Gilles Vidal has posted some great panoramic news scenes.
Category: Politics
Blanchard on the Jensen Prosecution
cBride, in her post, goes on to challenge the Jensen prosecution on grounds of cost: “I’d be willing to bet that the prosecution cost the taxpayers more money than the supposedly illegal campaigning did. That would be a great question for the media to ask the Dane County DA: Mr. Blanchard, what was the bill?”
Well, as Woody Allen says in Annie Hall, it so happens that we have Marshall McLuhan right here.
“Ms. McBride is wrong on the comparison of costs,” writes Blanchard in response to an e-mail from Isthmus. (Hmm, why didn’t McBride, a former reporter, think to try this?) “Easily many millions of dollars in public money are not currently being spent – and will not be spent in the foreseeable future – on anything resembling the large partisan caucus offices that Republican and Democratic legislators alike used in recent years to run private campaigns.
KPMG Tax Shelters: Judge Criticizes Prosecutors Case
Yesterday’s hearing in the complex KPMG tax shelter case brought about some interesting discussions:
- Reuters:
A federal judge accused prosecutors Thursday of overreaching in their attempt to show that former KPMG executives sold questionable tax shelters to wealthy clients.
Lawyers involved in the case expect U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan to reject defendants’ calls to dismiss the case.
The New York judge, however, faulted what he called the government’s “shameful” activity that led the accounting firm not to pay defendants’ legal bills, contrary to past practice. He also suggested that prosecutors drop some lesser counts.
- Lynnley Browning:
A federal judge raised questions yesterday about the prosecution of 16 former KPMG employees over aggressive tax shelters, criticizing prosecutors for what he called murky definitions of fraud and evasion.
The judge, Lewis A. Kaplan of Federal District Court in Manhattan, said he was confused by what prosecutors said was a conspiracy by the defendants to make and sell aggressive shelters that allowed hundreds of wealthy investors to evade $2.5 billion in taxes from 1996 to 2002.
“Frankly, I’m very bothered by it,” the judge said, saying the document “puts the government’s thumb on the scales” and raises questions about the Sixth Amendment constitutional right to legal representation.
No court has ruled the shelters illegal, but the I.R.S. has never considered them valid for deductions.
Nonetheless, Steven Bauer, a lawyer who represents John Larson, a former KPMG partner who is one of the 18 defendants, said prosecutors had withheld important information detailing, among other things, debate inside the I.R.S. over whether the shelters were legitimate.
Judge Kaplan ordered the prosecution to turn over any withheld information.
The Real US Broadband Problem
Maynard Handley writes:
The issue of importance is not the cost of broadband; that is higher than it should be in the US, but it will fall.
Neither is the issue of importance the speed. Higher speed is nice, but what’s available in the US is adequate for now.What is important is the extent to which home users on the internet are empowered:
Do their terms of service allow them to run their own web pages off their home machines? Can they run personal blogs and wikis for their friends to visit? Can they log into their home machines from somewhere else? And so on.The common place TOS in the US prevent such activities; the powers that be in the US are interested in making the US an alternative form of television, and very much a one-way medium. Not only is this profoundly immoral, it is profoundly undemocratic, and profoundly stupid (since it is yet one more attempt to freeze an existing business model rather than looking at the big picture of how to take advantage of new, as yet undreamed of possibilities); but of course, this sort of trifecta is about what one expects from US business these days.
The point of my writing is to express my disappointment that these issues were not raised; either in the context of the US or in the context of France. I would like to hope that French companies are being better citizens about this than their US counterparts, but I have no reason to believe so. I would, however, hope that a newspaper article would include at least some nod to issues more important than saving a few bucks on one’s cable bill.
Yours sincerely,
Maynard Handley
Handley is correct. www.schoolinfosystem.org is a very small attempt to address some of these issues.
Yahoo’s China Problem
Companies can and do make choices. You can engage in China and choose not to do certain kinds of business. Yahoo! has placed user e-mail data within legal jurisdiction of the People’s Republic of China. Google and Microsoft have both chosen not to do so. Why did Yahoo! chose to do this?
“Trusting the Marketplace”
Billmon takes on political/business hypocrisy.
What’s the Biggest Change Facing Business in the Next 10 Years?
In Fast Company’s first decade, we introduced readers to a lot of amazingly smart people. To launch our second, we asked 10 of our favorite brains what’s next–and how to get ready for it.
I think Malcolm Gladwell nails it, business will become much more active in political issues:
“Business has to find its national voice. It has to be engaged in the politics of this country in a way it’s not accustomed to. Right now, executives are very good at saying, ‘Cut our taxes, cut our regulations.’ And they’re really terrible at making far more important and substantive arguments about social policy. It’s time they stopped banging this one-note drum and started saying that a lot of the things that have been relegated to ideology are, in fact, matters of fundamental international competitiveness for this country.
Take, for example, health care. We are ceding manufacturing jobs to the rest of the world because we can’t get around to providing some kind of basic, uniform health insurance. Because of our strange ideological problem with nationalized health insurance, we’re basically driving Detroit out of business–which strikes me as a very counterintuitive, nonsensical policy. The simple fact is that GM and Ford and Chrysler cannot compete in the world market if they’re asked to bear the pension and health-care costs of their retirees. Can’t be done. It’s that simple.
Grow Your Own Oil, US
Researchers hoping to ease America’s oil addiction are turning sawdust and wood chips into bio-oil, a thick black liquid that could become a green substitute for many petroleum products.
Bio-oil can be made from almost any organic material, including agricultural and forest waste like corn stalks and scraps of bark. Converting the raw biomass into bio-oil yields a product that is easy to transport and can be processed into higher-value fuels and chemicals.
“It is technically feasible to use biomass for the production of all the materials that we currently produce from petroleum,” said professor Robert C. Brown, director of the Office of Biorenewables Programs at Iowa State University.
New Rand Healthcare Study
1. We get only 55 percent of recommended medical attention [TC: hey, didn’t an earlier Rand study show us that more care doesn’t translate into better health care outcomes?]
2. “Those with annual family incomes over $50,000 had quality scores that were just 3.5 percentage points higher than those with incomes less than $15,000….insurance status had no real effect on quality.”
This should make everyone uncomfortable, but most of all those who think that access to health insurance is a panacea. Here is the press release, the piece is in The New England Journal of Medicine. Am I supposed to believe the following?:
Fight Against Farm Subsidies
Scott Kilman and Roger Thurow:
A movement to uproot crop subsidies, which have been worth nearly $600 billion to U.S. farmers over the decades, is gaining ground in some unlikely places — including down on the farm.
In Iowa, one of the most heavily subsidized states, a Republican running to be state agriculture secretary is telling big farmers they should get smaller checks. Mark W. Leonard, who collects subsidies himself and campaigns in a white cowboy hat, told a room full of farmers recently that federal payments spur overproduction, which depresses prices for poor growers overseas.
“From a Christian standpoint, what it is doing to Africa tugs at your heartstrings,” Mr. Leonard told them. Last year, he helped humanitarian group Oxfam International in its anti-subsidy campaign by escorting a cotton farmer from Mali to church gatherings near his farm in Holstein.