MN Peoples' Assembly Take Your Money Outta the Bank!

MN Peoples' Assembly 

Take Your Money Outta the Bank!

	Saturday, November 5 · 9:30am - 12:30pm
	MN State Capitol Downtown Saint Paul 75 Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd.,  Directions: North of downtown St. Paul, accessible from I-94 and I-35E. Saint Paul, MN

Wells Fargo, Clean up Your Act!   (Bring mops, brooms, buckets, sponges, noisemakers!) Donations will be taken to buy toys for homeless children, please contribute.  Money will be accounted. Assembly 9:30 - Floyd B. Olson statue Rally 10:00 - The People speak!   We don't want a stadium.  Shelter Not a Stadium! We want coop housing for the homeless! We want an end to endless student debt! We want money outta politics! End foreclosures! Jail the crooked bank$t4er$ Stop the bank fees ripoff! Quit funding companies that spoil our planet! The poor contribute to our society,  stop the demonization! Don't let one child or adult freeze outside this winter! 30 speeches, 2-minutes each and THEN ... March/Parade  Dorothy Day Center/Listening House/Mary Hall Where people sleep in the rough every night as there are NOT enough beds. Let's speak to our poorest citizens (the MN Legislature doesn't!) March to Wells Fargo, Saint Paul  Wells Fargo! Clean up your act!   Demand that John Stumpf use his EXCE$$IVE executive compensation, paid by his tax evading bank give #MNpeoplesassembly $1 million dollars (chump change to HIM) to do the feasibility study to remodel the old Ramsey County jail as a shelter. We also want a center to come up with SUSTAINABLE cooperative social housing pronto!  See www.takethesquare.net.  Stumpf gave Habitat Saint Paul $1mm -  WHY NOT THOSE HE FORECLOSED ON? People will be urged to put their money in credit unions AND establish a state bank. (WWW.WEBOFDEBT.ORG)   http://www.seiu.org/a/profilewells.php -  profile of Wells Fargo And THEN March to Pioneer Press, and past MPR We demand that all media in MN cover the real #occupy issues - including our calls for economic democracy and moneyouttapolitics.org / www.movetoamend.org Stories from victims of the corporate GREED systems victims will be presented to them as well The Peoples' solutions! Media, clean up your acts! Move your money and then!! At 4:30 pm we to the Capitol South Lawn to hold a MN Peoples' Assembly We will discuss General Assembly rules AND our proposals for economic democracy and Next Steps to get economic predators to clean up their acts! How about YOU, Mark Dayton?  Care about our homeless crisis?  And the 6 billionaire$ in the state of MN -  how about YOU? If you do, contribute to remodel the old jail to accommodate the homeless NOW and develop sustainable cooperative housing.   Give homeless children some toys, too! #USDORMN            #MNPeoples                  #5NovMN DORMN@gmail.com               USuncutMN#gmail.com www.USuncutMN.blogspot.com Daily #occupy newspaper, US Days of Rage Minnesota Daily: http://www.paper.li/USuncutMN/1312728764 Coming Soon: Minnesota People's Mic on blogtalk radio. One citizen, one vote, one dollar! FOR MORE INFO: http://facebook.com/nov.fifth Together we can ensure that these banking institutions will ALWAYS remember the 5th of November!!  If the 99% removes our funds from the major banking institutions to non-profit credit unions on or by this date, we will send a clear message to the 1% that conscious consumers won't support companies with unethical business practices. • Research your local credit union options • Open an account with the one that best suits your needs • Cancel all automatic withdrawals & deposits • Transfer your funds to the new account • Follow your bank's procedures to close your account before 11/05 FIND A CREDIT UNION USA: http://www.findacreditunion.com/  To help out or donate, call 612 492 1411

---

The Most Widely Known Secret People Are Writing On $1 Bills

It’s today’s message in a bottle. Will recipients take heed?

And some people are even using markers*.

*MoveOn does not condone the defacing of currency or any other government property. Just sayin’.

Found on Facebook. Originally submitted by Brandon W.

