January, 24 2018, 12:15pm EDT
For Immediate Release
Contact:
Chris Fleming,Email:,chris@redhorsestrategies.com
Koch Brothers Could Save Up To $1 Billion to $1.4 Billion Each Year From the Trump Tax Law
WASHINGTON
A new analysis by Americans for Tax Fairness estimates that Charles Koch and David Koch and/or Koch Industries could save between $1 billion and $1.4 billion combined in income taxes each year from the Trump tax law--and that doesn't even count how much the brothers might save in taxes on offshore profits or how much their heirs will benefit from weakening the estate tax.
Last week's FEC filings show that the Kochs made a $500,000 contribution to "Team Ryan"--a joint fundraising committee benefiting Ryan, the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) and a pro-Paul Ryan PAC. On top of that, the Kochs gave an additional quarter million to the NRCC.
The Kochs made securing big tax cuts for themselves and their corporation a key goal for their political network in 2017. The Koch groups spent over $20 million promoting the tax bill that ultimately became law, according to a fact sheet they provided to the Wall Street Journal. Their efforts included town halls, door-to-door canvassing, and television ads--not to mention direct lobbying--in favor of the tax cuts. Now that the bill is law, they've pledged to spend millions more promoting it to the public in an effort to protect the members of Congress who voted for it.
That's not a bad return on investment: what's $20 million when you're looking at a billion or more in tax breaks?
Click here to review the full analysis by Americans for Tax Fairness.
Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF) is a diverse campaign of more than 420 national, state and local endorsing organizations united in support of a fair tax system that works for all Americans. It has come together based on the belief that the country needs comprehensive, progressive tax reform that results in greater revenue to meet our growing needs. This requires big corporations and the wealthy to pay their fair share in taxes, not to live by their own set of rules.
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Warnings of 'Patriot Act 2.0' as House Prepares to Vote on Mass Spying Authority
An amendment headed for a vote Friday "would put in place the largest expansion of domestic surveillance since the Patriot Act," one privacy advocate warned.
Apr 12, 2024
The U.S. House is expected to vote Friday on legislation to reauthorize a surveillance authority that intelligence agencies have heavily abused to collect the communications of American activists, journalists, and lawmakers without a warrant.
Friday's vote will come after House Republicans earlier this week blocked Speaker Mike Johnson's (R-La.) attempt to advance legislation reauthorizing Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which allows U.S. agencies to spy on non-citizens located outside of the country.
The FBI and NSA have regularly used the spying authority, which is set to expire next week, to obtain the communications of U.S. citizens, sparking a bipartisan reform push.
The legislation the House is set to consider Friday would reauthorize Section 702 for two years instead of five. Lawmakers will also vote on several amendments, including three from the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) that would expand the spying authority.
"The first amendment would put in place the largest expansion of domestic surveillance since the Patriot Act… and I don't say that lightly," Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, wrote on social media late Thursday. "It would hugely inflate the universe of companies required to assist the government in conducting surveillance."
Another amendment, she noted, would permit "suspicionless searches for the communications of non-U.S. persons seeking permission to travel to the U.S., even if the multiple vetting mechanisms already in place have revealed no cause for concern."
The underlying legislation, titled the Reforming Intelligence and Securing America Act, "would do nothing to prevent abuses of Section 702, and it would actually weaken the FISA Court's oversight of surveillance," Goitein wrote.
The House will vote on Section 702 TOMORROW MORNING. If you think warrantless surveillance should be reined in rather than massively expanded, PLEASE USE THIS CALL TOOL ASAP (click below or call 202-899-8938) & leave a message if you get VM. 1/21 https://t.co/HAOHURZoJQ
— Elizabeth Goitein (@LizaGoitein) April 12, 2024
Members of the House Judiciary Committee, meanwhile, will offer an amendment that would require U.S. intelligence agencies to obtain a warrant before surveilling American citizens' communications under Section 702—a change opposed by the Biden White House.
The Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC), led by Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), formally endorsed the amendment on Thursday after a membership vote. More than two-thirds of the CPC's membership voted in favor of endorsing the amendment.
