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 Cases like Rodney King, Oscar Grant, Eric Garner and Michael Brown have helped fuel demands for police accountability. We are joined by a guest who has advice for the growing number of people filming police abuse with their smartphones and video cameras, particularly with respect to how to properly preserve such video. Yvonne Ng is senior archivist for WITNESS, a group that trains and supports people using video in their fight for human rights. She co-authored their resource, "Activists’ Guide to Archiving Video." Watch part two of this interview.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We end today’s show with a guest who has advice for the growing number of people filming police abuse with their smartphones and video cameras. Over the years, such footage has helped fuel demands for police accountability in the United States. In 1991, Rodney King became a worldwide symbol of police abuse and racial conflict after homemade video emerged of Los Angeles police officers brutally beating him. Eighteen years later, cellphone footage caught the death of Oscar Grant, who was shot to death on a subway platform in Oakland by a transit police officer.
AMY GOODMAN: Earlier this summer, a resident of Staten Island, New York, filmed the death of Eric Garner, an African-American father of six who died July 17th after police placed him in a chokehold when he was accused of selling loose cigarettes. Garner can be heard repeatedly saying, "I can’t breathe," and eventually stops moving.
POLICE OFFICER 1: Put your hand behind your head!
ERIC GARNER: I can’t breathe! I can’t breathe! I can’t breathe! I can’t breathe! I can’t breathe! I can’t breathe! I can’t breathe! I can’t breathe!
RAMSEY ORTA: Once again, police beating up on people.
POLICE OFFICER 2: Back up. Back up and get on those steps.
RAMSEY ORTA: OK.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Eric Garner’s death has since been ruled a homicide, and a grand jury is investigating. The original police report made no mention of the chokehold.
And most recently, video has emerged of unarmed teen Michael Brown, left dead in the street for hours after he was killed by police officer Darren Wilson, contributed to the protests that lasted nearly two weeks. Demonstrators then filmed the militarized police force that greeted them, prompting further outrage. At one point, video of an officer pointing his semi-automatic assault rifle at peaceful protesters and threatening to kill them led to his indefinite suspension.
AMY GOODMAN: To talk about how to properly preserve such video, we’re joined by Yvonne Ng. She is the senior archivist for WITNESS, a group that trains and supports people in using video in their fight for human rights. She co-authored "Activists’ Guide to Archiving Video," which is available in English and Spanish and Arabic, after hearing from activists this was a skill set they were largely missing.
Welcome to Democracy Now! It’s so great to have you with us, Yvonne. Explain what you do. So you’re there with your cellphone, and you’re filming something. What do you do with it after that?
YVONNE NG: Well, I mean, that’s a very important point. We provide resources on how to film, like how to film during a protest, but it’s just as important to think about what you’re going to do after you film, so that what you’ve done can make the most difference it can. So, that’s really where the archiving comes in. The point of archiving is to help ensure that your video is preserved, intact and is ready to be used when you need it.
So, there are a number of things that activists can do. And as you know, archiving can—when you get really into it, can get quite complex, but there’s a lot of very basic practices that anyone can do to ensure that their video survives intact and can be used. And we know that this is possible because we’ve worked with activists in Syria, who are facing enormous challenges—daily bombardment, insecurity, a lack of access to basic resources—and they have been able to successfully implement some of these practices.
AMY GOODMAN: Explain what you’re trying to preserve. You’re trying to preserve not just the video image, but explain what else, like the metadata.
YVONNE NG: Mm-hmm. Well, videos can be used to not only raise awareness of what’s going on, but they can be used in legal contexts, to exonerate somebody who’s been falsely accused or to hold somebody accountable for actions. But in order for that to happen, you know, your video needs—people need to understand what’s going on in your video, people need to know that what is in it happened when you say it happened, where you said it happened. So, it’s important to hold onto copies of your original video. So we know that a lot of activists upload videos to YouTube, and then they often delete their copies of the video because they need the storage space. So, it’s understandable. But YouTube, as you know, takes videos down all the time for various reasons. So if you don’t have a copy, it’s lost. And you also want to hold onto your videos in their original format, because, like you said, there is metadata that’s embedded in those video files by the camera that shows when and sometimes where the video was shot. And that is important for demonstrating the authenticity of your video.
AMY GOODMAN: So where do you download it to?
YVONNE NG: Well, the easiest thing to do is, when you have your memory card or your phone, plug it into your computer and copy the files directly onto your computer without using any sort of processing or specialized software. It’s that simple to keep the original file. And then, once you’ve copied it onto your camera, you want to—off your camera, you want to make sure you have two copies on two separate storage devices, because, as you know, hard drives fail all the time. They’re not meant to last. So having two copies ensures that if one drive fails, you have another. The third thing you want to do is to document your video with basic information, like I said, like where, when, who shot the video and basically what’s going on, because raw footage is not always evident.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And what kind of support does WITNESS provide to people out in the general public who are doing this taping?
YVONNE NG: Yeah, so, we have created resources on how to film—how to film a protest, how to use a mobile phone, and our "Archivists’ Guide to Archiving Video." So we’ve distributed this to activists all around the world, including activists in Ferguson. Some of our resources have been downloaded thousands of times since we’ve shared that since that incident.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We’ve got about 10 seconds.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you very much for being with us. Yvonne Ng is the senior [archivist] for WITNESS, which trains and supports people using video in their fight for human rights, co-author of "Activists’ Guide to Archiving Video," and we’ll link to it online. I also want to do—we’ll do a post-show with you to talk about what some of the people who have written in about have questions for you.
