They’re also chipping away at the most fundamental freedom of all: the right to vote – restricting everything from mail-in voting to ballot dropboxes.
But their chipping away at freedom is even bigger than all this.
Can you really be free if you’re saddled with medical debt and have to routinely pay outrageous health care costs?
Can you really be free if you have no voice in your workplace and your employer refuses to let you organize with your coworkers for the right to collectively bargain?
Can you really be free if you’re not paid a living wage and have to choose between feeding your family or keeping your lights on?
A living wage, the right to join a union, guaranteed healthcare, the right to vote – these are the foundations of real freedom.
Yet Republicans oppose all of these.
There’s a reason the historic 1963 rally was called The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Because freedom also means the ability to work in a job that pays enough to provide food, clothing, shelter, and medical care.
What Republicans want to preserve isn’t freedom, it’s power. The power to impose their narrow ideology on everyone else, no matter who suffers. Don’t let their propaganda convince you otherwise.
Early in 2020, as the pandemic gripped the nation, JPMorgan Chase offered to help customers weather the crisis by taking a temporary pause on mortgage, auto and credit card payments. Chase’s CEO, Jamie Dimon, sounded sympathetic about a year later as he offered broader reflections on what was ailing the country. “Americans know that something has gone terribly wrong,” he wrote in a letter to shareholders. “Many of our citizens are unsettled, and the fault line for all this discord is a fraying American dream — the enormous wealth of our country is accruing to the very few. In other words, the fault line is inequality.”
But even as those words were published, the bank had quietly begun to unleash a lawsuit blitz against many of its struggling customers. Starting in early 2020 and continuing to today, Chase has filed thousands of lawsuits against credit card customers who have fallen behind on their payments.
Chase had stopped pursuing credit card lawsuits in 2011, in the wake of the last major economic downturn, after regulators found that the company was filing tens of thousands of flimsy suits, sometimes overstating what customers owed. Rather than being backed by extensive billing records to document the debts, according to the regulators, the suits were typically filed with a short affidavit from one of a half-dozen Chase employees in one office in San Antonio who vouched for the accuracy of the bank’s information in thousands of suits.
Chase “filed lawsuits and obtained judgments against consumers using deceptive affidavits and other documents that were prepared without following required procedures,” the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau concluded in 2015. At times, Chase employees signed affidavits “without personal knowledge of the signer, a practice commonly referred to as ‘robo-signing.’” According to the CFPB’s findings, there were mistakes in about 10% of cases Chase won and the judgments “contained erroneous amounts that were greater than what the consumers legally owed.”
Chase neither admitted nor denied the CFPB’s findings, but it agreed, as part of a consent order, to provide significant evidence to make its cases in the future. The company also agreed it would provide “relevant information and documentation maintained by [Chase] to support their claims” in cases — the vast majority of those it filed — in which customers did not respond to the lawsuit.
But that provision expired on New Year’s Day 2020. And since then the bank has gone back to bringing lawsuits much as it did before 2011, according to lawyers who have defended Chase customers.
“From what I can see, nothing has changed,” said Cliff Dorsen, a consumer-rights attorney in Georgia who represents Chase credit card customers.
Chase declined to make executives available for interviews. It said in a statement that the timing of the resumption of its credit card lawsuits was just a coincidence. “We have engaged with our regulators throughout this process,” said Tom Kelly, a bank spokesperson. “We continue to meet the requirements of the consent order.” (Kelly said Chase also filed some credit card lawsuits in 2019.)
Kelly declined to say how many suits it has filed in its blitz of the past two years, but civil dockets from across the country give a hint of the scale — and its accelerating pace. Chase sued more than 800 credit card customers around Fort Lauderdale, Florida, last year after suing 70 in 2020 and none in 2019, according to a review of court records. In Westchester County, in New York’s suburbs, court records show that Chase has sued more than 400 customers over credit card debt since 2020; a year earlier, the equivalent figure was one.
A similar surge is occurring in Texas, according to January Advisors, a data-science firm. Chase filed more than 1,000 consumer debt lawsuits around Houston last year after filing only seven in 2020, the analytics firm’s review of court records in Harris County shows. Chase instigated 141 consumer debt cases in Austin last year after filing only one such case in 2020, according to January Advisors, which is conducting research for a nationwide study ofdebt collection cases.
Today, just as it did before running afoul of the CFPB, Chase is mass-producing affidavits from the same San Antonio office where low-level employees generated hundreds of thousands of affidavits in the past, according to defense attorneys and court documents. Those affidavits are often the main piece of evidence that Chase uses to win its case while detailed customer records — and any errors they may contain — remain out of sight.
“Our clients deserve to see everything that Chase has in its files,” Dorsen said. “Instead, Chase gives us these affidavits and says: ‘You can trust us about the rest.’”
Before the robo-signing scandal a decade ago, Chase recovered about a billion dollars a year with its credit card collections business, according to the CFPB. Why would Chase stop suing customers for years, forgoing billions of dollars, only to ramp up its suits once key provisions of the CFPB settlement had expired?
Craig Cowie thinks he has an answer. “Chase did not think it could make money if it had to sue customers and abide by the CFPB settlement,” said Cowie, who worked as an enforcement attorney at the CFPB during the Obama administration and now teaches at the University of Montana Law School. “That’s the only explanation that makes sense for why the bank would have held back.”
Cowie, who did not work on the CFPB’s case against Chase, said he doesn’t know why the agency agreed to a time limit on some settlement provisions. He pointed out that such agreements are negotiated and the CFPB cannot just dictate the terms. The agency may have felt it had to let some provisions of the settlement expire to get Chase to agree to the deal, Cowie said.
The CFPB declined to comment.
