Note to all billionaires especially those with holdings 50 b

washingtonpost.com/nation/2 … edirect=on

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gM4Xm2MGLNQ[/youtube]

I like living easy without family ties (living eaaaasy)
Till the whippoorwill of freedom zapped me right between the eyes

'Cause I live and breathe this Phiiiiladelphia freedom!

holy shit was this the wrong thread. my bad.

i thought this was current events or something.

Close enuf. Billionaires have access.to information. And who knows nowadays what’s relevant. Charity is fine, and the above.goes. Billionaires or.anyone for that matter will only act in crisis where their own survival is at stake. I was going to list all of the billionaires so good acts, and some of them are commandible, but some are merely to yawn at, for the most part the trusts in favor of a guaranteed succession of powers take precedence
The rest result in tax writeoffs and other goodies.

What we have for dinner, freedom or slavery if that was Your intended forum, may be interesting though, cross economic borders.

I will list billionaire charities down the line when I have more quality time.

Here it is lists of those who gave most and least, by Forbes:

The New Forbes 400 Philanthropy Score: Measuring Billionaires’ Generosity

Deniz CamForbes Staff

I cover the world’s richest people

US-UN-GOALKEEPERSGETTY

For the first time, Forbes 400 members are ranked not just on their total wealth and on how self-made they are, but also on their generosity. Members of this elite club have been scored on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being the most philanthropic. List members about whom we could find no charitable giving information received an N.A. (not available).

To come up with the scores, we first estimated each list member’s total lifetime giving. A team of 32 Forbes journalists delved into public filings, from tax forms for private foundations to press releases, and reached out to 400 members and nonprofits as well. Next we looked at what percent of their fortune they had given away. We weighted these two factors equally and scored people accordingly.

Some individuals were then bumped up or down based on several other factors, including whether they had signed the Giving Pledge, whether they had pledged significant donations, how personally involved they were in their charitable giving and how quickly and effectively their private foundations distributed dollars. In a few instances, we also used some lifetime-giving information from Boca Raton-based firm SHOOK Research. We did not make a qualitative evaluation of the 400 members’ charitable gifts. We didn’t count pledges or announced gifts that have yet to be paid out. That’s why the world’s richest person Jeff Bezos is ranked a 2 out of 5 and not higher. Had the Amazon founder immediately distributed the $2 billion he pledged in September to help homeless families and start preschools, his score would have been a 4.

2018 Forbes 400 Philanthropy Scores ChartFORBES 2018

Only 29 of America’s 400 richest were given the highest possible score. To get to that recognition, a person had to give away at least $1 billion and/or 20% of their total net worth. There were 36 people, for instance, who gave away $1 billion who didn’t get the top score and another three who gave away less than $1 billion but still earned a score of 5. Notable top givers include Bill Gates, who has donated $35.8 billion to his charitable foundation, more than anyone else in the world; that figure is 27% of his fortune as of September 7, 2018, the day we locked in net worths for the Forbes 400. (To calculate giving as a percent of net worth, we added the value of the gift to the September 2018 net worth and then divided lifetime giving into that amount.)

In percentage terms, George Soros has donated more than any other Forbes 400 member. In 2017, Soros shifted $18 billion from his Soros Management Fund to his philanthropic network, Open Society Foundations. The move brought Soros’ lifetime giving to a total of $32 billion, or 79% of his wealth. Since its inception in 1993, Open Society Foundations distributed $14 billion to a variety of organizations, including UN Women, Planned Parenthood, Amnesty International, the Roma Education Fund, and the Civil Liberties Union for Europe. In April 2018, Soros, who fled his home country Hungary during World War II, launched a $10 million emergency assistance fund to help Rohingya Muslims fleeing Myanmar during an ethnic cleansing campaign.

Nike cofounder Phil Knight and former Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer each received a score of 4. Though each has given away more than $1 billion, those gifts were less than 20% of their net worth. In contrast, hedge fund manager Steve Mandel, whose lifetime giving Forbesestimates at $690 million, has donated more than 20% of his fortune to causes like reversing climate change and education equity. Three AirBnB cofounders—Joe Gebbia, Brian Chesky, Nathan Blecharczyk—received a 2; their publicly-disclosed giving so far is minimal, in large part because their company is private, but all three have signed the Giving Pledge and made clear they will be active philanthropists. Seventy-six of the list members received a score of 1, including President Donald Trump, meaning they gave away less than $30 million or less than 1% of their fortune to date. In June, the New York attorney general filed a lawsuit against Trump, seeking $2.8 million plus penalties for allegedly using the foundation as a tool for his business and his presidential campaign. His lawyers say the case is politically motivated. (Editor’s Note: Elon Musk was erroneously included as 1 when Forbes first published the list; In 2015 Musk, who signed the Giving Pledge, gave 1.2 million Tesla shares worth $254 million to his foundation)

Some billionaires worked with Forbes; others refused to cooperate, citing privacy concerns and/or religious beliefs. Others disagreed with our efforts and our methodology. “The new philanthropy ranking is fundamentally flawed, in that it is biased in favor of those who make their gifts widely known, and against donors who choose to make their charitable contributions anonymously,” one current Forbes 400 member (who did not wish to be named) argued via email.

