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#betsy

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Chuck Darwin<p>Rarely do private companies find themselves punished for using <a href="https://c.im/tags/shell" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>shell</span></a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/companies" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>companies</span></a> to move capital and avoid taxes. </p><p>The fine accountants at Ernst &amp; Young cooked up a complicated scheme in 2008 for a restructuring of <a href="https://c.im/tags/Koch" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Koch</span></a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Industries" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Industries</span></a> via shell entities in Luxembourg, <br>a notorious tax haven, with the reasonable expectation that the ruse would never be revealed. </p><p>But then someone leaked a raft of private documents from <a href="https://c.im/tags/Mossack" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Mossack</span></a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Fonseca" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Fonseca</span></a>, a law firm in Panama that specializes in the creation of shell companies. </p><p>The info dump became known as the <a href="https://c.im/tags/Panama" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Panama</span></a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Papers" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Papers</span></a>, and among its many revelations was Koch Industries’ bid to reinvent parts of the company, on paper, <br>as tax-avoidant Luxembourg shell companies. </p><p>According to the Center for Public Integrity, the essence of the Koch Industries deal was to <br>“reorder the ownership of many subsidiaries and centralize them under Luxembourg companies that are all served by internal corporate finance companies, <br>akin to a company’s own bank.”</p><p>Maybe that’s where the Koch siblings got the idea to get behind <a href="https://c.im/tags/DonorsTrust" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>DonorsTrust</span></a><br>—a sort of house bank for the array of political entities and think tanks they fund. </p><p>Of course, as with all of the organizations funded by Koch, they’re not in it alone. </p><p><a href="https://c.im/tags/Betsy" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Betsy</span></a> and <a href="https://c.im/tags/Dick" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Dick</span></a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/DeVos" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>DeVos</span></a> helped fund DonorsTrust, according to Mother Jones.</p><p>And then there are the many Koch-network “pass-through” groups, such as "Freedom Partners"<br>and the "Center to Protect Patient Rights", <br>which function much the way that shell companies do in the world of private capital: <br>-- they add layers of obfuscation over the provenance of the dollars flowing from one right-wing organization or institution to the next.</p><p>For instance, there’s the <a href="https://c.im/tags/Wellspring" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Wellspring</span></a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Committee" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Committee</span></a>, <br>a pass-through funded in part via the Koch network, whose director, Ann Corkery, also sat for six years on the board of the <a href="https://c.im/tags/Becket" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Becket</span></a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Fund" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Fund</span></a> for <a href="https://c.im/tags/Religious" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Religious</span></a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Liberty" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Liberty</span></a>, <br>a pro-bono law firm, according to tax filings. </p><p>With its portfolio of so-called religious freedom cases, <br>the Becket Fund gained notice as the firm representing the principals of the <a href="https://c.im/tags/Hobby" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Hobby</span></a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Lobby" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Lobby</span></a> company in <br>a 2014 Supreme Court challenge to a mandate in the Affordable Care Act <br>for employer-based health insurance to cover, <br>without a co-pay, the costs of prescription <a href="https://c.im/tags/contraception" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>contraception</span></a>.</p><p>One type of private company is the “<a href="https://c.im/tags/closely" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>closely</span></a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/held" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>held</span></a>” variety, which may occasionally trade stock publicly, but has only a few shareholders. </p><p>The Supreme Court’s decision in favor of Hobby Lobby (number 106 on the 2016 Forbes list of the nation’s top private companies) specifically cited its “closely held” status as a qualification for its exemption from the ACA contraceptive mandate.</p>