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 As international climate scientists warn runaway greenhouse gas emissions could cause "severe, pervasive and irreversible impacts," the Obama administration is abandoning attempts to have Congress agree to a legally binding international climate deal. The New York Times reports U.S. negotiators are crafting a proposal that would not require congressional approval and instead would seek pledges from countries to cut emissions on a voluntary basis. This comes as a new U.N. report warns climate change could become "irreversible" if greenhouse gas emissions go unchecked. If global warming is to be adequately contained, it says, at least three-quarters of known fossil fuel reserves must remain in the ground. We speak to 350.org founder Bill McKibben about why his hopes for taking on global warming lie not in President Obama’s approach, but rather in events like the upcoming People’s Climate March in New York City, which could mark the largest rally for climate action ever. "The Obama administration, which likes to poke fun at recalcitrant congressmen, hasn’t been willing to really endure much in the way of political pain itself in order to slow things down," McKibben says. "The rest of the world can see that. The only way we’ll change any of these equations here or elsewhere is by building a big movement — that’s why September 21 in New York is such an important day."
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: President Obama is reportedly seeking a nonbinding climate accord in lieu of a binding global treaty to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The New York Times reports U.S. negotiators are crafting a proposal that would not require congressional approval and instead would seek pledges from countries to cut emissions on a voluntary basis. Earlier this year, Obama voiced his frustration with members of Congress who refuse to accept the reality of climate change .
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: In some parts of the country, weather-related disasters like droughts and fires and storms and floods are going to get harsher, and they’re going to get costlier. Today’s Congress, though, is full of folks who stubbornly and automatically reject the scientific evidence about climate change. They will tell you it is a hoax or a fad. One member of Congress actually says the world is cooling.
AMY GOODMAN: Meanwhile, a new draft of a United Nations report warns climate change could become "irreversible" if greenhouse gas emissions go unchecked. The report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, obtained by media outlets, says human-driven warming has already fueled extreme heat and torrential rains, as temperatures have risen 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit since pre-industrial times. While the report says it could still be possible to cap warming at the globally agreed-upon limit of 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, or 2 degrees Celsius, it warns a continued rise in emissions could eventually cause an 8-degree Fahrenheit rise. That could prompt mass extinction of plants and animals and catastrophic floods. If global warming is to be adequately contained, the report says, at least three-quarters of known fossil fuel reserves must remain in the ground.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: The new report comes as activists are gearing up for what might be the largest rally for climate action ever, the People’s Climate March on September 21st. Organizers are hoping more than 100,000 people will take to the streets of New York City. More than 700 groups have endorsed the historic event, including 20 labor unions. The rally is scheduled to take place two days before global leaders convene at the Climate Summit at the United Nations headquarters.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, for all that and more, we’re joined now by Democracy Now! video stream by Bill McKibben, co-founder, director of 350.org, author of many books, including Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet.
Bill, welcome back to Democracy Now! Can you talk about the latest U.N. report and then what President Obama, at least according to The New York Times in this major front-page piece, is planning to do?
BILL McKIBBEN: Sure. The new U.N. report is more of the same. In a sense, it’s the scientific community, through the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, telling us what they’ve been telling us now for two decades, that global warming is out of control and the biggest threat that human beings have ever faced. They’re using what was described as blunter, more forceful language. At this point, you know, short of self-immolation in Times Square, there’s really not much more that the scientific community could be doing to warn us. Our early warning systems have functioned, you know? The alarm has gone off. All our satellites and sensors and supercomputers have produced the information that we need to know. The question is: Will we act on it?
And the answer so far is no. It’s been no in Congress, that’s for sure. Nothing is going to move through Congress, and there’s no hope of a treaty that would get ratified by two-thirds of the Senate. That’s the complication at the moment in international negotiations. We can’t reach any kind of binding treaty. Everyone’s known this. The Times story about the new Obama approach is pretty much old news. Everybody’s known for years that there’s not going to be a treaty ratified by the U.S. Senate. And everyone’s been looking for some kind of workaround.
The workaround would involve some kind of different, voluntary commitments by different countries, but done publicly so one could keep track of them. If this all sounds a little dubious to you, it will sound even more dubious to all the countries that are, you know, watching themselves disappear beneath the waves, so on and so forth, as global warming accelerates. The real question, though, is less the form of the agreement than the content. And here’s where we’ll find out, in the next few months, whether the Obama administration is actually serious or not.
If we’re going to do anything about the problem on the scale that the scientists describe it, then we’re going to need far, far more ambitious attempts than the Obama administration has put forward so far. Yes, they’ve put a cap on coal-fired power plants. That’s good. At the same time, they’ve helped expedite the rise of the United States to become the biggest coal and gas producer in the world, passing the Saudis and the Russians, and they’ve watched coal exports steadily grow. That’s not compatible with what the scientists tell us, that we need to keep 75 or 80 percent of the fossil fuel that we know about underground. So the Obama administration, which likes to poke fun at recalcitrant congressmen, hasn’t been willing to really endure much in the way of political pain itself in order to slow things down. The rest of the world can see that.
The only way we’ll change any of these equations, here or elsewhere, is by building a big movement. That’s why September 21st in New York, which all these groups are coordinating, is such an important day.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Bill, given the failure of the United States Congress in any way to act, what do you think President Obama could do, some of the specifics of what a more progressive policy on climate change would be?
BILL McKIBBEN: Sure. President Obama could have said forthrightly four years ago or three years ago, "We’re not going to build the Keystone pipeline." That would have been a signal to the rest of the world, because it would have been the first time that a world leader had said, "Here’s a massive project that we’re not building because of its effect on the climate." Instead, he’s just sort of delayed and passed it along from one election to the next and tried to avoid any political pain.
There are many other things he could be doing, including pushing hard for a serious price on carbon, which is not necessarily a political impossibility. There’s a good editorial in today’s Washington Post about the so-called cap-and-dividend proposals that would put a big tax on carbon but then rebate the money directly to citizens. It’s the kind of thing that might strike a chord if pushed hard. But the president hasn’t expended much political capital in this direction.