We acknowledge that some of our lifetime giving estimates may be low because of a lack of transparency, since it’s possible to make charitable gifts anonymously. However, the spirit of the project harks back to an anecdote that Bill Gates shared at The Forbes 400 Summit on Philanthropy in 2014. “One of the [Middle Eastern magnates] mentioned that in the Qur’an, it actually says the reason to talk about your philanthropy is [that] it encourages other people to do the same,” he said. “In that case, you have an obligation to talk about your philanthropy.” We agree, and hope to spark more conversation about the nation’s richest and their commitment to the public good.

© 2019 Forbes Media LLC. All Rights Reserved

Trump And Other Billionaires Who Scored As Stingiest Members Of Forbes 400

Room for improvement: A significant number of billionaires on our list have little to show when it comes to philanthropy.

How do the richest Americans do when it comes to giving away their money to charity? Let’s put it this way: Not every billionaire is eager to share their good fortune.

While many of the nation’s wealthiest people are exceedingly generous — by Forbes’ calculations, 36 members of The Forbes 400 have given away at least $1 billion or more over their lifetimes — there are a significant number of stingy billionaires who, to the best Forbes could find, have given away next to nothing in their lifetimes.

For the first time this year, we scored each member of The Forbes 400 list of richest Americans on how generous (or not) they are with their money. We found that a perhaps surprising number are tight-fisted, despite their financial wherewithal. Seventy-six billionaires (or nearly a fifth of our list members) earned the lowest-possible philanthropy score of one, which means they have given away less than $30 million or under 1% of their fortune in their lifetimes.

For some it is quite intentional. One plain-spoken billionaire is blunt about his disavowal of philanthropy. Ken Fisher, who founded Fisher Investments with $250 in 1979 and now manages some $96 billion in assets, says he is “not a fan of philanthropy.” He’s not terribly interested in volunteering his time, either, and has said that sitting on the board of a nonprofit would be “distracting.” (Even still, Forbes found that he has made at least $11.5 million in donations over the years.)

Archie Aldis “Red” Emmerson, who made a fortune in timber and is the nation’s third-largest landowner, has made similar comments. When his kids gave Oregon State University $6 million to build a forestry lab and name it in his honor, he quipped: “That’ll take you all the way to the poor farm. Better not do it very often.”

Another high-profile billionaire has been sued over his philanthropy. In 1987, President Donald Trump started the Donald J. Trump Foundation and indicated he would give away profits from his book, The Art of the Deal. However, over the next 30 years, the foundation became a vehicle for self-promotion, in which he took donations from others and distributed the money as if it were his own. In June 2018, New York’s attorney general filed a lawsuit against Trump, seeking $2.8 million plus penalties for allegedly using the foundation as a tool for his business and his 2016 presidential run. His lawyers responded by saying the suit is politically motivated.

Other times the nonprofits are the ones that want nothing to do with the billionaires. Former owner of the L.A. Clippers Donald Sterling has run into trouble with at least one institution that didn’t want his money. In 2014, following the airing of racist remarks that were caught on tape, UCLA returned a $425,000 donation and rejected the remainder of a $3 million pledge that Sterling had made to support basic kidney research at the university. Not that he was all that generous anyway. Sterling started his foundation in 2006, the same year he was sued by the Department of Justice for allegedly refusing to rent to African-Americans, but had put just $4 million into the charitable vehicle as of the end of 2016. That amounts to just 0.001% of his estimated $3.6 billion fortune.

There are plenty more billionaires who simply do not appear to have made philanthropy a priority. Many of them either lack a foundation altogether or have started a foundation and not done much with it. Some have publicized a gift here or there, as evidence of their philanthropy, but the donations don’t add up to much.

Take Stan Kroenke, a real estate and sports mogul who owns the L.A. Rams. He is the 58th richest person in the country but Forbes could only find traces of a single donation. In 2017, he and his wife Ann Walton Kroenke (a niece of Walmart founder Sam Walton) donated $1 million to the Red Cross in the wake of Hurricane Harvey. The Rams have a foundation, in which they support local youth organizations, but it relies on donations from others. It’s possible, however, that Kroenke prefers to give anonymously. His spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment.

Andy Beal, a Texas banker with a fortune estimated at $9.9 billion, also doesn’t appear to have given away much. He describes on his website a $1 million donation to the Perot Museum of Nature and Science in Dallas and “millions” more to colleges and charity sponsorships, as well as to prizes for science and math education. That is peanuts, relatively speaking, for a man who collected over $650 million in dividends from his banks just in 2017.

Sometimes the lack of giving is tied to the age of the billionaire or how recently they’ve made their fortunes. Some frankly are just getting started and can be expected to ramp up their philanthropy in coming years. For instance, Dropbox cofounder Drew Houston, 35, took his cloud storage company public in March, then promptly donated $5 million to a new foundation. Snap cofounder and CEO Evan Spiegel, 28, completed an IPO in 2017 and has also pledged to donate as many as 13 million Class A shares to a new foundation over the next two decades. So far, he has donated just shy of one million shares, worth roughly $10 million, according to regulatory filings. (Meanwhile, his cofounder Bobby Murphy, 30, has donated 3.3 million shares, equivalent to $54 million, and was thus given a higher philanthropy score.)

We acknowledge that some scores may be too low because we do not have a complete picture of a billionaire’s charitable giving. While many people have long been public with their philanthropy or opted to share details of their giving with Forbes, there are others who have remained anonymous or declined to cooperate with us.

