that means sea level rise is likely to be higher and faster than the report’s projections, especially under Trump’s policies.
The implications for coastal property values are grave. “The risk will rise as sea levels rise, and when that happens, you’d expect your property value to fall,” as Lloyd Dixon, the director of the RAND Center for Catastrophic Risk Management and Compensation, told the International Business Times last month. “At some point, the property becomes worthless.”
Sean Becketti, the chief economist for mortgage giant Freddie Mac, warned a year ago that the coastal property bubble will burst sooner than expected: “Some residents will cash out early and suffer minimal losses. Others will not be so lucky.”
As Bloomberg put it in April, “Demand and financing could collapse before the sea consumes a single house.”
That process may already be starting. Last November, the New York Times reported that “nationally, median home prices in areas at high risk for flooding are still 4.4 percent below what they were 10 years ago, while home prices in low-risk areas are up 29.7 percent over the same period.”
Jesse Keenan, who studies coastal property, has “begun to see evidence in survey data that middle-income people are leaving Miami Beach and other places with nuisance flooding that makes it difficult to get around at high tides or insure a car,” Scientific American reported back in May. “It’s not out of the question that Miami Beach loses 20 percent of its population and most of those people go to the mainland,” said Keenan. “I’m talking about the next 20 years.”
The GOP tax reform bill the House of Representatives is considering takes a few whacks at states with a lot of coastal property. As the New York Times reports, it proposes “to put a cap of $10,000 on the property taxes that can be deducted at the federal level; to eliminate the deduction for state and local income taxes; and to restrict the mortgage interest deduction to loans of $500,000 or less.”
The key point is these changes hit the highest-price homes the most — and coastal property values are nearly double the value of similar inland property, according to a Congressional Budget Office study. They could deflate coastal property values more than 10 percent.
Given that the coastal property bubble must burst sometime in the not-too-distant future — and that the early sellers of overpriced coastal property will do a lot better than the later ones — this initial deflation may well hasten the inevitable sell-off.
Here’s the ultimate question for owners of coastal property — and the financial institutions that back them: Who will be with the smart money that gets out early — and who will be with the other kind of money?
By Robert L. Borosage November 3, 2017
Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell with Senate majority whip John Cornyn, and Senator John Barrasso, talk to reporters, July 25, 2017. (AP Photo / Jacquelyn Martin)
The House Republican tax bill has been introduced, packaged beautifully with lies. Now House Republicans will push to pass, in one week, a 500-page bill written in secret that transforms the tax code. Powerful special interests will spend millions for and against. Legions of lobbyists will fill congressional offices. Experts will duel over the effects. Trump is already boasting about “a great Christmas present” of the biggest tax cuts ever.
Republicans hope that the fog of competing claims will cover their tracks. In the midst of the frenzy, remember one thing: this entire project is utterly wrong-headed. Few politicians dare say it, but the reality is Americans are not overtaxed. They are under-served by their government.
American corporations and American citizens are not overtaxed, compared with other industrial nations. The greatest impediment to corporate competitiveness isn’t what corporations pay in taxes; it is an inefficient, outdated, and increasingly dangerous infrastructure. It is time wasted in traffic jams, slow trains, and overcrowded airports. Our broadband is slower and costs more than that of other leaders in the industrial world. Nine percent of all bridges are rated “structurally deficient” and 40 percent are over 50 years old. Our energy and water systems are aged and fragile. A bridge falls every other day in America. The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates that our increasingly decrepit infrastructure will cost about 2.5 million jobs and $7 trillion in sales by 2025. For businesses, the best use of public dollars isn’t tax cuts for the rich and big corporations but investments in rebuilding America.
Similarly, America’s workers are gouged far more by inadequate and wasteful public investment than by high taxes. We pay about two times as much per capita for health care—with worse results and leaving millions of people still not covered. The costs of educating kids—from pre-K to summer programs to soaring college tuitions and fees—rise far faster than stagnant wages. Crowded and pot-holed roads steal time and tax cars and tires. Flint is not alone in suffering from aging pipelines and poisonous water. For working people, the best use of public dollars is to invest in Medicare for All, tuition-free college, universal pre-K, and efficient roads and water systems.
