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Rand Paul Wants to Loosen Laws on Offshore Tax Evasion

by Aaron Dempsey Posted on May 9, 2013

Mother Jones

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Late Tuesday, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) introduced a bill that would repeal part of a law aimed at fighting offshore tax evasion.

The law, called the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, was passed in 2010 and is supposed to go into effect on January 1, 2014. It requires foreign financial institutions to report information about Americans with accounts worth more than $50,000 to the IRS. Firms that don’t comply will be fined.

Tax policy watch dogs say the FATCA is essential to rooting out tax cheats. “The increased bilateral exchange of taxpayer information that…is crucial to cleaning up the worldwide shadow financial system,” Heather Lowe, director of government affairs for the advocacy organization Global Financial Integrity told Accounting Today earlier this month. “Foreign financial institutions should not harbor the illicit assets of U.S. tax evaders.”

But Paul’s bill to weaken the law was immediately hailed as “heroic” by the biggest independent financial advisory firm in the world. In an email press release from the deVere group, chief executive Nigel Green said, “Senator Paul’s heroic stance against this toxic, economy-damaging tax act is a landmark moment in the mission to have it repealed. He has taken a courageous stand against FATCA, a law that will impose unnecessary costs and burdens on foreign financial institutions.”

Paul, generally a die-hard anti-taxer, says the intent of his bill “is not to disrupt legitimate tax enforcement.” Instead, he says he objects to FATCA because it “violates important privacy protections,” by giving foreign governments too much access to US citizens’ tax information. Paul says he is only in favor of repealing those provisions.

But Paul has a long history of fighting the offshore-tax evasion law. Since FATCA was signed, the Treasury Department has been negotiating and signing treaties with over 50 countries to implement the law’s provisions. Paul has put a hold on Senate approval of all tax treaties since he was elected in 2010, and as such has been blamed for trying to block FATCA.

A companion version of Paul’s bill is expected to be introduced in the House soon.

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Rand Paul Wants to Loosen Laws on Offshore Tax Evasion

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Electric vehicles could stabilize grid, make money as batteries

by Jonathan Cawley Posted on April 30, 2013

Electric vehicles could stabilize grid, make money as batteries

By John Upton

Shutterstock

Makin’ money.

Electric vehicles aren’t just cars that are cleaner to operate than internal combustion dinosaurs. They’re also powerful batteries on wheels. Andthat quality could spur EV owners to buy electricity at night, or operate their own solar panels or wind turbines, and store the excess energy in their cars. Then they could sell that electricity onto the grid from their parked vehicles during the day, when energy prices are highest.

The University of Delaware began working with NRG Energy in late 2011 to try to realize and commercialize that concept. Last week, the project hit a landmark: It has begun selling power from parked EVs into an energy market being developed by wholesale electricity dealer PJM.

From the New York Times:

A line of Mini Coopers, each attached to the regional power grid by a thick cable plugged in where a gasoline filler pipe used to be, no longer just draws energy. The power now flows two ways between the cars and the electric grid, as the cars inject and suck power in tiny jolts, and get paid for it. …

The possibilities of using electric cars for other purposes are being realized around the globe. Electric cars like the Nissan Leaf and Chevrolet’s plug-in hybrid Volt are generally not sold in the United States with two-way chargers that could feed back into the grid. But Nissan is offering a similar device in Japan that allows consumers to power their houses when the electric grid is down.

In the Delaware project, each car is equipped with some additional circuitry and a battery charger that operates in two directions. When the cars work with the grid, they earn about $5 a day, which comes to about $1,800 a year, according to Willett M. Kempton, a professor of electrical engineering and computing. He hopes that provides an incentive to make electric cars more attractive to consumers, and estimates that the added gadgetry would add about $400 to the cost of a car.

According to a press release, the Delaware project became “an official participant in the PJM’s frequency regulation market” on Feb. 27. “Since then, the project has been selling power services from a fleet of EVs to PJM, whose territory has 60 million people in the 13 mid-Atlantic states.”

The option to sell electricity to the grid from parked cars could be particularly attractive for fleet operators. But the idea would also be expected to spread to personal garages and parking spaces, providing some extra spark for EV marketing efforts.

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Electric vehicles could stabilize grid, make money as batteries

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Lockheed Martin Has Crazy-Fast Quantum Computers And Plans on Actually Using Them

by 7GrittonMaine146 Posted on March 22, 2013

Close up of a processor for a D-Wave quantum computer. Photo: D-Wave Systems Inc.