We also should be working hard figuring out how at every turn to expedite and speed up the deployment of renewable energy. The president made a big point of how he was expediting the federal permitting process to do things like build the southern half of the Keystone pipeline across Texas and Oklahoma. There hasn’t been the same kind of work to speed up, say, the Cape Wind project off the Massachusetts coast. We need to be doing what the Germans have done. There were days this summer when the Germans were getting 75 percent of their power from solar panels within their borders. That’s the kind of effort that we need. We’re not, I think, yet at 1 percent in this country.
AMY GOODMAN: Bill McKibben, when President Obama flew into Copenhagen, many there, the thousands of people who were there for the U.N. climate summit, felt he ultimately sort of blew up the possibility of real agreement there. Now, that was in 2009. Do you think he has made progress? Do you see this—what is being rolled out, politically binding, but not actually binding—as continuing that trend?
BILL McKIBBEN: I think, actually, it’s probably continuing the trend we saw in Copenhagen. They’re not willing to provide the kind of powerful, galvanizing leadership that might really shake things up, but they are determined to avoid another face-costing embarrassment like there was in Copenhagen. The next Copenhagen meeting is in Paris next December, December 2015. If it’s the same kind of PR disaster that Copenhagen was, the president will leave with a stain on his legacy. I think he wants to try and keep some kind of climate legacy. He knows it’s how history will judge him. But so far they’re not willing to take the kind of political hit in this country from the fossil fuel industry that would go hand in hand with doing something serious. So they’re kind of trying to have it both ways, not for the first time on some issue in the Obama administration.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Bill McKibben, given the stark nature of this latest report, talking about a 3.6-degree Fahrenheit increase in temperatures by 2050, as much as 6.7 degrees by the end of the century, do you see any—and that’s given the continued greenhouse gas emissions rates now—do you see any hope anywhere in the world for, in one particular nation or other, where the people have managed to get their governments to tackle this problem?
BILL McKIBBEN: Absolutely. Look, the thing that’s changed in the 25 years since I wrote the first book about all this was that we now know that the answers are technologically available. As I said, the Germans have done a fantastic job of deploying renewable energy. But it’s not because Germany has so much wind and so much sun. I mean, in fact, it’s at a far northern latitude. Munich is north of Montreal. It’s because, instead, they have the more important natural resource of political will.
The good news is, political will is something we can create. And that’s why we’ll all be in the streets of New York on September 21st. That’s going to be an amazing day. That march is going to be led by environmental justice advocates, especially from New York City, but from around the country and around the world, the people who are on the front lines of this fight and have borne the brunt of it. It will be joined by the entire progressive spectrum, including, really for the first time, the labor movement in a big way. It’s an attempt to show that there’s powerful demand for change around climate. If people out there have long thought to themselves, "I wish I could do something about global warming, but it seems so overwhelming. What can one individual do?" in one sense, that’s true. Changing your light bulb isn’t going to do it at this point. But changing the system still could. And that means that your body is badly needed in the streets of New York on September 21st for a peaceful, festive, but ultimately very powerful, I think, demonstration of political will.
AMY GOODMAN: Bill, I wanted to turn to CNN Worldwide President Jeff Zucker, whose network has come under criticism for its lack of coverage of climate change. At the Deadline Club’s annual awards dinner in May, Zucker suggested American audiences just aren’t interested in climate change.
JEFF ZUCKER: Climate change is one of those stories that deserves more attention, but that we all talk about and we haven’t figured out how to engage the audience in that story in a meaningful way, and that when we do do those stories, there does tend to be a tremendous amount of lack of interest on the audience’s part.
AMY GOODMAN: That was CNN Worldwide President Jeff Zucker. Bill McKibben of 350.org, your response?
BILL McKIBBEN: Well, first of all, makes one say, "Thank God for Democracy Now!" no? The second thing is, these guys aren’t trying. Look, people are actually interested in things like massive storms, huge droughts. I mean, they’re scary and powerful. These guys don’t try, because, among other things, the fossil fuel industry is the richest industry on Earth, and taking on climate change means taking on the fossil fuel industry. That’s difficult for people in those kind of positions to do. But at any rate, the notion that the only reason—the only way we figure out what we’re going to cover as reporters is what’s popular, well, it would yield pretty much the kind of journalism we see all around us at the moment.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And Bill, California is still suffering from a catastrophic drought, its worst in more than a century. Last week, the state’s third-largest city, San Jose, officially declared a water shortage and urged residents to reduce their usage of water. Last month, the U.S. Drought Monitor reported that more than half of the state was experiencing the most severe drought possible. Your response in terms of these extreme weather conditions?
BILL McKIBBEN: California is experiencing a drought far deeper than anything since at least the 1500s, when there were not 38 million people living there. The scientists said last week that they think California has lost about 63 trillion gallons of groundwater in the course of this drought. That’s been enough to cause the Sierra Nevadas to—the pressure released by that disappearance of that water has caused the mountains of California to rise half an inch in the last year. Given that we’re now making change on that kind of scale, it would be appropriate for our leaders to actually make change on that kind of scale. Your point’s exactly the right one. These are massive changes. These are civilization-threatening kinds of changes. It’s hard to imagine, as Steven Chu, the former energy secretary, said some years ago, how on Earth you’re going to have agriculture in California by century’s end, much less have big cities there. That’s reality, unless our leaders get together and do far, far, far more than they’re doing at present.
AMY GOODMAN: And the student movement around the country to have their universities and colleges divest from oil companies, Yale just became the latest, joining with Harvard and Brown, to say no to divestment; of course, others have said yes. What is your assessment of that movement?