To come up with the philanthropy scores, a team of 32 Forbes journalists delved into public filings and reached out to 400 members and nonprofits in an effort to estimate lifetime giving. We also looked at what percent of their fortune they had given away. We weighted these two factors equally and scored people accordingly. Some individuals were then bumped up or down based on several factors, including whether they had signed the Giving Pledge, how personally involved they were in their charitable giving and how quickly their private foundations distributed dollars.

Read more: The New Forbes 400 Philanthropy Score: Measuring Billionaires’ Generosity

© 2019 Forbes Media LLC. All Rights Reserved

MOreece surrendered. Can you buhlee that? Guess he won’t a real gangsta ass nigga.

Jeffrey Epstein’s autopsy reveals possible homicide
By Leslie Salzillo / Daily Kos (08/15/2019) - August 15, 20191139

Conspiracy theories and mysteries continue to surround the death of convicted sex offender and billionaire Jeffrey Epstein who was found dead last week at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan. But not all are conspiracy theories—many are facts that reveal such blatant corruption that some of us simply find it hard to wrap our heads around them enough to believe the facts are true. Today, we have learned something new.

An autopsy was performed on Epstein soon after his body was found. It was called an “apparent suicide” by U.S. Attorney General William Barr. Epstein reportedly hanged himself. No witnesses, no guards, no camera video when it “apparently”. happened.

The autopsy report now reveals he had multiple breaks in his neck bones—with some irregular for a suicide.

Washington Post writes:

Among the bones broken in Epstein’s neck was the hyoid bone, which in men is near the Adam’s apple. Such breaks can occur in those who hang themselves, particularly if they are older, according to forensics experts and studies on the subject. But they are more common in victims of homicide by strangulation, the experts said.

More investigations are, of course, expected.

People familiar with the autopsy, who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitive stage of the investigation, said Sampson’s office is seeking additional information on Epstein’s condition in the hours before his death. That could include video evidence of the jail hallways, which may establish whether anyone entered Epstein’s cell during the night he died; results of a toxicology screening to determine if there was any unusual substance in his body; and interviews with guards and inmates who were near his cell.

This sounds like it could be straight out of a gangster movie. If it was murder, Lord knows how many suspects there will be, because so many of Epstein associates are in high places and have much to lose if certain truths were to come out.

One thing is for sure. This story is not, and should not go away—not only because we want to know the truth about how Jefferey Epstein died, but more importantly to redeem the plethora of innocent, underage victims that he and his pals raped.

Jeffrey Epstein’s Bodyguard’s Thoughts on His Suicide Opens Eyes

The Bizarre Painting of Clinton That Epstein Had in His House

And the plot thickens….

Money is essentially a promissory note, with much of the wealth of billionaires consisting of essentially numbers in hard drives. And the value of those numbers are essentially maintained if the global economy continues to grow. But there are also limits to growth.

Sure bit those limits can be expanded by diversification , off line washing and tax evasion , murder for hire for whistle-blowers, faux business fronts, capital transfers to shadows, promissory notes loan sharing secured by murder inc., charity write offs, gambling and buying sprees, villas and neachfronted homes secured neighborhood watch, swill diamond studded watches to the tune of.millions, 'lost insured diamond studded multuplly insured watches, running scams like assassinations of third world leaders paid by narco criminals, assassination of hit men, movie stars and us presidents who do not toe the line, kidnappings and mind washing waterboarding and other fun stuff, and many many more.

Where is jimmy Carter who tried to limit growth? A pitiful 1 termer, lost somewhere between rows of.peanuts, that’s where!

Well here is something to prove that Trump’s charity extends to salvage our intelligence:

The New York Times

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Trump Demands That American Companies ‘Start Looking for an Alternative to China’
Image
China’s plan to retaliate against American tariffs, which was announced late on Friday in Beijing, includes putting new levies on $75 billion worth of American goods.
China’s plan to retaliate against American tariffs, which was announced late on Friday in Beijing, includes putting new levies on $75 billion worth of American goods.CreditLam Yik Fei for The New York Times
By Alan Rappeport and Keith Bradsher
Aug. 23, 2019
Updated 5:09 p.m. ET
WASHINGTON — President Trump, angered by Beijing’s decision on Friday to retaliate against his next round of tariffs and furious at his Federal Reserve chair for not doing more to juice the economy, said he would increase taxes on all Chinese goods and demanded that American companies stop doing business with China

Mr. Trump, in a tweet, said he would raise tariffs on $250 billion worth of Chinese goods to 30 percent from the current rate of 25 percent beginning Oct. 1. And he said the United States would tax the remaining $300 billion worth of imports at a 15 percent rate, rather than the 10 percent he had initially planned. Those levies go into effect on Sept. 1.

“China should not have put new Tariffs on 75 BILLION DOLLARS of United States product (politically motivated!). Starting on October 1st, the 250 BILLION DOLLARS of goods and products from China, currently being taxed at 25%, will be taxed at 30%,” Mr. Trump said in a tweet.

In an earlier series of angry Twitter posts, Mr. Trump also called for American companies to cut ties with Beijing and said the United States would be economically stronger without China. The president also called the Fed chair, Jerome H. Powell, an “enemy” of the United States and compared him to President Xi Jinping of China, his trade nemesis, after Mr. Powell declined to signal an imminent cut in interest rates.

“My only question is, who is our bigger enemy, Jay Powell or Chairman Xi?” the president tweeted.