Lockheed Martin, a U.S. aerospace and defense company (and all-around inventor-of-the-future) will be the first company in the world to wrangle quantum computing out of the realm of research and into commercial scale usage, says The New York Times.

Starting from an early quantum computer built by Canadian firm D-Wave that the defense contractor bought a few years ago, Lockheed Martin will ramp up the technology to become “the first company to use quantum computing as part of its business,” says the Times.

Quantum computers are a fledgling, finicky technology that should be able to crunch through complex mathematical equations “millions of times faster” than today’s computers.

Ray Johnson, Lockheed’s chief technical officer, said his company would use the quantum computer to create and test complex radar, space and aircraft systems. It could be possible, for example, to tell instantly how the millions of lines of software running a network of satellites would react to a solar burst or a pulse from a nuclear explosion — something that can now take weeks, if ever, to determine.

Whether Lockheed Martin’s venture pans out, the move heralds an ongoing shift in the quantum computing world. Just a few days ago, the founders of BlackBerry announced that they are opening up a $100 million research facility focusing on quantum computing.

The Times says that the large-scale application of quantum computers could bring the digit-crunching prowess of the technology to bear on a huge number of important problems:

Cancer researchers see a potential to move rapidly through vast amounts of genetic data. The technology could also be used to determine the behavior of proteins in the human genome, a bigger and tougher problem than sequencing the genome. Researchers at Google have worked with D-Wave on using quantum computers to recognize cars and landmarks, a critical step in managing self-driving vehicles.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Quantum Computing Now At Least Vaguely Plausible

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Lockheed Martin Has Crazy-Fast Quantum Computers And Plans on Actually Using Them

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Sneaky House Bill Would Gut Financial Reform

by Curtis Tangredi Posted on March 21, 2013

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A bipartisan group of four representatives introduced a sneaky little bill Wednesday that would dismantle an huge chunk of the historic financial reform laws enacted after the financial crisis.

The Swap Jurisdiction Certainty Act, introduced by Reps. Scott Garrett (R-N.J.), Mike Conaway (R-Tex.), John Carney (D-Del.), and David Scott (D-Ga.), all of whom sit on the House Financial Services Committee, would allow big banks to shift risky activities to foreign subsidiaries in order to avoid US regulations. Part of the landmark 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform act requires that derivatives—financial products whose value is based on things like currency exchange rates and crop prices—be traded in public marketplaces, instead of in private. The new bill would exempt foreign companies from these US derivatives rules, which sounds reasonable; the law purportedly just affects other countries. But what it would mean is that huge US-based banks that operate internationally could just do their paperwork through their international arms to avoid regs, effectively gutting the section of Dodd-Frank that gave federal regulators the authority for the first time to regulate derivatives such as the credit default swaps that helped cause the 2007 bank failures.

The Commodities Futures Trading Commission and Securities and Exchange Commission were supposed to have finalized the Dodd-Frank derivatives laws into regulations a long time ago, but those governing international trading are still pending. The agencies are supposedly close to final rules now—SEC chair Elise Walter said earlier this year that finalizing these rules was a top priority at the agency. But until they’re finalized, the rules are still vulnerable to tweaking, or gutting, by crafty lawmakers (or crafty industry folk).

Carney has defended his bill as consumer-friendly and bank-friendly all at once: “Congress and regulators must ensure that we’re protecting American consumers, ending future bailouts and maintaining American competitiveness in an increasingly global economy,” he said in a press release. Garrett was more straightforward about what the bill would do. “Our job creators—millions being crushed by overly burdensome Washington rules and regulations—deserve to be on a fair, level playing field with the international community,” he said.

But last year, when Congress introduced a similar bill, financial reform advocates slammed it. Americans for Financial Reform, a group of national and state organizations that push for common sense financial reforms, wrote an open letter to representatives in May 2012:

The legislation “would create an overwhelming temptation to move swaps business overseas, indeed to the foreign jurisdictions where regulation was most lax compared to the U.S. In addition to seriously undermining the basic transparency and accountability requirements in the US, such a ‘race to the bottom’ would be a serious blow to the entire international effort to make derivatives markets safer.

Walter has said the derivative rules were the “critical linchpin” of Dodd-Frank because of the “global nature of the market.”

Indeed, says Dennis Kelleher, president and CEO of the Wall St. watchdog group Better Markets. “The CFTC proposed very strong cross border guidance,” he told Mother Jones. “Even if the CFTC gets all of the other rules correct—if they don’t get the cross border rules right, then all their other work doesn’t matter.”