For its part, Chase said it waited years to restart its lawsuits because it took that long to get the system working right. “We rebuilt the litigation program slowly and methodically to make sure we had the right controls in place,” said its spokesperson, Kelly.
At the time, the CFPB had found numerous flaws in Chase’s suits. The agency concluded that Chase used “unfair” legal tactics when it promised that its credit card account information was reliable and mistake-free. It wasn’t simply a matter of errors in calculating how much was owed; in some cases the company even got the customer’s name wrong. Chase would sometimes pass accounts with errors — including instances where customers had been victims of credit card fraud, others who had tried to settle their debts and even some who had died — on to outside debt collectors, who might then take action based on that information.
Once Chase won a victory in court, the bank could seek to garnish a customer’s wages or raid their bank accounts, and those customers would pay a further price: a stain on their credit report that could make it harder to “obtain credit, employment, housing, and insurance,” the CFPB wrote.
Those sued by Chase, then and now, might spot errors if the company provided full records in its court filings, consumer advocates say. Instead, Chase typically submits copies of a few credit card statements along with a two-page affidavit attesting that the bank’s records were accurate and complete.
Consumer advocates say they do not expect that the majority of Chase’s credit card records are tainted with errors. But if today’s error rate is the same 10% that the CFPB estimated in the past and the Chase lawsuit push continues, thousands of customers may be sued for money they don’t owe. And there is no easy way to check when Chase keeps so many of its records out of sight.
Chase said that its current system for processing credit card lawsuits is sound and reliable. “We quality-check 100% of our affidavits today,” the company said in a statement.
Credit card customers do not respond to collections lawsuits in roughly 70% of cases, according to research from The Pew Charitable Trusts. In those instances, the customer typically loses by default.
In the small percentage of cases where a customer gets a lawyer or otherwise fights back, Chase still has the advantage because it can access all of the customer’s account records easily, according to consumer lawyers. (The bank typically closes accounts of customers who have failed to pay their debts, leaving them unable to access their records online.) Chase usually shares the complete credit card account file only after a legal fight, according to attorneys and pleadings from across the country. “Chase has all the evidence and we have to beg to get it,” said Jerry Jarzombek, a consumer-rights attorney in Fort Worth, Texas, who is defending several Chase customers.
The result leaves many defendants in a bind: They don’t have enough information to know whether they should dispute the company’s claims. “Chase wants us to believe its records are reliable so we don’t need to see them,” Jarzombek said. “Well, I’m sorry. I’ve dealt with Chase for decades. I’d prefer to see what evidence they’ve actually got.”
The robo-signing scandal exposed Chase’s affidavit-signing assembly line. Before the settlement, Chase had about a half-dozen employees churning through affidavits stacked a foot high or taller, according to the former Chase executive who brought the practices to light at the time. Kamala Harris, who was then California’s attorney general and is now vice president, likened the process to anaffidavit mill.
The current operation involves roughly a dozen “signing officers” working from the same San Antonio offices as before and performing many of the same tasks, according to Chase employees and outside lawyers who have represented the company.
Chase used to prepare affidavits “in bulk using stock templates,” according to the 2015 CFPB findings. That is again happening today, according to two of Chase’s outside lawyers who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the process.
The lawyers said they typically send their affidavit requests in batches. The requests already contain the basic details of the customer’s account when they arrive in Chase’s San Antonio office, they said. An affidavit request that is sent one day can typically be processed and returned the next business day, the lawyers said.
Chase affidavits contain stock language that the “signing officer” has “personal knowledge of and access to [Chase’s] books and records.” That “personal knowledge” is limited, said one signing officer who declined to be named. Chase does not expect signing officers to perform a forensic review of an account but rather to follow computer prompts to complete the affidavit, said the employee. “We just work with what’s on the screen.”
Chase declined to discuss its process for creating affidavits, but the bank said it satisfies the rules set by courts in the places where it operates. “Judges, clerks and other judiciary staff are well versed in the court rules and laws in their jurisdictions,” said the statement by the bank’s spokesperson, Kelly. “Through our counsel, we provide the information those parties require in matters before them.”
Courts around the country have grown too accepting of what big banks and debt collectors say, according to consumer advocates. And the justice they dispense can feel as cursory and hurried as the suits that Chase files.
In Texas a decade ago, lawmakers pushed most credit card cases into the state’s version of small claims courts, known as justice courts. The rules of evidence are more lax there and the judge might not even be a lawyer. A retired basketball player presides over one suchcourtroom in Houston. “One of these judges said to me: ‘What’s the point of seeing a bunch of evidence? We already know these people borrowed the money,’” said Jarzombek, the Fort Worth attorney. “I said: ‘Why even have a trial, then? Let the banks take whatever they want.’”
In Houston, where Chase has more than 1,000 consumer credit suits on the docket, only one defendant in those cases has fought to a trial on her own, according to court records.
That person’s experience is instructive. Like many, Melissa Razo struggled financially during the early pandemic. A former restaurant manager, the 42-year-old Razo had gone back to school, the University of Houston, to study psychology, and she supported herself by doing typing for an online transcription service. That work suddenly dried up when the pandemic hit, and Razo began missing credit card payments. Her debt escalated. Chase sued her in January 2021, claiming she owed a total of about $8,500 on two credit cards.
Razo had a previous court experience stemming from an acrimonious divorce, where she had learned that a plaintiff needs facts and evidence to win. “Nothing I presented was good enough,” she recalled of the divorce case.
Using what she’d learned, Razo prepared for her day in court against Chase. She could not access her account anymore, she said, because the bank had shut it down. So in late June, as her hearing date approached, Razo pulled together as many of her credit card statements as she could find. They told a story of grocery runs and shopping at Target and Goodwill, along with missed payments and penalties.