"In 2022 alone, the FBI exploited Section 702 more than 200,000 times to search for Americans' data, circumventing the Fourth Amendment and betraying public trust," the caucus said in a statement. "These searches unjustly targeted individuals, including Members of Congress, 141 Black Lives Matter protesters, 19,000 donors to a congressional campaign, a local political party, tens of thousands of people involved in 'civil unrest,' visitors to FBI offices, and individuals based solely on their race. The House has voted multiple times to end this practice of performing backdoor searches on Americans with strong bipartisan support."
Jayapal wrote earlier this week that Congress "must reform Section 702 to include a warrant requirement if the intel community wants to spy on Americans. Period."
The House's latest attempt to extend Section 702 comes after Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio), the chair of the HPSCI, attempted to tip the scales in favor of continued warrantless spying by warning of a "serious national security threat" in an ominous February statement.
It quickly became clear that the Ohio Republican's statement referred to U.S. intelligence—gathered with Section 702 authority—indicating that Russia has made significant progress on a space-based nuclear weapon purportedly designed to target American satellites, which lawmakers have known about for years.
"Unfortunately, the House Intelligence Committee has tripled down on misleading their colleagues and pushing forward Patriot Act 2.0, all while fighting to expand suspicionless digital strip searches of immigrants and the already extremely broad definition of foreign intelligence information," Sean Vitka, policy director of the advocacy group Demand Progress, said in a statement ahead of Friday's vote.
Vitka expressed support for the House Judiciary Committee amendment, saying it would "create the first meaningful privacy protection against Section 702 spying since its enactment."
"We will continue to ensure that everyone in Congress knows that their constituents demand it," Vitka added.
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Vietnam Sentences Billionaire to Death for White Collar Fraud
The trials of Tru'o'ng Mỹ Lan and 84 others are part of an anti-corruption campaign led by the head of Vietnam's Communist Party.
Apr 11, 2024
As global billionaires see their wealth soar to record heights, one Vietnamese real estate tycoon was sentenced to death on Thursday in the Southeast Asian nation's largest-ever financial fraud case, part of a government crackdown on corruption.
Tru'o'ng Mỹ Lan, founder of the real estate developer Vạn Thịnh Phát Group, was arrested in October 2022 for illegally controlling and embezzling money from Saigon Commercial Bank (SCB) for a decade after a 2011 merger she arranged.
"Lan embezzled $12.5 billion, but prosecutors said Thursday the total damages caused by the scam now amounted to $27 billion—a figure equivalent to 6% of the country's 2023 [gross domestic product]," according toAgence France-Presse. "The court ordered Lan, 67, to pay almost the entire damages sum in compensation."
The BCCreported that "according to prosecutors, over a period of three years from February 2019, she ordered her driver to withdraw 108 trillion Vietnamese dong, more than $4 billion in cash from the bank, and store it in her basement. That much cash, even if all of it was in Vietnam's largest denomination banknotes, would weigh two tonnes."
AFP spoke with one of the 42,000 victims of the scandal identified by authorities:
Nga, a 67-year-old Hanoi resident... told AFP Thursday that she had hoped for a life sentence for Lan so she could live to fully witness the pain her actions had caused ordinary people.
"Many people worked hard to deposit money into the bank, but now she's received the death sentence and that's it for her," said Nga, using a pseudonym to protect her identity.
"She can't see the suffering of the people."
Nga has so far been unable to retrieve the $120,000 she invested with SCB.
Human rights advocates consider Vietnam to be a global leader in death penalty sentences and executions, though data on the topic are considered state secrets, so precise figures are not known.
"From January to early October 2023, at least 189 people have been sentenced to death in Vietnam," The Vietnamese Magazinereported last year, citing state media reports. Among them, "44 were convicted of murder (23%), while the remaining 145 (77%) were involved in illegally trading or transporting narcotic substances."
Amnesty International, which opposes the death penalty in all cases, released its latest annual report on sentences and executions worldwide last May. While noting the Vietnamese government's limits on official data, the group found that in 2022, there were at least 102 sentences handed down and over 1,200 people on death row in the country.