Trump and Republicans want to sell tax cuts as key to growth and jobs, but this too is a con. In using public money to create jobs, the most authoritative assessment—made by Moody’s Mark Zandi, a former adviser to John McCain—is that investing in infrastructure would produce far more “bang for the buck” in jobs and growth than tax cuts would create. The money would be more likely to stay here, since 35 percent of corporate tax cuts would go to foreign investors or companies. The working people hired on public projects spend their wages, the rich less so. All this is particularly true now: Corporate profits are near-record levels, inequality is at record extremes, and interest rates are still low. Corporations don’t need tax breaks. They need customers. The rich will get more money under the GOP plan, but they’ve already captured so much of the nation’s income and wealth that even the conservative International Monetary Fund has warned that inequality has reached extremes that are an impediment to growth and jobs.
Republicans hypocritically will run up deficits and add a trillion or two to the national debt, but the real damage is that they will exacerbate what is now a crippling public-investment deficit. For all the alarms you’ll hear from Democrats and some Republicans in the next weeks, the budget deficits aren’t much of an economic concern. Inflation, if anything, is too low, and America bonds sell at remarkably low interest rates.
Budget deficits, however, are a political club. Once the tax cuts are passed, Republicans will return to hectoring about deficits and debt. Their budget documents already call for brutal cuts in Medicare, Medicaid, education, and the entire range of public services. As crippling as America’s public investment is today, passage of the Republican tax plan virtually insures that it will get far worse.
As Republicans rush to get this bill passed before it is read, the big lies will be exposed. The rich will clean up; some in the middle class—particularly those with large families—will pay more. Wealthy real-estate operators, investors, lawyers, and accountants will pocket most of the so-called small business “pass-through” tax break. Repatriation and territoriality will give corporations even more incentive to rig their books to report profits in tax havens abroad. But the specific outrages are neither as destructive nor as appalling as the entire project itself. By making it harder to address America’s crippling public-investment deficits, large tax cuts, if passed, will accelerate this country’s decline.
Robert L. Borosage is a leading progressive writer and activist.
Posted By: S. Nicholson November 6, 2017
In the aftermath of the mass shooting at the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, TX this weekend, many on the left have renewed their pleas for gun law reform in order to reduce the likelihood of such incidents.
For instance, while GOP lawmakers simply called for prayer, Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut said that “no one is safe so long as Congress chooses to do absolutely nothing in the face of” the seemingly commonplace mass shootings.
“As my colleagues go to sleep tonight, they need to think about whether the political support of the gun industry is worth the blood that flows endlessly onto the floors of American churches, elementary schools, movie theaters, and city streets,” Murphy said.
Former President Barack Obama tweeted out that his family grieved with all the families affected by the gun violence, and invoked God to “grant all of us the wisdom to ask what concrete steps we can take to reduce the violence and weaponry in our midst.”
And as details emerged about the shooter, Devin Kelley — particularly his history of domestic violence towards his wife and stepson, as well as a previous incident of animal cruelty — documentary filmmaker Michael Moore issued a statement on Facebook condemning the culture that allows such a person to legally purchase an assault-type rifle:
“Ok, after hearing the history of the Texas gunman, I finally get it. Before you can buy a gun in the USA, you first can beat your wife, then you can beat your child, then, after you’ve served jail time for that, you can be court-martialed and removed from the military for “bad conduct,” and THEN, after all that, you can have an hour-long stand-off with police after you’ve clubbed your dog in the head – after which you are then arrested for animal cruelty — AND THEN AND ONLY THEN you can go out a legally buy the assault weapon of your choice! WHY DOESN’T ANY OTHER COUNTRY FOLLOW OUR FINE EXAMPLE?!”
Go Netherlands! Read more: http://bit.ly/2uGcvrL
Go Netherlands!Read more: http://bit.ly/2uGcvrL
Posted by EcoWatch on Monday, November 6, 2017
Nexus Media November 6, 2017
Navajo Generating Station, Arizona. CREDIT: Wolfgang Moroder
By Jeremy Deaton
It looks like it doesn’t belong there. The lonely, aging power plant stands out against the red desert, connected to the nearest town by a single, crumbling road. It will soon become an artifact, a relic from when coal was king.
If the Navajo Generating Station (NGS) closes — as it is set to do in 2019 — it will leave the local communities with 800 fewer jobs and a massive dent in revenue. But opponents to the plant say the cost to human health has been too high, and it’s time to turn to alternative sources of energy and jobs.
The plant is facing a future familiar to many coal-fired power plants, struggling to compete with smaller, more nimble natural gas-fired generators, wind farms, and solar arrays.
“You know the old saying, ‘You make money if you buy low and sell high’? They’re buying high and selling lower,” said David Schlissel, director of resource planning analysis at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA).