US Uncut Exposes Rush Limbaugh with One Simple Question

http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/?akid=7519.187755.owKoql&id=660961&rd=1&t=1

Sometimes It’s Easy: US Uncut Exposes Rush Limbaugh with One Simple Question

 Carl Gibson, one of the founders of US Uncut, just steamrolled the drugged one. It was a thing of beauty. Rush would take a punch, hit the canvass, struggle to his feet, only to be flattened again. Eventually, as is always the case when right wing talkers find their asses handed to them, Ruash cheated. He spoke over Gibson, cut him off, spewed a slew of irrelevant right wing talking points, hung up on him, and then spent the next 10 minutes flailing desperately in an effort to make his audience forget what Carl’s question was.

So… What was the question? Well, a bit of background is in order first. Did you know that 47% of American households pay no income taxes? Let me tell you, every listener to right wing talk radio has heard that tired old talking point hundreds of times. It’s the ear bug of right wing talk that establishes the foundation of their resentment politics. After all, somebody has to be paying for all those welfare checks, right?

I probably don’t have to mention it to this crowd, but it is true, of course, that Limbaugh and his lieutenants (and the cultists that tune in faithfully every day) ignore the fact that everyone that works pays payroll taxes to the feds (about 12% of every dollar they earn)… They don’t mention the federal tax on gasoline… Or state, local and sales taxes. The truth is that nobody escapes the tax man, and that many of the folks that pay no federal income taxes nevertheless lose a higher percentage of their earnings to taxes than the super-rich do.

So yeah, virtually every day, Limbaugh tells his listeners that they are paying income taxes so that leech scum underclass of America can be coddled by the nanny state. So Carl called and politely as can be, asked:

Carl:  “…several multi-billion dollar corporations paid their CEOs more than they pay the government in taxes. Now I know how you feel about folks, I mean individuals who don’t pay their taxes, but I want to know how you feel about corporations that don’t pay taxes. Do you have the same antagonism for them?”

Rush: “How do I feel about how he felt about corporations that don’t pay income taxes?”

Carl:  “No, corporations.”

Rush:  “No, you said you know how I feel about individuals that don’t pay taxes… How do I feel about that?”

Carl:  “Well, I’ve heard you refer to the 47% of Americans that don’t pay taxes.”

Rush:  “Well, that’s… uh… they’re not illegally avoiding taxes, they don’t have to pay taxes because they’ve been exempted. Their votes are being purchased.”

Carl:  “Well, they have to pay a third of their income in sales and property and payroll and excise taxes too… but..” 

Rush:  “Look, the only major corporation I know not paying US taxes is General Electric.” 

Carl:  “GE, EBAY, Verizon, Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Bank of America, Citibank, I mean I can go on…”

Rush:  “Are you trying to tell me that every one of those corporations pay zero US taxes?”

Carl:  “Zero US taxes Rush. Sometimes they get money back from the federal government.”

And on, and on, and on and on… 

Eventually, Rush came back from his break to inform his listeners that ExxonMobil paidbillions in taxes!  It was just the caller's clever use of a technicality that allowed for him to make his claim.  It turns out that United States corporations can deduct the taxes they pay to other governments from their US tax bill.  

Are you kidding me?

Rush thinks it's OK for us to cut Social Security and Medicare while ExxonMobil pays nothing in taxes because they are sending money to other countries instead?  From there, Limbaugh just became a caricature of himself.  The plain fact is this:  Limbaugh had no good answer for Carl's question.  Limbaugh refused to say why he takes umbrage at the poor not paying federal income taxes while multi-billion dollar corporations that are enjoying record profits either pay no taxes, or even get refunds from the federal government.  

Listen for yourself (and you should - there's a lot of good stuff I left out):

By Mike Stark | Sourced from DailyKos 

If you were holding your breath waiting for the collapse, you can relax now. It's here...

If you were holding your breath waiting for the collapse, you can relax now. It's here...