Razo presumed Chase would have to back up its claims just as she had been expected to do in divorce court. She expected the company’s lawyers would have five years of statements and documents to show that she owed exactly what they said she owed. This was a trial, after all.
The trial lasted perhaps a minute, according to Razo. It boiled down to two questions. Was Razo present? the judge asked over Zoom. When she announced herself, the judge asked if she had a Chase credit card. Yes, Razo said, that was true. Then, she said, the judge ruled in favor of Chase.
Chase declined to comment on the case. The judge was not authorized to speak about the matter, according to a court clerk. And the justice courts do not transcribe their hearings, so ProPublica could not verify what was said. (The court’s docket did confirm that a judgment was entered in Chase’s favor after a judge trial.)
Razo’s courtroom experience, though, sounds typical, according to Rich Tomlinson, a lawyer with Lone Star Legal Aid. “I can’t recall ever seeing a live witness in a debt case,” said Tomlinson, who has represented hundreds of debtors in his career. “These trials are not like Perry Mason. They’re not even Judge Judy.”
ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
People everywhere are waking up to the realization that they must fight to organize the world in such a way that there is a sustainable future for humanity and the planet.
Above: Photo credit, NASA
Last month’s COP26 climate summit at Glasgow ended as a complete flop. While some have hailed as success the mere inclusion of the phrase “unabated coal should be phased down” in the final agreement, the fact of the matter is that the transition from fossil fuels to clean energy remains a distant dream. It should also be obvious to all that the climate deal reached at COP26 in no way prevents planetary temperature from crossing the 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold.
Under such a socioeconomic system, it is highly unlikely that the political establishment will dare to embark on a climate action course that might prove detrimental to powerful economic interests.
But let’s be blunt about rising global temperatures. Thanks to the failure of politics with regard to global warming, the critical threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius will be reached or exceeded within the next couple of decades under all emissions scenarios considered, according to IPCCS’ latest findings. The only question is whether we can prevent the planet from getting even hotter—potentially passing 2 degrees or even 3 degrees Celsius.
Indeed, our national leaders have failed us on climate change, and we know the reasons why.
I explained this in a recent Op-Ed for Al Jazeera English.
“First, leaders sit on climate negotiating tables with the intent to advance an agenda that serves above all their own national interests rather than the health of our planet. Their mindset is still guided by the principles of “political realism” and political short-termism. This is why their words are not matching up with their actions.
Thus, Joe Biden can make a moral pronouncement to world leaders at COP26 in Glasgow that the US will lead the fight against the climate crisis “by example”, but, less than two weeks later, his administration auctions oil and gas leases in the Gulf of Mexico.
Second, the nation-state remains the primary actor in world affairs, so there are no international enforcement mechanisms with regard to pledges about cutting emissions. International cooperation, let alone solidarity, is extremely difficult to attain under the existing political order, and as leading international affairs scholar Richard Falk has argued, “Only a transnational ethos of human solidarity based on the genuine search for win/win solutions at home and transnationally can respond effectively to the magnitude and diversity of growing climate change challenges.”Third, “the logic of capitalism” guides the world economy. With profit-maximization as the ultimate motive, capitalism is toxic for the environment, especially in its neoliberal version, with a strong emphasis on deregulation and privatization.
Under such a socioeconomic system, it is highly unlikely that the political establishment will dare to embark on a climate action course that might prove detrimental to powerful economic interests.” But all is not yet lost. Climate activism is now a global movement, and it is surely our only way out of the climate conundrum. An estimated 100,000 people marched in Glasgow, and tens of thousands in other cities around the world, demanding bold action at the COP26 climate conference. Global warming demonstrations are filled with people of all ages and walks of life. Scores of scientists were arrested during the COP26 summit for carrying out various acts of civil disobedience.
To be sure, real leadership at the Glasgow summit was on display by the thousands of activists who took to the streets—not by the diplomats inside the halls of the Scottish Event Campus.
Moreover, we should not overlook the fact that some progress has indeed been made in the fight against global warming. The European Union is trying to make more than 100 cities carbon neutral by 2030. In Latin America and the Caribbean, in Asia and the Pacific, hundreds of climate projects have been introduced to combat fight the climate crisis.
Progressive economists, like those at the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) of the University of Massachusetts–Amherst, are taking real steps to help us combat global warming by producing highly detailed climate stabilization programs that drive sustainability while boosting employment. Indeed, Robert Pollin and some of his co-workers at PERI have brought the Green New Deal project to the forefront of public consciousness in scores of U.S. states. They are also hard at work now to spread it to other countries of the world.
Within the same context, organizations such as ReImagine Appalachia in the Ohio River Valley are laying the groundwork for a post-fossil fuel economy. Through both grassroots and grasstops initiatives, ReImagine Appalachia has engaged a wide variety of stakeholders in a shared vision of building a sustainable future based on clean and renewable energy sources and investments in the natural infrastructure to support “carbon farming,” but also through the creation of good union jobs for low-wage workers and by ensuring a just transition for all towards an environmentally sustainable economy, including of course workers in the extractive industries. As Amanda Woodrum, Senior Researcher, Policy Matters Ohio, and Co-Director, Project to ReImagine Appalachia likes to say, this is the only way that “Appalachia stays on the climate table, otherwise it will be on the menu.”
In the state with the largest economy in the United States, a detailed project of building a clean-energy infrastructure and reducing emissions by 50 percent as of 2030 and achieving a zero-emissions economy by 2045 has received strong support by more than 20 major unions across the state, including the United Steel Workers Locals 5, 675 and 1945 (who represent workers in the fossil fuel supply chain). The latest union to endorse the California Climate Jobs Plan, outlined in Program for Economic Recovery and Clean Energy Transition in California by Robert Pollin and his co-workers at PERI, is the San Fransisco Region of the Inland Boatman’s Union.
