The Super Rich Tax you to death

www.thaindian.com...

The arrests were part of the police investigation into the alleged fraud in the bidding by the MMX Logistica mining firm, which is owned by businessman Eike Batista, one of Brazil’s best-known businessmen.

farmlandforecast.colvin-co.com...

When Eike Batista, the most swashbuckling of Brazil’s current crop of entrepreneurs, applied to build a new port in São Paulo state he was unable to secure an environmental permit for his project.

[edit on 21-3-2010 by drew hempel]

Good behavior doesn't get rewarded well, in the business world.

He was on Charlie Rose, recently. He estimates that within the coming years, his wealth will exceed 100 billion dollars.

www.charlierose.com...

reply to post by Kaytagg


online.wsj.com...

BY ANTONIO REGALADO SÃO PAULO, Brazil -- Federal police Friday searched the offices of Eike Batista, Brazil's richest man, sending shares plummeting in several companies recently taken public by the entrepreneur. Police said the early morning raid was part of a probe into government corruption and tax evasion. In a statement, Mr. Batista's holding company denied "all allegations" of illegal conduct and said it would "cooperate with any legal investigation involving its businesses." News that Mr. Batista, Brazil's most-colorful entrepreneur, had become ensnared in a corruption probe pummeled several stocks, including shares in ...

reply to post by Kaytagg


incakolanews.blogspot.com...

This morning, an outfit calling itself "63X Master Fund" of The Cayman Islands, apparently a branch of the Brazilian EBX holding company run by Brazilian metals billionaire Eike Batista (he of MMX among other companies) announced that it had bought 10.2% of Ventana Gold in the following way: RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL--(Marketwire - July 20, 2009) - 63X Master Fund ("63X"), of Unlgand House, Grand Cayman, KY1-1104, Cayman Islands, announces pursuant to National Instrument 62-103 that it acquired ownership and control of 8,210,900 common shares of Ventana Gold Corp. ("Ventana") in a private purchase from Ventana from common shares in treasury. The common shares purchased by 63X represent in aggregate approximately 10.2% of the 80,382,000 issued and outstanding common shares of Ventana reported by the Toronto Stock Exchange and Bloomberg.

So what's going on here? A crude attempt to move the market? Some communications breakdown? Sure smells fishy, whatever's at the bottom of this story. EBX even got the share count wrong, apparently. All rather weird.

www.forbes.com...

Shares of Ventana Gold Corp dropped 16 percent on Friday after the company said the local owner of the mineral rights at Ventana's key gold property in Colombia had filed for arbitration in the hopes of reclaiming the property.

Ventana said La Bodega's arbitration request is based on arguments that the option agreement does not comply with Colombian law.

[edit on 21-3-2010 by drew hempel]

taxjustice.blogspot.com...

"Campaigners for a "Robin Hood tax" watched with alarm as thousands of votes poured into their website, rejecting their proposal for a levy on City wheeler-dealing, to raise money to fight poverty and climate change." Almost 5,000 votes poured in within 20 minutes. Interesting, the campaigners thought. So they investigated. What did they find? These votes "turned out to emanate from just two computer servers, one of which was registered to the investment bank Goldman Sachs."

www.informationclearinghouse.info...

For companies in certain businesses, such as pharmaceuticals, it is very easy to simply “invent” the price a company charges their U.S. business for buying the company’s product which they manufacture in another country. And if they charge enough, poof; all the profit vanishes from the US, or Canada, or any other regular jurisdiction and end up in a corporate tax-haven. And that means American and Canadian tax payers don’t get their fair share. Many multinational corporations essentially have two sets of bookkeeping. One set, with artificially inflated transfer prices is what they use to prepare local tax returns, and show auditors in high-tax jurisdictions, and another set of books, in which management can see the true profit and lost statement, based on real cost of goods, are used for the executives to determine the actual performance of their various operations.

gregmankiw.blogspot.com...

Given those values, domestic labor bears slightly more than 70 percent of the burden of the corporate income tax.

www.guardian.co.uk...

Google, which has an estimated 90% market share of UK internet searches, last year used a cross-border network of subsidiary companies to ensure it did not pay a penny in corporation tax on its £1.6bn advertising revenues in Britain.

citizenvox.org...

Last Friday, David Arkush, director of Public Citizen’s Congress Watch division, went on CNBC to take on the corporate lobby’s spin about the effects of a tax on Wall Street’s speculative activities.

Here we go --

motherjones.com...

