(What the Koch Bros. Really Want?) Sleazy PR Campaign to Prevent the IRS From Making Your Taxes Simpler (Think Slavery Was In the Past? (Not Really) George Bush's Great Grandfather Was Slave Trader)

How do you like knowing that the IRS already knows how much you made (legally, anyway) and could easily just tell you what they think you owe?

So much for creative accounting.

Slavery, historically, was another matter altogether.

Not to say that versions of it are not going on presently.

But at least they aren't sending ships out to collect the slaves now.

They're already here for the plucking.

What Do the Koch Brothers Really Want?

By Bernie Sanders, Reader Supported News

12 April 14

s a result of the disastrous Citizens United Supreme Court decision, billionaires and large corporations can now spend an unlimited amount of money to influence the political process.

Perhaps, the biggest winners of Citizens United are Charles and David Koch, owners of the second-largest privately run business in America Koch Industries.

Among other things, the Koch brothers own oil refineries in Texas, Alaska, and Minnesota and control some 4,000 miles of pipeline.

According to Forbes Magazine, the Koch brothers are now worth $80 billion, and have increased their wealth by $12 billion since last year alone.

For the Koch brothers, $80 billion in wealth, apparently, is not good enough. Owning the second largest private company in America is, apparently, not good enough. It doesn’t appear that they will be satisfied until they are able to control the entire political process.

It is well known that the Koch brothers have provided the major source of funding to the Tea Party and want to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

In 1980, David Koch ran as the Libertarian Party’s vice-presidential candidate in 1980.

Let’s take a look at the 1980 Libertarian Party platform.

Here are just a few excerpts of the Libertarian Party platform that David Koch ran on in 1980:

• “We urge the repeal of federal campaign finance laws, and the immediate abolition of the despotic Federal Election Commission.”
• “We favor the abolition of Medicare and Medicaid programs.”
• “We oppose any compulsory insurance or tax-supported plan to provide health services, including those which finance abortion services.”
• “We also favor the deregulation of the medical insurance industry.”
• “We favor the repeal of the fraudulent, virtually bankrupt, and increasingly oppressive Social Security system. Pending that repeal, participation in Social Security should be made voluntary.”
• “We propose the abolition of the governmental Postal Service. The present system, in addition to being inefficient, encourages governmental surveillance of private correspondence. Pending abolition, we call for an end to the monopoly system and for allowing free competition in all aspects of postal service.”
• “We oppose all personal and corporate income taxation, including capital gains taxes.”
• “We support the eventual repeal of all taxation.”
• “As an interim measure, all criminal and civil sanctions against tax evasion should be terminated immediately.”
• “We support repeal of all law which impede the ability of any person to find employment, such as minimum wage laws.”
• “We advocate the complete separation of education and State. Government schools lead to the indoctrination of children and interfere with the free choice of individuals. Government ownership, operation, regulation, and subsidy of schools and colleges should be ended.”
• “We condemn compulsory education laws … and we call for the immediate repeal of such laws.”
• “We support the repeal of all taxes on the income or property of private schools, whether profit or non-profit.”
• “We support the abolition of the Environmental Protection Agency.”
• “We support abolition of the Department of Energy.”
• “We call for the dissolution of all government agencies concerned with transportation, including the Department of Transportation.”
• “We demand the return of America's railroad system to private ownership. We call for the privatization of the public roads and national highway system.”
• “We specifically oppose laws requiring an individual to buy or use so-called "self-protection" equipment such as safety belts, air bags, or crash helmets.”
• “We advocate the abolition of the Federal Aviation Administration.”
• “We advocate the abolition of the Food and Drug Administration.”
• “We support an end to all subsidies for child-bearing built into our present laws, including all welfare plans and the provision of tax-supported services for children.”
• “We oppose all government welfare, relief projects, and ‘aid to the poor’ programs. All these government programs are privacy-invading, paternalistic, demeaning, and inefficient. The proper source of help for such persons is the voluntary efforts of private groups and individuals.”
• “We call for the privatization of the inland waterways, and of the distribution system that brings water to industry, agriculture and households.”
• “We call for the repeal of the Occupational Safety and Health Act.”
• “We call for the abolition of the Consumer Product Safety Commission.”
• “We support the repeal of all state usury laws.”