"The death penalty in Vietnam is used to intimidate those who would break the law, while also showing the power of the ruling party," Human Rights Watch's Asia deputy director Phil Robertson toldCNN in 2022. "This is a government that chases down dissidents, runs roughshod over civil society, sentences and imprisons people after kangaroo court trials, and now we know, executes far more people than anyone else in [the region]."
"Vietnam's horrendous record of executions dwarfs that of any of its neighbors but it is not surprising that the government has systematically implemented the death penalty and kept executions out of the public eye," Robertson added.
As the BCC noted:
The habitually secretive communist authorities were uncharacteristically forthright about this case, going into minute detail for the media. They said 2,700 people were summoned to testify, while 10 state prosecutors and around 200 lawyers were involved.
The evidence was in 104 boxes weighing a total of six tonnes. Eighty-five others were tried with Tru'o'ng Mỹ Lan, who denied the charges and can appeal.
All of the defendants were found guilty. Four received life in jail. The rest were given prison terms ranging from 20 years to three years suspended.
The trials were part of the ongoing "Blazing Furnace" anti-corruption campaign spearheaded by Nguyễn Phú Trọng, secretary-general of Vietnam's Communist Party.
Multiple top officials have left office during the campaign, including Vietnamese President Võ Văn Thưởng, who resigned last month. The Communist Party did not offer details about the reason for his departure but said that "Thưởng's violations and shortcomings have caused bad public opinion, affecting the reputation of the party, the state, and him personally."
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US Tax Day Campaign Urges Congress to Stop Arming Israel's Genocide in Gaza
"This scale of devastation is only possible because of financial, political, and military support from the United States," said one Quaker campaigner.
Apr 11, 2024
With the April 15 U.S. federal income tax filing deadline just around the corner, the American Friends Service Committee on Thursday announced a Tax Day campaign to demand members of Congress stop funding Israel's genocidal war on Palestinians in Gaza.
AFSC—a Quaker group that has been active in Gaza since the Nakba, or Israeli ethnic cleansing of Arabs from Palestine in 1948—said it seeks to highlight how U.S. taxpayer dollars "are misused to fund war and militarism instead of life-sustaining programs."
This year, the group's focus is on U.S. military aid to Israel amid the ongoing Gaza genocide, in which at least 109,500 Palestinians have been killed or wounded by Israeli forces, often using weapons supplied by Washington—including 2,000-pound bombs that can level entire city blocks. The majority of Palestinians killed during the war have been women and children, including more than 13,000 minors.
According to AFSC:
Over the last six months, tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza have been killed using weapons provided by the United States. Humanitarian aid workers delivering vital assistance continue to be attacked and killed at unprecedented rates. The blockade and killing of humanitarian aid workers are causing widespread famine and starvation in Gaza.
"This scale of devastation is only possible because of financial, political, and military support from the United States," Jennifer Bing, who heads the AFSC's Palestine Activism Program, said in a statement. "We need our members of Congress to listen to their constituents and their conscience and say no to any additional military funding for Israel and yes to a cease-fire and humanitarian access."
AFSC general secretary Joyce Ajlouny said: "The U.S. government is deeply complicit in the deaths of thousands of Palestinian children and families. Our tax dollars are buying the bombs dropping on their loved ones and the tanks that are destroying their cities."
"As a Quaker and a Palestinian I know that this violence will never bring peace," Ajlouny added. "We need an immediate cease-fire, an end to military funding from the U.S., and a political process that will end the apartheid system and bring true peace and justice for both Israelis and Palestinians."
The U.S., which already gave Israel around $4 billion in annual military aid before the October 7 attacks, has approved more than 100 arms shipments to the key Middle Eastern ally over the past six months. President Joe Biden—who since October 7 has repeatedly circumvented Congress in order to expedite weapons transfers to Israel—is seeking an additional $14.3 billion in armed assistance to the country.
This, despite multiple domestic laws and the Biden administration's own rules barring arms transfers to countries that violate human rights.
Israel imports nearly 70% of its arms from the United States. Common Dreamsreported earlier this month that the Biden administration is pushing Congress to approve the sale of $18 billion worth of F-15 fighter jets to Israel.
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