Indeed, labor activism in California is in the midst of a dramatic resurgence, with key labor union leaders and organizers such as, among others, Tracey Brieger, Dave Campbell, Norman Rogers, and Veronica Wilson, keen to continue the legacy of Tony Mazzocchi of the Chemical and Atomic Workers International Union. Mazzocchi was one of the earliest environmental activist leaders who advocated the idea of just transition for workers in carbon-intensive industries. His view, which is at the core of “Just Transition,” was that helping displaced workers should not be seen as philanthropy or welfare. According to Mazzocchi, those who had worked to “provide the world with the energy and the materials it needs deserve a helping hand to make a new start in life.”
There is no shortage of activism in today’s world. The Green New Deal Network, a coalition of 15 progressive organizations working together with the explicit aim of mobilizing grassroot power in order to advance the vision of the Green New Deal across key states, while also applying pressure at the federal level, is yet another case emblematic of the important shift taking place in a world where the conditions for the transition to a sustainable and just future are being so blatantly ignored by the political establishment.
People everywhere are waking up to the realization that they must fight to organize the world in such a way that there is a sustainable future for humanity and the planet. They know that they have a world to win.
Originally published on Common Dreams by C.J. POLYCHRONIOU and republished under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Above:Photo Collage / Lynxotic / Original Image by ICIJ
“U.S. President Biden must match his own rhetoric on shutting down global illicit finance, and start with the biggest offender—his own country.”
The leak of an enormous trove of tax haven files over the weekend offered a further glimpse into the secretive world of offshore finance—a system facilitated by the U.S. and other rich nations—and prompted calls for immediate changes to global rules that let the powerful hide their wealth, skirt their obligations, and starve governments of crucial revenue.
“This is where our missing hospitals are,” Susana Ruiz, the tax policy lead at Oxfam International, said in a statement. “This is where the pay-packets sit of all the extra teachers and firefighters and public servants we need. Whenever a politician or business leader claims there is ‘no money’ to pay for climate damage and innovation, for more and better jobs, for a fair post-Covid recovery, for more overseas aid, they know where to look.”
“Tax havens cost governments around the world $427 billion each year,” Ruiz added. “That is the equivalent of a nurse’s yearly salary every second of every hour, every day. Ordinary taxpayers have to pick up the pieces. Developing countries are being hardest hit, proportionately. Corporations and the wealthiest individuals that use tax havens are out-competing those who don’t. Tax havens also help crime and corruption to flourish.”
Like the 2016 Panama Papers, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists’ (ICIJ) Pandora Papers shine additional light on the functioning of a “shadow economy” that world leaders, celebrities, and billionaire business moguls—including some accused of egregious crimes—are exploiting to shield trillions of dollars in assets from transparency and taxation.
The 11.9 million files obtained, analyzed, and leaked by the ICIJ reveal the closely-guarded financial maneuverings of more than 330 politicians and top public officials from nearly 100 countries and territories, including dozens of current national leaders.
“The secret documents expose offshore dealings of the King of Jordan, the presidents of Ukraine, Kenya, and Ecuador, the prime minister of the Czech Republic, and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair,” ICIJ notes in a summary of its sprawling cache of documents. “The files also detail financial activities of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s ‘unofficial minister of propaganda’ and more than 130 billionaires from Russia, the United States, Turkey, and other nations.”
The trove also links prominent athletes, models, and artists to offshore assets, including India’s famous cricketer Sachin Tendulkar, pop music star Shakira, and supermodel Claudia Schiffer.
But Alex Cobham, chief executive of the Tax Justice Network, cautioned that a narrow focus on the individuals who have made use of an international tax system rigged in their favor diverts attention from the institutions and countries that have done the rigging.
“These personal actions are shameful and will no doubt come under great scrutiny in the coming days, but it’s important that we don’t lose sight of one crucial fact: few of the individuals had any role in turning the global tax system into an ATM for the superrich,” Cobham wrote in a blog post on Sunday. “That honor goes to the professional enablers—banks, law firms, and accountants—and the countries that facilitate them.”
Cobham observed that the Pandora Papers—the product of a nearly two-year investigation by more than 600 journalists in 117 countries and territories—confirm that the United States is “the world’s biggest peddler of financial secrecy.”
“The biggest blockers to transparency are the U.S. … and the U.K., the leader of the world’s biggest tax haven network,” Cobham wrote. “We need full transparency so we can hold tax abusers accountable, especially when our politicians are among them. U.S. President Biden must match his own rhetoric on shutting down global illicit finance, and start with the biggest offender—his own country.”
This is fundamental – every government leader should match this commitment, and then hold themselves publicly accountable by publishing results of each investigation https://t.co/2MiospKxuR
— Alex Cobham @alexcobham@mastodon.social (@alexcobham) October 3, 2021
As the ICIJ notes, the new files show in some detail “how the United States, in particular, has become an increasingly attractive destination for hidden wealth, although the U.S. and its Western allies condemn smaller countries for allowing the flow of money and assets tied to corruption and crime.”
“The Pandora Papers include documents from 206 U.S. trusts in 15 states and Washington, D.C., and 22 U.S. trustee companies,” the ICIJ points out. “The documents provide details about the movement of hundreds of millions of dollars from offshore havens in the Caribbean and Europe into South Dakota, a sparsely populated American state that has become a major destination for foreign money.”
“We in the U.S. should be embarrassed that we’ve become a magnet for kleptocratic funds,” said Chuck Collins, director of the Program on Inequality and the Common Good at the Institute for Policy Studies.