BILL McKIBBEN: So, Oxford University, in a study last year, said that it’s the fastest-growing such movement in history. We’re way ahead of where we thought we would be. Yeah, the Ivy Leagues are so far not divesting, but they will. It took them eight or nine years when the subject was apartheid in South Africa. Others are going at a blistering pace. The World Council of Churches, representing 580 million Christians, this summer, there’s now a drive underway—you can find out about it at 350.org—to persuade Pope Francis to have the Vatican divest. A big Roman Catholic research university, University of Dayton in Ohio, divested this summer. Yesterday, Sydney University in Australia, center of the Australian establishment in the biggest coal nation on Earth, announced that it was divesting from coal. This is an exciting fight. And the point is the point we’ve been making in it, that there’s—that the fossil fuel industry has four times as much carbon as we could possibly burn. It’s no longer just a point that I’m making in Rolling Stone or that university students are making. Now the World Bank is making it, now the International Energy Agency and, on Monday, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Everybody’s doing that math. It’s only a matter of time before people at universities and other institutions begin to do it, too. I think we’ll see some powerful announcements about divestment out of the United Nations summit right after the big march on the 21st.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you, Bill McKibben, for joining us from your home in Vermont. Bill McKibben, co-founder and director of 350.org, author of many books, including Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet. Of course, Democracy Now! will cover the major march here in New York, as well as we’ll be in Lima, Peru, for the next U.N. climate summit in December.
This is Democracy Now! When we come back, is Burger King becoming a major tax dodger whopper? Stay with us.
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 This week Burger King announced it is buying the Canadian coffee-and-donut chain Tim Hortons for $11.4 billion, creating the third-largest fast-food chain in the world. The newly created firm will be headquartered in Canada where the corporate tax rate is lower than in the United States. While Burger King denies it was motivated by lower taxes, the deal has revived the debate over so-called tax inversions, whereby U.S. companies use mergers to move overseas and avoid U.S. tax rates. In July, the Obama administration estimated tax inversions could cost the United States as much as $17 billion per year. One investor who stands to profit from the Burger King deal is President Obama supporter Warren Buffett. He lent Burger King $3 billion at a lucrative 9 percent interest rate to help complete the deal. We are joined by James Henry, an economist, lawyer, and senior adviser with the Tax Justice Network. He is former chief economist at McKinsey & Company.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: This week Burger King announced it is buying the Canadian coffee-and-donut chain Tim Hortons for $11.4 billion, creating the third-largest fast-food chain in the world. The newly created firm will be headquartered, however, in Canada, where the corporate tax rate is lower than in the United States. While Burger King denies it was motivated by lower taxes, the deal has revived the debate over so-called tax inversions, whereby U.S. companies use mergers to move overseas and avoid U.S. tax rates. In July, the Obama administration estimated tax inversions could cost the United States as much as $17 billion per year. One investor who stands to profit from the Burger King deal is Obama supporter Warren Buffett. He lent Burger King $3 billion at a lucrative 9 percent rate to help complete the deal.
AMY GOODMAN: To discuss this deal and what it could mean, we’re joined by James Henry, an economist, lawyer, senior adviser with the Tax Justice Network, former chief economist at McKinsey & Company. And joining us via Democracy Now! video stream from Portland, Oregon, is Tim Dickinson—covers the national affairs beat for Rolling Stone, where he’s contributing editor, has just published a new piece headlined "The Biggest Tax Scam Ever: Some of America’s top corporations are parking profits overseas and ducking hundreds of billions in taxes. And how’s Congress responding? It’s rewarding them for ripping us off."
Well, we’re going to go first right here in New York to James Henry. Explain what inversion is and what exactly Burger King is doing with Tim Hortons.
JAMES HENRY: Well, there are lots of kinds of inversions, but in this case we have, basically, a U.S. company that’s paying—you know, with about 7,000 locations here—paying a higher corporate tax rate than it would if it were a Canadian company. And simply by switching the corporate headquarters to Canada, they can realize that gain. The company is denying that that’s the motivation. But, in fact, because Canada has a territorial corporate income tax, they wouldn’t be receiving any income on the more than 6,000 locations that are outside of the United States. And so, it basically amounts to a way of immediately cutting Burger King’s taxes that are paid to the IRS.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Now, this has been a growing trend now in recent years in the United States. Could you talk about some of the other major companies that have done the same thing? And what is—clearly, it’s legal, but the Obama administration has been on a warpath on this issue.
JAMES HENRY: Well, there’s been a dramatic increase in the interest in this activity. If you go back to 1983 to 2004, there were about 27 corporate inversions. In the next decade, in the last decade, there’s been about 50. And just this year, there’s at least 50 that are under consideration. We have companies mainly in the pharmaceutical industry, like Medtronic, AbbVie, that are looking at offshoring their ownership to countries in places like Ireland, that has a 12 percent tax rate. So, this isn’t beginning with Burger King. This is quite a flurry of activity.
And, you know, there is legislation in Congress that could try to constrain this, introduced by Senator Levin and by his brother in the Congress, simply by qualifying the—restricting the amount of ownership that a U.S. company has to have, but that hasn’t really gotten a lot of support among the Democrats. Democrats are kind of divided on this issue. This really has to be seen as part of a more general phenomenon, though. I think the right is now working on an agenda to basically repeal the corporate income tax. And so, where there’s a flurry of activity around inversions, but just this summer we’ve seen at least two editorials in The New York Times talking about "Why not repeal it? It’s just so complicated." So, inversions are kind of the tip of that problem.
AMY GOODMAN: Burger King has defended its plans to buy Tim Hortons and move to Canada. The executive chairman, Alex Behring, said on Tuesday, quote, "This is not a tax-driven deal. It is fundamentally about growth and creating value through accelerated expansion." The company’s chief executive, Daniel Schwartz, added, quote, "We don’t expect there to be meaningful tax savings or any meaningful changes in our tax rate." Is that true, James Henry?
JAMES HENRY: Well, you know, this operates—I mean, I think this is not true. It’s a whopper. The fact is, the Canadian tax rate officially is 27 percent, which is not much lower than ours, but, in fact, effective tax rate in Canada is about 20 percent or lower. And because of the fact that they have a territorial tax, any U.S. profits that were received from those 6,000 restaurants offshore would not be taxed by Canada. So Canada is not getting any incremental revenue from it, and all that revenue is just being lost to the U.S. Treasury. The other thing that we’ve seen in the other 70 inversions to date is that companies have loaded up on foreign debt. So they typically will—a foreign new owner of a U.S. company will make the U.S. company borrow and then pay interest to the parent in a low-tax jurisdiction. So that’s been a big pattern with inversions. I would expect to see that here.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Speaking about the financing of this particular deal, it turns out Warren Buffett is one of the main bankrollers of this deal. Now, he’s a friend and supporter of President Obama, extolled by him repeatedly as an ethical businessman. And yet, here he is, after constantly criticizing his fellow billionaires for not willing to pay enough taxes, suddenly bankrolling this inversion.