Behind the tirade was the growing reality that the type of trade war Mr. Trump once called “easy to win” is proving to be more difficult and economically damaging than the president envisioned. Mr. Trump’s stiff tariffs on Chinese goods have been met with reciprocal levies, hurting American farmers and companies and contributing to a global slowdown.

On Friday, China said it would increase tariffs on $75 billion worth of American goods, including crude oil, automobiles and farm products like soybeans, pork and corn in response to Mr. Trump’s plan to tax another $300 billion worth of Chinese goods in September and December.

Mr. Trump’s response to China unnerved investors, who worry that the trade war between the world’s two largest economies will further drag down global growth. Stocks fell sharply on Friday, with the S&P 500 closing down more than 2.5 percent. The Dow Jones industrial average was down slightly more than 2 percent and the technology-heavy Nasdaq index fell 3 percent.

Mr. Powell said on Friday that the Fed could push through another interest rate cut if the economy weakened further but suggested that the central bank’s ability to limit economic damage from the president’s trade war was constrained.

Talks between the two nations have largely stalled, with China refusing to accede to the United States’ trade demands. As economic damage from the yearlong dispute mounts, Mr. Trump has taken a scattershot approach to spurring the economy: clamoring for the Fed to cut interest rates, teasing the idea of tax cuts and, on Friday, commanding American companies to do his bidding against China.

“Our great American companies are hereby ordered to immediately start looking for an alternative to China, including bringing our companies HOME and making your products in the USA,” he tweeted, adding “We don’t need China and, frankly, would be far better off without them.”

Mr. Trump also said he was directing the United States Postal Service and private American companies like FedEx, Amazon and U.P.S. to search packages from China for the opioid fentanyl and refuse delivery.

It was not yet clear on Friday how Mr. Trump planned to carry out his demands, including ordering companies to begin seeking alternatives to producing in China. Mr. Trump has routinely urged American companies to stop doing business in China and has viewed his tariffs as a way to prod them to move production. While some companies have begun looking for other places to locate their supply chains, including Vietnam, many businesses — particularly smaller ones — say such a move is costly, time-consuming and could put them out of business.

Business groups reacted with deep concern and pushed back against the notion that American companies would sever ties with China at Mr. Trump’s request.

“U.S. companies have been ambassadors for positive changes to the Chinese economy that continue to benefit both our people,” said Myron Brilliant, the head of international affairs at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. “While we share the president’s frustration, we believe that continued constructive engagement is the right way forward.”

Retailers, which are bracing for pain from Mr. Trump’s next round of tariffs, said the president’s demands would hurt, not help, American businesses and the economy.

“It is unrealistic for American retailers to move out of the world’s second largest economy, as 95 percent of the world’s consumers live outside our borders,” said David French, the senior vice president for government affairs at the National Retail Federation.

And farmers, who have borne the brunt of China’s retaliation, said Mr. Trump’s tactics were only making things worse.

Chinese imports of American-made cars are among the goods China plans to target if the trade war escalates.CreditLam Yik Fei for The New York Times
“Every time Trump escalates his trade war, China calls his bluff – and why would we expect any differently this time around?” said Roger Johnson, president of the National Farmers Union. “It’s no surprise that farmers are again the target.”

On Friday afternoon, the president hastily assembled his top trade advisers at the White House — including Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who joined by telephone — to settle on a response. The president was not aware that China’s retaliation was coming and was angry about being blindsided, according to people familiar with the matter.

Mr. Trump’s tweets on Friday caught most of his advisers and staff by surprise, and prompted alarm. Some of Mr. Trump’s advisers privately expressed concern that the ferocity of Mr. Trump’s response could derail the negotiations permanently and could unsettle supporters during an election year.

Mr. Trump’s advisers believe he is being urged on by Peter Navarro, a trade adviser who has been the main proponent of continuing down an antagonistic path with China. Mr. Navarro tried to play down the escalation on Fox Business Network, saying Beijing’s response was to be expected and would only galvanize support in the United States for Mr. Trump’s tough approach to China.

“I just think that the way that China is reacting to this whole thing is simply reinforcing America’s perception of China as a bad actor,” said Mr. Navarro, who is considered the biggest China hawk in the administration. “When China tries to bully us, that only strengthens our resolve.”

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Mr. Navarro said the new tariffs that China was imposing were just a sliver of the overall United States economy and that they should not affect growth. He said that actions by central banks to cut interest rates were more significant to the global economy than the trade dispute between the United States and China.

He added that he expected the negotiations between the United States and China would resume in September.

David Dollar, a China expert at the Brookings Institution, said that Mr. Trump’s anger appeared disproportionate to the relatively modest retaliation from China that should have been anticipated. However, he said it was notable that Mr. Trump’s order to companies appeared to take a page from Beijing’s playbook.

“It’s definitely outside the realm of a free-market economy,” Mr. Dollar said of the call for businesses to cut ties with China. “It’s typical of the kind of thing we complain about from China and other economies where a government intervenes outside the rule of law.”

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Mr. Trump’s anger was compounded by remarks from Mr. Powell, who did not suggest the Fed would undertake the kind of big interest rate cut that the president had been pressing for. Mr. Powell said that while another rate cut was possible, it was not guaranteed. And he suggested that the central bank’s ability to keep the economic damage from the president’s trade war at bay was somewhat limited.

“While monetary policy is a powerful tool that works to support consumer spending, business investment, and public confidence, it cannot provide a settled rule book for international trade,” said Mr. Powell, who spoke in Jackson, Wyo., at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City’s annual symposium.