If the Navajo Generating Station shuts down, locals will lose some 800 jobs, both at the plant and in the nearby Kayenta mine, which supplies coal to the generating station. Facing unemployment rates upwards of 40 percent, the Navajo and Hopi tribes are eager to protect those jobs, to say nothing of the revenue the operation provides.
“The Navajo Nation is so dependent on the jobs and the revenue for their budget. It’s really sad because, looking forward, it just doesn’t seem to be a sustainable economic enterprise,” Schlissel said. “I have no idea who would put their money here.”
Credit: Stephanie Smith, Grand Canyon Trust
Some, however, are happy to see the plant and the mine close down. While the operation is the cornerstone of the local economy, it is also a symbol of exploitation. Built on sacred land and without the consent of traditional leaders, the operation has better served its corporate owners than the tribes themselves. Thanks to a one-sided lease brokered by the federal government, for decades the Navajo and Hopi tribes received pennies on the dollar for every ton of coal mined.
Critics of the plant see its closure as an opportunity to create new businesses owned and operated by Native Americans in tourism, agriculture, and energy. Experts believe the tribes could repurpose much of the existing infrastructure associated with the Navajo Generating Station — including power lines to populations centers — to support new solar and wind projects. The transition to renewable energy sources would be difficult, but it could breathe life into the community.
In many ways, the embattled plant is a microcosm of a story unfolding across the country. As coal loses ground to natural gas and renewable energy, coal miners and plant operators are looking to the Trump administration to keep them afloat. But there is only so much policymakers can do. The Navajo Generating Station offers a preview of what’s to come.
The Navajo Generating Station as viewed from above. CREDIT: Ken Lund
The story of the Navajo Generating Station dates back to the late 19th century, when government surveyors discovered expansive reserves of copper on land inhabited by Hopis, Navajos, and a handful of Mormon settlers. As Judith Nies explains in Unreal City, a history of coal power in the Southwest, President Chester A. Arthur worried that Mormons would snatch up the mineral-rich land at a time when demand for coal was on the rise.
In 1882, Thomas Edison flipped the switch on the world’s first commercial coal-fired power plant, and it was clear that the electrification of the United States would drive up demand for coal. That same year, Arthur signed an executive order creating an Indian reservation that spanned a large swath of Arizona coal deposits. The president’s order would keep coal reserves out of the hands of Mormon settlers, giving the federal government the opportunity to exploit those resources at a future date.
That day came nearly a century later, as the rapid growth of Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and other cities in the Southwest spurred investments in coal power. In 1966, Navajo and Hopi leaders signed a lease allowing coal giant Peabody Energy to mine 40,000 of acres of their reservation. The lawyer who represented the Hopi tribe also represented Peabody, and he did much better work for the coal company than he did for the Native Americans.
The Peabody lease “violated every guideline that the Department of Interior had set up for leasing on public lands: no competitive bidding, no automatic renegotiation clauses, a fixed rate rather than a percentage royalty rate,” Nies writes. At that time, the royalty rate on federal lands was $1.50 per ton of coal, but under the terms of the lease, the Hopi and Navajo tribes would earn just 37 cents on each ton of coal mined. Hopi leaders decried the lease as “arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion.”
The Kayenta Mine. CREDIT: Doc Searls
The deal was a giveaway to Peabody, but Nies writes the lease was “about more than money. It was about growth — the power to pump water into Phoenix, air-conditioning to Los Angeles, and the electricity to light the giant casinos and cool thousands of homes in Las Vegas as the population doubled and then tripled every year.” All of it depended on a steady supply of cheap electricity.
In 1973, Peabody began operations at the Kayenta mine. Three years later, the Navajo Generating Station came online, delivering power to customers across the Southwest. The tribe mined coal, exported electricity, and raised revenues, but the biggest winners were Peabody energy and the power utilities that owned the plant. “The Navajo Nation really didn’t get its fair share out of those operations,” said Brett Isaac, a Navajo solar entrepreneur. “It tied us to those jobs and didn’t allow us to diversify.”
Now, with the plant set to close, workers are worried about how they will make ends meet. “A lot of the miners and plant operators, they are pretty much lifelong employees of that operation,” Isaac said. “I have an uncle who has worked at the Peabody mine since right out of high school. The next week after graduation he started working at the mine. He’s never had to apply for a job.”
Until recently, coal was the country’s cheapest and most abundant source of power, and utilities relied on large facilities like the Navajo Generating Station to provide reliable electricity. In recent years, however, coal has lost ground to other power sources. Wind and solar are growing cheaper by the day, while advances in hydraulic fracturing have made natural gas more affordable than coal. Small, gas-fired power plants can ramp up and down more quickly than large, coal plants, allowing them to track consumer demand more closely.