Conspicuously absent from the Pandora Papers is any mention of the wealthiest people in the U.S., including Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Warren Buffett, and Jeff Bezos—the richest man in the world. But as the Washington Postexplains, that could be because “the uber-rich in the United States tend to pay such low tax rates that they have less incentive to seek offshore havens.”
In response to the Pandora Papers revelations, Oxfam called on world governments to crack down on tax havens by taking a number of steps, including:
Ending tax secrecy on individuals, offshores, and multinational corporations. Set up a public register on the real owners of bank accounts, trusts, shell companies, and assets. Require multinational corporations to publicly report their accounts where they do business, country-by-country.
Increasing the use of automatic exchange, allowing revenue authorities access to information they need to track the money.
Ending corporate profit shifting to tax havens via new rules, and by setting a global minimum tax under the OECD’s BEPS deal, ideally of around 25%.
Agreeing a global blacklist of tax havens and taking counter measures, including sanctions, to limit their use.
Setting a new global agenda on taxing wealth and capital fairly; addressing tax competition between countries on high-net-worth-individuals, either on income or wealth, against agreed standards.
“Governments’ promises to end tax havens are still a long way from being realized,” said Ruiz. “We cannot allow tax havens to continue to stretch global inequality to breaking point while the world experiences the largest increase in extreme poverty in decades.”
Originally published on Common Dreams by JAKE JOHNSON and republished under a Creative Commons License (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
“We continue to bankroll the very fossil fuel companies responsible for the climate crisis, then wonder why our planet is on fire.”
A new report released Wednesday identifies $86 billion worth of offshore tax loopholes that a dozen U.S.-based oil and gas companies exploit each year as part of a “tax bonanza,” a finding that comes as climate justice advocates push Congress to eliminate subsidies to the fossil fuel industry.
“Our government cannot continue to bankroll climate destruction,” Friends of the Earth tweeted Wednesday.
NEW REPORT: Exxon Mobil currently relies on a tax loophole worth nearly one BILLION dollars. Enough is enough — time to gut all $121 billion in fossil fuel subsidies. Our government cannot continue to bankroll climate destruction.#EndFossilFuelSubsidieshttps://t.co/1gdN6oEgQt
The report (pdf), compiled by Friends of the Earth, Oxfam America, and BailoutWatch, reveals the consequences of “two esoteric provisions in the tax code worth tens of billions of dollars to Big Oil’s multinational majors,” including ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and other polluters most responsible for the climate emergency.
As a result of the GOP’s 2017 tax law, corporations that drill overseas benefit from special treatment under the Global Intangible Low-Tax (GILTI) framework, which covers Foreign Oil and Gas Extraction Income (FOGEI).
The Treasury Department estimates that repealing the Trump-era exemption for FOGEI would raise $84.8 billion in revenue from just 12 companies that are currently eligible for the carveout, the report notes.
“It is unfortunate but not surprising that the handful of companies benefitting from these loopholes are lobbying to protect their special treatment.” —Chrive Kuveke, BailoutWatch
Another corporate handout, the so-called dual capacity loophole, is “a longstanding gimmick” wherein fossil fuel giants “artificially inflat[e] their foreign tax bills” to evade U.S. taxes.
Although they are permitted to claim tax credits for taxes paid to foreign governments, U.S. companies are not allowed to do so for non-tax payments such as royalties.
“In practice, however, the categories often are commingled—particularly when companies make a single combined payment including both taxes and fees,” the report explains. “A foreign country may even try to disguise non-tax payments as a tax, knowing that in many cases a multinational company may receive a foreign tax credit from its home country. Existing regulation gives dual capacity taxpayers vast latitude to assert what portions of their payments are taxes eligible to offset U.S. tax bills.”
Eliminating the dual capacity loophole would raise at least an additional $1.4 billion, according to the Biden administration, while the Joint Committee on Taxation puts the figure somewhere between $5.6 billion and $13.1 billion. The report points out that “the estimates vary so widely in part because we have precious little visibility into Big Oil’s payments to governments—and that’s just how the companies want it.”
“As Democrats propose closing loopholes to help cover the cost of their $3.5 trillion reconciliation package,” the report states, “these obscure subsidies present a rare chance to act on climate, fund infrastructure, and promote tax fairness in a single stroke.”
While the House Ways and Means Committee’s markup of the Build Back Better Act includes a tax reform proposal that would reverse the FOGEI carveout and the dual capacity loophole, it would leave intact at least $35 billion in federal subsidies for domestic fossil fuel production—despite President Joe Biden’s call to phase out polluter giveaways over a decade.
House Democrats’ failure to stop showering Big Oil with public money—a move supported by a majority of people in the U.S. and many, though not all, Democratic lawmakers—has drawn progressives’ ire.
“The House bill made a decent start by targeting Big Oil’s international tax loopholes, but it went nowhere near far enough,” Lukas Ross, Climate and Energy Justice program manager at Friends of the Earth, said Wednesday in a statement.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) “needs to lead on climate and ensure that all $121 billion in fossil fuel subsidies are repealed in the final package,” Ross added.
According to Daniel Mulé, policy lead for Oxfam’s Extractive Industries Tax and Transparency project, “U.S. Big Oil companies like Exxon and Chevron have fought tooth and nail to keep the payments they make to governments around the world a secret, while paying lip service to the global movement for payment transparency.”
“This secrecy,” said Mulé, “has a potential tax impact in the U.S. as well, as it makes it all the more difficult to discern if U.S. oil and gas companies are illegitimately inflating their foreign tax credits.”
