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http://amarillo.com/opinion/op...

Good paying jobs, and women just don't want them.

What we still don't seem to have, is proof of any actual crimes.

Public outrage over morally questionable selfishness is pointless stupidity. Where is the crime? Where is the proof?

Actually, we have the proof. It's in the data dumps.

The actual actions involved are illegal tax shelters. These work for corporations because they are, in fact, legal. They also work for high net worth individuals, but only if they are willing to relocate their residence outside their home country for a period of time.

For the U.S., the magic number is ~191 days a year (indisputably, at least 51% of their time). For other countries, the numbers are different.

In all cases, however, the general rule is that you want to establish a legal tax shelter. And if you can't ... well, some people *still* don't want to pay taxes, and instead establish illegal tax shelters.

The primary reason that there are not a lot of U.S. individuals on the disclosure list is that most of these schemes were shut down in the U.S. about a decade ago (closer to 2004/2005, so add a couple of years to that). Now it's the turn of the rest of the world.

Here's an example from 2004 for the U.S..

The way the scheme operates is to relocate a business and your primary legal residence to an economic development zone (EDZ), which saves you 90% (as an exemption) on your federal income tax, if you employ a certain number of people in a business. Only the rules were pretty lax, and a lot of people didn't meet the 190+ days a year requirement, because they tried to count actually living in the U.S. as "vacation time".

As part of the laxity of those rules, you didn't have to personally employ the people, instead you could buy into a co-op that employed that number of people (what they did or didn't do really didn't matter -- the rules were lax), buy a vacation home in the area, and live there as much as you could.

Now it should be noted that not every co-op was a tax shelter scam, and there were people who in fact met the 190+ day requirement, and owned businesses in the EDZ's, that employed the required number of people. In addition, a number of the co-ops that were being used as scam shelters, actually had these honest people involved in them as well -- both as protective covering, and because it was handy to have the co-op deal with the details of the paperwork.

One of these shelters was "Kapok" in the U.S. Virgin Islands, which were an EDZ at the time, and remained so for about a decade.

The point is that, just because there are good apples, doesn't mean that there are not also rotten apples, and it's pretty clear that this disclosure, even for those which are not engaged themselves in illegal activity, is going to rip the bandaid off what is, at least in areas, a festering wound.

If you want to read more about Kapok, specifically, here's an article from 2004: http://amarillo.com/stories/20...

P.S.: if you want to know about how to legally take advantage of a tax loophole opened by Prop 13in California, at the last minute, by the Kaiser Family Foundation, I can enlighten you on that as well, but be aware, you pretty much have to be a rather large property holder (like the KFF) to take reasonable advantage of it. There are also some pretty careful zoning hurdles you have to pass ... but it's doable.

"You f*cking Jew b@stard." -- Hillary Clinton to political operative Paul Fray. This was revealed in "State of a Union: Inside the Complex Marriage of Bill and Hillary Clinton" and has been verified by Paul Fray and three witnesses.

You might wanna check that quote again, seeing how Fray "wrote a letter to Clinton begging her forgiveness for saying things about her without factual foundation" - i.e. he apologized for LYING.

http://amarillo.com/stories/071900/usn_142-3950.shtml

Clinton accuser wants to make amends
Posted: Wednesday, July 19, 2000

The Associated Press

NEW YORK (AP) - The man who is accusing Hillary Rodham Clinton of using an ethnic slur against him during an argument in 1974 has a colorful past.

Paul Fray can no longer practice law because someone paid him to alter a court document, and he surrendered his law license to the Arkansas Supreme Court in 1980.

He suffered a cerebral hemorrhage that led to seizures, addiction to prescription pain killers, erratic behavior and memory loss, according to court records.

He wrote a letter to Clinton begging her forgiveness for saying things about her without factual foundation.

On Tuesday, Fray said he'd like to meet with Clinton and resolve the controversy about his accusation, which has surfaced in a new book this week in the midst of her Senate campaign.

"This matter will go away," he told the Fox News Channel. "I don't want to adversely affect her race."

Fray did not return several calls from The Associated Press.

Fray's accusation about the slur has rocked the first lady's campaign and become fodder for Web sites, newspaper headlines and cable TV news shows.

Clinton unequivocally denied calling him a "Jew b---' during an emotional news conference Sunday in the garden of her Westchester home. The president phoned a New York Daily News managing editor and called the accusation "crap."

Fray claims that Hillary Clinton made the comment in Fayetteville, Ark., on the night that Bill Clinton lost a Congressional election. Fray had worked on the campaign.

Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who didn't have a lot of nice things to say about the first lady when he was running for Senate against her before dropping out of the race, spoke in her defense Tuesday.

"What she did say or didn't say 26 years ago, I can't imagine it has any relevance today," he said.

I'd recheck those other sources too, if I was you.

... he impersonated an army officer to take command of the launch site for nearly two days after 14 people were killed when an Interstate 40 bridge fell in eastern Oklahoma...

I know you're an idiot troll, but just in case anyone with a half a brain is interested, the dust bowl was caused by a combination of drought and poor farming practices. Since North American farmers no longer follow the same destructive practices that caused the dust bowl, we're not likely to see it happen again, even though this drought is worse than the one that created the dust bowl.

So here's your notice, the drought is worse (less than 1/10th the rain in the 30's), but the U.S. Government took action long ago to prevent another dust bowl from occurring.

Downloading child pornography doesn't seem to be a violent crime to me. Why did they need to send a SWAT style raid rather than knocking on the door with a warrant? Did the guy have a history of violent crime?

Aggresive raids get people killed - both the people being raided (e.g. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/26/AR2006012602136.html) and the police doing the raid (e.g. http://amarillo.com/stories/112201/tex_firedfor.shtml - note that was a raid of someone who owned a lot of guns, but the police did manage to fire 369 shots killing one of their own while the guy being raided did not touch a gun let alone fire a single shot).

For suspects of non-violent crimes (and downloading/viewing child pornography is not more violent than downloading/viewing videos of an assault - that the production of the pornography involves violence is irrelevant) and even for convicted non-violent criminals "kicck the door down and point guns at everyone" raids are only going to increase the risk of death and injury.