Bono's BS

Pabst, I found this at The NY times.

The Netherlands, the New Tax Shelter Hot Spot

Amsterdam

LAST spring, Keith Richards, the craggy-faced and hard-partying lead guitarist for the Rolling Stones, fell from a tree at a beach resort in Fiji, slamming his head against the trunk on his way down. Mr. Richards was flown to New Zealand, where a surgeon provided emergency care to treat swelling in his brain. While the accident forced the Rolling Stones to cancel part of their summer tour, Mr. Richards, 62, handily survived his plunge.

“It’s not the first brush with death I’ve had,” Mr. Richards later told Rolling Stone magazine. “I guess what I learned is, don’t sit in trees anymore.”

What two of the other three Rolling Stones apparently learned, including Mick Jagger and Charlie Watts, was that Mr. Richards’s near-death experience meant that it was time to think about their heirs. For that, the aging rockers turned to a reclusive Dutch accountant, Johannes Favie, whose company, Promogroup, has helped them minimize their tax bills for more than 30 years. (The fourth Rolling Stone, Ron Wood, handles his finances apart from Promogroup.)

And so, last August, according to details disclosed in documents maintained by the Handelsregister, the trade registry of the Netherlands, Promogroup helped the three performers set up a pair of private Dutch foundations that will allow them to transfer assets tax-free to heirs when they die. Other Dutch shelters that Promogroup has arranged for the three have already paid off handsomely; over the last 20 years, according to Dutch documents, the three musicians have paid just $7.2 million in taxes on earnings of $450 million that they have channeled through Amsterdam — a tax rate of about 1.5 percent, well below the British rate of 40 percent.

The Rolling Stones are not the only celebrities sheltering income in the land of tulips, windmills and Rembrandt. The rock powerhouse U2 has transferred lucrative assets to Amsterdam, as have other pop singers and well-known athletes, all of whom have used or continue to take advantage of the Netherlands’ tax shelters, according to a Dutch tax lawyer who requested anonymity because of client confidentiality agreements.

Entertainment companies and others that benefit handsomely from the Dutch shelters include EMI, the giant record label, and CKX Inc., the entertainment company that owns stakes in “American Idol,” the Elvis Presley estate and the soccer pin-up idol David Beckham.

When it comes to attracting celebrity wealth seeking shelter from taxes, the Cayman Islands and other classic Caribbean tax havens are receding in favor like so many waves on the beach, according to tax experts here and overseas. While old-school, offshore tax havens — the warm ones with tropical fish, off-the-shelf holding companies sporting post-office-box addresses, and scant regulation or transparency — still attract money, they are largely patronized, tax lawyers and entertainment bankers say, by hedge funds and private equity firms looking to protect lush trading profits from taxes.

But for earnings derived from intellectual property such as royalties, the Netherlands has become a tax shelter of choice. With celebrities lending their names and images to clothing lines, licensing their hit songs to corporate sponsors, seeking roles in Hollywood and engaging in other ventures that generate significant taxable income, the Dutch system, which does not tax royalties, offers a nifty shelter.

As they flock to Amsterdam, celebrities are taking a leaf out of the playbook of major corporations that also use Dutch tax shelters to help reduce or eliminate the royalty taxes on patents, another form of intellectual property.

“The Caribbeans are thinking about trading profits, not royalties, so the smaller European countries like Holland have had to be creative, tax-wise,” said David Pullman, an investment banker in New York who caters to entertainers and athletes. “They are going for the high-end stuff and don’t want to be seen as shady like some Caribbean haven.”

OFTEN mentioned as a candidate to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, or, perhaps less seriously, to run the World Bank, U2’s 46-year-old lead singer, Bono, has toured Africa with senior American officials to campaign against AIDS, and hobnobbed with financiers and policymakers while speaking out on global poverty issues at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. He even mugged for the cameras in 2000 with Pope John Paul II, who tried on his sunglasses.

