I Like my iPhone but…

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…I’m pissed off at Apple today.

NPR reports:

Tech giant Apple used a “complex web of offshore entities” to avoid paying billions of dollars in taxes in the U.S., a congressional investigation has found.

…

The subcommittee’s statement detailed some of Apple’s practices:

“[Apple Operations] was incorporated in Ireland in 1980, and is owned and controlled by the U.S. parent company, Apple Inc. Ireland asserts tax jurisdiction only over companies that are managed and controlled in Ireland, but the United States bases tax residency on where a company is incorporated. Exploiting the gap between the two nations’ tax laws, Apple Operations International has not filed an income tax return in either country, or any other country, for the past five years. From 2009 to 2012, it reported income totaling $30 billion.”

and…

“A second Irish subsidiary claiming not to be a tax resident anywhere is Apple Sales International which, from 2009 to 2012, had sales revenue totaling $74 billion. The company appears to have paid taxes on only a tiny fraction of that income, resulting, for example, in an effective 2011 tax rate of only five hundreds of one percent. The third Irish subsidiary is Apple Operations Europe. In addition to creating non-tax resident affiliates, Apple Inc. has utilized U.S. tax loopholes to avoid U.S. taxes on $44 billion in otherwise taxable offshore income over the past four years, or about $10 billion in tax avoidance per year.”

That’s just wrong. They make billions of dollars setting up shop in places around the world that provide them with infrastructures that allow them to market their highly profitable products around the globe, and provide them with highly educated engineers to design their products.

Apple can certainly afford to pay taxes from the enormous pile of cash it’s been hoarding.

Apple has enough cash on hand to buy every man, woman and child in the U.S., UK, and Germany a $300 iPod Touch, and have a little left over for a case or two. Apple has enough cash to buy every person on the planet a $20 lunch. And Apple has enough cash to pay off the national debts of New Zealand, Kenya, Nigeria, Jamaica, Cuba, Egypt, Vietnam, and Singapore.

They shouldn’t have to be coerced by a Senate subcommittee to pay taxes. They should want to pay taxes into the countries that allow them to make so goddamn much money.

Capsula previews new songs at The Triple Door

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Capsula finished recording their new album, Solar Secrets, at Saint Claire Studio in Kentucky with Tony Visconti producing. While he is mixing the album that is due out in August, the band is on the road as the opening act for Ose Mutantes.

The show was Wednesday night at The Triple Door, Seattle’s dinner-club music venue. It’s nothing like The Funhouse, The Comet Tavern  (de puta madre!), or the Mural Amphitheater – the three venues Capsula has played in past shows.

I’ve seen a few shows at The Triple Door, and I wasn’t sure how Capsula would play to a crowd of mostly older music fans who were all seated at their tables eating dinner and sipping on their drinks as they waited to see the headliner, Ose Mutantes.

Capsula had no problem adapting to the venue. They opened with a song from Rising Mountains, and followed with their cover of “Moonage Daydream” from the Ziggy album and, during his guitar solo, Martin Guevara got down from the stage, jutted back and forth between tables, and then climbed on top of a booth to play out the solo. The band had the crowd in its hands from that point on.

They played a couple of new songs from Solar Secrets, but I don’t recall the titles. I do remember the songs rocked and sounded great. I think it was during one of the new songs when Martin scraped the neck of his guitar across the edge of the stage to start some feedback and then held it above his head and banged on it like it was a percussion instrument. Loved it.

Before the last song of the set, Martin said “I don’t know if you can get out of your seats here, but you should for just this last song, if it’s okay.” Many people obliged.

Capsula Triple Door 1Cory and I were able to talk to their tour manager in the merch booth and later to the band. We found out they’ll be heading back to Europe this summer and hope to return to Seattle during their U.S. tour to support the new album. Martin said he would really like to play the KEXP Barbecue at the Mural Amphitheater this year. (Anybody from KEXP reading this? Make it happen!)

They also did an in-studio performance for KEXP on Wednesday afternoon, and thanks to the magic of the intertubes, you can listen to it right here, right now.