Chuck Darwin<p>The wealth of <a href="https://c.im/tags/Betsy" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Betsy</span></a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/DeVos" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>DeVos</span></a>, <br>by contrast, comes from a simpler operation: <br>the marketing of what some have called a pyramid scheme that goes by the brand name <a href="https://c.im/tags/Amway" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Amway</span></a>. </p><p>Founded by her father-in-law in 1959, Amway distributes home products like dish soap and cosmetics through a network of home-based sellers <br>who are pressured to recruit more sellers in order to earn a bonus on the amount of product the distributor would then sell wholesale to the recruit. <br>That recruit would also be a distributor, looking for recruits of his or her own, in order to sell more products wholesale in order to get that bonus. </p><p>Note the emphasis on recruitment and bonuses rather than the direct-selling to retail customers, <br>who, in the end, were the ones for whom Amway products were ostensibly intended.</p><p>In the business press, Amway is often described as a “multilevel marketing company.” </p><p>In the 1970s, the Federal Trade Commission described its business model as <br>an “inherent fraud,” as historian Rick Perlstein reported in The Nation, <br>and tried to shut the company down. <br>The FTC failed in that effort, but did issue orders in 1979 slapping Amway for price-fixing and misrepresenting the kind of money distributors could expect to make. <br>In fact, Amway was made to tell distributors that they could wind up losing money.</p><p>Three decades later, in 2010, a class action lawsuit by former sellers (um, “distributors”) alleging Amway’s engagement in an “illegal scheme” was settled out of court. </p><p>According to USA Today, Amway agreed to pay $55 million to former distributors, <br>closely oversee high-level distributors who run training businesses, <br>strengthen refund policies <br>and make other changes estimated to cost an additional $100 million.</p><p>In Forbes’ 2016 listing of “America’s Largest Private Companies,” Amway clocks in at number twenty-nine.</p><p>The education secretary, née Elisabeth Prince, did not come into the DeVos family empty-handed. <br>Her own family of origin, while not as wealthy as her husband’s, was quite well-to-do through her father’s enterprise, 💥Prince Corporation💥, itself a privately held company until Johnson Controls bought it for $1.3 billion in cash in 1996. </p><p>Founder <a href="https://c.im/tags/Edgar" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Edgar</span></a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Prince" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Prince</span></a>, seeking to change the political culture to more closely resemble his own heartless Calvinism, <br>donated, according to Zack Stanton of Politico, “millions in seed funding to launch the <br>💥Family Research Council,” <br>the right-wing organization that represents and organizes politically conservative evangelical Christians, <br>and was famously designated an anti-LGBT hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. </p><p>Prince’s son, <a href="https://c.im/tags/Erik" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Erik</span></a>, used his windfall to found <a href="https://c.im/tags/Blackwater" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Blackwater</span></a>, the military contractor that went on to infamy when, in 2007, <br>its mercenaries gunned down civilians in a Baghdad city square. <br>Four Blackwater contractors were convicted in 2014 of killing fourteen unarmed Iraqis “in what prosecutors called a wartime atrocity,” according to the New York Times. <br>Blackwater, since sold and renamed <a href="https://c.im/tags/Academi" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Academi</span></a>, was also privately held. <br>It enjoyed more than $1 billion in government contracts. <br>In 2010, according to the Washington Post, </p><p>Prince moved to the United Arab Emirates “amid mounting legal problems for his American business.”</p><p>Both the <a href="https://c.im/tags/Mercers" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Mercers</span></a> and the <a href="https://c.im/tags/DeVoses" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>DeVoses</span></a> pour millions into the political system. <br>You can bet they plan to run the country the same way they have run their companies: using shell games and pyramid schemes, fraud and shakedown.</p><p>According to The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, <a href="https://c.im/tags/Robert" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Robert</span></a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Mercer" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Mercer</span></a> “gave $22.5 million in disclosed donations to Republican candidates and to political-action committees” to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. <br>And that doesn’t include possible donations to nonprofit advocacy groups, now allowed, <br>since the 2010 Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. FEC, <br>to conduct advertising for and against political candidates. </p><p>But unlike PACs, these nonprofits<br>—classified as “social welfare” groups<br>—are not required to disclose their donors.</p><p>Politico’s Stanton reports that Betsy and Dick DeVos pretty much own Michigan politics, <br>having spent “at least $100 million on political campaigns and causes over the past 20 years.” <br>The DeVoses used political giving and influence to cut funding to public schools and pave the way for a large influx of charter schools, <br>and to see Michigan, home to the once-mighty United Auto Workers, <br>turned into a so-called right-to-work state, <br>an anti-union designation that translates into greater workplace control for business bosses, but few rights for the bossed</p>