Natural gas has overtaken coal as the largest source of electricity in the United States. Coal production is expected to continue its long decline. Credit: Energy Information Administration
“All of the major utilities in the region, who are already co-owners of the plant, have decided for economic reasons that it’s cheaper for them to produce their own power or buy power from gas and renewables,” said Roger Clark, a program director at the Grand Canyon Trust, a conservation group based in Arizona.
“The outlook has gotten dimmer and dimmer as the years have past,” Isaac said. “We knew we would have to diversify, but we didn’t think it would be this sudden.”
The Navajo Generating Station is in an especially precarious position. Because the plant is situated 4,000 feet above sea-level, where the air is thinner, the coal burns less efficiently than it would at a lower elevation. The plant is also hundreds of miles away from major markets like Las Vegas and Los Angeles, and some electricity is inevitably lost en route. Utilities would rather generate power from solar, wind or natural gas closer to where it’s being used.
“For one thing, you’re not having to pay 800 people to run the mine and the power plant,” said Clark. At a gas-fired power plant, “a shift might be three to five people. At the Navajo Generating Station, it’s several hundred people.”
The high cost of generating coal power is only one problem. There is also the human cost of operating the mine, which has left a generation of workers with black lung disease. The power plant , which is the seventh-largest source of carbon pollution in the United States, along with a host of toxic chemicals that worsen asthma, provoke heart attacks, and shorten lives. Pollution from the plant can be seen as far away as the Grand Canyon.
“You can see the haze,” said Isaac, who lamented the years of operation. “What did it actually cost us? People getting sick.”
Navajo Generating Station, Arizona. Credit: Myrabella
Perhaps more than the Hopi and Navajo tribes, Peabody is determined to keep the Navajo Generating Station open. The coal company said it has found a number of potential buyers for the plant, but it has not disclosed any names, and it seems unlikely that investors would be lining up to purchase the generating station. IEEFA projects it would cost upwards of $400 million to keep the plan online through the end of 2019, and it could cost more than $2 billion in subsidies to keep the plant running through 2030.
Peabody has an ally in Trump administration, though, which is desperate to make good on its promise to rescue the coal industry. In addition to rolling back dozens of environmental safeguards, the administration is pushing regulators to compel utilities to buy costly, polluting coal power. It has made the Navajo Generating Station a priority, not simply because the federal government has an ownership stake in the plant.
“If NGS closes, it will be very damaging for the administration,” Mike McKenna, who served on Trump’s transition team, told ClimateWire. “Closure is a preventable tragedy. The administration needs to prevent it.”
Trump administration throws weight behind keeping Arizona coal plant openOwners want to wash their hands of unprofitable coal plant.
Representatives from Peabody Energy recently met with officials at the Department of the Interior and the Department of Energy, as did Navajo and Hopi leaders. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke is exploring options for keeping the plant open, including erecting a high-powered solar facility that would be compatible with the current operation.
“Since the first weeks of the Trump administration, one of Interior’s top priorities has been to roll up our sleeves with diverse stakeholders in search of an economic path forward to extend NGS and Kayenta Mine operations after 2019,” Zinke said in a statement in June. The administration has yet to put forward a plan to stave off the plant’s closure.
Window Rock, a sandstone formation on the Navajo reservation. CREDIT: Ben FrantzDale
It’s unclear how locals could replace the jobs and revenue from the Navajo Generating Station, but experts have a few ideas. A recent report from IEEFA proposed that the Bureau of Reclamation, Peabody, and the utilities that own the plant “provide a substantial core of replacement jobs that require skill sets similar to those of the existing workforce.”
The report also recommended the tribes invest in infrastructure, tourism, agriculture, and water. Clark pointed to the infrastructure associated with the power plant, which includes a water pump, power lines, and an electric railroad that runs from the mine to the generating station. “All of these things might be able to be repurposed into a renewable-energy powered water system,” he said.
The power plant uses as much as 30,000 acre-feet of water each year, water that is siphoned from Lake Powell using a large pump, Clark explained. “If the power plant is taken down, that pump is a stranded asset, which also might complement the fact that the Navajo Nation itself has a legitimate claim to every bit of that water that the power plant is using plus another 20,000 acre-feet,” he said.
The Navajo tribe could build solar arrays to power the pump, which could be used to carry water from Lake Powell to the current site of the plant, a high point in the region. Water could then be fed to other parts of the reservation. “The water itself may be worth more than the coal to the Navajo Nation,” Clark said.