JAMES HENRY: Well, he claims that there’s substance to the deal and he’s not doing it for tax purposes. But, you know, when you really think about it, I mean, this is not the first time Tim Hortons has been acquired by a U.S. company. It was owned by Wendy’s from 1995 to 2006. Canadians are very upset to see this happen again, because when Wendy’s bought Tim Hortons, they added no value at all. It was a disaster, and they finally had to spin it off.
The real player behind the scenes here is a Brazilian billionaire that no one has even heard of in the United States, Jorge Paulo Lemann. He actually lives in Switzerland. But he and Buffett have gotten together on this deal. They now also own Heinz; they took them private. They own Anheuser-Busch. And so, they’re kind of on a path here to privatize and to, you know, reduce the taxes paid by major U.S. companies that we all know and love. So, you know, I’d like to ask Warren Buffett how he feels about the tax value here and exactly where he thinks Burger King’s going to add real value.
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 As Burger King heads north for Canada’s lower corporate tax rate, we speak to Rolling Stone contributing editor Tim Dickinson about his new article, "The Biggest Tax Scam Ever." Dickinson reports on how top U.S. companies are avoiding hundreds of billions of dollars by parking their profits abroad — and still receiving more congressionally approved incentives. Dickinson writes: "Top offenders include giants from high-tech (Microsoft, $76 billion); Big Pharma (Pfizer, $69 billion); Big Oil (ExxonMobil, $47 billion); investment banks (Goldman Sachs, $22 billion); Big Tobacco (Philip Morris, $20 billion); discount retailers (Wal-Mart, $19 billion); fast-food chains (McDonald’s, $16 billion) – even heavy machinery (Caterpillar, $17 billion). General Electric has $110 billion stashed offshore, and enjoys an effective tax rate of 4 percent – 31 points lower than its statutory obligation to the IRS."
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, some are calling for a boycott of Burger King because of the merger. Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio issued a statement that, quote, "Burger King’s decision to abandon the United States means consumers should turn to Wendy’s Old Fashioned Hamburgers or White Castle sliders. ... Burger King has always said 'Have it Your Way.' Well, my way is to support two Ohio companies that haven’t abandoned their country or customers," the senator said. Both Wendy’s and White Castle are based in Ohio. Brown also called for the creation of a global minimum tax to eliminate incentives for companies to move. And I would like Tim Dickinson to comment on this. Tim Dickinson has written extensively about these kinds of deals and others for Rolling Stone, where he’s a contributing editor. Talk about this and then what you call the "biggest tax scam ever," Tim.
TIM DICKINSON: Well, so the inversion trend is just the tip of a very destructive iceberg that’s seen the hollowing out of our corporate tax base. And so, the inversions, you know, is just basically a legal scam that lets a company technically offshore itself for a lower tax rate. And it goes sort of hat in hand with companies shipping massive quantities of corporate profits overseas through sort of elaborate accounting schemes. And while it’s overseas, it sits there tax-free, accumulates tax-free kind of like a 401(k) does. And so, right now there’s about $2 trillion in corporate profits that are stockpiled overseas, on which the U.S. government is technically owed something like half a trillion dollars. So, at the same time that we’re cutting food stamps, that we’re cutting home heating aid to the elderly, you know, there’s literally a jackpot of half a trillion dollars that politicians on both sides of the aisle just won’t go after, because there’s just an imbalance of power there. The corporate power has grown much greater than state power in this case.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Tim Dickinson, one thing that many of these companies that are parking their profits overseas keep quietly lobbying for is amnesty, right? They want a tax amnesty, where the government would lower their taxes temporarily, so they could bring this money back. Could you talk about that and who in Congress champions that?
TIM DICKINSON: Well, I mean, it’s like a bailout, basically. It’s a bailout on the tax bill. And this was done in the Bush administration in 2004. The nominal U.S. tax rate, nobody really pays it, but the nominal rate is 35 percent. And in the Bush era, corporations were allowed to bring their money home at a rate of five-and-a-quarter percent, 5.25 percent, so basically 30 points shaved off of the tax rate. And so, politicians in both parties really kind of are attracted to this idea. There are few folks who have raised enough of a stink about it that it hasn’t happened. But both really—literally, both sides of the aisle—most recently, Harry Reid and Rand Paul were shopping a bill that would allow corporations to bring cash home at a low rate of 9.5 percent; Dave Camp, the chief tax writer in the House, Republican side, as low as 3.25 percent, I believe; and then on the Senate side, Ron Wyden’s bill would again allow a 5.25 percent tax holiday, is what the jargon is.
AMY GOODMAN: So, James?
JAMES HENRY: I was just going to say, the 2004 experiment with this idea is illustrative. I mean, about a third of the benefits from that went to one company, Pfizer, and they proceeded to lay off their employees. It produced no jobs. Essentially, management got rich, because they used the money for management buyouts and for shareholder share repurchases. So it’s a good example of how bad this idea is.
AMY GOODMAN: Tim Dickinson, you write about Google. You write about the company that makes Viagra. You write about Apple. Tell us about what they take advantage of.
TIM DICKINSON: Well, so, there are a myriad tax schemes by which U.S. profits are funneled out of the country in ways that make them look like costs. So, to take Pfizer, for example, on Viagra, they had transferred at a very early stage of drug development the economic rights to the intellectual property behind Viagra to a shell company in Liechtenstein, which is a tax haven in Europe. And so, on every sale of the drug here, the Liechtenstein company would charge a very steep royalty. And so, the American company would appear to not only not make any profit on those sales, but actually be creating a business loss here in America, because they had to pay this business expense to its own subsidiary. And so, you’re lowering the tax bill on the American side, even as you’re increasing the profits on the Liechtenstein side. So, it’s this incredible racket, basically.
