What No One Is Telling You About Mark Zuckerberg Donating 99% Of His Fortune To “Charity”
By Sadho Ram | SAYS | December 2, 2015
By now you must have heard that Mark Zuckerberg along with his wife Priscilla Chan has pledged to give away 99% of his estimated USD45 billion in Facebook stock to charity. Basically, Mark is giving away enough money to fund one of the world’s biggest charities for the next 45 years. Instead, he is funding his own. Here’s how:
The vehicle for his beneficence will be the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative LLC, a family-run foundation that he controls and through which he will maintain control of Facebook for “the foreseeable future.”
Which basically means:
Mark Zuckerberg will transfer ownership of his Facebook stock without paying capital gains taxes. He will also benefit from the possibility that his foundation will live beyond him, with his heirs and their heirs at the helm, untouched by estate taxes.
A Facebook PR, while confirming to BuzzFeed News, said that the initiative is structured as an LLC, and not as a charitable trust
Which means that unlike a charitable trust, which is compelled to spend its money on charity, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, LLC will be able to spend its money on whatever it wants, including private, profit-generating investment.
While charity will certainly be one of the money’s destinations, it will be far from the only one. The money, according to a Facebook SEC filing, will go to “philanthropic, public advocacy, and other activities for the public good.”
One such activity: private investment. A Facebook release this afternoon stated as much.
“The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative will pursue its mission by funding non-profit organizations, making private investments and participating in policy debates, in each case with the goal of generating positive impact in areas of great need,” it said. “Any profits from investments in companies will be used to fund additional work to advance the mission.”
One more thing about his pledge:
The Facebook founder is not giving away 99% of his Facebook shares all at once. He will be doing it over the course of the rest of his life.
Also, Michael Maiello points out in this Daily Beast piece:
Mark will deduct the fair value of his gift to his foundation from his taxable income in the year he makes the donation. A donor like Mark could realize a tax benefit equal to about one-third of the value of his gift. In this case, he stands to benefit as much as USD333 million, based on the USD1 billion he plans as his first transfer.
Rather than give to existing nonprofits, Mark is doing what other business leaders have recently done. Increasingly siphoning their fortune into their own organisations and this can be problematic.
Alexander C. Kaufman of The Huffington Post explains how:
The desire for control leaves the massive pool of money set aside for charities — about $358 billion in the U.S. last year — divvied between the roughly 1.5 million nonprofits registered in this country. Creating a new organization every time a company or wealthy individual wants to foster change only shrinks the available slices of that pie.
“Just because you were successful in the for-profit world doesn’t mean that nonprofits are a bunch of bleeding-heart idiots that need you to come in and show them how it’s done,” Ken Berger, the managing director of the social-good data service Algorhythm, told The Huffington Post in October. He previously ran the nonprofit watchdog Charity Navigator. “We have one of the most complex and sophisticated nonprofit sectors ever seen. Partnering with others is the best approach.”
That last part is key.
To sum up, his money is not going to a charity, but to his own LLC, which will let him evade tax by moving his private assets into a foundation. See, Zuckerberg doesn’t need massive tax benefits to do whatever he wants. He can just do whatever he wants.
But he will get those tax benefits and estate planning benefits and he will be able to give up his stock while holding onto power over his company.
As Michael Maiello in his Daily Beast piece reveals, “when we pay people like Zuckerberg to fund their own foundations, we are really helping the rich and coddled few even as we thank and honor them for their charity.”
Why ‘Active Investigations’ Don’t Justify Keeping Police Video Secret
By Jay Stanley | ACLU | December 4, 2015
The Chicago police last week released video of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald being shot to death by a police officer. Release of the video showing the 16-shot barrage came only after a judge order its release, and after more than a year during which the police had refused to make it public. In Minneapolis, protesters have been clashing with police as the police similarly refuse to release video in the recent shooting death of another young Black man, 24-year-old Jamar Clark. In both cases the police have cited the need to keep video under wraps because there is an “ongoing investigation.”
