Letter Never Sent

Who would benefit from the privatization of Social Security? Bush and the rest of those bloodsucking elites he surrounds himself with. It’s outright corruption and Americans are bending right over for it and asking for seconds. From the NYTimes:

But there may be a third reason. Ask yourself: Who would benefit directly from the creation of “personal accounts” under Social Security?

Those personal accounts won’t be like personal stock portfolios. The Social Security Administration can’t and won’t become a stockbroker for 130 million clients, most of them with quite small accounts. Instead it’s likely that a privatization scheme would require individuals to invest with one of a handful of designated private investment funds.

That would mean enormous commissions for the managers of those funds. And those who would be likely to benefit showed their appreciation, in advance: During the 2000 election, according to opensecrets.org, campaign contributors in the two categories labeled “securities and investment” and “miscellaneous finance” (basically individual wheeler-dealers) gave Mr. Bush almost six times as much as they gave Al Gore.

Here, too, Mr. Bush’s past is prologue. I reported in an earlier column the story of Utimco, the University of Texas fund that, while Mr. Bush was governor and the current secretary of commerce, Donald Evans, headed the U.T. regents, placed more than $1 billion with private funds, many with close business or political ties to Mr. Bush himself. Among the beneficiaries were the Wyly brothers, who later financed a crucial smear campaign against John McCain. (“Bush reveals his poisonous colors” was the headline of a piece about that campaign, written by the online pundit Andrew Sullivan.)

Could America’s retirement savings really be used to reward the administration’s friends? Ask the teachers of Texas. In one of many odd deals during Mr. Bush’s time as governor, the Texas teachers’ retirement system sold several buildings without open bids, taking a $70 million loss, to a company controlled by Richard Rainwater, a prime mover behind Mr. Bush’s rise to wealth.

Ordinary murderers get the death penalty in Texas, and this corrupt shitheel gets to be president of the most powerful nation on earth. Life sure has a way of kicking you in the nuts.

Harken Energy is likely a CIA front, according to well-known left-wing rag (haha), Fortune Magazine:

Harken, which is engaged in oil and gas exploration, development, and production in Texas and the Gulf of Mexico, as well as in Colombia, Peru, Panama, and Costa Rica, soldiered on after Bush left. CEO Mikel Faulkner and COO Bruce Huff, CPAs who have been with the Harken since 1980 and 1990 respectively, pursued a variety of deals to jump-start its operations. But without much luck. The company’s Latin American operations in particular were a drag, and Harken lost some $263 million over the past five years. And in a complex series of transactions, Harken recently moved its South American operations into a British company called Global PLC, of which Harken owns 92%. “It was always suspected that something was fishy, but not because of the Bush connection,” says Gheit of Fahnestock. “That for a small company like Harken to be involved in foreign drilling operations getting concessions from foreign governments, things just didn’t add up. A lot of people had suspected that this was a CIA front.” That particular point, of course, is just a rumor.

Of course, only rumor.

Surprise. Crafty tax lawyers for the extremely wealthy have found further loopholes to keep the elite from paying their fair share. Read it and weep for yourself. Of course, that shitbird in the Whitehouse goes making the long face for estate tax abolition and huge tax cuts for the wealthy. From the NyTimes:

Through a technique invented by a lawyer in New York and a chemical engineer in California, each dollar spent on this insurance can typically eliminate $9 in taxes. Spend $10 million on this insurance, avoid $90 million or more in income, gift, generation-skipping and estate taxes.

“I’m not saying this is the best thing since sliced bread, but it’s really good for pushing wealth forward tax free,” said Jonathan G. Blattmachr, the New York lawyer who heads the estate tax department at Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy and who explained the plan in a half-dozen interviews.

The technique is legal, blessed by the I.R.S. in 1996. But some leading estate tax lawyers, as well as some accountants and insurance agents, say it shouldn’t be. They say it effectively disguises a gift to one’s heirs that should be taxed like any other gift involving millions in wealth. They also say it is but one example of how a tax exemption on life insurance that was approved by Congress in 1913 to help widows and orphans has been stretched to benefit the very richest Americans.

Several thousand of these jumbo policies have been sold, according to agents who sell them, all under confidentiality agreements with the buyers and their advisors. One member of the Rockefeller family took out a policy, according to people who have seen documents in the deal.