And it appears to be legal. This is not, you know, something that has been cracked down on by Congress. But the white-shoe accountants have figured out a way to sort of disappear this money and put it overseas. And I should mention that the U.S. has a global system of taxation, so that corporate profits around the world from an American-based multinational are supposed to be taxed. And that reflects the idea that the U.S. Navy secures shipping lanes, that our courts protect intellectual property across the world. And this has been practiced for more than a century, Supreme Court-approved since 1924. So this is not a new idea. But there’s sort of an incredible amount of accounting innovation that has gone into figuring out how to make profits disappear and in fact appear as losses in the United States, as the cash piles up in foreign subsidiaries, which in turn bank their money right back here in the United States. And then, when the CEOs need to use that money here in the United States, there’s something called "synthetic cash repatriation," where they’re able to use the same sort of accounting tricks either through short-term revolving loans or through bond offerings here in the United States, as Apple has done. And so, the cash can sort of—the power of the cash can reappear here in the United States. And the only one cut out of the loop is Uncle Sam, who’s supposed to get, you know, 35 percent the moment the money returns to the country.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, James Henry, I’m curious why there isn’t a greater public outcry over this. You essentially have American companies who take advantage of the protections that the American government provides—the patent laws, the intellectual property laws, as you say, the military that assures international commerce goes on—they take advantage of all the benefits of the government, but then they shift their money overseas where they don’t have to pay taxes to finance the very government that provides them that protection.
JAMES HENRY: Well, that’s exactly right. And small business is not benefiting from all these tax games that multinationals are able to play, and they’re having to compete with these companies here. You know, it really has been a growing movement, I think, in the tax justice movement. We made a film called We’re Not Broke, which is on Netflix and is about this very issue of corporate tax dodging, you know, the outrageous behavior of these companies offshoring their intellectual property, that was paid for by U.S. R&D subsidies here, to places like Ireland and Bermuda, where they have no research labs, and then paying themselves royalties tax-free. You know, the outrages are clear. The issue is, these are very powerful lobbies. The corporate tax lobby employs 1,800 tax lobbyists full-time in Washington working on these issues, night and day. I mean, I assume they take time off for Burger King once in a while. But the issue is, you know, we’re just outgunned on the level of the substance and the—you know, the—
AMY GOODMAN: So it’s three per every legislator in Washington, Congress and senators.
JAMES HENRY: Absolutely. And, you know, they—
AMY GOODMAN: And, of course, much more.
JAMES HENRY: I mean, this lobby has actually grown in power as the tax rates have actually fallen since the 1980s. I mean, we now have cut corporate tax rates in the United States roughly in half. There’s a race to the bottom worldwide. And this just has to be seen as part of that global phenomenon. So, if the United States persists in cutting its tax rates, it’s going to have terrible impact on other countries, developing countries in particular. If there’s no corporate income tax in the United States, there’s no tax credit for the taxes that American companies pay abroad, and so those countries will be forced to reduce their tax rates, as well. So, you know, this is not just about inversions. It’s part of a growing, I think, very radical movement on the right to essentially get rid of the corporate income tax.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, last point. I asked you about Google and Apple, Tim Dickinson. If you could just explain what they do, as we wrap up?
TIM DICKINSON: So, Apple has this amazing deal, where they’ve got essentially a shadow company in Ireland. And it’s incorporated in Ireland, but for Irish purposes, it’s an American company, and for American purposes, it’s an Irish company. And so you end up with this black hole of taxation where in fact this Apple subsidiary files a tax return to no government in the world. And so, it can use all kinds of accounting tricks to funnel money to this company, and they sit there essentially absolutely untaxed. Just there’s no tax return. And so you have billions of dollars sitting there. And again, when Apple needs billions of dollars to fund its American operations, it has bond offerings, and its cost of borrowing here in the United States is incredibly low. Just investors are virtually paying Apple to raise this money, because it’s secured by these massive piles of cash, technically abroad, although they’re actually banked reportedly in Manhattan. And so, you know, I believe that this is a phenomenon—really, I mean, we talk about it as a right-wing phenomenon, but it has infected both parties, that there is no meaningful party out there that is trying to address this. In fact, both parties now agree that there should be a—we should shave 10 percentage points off the tax rate, get the American corporate tax rate down to 25 percent. That’s a race to the bottom that America can’t win. There’s no way to run a global superpower and compete with low-tax nations like Ireland. But I just need to emphasize that this is truly a bipartisan scenario. Both parties are pushing corporate tax holidays. Both parties are pushing to lower the corporate rate, even though the rate that—effective rate that companies pay here on their profits is actually, in many cases, lower than the efective rate they pay in other countries.
AMY GOODMAN: Tim Dickinson, we want to thank you for being with us, covering national affairs for Rolling Stone, where he’s contributing editor. We’ll link to your latest piece, which is called "The Biggest Tax Scam Ever," speaking to us from Portland, Oregon. And thanks so much to James Henry, the former chief economist for McKinsey & Company, lawyer and senior adviser with the Tax Justice Network.
This is Democracy Now! When we come back, the "Activists’ Guide to Archiving Video." What happens when you take a video on your cellphone? What should you do with it? Stay with us.
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•U.S., Ukraine: Russian Forces Stage Cross-Border Attacks
The U.S. and Ukrainian governments are accusing Russia of launching a new cross-border operation to back separatist rebels in eastern Ukraine. On Wednesday, officials in Washington and Kiev said Russian forces had moved across the border for the third time this week, effectively opening a third front in Ukraine’s battle with the rebels. State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said Russia has launched a counteroffensive against Ukrainian troops.