In other words, the agenda of the Koch brothers is not only to defund Obamacare. The agenda of the Koch brothers is to repeal every major piece of legislation that has been signed into law over the past 80 years that has protected the middle class, the elderly, the children, the sick, and the most vulnerable in this country.

It is clear that the Koch brothers and other right wing billionaires are calling the shots and are pulling the strings of the Republican Party.

And because of the disastrous Citizens United Supreme Court decision, they now have the power to spend an unlimited amount of money to buy the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the next President of the United States.

If they are allowed to hijack the American political process to defund Obamacare they will be back for more.

Tomorrow it will be Social Security, ending Medicare as we know it, repealing the minimum wage. It seems to me that the Koch brothers will not be content until they get everything they believe they are entitled to.

Hope you've finished enjoying Tax Day by now.

I've always wondered (at this time of year mainly) why the citizens (you know, the ones who control the politicians, right?) don't demand simpler tax forms as there is really no reason to have it so complicated (if you're not using the confusing tax laws/forms in order not to pay taxes).

With tax rates low enough to engender voluntary compliance (which was originally the case), why is there a need for highly paid tax professionals to fill out the fairly straightforward information in the complicated forms?

4 Ways Our Tax Dollars Pay For Rich People's Toys

By Carl Gibson, Reader Supported News

14 April 14

fter losing all of my belongings in a fire, I still ended up owing the IRS a few hundred dollars. In the grand scheme of all taxes paid, that’s barely a drop in the Olympic-size swimming pool of tax revenue, yet it’s a significant cost to people in my situation.

While going through all the deductions I could claim, I was forced to leave blank all the slots available for purchasing a second home, buying a boat, drilling for oil, selling stocks, borrowing money to buy stocks, inheriting wealth, or having money in foreign bank accounts. People scraping by to make a living don’t have the money to purchase a second home or buy a few thousand shares of stock, and pay about a third of their income in taxes.

1. Frivolous Hobbies

While self-employed freelancers have to pony up nickels and dimes to pay the man, a multi-millionaire was able to write off $77,000 in deductions for a dancing horse in 2010. Romney classified his horse, Rafalca, as a "business," allowing the cost of the horse's training, stable fees, and grooming to be charged to the government. To compare, 256.6 freelancers who made $22,000 and had to write a $300 check to the Treasury Department would all pay for one extremely rich individual’s dancing horse.

2. Lavish Homes

The IRS allows people who buy million-dollar homes to qualify for the mortgage interest deduction, to where if someone borrows $1.3 million to buy a $1.5 million home, $1.1 million in interest can be deducted. As of 2009, 137,670 people qualified under those circumstances, saving $3,000 apiece.

This means $410 million in taxpayer money was spent helping 0.03 percent of the population buy a million-dollar house. If ten people like me who made $22,000 a year and had to write a $300 check to the Treasury Department combined our tax payments, all those checks would pay for one tax break for one person who bought a luxury home.

3. Inherited Fortunes

Our tax system is actually set up so people who earn their money are being bled dry so someone doesn’t have to pay a dime of tax on a gift in excess of $5 million. And the IRS is rapidly changing rules that will make taxes even more cushy on people who inherited their wealth rather than earning it through labor.

While the Bush tax cuts of 2001 exempted from estate tax all estates worth $1 million and less, the exemption cutoff has steadily grown over the last decade.

In 2010, there was no estate tax at all. When billionaire New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner died, his heirs paid no taxes on that wealth when they inherited it, which saved them $600 million in estate taxes.

