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Tag: billionaires
Elon Musk

How Elon Musk Changed Clean Water Into A Dirty Whine

There is nothing quite as pitiful as whiny billionaires. And the whiniest of all is the richest — Elon Musk. This self-entitled bully runs over anyone in his way, then whines when they protest.

Elon's latest high-pitched screech was prompted by public demands that his profiteering schemes obey clean-water and safety regulations. He owns a corporation named (believe it or not) the Boring Company — an underground tunnelling venture based in Bastrop, Texas, digging out tons of soil, chemicals and contaminated groundwater. But where to put all the waste? I'll just dump the stuff in the nearby Colorado River, said Lord Musk. Lots of stuff — 140,000 gallons of wastewater per day!

But that river is our main water source, said local people — you'll need to comply with water treatment and disposal rules. Outrageous, whined Elon, maniacally squealing that "Construction is becoming practically illegal" in America. So, he proceeded to dump his waste without a permit.

Then he encountered Chap Ambrose, a Boring neighbor and former Musk admirer. Chap began asking questions and getting nothing but evasions, lies and disrespect. Musk was messing with Texas, so Ambrose rallied local opposition through a website he named "Keep Bastrop Boring," promoting it on a local billboard. With a drone, he videoed Musk's expanding industrial mess, broadcasting the videos throughout the area. He filed actions with county, state and national regulatory authorities, and got his state senator to hold a hearing, attended by hundreds of residents in this rural county.

Musk can bamboozle powerful officials, but not feisty people like Chap, who recently ridiculed the pouty billionaire. "I'm sorry, neighbor," Ambrose told him. "Development remains legal in Bastrop, but what is illegal is polluting Texas water... You're making this way harder than it has to be."

The fight goes on — and I'm betting on Chap.

The Secretive Presidential Primary That Excludes You

Are you excited by — or do you dread — the upcoming presidential election season? Either way, buckle up, for it's only 12 weeks till the Iowa caucuses, and then (zoom!) there's nonstop voting across America for the rest of 2024. Democracy at work!

Well... unless you don't notice the Plutocratic Primary, where — shhhh! — presidential voting is already taking place. However, this balloting is only open to a teensy number of very exclusive voters: billionaires.

These privileged ones don't have to go to public campaign events; candidates come to them for closed-door tete-a-tetes, making undisclosed promises in exchange for millions of dollars in campaign funds. This secretive primary lets moneyed elites initiate or eliminate policies that candidates obediently support. Moreover, by granting or withholding large donations, billionaires can determine which candidates are considered "viable," letting the superrich have a heavy hand in "choosing the choices" that we commoners will have next year.

The New York Times reports that this flexing of the money muscle was recently exercised at a closed meeting of GOP sugar daddies in Utah. Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley, Chris Christie and other presidential wannabes were on display, pleading with the donors to choose them as the party's alternative to former President Donald Trump — and to shoo the other Republican contenders out of the race.

Haley bluntly appealed to the rich clique's plutocratic ego: "I think it's up to the donors to decide which candidates should get off the stage." Christie went a step further toward plutocratic rule, asking the elite attendees to decide who would be "the best president."

No one in the room bothered asking the obvious question: Best for whom? Everyone knew he meant best for the rich. No need for messy elections; let the billionaires choose!

To find out more about Jim Hightower and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators webpage at www.creators.com.

Reprinted with permission from Ceators.

Why Ordinary Americans Pay Taxes — But Billionaires Don’t

Why Ordinary Americans Pay Taxes — But Billionaires Don’t

After a year of reporting on the tax machinations of the ultrawealthy, ProPublica spotlights the top tax-avoidance techniques that provide massive benefits to billionaires.

Last June, drawing on the largest trove of confidential American tax data that’s ever been obtained, ProPublica launched a series of stories documenting the key ways the ultrawealthy avoid taxes, strategies that are largely unavailable to most taxpayers. To mark the first anniversary of the launch, we decided to assemble a quick summary of the techniques — all of which can generate tax savings on a massive scale — revealed in the series.

1. The Ultra Wealth Effect

Our first story unraveled how billionaires like Elon Musk, Warren Buffett and Jeff Bezos were able to amass some of the largest fortunes in history while paying remarkably little tax relative to their immense wealth. They did it in part by avoiding selling off their vast holdings of stock. The U.S. system taxes income. Selling stock generates income, so they avoid income as the system defines it. Meanwhile, billionaires can tap into their wealth by borrowing against it. And borrowing isn’t taxable. (Buffett said he followed the law and preferred that his wealth go to charity; the others didn’t comment beyond a “?” from Musk.)