Jen Psaki: "These incursions indicate a Russian-directed counteroffensive is likely underway in Donetsk and Luhansk. Clearly, that is of deep concern to us. I’ll also note that we are — and I’m not sure, many of you have seen this — but we’re also concerned by the Russian government’s unwillingness to tell the truth even as its soldiers are found 30 miles inside Ukraine. Russia is sending its young men into Ukraine, but are telling — are not telling them where they’re going or telling their parents what they’re doing."
The apparent Russian operations have helped separatist forces make several advances, including on the town of Novoazovsk earlier today.
•WHO: Ebola Cases Could Eventually Top 20,000
Global health officials are warning the Ebola outbreak in West Africa continues to escalate and could get far worse. The World Health Organization says the death toll in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea and Nigeria has reached 1,552 out of just over 3,000 known cases. More than 40 percent have occurred within the past three weeks. The WHO says the total could eventually exceed 20,000 cases. Speaking in Liberia, Lindis Hurum of Doctors Without Borders said aid workers are overwhelmed in trying to contain a worsening crisis.
Lindis Hurum: "Ebola today is all over the city. All areas, all districts of the city today have people dying and people getting sick every day. So the population has turned, and they are now afraid. They are asking for help. They don’t know how to respond to this, because if they call the hotline, nobody will come and pick them up because the system is completely overstretched. There are too many, and the response is too weak. It’s very important to understand today this is more than an Ebola outbreak. Today we are facing a humanitarian crisis, and it’s evolving in front of our eyes, and it’s getting worse every day."
•Mother of Kidnapped Journalist Issues Appeal to Islamic State
The mother of an American journalist held hostage by Islamic State has issued a public appeal for his release. Steven Sotloff was kidnapped while covering the conflict in Syria last year. He can be seen in the video Islamic State released earlier this month of its beheading of another American journalist, James Foley. In a taped message, Shirley Sotloff made a direct plea to the head of Islamic State, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
Shirley Sotloff: "Since Steven’s capture, I have learned a lot about Islam. I’ve learned that Islam teaches that no individual should be held responsible for the sins of others. Steven has no control over the actions of the U.S. government. He’s an innocent journalist. I’ve also learned that you, the caliph, can grant amnesty. I ask you to please release my child. As a mother, I ask your justice to be merciful and not punish my son for matters he has no control over."
•Freed American Reporter Thanks Supporters after Return from Syria
Freed journalist Peter Theo Curtis has spoken out upon his return to the United States. Curtis was held for nearly two years by another militant group, the al-Qaeda-linked Nusra Front. He was released on Sunday in a deal brokered by Qatar. Addressing reporters on Wednesday, Curtis thanked his supporters.
Peter Theo Curtis: "In the days following my release on Sunday, I have learned bit by bit that there have been literally hundreds of people, brave, determined and big-hearted people all over the world, working for my release. They’ve been working for two years on this. I had no idea when I was in prison. I had no idea that so much effort was being expended on my behalf. And now having found out, I am just overwhelmed with emotion. To all those people, I say a huge thank you from my heart, from the bottom of my heart."
•U.N. Panel: Syrian Gov’t, Islamic State Committing War Crimes
•Libya Warns of "Full-Scale Civil War" as Militia Fighting Continues
The Libyan government is warning of a full-scale civil war unless heavily armed militias are brought under control. Libya has been roiled by fighting among rival militias following the U.S.-backed ouster of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011. On Sunday, Islamist militias claimed control of the Libyan capital Tripoli after taking over the main airport. On Wednesday, Libyan Ambassador Ibrahim Dabbashi told the U.N. Security Council his country risks descending into a "full-blown civil war if we’re not very careful." Warning of a "mounting danger," the outgoing U.N. envoy to Libya, Tarek Mitri, said more than 100,000 people have been displaced since the conflict escalated last month.
Tarek Mitri: "The threat from the spread of terrorist groups has become real. Their presence and activities in a number of Libyan cities are known to all. At present, the chaotic security situation and the very limited capacity of the government to counter the threat may well have created a fertile ground for a mounting danger in Libya and beyond."
•Ohio Protesters Call for Probe into Police Shooting of Black Wal-Mart Customer
Protesters have gathered in Dayton, Ohio, to call for a federal probe into the fatal police shooting of an African-American man in a Beavercreek Wal-Mart. Police say John Crawford ignored commands to drop a gun, which turned out later to be a BB gun he had picked up from a shelf. But an attorney for the family of Crawford says surveillance video, which has not been released publicly, shows Crawford was leaning on the butt of the gun while talking on a cellphone when he was "shot on sight." Ohio’s attorney general has assigned a special prosecutor to investigate the case.
•Hundreds March over Chicago Police Shooting; Commander Charged for Gun Incident
In Chicago, hundreds of people have marched to protest the fatal police shooting of an 18-year-old African-American man. Roshad McIntosh was shot dead on Sunday after police say he pointed a gun in the direction of an officer. But residents, including McIntosh’s mother, claim he was on his knees surrendering when he was shot. According to the Chicago Tribune, Chicago police shot 36 people last year, 26 of them black men. So far this year, they have shot more than 30 people, including another African-American man killed the same night as McIntosh. In a separate case, a Chicago police commander has been charged with aggravated battery for sticking his gun into a suspect’s mouth during an arrest last year. A review board found police commander Glenn Evans was named in 14 complaints over a five-year period ending in 2006.
•Missouri Gov. Seeks 1st Black Cabinet Member for Law Enforcement Post
Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon has nominated former St. Louis Police Chief Daniel Isom to the state’s top law enforcement position, heading the Department of Public Safety. If confirmed, Isom would be the lone African-American member of Nixon’s Cabinet. His nomination comes in the aftermath of this month’s police shooting of unarmed African-American teen Michael Brown.