Chuck Darwin<p>🆘 Your government is in the hands of super-rich people who never had to show anything to anybody! </p><p>And you can bet they plan to run the country the same way they have run their companies: </p><p>using shell games and pyramid schemes, fraud and shakedown, answerable to virtually no one.</p><p>These are people who have thrived in a culture of unaccountability and self-dealing. </p><p>They are also people who have convinced themselves that the accrual of wealth to themselves is a boon to the nation at large. </p><p>They like to think of themselves as job creators, dynamic players in shaping the global economy. </p><p>Because their magnificence exists to benefit us all, the reasoning goes, they need not show us the methods by which they perform their magic. </p><p>And indeed we do all stand, mouths agape, at the show, dazzled by the 22,000-square-foot mansion<br> (with a 6,200-square-foot guest house) <br>that serves as the home address of secretary of education <a href="https://c.im/tags/Betsy" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Betsy</span></a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/DeVos" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>DeVos</span></a>, <br>or the 203-foot yacht (with an elevator inside) owned by <a href="https://c.im/tags/Robert" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Robert</span></a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Mercer" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Mercer</span></a>, the Trump donor and patron of chief White House strategist <a href="https://c.im/tags/Stephen" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Stephen</span></a> K. <a href="https://c.im/tags/Bannon" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Bannon</span></a>. </p><p>(Mercer’s daughter, <a href="https://c.im/tags/Rebekah" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Rebekah</span></a>, is said to have great influence in the West Wing.)</p><p>The source of Mercer’s wealth is ♦️Renaissance Technologies LLC, a privately owned firm known as a hedge-fund sponsor, <br>which was built by scientists who learned how to run algorithms that identify signals emanating from great masses of data in order to generate profitable financial trades. </p><p>After Renaissance founder and math wizard James Simons, a big donor to Democratic candidates and political action committees, retired and kicked himself upstairs to serve as the company’s chairman, <br>Mercer became co-CEO with <a href="https://c.im/tags/Peter" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Peter</span></a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Brown" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Brown</span></a>, his longtime research partner.</p><p>At the Renaissance office in East Setauket on New York’s Long Island, no sign is visible from the road to tell you you’ve arrived at the headquarters of a rare kind of casino<br>—one that moves billions of dollars around the world. </p><p>Thick plantings of trees obscure any view of the low-slung Renaissance building from the public side of the security gate.</p><p>Renaissance is spectacularly successful<br>—Investopedia named Renaissance Institutional Equities, the LLC’s largest entity, <br>the top-performing hedge fund of 2016, <br>after it yielded investors a return of 20 percent for the year. </p><p>Mercer’s genius as a data and systems geek is part of the super-secret sauce of this “quant fund” <br>that turned other people’s assets-minus-liabilities into riches for his investors. </p><p>It’s like a very complicated version of counting cards at the blackjack table. </p><p>But the best-performing fund at Renaissance is one that only its employees can join<br>—and indeed they must in order to actualize their full compensation package. </p><p>Bloomberg’s Katherine Burton described the employee-only Medallion fund as <br>“finance’s blackest box.”<br><a href="https://thebaffler.com/salvos/what-we-do-is-secret-stan" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://</span><span class="ellipsis">thebaffler.com/salvos/what-we-</span><span class="invisible">do-is-secret-stan</span></a></p>
Chuck Darwin<p>A dollar is a dollar is a dollar<br>But some dollars are different, because of how their owners obtain them and move them about. </p><p>These are the dark dollars of private companies, dollars slithery in their expert avoidance of taxes, their paths rendered invisible by the absence of footprints.</p><p>Critics of the Trump White House point to the obscene levels of wealth that you find among the inner circle of President Trump’s appointees and associates. </p><p>Just as striking, though, is the provenance of all this loose cash: <br>Trump’s trusted advisers have come into much of this wealth through private companies, <br>whose financial balance sheets and so much more are shielded from public view. </p><p>At least ten of Trump’s close political associates, including some of his cabinet picks, hail from the carefully shrouded world of private capital.</p><p>💥Private companies play by a different set of rules than those governing firms that trade their shares on stock exchanges. </p><p>Unlike their publicly traded counterparts, private companies don’t have to worry about facing irate shareholders. </p><p>That’s because&nbsp;a private company’s principals have chosen those shareholders, who are often drawn from a founder’s family. </p><p>No proxy fights or hostile takeovers to worry about; no bending to the will of big institutional investors.