This means that when 600,000 working-class households each wrote a $1,000 check to the Treasury Department for the taxes owed on income earned from a year’s worth of hard work in 2010, all of that revenue was cancelled out so a few wealthy heirs could avoid taxes on money they never worked for.

In 2014, estates are now exempt from paying taxes on gifts of less than $5,340,000. This is a $90,000 increase from the 2013 cutoff of $5,250,000. This means 300 people like me, who had to write a check to the Treasury Department for $300, are all paying for one heir’s tax break this year.

The Congressional Budget Office found that if the estate tax were restored to pre-Bush levels, we would rake in an additional $500 billion in ten years.

This means we’re currently hemorrhaging $50 billion a year so a few rich brats don’t have to pay taxes on wealth they didn’t earn.

To compare that with the rest of America, when 50 million working people write a $1,000 check to the Treasury Department, after showing up to work every day, stressing over rising grocery and heating costs, and worrying about how to put their kids through college, all of those taxes paid are cancelled out so the nation’s wealthiest heirs don’t have to pay taxes on the tremendous wealth that they didn’t have to work one minute for.

4. Corporate Welfare

The most unjust part of our tax system is seen in the tremendous exemptions given to billion-dollar corporations. Twenty-six highly-profitable corporations in the Fortune 500 paid $0 in federal income taxes between 2008 and 2012.

Just five companies – AT&T, Verizon, Wells Fargo, IBM, and General Electric – all enjoyed $77 billion in tax breaks during that time period. This means if 10 million Americans all wrote a check to the Treasury Department for $1,540 on taxes owed for a year of hard work, every year, for five years, all of that revenue would be cancelled out by just five extremely wealthy global corporations too greedy to pay for the services they use and depend on every day.

The income tax was set up to be an equitable redistribution of wealth. People would ideally pay a portion of their income to the government, which would then redistribute it so society can function. But as our tax structure is currently working, the masses of working poor who have been working longer hours for less pay over the last several decades are redistributing their income upward, to the people who already have more than they can spend.

Working people are being pinched for pennies and threatened by audits, all so the nation’s richest one percent and most profitable corporations can have even more money than they already have.

Imagine all of the good we could do in society if corporations like Verizon and GE no longer had offshore tax havens in which to stash the profits they made in the US.

Imagine if hard work was taxed at a preferential rate, investment income was taxed at a higher rate, and inherited wealth was taxed at the highest rate. We would have all the revenue we need to create millions of good-paying jobs, high-quality education for all those who wish to learn, and a strong social safety net to support those on hard times.

America’s wealthiest parasites have been sucking on the public’s teat for long enough. It’s time we vote out their servants in November and have the equitable tax system we deserve.

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(Carl Gibson, 26, is co-founder of US Uncut, a nationwide creative direct-action movement that mobilized tens of thousands of activists against corporate tax avoidance and budget cuts in the months leading up to the Occupy Wall Street movement. Carl and other US Uncut activists are featured in the documentary "We're Not Broke," which premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. He currently lives in Madison, Wisconsin. You can contact him at carl@rsnorg.org, and follow him on twitter at @uncutCG.)

The Sleazy PR Campaign to Prevent the IRS From Making Your Taxes Simpler

By Jordan Weissmann

Theoretically, it should be far easier for Americans with simple finances to file their tax returns. Instead of making tax filers putz around W-2s and tax prep software, the IRS could electronically prepopulate their paperwork with the information it already receives from banks and employers, and tell filers how much they owe. If the final figure looked about right, you’d have the option to file. As Matt Yglesias wrote here last year, the whole process could be a five-minute snap.

Theoretically. But for years now, Intuit, the maker of TurboTax, has fought tooth and nail to prevent automatic tax filing from becoming a reality, lobbying against bipartisan legislation to introduce it with the help of a powerful tech industry trade group and conservative anti-taxers like Grover Norquist. Intuit and its competitors in online tax prep don’t want the government cutting its market share.