U2’s riches are equally well-traveled and, like the Rolling Stones, the band has become sophisticated about finding overseas shelters for its money. When Ireland announced last spring that it would sharply curtail a lucrative tax break for musicians, painters, writers and sculptors, the shift posed a financial threat to U2, which has made the Emerald Isle its financial power base for nearly three decades. The Dublin-born-and-bred rockers built their fortune on hit songs and, in part, on Irish laws that forgive taxes due on royalties.

As of last year, U2 had amassed a net worth of 629 million euros — around $908 million — according to the annual “Rich List” of top earners in The Sunday Times of Britain. Royalties are the income that artists and athletes earn from recordings, performances, trademarks, brands, patents, copyrights, film rights, product endorsements, videos, films and the ever-extending commercialization of those assets — in short, the major portion of an artist’s or an athlete’s income..

Last June, with the Irish tax break about to shrink, U2 heeded the advice of its longtime business manager, Paul McGuinness, and moved its most lucrative asset — a song-publishing catalog with hits like “Where the Streets Have No Name” and “It’s A Beautiful Day” — from Mr. McGuinness’s firm, located near the Liffey River in Dublin, to Promogroup, which operates beside the elegant Herengracht canal in the heart of elegant, old Amsterdam.

But critics say that U2’s tax move to Holland is threatening to tarnish the halo surrounding the well-regarded, affable and articulate Bono, by lending him a whiff of hypocrisy. After all, unlike Bono, Mr. Jagger is not out campaigning against third-world debt, or writing a foreword for “The End of Poverty,” the most recent book by the prominent economist Jeffrey D. Sachs..

Bono is a worldwide advocate for greater aid to the developing world, and I applaud him for that,” said Joan Burton, the spokesperson for the Irish Labor Party’s finance unit and a former cabinet minister, in a telephone interview. “But obviously the money for that comes from taxation, so it’s very difficult to ask other people to pay tax to contribute to something very worthwhile while at the same time not paying taxes in a very modest environment.

Jeff Swystun, a global director at Interbrand, a brand consulting firm based in New York, said that “the Stones will always be credible because of a very simple proposition: we want to have a great party.” But U2, he said, “almost project themselves as a nonprofit, so the tax move doesn’t really fit with the brand values that they’re trying to communicate..”

 

How apt. That's where your kind generally end up. Perhaps you've already cultivated some associations there, with others who share your 'beliefs'.

You seem to be a man who finds it difficult to stay in one place. I wonder why that is...

 

And it's your kind which constantly pisses me off for exactly this kind of comments.So called "progressive" tolerant lefty assholes having absolutely no problems to judge somebody(they don't even know) at a snap of a finger. Your kind of lefty idiots is the most intolerant, pretentious,selfish, ego-centric, arrogant piece of shit I encountered in my life.

 

Almost, project themselves as non profit.

Uhh-that money DOESNT come from taxation, their EXPORT earners.

I repeat, musicians, painters, writers and SCULPTORS???????????????


Do you, personally know, a sculptor, a painter, or anything close????
I freakin DOUBT IT.

By all means pabst, get all your house deco from copperart, but i dont buy your everyone working two- jobs- to- live- bollocks for a second, yet you've the hide to suggest a SERIOUSLY succesful artist , which would be a freakin TRUE RARITY in your world, because the average person would have a life span of about 30 years, should pay more than everyone else!!!!!!!!!


What?????????

 

I appreciate your honesty even if I don't think the accusations are entirely warranted. I based my comments on my understanding that spect-hater has said, in posts here, that American black women should be sterilized to prevent them from breeding. If this is a mistake, I apologize, both to him and you. spect-hater has, in the past, outlined his agendum for the purity of the white race and his hierarchy of racial ascendency. If you stand with him in those views, we will have to agree to disagree.

I have consistently stated that I am opposed to a lot of the knee-jerk multi-culti liberal dogma, and have even cited Robert Hughes, a countryman of spect-hater and noted anti-lefty, as a personal intellectual hero. For these reasons, I feel your characterization of me is somewhat unfair. I will, however, defend your right, along with spect-hater, to speak your mind, just as I assume you defend my right to express my disgust if your views disgust me.