</p><p>This is not to say that there are no big donors to Democrats who don’t also get their dough from private companies. </p><p>For example, Democrats have long enjoyed the largesse of the Pritzker family, who took their Hyatt Corporation public only in 2009. </p><p>Until then, it was a closely held private company. </p><p>But no Democratic administration was ever dominated by the owners of privately held entities, <br>and no administration of either party has ever represented so much wealth derived from such secretive entities.</p><p>👉Little in the way of financial disclosure is required of privately held companies. When it comes to financial regulation, these companies reap the benefit of the government’s failure to call them to account. </p><p>The same is true of private companies as large as the Koch Industries conglomerate or as adorably tiny as a startup founded by a lone millennial in a stocking cap.</p><p>Sanctums of Privilege</p><p>This is not a screed against private companies. As a red-blooded American, I revel in tales of heroic entrepreneurship<br>—of hatched-in-the-garage ideas that yield their underdog executors an unlikely pot of gold. </p><p>This is, rather, a scream, the wail of a blues tune sung to my fellow red-blooded Americans: </p><p>🆘 Your government is in the hands of super-rich people who never had to show anything to anybody! </p><p>And you can bet they plan to run the country the same way they have run their companies: </p><p>using shell games and pyramid schemes, fraud and shakedown, answerable to virtually no one.</p><p>These are people who have thrived in a culture of unaccountability and self-dealing. </p><p>They are also people who have convinced themselves that the accrual of wealth to themselves is a boon to the nation at large. </p><p>They like to think of themselves as job creators, dynamic players in shaping the global economy. </p><p>Because their magnificence exists to benefit us all, the reasoning goes, they need not show us the methods by which they perform their magic. </p><p>And indeed we do all stand, mouths agape, at the show, dazzled by the 22,000-square-foot mansion<br> (with a 6,200-square-foot guest house) <br>that serves as the home address of secretary of education <a href="https://c.im/tags/Betsy" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Betsy</span></a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/DeVos" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>DeVos</span></a>, <br>or the 203-foot yacht (with an elevator inside) owned by <a href="https://c.im/tags/Robert" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Robert</span></a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Mercer" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Mercer</span></a>, the Trump donor and patron of chief White House strategist <a href="https://c.im/tags/Stephen" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Stephen</span></a> K. <a href="https://c.im/tags/Bannon" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Bannon</span></a>. </p><p>(Mercer’s daughter, <a href="https://c.im/tags/Rebekah" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Rebekah</span></a>, is said to have great influence in the West Wing.)</p><p>The source of Mercer’s wealth is ♦️Renaissance Technologies LLC, a privately owned firm known as a hedge-fund sponsor, <br>which was built by scientists who learned how to run algorithms that identify signals emanating from great masses of data in order to generate profitable financial trades. </p><p>After Renaissance founder and math wizard James Simons, a big donor to Democratic candidates and political action committees, retired and kicked himself upstairs to serve as the company’s chairman, <br>Mercer became co-CEO with <a href="https://c.im/tags/Peter" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Peter</span></a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Brown" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Brown</span></a>, his longtime research partner.</p><p>At the Renaissance office in East Setauket on New York’s Long Island, no sign is visible from the road to tell you you’ve arrived at the headquarters of a rare kind of casino<br>—one that moves billions of dollars around the world. </p><p>Thick plantings of trees obscure any view of the low-slung Renaissance building from the public side of the security gate.</p><p><a href="https://thebaffler.com/salvos/what-we-do-is-secret-stan" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://</span><span class="ellipsis">thebaffler.com/salvos/what-we-</span><span class="invisible">do-is-secret-stan</span></a></p>
Continued thread
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Ricardo Harvin

#Hurricane

My first was #Betsy in #1965 when we lived in #Miami, a bit Northwest of #KeyLargo where it officially made landfall in #Florida.

These storms, even "weak" ones, are like being in an extremely wide tornado for hours, 8 or more hours is not unusual, and they can spawn actual tornadoes and tornado-like microbursts.

#Ida reversed the course of the Mighty #Mississippi.

I've been in and near many, and they are never fun, as some think until they experience one.

#Earthstorm#Netflix
Continued thread
Public
Ricardo Harvin

I first lived here, in #Miami, starting in 1965, just before #Hurricane #Betsy hit (second grade).

In 1970, we moved to #PuertoRico and in 1973 returned to live in #Lauderhill.

I joined the #USNavy in 1976, and returned in 1980 to live in various cities across Broward County, with a break to attend #FloridaStateUniversity in #Tallahassee.

In 1993, I moved back to #WashingtonDC, and returned to Florida (#Sunrise) in 2017.

I've lived half my life in Florida. It's always been weird as fuck.

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