DL Open Thread: Thursday, Feb. 9, 2023

Did The Civil War Even Take Place?  Gotta wonder after this happened in Mississippi:

A white supermajority of the Mississippi House voted after an intense, four-plus hour debate to create a separate court system and an expanded police force within the city of Jackson — the Blackest city in America — that would be appointed completely by white state officials.

Mississippi’s capital city is 80% Black and home to a higher percentage of Black residents than any major American city. Mississippi’s Legislature is thoroughly controlled by white Republicans, who have redrawn districts over the past 30 years to ensure they can pass any bill without a single Democratic vote. Every legislative Republican is white, and most Democrats are Black.

“Only in Mississippi would we have a bill like this … where we say solving the problem requires removing the vote from Black people,” Rep. Ed Blackmon, a Democrat from Canton, said while pleading with his colleagues to oppose the measure.

Turkey: From ‘Construction Site To Cemetery’.  As inevitable as it is tragic:

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has declared a three-month state of emergency in the provinces hit hardest by the catastrophe, and declared seven days of national mourning. Because in Turkey, that’s what we do: Today we mourn, and tomorrow we forget, until the next tragedy.

But the Turkish people have questions: Where did the billions of dollars they paid in “earthquake taxes” since the 1999 catastrophe go? Why were the construction codes aimed at making structures more quake-resistant not followed? Why, despite experts’ warnings and politicians’ promises, was more not done to prevent all this death?

When the AKP came to power, in the early 2000s, it was little known. Voters embraced it because they were fed up with the old system of governance and its party coalitions, lack of transparency, police violence, and financial inequality. That paved the way for AKP’s messianic promise to create what it came to call a “New Turkey.”

This “New Turkey” used infrastructure projects to highlight its break with the past. The more the government built, the more powerful and modern it seemed. It looked toward the skyscrapers of Qatar and Saudi Arabia as models, instead of toward Europe. Favors and contracts and permits were granted to construction companies and businesses close to the party, in exchange for kickbacks and votes.

Yet One More Tax Scam Available Only To The Uber-Rich.  Outlawed by Congress in 1921, but still used today:

At first glance, July 24, 2015, seems to have been a brutal trading day for Steve Ballmer, the former Microsoft CEO. He dumped hundreds of stocks, losing at least $28 million.

But this was no panicked sell-off. Among the stocks Ballmer sold were those of the Australian mining company BHP and the global oil giant Shell. Had Ballmer lost confidence in BHP’s management? Was he betting that the price of oil would not soon recover? Not at all. That very day, Ballmer also bought thousands of shares in BHP and Shell.

Why would he sell and buy shares in the same companies on the same day? The answer is counterintuitive to the average person but obvious to a sophisticated investor: A loss, for tax purposes, is valuable; a big one can wipe out millions in potential taxes. Ballmer’s two-step process allowed him to use the loss to lower his taxes, while the near-simultaneous purchase meant he effectively hadn’t changed his investment.

Since 1921, claiming tax losses from so-called wash sales — selling shares of a company then buying them again within a short period — has been forbidden. But Ballmer collected his losses anyway because, technically, the types of shares he bought and sold weren’t the same.

Both Shell and BHP offered two different versions of their common stock. For each company, the two stocks were legally distinct, but they performed very similarly because, after all, they were shares in the same company.

Ballmer’s not-so-bad day, in fact, was carefully planned, part of a strategy by Goldman Sachs, which conducted the trades on Ballmer’s behalf, to wield the stock market’s natural volatility to the billionaire’s advantage.

Over and over, Ballmer sold and bought stocks in roughly equivalent amounts, as on that July day, when he swapped around $200 million worth. A month later, he did it again, landing at least $23 million in tax-reducing losses. Similar efforts that December brought $26 million more.

ProPublica estimates that from 2014 through 2018, Ballmer was able to generate tax losses totaling $579 million without changing his investment portfolio in a meaningful way. The tax savings from these losses amount to at least $138 million.

The scale of Goldman’s feat was remarkable, but Ballmer was just one client pursuing such a strategy. And Goldman was just part of an industry that helps the ultrawealthy report billions in losses — and save billions in potential taxes — even as their fortunes rise.

Of course, Congress could change the law.  Does anybody think they will?

Rethugs vs. Hunter Biden And Pre-Musk Twitter.  Best sentence I’ve read all day:

“House Republicans spent much of their first big oversight committee hearing Wednesday attacking Twitter for denying American voters the chance to look at Hunter Biden’s penis.”

Can’t top that.

What do you want to talk about?