Lake Powell. Credit: Wolfgang Staudt
The Navajo tribe could also invest in clean energy, both to sell across state lines and to provide power locally. “Other states don’t buy coal power anymore,” Isaac said, “but other states will buy renewable energy. So, we’re looking for ways that we can capitalize on that.”
A 2012 report from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory found that “neither solar, wind, nor geothermal power alone can replace all the types of benefits currently provided by [the Navajo Generating Station]. They might in aggregate, however.” The IEEFA report found that solar power could “replace some of the lost generation capacity, jobs, and revenue” from the plant’s closure.
Isaac said that many Navajos doubt the viability of clean energy, so they built mobile solar power units to bring electricity to parts of the reservation that are off the grid — around a third of homes on the Navajo Reservation lack power. “I wanted to build something that people could touch,” Isaac said. “Essentially, we’re building stories, because that is hopefully what’s going to encourage communities to shift.”
One of Isaac’s mobile solar units. Credit: Brett Isaac
The Department of Commerce has awarded some $420,000 to the Navajo and Hopi tribes to help them cope with the plant’s closure, money that could be used to implement some of these ideas. Even if the plant stays online for a few more years, it is inevitable that it will close sooner rather than later. Any effort to keep the plant open distracts from the hard work of creating new businesses. Isaac says the Navajo tribe needs to look beyond coal for jobs and income.
“We seriously thought we couldn’t survive without that royalty. We couldn’t survive without those jobs. We kind of put ourselves in a corner when it came to how to discuss the economic impact,” Isaac said. “It’s going to hurt, but we are a lot more savvy than we give ourselves credit for.”
Jeremy Deaton writes for Nexus Media, a syndicated news-wire covering climate, energy, policy, art and culture.
The president promised to bring trillions of dollars back to the US, but many around him are no strangers to the offshore world
Donald Trump: ‘Bring the money back. We’re rebuilding America.’ Photograph: AP, Guardian Design Team
Jon Swaine and Ed Pilkington, New York November 5, 2017
On the election trail in 2016, Donald Trump promised tax reforms to tempt major US companies back onshore and “bring back trillions of dollars from American businesses that is now parked overseas”.
As the first anniversary of his election victory looms this week, Trump and fellow Republicans are trying to drive those tax reforms through Congress.
On November 1st, Trump reiterated his commitment:
“Finally, our plan will bring back trillions of dollars from offshore … that will come pouring back into our country that will be put to work and will be spent by our companies that could never get the money back for many years. Bring the money back. We’re rebuilding America.”
But Trump is surrounded by wealthy individuals who have legally either sheltered their own investments or presided over policies to keep company profits or clients’ funds out of reach in tax havens.
Photograph: Kevin Dietsch/EPA
Trump’s chief economic adviser, who is the driving force behind the White House tax reform effort, is no stranger to offshore finance. The leaked documents reveal that for various periods between 2002 and 2006, Cohn was president or vice-president of 22 separate entities in Bermuda for Goldman Sachs.
As head of the bank’s commodities and then equities divisions, Cohn spearheaded the bank’s purchase of companies from a financial arm of General Motors, GMAC Commercial Holding of Bermuda.
The Bermuda companies specialized in real estate, and though all were based on the island, they also had registered addresses at 85 Broad Street in New York City, the headquarters until 2009 of Goldman Sachs.
In 2012, the companies were struck from the Bermuda registry, a move that strips defunct or inactive companies from the records.
In a statement, Goldman Sachs said it did manage a fund that invested in Asia, but paid taxes on its income from the fund “in all relevant tax jurisdictions”. Of Cohn, the company said it was common for its employees to be officers of its legal entities and they were not paid for these additional roles.
Cohn, who did not respond to requests for comment, stood down from the Bermuda companies in 2006, around the time that he took up the position of president at Goldman Sachs.
Photograph: Altaf Hussain/Reuters
The US secretary of state is named in the leaked files as a director of an offshore firm used in a multi-billion dollar oil and gas venture in the Middle East that became embroiled in controversy.
Tillerson was a director of Marib Upstream Services Company, incorporated in Bermuda in 1997. The company was tied to ExxonMobil, the American oil and gas corporation that Tillerson later led as chief executive. At the time, Tillerson was president of ExxonMobil’s Yemen division.
ExxonMobil and Hunt Oil, another Texas-based firm led by Tillerson’s close friend Ray Hunt, ran a $5bn venture to export 61m barrels of natural gas a year from fields in Marib, western Yemen. Hunt had discovered the fields in the mid-1980s and brought in ExxonMobil to help develop them.