The report draws attention to several legislative proposals that would do away with subsidies for domestic fossil fuel production as well as tax exemptions for foreign extraction, including:
The No Tax Breaks for Outsourcing Act from Sens. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), and Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), and Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas);
The Corporate Tax Dodging Prevention Act from Sens. Van Hollen, Sanders, Whitehouse, Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), and Jack Reed (D-R.I.), and Reps. Jimmy Gomez (D-Calif.) and Jan Schakowski (D-Ill.);
The End Oil and Gas Tax Subsidies Act from Reps. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.), Sean Casten (D-Ill.), Donald McEachin (D-Va.), and Katie Porter (D-Calif.).
The report was released the same day members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus urged House leaders to include a repeal of domestic fossil fuel subsidies in the Democrats’ Build Back Better Act.
“Instead of creating jobs,” the progressive lawmakers wrote, the subsidies “widen the profit margin of fossil fuel companies.”
We continue to bankroll the very fossil fuel companies responsible for the climate crisis, then wonder why our planet is on fire.
Thank you to the reps calling for an end to Big Oil’s $86 billion in offshore tax loopholes — as well as their $35 billion in domestic handouts! pic.twitter.com/hY0EVsOMK4
The report emphasizes that fossil fuel champions—including the Exxon lobbyist who was caught on camera discussing how the company benefits from offshore tax loopholes and intends to further undermine climate action—are fighting hard to preserve billions of dollars in taxpayer-funded handouts.
“Big Oil isn’t going quietly,” said Chrive Kuveke, an analyst at BailoutWatch. “Since Biden became president, it is unfortunate but not surprising that the handful of companies benefitting from these loopholes are lobbying to protect their special treatment.”
“The stench of corruption wafting up from Louis DeJoy’s office is so thick seagulls are flying in from the Jersey Shore and circling overhead.”
A leading government ethics watchdog on Wednesday cheered a federal judge’s ruling ordering the United States Postal Service to hand over documents concerning potential conflicts of interest involving embattled Postmaster General Louis DeJoy.
U.S. District Judge John D. Bates on Tuesday granted Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) a full summary judgment (pdf) and orderedthe United States Postal Service (USPS) to give the advocacy group seven documents it requested under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
USPS claimed the documents were FOIA-exempt. According toLaw & Crime, “Four of the documents concerned a request for a certificate of divestiture from DeJoy and the remaining three concern his recusal from matters where he may have a conflict of interest.”
Over the past seven years, the USPS has reportedly paid approximately $286 million to XPO Logistics, DeJoy’s ex-employer, and has “ramped up its business” with the company since DeJoy’s appointment as postmaster general. After his appointment, DeJoy continued to hold financial interests in XPO totaling between $30 and $75 million. DeJoy also held a significant amount of stock in Amazon, a major USPS competitor.
Earlier this month, Common Dreamsreported on growing calls to fire DeJoy following the revelation by The Washington Post that USPS will pay XPO Logistics $120 million over the next five years. Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) responded to the Post report by calling DeJoy a “walking conflict of interest.”
Last Friday, a Postreport that DeJoy had purchased hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of publicly traded bonds from Brookfield Asset Management—where USPS Board of Governors Chair Ron Bloom is a managing partner—fueled further calls for DeJoy’s termination, with Connolly calling Bloom and the postmaster general “bandits” whose “conflicts of interest do nothing but harm the Postal Service and the American people.”
CREW communications director Jordan Libowitz called Bates’ order “a big win not just for CREW, but for transparency advocates everywhere.”
“DeJoy’s decision-making as postmaster general has raised some serious ethical questions—now we should finally get some answers,” Libowitz added.
Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-N.J.) on Monday sent President Joe Biden a letter urging him to sack everyone former President Donald Trump appointed to the USPS board. Pascrell welcomed the Tuesday court order and reiterated his call for Biden to fire Trump appointees and “show DeJoy the door now before it’s too late.”
DeJoy and six of the nine USPS governors, including Bloom, were appointed by Trump; the rest are Biden appointees.
In addition to the alleged conflicts of interest in connection with XPO Logistics and Brookfield Asset Management, CREW, in advocating DeJoy’s ouster, notes that:
DeJoy and his wife, a former U.S. ambassador to Canada, got their jobs after contributing $2 million to Trump’s campaign coffers;
DeJoy is the first person in decades to lead the USPS without any previous experience in the agency;
DeJoy is under federal investigation for allegedly operating a scheme where he asked employees of his former company to make campaign contributions, then arranged for bonus payments to reimburse the employees; and
DeJoy apparently violated federal criminal laws by commanding the USPS to make policy changes at the agency that would depress or delay voting by mail in the 2020 election.
“Bottom line: Louis DeJoy has overseen an attack on the Postal Service and on American democracy itself,” CREW tweeted Wednesday. “The USPS Board of Governors must fire him before it’s too late.”
This is a tiny snippet from an upcoming exposé of the inner workings of the nightmare produced by Facebook, Google and Amazon
Isn’t it funny that the so called bursting of the dot-com bubble in 2000 which resulted in a nearly 75% drop in the tech heavy NASDAQ index by March, 2000. Ultimately, among survivors and upstarts, the winner-takes-all saga led to no less than three trillion dollar companies.
If the internet is, or at lest was, a dead end for any company trying to profit, how could these few have profited so obscenely in such a short time?
Most of the answers to that question attempted for the last two decades have been blatant hero worship and “to the victors go the spoils” nonsense with hardly any media attention paid (at least until around 2016) to the deeper, and darker, story that explains this regrettable paradox.
While the truth, particularly when it comes to tech and the internet, is often maddeningly complex, hiding behind a veil of complexity is a standard technique for anyone wants to keep their billion dollar golden geese a secret, shell companies, offshore banking, derivatives and “CDOs” and the like all benefit from being opaque and complex.
And while the absolute details would take mountains of pages to explain, mainly to explain away all the contradictions, the base issues are at the same time, in many ways, insanely simple.
