This year Bank of America is receiving the "income tax refund from hell" — $666 million for 2010, according to its annual report filed in late February 2011. This is following a $3.5 billion refund reported in 2009. Bank of America's federal income tax benefit this year is roughly two times the Obama administration's proposed cuts to the Community Development Block Grant program ($299 million).
Six banks — Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley together paid income tax at an approximate rate of 11% of their pre-tax US earnings in 2009 and 2010. Had they paid at 35%, what they are legally mandated to pay, the federal government would have received an additional $13 billion in tax revenue. This would cover more than two years of salaries for the 132,000 teacher jobs lost since the economic crisis began in 2008.
Wells Fargo reportedly received a $4 billion federal income tax refund on $18 billion in pre-tax income in 2009, and paid 7.5% of its pre-tax income of $19 billion in 2010 in federal taxes. Its net federal income tax benefit for 2009 and 2010 combined, $2.5 billion, is equal to the Obama administration's proposed cuts of 50% to the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program.
Banks use a variety of mechanisms to avoid corporate income taxes, including offshore tax shelters. 50% of the six banks' 1871 foreign subsidiaries are incorporated in jurisdictions that have been identified as offshore tax havens, such as the Cayman Islands.
Bank of America operates 371 tax-sheltered subsidiaries, more than any other big bank studied, and 204 subsidiaries in the Cayman Islands alone, according to its latest regulatory filings. 75% of Goldman Sachs's foreign subsidiaries are incorporated in offshore tax havens.
The banks' private banking arms also protect the wealth of rich clients from taxation through offshore investment strategies. Bank of America's wealth management arm encourages clients to register their yachts in foreign jurisdictions for tax reasons.
Closing special tax loopholes on the financial sector and implementing sensible revenue-raising initiatives such as the Financial Speculation Tax could generate over $150 billion in federal tax revenue each year.
Download the report: "Big Bank Tax Drain".
March 12, 2011
Right Sights Rites Sigh
To the Editor:
Dick Tracy has provided an amusing political lesson with his March 10 "Right Sights" (Vermont Standard). The entire piece can stand just as well (or rather, as weakly) if all instances of "conservative" and "progressive" are simply switched. Every criticism he makes of progressives applies equally, and often more aptly, to conservatives. This may be because he limits his definitions to big government versus big business, which are effectively one and the same.
Another problem is that no thinking person actually lives according to Tracy's broad abstractions and crude absolutes. Each of us is an ever-evolving stew of democrat and reactionary, liberal and puritan, anarchist and authoritarian - even, I venture to suggest, Dick Tracy, if he dare admit it.
Until then, the ritual recital of caricatures and fantasy scenarios, not only of others but even more revealing of himself, that characterize Tracy's column remains meaningless, "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
[Related to this, see "Dooleysprudence" by James Joyce (1916).]
[Also: "Is it time for Obama to nationalize and peopleize America's industrial production and its profits?" ('In the early twentieth century, Theodore Roosevelt agreed with progressives and reformers that the greatest threat to the nation's economy and its security was excessive corporate centralization of power and the consolidation of wealth in the hands of the very rich and powerful. ... Roosevelt recognized the growing possibilities of a Workers Revolution and proclaimed: "We should enter upon a course of supervision, control, and regulation of those great corporations — a regulation which we should not fear, if necessary, to bring to the point of control of monopoly practices and prices." One of the lines he drew in the sand against massive corporate power and its abuses was to be the 1902 Anthracite Coal Strike and the right for workers to strike and collectively bargain.')]
Vermont
Dick Tracy has provided an amusing political lesson with his March 10 "Right Sights" (Vermont Standard). The entire piece can stand just as well (or rather, as weakly) if all instances of "conservative" and "progressive" are simply switched. Every criticism he makes of progressives applies equally, and often more aptly, to conservatives. This may be because he limits his definitions to big government versus big business, which are effectively one and the same.
Another problem is that no thinking person actually lives according to Tracy's broad abstractions and crude absolutes. Each of us is an ever-evolving stew of democrat and reactionary, liberal and puritan, anarchist and authoritarian - even, I venture to suggest, Dick Tracy, if he dare admit it.
Until then, the ritual recital of caricatures and fantasy scenarios, not only of others but even more revealing of himself, that characterize Tracy's column remains meaningless, "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
[Related to this, see "Dooleysprudence" by James Joyce (1916).]