The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved

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According to Hunter S. Thompson’s 1970 dispatch written for Scanlan’s Monthly with illustrations by Ralph Steadman. Gonzo journalism was born.

The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved

Excerpt:

Later Friday afternoon, we went out on the balcony of the press box and I tried to describe the difference between what we were seeing today and what would be happening tomorrow. This was the first time I’d been to a Derby in ten years, but before that, when I lived in Louisville, I used to go every year. Now, looking down from the press box, I pointed to the huge grassy meadow enclosed by the track. “That whole thing,” I said, “will be jammed with people; fifty thousand or so, and most of them staggering drunk. It’s a fantastic scene–thousands of people fainting, crying, copulating, trampling each other and fighting with broken whiskey bottles. We’ll have to spend some time out there, but it’s hard to move around, too many bodies.”

“Is it safe out there?” Will we ever come back?”

“Sure,” I said. “We’ll just have to be careful not to step on anybody’s stomach and start a fight.” I shrugged. “Hell, this clubhouse scene right below us will be almost as bad as the infield. Thousands of raving, stumbling drunks, getting angrier and angrier as they lose more and more money. By midafternoon they’ll be guzzling mint juleps with both hands and vomitting on each other between races. The whole place will be jammed with bodies, shoulder to shoulder. It’s hard to move around. The aisles will be slick with vomit; people falling down and grabbing at your legs to keep from being stomped. Drunks pissing on themselves in the betting lines. Dropping handfuls of money and fighting to stoop over and pick it up.”

He looked so nervous that I laughed. “I’m just kidding,” I said. “Don’t worry. At the first hint of trouble I’ll start pumping this ‘Chemical Billy’ into the crowd.”

Read the whole thing here.

The real reason why the Gun Bill was voted down in the Senate

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“In the end it didn’t pass because we’re so politicized. There were some on my side who did not want to be seen helping the president do something he wanted to get done, just because the president wanted to do it.” Senator Pat Toomey (R-PA), co-sponsor of the Toomey-Manchin background check bill.

Shameful.
Pigheaded.
Intransigent.
Disgraceful.
Dishonorable.
Contemptuous.
Disdainful.

America Stuck in Neutral

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There’s not much to say about the disgusting failure of the United States Senate to muster sixty votes to expand background checks for gun purchases that hasn’t been said already. Suffice it to say that if we can’t even agree to close a loophole that allows dangerous people such as felons and certified nutcases to purchase firearms through a legal seller, there can be no better example of our country’s abysmal dysfunction.

I’m not a big fan of Maureen Dowd but a recent column on President Obama’s failure to use his office effectively to get a better result on the gun bill did resonate with me. To some extent I accept the sharp rebuttal from his defenders that it’s unfair to blame Obama when the real problem is a radical GOP that provided just five votes for the expanded background checks and only one (Mark Steven Kirk of Illinois) for bans on assault weapons and large capacity magazines. The fact remains, however, that in addition to the four Democrats who voted down the expanded background check, ten also failed to support a ban on high capacity magazines and fifteen the banning of assault weapons – both of which were used in the mass shooting of children and teachers at Newtown.

Yet just four months into his second term, the president overall seems to have reached a dead end, and with him the country. The goals he set out in his most recent State of the Union address are laudable and dead right for the country – universal pre-school, significant investments in infrastructure and scientific/technological research and development to name a few key ones – but seem completely out of reach in the current political environment. And the president has suffered from a number of self-inflicted wounds as well.

In the debt ceiling debacle of 2011, for example, which yielded the monstrosity that is sequestration, it is clear he miscalculated the willingness of Republicans to tolerate steep across the board defense cuts which, in turn, led him to agree to omit tax increases from the automatic trigger, as he had originally proposed. We now have harsh cuts to worthwhile programs in the discretionary budget that disproportionately affect children and the poor. To add insult to injury, Democrats have retreated the first time the public at large actually felt the pain of sequester cuts and, in the process, handed the GOP a significant victory.