The State Council Tariff Commission in Beijing said that the tariffs were a response to Mr. Trump’s threat to impose new tariffs by Sept. 1. Mr. Trump had initially said he would impose 10 percent tariffs on $300 billion in Chinese-made goods on that date, essentially targeting everything that the United States buys from China that has not already been hit by previous rounds of tariffs. He later delayed more than half of the latest round of tariffs until Dec. 15 to avoid hitting American pocketbooks during the holiday shopping season. A few tariffs were scrapped entirely.

On Friday afternoon, he said those tariffs would start at a rate of 15 percent, rather than 10 percent.

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Both sides have a lot at stake. Recent market moves have signaled that many investors expect the American economy to slide into recession, with the trade war as a major reason.

The Chinese government has its own worries. The country’s economic growth is already slowing. Though Beijing keeps tight control over China’s economy and still has a lot of financial firepower at its disposal to help growth, a huge and growing debt problem has limited its options.

The disproportionate scale of the proposed retaliation — tariffs on $75 billion in American goods meant to counter tariffs on $300 billion in Chinese goods — reflects how unbalanced trade has become between the two countries. The dollar value of goods targeted by China tends to be much smaller than the value targeted by the White House for the simple reason that China exports far more to the United States than it imports.

Mark Williams, the chief Asia economist at Capital Economics, wrote in a note to clients that the structuring of China’s latest salvo reflected its limitations in waging such a protracted trade fight with the United States, noting that it was mostly taxing goods that it could easily source elsewhere.

“China is running into the limits of how much it can inflict pain on the U.S. without also hurting itself,” Mr. Williams said.

Alan Rappeport reported from Washington, and Keith Bradsher from Shanghai. Maggie Haberman contributed reporting from Washington.

RELATED COVERAGE
U.S. Delays Some China Tariffs Until Stores Stock Up for HolidaysAUG. 13, 2019

© 2019 The New York Times

What is about the rich that confuses them to the degree that as ruling class they can not fathom the historically obvious?

Is there credence through the experience of the French revolution, the Romanov massacre, the Persian Shah’s debacle, the South Vietnamese fate of the Mandarins empire of recent role-to continue to live in an obscure hope of sustaining themselves as usual.

Here I then, it must be attitude, places against and not with and through the subservient masses!

What then, is their attitude?
Here is a search into that very mystifying element of behind the concept of historical causality:

Big Money

The bad behavior of the richest: what I learned from wealth managers

The habits of the wealthiest mirror the supposed ‘pathologies’ of the poor. But while those in poverty are called lazy, the rich are dubbed bon vivants

Big Money is supported by

About this content

Brooke Harrington

Fri 19 Oct 2018 02.00 EDT

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If nearly a decade interviewing the wealth managers for the 1% taught me anything, it is that the ultra-rich and the ultra-poor have a lot more in common than stereotypes might lead you to believe.

In conversation, wealth managers kept coming back to the flamboyant vices of their clients. It was quite unexpected, in the course of discussing tax avoidance, to hear professional service providers say things like:

“I’ve told my colleagues: ‘If I ever become like some of our clients, shoot me.’ Because they are really immoral people – too much time on their hands, and all the money means they have no limits. I was actually told by one client not to bring my wife on a trip to Monaco unless I wanted to see her get hit on by 10 guys. The local sport, he said, was picking up other men’s wives.”

The clients of this Geneva-based wealth manager also “believe that they are descended from the pharaohs, and that they were destined to inherit the earth”.

I’ve told my colleagues: ‘If I ever become like some of our clients, shoot me’

If a poor person voiced such beliefs, he or she might well be institutionalized; for those who work with the wealthy, however, such “eccentricities” are all in a day’s work. Indeed, an underappreciated irony of accelerating economic inequality has been the way it has exposed behaviors among the ultra-rich that mirror the supposed “pathologies” of the ultra-poor.

In fact, one of the London-based wealth managers I interviewed said that a willingness to accept with equanimity behavior that would be considered outrageous in others was an informal job requirement. Clients, he said, specifically chose wealth managers not just on technical competence, but on their ability to remain unscandalized by the private lives of the ultra-rich: “They [the clients] have to pick someone they want to know everything about them: about Mother’s lesbian affairs, Brother’s drug addiction, the spurned lovers bursting into the room.” Many of these clients are not employed and live off family largesse, but no one calls them lazy.

As Lane and Harburg put it in the libretto of the musical Finian’s Rainbow:

When a rich man doesn’t want to work

He’s a bon vivant, yes, he’s a bon vivant

But when a poor man doesn’t want to work

He’s a loafer, he’s a lounger

He’s a lazy good for nothing, he’s a jerk

When the wealthy are revealed to be drug addicts, philanderers, or work-shy, the response is – at most – a frisson of tabloid-level curiosity, followed by a collective shrug.

Behaviors indulged in the rich are not just condemned in the poor, but used as a justification to punish them, denying them access to resources that keep them alive, such as healthcare and food assistance. Discussion of poverty has become almost impossible without moral outrage directed at lazy “welfare queens”, “crackheads” and other drug addicts, and the “promiscuous poor” (a phrase that has cropped up again and again in discussions of public benefits over more than a century).

