Tag: rex tillerson
In Cuba, Trump’s Hostility Serves Russia — Not The United States

In Cuba, Trump’s Hostility Serves Russia — Not The United States

HAVANA — The presidency of Donald Trump is teaching millions of Cubans — along with people around the world – to see the United States as a symbol of disappointment rather than hope. Within a few months, his abusive attitude toward Cuba has nearly reversed the diplomatic, cultural, and humanitarian opening initiated by his predecessor.

Trump’s angry and unthinking policy represents in microcosm his generally malignant impact on American interests abroad. And it is yet another occasion when his actions have clearly advanced the fortunes of a hostile foreign power. 

Yes, that means Russia. 

Today the U.S. Embassy on Havana’s shoreline boulevard, the Malecon, is virtually silent, its staff reduced from a barely adequate 54 to a pitiful 14 (not counting the Marine guards who provide security). Five are State Department officials and nine are support staff. Our current ambassador Philip Goldberg is a seasoned diplomat, but he arrived only a week ago to serve in acting status for an indeterminate tour. With almost no consular staff on hand, the embassy can do nothing for the Cuban people, who yearn for the thousands of visas our government agreed to provide. For despite decades of ideological hostility, the United States and American people remain extraordinarily popular here.

 Not far away from the crippled American outpost, however, stands the Russian embassy — a looming, hideous edifice that resembles an upraised middle finger in an otherwise charming neighborhood.

Never much liked by Cubans even during the Soviet period, when they provided enormous aid and trade benefits as a political ally, the Russians fell out of favor altogether when the Communist empire imploded. Yet over the past year or so, Russia has become very active again here, making lots of deals with the Cuban government. Where Venezuela was once the ally that sent discounted oil to Havana, the Russian Federation has stepped up, perhaps because its energy sector intends to exploit Cuba’s undersea petroleum deposits.

And since Trump’s election, Russian agencies and companies have negotiated technology, defense, and commercial agreements with the Cubans, including an ambitious $2 billion scheme to rebuild the island’s decrepit railroad system. In short, the Russians are emphatically back, only 90 miles from Key West, where the withering of American influence will encourage whatever mischief they mean to create not only in Cuba itself but in the United States and throughout Latin America.

The timing is perfect, too. President Raul Castro is scheduled to cede power within months to a successor from a new generation, a wrenching change for a country ruled by Castros since 1959.

Underlining this opportunity for the Kremlin, of course, was the American reaction to an apparent assault on our personnel in Havana last year, which inflicted pain, panic, and medical injuries via means that remains mysterious.  A lengthy investigation by American law enforcement and intelligence agencies has yet to determine what caused the illnesses that afflicted Americans and Canadians at several locations, including hotels and residences.  And the exhaustive, highly technical investigation has also failed to find a culprit.

Naturally Trump has blamed the Cubans, although they offered unprecedented cooperation in the probe and there is no substantive evidence of their guilt. The lack of proof hasn’t dissuaded either the president or Secretary of State Rex Tillerson from retaliating with a travel warning that discourages American tourism and the expulsion of more than a dozen Cuban diplomats.

Those actions have badly undermined the nascent détente with Havana. Which may well have been Trump’s aim from the beginning, since he aims to undo all of Obama’s achievements regardless of merit and constantly stokes the prejudices of every Republican voting bloc. Meanwhile, he is harming ordinary Cubans in every possible way.

No doubt the strange assault on U.S. personnel in Cuba is genuinely disturbing to Tillerson, who has convened an Accountability Review Board to assess the department’s response. While the former ExxonMobil executive has decimated and mismanaged the diplomatic corps in ways that must also please his old friends in Moscow, his safety concerns are understandable.

But it is important to observe  – as Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) did during a visit to Cuba this week – that Canada has maintained a fully functioning embassy in Havana, although Canadian personnel were also affected by the mystery ailment. At a press conference on Wednesday, Leahy rightly urged the State Department to restore full staffing at the U.S. embassy, where plenty of our dedicated Foreign Service officers are still eager to serve.

We don’t know who is behind the troubling incidents in Havana, but the perpetrators’ agenda is all too obvious, whether they are acted on behalf of a foreign power or a renegade element in the Cuban state or both.  They aim to drive the United States and Cuba apart at a crucial moment. Our government should stop acting as their hapless pawn.

IMAGE: Honor guards carry the U.S. and Cuban flags during a wreath laying ceremony by U.S. President Barack Obama at the Jose Marti monument in Revolution Square in Havana, Cuba March 21, 2016. REUTERS/Ivan Alvarado

#EndorseThis: Lee Camp Shreds Trump For Weaponizing Religious Freedom

#EndorseThis: Lee Camp Shreds Trump For Weaponizing Religious Freedom

To President Trump, the world may appear as nothing but dollars and assets. While it’s true that leaders like Barack Obama bartered with quasi-hostile countries to forge alliances, what makes Trump so abnormal – and such a mortal threat to world peace – is a total lack of scruples. He is willing to lie outright to other nations, just as he deceives his own.

On Redacted Tonight, journalistic lion Lee Camp exposes the White House for putting Pakistan on a “religious freedom watch list” only a day after the Pakistani government said it would not exchange American dollars with China. Camp destroys Trump for taking childish, nonsensical revenge on a country the POTUS once called “fantastic.”

Watch past 1:00 for a brutal mockery of Rex Tillerson’s role in the Trump administration.