The tax-crusaders want to ensure that paying the government remains as much of a painful, resentment-generating slog as ever. And thus a potent alliance has been born.

Today, ProPublica, which published a great report on this subject last tax season, explains that the Computer & Communications Industry Association, which counts Intuit as a member, has been sponsoring an astroturf campaign to convince Congress that easyfiling would end up hurting the poor.

A public relations firm working on the trade group’s behalf has been luring unsuspecting spokespeople to join its cause — reaching out to them without mentioning any lobbying ties.

Here’s how ProPublica sums up one example:

One letter-writer, Richard Smith, the president of the NAACP Delaware State Conference, was approached by a longtime acquaintance with information about how return-free filing would take dollars out of poor people's pockets. Smith felt so strongly he fired off a letter to Sen. Tom Carper, D-Del., and encouraged other local NAACP leaders to do the same.

Smith said the acquaintance, Anne Farley, told him that if return-free filing was adopted, the government would stop offering free tax filing help to low-income communities. (In fact, none of the bills on return-free filing propose that.)

When ProPublica told Smith that Farley is also a registered lobbyist, he said he was now questioning the information she gave him.

"We may have to retract so far based on my research," Smith said. "I didn't question her."

There’s a reasonable argument against easy tax filing and an unreasonable argument. As you might be able to guess from the underhanded tactics, this seems to be an example of the latter.

The unreasonable argument is that the IRS can’t be trusted to fairly fill out most Americans’ tax forms while also enforcing compliance. Moreover, they say, the poor would be most likely to be victimized, since they have the fewest resources to challenge a bum return. This is nonsense for a few reasons.

First, nobody is suggesting that taxpayers be forced to accept the IRS’s calculations. If someone looked at their refund and thought it was bizarrely small, they could go ahead and file their taxes as normal. Nor, as ProPublica notes, is anybody suggesting that we eliminate free tax prep services for low-income Americans.

And most importantly, the IRS already receives all of this information. It would simply be transcribing the data it otherwise might use to audit you. As some advocates have written, it’s “scrivener’s work.”

The reasonable argument against e-filing is that such a system wouldn’t be ideal for Americans with complicated taxes. Countries that already have automatic filing, such as Denmark, Sweden, and Spain, have much simpler tax codes, they note. Meanwhile, small businesses might also have to spend extra money getting payroll information to the IRS on a tighter schedule so the government could pre-populate everybody’s paperwork.

But there are probably enough Americans who simply input some W-2s and take a standard deduction without adding on any complicated breaks to make the system worth it. Some studies have suggested the system could work for somewhere around 40 percent of taxpayers, saving them time and money.

Of course, e-filing wouldn’t instantly turn everyone’s taxes into a snap. There would still be state returns to deal with, and if we’ve learned anything from health care reform, it sometimes takes the government a while to get a website up and working.

But, in the end, it doesn’t speak well for an argument if you have to trick a mouthpiece into making it for you.

And speaking of those who really benefited from slavery . . .

We have more than a few very famous ones here. And guess who's leading the parade of stars?

George W. Bush’s Great-Great-Great-Great-Grandfather Was a Slave Trader

A surprising new discovery about the notorious Thomas “Beau” Walker.

By Simon Akam 

BUNCE ISLAND, Sierra Leone — Twelve American presidents owned slaves, eight while serving in office, and at least 25 presidents count slave owners among their ancestors. But new historical evidence shows that a direct ancestor of George W. and George H.W. Bush was part of a much more appalling group: Thomas Walker was a notorious slave trader active in the late 18^th century along the coast of West Africa.

Walker, George H.W. Bush's great-great-great grandfather, was the captain of, master of, or investor in at least 11 slaving voyages to West Africa between 1784 and 1792.