2. The $5 Billion IRA

Other billionaires used less conventional ways to avoid income, we found. Tech mogul Peter Thiel amassed a $5 billion Roth IRA, a type of account that shields income from taxes and is intended to help low- and middle-class savers prepare for retirement. Back in 1999, Thiel stuffed low-valued shares of the company that would become PayPal into the account, a maneuver tax lawyers said risked running afoul of IRS rules. (It’s not clear if the government ever challenged the move.) He set himself up to reap billions in untaxed gains. (Thiel did not respond to questions for the original article.)


3. The $1 Billion Parlor Trick: Turning High-Tax-Rate Trading into Low-Tax-Rate Income

Even when tech billionaires do show income on their tax return, they tend to pay relatively low income tax rates. That’s because of the type of income they have: Gains from long-term investments, such as from stock sales, are taxed at a lower rate. But what do you do if you’re making over $1 billion every year, and it’s largely from short-term trading? Do you just accept that you’ll pay the higher rate on all that income? As we reported this week, Jeff Yass, head of one of the most profitable firms on Wall Street, did not meekly accept this fate. Instead, his firm, Susquehanna International Group, found creative ways to transform the wrong sort of income into the right kind, generating tax savings that exceeded $1 billion over just six years. (Susquehanna declined to comment but in a court case that centered on similar allegations, it maintained that it complies with the law.)

4: The Magic of Sports Ownership: Make Money While (Legally) Reporting Losses

The tax code offers business owners a slew of methods to erase income through deductions, none more awesome than buying a sports team, as former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer did with the Los Angeles Clippers. It doesn’t matter whether the team is actually profitable and growing in value. It can still be a write-off. (In some cases, we found, owners could effectively deduct a given player’s contract not once, but twice. They’re allowed to take deductions comparable to those for factory equipment that loses value as it ages, even as teams almost inevitably gain in value.) That’s one reason owners tend to pay far lower tax rates than the athletes they employ, or even the people serving beer in the team’s stadium. In our story, we found a Clippers arena worker who made $45,000 a year and paid a higher tax rate than the billionaire Ballmer. (Ballmer said he pays the taxes he owes.)

5. Build, Drill and Save: The Real Estate and Oil Businesses Can Both Be Tax Havens

In certain industries, like real estate or oil and gas, the tax breaks are so plentiful that billionaires can erase their income entirely even as they grow richer. That’s how real estate developer Stephen Ross (who also happens to own the Miami Dolphins) went 10 years without paying any income tax. Ross said that he followed the law. Another mogul, this one in the oil business, managed to tap a near bottomless well of write-offs via one of the biggest oil spills in history. (The mogul’s representatives did not respond to requests for comment.)

6. Even a Billionaire’s Hobbies Can Pay Off at Tax Time

Deductions from hobbies and side projects, which the ultrawealthy can structure as businesses, are another fun option. For some billionaires, it’s race horses: We found that six owners of thoroughbreds at the 2021 Kentucky Derby had taken a combined $600 million in tax write-offs on their horse racing operations. For others, like Beanie Babies founder Ty Warner, it’s luxury hotels. The billionaire splurged on a couple of landmark Four Seasons locations and then went 12 years without paying any income tax. (Representatives for Warner did not respond to requests for comment.)

7. Think Your Taxes are Too High? Change the Tax Laws

Sometimes, it pays to fight for a new tax break. For the billionaires who contributed millions to Republican politicians, the payoff came in the form of Trump’s “big, beautiful tax cut” for passthrough businesses. We found the change sent $1 billion in tax savings in a single year to just 82 ultrawealthy households. Some business owners also boosted their savings with a trick: They slashed their own salaries and categorized the money instead as passthrough income.

8. Why Tech Billionaires Pay Less Than Hedge-Fund Managers

With so many options to reduce taxes, the richest Americans often manage low income tax rates. We analyzed the incomes and taxes of the country’s top 400 earners, those averaging over $110 million in income per year. Overall, the group paid relatively low rates, but certain segments (tech billionaires, heirs, private equity executives) stood out even within this elite population because they were able to draw on the sorts of techniques detailed above. (Also drawing on these techniques were wealthy politicians, like the governors of Colorado and West Virginia.)