Yemen later moved to nationalize the gas-drilling operation, banishing the ExxonMobil, Hunt firm when its 20-year exploration contract expired in 2005. The Texans claimed they were entitled to an extension and sued Yemen for $1.6 billion. The case was arbitrated at the International Chamber of Commerce, where Yemen prevailed.
A report published last year by the campaign group Citizens for Tax Justice said ExxonMobil had at least 35 subsidiaries in tax havens such as the Bahamas, Bermuda and the Cayman Islands – and was holding approximately $51bn offshore while Tillerson was CEO.
A state department spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.
Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
The US Treasury secretary’s former bank financed offshore private jets for wealthy clients, including a billionaire Yemeni businessman whose son is wanted for rape and murder in the UK.
CIT Bank, where Mnuchin was deputy chairman, provided customers with financing structures for personal aircraft priced at tens of millions of dollars, which customers used to legally avoid sales taxes and other charges.
One leaked file from October 2015 shows CIT billing an Isle of Man company $430,993 for an installment on a $30 million Dassault Falcon 2000EX jet. Other files say that the ultimate owner of the Isle of Man company is Shaher Abdulhak Besher.
Besher, an ally of the former Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh, has a business portfolio spanning drinks bottlers, telecoms and several other industries.
His son Farouk Abdulhak, 30, is wanted in London on suspicion of raping and murdering Martine Vik Magnussen, a 23-year-old student, who was found dead in a basement in Fitzrovia in May 2008. He denies the allegations.
Mnuchin is not named in the leaked documents and it is unclear whether he was aware of the arrangements. The financing for Besher was set up by CIT in 2012, before Mnuchin’s arrival. The arrangement continued through Mnuchin’s tenure. Mnuchin was paid $11.2m by CIT in 2016, before leaving to join Trump’s administration. CIT sold its aircraft financing division last year.
A spokeswoman for CIT said: “CIT complies with all laws, regulations and ethical standards in pursuit of its business.” An attorney for Besher said he declined to comment. Treasury spokespeople did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
The Trump administration’s most senior banking watchdog appears in the Paradise Papers in connection with an offshore bank that is under investigation by US authorities for possible tax evasion.
Quarles, Trump’s vice-chairman for supervision at the Federal Reserve, is named in the files as an officer of two firms incorporated in the Cayman Islands by the Carlyle Group, the private equity giant where Quarles was a partner until 2013.
The files detail transactions between one of Quarles’s offshore vehicles and Butterfield, a Bermuda-based bank in which Carlyle had led a $550m investment in 2010. That stake was one of several in distressed banks bought up by a new specialist team at Carlyle, including Quarles, following the 2008 financial crisis.
In November 2013, federal authorities secured court orders requiring a group of US banks to disclose information on Americans “who may be evading or have evaded federal taxes” via undisclosed affiliated accounts at offshore banks including Butterfield. They said 81 such accounts at Butterfield had already been disclosed.
Butterfield said in its last annual report that it was cooperating with US authorities and had set aside $5.5m to pay penalties that may arise from the inquiries.
Quarles told ethics regulators this year that he held assets worth between $5m and $25m in a Carlyle fund that held a stake in Butterfield. He said he intended to sell his holdings in that and most other Carlyle funds.
A Federal Reserve spokesman said Quarles “had no specific responsibilities, was not delegated any responsibilities by the board, and received no income for this position” at the offshore company, and had divested from Butterfield when he joined the government.
Photograph: Rick Bowmer/AP
Trump’s new US ambassador to Russia helped lead a previously undisclosed offshore company, according to the leaked files.
Huntsman, the former Utah governor, was listed as a director of HICI International Sales Corporation in a confidential filing to authorities in Barbados, where the company was formed in 1999. The offshore vehicle was set up to carry out overseas sales for Huntsman ICI, an industrial chemicals branch of Huntsman Corporation.
The filing said HICI was owned by Huntsman ICI Holdings LLC in the US, where Huntsman was vice-chairman and manager. In 2000, Huntsman ICI reported making a $151m profit on revenues of $4.4bn.
HICI was a foreign sales corporation, a type that allowed Americans to exempt 32% of overseas income from US taxation under 1984 reforms signed by Ronald Reagan. The US closed the loophole in 2007.
Troy Keller, a spokesman for Huntsman Corporation, said of HICI: “It existed for just a few years and it participated in a US government-created program to promote exports.”
Huntsman Corporation did not report the offshore vehicle in its public filings to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Subsidiaries in tax havens may be omitted from public filings if they comprise less than 10% of a company’s assets, investments, or income.