These disparate perceptions aren’t just evidence of hypocrisy; they are literally a matter of life and death. In the US, the widespread belief that the poor are simply lazy has led many states to impose work requirements on aid recipients –even those who have been medically classified as disabled. Limiting aid programs in this way has been shown to shorten recipients’ lives: rather than the intended consequence of pushing recipients into paid employment, the restrictions have simply left them without access to medical care or a sufficient food supply. Thus, in one of the richest counties in America, a boy living in poverty died of a toothache; there were no protests, and nothing changed.

Why are so few US politicians from the working class?

Meanwhile, the “billionaire” in the White House starts his days at 11am – the rest of the morning is coyly termed “executive time” – and is known for his frequent holidays. “Nice work if you can get it,” quipped an opinion piece in the Washington Post.

We don’t hear much about laziness, drug addiction or promiscuity among the wealthiest members of society because – unlike Trump – most billionaires are not public figures and go to great lengths to seek privacy. Thus the motto of one London-based wealth management firm: “I want to be invisible.” This company, like many other service providers to the ultra-rich, specializes in preserving secrecy for clients. The wealthy people I studied not only had wealth managers but often dedicated staff members who killed negative stories about them in the media and kept their names off the Forbes “rich list”.

Donald Trump, who starts his days at 11am, has found plenty of time for vacation. Photograph: Peter Morrison/AP

Many even present themselves as homeless – for tax purposes – despite owning multiple residences. For the ultra-rich, having no fixed residence provides major legal and financial advantages; this is exemplified by the case of the wealthy businessman who acquired eight different nationalities in order to avoid taxes on his fortune, and by the UK native I interviewed in his Dubai apartment building:

“I am not tax resident anywhere. The tax man says ‘show me a utility bill’, and the only utility bill I can present is for the house I own in Thailand, and it’s in a language that the European authorities aren’t familiar with. With all the mobility going on in the world, international marriages, governments can’t keep up with people.”

Meanwhile, the poor can end up being “resident nowhere” because no one will allow them to stay in one place for very long; as the sociologist Cristobal Young has shown, the majority of migrants are poor people. In addition, the poor are routinely evicted from housing on the slightest pretext, frequently driving them into homeless shelters – which are in turn forced to move when local homeowners engage in nimby (not in my back yard) protests. Even the design of public spacesis increasingly organized to deny the poor a place to alight, however temporarily.

It is as if the right to move around, to take up space, and to direct your own life as you see fit have become luxury goods, available to those who can pay instead of being human rights. For the rich, deviance from social norms is nearly consequence-free, to the point where outright criminality is tolerated: witness the collective shrug that greeted revelations of massive intergenerational tax fraud in the Trump family.

For the poor, however, even the most minor deviance from others’ expectations – like buying ice cream or soft drinks with food stamps – results in stigmatization, limits on their autonomy, and deprivation of basic human needs. This makes life far more nasty, brutish and short for those on the lowest rungs of the socio-economic ladder, creating a chasm of more than 20 years in life expectancy between rich and poor. This appears to some as a fully justified consequence of “personal responsibility” – the poor deserve to die because of their moral failings.

So while the behavior of the ultra-rich gets an ever-widening scope of social leeway, the lives of the poor are foreshortened in every sense. Once upon a time, they were urged to eat cake; now the cake earns them a public scolding.

Brooke Harrington is a professor of economic sociology at the Copenhagen Business School and the author of Capital without Borders: Wealth Management and the One Percent (2016, Harvard University Press

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The contrarian basis of Capital in all it’s manifestations: Tlme granted, will explore the metaphisical aspects including magic rites thereof. (Work in progress)

Canada THE FIFTH ESTATE

B.C. billionaire brothers’ use of KPMG offshore tax scheme exposed in emails

Federal auditors request for accounting giant’s records stalls yet again, 7 years into tax probe

Harvey Cashore, Frédéric Zalac - CBC News

Posted: 4 Hours Ago
Last Updated: 3 Hours Ago

Records show that Caleb Chan, pictured, and his brother Tom were part of a group of more than 20 wealthy Canadians whose families invested in a sophisticated KPMG tax dodge first developed out of the accounting firm’s Vancouver office in the late 1990s. (Edmond So/South China Morning Post)

The Chan family is one of the wealthiest in British Columbia and is known for donating millions to philanthropic causes.

Led by billionaire brothers Caleb and Tom Chan, the family donated $40 million this year to a Vancouver Art Gallery relocation project that will be christened the Chan Centre for the Visual Arts.

But right across the street from the existing gallery, a far different portrait of the Chan brothers is emerging, as they battle the Canada Revenue Agency in the Federal Court of Canada over a decade-long offshore tax dodge.

Numerous internal emails filed in court this summer reveal the Chans’ involvement in a KPMG offshore scheme so secret that neither tax collectors nor even their spouses were ever supposed to find out.

The Chan brothers may be the most prominent of several wealthy families whose identities have been revealed over the past few years as being part of the scheme.

The records show the Chan brothers were part of a group of more than 20 wealthy Canadians whose families had at least $5 million to invest in a sophisticated KPMG tax dodge first developed out of the accounting firm’s Vancouver office in the late 1990s.

Tom Chan, seen speaking in April 2017, at a performance to mark the 20th anniversary of the Chan Centre at UBC. (Paul Joseph/UBC)

The KPMG offshore tax dodge helped wealthy clients set up shell companies on the Isle of Man, a tiny tax haven in the middle of the Irish Sea. It promised clients they could pay “no tax” on their investments and hide money from their ex-spouses.