•Omaha Police Fatally Shoot "COPS" TV Crew Member During Standoff
Police in Omaha, Nebraska, have accidentally shot and killed a sound technician with a crew filming their operations for the long-running television show "COPS." Bryce Dion was embedded with officers as they confronted a robbery suspect inside a fast-food restaurant when he was struck by a police bullet. Omaha Police Chief Todd Schmaderer described the incident and said he had authorized the COPS filming because he wanted to repair the police department’s tarnished reputation after an incident last year.
Omaha Police Chief Todd Schmaderer: "When they encountered the suspect, and gunfire ensued — and it’s a very dramatic video — when the gunfire ensued, at some point Mr. Washington started exiting his way out, as you can see in that bottom picture there. He’s on his way out. Officers are returning fire. Bryce is in that vestibule and gets struck by a round. I don’t regret it in one sense, because I wanted to be transparent for the community, how I thought transparency was the way to instill and better police-community relations. Personally, I will live with this forever, and if I’d have known this would happen, of course I wouldn’t have done it."
•NRA Tweets About "Fun at the Shooting Range" for Children Following Instructor’s Death
The news comes admist reports about a nine-year-old girl who accidentally shot an instructor who was teaching her to use an Uzi submachine gun at a shooting range in Arizona. As the shooting became a topic of national discussion Wednesday, the National Rifle Association drew criticism for tweeting a link about "seven ways children can have fun at the shooting range." An account with the handle @NRAWomen tweeted that link and later deleted it.
•Closing Arguments Made in Blackwater Nisoor Square Trial
Closing arguments have wrapped in the trial of four Blackwater operatives over the 2007 massacre at Baghdad’s Nisoor Square. The suspects are charged for the deaths of 14 of the 17 Iraqi civilians who died when their Blackwater unit indiscriminately opened fire. The case has lagged for years with prosecutors accused of dragging their feet and a lower court’s dismissal of the charges in 2009. The trial featured testimony from witnesses who survived the attack and saw loved ones gunned down. In closing arguments on Wednesday, prosecutors said Blackwater guards had shot fleeing civilians and boasted of taking their lives. Jury deliberations are set to begin next week.
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"The Guns of August" by Amy Goodman
In her epic, Pulitzer Prize-winning book “The Guns of August,” historian Barbara Tuchman detailed how World War I began in 1914, and how the belligerence, vanity and poor policies of powerful leaders led millions to gory deaths in that four-year conflagration. Before people realized world wars had to be numbered, World War I was called “The Great War” or “The War to End All Wars,” which it wasn’t. It was the first modern war with massive, mechanized slaughter on land, sea and in the air. We can look at that war in retrospect, now 100 years after it started, as if through a distant mirror. The reflection, where we are today, is grim from within the greatest war-making nation in human history, the United States.In the early years of the 20th century, the leaders of the nations of Europe had contrived a web of alliances, each treaty binding one country to join in the defense of another in the event of war. When the Austrian emperor’s son, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, visited Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, 19-year-old Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip assassinated him. As Barbara Tuchman writes in her book, published in 1962, Austria-Hungary attacked Serbia, which set off a chain reaction, involving Russia, France, Belgium and Great Britain in the war against Austria-Hungary, Germany and the Ottoman Empire.
After the war plans of the various powers failed, a period of brutal trench warfare began, with millions of lives lost under a relentless barrage of mortars, machine guns, mustard gas and newfangled airplanes outfitted with machine guns and bombs. By the war’s end, an estimated 9,700,000 soldiers would be dead, along with 6,800,000 civilians killed.
What, if anything, have we learned from the disaster of World War I? Look no farther than Gaza, or Ferguson, Mo. After nearly 50 days of the bombardment of Gaza with Israel’s intensely lethal, high-tech, U.S.-funded arsenal, Palestinian health officials put the number of Gazans killed at 2,139, of whom over 490 were children. Israel reported 64 soldiers killed as a result of its ground invasion of Gaza, with six civilians dead. The narrow Gaza Strip, one of the most densely populated places on Earth, suffering under an Israeli-imposed state of siege, is now a pile of rubble through which people pick, searching for the bodies of loved ones.
In Ferguson, police violence has provoked protests and a national debate after police officer Darren Wilson shot and killed unarmed, African-American teenager Michael Brown just days before Brown was to head off to college. The small St. Louis suburb of Ferguson has a fully militarized police force, with body armor, armored personnel carriers, and automatic weapons. If images from Ferguson looked like the streets of Baghdad or Kabul, it was no coincidence: The U.S. military has a program to distribute surplus war-making materiel to municipal police forces. It is less burdensome for a budget-constrained Pentagon to fob off its unwanted heavy armor to local police, rather than maintaining a large inventory. But why do our police need weapons of war?
The United States spent $640 billion on arms in 2013, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, out of a global total of $1.7 trillion. Increased arms expenditures in other nations, notably China and Russia, indicate they aren’t comfortable with the United States being the sole global superpower.
What do those trillions spent on arms get us? In a word: war. Gaza is just one example. Syria’s civil war grinds on through its third year, with more than 200,000 killed. The militant group ISIS has taken control of vast swaths of Syria and Iraq. Libya, “liberated” by NATO airstrikes, is in a state of violent anarchy. Conflicts still rage, virtually unreported, in South Sudan, and in the sites of ongoing “Dirty Wars” waged by the U.S., as reported by Jeremy Scahill in his book of that title, in Yemen, Somalia and Afghanistan. Violence in Ukraine has increased, according to the United Nations, with 1,200 people killed in the past month alone.
The millions killed pointlessly in World War I are mostly forgotten, a century on. Barbara Tuchman closed “The Guns of August,” closer to the 50th anniversary of that war, writing, “The nations were caught in a trap ... a trap from which there was, and has been, no exit.” But there is a force more powerful than the governments of all these nations: the power of people everywhere, saying no. War is not the answer to conflict in the 21st century.
Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.
Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 1,200 stations in North America. She is the co-author of “The Silenced Majority,” a New York Times best-seller.
© 2014 Amy Goodman
Distributed by King Features Syndicate
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