Danziger: Call Of Duty

Danziger: Call Of Duty

Jeff Danziger lives in New York City. He is represented by CWS Syndicate and the Washington Post Writers Group. He is the recipient of the Herblock Prize and the Thomas Nast (Landau) Prize. He served in the US Army in Vietnam and was awarded the Bronze Star and the Air Medal. He has published eleven books of cartoons and one novel. Visit him at DanzigerCartoons.com.

The GOP Tax Plan’s Mega Gift To Some of Trump’s Richest Appointees

The GOP Tax Plan’s Mega Gift To Some of Trump’s Richest Appointees

Reprinted with permission from ProPublica.

There are times that you run across something that’s so preposterous that it’s hard to believe it’s true. But in this case, it is.

I’m talking about the multiple — and permanent — set of tax breaks that some of the Trump administration’s mega-wealthy appointees and their heirs stand to get if the estate tax repeal in the House Republicans’ tax bill becomes law.

The appointees I’m talking about are those with a net worth above $11 million (which is a lot of them) who sold assets that the Office of Government Ethics said would pose conflict-of-interest problems in their new gigs.

Combine the rules that cover such sales with terms of the proposed estate tax repeal, and these people get a multilevel, multigenerational bonanza. A gift that would keep on giving (and giving and giving).

I couldn’t believe what I was reading, and figured that I might be overly eager to uncover gifts to the ultra-rich in the House tax cut bill, which is by no means tax reform because it hurts millions of taxpayers in my home state of New Jersey and other places that aren’t reliably Republican, but bestows plenty of breaks on big businesses and the rich. So I asked tax expert Bob Willens of Robert Willens LLC, whom I’ve consulted for decades, to show me where I was making a mistake.

It turned out that Willens couldn’t believe what he was reading, either, when he parsed the proposed estate tax repeal provisions. “I had to read that about eight times,” Willens told me. “It defies description. It’s unheard of. It’s unbelievable.”

Now, let me show you why. And why mega-wealthy Trump appointees and their heirs would get level after level after level of tax goodies, even more than regular rich people would get.

Under Section 1043 of the tax code, enacted in 1989, eligible federal appointees (such as an energy secretary who owns oil stocks) who sell conflict-posing assets and reinvest the proceeds in something permissible, such as an index mutual fund, don’t owe any tax until the replacement asset is sold. At that point, they pay taxes on the total gain in, to use our example, the mutual fund they bought with the proceeds of the assets they had to sell. In other words, the only benefit they get under current law is a deferral in their capital gains taxes. They don’t get to permanently escape taxes.

I have no problem with this tax deferral, by the way. I don’t think people should have to shell out serious money in order to work for the government. If they happen to benefit by being able to diversify their portfolios on a tax-deferred basis, the way former ExxonMobil chief executive Rex Tillerson could diversify out of his Exxon stock and long-time Goldman Sachs executive Gary Cohn could diversify out of his Goldman holdings, that doesn’t bother me, either.

Besides, until now people who have gotten very large Section 1043 tax deferrals have been almost certain to be wealthy enough to trigger estate tax — no, it’s not a “death tax,” it applies to only about 1 in 500 estates — when they die. Some 99.8 percent of estates don’t pay tax because about $5.5 million of assets are exempt from estate tax for a single person, and about $11 million for a married couple.

Now, watch where the outrageous part comes in. Under current law, heirs have to pay estate tax based only on the value of the inherited assets on the day the person who bequeathed them died. They don’t have to pay a penny on the assets’ gains while the dearly departed owned them. (The adjustment is known as a “basis step-up” in tax jargon.) But of course, the estate has to pay estate tax of 40 percent of the amount by which the inherited assets exceed the $5.5 million/$11 million threshold. The tax-free basis step-up allows heirs to avoid having to pay both capital gains tax and estate tax on the assets they inherit, which strikes me as a reasonable thing.

However, under the Republican plan’s estate tax repeal, not only would heirs collect everything tax-free, but they would also get a tax-free basis step-up in the assets they inherit. By contrast, when the estate tax was repealed for a year in 2010 as part of the George Bush tax cut bill, the step-up in basis was largely negated, which stopped heirs from getting a mega-windfall.

I assumed that would be the case in whatever plan the Republicans proposed this time. In fact, I predicted that in a January article that I wrote with Cezary Podkul, then a ProPublica colleague, currently a Wall Street Journal reporter.

We felt that even if the estate tax were repealed, the heirs of Donald Trump’s appointees would be subject to capital gains tax when they sold the assets their benefactors had acquired to solve conflict-of-interest problems.

Besides, even Trump, who campaigned on eliminating the estate tax, wasn’t proposing that heirs get a totally free ride. He was proposing something — details of which were never made clear — that seemed to involve estates paying capital gains tax on unrealized gains above $10 million.

That idea of taxing estates in any way seems to have disappeared entirely from Trump’s public statements these days. And I realize now that I was naïve to think that Trump might ever promote anything that might cost him or his family any money.

To return to where I started, I’m just astounded by the multiple tax breaks Trump appointees and their heirs stand to get if the House version of estate tax repeal becomes law. So is Bob Willens, the tax expert.

“You get to diversify tax-free,” he said, a tone of wonder in his voice. “Then you get to bequeath your portfolio tax-free. And the most amazing part is that your heirs get to step up their basis in the inherited assets tax-free.”

A great deal for these people. A terrible deal for the rest of us, who would have to pick up the tab for it.

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