Scores of European merchants and American plantation owners grew rich on the trade that transported more than 10 million Africans to North America, the Caribbean, and Brazil between 1550 and 1850. Bush's family, like many others, has previously been identified as slave owners in the United States. In the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries, at least five Walker family households, George W. Bush’s ancestors by his father’s mother, owned slaves in Maryland’s Cecil County. 

But this is the first time an ancestor of Bush has been directly linked to the brutal trans-Atlantic trade in which millions perished. When I queried the New England Historic Genealogical Society, which publishes ancestries of American presidents, the only other president they flagged up with definite slave dealer ancestry was Thomas Jefferson, whose father-in-law, John Wayles (1715-1773), was a planter, slave trader and lawyer in the Virginia Colony. (The NEHGS did acknowledge that there could be other presidents with slavers as ancestors.)

The discovery of the slave-trading ancestor of the Presidents Bush was made by two men: Roger Hughes, a retired newspaper editor and genealogist in Illinois who has previously documented other Bush ancestors as slave owners in the United States, and Joseph Opala, an American historian who has spent much of his adult life in Sierra Leone, the former British colony on the West African coast.

Opala heads a project to preserve Bunce Island, a slave fort 20 miles upriver from Sierra Leone's coastal capital, Freetown, where Thomas Walker bought Africans in the late 18^th century. On Bunce Island thick jungle hems in the hulking ruins of the slave fort, abandoned after Britain banned the slave trade in 1807 and left largely untouched since then. Gravestones record the names of long-dead slavers.

As Hughes conducted genealogical research into Bush's ancestors, he began to suspect that two Thomas Walkers in the historical record — one a British-born merchant and known ancestor of the Bushes, the other a slave ship captain who journeyed to Bunce Island — might be the same man. The known Bush ancestor married in 1785 at Bristol, which along with London and Liverpool was one of the three British cities highly involved in the Atlantic slave trade. He later emigrated to the United States, applying for naturalization at New York in 1792, which he received two years later, and purchasing property at Burlington, N.J., in 1795.

At Opala's recommendation Hughes sent scans of the two Walkers' signatures to Maija Jansson, a handwriting analyst at Yale University, without any information on their provenance. Jansson confirmed that the signatures were from the same individual.

Thomas Walker's marriage document, the "license bond," and Thomas Walker's letter of June 23, 1787, from West Africa

"The angle and slope of the writing is the same on all of the signatures," Jansson told Slate in an email. "The initial letter of the family name, 'W', is the same form in each, as is the initial 'T' of the Christian name."

"The decorative loop under the signature is a key and is virtually the same in the letters," she said.

Margaret White, a handwriting expert I contacted, confirmed that the signatures were from the same hand. Likewise, Keith McClelland, a research associate at the Legacies of British Slave Ownership Project at University College London, also examined the documents and came to the same conclusion. "Having examined the handwriting examples, it is clear that this was the same man,” he said. "Having seen some of the documentation, there seems to me little doubt that the connection between Walker the slave trader and the current Bush family is also undeniable."

 

A series of documents comparing the signatures of Thomas Walker. (Click to view larger.)

Hughes said he was convinced, based on the historical evidence, that Bush's forebear Walker was the same man as the known slave trader. "If I had to testify to this, I'd say this is the same guy.

If it's not the same guy, I'm going to the gallows."

The Bush family's spokesman in Houston, Jim McGrath, had no comment on the findings. The George W. Bush Presidential Center in Dallas did not respond to multiple requests for comment, nor did Jeb Bush spokeswoman Jaryn Emhof.

The signatures of Thomas Walker, the known Bush ancestor, come from documents recording his marriage to Catherine McLelland in February 1785 in Bristol. They are preserved in the Bristol Record Office. The signatures of the known slave dealer Walker were drawn from two letters dated June 23 and July 2, 1787, the first written at Bunce Island and the second at the Banana Islands, which lie off the Sierra Leone coast. These letters are preserved in the British National Archives at Kew.