 

You're right, I do find it hard to stay in one place. It's nice to put down roots. I just like discovering other parts of the world too much, for now. As costly (time and money) as that can be, I think it's better than bringing the whole world to you (current immigration policy).

 

That marks a pleasant change in sentiment, Nik. I recall you standing aghast that views like mine were being posted here and promising to shout me down at every opportunity.

Let me clear up some of your confusion, though.

I never suggested point-blank that blacks be sterilized. Ever. I would never deny anyone (except perhaps the most obviously mentally retarded) the opportunity to procreate. But I think there needs to be some sort of limit imposed; that procreation should be treated slightly more as a privilege than an outright right. The decisions a society makes about who it allows to procreate, and how much, will have the greatest effect on the future of that society. A society dominated by the progeny of crack-whores will differ greatly from a society dominated by the progeny of solid-state physicists. You don't even need to introduce genetics into the equation to defend that position. Of course, I see the causes of such differences being predominantly genetic, but that simply bolsters what I would argue in any case.

And I, personally, have never been obsessed over issues of 'purity'. True, there are some who elevate race to a religious level of veneration. You don't believe it, but I am simply not one of them. While race may not be everything, certainly it is not nothing. And what I want, above all, is a society that works. Racial differences are simply one important difference in the long line of differences that divide people. "Celebrating" such racial differences only serves to divide people, despite their willingness to mouth politically correct likes. If you really want to overcome racial differences, you need an strong cultural core; one which makes people say, yeah, well, Billy, he's a so-and-so, but so what, you know, we're all American (British, Australian, what have you). The greater the racial differences, the stronger the cultural core required to bridge the racial gaps. Some gaps are so big, like white and black, or white and yellow, that I don't think they can ever be fully bridged, in the sense that people of those races intermarry with nary any thought as to race entering into people's calculations. That's the gold standard of integration right there, intermarriage. Europeans have proven that the small differences that exist between them, right down to the somewhat larger differences between northern/central Europeans and the swarthier southern Europeans, can be bridged to a level of non-issue intermarriage. Non-issue intermarriage between other races remains elusive. (A large part of this is cultural simiarity between northern and southern europe.) And I don't just mean non-issue on the leve of individuals. I mean the acceptance of it by those individuals' families and their wider social groups.

Just today I learnt that my godfather's daugther had met some Jamaican guy over the internet, and she'd recently been there to see him and she was planning on brining him to Australia. She was showing me photos and stuff, and asked me "what I think". About what, I asked. What do you think about him being black? Lol. I might talk a tough game on the net (thank God for the net), but in real life, I am usually way sensitive about hurting anyone's feelings, especially with females. Obviously this question wasn't meant to find out what I really think, rather to hear what she really wanted to hear (from Spect, the known softy, no doubt), the encouragement that yes, hon, it's absolutely fine. So the funny thing is that I still managed to blurt out, "Well, I don't think it's bad bad, but it's, you know...different" -- ie, not exactly what she was hoping to hear. I don't know man, I just can't understand this modern mindset that sees no difference between marrying someone racially and culturally recognizable to yourself and marrying someone racially and culturally alien. Wtf? Okay, this guy, for now, makes her feel like a queen, and that's a wonderful feeling and not even I would begrudge anyone that. But marriage? Children? Is love really enough for this? Historically it was, because people overwhelmingly tended to marry people like themselves. With multiculturalism and multiracialism added to the mix -- and a society that unthinkingly guarantees it's all just swell -- I think decisions like this need a lot more thought. They'll probably survive the inital exciting "oh my God I'm married" years, but what about beyond that, when problems start appearing, as they virtually always do? Family support, a cultural core, so many things outside the marriage that help to keep a marriage together, are lacking in these sorts of unions. Without them, divorce seems such a more attractive option. To me, this isn't wise.

Lastly, Nik, am I really a "hater", or am I just being prudent? If I was given a magic wand, I wouldn't choose to create a humanity such as I think exists; I don't think it's a good that things are the way they are (or, if you like, as I see them as being). It's just that I'm quite convinced that this is the way things are and I just don't think you can wish it away.