The leaked files did not detail how much revenue passed through HICI. When he ran for president in 2012, Huntsman said his stakes in Huntsman companies were worth up to $50m.
Trump’s ambassador to India benefited from the offshore business of his former investment company and its billion-dollar purchase of a shipping corporation.
Juster is named in the Paradise Papers as a beneficial owner of a Bermuda-based branch of Warburg Pincus, a private equity firm where he was a partner before joining the Trump administration.
Juster, who was a senior economic adviser to the president until this summer, declared holdings in Warburg Pincus worth up to $5m to ethics officials this year.
He was separately listed among Warburg partners in compliance documents relating to the buyout firm’s 2011 purchases of Triton Container International, a shipping container leasing company, and its sister firm International Asset Systems, which makes cargo tracking software.
A state department official said in an email: “Mr Juster has, at all times, fully disclosed and properly reported these financial interests on his US federal income tax returns. He also has timely filed and fully paid all US federal income tax liabilities in connection with the ownership of these interests.”
Photograph: Brendan Mcdermid/Reuters
Icahn, a friend and former adviser to Trump, owns a $250m mining company spread across three tax havens and structured in a way that limits the information it must disclose to US authorities.
The leaks detail how Icahn holds a controlling stake in Ferrous Resources, a Brazilian mining company officially based on the Isle of Man. It in turn owns a pair of holding companies in Luxembourg and Malta, which operate iron mines in Brazil.
All three jurisdictions offer low- or zero-tax regimes for corporations, making them destinations of choice for foreign businesses seeking to legally lower their tax bills. A report in 2015 by Citizens for Tax Justice said Icahn operated 20 subsidiaries in offshore tax havens.
Icahn was a special adviser to the president until August and has a net worth of about $16.6bn, according to Forbes.
An email unearthed in the Paradise Papers said the structure of Ferrous Resources meant it escaped some disclosure requirements under an Obama-era law aimed at preventing offshore tax avoidance. The structure of Ferrous Resources was in place when Icahn bought the company.
Icahn was separately identified in the documents as having been a director for 11 years of Scientia Health Group, an investment company based in Bermuda in which he and his wife, Gail, held a stake. The firm’s investors also included the celebrity chef and lifestyle guru Martha Stewart and the disgraced film mogul Harvey Weinstein.
Jesse Lyn, general counsel for Icahn Enterprises, said: “We invested significant sums to save Ferrous from bankruptcy and to date have lost hundreds of millions of dollars on the investment.” Lyn said Icahn formerly held a small stake in Scientia which had “nothing to do with the company’s tax planning or structuring”.
Photograph: Bloomberg via Getty Images
The chairman of Trump’s inaugural committee leads a $58bn real estate investment trust that channels some of its profits to the low- or no-tax jurisdictions of Luxembourg, the Cayman Islands and Lebanon.
Barrack, who has described himself as one of the president’s “closest friends for 40 years”, appears in the Paradise Papers through offshore subsidiaries of Colony NorthStar, of which he is CEO.
In 2011, Appleby helped devise a rolling credit facility linking Barrack’s US-based investment funds with a pair of Cayman-Islands-based subsidiaries dealing in troubled real estate, which the lawyers asked him personally to approve.
A confidential chart in the leaked documents suggested money would flow from the funds in Delaware to a Cayman Islands entity, Colony Distressed Credit Fund II Feeder A, which was “exempted”, meaning it paid no local taxes. The chart suggested the money would then be repatriated in a complex web to a separate Delaware subsidiary closer to the parent company.
Barrack was an early endorser of Trump for president, co-founding the Rebuilding America Now Super Pac, which pumped $ 23 million into the 2016 race. He was rewarded by being invited to deliver a keynote address at the Republican national convention.
Barrack declined to clarify whether he was aware that Colony was passing money through a subsidiary in the Cayman Islands or whether the feeder funds were set up to reduce tax payments. The firm said: “Colony NorthStar is in strict compliance with the letter and spirit of all applicable rules for cross-border business, as we have been for more than 25 years.”
Trump’s SEC chairman received income from a hedge fund based in the Cayman Islands.
Clayton disclosed to the government ethics office before taking up the SEC job that he received income from Mount Kellett Capital Partners (Cayman) LP, the offshore subsidiary of a US hedge fund. A proposed structure chart in the leaked Appleby files shows a complex web of ties that were created between the Cayman Islands offshoot, its head company, and other offshore subsidiaries.