9. Brother, Can You Spare a Stimulus Check?

But the real standouts were the billionaires who reported such low incomes that they qualified for government assistance. At least 18 billionaires received stimulus checks in 2020, because their tax returns placed them below the income cutoff ($150,000 for a married couple).

10. Trust This: How Wealthy Families Pass Billions to Heirs While Avoiding Taxes

The holes in the estate tax, we found, are even more remarkable. There are well-worn ways to make sure Uncle Sam doesn’t get his cut of a fortune being passed on to heirs, and the most common is through a trust. How common no one can say, but we found evidence that at least half of the nation’s 100 richest individuals had used estate-tax-dodging trusts. In another story,we followed three century-old dynasties down through the generations, showing how they used trusts to avoid taxes, so that a fortune could pass all the way from the original early 20th century tycoon to, for example, the great-great-granddaughter who recently collected $210 million before her 19th birthday.

Reprinted with permission from Propublica.

How The Supreme Court Became A Corporate Rubber Stamp

How The Supreme Court Became A Corporate Rubber Stamp

Today's six-member supermajority on the Supreme Court has surrendered all claim to being an impartial moral force for blind justice. Instead, the GOP's small network of corporate and right-wing operatives has painstakingly fabricated and weaponized the court as its own political oligarchy. In only a couple of decades, backed by a few billionaires, these anti-democracy zealots have incrementally been imposing on America an extremist political agenda that they could not win at the ballot box.

Their "Eureka!" moment — the startling development that opened the eyes of the moneyed elites and ideologues to the raw power they could grab by politicizing the judiciary — was the Supreme Court's illegitimate Bush v. Gore ruling. In December 2000, that five-person GOP majority abruptly crashed Florida's presidential vote count, storming over both democracy and judicial propriety to install George W. in the White House. Appalled, dissenting Justice John Paul Stevens mocked the five, pointing out that while their trumped-up ruling didn't really establish whether Bush or Gore won, it did make the loser "pellucidly clear: It is the Nation's confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law."

One of those who helped run the court's blatant political power play over the Florida vote was an obscure corporate lawyer who had long been an aggressive, behind-the-scenes Republican monkey-wrencher pushing to restrict voting by people of color, poor people and other Democratic constituencies: John Roberts. Shortly thereafter — surprise! — Bush elevated Roberts to a top federal judgeship, and just two years later moved him on up to America's ultimate judicial power spot, chief justice of the Supremes.

From this lofty roost, Roberts has orchestrated an expansive political docket for the court, handpicking cases created and advanced by far-right interests. He then has manipulated precedents and procedures to produce convoluted decisions that impose plutocratic, autocratic and theocratic domination over the American people's democratic rights and aspirations.

To date, Chief Justice Roberts has cobbled together slim, all-Republican majorities to hand down more than 80 blatantly partisan rulings, fabricating law that We the People have never voted for and don't support.

It's bizarre to have the Supreme Court, the least democratic branch of government, professing to speak in the name of The People. Even as its right-wing core is grinding out an unprecedented level of partisan judgments that We the People clearly do not want — and will not support. Take that abortion right, for example, that the court — now freshly packed with former President Donald Trump's trio of Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh — will likely move this year to nullify. If they do, it will be a pricey "victory" for those politicos, because they are imperiously thrusting their own agenda over the overwhelming will of the people.

Helloooo, your honors: Some six in 10 Americans have consistently and passionately affirmed that these deeply personal and emotional decisions belong to the women affected, not to unelected ideologues and political opportunists. A court so far out of touch with the people is marching forth with no cloak of legitimacy, squandering its authority to be taken seriously, much less obeyed.

Not only has this band of self-righteous judges been punching their reactionary social biases into court-made law, but they've also been rubber-stamping cases to enthrone corporate supremacy over us and our environment. Throughout Roberts' reign, the court has sided with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (the chief front group for U.S. corporate giants) a staggering 70 percent of the time! Indeed, three members — Roberts, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas — now rank among the five most corporate-friendly justices of the past 75 years.

This aggressive corporatization and partisanship has lifted the Supremes to a new level of public awareness — much to their chagrin. In a Quinnipiac survey last November, more than six in 10 Americans said they believe Supreme Court decisions are motivated primarily by politics, not by unbiased readings of the law. Rather than instilling a modicum of humility, however, the bad reviews have stirred embarrassing outbursts of judicial pique and vitriol. Alito, for example, whined loudly last year that critics are engaged in "unprecedented efforts to intimidate the court or damage it as an independent institution." Likewise, Barrett was so stung that she felt it necessary to go public with a strained denial, pleading for the public to believe that "this court is not comprised of a bunch of partisan hacks."