 

I think some trendy lefties are like that, flaunting their exquisite tolerance as a mark of moral superiority. Of course, they are really just unthinking hypocrites, living lives almost diametrically opposed to the very values they promote. Sometimes, that's understandable. For example, someone who believes strongly in "economic justice" might not be willing to unilaterally surrender his mansion, but would gladly do so if everyone else was going to be forced to. Mostly, though, I think these trendy lefties -- "limousine liberals" -- just don't have a solid enough grasp of the issues to be really relevant and they know it; they're just hunkoring for the prestige that comes with being regarded "modern" and "progressive".

"Grass roots" type lefties, though, whatever else you might say about them, they are a caring, not an indifferent, group of people. You might vehemently oppose their causes, you might think them cosmically wrongheaded, but I think you have to grant that they do what they do because they care and they want to help. I find it hard to get really angry with them. My gripe with them is that basically no one on this earth has the power to create the kind of world they think is possible (certainly not through the means they employ) but they cannot accept this.

 

You've written some things that have inspired in me the most outrage of any posts I have read here. I find your posts a lot more disturbing than Pabst's and others who have said more monstrous things, because of the rational tone you take. I don't save the links to those posts, so I can't quote them. I am not going to spend the time doing a search to find them – they are a matter of record.

I find it interesting that you felt the need to include the phrase 'point blank' in the first sentence above. Please understand that I am not trying to be a smart-ass; I am genuinely interested in this qualification. If not point-blank, did you suggest it indirectly? Are you saying that you feel that in some cases blacks should be sterilized? How about career criminals? Or what about crack whores? I believe that you do in fact think that sterilization of people like this would be a morally acceptable way of improving the condition of society as a whole. I assume that you also believe that white crack whores should be sterilized. Is that the case?

The reason that I have avoided engaging you about beliefs like this is that I don't think I’ll ever be able to explain to you my view of the fundamental problem with a policy of sterilization, either literal sterilization or the kind of de facto sterilization to which you make reference in the passage above, that is, legislated control of the fertilization. You see, Dan, there are problems associated with putting the decision about who can or can't bear children into the hands of a bureaucracy. I am not smart enough to make specific references to the philosophers who have elucidated this idea, but the essence of it is that if you put into the hands of bureaucrats, who are loyal to the government of the day, the power to make a decision like that, you open the system up to abuses. The problem with your idea is the same as the problem with Communism. What is it that derailed Communism? To some extent, it was the avarice of men, the fact that the men who achieved power started to act in ways that were contrary to the ideal. If you were in power, your feelings about immigration into ‘white’ countries would affect the decisions you made. Those decisions would not be based on the ideal of an assumed equality and liberty for all, because as you have stated, you do not believe that all people are created equal.

Now… let us take a moment and examine your past statements about the relative value of the different races. You have stated repeatedly that black people are at the bottom of the food chain, in your view of relative worth of the races. You have said that they are the least intelligent. As I tried to point out to you early on, there is a fundamental flaw in generalizing from Stanford-Binet averages to the individual. The problem is this.

Even though the average Stanford-Binet score of 1 million randomly selected blacks might be lower than the average of 1 million randomly selected whites, that fact does not provide a logical basis for legislation which affects the limits/rules/expectations that society imposes upon any PARTICULAR black.

You see? This is why I’m always accusing the racists here of intellectual sloth. The fact that any individual black might be brighter/have more potential than a million randomly selected whites trumps everything. That is the reason that we can’t legislate based on our knowledge about IQ score averages, no matter how accurate they may be. This is the absolute foundation of the concept of individual freedom. You have wondered why I have been so verbally abusive and dismissive of you and others like you. The reason is this: I cannot bring myself to believe that you do not understand this most basic point, that all people must be treated like individuals first, not members of a particular race, and given a clean slate the moment they come out of the womb. I would rather believe that you are either like the racist leaders (KKK leaders, white supremacist group leaders, who do not really believe in their rhetoric, but instead are kind of like Ann Coulter – they have found a niche market and are using it to accrete personal power) or one of those who I despise the most - racists who attempt to cloak their racism in pseudo-scientific terms. I have developed the impression that you are one of these. If I am wrong, I will suffer the consequences of my false accusations.