The finance lobbyists OWN D.C. lock, stock and barrel -- what an amazing investment -- buy off the politicians -- why? Because corporations ARE PEOPLE -- and therefore have free speech rights, due process rights, etc.

Go corporate personhood -- down with real people. Buy me baby. 100 to 1 return on D.C. I'm in. Big Media - brainwash those people!

Healthcare is nbr 2. on owning D.C. -- so a little healthcare coverup for the wall street fiasco?

Yep -- nice Sunday people.


[edit on 21-3-2010 by drew hempel]

www.businesspundit.com...

How Wall Street bought Washington --

1 million dollars in lobbying money got a 1 billion dollar tax write-off for "carried" capital gangs for money managers!!

www.wallstreetwatch.org...

Yeah the classic

"Bush Cycle" expose:

topdocumentaryfilms.com...

Hey man quit spamming my thread!

topdocumentaryfilms.com...

Why am I forced to hire mercenaries?

51% of my taxes goes to the new PRIVATIZED military!!

Patriotic?

Take the Rich Off Welfare!!

Study Tallies Corporations Not Paying Income Tax - NYTimes.com Aug 13, 2008 ... Two out of every three United States corporations paid no federal income taxes from 1998 through 2005, according to a report by the ... www.nytimes.com/2008/08/13/business/13tax.html

www.charlierose.com...

Interesting stuff..

drew hempel has the right idea.

in response to OnceReturned.. oh this just makes me mad. Defending the rich. Do you have stockholm syndrome because you seem to love your overlords so much.
wow, I need to dissect your response, here goes.
you say its unfair the rich have to pay more but if they were not so aggressively destroying the middle class, there would be more people in higher tax brackets paying more into the system, and spending more disposable income boosting the whole economy. Instead were all out of work and spending less. Great job!

My biggest gripe is what you say here

The reality is that within a capitalist free market, the amount of money you make is an exact reflecton of the value of your services to society. You are not stealing anything, people are giving it to you. If people are willing to pay you three million dollars a year for your services, then that means that your services are worth three million dollars to them. By definition that is true. And they are the people who are paying you and recieving the service, so certainly no one else should decide how much what you are doing is worth except you and the person who is paying you. If they could find someone who could do what you are doing for less, they would hire that person. If you could go elsewhere and do the same thing and make more money, you would.

Was wall street performing a useful service when it collapsed our whole economy? is that why they get big bonuses? Cause they perform such a vital useful wonderful function? What great service was Burnie Madoff performing with his ponzi scheme? The average yearly wages for professional athletes were $79,460 in 2008. Does a person hitting a ball with a stick do anything at all to improve the world we live in. NO!

Every time I hear a CEO got paid millions of dollars to 'prevent the best talent from leaving' it just infuriates me. They needed a bailout because they did a bad job. FIRE THOSE JERKS. And by fire I mean pour gas on them and set them on FIRE.

If poor people were providing very valuable services, people would be paying them more money.

your concept of value for service is terribly flawed. I can go to mexico and get a doctor to treat me for faaaaaaar less than a US doctor. Same service rendered yet a huge difference in income.

The problem, or at least one of the big problems, in any society is the huge group of people who are not doing anything that is valuable.

You make it sound so cut and dry, it's not. The people making minimum wage are trapped in a cycle of poverty. You need money to make money as the saying goes. If your living in poverty you probably cant afford a car and car insurance which limits your access to any job more than a few miles from home and if you lose that job you probably lose your home too. Then your homeless and it becomes even harder to find another job, even a minimum wage one. It's a downward spiral. Inversely the rich have developed the reverse of this, the upward spiral. The Ivy league skull and bones secret society aristocrats help each other get high paying jobs no matter how unworthy and despicable you may be. For example, how else could a coked up illiterate douche like W. Bush become president of the United States of friggin America if he wasn't thrown every bone imaginable. It's like the movie American Psycho, if your one of the elite it becomes very hard to fail, no matter what you do, no matter how terrible the crime, you will get away with it and be successful and rich anyway. Cheney shot someone in the face, with a gun. No charges filed.

I've noticed that the poor are the most religious kind honest caring folk who will help each other through struggle and sacrifice to improve the community. The rich on the other hand run these evil evil corporations

see my thread about it for details on evil corporations.

They do harm for profit.

Whats missing is ethics. People don't do whats right, they don't do whats ethical, they do whatever will maximize their profits. The bank bailout is a key example. Huge risk to generate profits and when its time to take a loss for their actions they pass the bill on to the American people.