Note to petulant judges: If you don't want to be called a partisan hack, stop being one. And, Brother Alito, it's not critics who're damaging the third branch "as an independent institution," it's your obsequious fealty to corporate interests and your knee-jerk allegiance to extremist ideologues. You can wear the robe, but you can't hide in it.

Reprinted with permission from Creators.

There’s Rich, Ugly Rich, And Jeff Bezos

There’s Rich, Ugly Rich, And Jeff Bezos

When I was just a tyke, cowboy television actors were marketed as role models and heroes for little backyard cowpokes like me, and we could send off a cereal box top to get a certificate making us "Pals of the Saddle" or some-such with Roy Rogers, Hopalong Cassidy or other "heroes."

Cute for a four year-old. Less so for 57-year-old Jeff "Space Boy" Bezos.

Yet there he was in July — the gazillionaire profiteer, labor exploiter, and tax scofflaw who heads the Amazon online retail syndicate — all dressed up and playacting as a heroic conqueror of space. Marketed as some combination of the Wright brothers' innovation and the Apollo 11 moon landing, Little Jeff's trip on his private Blue Origin rocket ship was essentially a very expensive, high-tech carnival ride. The whole thing took only 11 minutes, barely got into suborbital space, achieved no scientific purpose, and did zero to enhance American prestige in the world.

As for personal genius or heroics, Bezos didn't invent or build the spacecraft, didn't have any role in flying it (the trip up and down was fully automated), and didn't face any cosmic unknowns (he didn't even have to wear a spacesuit). All he really did was buy the spacecraft — a cheap bauble for the world's richest man.

But he did get to dress up in a sort of space-style jogging outfit with his name and his Blue Origin corporate logo emblazoned on it. Then, like a little boy getting a cereal-box certificate proclaiming him a cowboy, when the diminutive mega-billionaire floated back to terra firma, he held a fake ceremony at which some former NASA official pinned a set of phony "astronaut wings" on him, custom designed by his own corporation. More pathetically, his corporate lobbyists are said to be appealing to Washington officials to award official astronaut wings to this uber-rich space tourist.

So, there you have the new pantheon of America's flight heroes: the Wright brothers, Amelia Earhart, John Glenn, Neil Armstrong ... and Jeff "Space Boy" Bezos. Did I mention "pathetic"?

I cheered when Bezos, the richest man on Earth, had himself rocketed into space. But then he came back down.

There's nothing irredeemably wrong about being rich — indeed, as Mark Twain put it, "I'm opposed to millionaires, but it would be dangerous to offer me the position." One good role model for handling wealth, rather than letting it handle you, is music superstar Dolly Parton. She donated a cool million bucks to the Vanderbilt University Medical Center in 2020 to help finance its development of the Moderna vaccine that's now preventing millions of people from dying with COVID-19.

Then there's ugly rich, like Amazon kingpin "Space Boy" Bezos, who keeps spending gobs of his unsurpassed net worth on vainglorious purchases that end up revealing his essential worthlessness. Last year, he paid half a billion dollars for a yacht that's three football fields long and still not big enough to float his ego. So, last month, combining cluelessness with callousness, he actually ran a global media campaign to glorify himself for spending untold billions on his ego trip up to the edge of space. Back on Earth, he publicly blurted out that Amazon's underpaid and abused workforce should be applauded, because "you guys paid for all this."

Meanwhile, Wall Street speculators keep bloating Space Boy's personal fortune. On just one day last year, his wealth was jacked up by $8 billion ! One day! For doing nothing — he didn't work longer, harder or smarter. Well, he has been diligent about one task: tax dodging. Even though his wealth now tops $162 billion, he's had years in which he's paid zero income tax for the support of our nation.

But this year, Jeff suddenly became a philanthropist! Increasingly ridiculed as a self-indulgent rich jerk, he loudly announced he was giving $200 million to charitable causes. Wow — how generous. Except ... that's no sacrifice for Jeff, it's pocket change — doling out two big bills means he still has $161.8 billion in his vault.

We don't need his self-serving "charity"; we need a wealth tax to restore a bit of fairness and to support America's common good.

To find out more about Jim Hightower and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators webpage at www.creators.com.