To summarize this portion of my reply, people like you could not be counted on to make the legislative decisions about who could or could not procreate because of your fundamental beliefs about the innate inequality of various races. In fact, no one is free of their personal prejudices and humans have shown only one thing over the millennia of civilized life – that they are capable of anything once power and money are dangled in front of them. This is why we cannot legislate who can and cannot procreate based on anything other than a case by case basis – the ultimate decisions will often fall to bureaucrats, and this can never be allowed. Instead we must start with a few basic assumptions about the value of individual lives and make those the basis of our societies. These are the values that inform lovers of freedom. Reverse engineering our legislative attempts, based on our measures of variables within a particular racial or cultural group, socioeconomic group or religious group, or hair-colour group is a fundamentally flawed approach, because of the fact that any individual within these groups can and will buck the trend.

With regard to your ideas about limits to procreation… I do not think you are talking about the type of limits that have been imposed in very-high population countries. This is just a watered down version of the sterilization concept. So what… once you’ve been identified as a crack addict who left her kids alone in the house to go score, you lose the right to procreate for 2 years? You are forcibly aborted if you become pregnant? Your right to procreate is reviewed by a 3-man panel at the end of two years? 3 strikes and your uterus is out?

Or perhaps you have to have a minimum income to procreate? Need I tell you how discriminatory this is?

Yep, it is really hard to look at that filthy, crack addicted whore who has never had the mental strength to kick even though the government has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to help her, who doesn’t think about the possibility that she is not in a position to provide a decent life for her future kids, and say ‘Sure, you can have more kids if you choose’. But the ideals of true freedom, of true equality, demand that we allow her to procreate. (And here we have an interesting paradox. Is not the RIGHT TO LIFE a pillar of the radical conservative platform. At this point, I will say this – you ARE Pro-Life, aren’t you? Or are you Pro-Choice? Because Pro-Lifers couldn’t simultaneously say that an unborn child has a right to life but an unconceived child does not have the right to life). At any rate, this is the (possibly distasteful to you) reality. Freedom means freedom for everyone, even if it is very hard to treat these people as if they have the right to the same freedoms as you do.

The price we pay for true liberty is that we have to allow the crack whore to have kids if that is what she chooses. I do not believe that being a crack whore is enough for us to be able to tell a woman ‘You can no longer have children’. You do not believe that the right to procreate is inalienable; I do. I understand your feelings and there are plenty of people who I wish we could sterilize. There are a LOT of them. But there is no model that doesn’t inevitably include the unwarranted discrimination of one ‘type’ of person.

If a woman has a child, then kills it, then has another, then kills it, then has another and kills it, should she be allowed to bring kids into the world? No. But the exception, as it always does, proves the rule. Case by case. Has there ever been an example of a woman upon whom a hysterectomy was forcibly performed? We have had several female multiple baby killers (and Dan…. they’re all white, at least the ones I can remember, but I DO NOT think that means anything about the capability or suitability of white women to be mothers).

Furthermore, it is impossible to understand how anyone could argue that since we can correlate crack-whoreness with a particular race, that we can then go ahead and take prophylactic measures (no pun intended) to ensure that other people who are statistically similar are also prevented from procreating.


cont...

 

I found this segment very interesting and somewhat telling. With the last line, you seem to be saying that the difference between someone who ends up as a physicist and someone else who ends up as a crack whore is genetic. Now, I am a determinist, through and through, but I don’t believe for a second, (nor does any determinist of my kind) that genetics is the entire story. This segment is indicative of what I believe to be the fundamental flaw in your way of thinking – a tendency to make these vast, sweeping generalizations and then to suggest legislation based on them. In fact, I know what you mean by this. You mean, by this last sentence (correct me if I am wrong) that if we weed out weak bloodlines, that there will be more physicist-caliber people than crack whore-caliber people, right?