The question of what police body camera video gets released to the public, and when, is an important one, and has become one of the central areas of dispute surrounding the technology. At issue are two sometimes conflicting values: privacy, and government transparency. Our position (as outlined in our body camera white paper and model policy) is that while most video footage should be kept private—held for a short period in case a complaint is filed, not analyzed or used for any other purpose, and then deleted within six months—some video footage is important for the public to see. We call for video of incidents to be releasable under state open records laws where there has been a use of force, a felony arrest, or a complaint against a police officer. Certainly in the case of a police shooting or other use of deadly force, the public’s interest in understanding how and why an officer took such an extreme measure is overwhelming.
Police departments, however, regularly refuse to release video citing their need not to release details of ongoing criminal investigations. Aside from the question of whether police should have exclusive control over videos in the first place, the question needs to be asked: does this general exception to public transparency make sense in the case of body camera or other video footage of police uses of force?
There are a limited and narrow range of purposes for which exemptions should legitimately be granted. Those purposes include:
- Protecting personal privacy
- Protecting confidential sources
- Not interfering with the investigation
- Protecting the right to a fair trial
Many state laws have active-investigation exceptions to their open-records laws, and these laws vary but generally include the above factors, as does the federal FOIA law (Exemption 7). The federal law also includes a broad catch-all exemption for circumstances where disclosure could “reasonably be expected to interfere with enforcement proceedings,” as well as an exemption for when it could “reasonably be expected to endanger the life or physical safety of any individual.” And, it contains an exemption for law enforcement guidelines, techniques, and procedures where “such disclosure could reasonably be expected to risk circumvention of the law.”
But none of these exemptions justify the withholding of video footage of a shooting or other use of force by a police officer. Exemptions to open-records laws for “ongoing investigations” were simply not created with police video of police shootings in mind, and do not make sense applied to such recordings. Yet police departments around the country are using these rules to block or delay release of video not because it would harm investigations, but because it makes them look bad. This is not how things are supposed to work in a democracy.
Let’s look at each justification for “active investigation” exemptions and how they apply—or not—to body camera footage.
Privacy: One purpose of these exemptions is to protect people from the stigma of being under investigation before the police have even finished assessing whether there is evidence of their involvement in a crime. A police officer who has used deadly force against a citizen has typically already been identified, and has no right to privacy in such circumstances as they are an employee of the public whose actions, ostensibly to protect the interests of that public, merit the highest levels of community scrutiny.
A concrete example of this was given to me recently by Laura Schauer Ives, a civil rights attorney in New Mexico (and former legal director for the ACLU there) who litigates on police use-of-force issues, including the infamous James Boyd shooting. As she pointed out,
The public needs to know if there are problematic officers. That’s why in Albuquerque, we know which officers have shot people three, four times. We have officers who have repeatedly used excessive force against citizens, and that’s the only way to know it, by knowing their names. And that is their job. You’re a police officer doing your public job.
In Chicago, where police and city officials fought to keep civilian complaints secret, the resulting lack of sunshine has allowed problematic officers to stay on the job unpunished (as we now know only because of a decade-long legal battle to bring that information to light).
When it comes to the privacy interests of the subject or victim of a use of force (or his or her survivors), typically they do not object to release of the video on privacy grounds; in the vast majority of cases under contention they are the ones clamoring for release. I recently wrote about an exception, where a shooting victim’s family sought to block release—but even there the public’s interest in monitoring the police force overcomes the privacy rights of the subject of police use of force. Should a video show bystanders with a legitimate privacy interest, their identity can be obscured through redaction of the video.
Protecting confidential sources: If an officer shown in the video is an undercover officer, his or her identity can ordinarily be obscured through redaction. While a case involving an undercover officer is theoretically possible, I have not heard of one. Redaction should also be sufficient should bystanders or others in a video happen to be informants. (And of course unredacted bystander video posted online can render any of these protections moot.) But this exemption to transparency has been abused: Ives told me that in New Mexico “we see the Albuquerque Police Department making the argument that officers who are not undercover, are undercover. If you’re out in public in a police vest that says APD, sorry but you’re not undercover.”