[Also: "Is it time for Obama to nationalize and peopleize America's industrial production and its profits?" ('In the early twentieth century, Theodore Roosevelt agreed with progressives and reformers that the greatest threat to the nation's economy and its security was excessive corporate centralization of power and the consolidation of wealth in the hands of the very rich and powerful. ... Roosevelt recognized the growing possibilities of a Workers Revolution and proclaimed: "We should enter upon a course of supervision, control, and regulation of those great corporations — a regulation which we should not fear, if necessary, to bring to the point of control of monopoly practices and prices." One of the lines he drew in the sand against massive corporate power and its abuses was to be the 1902 Anthracite Coal Strike and the right for workers to strike and collectively bargain.')]
Vermont
Loving Liberty
Tom Hodgkinson writes in his book The Idle Parent (Click here to visit The Idler web site):
As John Locke wisely observed, children are lovers of liberty. They resist confinement. They appear to have naturally imperious, even insolent natures. Clearly the purpose of 'civilizing' through parental nagging and school-based education systems is to squash the imperiousness and introduce docility. To make slaves out of gods. That the kids resist the process tooth and nail should be celebrated. Might their resistance not demonstrate that there is something at fault with the enclosing system rather than the things enclosed? We should learn from these liberty-lovers to resist enclosure ourselves, rather than attempting to drag the kids down to our slavish level. Forget ideas of 'good' and 'bad' behaviour. Keep instead the poles of 'free' and 'enslaved' in your mind. Reduce authority and enlarge freedom. Revere and respect the little creatures in your house. As Bertrand Russell wrote in 'Freedom Versus Authority in Education': 'Reverence for human personality is the beginning of wisdom, in every social question, but above all in education.'
And George Meredith writes in his novel The Ordeal of Richard Feverel:
It is difficult for those who think very earnestly for their children to know when their children are thinking on their own account. The exercise of their volition we construe as revolt. Our love does not like to be invalided and deposed from its command ...
As John Locke wisely observed, children are lovers of liberty. They resist confinement. They appear to have naturally imperious, even insolent natures. Clearly the purpose of 'civilizing' through parental nagging and school-based education systems is to squash the imperiousness and introduce docility. To make slaves out of gods. That the kids resist the process tooth and nail should be celebrated. Might their resistance not demonstrate that there is something at fault with the enclosing system rather than the things enclosed? We should learn from these liberty-lovers to resist enclosure ourselves, rather than attempting to drag the kids down to our slavish level. Forget ideas of 'good' and 'bad' behaviour. Keep instead the poles of 'free' and 'enslaved' in your mind. Reduce authority and enlarge freedom. Revere and respect the little creatures in your house. As Bertrand Russell wrote in 'Freedom Versus Authority in Education': 'Reverence for human personality is the beginning of wisdom, in every social question, but above all in education.'
And George Meredith writes in his novel The Ordeal of Richard Feverel:
It is difficult for those who think very earnestly for their children to know when their children are thinking on their own account. The exercise of their volition we construe as revolt. Our love does not like to be invalided and deposed from its command ...
March 11, 2011
Republican or Democrat?
The difference between today's Democratic and Republican parties is that whereas the latter simply take us backward step by step, the former, for every step forward, take us 2 steps backward. The result is the same.
Embarrassments of Empire
David Bromwich writes at Tomgram (click the title of this post):
The need to give assurance seems to be an inseparable trait of Obama’s character. He deals with big decisions by first moving to cement a secure alliance with the powers-that-be, no matter how discredited they are, no matter how resounding his previous contempt for them may have been. Yet this is a reflex that often prematurely cedes control to the powerful over whom he might otherwise be in a position to exert leverage. That fight, however, is not for him.
To say it another way, Obama visibly hates crisis. He is so averse to the very idea of instability that he seems unable to use a crisis to his advantage. Seldom, to judge by the evidence thus far, is he the first, second, or third person in the room to recognize that a state of crisis exists. The hesitation that looked like apathy and the hyper-managerial tone of his response to the BP oil spill offered a vivid illustration of this trait. Egypt brought out the same pattern.
The need to give assurance seems to be an inseparable trait of Obama’s character. He deals with big decisions by first moving to cement a secure alliance with the powers-that-be, no matter how discredited they are, no matter how resounding his previous contempt for them may have been. Yet this is a reflex that often prematurely cedes control to the powerful over whom he might otherwise be in a position to exert leverage. That fight, however, is not for him.