How about the way they take out dead peasant insurance policies on their own employees. They can make more money from your death than your life.
dead peasant policy explained

We humans, as a species, have not changed much from the time we were animals. Of course we are told that we are better than the animals because of our use of tools and language and science etc etc however we remain essentially the same as we were 8 million years ago. We are just baboons with a veneer of civilization. Take away all that shiny technology and watch how fast we start to eat each other. Its that baboon mentality of hoarding all the food and all the women. Being king of the mountain. Domination and abuse of the weaker males.

I think we need to set a limit on wealth. Personal wealth is distributed so unevenly across the world that the richest two per cent of adults own more than 50 per cent of the world’s assets while the poorest half hold only 1 per cent of wealth. Nobody should ever be allowed to have more money than they need to live a luxurious lifestyle. If we just make the super rich limit themselves to one gigantic mansion instead of 7, and just one huge yacht instead of a fleet etc, then the rest of that wealth can be used for something good and useful, beneficial to the world.

I'm not asking for utopia, I just want my fair share of basic human happiness.

Originally posted by guyopitz
The average yearly wages for professional athletes were $79,460 in 2008. Does a person hitting a ball with a stick do anything at all to improve the world we live in. NO!

This is where we diverge fundamentally in our philosophies. I agree with you that if we were come up with the list of "most important things people need to do to make things okay in the world," building houses would be above playing baseball. But that's not the way the world works and it's not the way the world should work. Not you, or any other small group of people should look at a job and then decide arbitrarily - based on your personal opinion - how much someone should get paid for that job. Let society decide how much people will actually pay to have that job done.

You can only decide how much you would pay someone to do that job for you. That's what's going on in reality when it comes to sports. If ten thousand people want to pay fifty bucks each to go to a game, then the venue makes $500,000. It's that simple. If people weren't willing to pay so much for sports, atheletes wouldn't be making as much. Their salary is exactly a reflection of how much people are willing to pay to watch them, which is exactly a reflection of how much people value their services. No one is stealing and giving to the atheletes. People give their money to see the atheletes. Are you going to tell them that they can't pay as much as they want to for a ticket? The idea that carpenters are more valuable to society is true when we compare carpenters as a whole to atheletes as a whole. But, society is willing to pay more for an individual athelete to do what he does than they are for an individual carpenter to do what he does.

As for the bail out stuff and Madoff, I disagree with government intervention in the free market virtually across the board, and I think people who break the law should be arrested. I think if a company is going to fail then let them fail and let the people who screwed up suffer the consequences. It's an unfortunate side effect of this that the people who gave their money to this company also suffer, but what can be done about this? None of these banks set out to screw up, and no one made anyone give their money to any certain banks. A risk of investment is that the situation can go south real quick, and sometimes it does. I agree with the FDIC insurance of private money in banks, and I think it's a good idea for low risk investment in general. This is how we should protect the people and not corporations from businesses which are "too big to fail."

Drew and Kaytagg,

You guys keep pointing our corruption, but that's not what I'm advocating. I don't think people should evade paying their taxes illegally, and I think any loop holes that allow people to evade paying taxes in convoluted, unfair ways should be closed. Of course I disagree with flagrant abuses of the system. I don't think people should break the law and I think that whatever weaknesses exist in the sytem which allow people to abuse loopholes in the law in unfair ways should be corrected. This includes unethical political practices with lobbyists, as well as nepotism within corporations.

There are laws on the books intended to stop this stuff though, and these problems could be addresesed with more rigorous and fair enforcement of the laws, as well as comprehensive tax reform to eliminate the loopholes. I believe, though, that the abuses which exist in our system are a symptom of human nature, incompetent enforcement, and technical imperfections in law. The latter two of these can be solved by adjusting the details of things, and the first one can't be solved; corruption is universal and effects all organizations of people across all cultures and all of time. We just have to do the best we can to discourage and punish it. None of these issues are symptoms of anything fundamental within capitalism. They are all separable from our economics, and should be dealt with separately. If we did away with every system that some people sometimes abused we would be left with nothing.

As far as the unfair circumstances issue; I'm not sure what you want. You want everyone to start from the exact same place in life? And have the exact same circumstances throughout their lives? This isn't anything applicable to reality. Economic desparity has effects, political power has effects; there's not even any conceivable way to move towards a world in which circumstances don't effect your life. An effort is being made to limit circumstantial handicaps, and things like nepotism in the workplace are illegal. All we can do is improve these systems which are already in place.