Mother Jones
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Sneaky House Bill Would Gut Financial Reform

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Covering Hugo Chávez: "If Only He Ruled As Well As He Campaigned"

by sreg2 Posted on March 8, 2013

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With the death of Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, Latin America—and the world—lost one of its most polarizing leaders. Responses from the international community have ranged from devastated to celebratory, while the barrage of political postmortems in the United States has tended toward ambivalence (see here and here).

This isn’t surprising. Chávez was a contradictory figure: a champion of the poor who globe-trotted in a $65 million Airbus; a folk hero who feted Hollywood royalty and retained one of Caracas’ top fashion designers; an irrepressible showman whose recent private life remained a mystery. If at times he seemed like a throwback to an earlier generation of caudillos (most notably Fidel Castro, with whom Chávez shared an intense bond), he was nonetheless a populist, genuinely and rapturously loved by Venezuela’s poor.

His political legacy is decidedly murky. While chavistas are quick to praise the regime’s accomplishments—free education, free health care, reduced poverty, massive food and agricultural subsidies, a 93 percent literacy rate—the reality of day-to-day life in Venezuela tells a more troubling story. Caracas claims one of the world’s highest murder rates and a steady drumbeat of kidnapping, carjacking, and home invasion. One of its most notorious landmarks, the unfinished 45-story Tower of David, is now home to 2,500 squatters, a monument to the bungled economy.

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Covering Hugo Chávez: "If Only He Ruled As Well As He Campaigned"

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New food safety rules are not making us feel all that nauseated

by Myrna Posted on January 9, 2013

New food safety rules are not making us feel all that nauseated

By Susie Cagle

A bout of food poisoning is a memorable and vomitous experience. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 48 million Americans each year are sickened by bad food and 3,000 of them die. In the case of food-borne illness outbreaks, like the one we saw this fall in peanuts, it can take weeks and even months to track down the culprit. We’d love for causes to be clear, but of course it’s not that easy.

NIAID

Please stay out of my peanut butter, salmonella.

The Columbia Journalism Review has a long feature on why it’s so hard for scientists and reporters to identify the sources of food-borne illnessess.

The epidemiology of foodborne disease is complicated; there are numerous barriers to definitively linking sick people in multiple states to the same pathogen and a common food product. One of the biggest hurdles is that foodborne illnesses are severely underreported. For every case of Salmonella that is reported, the CDC estimates that some 29 are not. …

Detecting and solving foodborne-illness outbreaks relies heavily on the capacity and expertise of state and local health departments, which have been hit hard by budget cuts and are often tracking multiple outbreaks or small clusters of disease at once. …

Even when dealing with confirmed illnesses, it’s difficult to definitively link them to a food product. Health officials use food-history questionnaires to help identify foods that sick people have in common, but it’s not easy to recall what you had for lunch three days ago, down to the ingredient. Cracking the cases can take some time.

It’s not just our bad food memories at play here, of course — industrial farming practices have done wonders to mix our spinach with our pig feces.

But now the Food and Drug Administration is proposing big, new food-safety rules, especially in some key farming states where our food has gotten pretty gross in recent years. The Los Angeles Times reports that the new rules are aimed at transforming the FDA “into an agency that prevents contamination, not one that merely investigates outbreaks”:

The rules, drafted with an eye toward strict standards in California and some other states, enable the implementation of the landmark Food Safety Modernization Act that President Obama signed two years ago in response to a string of deadly outbreaks of illness from contaminated spinach, eggs, peanut butter and imported produce.

The first proposed rule would require domestic and overseas producers of food sold in the U.S. to craft a plan to prevent and deal with contamination of their products. The plans would be open to federal audits. The second rule would address contamination of fruit and vegetables during harvesting. …

The third rule, which has yet to be issued, would establish how food importers would verify that the products they bring in meet U.S. standards. …

The FDA said developing the complex new rules took time as it consulted “consumers, government, industry, researchers and many others,” and “studied, among many other sources, the California leafy greens marketing agreement.” Additional rules will “follow soon,” the agency said.

USA Today reports that “[f]ood safety advocates and the food industry, who have been waiting for the rules with mounting frustration, are thrilled.”

But the frustrated waiting isn’t over yet: There will be a four-month period for public comment before the rules are finalized, and then at least 26 months before farms have to comply. That sounds like a glass of ginger ale for a food industry sick with E. coli.

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New food safety rules are not making us feel all that nauseated

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