Posted By: Watchman
Date: Monday, 1-Aug-2011 22:05:16

from: http://www.woodpilereport.com/ If you're living in fear of collapse, you can relax now. It's here. All around you. Keep those doomer manuals handy, this is what a slide to disaster looks like from the inside. QE2 has failed to generate any growth in the economy, with both Q2 and Q1 GDP crashing spectacularly to a point where post another revision Q1 will be the inflection point where America re-entered another recession ... the downslope we are already in may convert into a stall from which the global airborne Titanic does not recover. Tyler Durden, Zero Hedge Are you convinced yet? The economy has not only failed, any remnants still able to draw a breath are being ferreted out and looted in detail. Europe is going down too, and it's getting ugly. They've seen this stretch of bad road before and the scramble for good ground is ferocious. For us, things are not as bad as they appear. They're worse. The US passed the tipping point some time ago and nothing's going to change it, a tipping point separates what was from what is. Some analysts—those who are either in the tank for the government or are completely ignorant to the real facts—will claim that while the second quarter GDP is low, it's still positive, which suggests there's still growth. As we have pointed out in several reports previously, this is simply not the case once you factor in price inflation and monetary easing. If it wasn't clear up until today, it should be now. Mac Slavo, SHTFPlan It's been one catastrophe after another, and it's all happening even faster than many tinfoil hats predicted. From here things get really bad. Surely you've noticed the bizarre is the new normal. Look for ever-bigger shocks and failures. They'll arrive closer and closer together because everything is leveraged against everything else and the money's gone. We're financing debt with more debt and paying interest on both. Nothing is actually funded, very little ever was. Government's and Wall Street's—but I repeat myself—guarantees and promises have been revealed for what they are, worthless. The covenant is broken. The citizenry is going into shock. The concentration of wealth is now in so few hands and is so extreme in degree, that the combined liquid financial power of all of those not in this small group is inconsequential to determining the direction of the economy. As a result, we now have the equivalent of centralized planning in global marketplaces... The result was inevitable: gross misallocation across all facets of the private economy. Jon Robb, Global Guerillas Like any other train wreck, the damage is determined by how and where it happens. This one sends us off a high bridge, arcing toward the river. Almost graceful so far. Enjoy the ride. Next comes the real panic and then the real pain. How bad it'll be nobody knows, but a glance through history tells us no "worst case" is ever off the table. The only winners in any of this are government and their employers, it's all about their survival, not ours, which is why citizen involvement has gone from a civic duty to an annoyance to an outright threat. Think not? The Patriot Act, Stimulus Bill, TARP and ObamaCare were all drawn up in secret—"under the radar" they call it. All were loathed and opposed by the citizenry, all were passed virtually unread. We have a secret government which negotiates with itself. Worse, critical parts of some laws are secret, the Patriot Act for one. There's more. Regulatory agencies have been expanding their mandates by acting on extreme interpretations of the law, or by enforcing laws proposed but not enacted, or otherwise going rogue, the EPA and ATF most conspicuously of late. Regulatory agencies have come to abuse us the way a straw boss abuses his field hands. Uppity ones go to the post. The prudent will avoid unnecessary interaction with government but strictly observe the difference between avoidance and evasion. Render unto Caesar. Be prepared to do without basic utilities and services. Ensure your water, food, shelter and security on a long-term basis. Be prepared to do things for yourself you never thought you'd have to. Be prepared for lawlessness and lawless tyranny alike. Expect to be menaced and intimidated and threatened in ways not seen since occupied Europe of the 1940s. Stay in touch with friends. Get in touch with like-minded and reliable neighbors, you're going to need each other. Be alert. Stay away from crowds. Keep your head down. Anticipate. Be aware. Be resilient. Give some thought to documenting everything, especially malfeasance. Don't get in their face about it, it's dangerous even now, malfeasance or not. Hard copy is most durable. Miscreants will have their day of accounting, make a contribution to future prosecutions. And give some thought to rebuilding the Republic. A second Republic could be better than the first. We know where it went wrong. We knew even at the time, or should have. There were voices raised, strong objections were made. But for now it's enough to remember: there's no long term without the short term. We have arrived, ready or not.

Chuck Schumer's Amazing Double-Somersault on the Repatriation Holiday

Senator Schumer Supported, then Opposed, and Now Supports, Amnesty for Corporate Tax Dodgers

In 2004, Senator Charles (Chuck) Schumer of New York voted in favor of the so-called American Jobs Creation Act, a bill full of so many tax breaks for special interests that one observercalled it a “bacchanalia of Caligulan proportions.” The bill, which many Democrats and Republicans supported, prompted one business lobbyist to confess to a reporter that the policy process had “risen to a new level of sleaze.” One of the most outrageous breaks in the bill was an amnesty for corporate tax dodgers, a measure called a “repatriation holiday” by its supporters.

