Friday, May 10, 2024

Zucman: It's Time To Tax The Billionaires

Further consultations Crackdowns and Crickets: money-laundering to keep firing up real estate … for now


Zucman: It's Time To Tax The Billionaires


Lesson From The Tax Court: When Is An Excise Tax Really A Penalty?


ProPublica: Sports Team Owners Face New Tax Scrutiny From The IRS


Secret Treasury advice. Neither frank nor fearless but dishonest and fearful 

Senior officials regularly give advice to Ministers and are paid very well to do so. But how frank and fearless is that advice when kept secret from the people it ultimately affects?



Off the Books: how the Army privatised SAS elite to dark ops outfit Omni 

Former SAS officers referred to national corruption watchdog over $230 million in government contracts to private security and intelligence “front company” Omni Executive.


Doctor at Cigna Said Her Bosses Pressured Her to Review Patients’ Cases Too Quickly

 Cigna Threatened to Fire Her: “Cigna tracks every minute that its staff doctors spend deciding whether to pay for health care. Dr. Debby Day said her bosses cared more about being fast than being right: “Deny, deny, deny. 

That’s how you hit your numbers,” Day said…Day was, in her own words, persnickety. If a nurse recommended denying coverage for a cancer patient or a sick baby, she wanted to be certain it was the right thing to do.

 So Day said she researched guidelines, read medical studies and scrutinized patient medical records to come to the best decision. This took time. She was clearing fewer cases than many of her peers. Some of her colleagues quickly denied requests to keep pace, she said. 

All a Cigna doctor had to do was cut and paste the denial language that the nurse had prepared and quickly move on to the next case, Day said. This was so common, she and another former medical director said, that people inside Cigna had a term for these kinds of speedy decisions: “click and close.” “Deny, deny, deny. That’s how you hit your numbers,” said Day, who worked for Cigna until the late spring of 2022. “If you take a breath or think about any of these cases, you’re going to fall behind.”… [h/t Pete Weiss]


Extremist Militias Are Coordinating In More Than 100 Facebook Groups - Wired: Facebook Dangerous Individuals and Organizations List (Reproduced Snapshot Original Document (PDF) » [100 pages] Contributed by SooHee Cho (The Intercept). 

“This is a reproduction of an internal Facebook list used to regulate speech on company platforms. This snapshot of the list has been lightly edited for clarity. Notes associated with the entries were included where relevant. The Intercept is publishing the list because of public concerns about the bias in Facebook’s moderation so that readers may draw their own conclusions about the quality of that moderation. 

The information contained in the list, including the purported activities, designations, and affiliations of the named people and groups, comes from Facebook, not The Intercept. The Intercept has not verified that information and does not intend its reporting to make any assertion regarding the accuracy of the information contained in Facebook’s list.”

  • Global data includes: Name, Category [Terror, Crime, Hate, Militarized Social Movement], Region, Type, Affiliated With