Over time, interest income from the overseas investments would accumulate untaxed, and funds would also be sent back to family members or other “eligible persons” as untaxed “gifts.”

The CRA says the so-called gifts were masking actual income and, in another tax case against KPMG clients, has called the operation a “sham.”

The agency first pursued the KPMG scheme in 2012, but then fought for years in court to have the accounting firm reveal the names of the wealthy Canadians involved.

Brothers cited for philanthropy in Canada and abroad

Born in Hong Kong, the Chan brothers immigrated to Canada in 1987.

Their business empire includes golf courses in B.C. and other real estate holdings. Their combined net worth is estimated at $1.07 billion, according to Canadian Business magazine.

In 1990, Caleb and Tom Chan received honourary degrees from the University of British Columbia after being cited for their philanthropic work, including a $10 million donation to the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts at UBC.

The family’s donation to the Vancouver Art Gallery earlier this year was billed as the largest private donation to the arts in the province’s history. At the donation ceremony in January, Caleb Chan’s son Christian said the family was “honoured to participate in a project [that is of] such vast public benefit while also fitting so well into our family’s intergenerational charitable mandate.”

The Chans donated $40 million this year to a Vancouver Art Gallery relocation project that will be christened the Chan Centre for the Visual Arts. (Vancouver Art Gallery)

But around the same time, the battle between the Chan brothers and the CRA was beginning to escalate. New documents would soon be filed in federal court that show a pattern of extreme secrecy in their offshore accounts, set up in part to avoid paying Canadian taxes on their Hong Kong family charitable trusts.

In one email from 2002, a KPMG accountant explained the Chan brothers did not want their spouses to learn about their offshore dealings.

“The concern is that the wifes [sic] are not to know about the assets of the husbands,” said the accountant’s email.

In the Isle of Man, where the shell companies were set up, the response was to “rest assured” that the Chans’ partners would not find out.

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The documents show tax authorities were also not supposed to find out. The court records show the Chans did not disclose their offshore companies in the Isle of Man during a 2005 audit, even after being required to list all their global assets.

Another email exchange between accountants reveals plans to route communication outside Canada as much as “humanly possible” and through a law firm that might allow the players to “claim solicitor/client privilege.”

Despite the secrecy provisions built into the Chans’ offshore accounts, the records show CRA discovered their involvement in late 2016 from officials in the Isle of Man.

‘Stalling tactics’

The Chan brothers have since engaged in a legal battle against the CRA, hoping to block tax auditors from reviewing an additional 1,000-plus documents in KPMG’s possession, arguing that they are protected by solicitor-client privilege.

“These are stalling tactics, they are just trying to buy time,” said tax law professor Marwah Rizqy, who has reviewed the Chan court file and studied what has become known as the KPMG Isle of Man tax dodge for several years.

While some of the withheld documents may be legally privileged, tax experts consulted by The Fifth Estate and Radio-Canada’s Enquête say the revenue agency faces an uphill struggle getting access to all records from the Chan brothers they’re entitled to examine.

“How is the CRA supposed to follow through on its widely proclaimed desire to address offshore evasion and avoidance when the necessary information about wealthy Canadians cannot be obtained or reviewed?” said University of Victoria tax law professor Geoffrey Loomer.

The KPMG offshore tax dodge helped wealthy clients set up shell companies on the Isle of Man, a tiny tax haven in the middle of the Irish Sea. (Reinhard Krause/Reuters)

The court records show that as recently as last year, the CRA had not been able to obtain the crucial “general ledgers” from Caleb and Tom Chan’s offshore companies. The general ledgers would typically show money coming out of the offshore accounts, and where the money ended up.

In December 2017, Caleb Chan told tax auditors he did not have a copy of the general ledger.

Did company ledgers go missing?

Isle of Man documentspreviously obtained by The Fifth Estate and Enquête show that the Chan offshore companies were shut down in 2012, and that all “books, documents and all papers” were ordered “destroyed.”

Daniel Reid, a lawyer for the Chans, said his clients were not aware of the destruction order and that electronic records still exist. The lawyer did not respond to a question about whether the CRA had been provided the ledgers.

A KPMG flow chart of the secret Chan companies, filed in court, shows that the brothers named themselves, their spouses and their children as the “eligible persons” that could receive the tax-free “gifts.”

Reid said that any tax benefits for the Chan companies would have only been for international philanthropy outside Canada, and that no money ever went to family members.

Reid also said that KPMG told them “eligible persons” had to be named, even if they were not going to receive any money.

The internal flow chart, written at the time the offshore companies were set up, stated that donating to a charity was part of the scheme, warning advisors for the Chan brothers that it “must be a bona fide/genuine charity.”

Rizqy said it is hard to understand the Chan family position that none of them ever received the “gifts” from the Isle of Man, since they were the ones named as being “eligible” to receive them.

A KPMG flow chart of the secret Chan companies, filed in court, shows that the brothers named themselves, their spouses and their children as the “eligible persons” that could receive the tax-free “gifts.” (Federal Court of Canada)

“They wrote in black and white that there were members of the family who would be able to receive funds from the Isle of Man. And, they never divulged this information to the tax authorities,” Rizqy said.

Rizqy said that even if the Chan family did give all of its investment money to charity, their offshore investment income still needed to be declared on their taxes. In Canada, residents are taxed on their worldwide income.