Fraud, Ponzi schemes, illegal monopolistic behavior, all the usual suspects are not only present but rampant and rancid like a planet sized pile of moldy cheese.
And those are the larger threads, the ones that fit into a framework of past anti-trust cases and prior greed fueled crime sprees.
The devil as they say, is always in the details. Here are a few, some general and others much more specific, that point to how we could have gotten to this absurd destination.
Google and the “hiding engine” from hell
Click to see “Goliath” and help Lynxotic and all independent bookstores
While it is lovely that Google “allows” us to find out Lucille Ball’s birthday with a single click – or the capital of Afghanistan just as easily, what if you are looking for something a little less obvious? What if the information you need is worth something? What if you need fair, honest advice or even wisdom?
You’re out of luck. Since the entire basis for this business to to charge you (or somebody, regardless) for information that is, in reality, publicly available (the internet is public after all and the information on it does not belong to google), the primary function of Google’s vaunted trillion dollar algorithm is to hide any information of value from you until they have extracted a price.
Since they are known as a “search engine” this is counterintuitive but it will make more sense as we delve into the other two “winners” of the dot-com era. Each of these three companies share this one thing in common. They are all build to exclude, hide and criminally manipulate essentially public information for the benefit of a private enterprise. k?
Facebook and the lure of “exclusive membership”
As has been well documented, to the extent of having been memorialized in a feature length hollywood film, the fast start in membership that Facebook achieved was based on two “triggers” related to exclusivity and “hiding” of information. The first was, during the initial launch at harvard and for a period of time at various other colleges and universities, a requirement for membership was “proof” that you were a student in the form of an “edu” suffixed email. This added popularity to the site as those joining felt they had not only potential access to others where they went to school, but also would not be associating with non-students, or in the extreme initial example, not socializing with non-harvard people.
Click to see “World Without Mind” and help Lynxotic and all independent bookstores
While this seems innocuous enough and a great marketing ploy, indeed it was heralded as genius by hundreds of sycophantic scribes, the next bit is where the system that exists to this day became an engine for corporate greed at the expense of virtually the entire world population.
Once you join Facebook, you are “allowed” to have contact only with “friends” that authorize you to do so. But the recommendations for “friending” those people, other than from your own laborious manual searching, are controlled by Facebooks algorithms.
This is a familiar tune. The real purpose of this structure was not to give you exclusivity or for you to benefit from the “wisdom” of the algorithm, but to block private and, in particular, business entities from coming in contact with you without first paying Facebook. In other words, using its log-in membership system and proprietary software labyrinth as a private, separate internet sphere, it was able to build the largest network of phantom tool booths the world has ever seen and now collects hundreds of billions simply because “the public” has opted-in and has no idea what an open alternative would look like or the damage that has been done by this harmless seeming “social platform”.
The real potential of networked human communications, a.k.a. the internet, is almost totally lost to history, with the surviving structure entirely based on the systems that these three giants have constructed with a view to nothing more than private, personal enrichment.
While this opinion may seem harsh, looking at the inner workings of the software and who financially benefits vs. who loses (a.k.a. everybody else) will, in time expose one of the greatest swindles ever perpetrated on the public, in this case the entire world population, or at least the population of internet users across the globe.
Amazon and the alleged layers of deceit and corruption beyond all imaginings
It is fairly common these days to hear criticism of Amazon and “worlds richest man” Bezos, which is understandable since the operation is so massive and, like any huge concern, likely to step on a few toes here and there, regardless.
Naturally there is also plenty of hero worship, particularly the insane love of “Bezonomics” and a cult of personality toward the founder and CEO for, well, stepping on the most faces of any human, other than perhaps Genghis Kahn.
Again, the real devil is in the details. It is easy to defend any criticism of the company by pointing out the “good” that it has done or continues to do and to create a “straw man” argument that the company should somehow get “credit” for those things and that they somehow offset any valid critique.
That is like saying someone who succeeded in getting elected president by bribing millions of voters should therefore be allowed to wage war or imprison anyone he likes since he has earned “credit” by doing right by those who were bribed.
There a little story, told to us by an anonymous source, who’s stories have all checked out before, that illustrates the system at work when you step onto the private property of Amazon’s web site.
Click to see “Life After Google“ and help Lynxotic and all independent bookstores
Again search is at the center of the story, as is the requirement to log in and agree to terms and conditions. This is tantamount to agreeing that you are leaving the public sphere and are agreeing to abide by the rules and be subject to the whims of the private entity on whose “sole property” you are now “standing” / shopping.
In that private world Amazon, and by extension Bezos, not only play god, they are god.
To illustrate this fact let’s say you have a 7 year-old child that loves a certain children’s character and you want to buy a book that has “pop-up” cut-outs to entertain and delight. And this exact item can be found via “search”.
Naturally, you type in the name of the book or character and perhaps add “pop-up”. What shows up in the “search” results is exactly what you are looking for. It’s the precise item and it looks exactly as you had hoped. Then you look at the price. $50. Hmmm that’s a little high you think. With a little further research you find out that the “MSRP” for this item, a.k.a. the list price is $30 which seems a bit odd.
You keep trying to search and click any link on the site that will lead you to the same item at a more reasonable price – but that is only available “used” and you will not purchase a used item for your child!
In the end you rationalize, it must be a very rare item to have such a high price, and since the Amazon search results “must be scientific” there are apparently no lower priced copies available. So you buy it.
This scenario was repeated hundreds if not thousands of times for this one product over a period of several months. And likely was repeated millions of times over a period of years across thousand, if not millions of items. So what?