According to his ethics disclosure, Clayton received income from Mount Kellett through a trust set up for partners of Sullivan & Cromwell, the law firm where he worked for many years. In March, he agreed to divest from the fund within 90 days of taking up his SEC post.
Clayton declined to say how much he received annually from the Cayman Islands subsidiary, or to comment on how his involvement offshore would affect his new role as overseer of offshore investments.
As a corporate lawyer, Clayton gained a reputation for his close ties to Wall Street. As SEC chairman, his role is to protect investors and ensure the smooth working of the markets. Within that an important function is to keep an eye on the offshore interests of companies and hedge funds.
Trump has encouraged the SEC to eradicate many regulations. One of Clayton’s first moves was to allow private companies to be more secretive in the process of going public.
Photograph: Carlo Allegri/Reuters
A biotechnology company headed by Carson, Trump’s housing and urban development (HUD) secretary, set up offshore firms that could have reduced its tax bill.
The Paradise Papers contain files on two subsidiaries of Vaccinogen in Bermuda that date from Carson’s time as chairman of the Baltimore-based biotechnology company. The offshore vehicles were established as holding companies for “intellectual property related to the treatment of cancer and other diseases”, according to the files.
Offshore holding firms can be used to lower corporate tax bills for firms that make money from inventions or creative productions. Typically the offshore entity holds the intellectual property, leases it back to the parent company, and collects the royalties or revenues from its use. Tax havens such as Bermuda impose no tax on company profits. Vaccinogen did not respond to a request for comment.
The specific arrangements of Vaccinogen’s firms were not clear. One file named Michael A Bloom as a contact. An attorney with that name in New York states that he once “represented a publicly traded US pharmaceutical company in connection with IP tax migration and tax planning”. Bloom did not respond to an email.
Carson, a retired neurosurgeon, stood down as chairman of Vaccinogen in May 2015 after announcing that he was running for the Republican presidential nomination.
Raffi Williams, a spokesman for HUD, did not respond to several requests for comment. Williams eventually said questions should be directed to Carson’s personal attorney, and then declined to identify that attorney.
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WASHINGTON ― You may have seen this photo of President Donald Trump’s motorcade winding down a wooded road last week as a woman on a bicycle pedaled by ― giving the middle finger to Trump.
The woman’s name is Juli Briskman. Her employer, government contractor Akima LLC, wasn’t so happy about the photo. They fired her over it.
In a Saturday interview with HuffPost, Briskman, a 50-year-old mother of two, said she was stunned that someone had taken a picture of her giving Trump the middle finger.
As the photo circulated online, Briskman decided to tell Akima’s HR department what was happening when she went to work on Monday. By Tuesday, her bosses called her into a meeting and said she had violated the company’s social media policy by using the photo as her profile picture on Twitter and Facebook.
“They said, ‘We’re separating from you,‘” said Briskman. “Basically, you cannot have ‘lewd’ or ‘obscene’ things in your social media. So they were calling flipping him off ‘obscene.’”
Briskman, who worked in marketing and communications at Akima for just over six months, said she emphasized to the executives that she wasn’t on the job when the incident happened and that her social media pages don’t mention her employer. They told her that because Akima was a government contractor, the photo could hurt their business, she said.
Virginia is an employment-at-will state, meaning employers can fire people anytime and for any reason. But Briskman said what’s been particularly infuriating is that a male colleague kept his job after recently posting lewd comments on his Facebook page that featured Akima LLC as his cover photo. She said this colleague was reprimanded for calling someone “a fucking Libtard asshole” on Facebook, but was allowed to delete the post and keep his job.
“How is that any less ‘obscene’ than me flipping off the president?” she asked. “How is that fair?”
A request for comment from Akima was not immediately returned.
“He was passing by and my blood just started to boil,” she said. “I’m thinking, DACA recipients are getting kicked out. He pulled ads for open enrollment in Obamacare. Only one-third of Puerto Rico has power. I’m thinking, he’s at the damn golf course again.”
“I flipped off the motorcade a number of times,” she added.
Briskman, a Democrat, said she plans to look for a new job with an advocacy group that she believes in, like Planned Parenthood or PETA.
Despite getting fired, she said she has no regrets about the attention her public show of displeasure with Trump received. In fact, she said she’s happy to be an image of protest that resonates with many Americans.
“In some ways, I’m doing better than ever,” she said. “I’m angry about where our country is right now. I am appalled. This was an opportunity for me to say something.”
Community Gardens are spreading across the USA! November 4, 2017
Community Gardens are spreading across the USA!via Rob Greenfield Outspeak
Posted by EcoWatch on Sunday, November 5, 2017