A second “repatriation holiday” was proposed as “economic stimulus” in 2009, but Senator Schumer, like most Senators, voted against it because of data summarized by the Congressional Research Service showing that the 2004 measure did not create jobs. In fact, the research showed that the benefits went to enrich shareholders rather than to job creation.

Now Senator Schumer has switched positions again and is supporting a second repatriation holiday.

How the Repatriation Holiday Would Help Corporations

In theory, U.S. corporations pay U.S. income taxes on their profits no matter where they are generated. But they are allowed to “defer” (not pay) U.S. taxes on their offshore profits until they bring those profits back to the U.S. (until they “repatriate” the profits), which may never happen. (A separate provision ensures that these profits are not double-taxed if taxes are paid to the foreign government.)

A tax holiday for repatriated profits would allow them to bring these profits to the U.S. and pay no taxes, or pay a very low rate. (The 2004 measure taxed offshore profits repatriated during the holiday at a nominal rate of just 5.25 percent instead of the normal 35 percent corporate income tax rate.)

Another Repatriation Holiday Will Cost the U.S. $79 Billion in Tax Revenue

According to the non-partisan Joint Committee on Taxation, a repeat of the 2004 repatriation holiday would raise some revenue during the first few years, but then reduce revenue by a larger amount over the rest of the decade, resulting in a net loss of about $79 billion over ten years.

The analysis also shows that a repatriation holiday that is slightly less generous to corporations (one taxing repatriated offshore profits at 10.5 percent) would cost about $42 billion over ten years. 

Another Repatriation Holiday Will Cost the U.S. Jobs

One factor causing the $79 billion revenue loss is the way U.S. corporations will respond when Congress shows itself willing to enact a repatriation holiday more than once. Corporations will likely shift even more profits offshore in the long-run, because corporate leaders will think they can simply wait for Congress to enact the next repatriation holiday allowing them to bring those profits back to the U.S. tax-free or almost tax-free. This means more investment will be made overseas rather than here in the U.S.

Incredibly, the coalition of companies promoting the holiday argue that it will create jobs, even though the non-partisan Congressional Research Servicefound that the 2004 measure failed to create jobs and that the benefits went instead to corporate shareholders.

The Repatriation Holiday Is an Amnesty for Corporate Tax Dodgers

Corporations would not just shift real investments (real operations and jobs) overseas. They would also respond by increasing the amount of profits they shift to offshore tax havens through sham transactions that exist only on paper. In fact, the proposal would give the greatest benefits to the worst corporate actors, those who shift profits offshore to avoid U.S. taxes.

A U.S. company that is doing real business in another country typically will reinvest those offshore profits in factories, oil wells or other assets, making it difficult to bring those profits back to the U.S. But a company that is engaging in profit-shifting (disguising U.S. profits as “foreign” profits through transactions that exist only on paper) has likely merely shifted profits to a tax haven subsidiary that consists of little more than a post office box. It’s much easier to repatriate these offshore profits than the offshore profits from real business activities. 

Also, a U.S. corporation that is doing business in a typical foreign country is already paying some tax to the foreign government, which means they can already repatriate those profits to the U.S. without paying the full 35 percent U.S. corporate income tax rate. But a U.S. corporation that has shifted its profits to a tax haven is typically paying no taxes to the tax haven government, which means they would pay the full 35 percent U.S. rate if they repatriated those profits under current law. U.S. corporations shifting their profits to tax havens therefore stand to gain the most from a repatriation holiday.

Corporate Leaders Are Divided on the Repatriation Holiday

Some corporate leaders have banded together in an extremely well-funded campaign to promote a second repatriation holiday. But other corporate leaders have decided to lobby instead for an even bigger tax giveaway. A repatriation holiday is essentially a temporary tax exemption for corporations’ offshore profits. Some corporate leaders think they can obtain a permanent tax exemption for offshore profits — a territorial tax system, in other words — and they think that enactment of a repatriation holiday would distract from that goal.