The search is rigged, that’s what. How do I know? The person that related this story was the seller, in 2014, of over 1000 copies of the item at $50. He did not create this fraud, merely piggybacked on what Amazon itself had set up. Only they have control of the search results.
What’s the big deal you say, after all there were no cheaper units available so it is just “surge pricing”; supply and demand, right?
Wrong. There was, after all, another listing of the same item, expertly hidden by Amazon, where only a hacker or software expert could find it. On that listing, for those that Amazon chose not to swindle, was the exact same item for the standard, heavily discounted, price of $16 or nearly 50% off the list or MSRP. You see, the result is, regardless of who is selling the item, Amazon earns triple (triple the fees) when the price is higher, as in this example.
This is not an isolated “mistake”. Many who have experience working inside the Amazon system have seen literally thousands of similar examples all tied to this “malfunctioning” search engine.
What’s more a calculation of the possible financial benefits during the time in question amounted to nearly the entire reported net profit of the entire company. It was common knowledge that the company was reporting little or no net profit during many years, even as it remained a darling of stockholders.
And if any one would bring such a specific case to Amazon’s attention? Naturally they would blame the seller, software issues, the moon and the stars, anything but admit that they use every inch of their private real estate for one purpose and one purpose only, to maximize the amount of money that ends us in their accounts.
And many who are reading this still don’t get it. “Why not?” It’s capitalism after all! To the victor go the spoils! Hail Ceasar! Heil Hitler. It’s your internet. Not theirs.
President in the Pocket of Big Oil stands in charge of National Treasures
When it comes to environmental issues, Donald Trump has not been a friend of the environment, and that is putting it lightly. Since entering office, Trump has pulled America out of the Paris climate agreement, repealed several eco-friendly acts from the Obama administration, and opened up federally protected land for privatization and extractive industries.
Most of this new real estate comes from National Parks, Forests, and Wildlife Refuges, all managed by the Department of the Interior. Aside from being areas of dense plant and wildlife, these spots are crucial parts of the American experience. They preserve some of the nation’s most breathtaking landscapes and deepest natural history. They are America’s last piece of what Henry David Thoreau would call “the sublime”—a term he barrowed from Immanuel Kant to describe nature’s unfathomable and soul captivating beauty.
Understandably, in a world undergoing a climate crisis, it may not seem imperative that world leaders preserve beauty per-se. Environmentally speaking, there are certainly bigger fish to fry right now. However, as stunning as National Parks are, they offer far more than just beauty. The Parks have ecological significance beyond measure and ignoring their importance now could actually have immense detriments to our ongoing battle against climate change.
Historically, the reason that Congress created the National Parks Service at the turn of the twentieth century was to preserve nature. Seeing the environmental detriments of overhunting and overfishing in certain areas of the country, conservationists realized that some of America’s most luscious wildernesses would soon disappear if they did not press for protection.
Because of this precedent, the National Parks to this day are places where animals and plants can run wild and fulfill their natural duties. Collectively, the Parks are homes to millions of trees across the nation. These untouched forests are enormous natural carbon drains. If we were to open up this land for consumption, we would run the risk of deforestation and losing these carbon-sucking plants, thus contributing immensely to global warming.
“We’re never going to solve the climate crisis … he is an oil president, his cabinet is an oil cabinet. He is bought off by fossil fuels, and a lot of people in the Senate, a lot of Republican candidates, are too, we can’t solve the problem when we have elected officials who are paid by the fossil fuel industry.”
– Jane Fonda
Similarly, if we allow for private industries to drill, mine, or develop on the land, then habitats would be lost, water could be contaminated, and lots of the Earth’s rich nutrients would be infringed upon. The same could go for hunting and fishing. While each of these latter two activities are sustainable in small doses, if overdone (particularly on corporate levels), then the victimized species could become threated quite quickly.
Consequentially, with an already unbalanced ecosystem, we cannot expect the world to respond to these changes in natural ways. Therefore, when we disrupt the pristine National Parks, we could inadvertently be accelerating the climate crisis.
Sunrise over Schwabachers Landing in Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming – Photo / Adobe Stock
Priceless Resources could be lost, Forever
Of course, the Parks have not gone entirely untouched in their hundred-plus year existence. With the advent of the automobile, the government built roads through the land, cleared campsites, and erected service buildings, allowing travelers to journey through and see everything the Parks have to offer. Throughout all of this, though, the Department of the Interior has always prioritized sustainability, making sure that the development is minimalist and that the guests remain frugal during their visits.
Trump, however, even wants the to privatize the Parks’ campsites. This means that the price of pitching a tent could go up—potentially making the traditionally affordable Parks an exclusive luxury. More importantly, though, if the camps become privatized, there is hardly as much of a grantee that they will remain eco-friendly. For one example, the privately owned camps could have more lenient rules when it comes to sanitation and littering. Clutter and trash will not only hurt the Parks aesthetically, but it will also hurt them environmentally, as ecosystems will not be able to thrive with improperly disposed plastic and Styrofoam taking up space.
Moreover, if the Trump privatizes the camps, who’s to say that the buck will stop there? Given Trump’s environmental record and business mind, perhaps the “camps” will eventually not be “camps” at all. Perhaps they will evolve into full-on resorts with hotels, pools, and parking lots paved over the land that Americans have treasured and fought so hard to protect for generations.
Granted, there is nothing wrong with a little tourism in our National Parks. In fact, even extractive industries have their merit at times. If people did not have the chance to appreciate and gain from the Parks, then we would probably not prioritize them as much as we do. Nevertheless, the Parks do more than just please the eye. They are natural oases for many species, each contributing a vital part to an ecosystem. This keeps the natural world in check and if it goes unchecked, then we will be sacrificing far more than just the animals, plants, and views. The ultimate burden will always come back to people.