The letters, addressed to Bristol slave dealer James Rogers, show Walker complaining about the high cost of slaves. The June 23 letter states: "Times on the coast is by no means as favourable as I expected. Slaves is at the price of 150 [illegible] and the coast seemes [sic] to be lin'd with vessels of all kind."

The July 2 letter says: "I have purchased seventeen fine negroes and am this day proceeding down the coast to try what I do can there. Slaves is at a very greate [sic] price."

The Thomas Walker who married Catherine McLelland is identified as Bush's ancestor in Gary Boyd Roberts' Ancestors of American Presidents, published by the New England Historic Genealogical Society.

Former President George W. Bush talks to his father, President George H.W. Bush, during the opening ceremony of the George W. Bush Presidential Center on April 25, 2013, in Dallas. (Photo by Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images)

Roberts said that while he had not known of Walker's slave dealing, the finding did not surprise him, given that the Walkers were a mercantile family and Baltimore, where they established themselves in the United States, was a hub for the slave trade. "It would strike me as being perfectly logical and perfectly expectable," he told Slate.

The historical evidence suggests that Thomas Walker died at sea in 1797 when his own crew mutinied and threw him overboard. Documents in the British House of Lords Sessional Papers indicate Thomas Walker is the same man as a “Beau Walker,” whose unpleasant end is in turn recorded in the journal of Zachary Macaulay, a British anti-slavery activist, sometime governor of Sierra Leone and father of the celebrated Whig historian Thomas Macaulay.

Macaulay’s journal entry for Oct. 24, 1797, is as follows:

“You have heard of the noted Beau Walker, an English slave trader of these parts. He arrived at the Isles Du Los [off present-day Guinea] lately in an American Brig being bound to Cape Mount [in present-day northwest Liberia] for slaves. He had scarce arrived at the last place, when exercising his usual barbarities on his officers & crew, they were provoked to conspire against him.  As he lay on one of the hencoops a seaman came up & struck him on the breast with a handspike, but the blow being ill directed, did not produce its intended effect and Walker springing up wd soon have sacrificed the mutineer to his fury, had not a boy at the helm, pulling a pistol from his breast, shot him dead on the spot. His body was immediately thrown overboard. Thus ended Walker’s career, an end worthy of such a life. The vessel left Cape Mount, and it is supposed has gone for the Brazils or South Seas. There could not possibly have been a more inhuman monster than this Walker. Many a poor seaman has been brought by him to an untimely end.”

Thomas Walker and Catherine McLelland had three children, Rosetta, Thomas, and George, born between 1785 and 1797. Their younger son, George’s, descendants include the Presidents Bush. After Thomas Walker’s death, Catherine moved with the three children from Burlington, N.J., to Philadelphia, where in May 1801 she remarried to a man called Robert Hodgson. While records are scarce, it seems that Thomas Walker’s slave trading did not bestow lasting prosperity on his family. George E. Walker lost property in Maryland’s Cecil County inherited by his wife, Harriet, and the subsequent rise of the Walker family began several decades later, after they moved to Illinois in 1838.

On his 2003 visit to Goree Island, a former slave fort off the coast of the Senegalese capital, Dakar, George W. Bush denounced the slave trade as one of "the greatest crimes of history.”

"Small men took on the powers and airs of tyrants and masters," he said. "Some have said we should not judge their failures by the standards of a later time. Yet, in every time, there were men and women who clearly saw this sin and called it by name."

While Bush's distant ancestors may have been involved in exploiting African slaves, his own presidency won praise from many poverty campaigners for its work on the continent. Bush backed debt forgiveness for 21 African states, and his President's Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (PEPFAR) pumped billions of dollars into antiretroviral drugs for HIV/AIDS sufferers, saving millions of lives in Africa.

Simon Akam is a British writer. His work has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the Times Literary Supplement, the Economist, and the New Republic.