The Republican chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Dave Camp, agrees with the corporate leaders who prefer a territorial system (the bigger tax giveaway) to a repatriation holiday. But he has not ruled anything out.

Photo via Pro Publica Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0

Categories:

 

• Offshore Tax Abuses,
 
• Tax Avoidance, Tax Evasion, and Tax Enforcement,
 
• Tax Giveaways for Corporations

The Good News in Wisconsin That the Media Isn’t Covering

The Good News in Wisconsin That the Media Isn’t Covering

by Mike Elk

This week in Madison, Wis., has seen the largest protests since a "budget repair bill" virtually outlawing collective bargaining proposed by Gov. Scott Walker inspired an occupation of the state capitol building and massive street protests this past winter.

Now, thousands are protesting Governor’s Walker drastic cuts to the social safety net and workers’ rights, contained in his 2011-2013 budgets. The budget would cut education funding by $824 million and Medicaid by $466 million. Walker is making these cuts despite giving away nearly $320 million in tax cuts to big corporations.   

The Republican governor has also proposed allowing local governments to privatize their highway departments and hire private contractors to maintain state roads in Wisconsin. This upset many highway workers who would be stripped of their union representation if highway work was privatized in Wisconsin. Many claim not having union representation would make highways dramatically more dangerous as it would be more difficult to speak up about safety problems if highway workers did not have union protection.

Also, the budget bill would strip police and firefighters of their right to collective bargain over their healthcare plans. Previously, police and firefighters had been exempted from the ban on public employees collectively bargaining that passed as part of a budget repair bill in March.

Of course, a Wisconsin Court has ruled that that bill’s passage was illegal since it violated the Open Meetings Law. It nullified the bill. There are even rumors that Republicans might try to pass a new, less legally dubious version of the ban of public employee collectively bargain as part of the 2011-2013 budgets, since Republicans expect to lose control of the State Senate in a series of six state senate recall elections to be held this July.   

Activists, who have been locked out of the Capitol by Governor Walker’s administration despite numerous court orders telling the administration to re-open the Capitol, have responded by setting up a tent city on the Capitol Lawn called “Walkerville.” More than 300 people have been sleeping on the lawn of the Capitol all week lawn in protest of Walker’s attempt to pass the bill.

On Monday, there was a large march against the budget by more than 1,000 people led by former Senator Russ Feingold. While there has been a lot of coverage of the recent protests in Wisconsin in local media and national progressive outlets, what hasn’t been talked about much is what the protests now entering their 116^th day—if you start counting from the initial response to Walker's "budget repair" bill back in February—have done to deepen the militancy of the people involved.

As the struggle in Wisconsin wears on, workers have become engaged not just in acts of protest, but in acts of civil disobedience. On Monday, 25 people were either arrested or cited including two journalists from the media outlet The UpTake, who were covering the protesters breaking into the Capitol.  

Activists have also gotten more creative in how they have targeted expanding direct, militant action to other targets of corporate power. After the protesters were pushed out of the Capitol, they went to the local M & I Bank branch, a major financial backer of Governor Walker’s campaign where by protesting it they forced the bank to close for the day. Activists have begun to draw up lists of banks that pay no taxes and look for ways to resist the attempts of those banks to foreclose on homes in their neighbors. 

The attack on workers’ rights in Wisconsin has proven to be a training ground for activists in a lot of ways that are going to pay long-term benefits for activism in the state. Unions stripped of their ability to automatically deduct dues from workers’ pay checks have started training activists and shop stewards to collect dues individually from workers each month. Collecting dues individually from workers is a process that involves hundreds, thousands of activists.

“I think what my union AFSCME has done is really cool. We have had a huge discussion of the old-school style of unionism with our rank-and-file members that we haven’t had in the past,” says Edward A. Sadlowski a staff representative for AFSCME in Wisconsin. He continues:

Due to the law, we simply can’t return to the model of having a staff representative do everything for workers and expect to survive as a union.  Now we have to actually to train people about how are unions. We actually have to involve people in their unions and make them feel like they run the unions, not their staff representatives.  This is going to have amazing results for the labor movement over the long run.