Hmmm… the first sentence above seems like a sort of obligatory nod of the head to the other side, but your heart doesn’t seem like it’s in it. Let’s face it – you ask a Greek who thinks like you do about the difference is between him and a Macedonian and you are going to get a mouthful. You’re telling me that the Basques see themselves as basically the same as their Southern countrymen? But in your view, it is black-white differences that can’t be overcome. Again, how do we relate this to your beliefs about the inferiority of blacks on a purely intellectual level? Somehow, I think this is your problem, not differences in ‘black culture’ vs. ‘white culture’. Is it okay to marry up your intellectual food chain?

Well… acceptance of something like that comes when the thing becomes more and more widespread, doesn’t it? This seems a bit circular to me, but it’s a minor point. Surely you can come up with examples of things that used to be ‘unacceptable’, which are perfectly acceptable to you, simply because you live in a different era. Child rape will never make it, nor will putting a gun to a man’s head and asking him for his watch.

Dan… it is statements like these that initially made me suspect your bona fides. Are you seriously telling me that you believe this, when divorce rates among same-race couples in the West are approaching 40%??? Family values, a cultural core? By your logic, ‘white culture’ (whatever the hell that is, since there exists nothing of the kind), is the type that produces people who are unwilling to make the sacrifices and compromises necessary to hold a family together. There are 3 kinds of lies, right Dan? Doesn’t it seem likely to you that mixed race couples, having had the strength of mind to make a decision that they knew would be opposed by many, would be more likely to have what it takes to hold a marriage together? Don’t you think that children of mixed race couples, having gone through the teasing that they might have been subjected to, would realize that their personal worth was based on more than the colour of their skin or the slant of their eyes? Don’t you think that they would become adults who have a broad understanding of the things that unite us as oppose to those which divide us?

This whole bit about ‘mixed race marriage is bad for society’ is just impossible for me to believe, and I don’t think you can provide any support for this argument. The fact of same-race divorce rates makes this quote above just absolutely impossible to understand.

With regard to your question about whether love is really enough for this for your goddaughter and her Jamaican guy… why on earth would you assume that love isn’t necessarily enough? Believe it or not, there are huge groups of people who would send them out into the world with all blessings, and who would treat them like any other couple if they walked into a business or an institution like a school or whatever. The thing you don’t seem to want to admit is that these people may harbor some of the same reservations as you!!! Does that surprise you? Does that make you want to say ‘Then they agree with me’! No… they don’t. There’s just something inside of them that, when it comes time to deal with a person face-to-face, allows them to see through the colour to the person underneath and treat them like… a person. To them, individual opportunity and potential trumps statistics.

Since you included an apparently personal element in your post and since you seem sincere, I will say that I wish only the best for your goddaughter. If she marries a black man and lives in a predominantly white society she will of course face challenges. But every marriage faces challenges. If they are by chance very compatible personally but face challenges created (by other people!!!) by virtue of their race, I don’t think they are starting off in any worse a position than a same-race couple who are not particularly compatible (and god knows, so many people get married who shouldn’t) or who have other problems or hurdles which they must overcome.

With regard to your description of the ‘real life’ Spect, the soft hearted one, I guess all I can say is that I am forced to give you the benefit of the doubt, seeing as I ask the same from you when I tell you that in my ‘real-life’, I am known as someone who always wanted to make others feel good about themselves, and that I can count on one hand (probably two fingers) the number of times I have had anything approaching a serious verbal confrontation with another person in my life. Had a few physical ones because I grew up in small town Canada, but those were just good-natured scraps to show dominance, like Rams butting heads, with a few shots exchanged and no one seriously hurt before friends step in and break it up, often ending with the combatants shaking hands at the end of the night. I try really hard to be a good person and to treat other people with respect, contrary to what you might believe about me after reading my posts here. I’ve had more opportunities handed to me by virtue of the fluke circumstance of my birth than anyone else here, and I’m grateful for it every day. And no, I am not talking about family wealth.

cont...