“Whether this was intended for philanthropy or not, we have tax rules,” said Rizqy, adding that governments need all Canadian residents to pay their fair share of taxes for social programs and other expenditures. “We cannot be above the law.”

Exactly how much money the KPMG tax dodge diverted from the federal treasury remains unknown, but court records and documents in other cases suggest there were tens of millions in undeclared income in a scheme the CRA has alleged “intended to deceive.”

KPMG profited from the scheme by receiving annual fees from the clients, and in some cases, a percentage of the taxes dodged. The most successful KPMG salespeople were known internally as “product champions.”

‘We have a deep love for Canada’

Lawyers for the Chan brothers say that throughout their involvement in the KPMG offshore planning, they were relying entirely on the advice of tax professionals.

In a statement sent to The Fifth Estate/Enquête on Aug. 26, Caleb Chan added their goal was always to ensure the “sustainability” of their charitable giving.

“We have a deep love for Canada and the utmost respect for its laws and institutions. Any suggestion that we would deliberately act counter to this goes against everything that we stand for.”

“Our family has faith that our good and genuine intentions, our values, and our contributions to make Canada and the world a better place will ultimately shine through.”

The recently opened court documents reveal a major rift developing between the Chan brothers and KPMG. In a “memorandum of fact and law” filed in April, lawyers for the Chan brothers state that senior KPMG executives were “directly involved” in the scheme, including Walter Pela, now the firm’s B.C. managing partner.

The memorandum also says that others involved in the “planning, implementing, considering, or unwinding” of the offshore companies included Elio Luongo, the current chief executive officer of KPMG Canada, and Gregory Wiebe, the head of KPMG Canada’s tax office.

KPMG disputes those descriptions. In a statement to The Fifth Estate/Enquête, the firm said representatives for the Chan brothers “incorrectly” named Luongo, Wiebe and Pela, and said those three executives had “no involvement in the Chan engagements and/or didn’t provide any information, advice and expertise.”

This KPMG scheme first attracted the attention of the Liberal-controlled finance committee in 2016. The committee held hearings into the accounting firm and its offshore scheme that promised “no tax” on investments.

Liberal MPs ended up voting to shut down their inquiry prematurely, at KPMG’s urging. The accounting firm had argued that a continuation of the inquiry might unfairly prejudice any future court action against KPMG and its clients.

KPMG has said its Isle of Man scheme complied with all laws, but also said it would no longer support this kind of offshore tax planning.

To date, the CRA has settled all court actions related to the KPMG scheme instead of going to trial.

With files from Kimberly Ivany

If you have tips on this story, you can contact Harvey Cashore by email at Harvey.Cashore@cbc.ca, on Twitter @harveycashore or by phone at 416-526-4704.

CRA deploys new weapons against tax evasion: Freezing assets, seizing property

Limits to growth refers to limitations in the biosphere that can provide energy and material resources ultimately needed to back up all those numbers in hard drives.

We are likely approaching them, and no amount of increased credit can defy physics.

I think so as well, with that point probably passed with ex
President Carter’s push for growth limits and conservation.
He became an unpopular one-termer, for this , for the most part.

Instead of a wall there should be an help-corridor, a zone where people are helped with basic resources and allowed to stay there and build something. A no-country between Mexico and the US, in which there is only habeas corpus guaranteed by an otherwise non interventionist Swiss Guard.

People need to prove something here.
Its no longer about finding happiness in a pre existing structure. It is about proving the vitality of mankind.

Jeff Bezos could pay for this whole thing if he wanted.
There is need of a purpose for money.

Speak to the money kid. Speak to the money and treat it like you want it to treat you.
The golden rule applied to gold.
What could be wrong?

Guess!

It would upset the structural fidelity of the setup. The minutes blemish in that freeze, could cause avalanches of reprisal. At that level , the very eye of the target has to be within quanta of measurement. They are afraid of meltdown, at a time where systemic cohesion is at a very minimum.

Jacob, I said this all along, even when St.James and Armenius were around , that a net capital holding of one trillion individual holding , would indicate an unacceptable level, be it psychological, inflationary, or otherwise.
The world economy would basically begin to be run on futures of shortening risk, and it would probably create an unsupported weakness in the world economy, even one predicated on the NWO.

But I hold to that, even against variable odds, as mostly based on a gut feeling.

To be actually charitable, the wealthy possessing a great deal of political power, could actually make charity more viable in terms of more then periodic nominal contributions, coming through as gestures of good will.
They could more strongly endorse to clarify such hardly noticed but not less disturbing noticed on executive power, as they appear to snow ball by the minute.
Trump seriously is starting to advocate 3 or more presidential terms.
One notable significant comment suggests the seriousness of the sitiation:

"Below the level of rationality , there exists the primal question, -what shadows follow is from the choice between the evil genius , or the managed one?

Can this, does this question signal some kind of doubly vested metaphor in the new schemal working of things, of deciding what route best describes
venturing into the proper road to peace, rather than war?

For the former describes a split between good and evil, while the later above it and beyond."

I think this is a very intelligent observation, one that could have repercussions toward a slippery slope argument, that may effect a world politic on a complete irreversible trend, even to the point of total negation, toward dialectical reasoning.

youtu.be/9jK-NcRmVcw

Next stop : national socialism, but don’t use this retroactively.

youtu.be/vXwcacayJzA

youtu.be/u9sq3ME0JHQ

This contradicts your earlier statement, that these limits can be expanded.