To say it another way, Obama visibly hates crisis. He is so averse to the very idea of instability that he seems unable to use a crisis to his advantage. Seldom, to judge by the evidence thus far, is he the first, second, or third person in the room to recognize that a state of crisis exists. The hesitation that looked like apathy and the hyper-managerial tone of his response to the BP oil spill offered a vivid illustration of this trait. Egypt brought out the same pattern.
March 10, 2011
Thomas Friedman is off today
From the New York Times:
Thomas L. Friedman is off today.
It's a start, but at some point they will have to admit that Thomas Friedman is always off.
It's a start, but at some point they will have to admit that Thomas Friedman is always off.
March 9, 2011
Energy Cycling
Ben Falk writes in Vermont Commons (click the title of this post for the entire piece):
Why are trees – especially nut trees – at the basis of these regenerative land use systems and highly adapted human cultures? In the simplest terms, it has to do with inputs and outputs. A nut tree is simply more effective and efficient at converting sunlight and precipitation into value, over the long term, than any other technology humans have yet designed.
This becomes clear when comparing biological systems in general with non-living technologies. Consider a photovoltaic panel or wind turbine. Each requires large and damaging inputs to generate single outputs. What are the inputs for a photovoltaic panel? Bauxite from which to smelt the aluminum frame, silicon and numerous other minerals (many only found in difficult-to-access and a dwindling number of places on the planet), and myriad other mined and smelted metals and minerals. These all must be mined, transported, refined, transported again, then fabricated, then shipped again. All for one output: electricity.
What are the inputs required for a nut tree? An exchange between breeder and planter, transporting of the seed or seedling, some woodchip mulch, rain, and sunshine. And time. What are its yields? Oxygen, soil, wildlife food and housing, moisture retention, carbon sequestration, air filtration, human food, stock feed, building materials, shade, windbreak, and beauty, to name a few.
The former resource path – the abiotic – provides us with a practical service at great cost. The latter, biological (or “soft”) path creates an enduring and generative legacy of positive value. And whereas a solar panel or wind turbine or green building offers diminishing yields over time, a nut tree’s output actually increases, for at least the first century or two of its lifetime.
Such is the power – and imperative – of biological systems: they are the only means we have of sidestepping entropy, at least for significant periods of time, on this planet. That’s what tips the balance; it all comes down to capture, storage, and transfer. The best system is the one that can harvest the most sunlight and moisture, then store that value for the longest period of time while converting some of it into products and services that other living things, like humans, can use. And biological systems do this very well, while non-living mechanical systems cannot.
tags: environment, environmentalism, Vermont
Why are trees – especially nut trees – at the basis of these regenerative land use systems and highly adapted human cultures? In the simplest terms, it has to do with inputs and outputs. A nut tree is simply more effective and efficient at converting sunlight and precipitation into value, over the long term, than any other technology humans have yet designed.
This becomes clear when comparing biological systems in general with non-living technologies. Consider a photovoltaic panel or wind turbine. Each requires large and damaging inputs to generate single outputs. What are the inputs for a photovoltaic panel? Bauxite from which to smelt the aluminum frame, silicon and numerous other minerals (many only found in difficult-to-access and a dwindling number of places on the planet), and myriad other mined and smelted metals and minerals. These all must be mined, transported, refined, transported again, then fabricated, then shipped again. All for one output: electricity.
What are the inputs required for a nut tree? An exchange between breeder and planter, transporting of the seed or seedling, some woodchip mulch, rain, and sunshine. And time. What are its yields? Oxygen, soil, wildlife food and housing, moisture retention, carbon sequestration, air filtration, human food, stock feed, building materials, shade, windbreak, and beauty, to name a few.
The former resource path – the abiotic – provides us with a practical service at great cost. The latter, biological (or “soft”) path creates an enduring and generative legacy of positive value. And whereas a solar panel or wind turbine or green building offers diminishing yields over time, a nut tree’s output actually increases, for at least the first century or two of its lifetime.
Such is the power – and imperative – of biological systems: they are the only means we have of sidestepping entropy, at least for significant periods of time, on this planet. That’s what tips the balance; it all comes down to capture, storage, and transfer. The best system is the one that can harvest the most sunlight and moisture, then store that value for the longest period of time while converting some of it into products and services that other living things, like humans, can use. And biological systems do this very well, while non-living mechanical systems cannot.
tags: environment, environmentalism, Vermont
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