While the mainstream media has focused heavily on the change that could come from the upcoming recall elections in Wisconsin, the real long-term change is likely to come from the galvanization and training that the attack on workers’ rights has provided for activists in Wisconsin. Activists have been gaining a confidence and creativity in their ability to take on entrenched corporate power while at the same time union members have become more involved in running their unions. This promises to have a generational long-term effect much greater than any recall election for a four-year state senate term.

© 2011 In These Times

Mike Elk is a third-generation union organizer who has worked for the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers, the Campaign for America's Future, and the Obama-Biden campaign. Based in Washington D.C., he has appeared as a commentator on CNN, Fox News, and NPR, and writes frequently for In These Times as well as Alternet, The Nation, The Atlantic and The American Prospect.

iHate Tax Cheats: US Uncut Targets Apple

Allison Kilkenny

May 27, 2011  

US Uncut, the anti–corporate tax dodging group, recently announced that Apple is its newest target. In a press release, the organization declares it will stage actions across the country on June 4 against the popular company.

Related Content

Walter Mosley: How to Put America on the Right Track

This Week: America's Longest War. PLUS: The Trump Sideshow

GOP Spreads Corporate Tax Disinformation, America Fights Back

How Socialists Built America

UMass Joins National Teach-In on Campuses Calling for Equality in America

About the Author

Allison Kilkenny

Allison Kilkenny is the co-host of the progressive political podcast Citizen Radio (wearecitizenradio.com) and...

Related Topics

America Apple United States iPhone

The group is demanding Apple remove its support of the Win America Campaign (WAC), an effort aimed at repatriating $1 trillion in foreign accounts back to America at just a 5 percent tax rate. Essentially, WAC’s efforts would lead to a $4 billion tax cut for Apple.

The Win America campaign backs a Congressional proposal called the Freedom to Invest Act of 2011 that seeks to give corporations that shelter profits overseas—including giants like Apple, Microsoft, Google, Adobe, Cisco and many others—a limited-time “tax holiday” that would allow them to return their profits to the United States without paying traditional rates of taxes.

“Apple plays huge games with their taxes. By disguising profits in the United States as foreign earnings in low-tax countries, Apple dodges billions of dollars of taxes they should be paying,“ the group stated.
Last month, Apple reported a record March-quarter growth rate of 83 percent with a 95 percent profit growth and record iPhone sale growth of 113 percent. The company’s second-quarter revenue was a record-setting $24.6 billion.

“When this ‘Win America’ tax cheat coalition wins, we all lose as Americans,” US Uncut San Francisco organizer Ana Corrie stated in the group’s press release. “We are all disappointed to see a great company like Apple participate in such a deceitful campaign that violates their commitment to operate in a socially responsible manner.”

Other companies, such as Bank of America, Pfizer, Duke Energy, General Electric and big oil companies all use this technique of disguising profits as earnings in low-tax countries to lower their tax liability, and on a far lager scale, but US Uncut is targeting Apple due to the company’s popularity. The group hopes to draw attention to the problem of tax dodging by focusing on a brand universally recognized by working Americans.
“I love my iPhone, but I hate tax cheats,” said US Uncut spokesperson Carl Gibson, “The only winners in the WAC effort are the same corporate executives who continue to steal $1 trillion out of our nation’s coffers every decade. We all pay our fair share of taxes, and Apple should too.”

Thus far, the group has put together an “Action Scenario” detailing a typical scenario for how a flash mob might occupy an Apple store. Such an event entails unveiling signs, banners, chanting and distributing leaflets to customers. But it also can involve the more creative approaches of dressing like Apple employees and participating in dance parties.

“It’s outrageous for a company that got $4 billion in tax credits last year to only pay 85 percent less than they should in taxes while the public services we all depend on get the axe,” said US Uncut San Francisco organizer Joanne Gifford. “Should we really be giving away tax loopholes to the folks who sell iPads at the same time we cut Grandma off Medicare? It’s shameful.”

“We already got duped once by this hoax of repatriating profits with the ‘American Jobs Creation Act of 2004’ under Bush,” said US Uncut spokesperson Ryan Clayton, “It did not create jobs and only opened the door for tax haven abusers to continue to cheat the system. As the saying goes: ‘Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.’ ”

Like this blog post? Read it on The Nation’s free iPhone App, NationNow.

Allison Kilkenny