Interfering with the investigation: Another purpose of secrecy can be to avoid alerting suspects that they are under investigation (potentially spurring them to destroy evidence) or revealing what the authorities know about them and their possible crimes. But if there has been a police shooting, then the situation is different from those in which the above concerns apply. In a shooting, or if there has been a complaint, the involved officers know full well that they will be the subject of an investigation. (It is important to temporarily withhold the video from viewing by those under investigation—witnesses, arrestees, and the involved officers—until after they have given initial statements on the incident, as we have explained, but that does not justify any significant delay in release of the video to the public.)
Furthermore, the reason that police don’t want to release the details of an investigation to the public is that they don’t want one member of the public in particular—the perpetrator—to see that evidence. But in a police shooting, once the involved officer has seen that video, withholding it from the public no longer serves the purpose of keeping it from the person under investigation—now it serves only to prevent the public from seeing it. That’s not a legitimate goal on its own.
The right to a fair trial: It is important insofar as possible to protect defendants in criminal trials—whether they are arrestees or police officers—against pre-judgment by the community. Exposure to video evidence can harm not just the defense, but also the prosecution; one former Justice Department official whose job had included prosecuting police officers made the point to me that letting potential jurors in the community view a video before trial will shape and prejudice their impressions of what took place.
This is a legitimate concern, but generally does not hold up against the public’s critical need to engage in oversight of how its police are using force. There are also several factors that diminish the force of this consideration. Bystander video has so far been much more common in police shootings than bodycam video, and nothing can stop bystanders from exercising their First Amendment right to post their videos of an incident for the whole community to see. The courts have dealt with public bystander videos and they can deal with public bodycam videos—through the jury selection process for example, or change-of-venue motions that can be filed if the concern is particularly significant. In addition, it’s not clear how differently a video will prejudice a juror who views it on YouTube before joining a jury, compared to how they’ll interpret it when viewed at trial. It is far more important to get untainted initial testimony from witnesses and participants in a use of force case, than shielding the community at large.
The right to a day in court: There’s another reason it’s not okay to delay release of video until investigations and other legal processes around an incident have run their course: it prevents individuals from seeking justice for police wrongdoing in court. “It’s actually imperative that these things be public because of federal pleading requirements,” Laura Ives told me, explaining:
It used to be when you go to federal court with a claim of abuse, you just needed to make enough of a claim to get past a motion to dismiss. Now the federal standard under a case called Iqbal is that your claim needs to be “plausible.” To demonstrate that, you have to have enough information—you have to have evidence, you have to have a fairly strong claim going into the litigation, and even then you’re going to go up and back within a circuit on the qualified immunity issue before you ever get discovery, before you ever get to see a video or get a deposition. So getting video as a public record, seeing what happened in a shooting for example, is very, very important if you don’t want your lawsuit dismissed before you ever get to see discovery.
Overall, in some circumstances there can be sufficient reason to delay the release of certain evidentiary materials due to an active investigation, but when it comes to police body camera videos, the public’s interest in immediate oversight of how police officers use force is overwhelming, and it is hard to imagine circumstances in which the reasons for withholding such videos are not inapplicable or fatally weak—and even in the scenarios I can come up with, redaction would be sufficient.
Indeed last week’s release of the Laquan McDonald video followed a ruling by a judge who found that the Chicago police had failed to prove that releasing the video would hurt any ongoing investigation. But where existing state open records laws and jurisprudence do not clearly provide for the immediate release of police body camera video, state legislatures should take action to make clear that ongoing-investigations exceptions to open records laws do not apply to police body camera footage. If unusual situations should arise that we have not unanticipated, in which the harms such laws are intended to prevent would be brought about with sufficient severity to overcome the compelling public interest in disclosure, then withholding should be allowed if the police can establish the likelihood of those harms to a judge under a very high standard—and establish that redaction cannot solve the problem. And the videos should be released at the earliest possible moment that those extraordinary conditions no longer apply.
Finally, it’s important to note the significant harm that withholding video of police shootings does to trust and confidence in police and their relations with the community. Such withholding increases the sense of disrespect, and often appears to communities to be another example of police abusing their authority—not without reason, as our analysis here suggests. Police having exclusive control over, and then refusing to release, video of killings, which are disproportionately of Black men, frays even further any semblance of dignity and trust, and brings into sharp relief the use of authority to attempt to avoid accountability.
Paris-San Bernardino
XYMPHORA | December 4, 2015
Remember the Paris attack, with the teams of expendable “martyrs”, and the three white mercenaries, the “non-expendables“, who drove up in a Mercedes, did their shooting, and then disappeared, never to be heard from, or spoken of, again, while the Muslim world of France continues to be torn apart looking for ‘terrorists’. Then there was the Saint-Denis engagement, an explosion, and dead Muslims/witnesses.
Tweet (FOX 11 Los Angeles):
“#BREAKING: Reports of an active shooter in San Bernardino. Police looking for 3 white males dressed in military gear. At least 20 injured”
Eventually, there is an engagement on the highway, a shootout, and dead Muslims/witnesses.
Some things that make you wonder:
- “Farook and Malik, who are thought to have married earlier this year in Saudi Arabia, are parents to a young child, now orphaned, whom they left with a grandparent before heading out on their murder spree.”
- “A spokesman for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives said the suspects threw a thick-gauge copper pipe out of the SUV, but no explosives were found inside. The fake pipe bomb was equipped with a piece of material made to look like a wick.” With an apartment allegedly full of real bombs – an apartment the authorities are allowing the press to rummage through – why would you throw a faked one?
- “Baccari says the reserved Farook showed no signs of unusual behavior, although he grew out his beard several months ago. He said he had been sitting at the same table as Farook at the party on Wednesday morning, but his co-worker suddenly disappeared, leaving his coat behind.” As if he knew when to leave.
- A comment by ‘Clouds are nice’: “Good job they caught them or everyone would still be looking for the three white men wearing balaclavas.” Ha!
“Correlations on Facebook Probably Key to ISIS Claim in San Bernardino” “Female San Bernardino Shooter “Pledged Allegiance” to ISIS on Facebook” A rather half-assed creation of the ‘legend’, with seemingly no other evidence of political inclination, and absurdly easy for anybody to fake.
“Lawyer For San Bernardino Gunman’s Family Floats Sandy Hook Trutherism”
Is this another ‘hybrid’ ‘terrorist’ attack like Paris, where elements of ISIS and French intelligence worked hand in hand like the brothers they are, or is this some kind of patsy situation?
Israel the Main Buyer of ISIS Oil — Report
Multiple reports claim that Israel is the top purchaser of smuggled ISIS oil
By Enrico Braun | Russia Insider | December 3, 2015
Citing multiple sources, the Israeli business press are now reporting that Israel is the main recipient of ISIS oil:
Kurdish and Turkish smugglers are transporting oil from ISIS controlled territory in Syria and Iraq and selling it to Israel, according to several reports in the Arab and Russian media. An estimated 20,000-40,000 barrels of oil are produced daily in ISIS controlled territory generating $1-1.5 million daily profit for the terrorist organization.
The oil is extracted from Dir A-Zur in Syria and two fields in Iraq and transported to the Kurdish city of Zakhu in a triangle of land near the borders of Syria, Iraq and Turkey. Israeli and Turkish mediators come to the city and when prices are agreed, the oil is smuggled to the Turkish city of Silop marked as originating from Kurdish regions of Iraq and sold for $15-18 per barrel (WTI and Brent Crude currently sell for $41 and $45 per barrel) to the Israeli mediator, a man in his 50s with dual Greek-Israeli citizenship known as Dr. Farid. He transports the oil via several Turkish ports and then onto other ports, with Israel among the main destinations.
In August, the Financial Times reported that Israel obtained 75% of its oil supplies from Iraqi Kurdistan. More than a third of such exports go through the port of Ceyhan, which the FT describe as a “potential gateway for ISIS-smuggled crude.”
It’s been well-established that Turkey is a major transportation hub for ISIS oil smuggling operations. But where is the oil sent? Someone has to buy it. The answer, apparently, is: Israel.
Al-Araby published an extensive investigation which lays out in detail how oil is transported from ISIS-controlled wells to Israel via Turkey.