Another example is the fiscal cliff negotiations wherein he effectively held all the cards yet won a paltry $600 billion in new revenues; inequities such as the favorable tax rates enjoyed by hedge fund managers and the likes of Mitt Romney on his unearned income remain.

And the president seems almost passive in the face of the outrageous refusal of Senate Republicans to allow his nominations for federal district and appellate court vacancies and even some agency heads an up or down vote. Added to which is the fact that he has been slow to send up nominees for many such appointments. Things will hardly get better in the future as Republicans become increasingly confident of gaining control of the Senate in next year’s midterm elections. This does not bode well should a Supreme Court vacancy arise.

That the country is stuck in neutral is indisputable. And while it’s possible another Democratic incumbent with keener political and negotiating skills could have done better, you really have to wonder how much difference it would have made. The GOP has moved so far to the right it really has become a radical party, home to anti-tax and pro-gun zealots as well as Tea Party fanatics. It is clearly more intransigent and obstructionist with a Democrat in the White House now than it was even in the Bill Clinton years; to the point of a willingness to be destructive to the country’s economic interests if doing so furthers its ideological aims.

The reason is not hard to see in considering the yawning chasm between Blue and Red America, a development even the vapid editorial writers of The Washington Post have noted. And the GOP, driven by a base that brooks no compromise, will have ample opportunities for even more mischief in the days to come, what with the debt ceiling looming again. And next year when Obamacare kicks in and suffers inevitable teething troubles, the situation will be just ripe for exploitation by a party that couldn’t care less if millions of Americans don’t have adequate health insurance.

Like I said, with Democrats trying to move us forward and Republicans taking every opportunity to drag us back, we are stuck in neutral.

And what does all this presage? Merely that if you think things are bad now, just wait.

Friday Night Videos – Featuring Richie Havens, George Jones, and Dave Edmunds with the Stray Cats

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This week we lost a couple of legends in the music business. Richie Havens died of a heart attack on Monday at the age of 71, George Jones died today at the age of 81.

Here’s Richie Havens performing the very first song of the first set of music played at Woodstock in 1969.

Here’s George Jones peforming one my all-time favorite songs by him, “White Lightning”, from what looks like an early sixties video.

And here are Dave Edmunds and the Stray Cats performing another one of my favorite George Jones songs, “The Race is On” from Dave’s album, Twangin…

Republican Senate Filibusters are Destroying Democracy

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James Fallows has written about the anti-democratic nature of the filibuster a few times for the The Atlantic. In this one he cites a Politico story and explains how it fails to distinguish between breaking a filibuster and passing a bill:

I recognize that this theme now lacks novelty value. But here is why it matters to track an engineered usage-change as it is underway:

It takes 51 votes to “pass the Senate.”

It takes 60 votes to break a filibuster.

Through the past six-plus years, the GOP minority-power strategy in the Senate has deliberately aimed to make the filibuster, historically a rarity, seem routine and acceptable. Every news account that presents the super-majority 60-vote threshold as the “necessary bar” for Senate passage, and a majority of 55 votes as “certain defeat,” ratifies this strategy. Especially in an “informed” insider political-specialist publication.

Fallows go on to say that it doesn’t take a lot of extra print to distinguish between the votes necessary to break a filibuster and the votes necessary to pass a bill.

It’s not just the media that needs to make this distinction clear. Democrats need to use the words “Republican” and “filibuster” in the same sentence much more often than they do. President Obama and Senator Harry Reid and his fellow Democratic senators need to stop saying things like, “We aren’t able to get the votes necessary to move the bill forward” and start saying things like, “We have the 51 votes required to pass this bill, but once again the Republicans are threatening a filibuster in order to kill a bill that a majority of Americans support.”

If the Democrats change their language, the change to the way the media speaks about the votes will follow.

GOP Filibuster Kills Bill to Expand Background Checks on Gun Sales

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We at harikari have written much about guns, gun control, and the need to enact laws that make it more difficult for criminals and mentally unsound people to purchase guns. After the Newtown tragedy, Americans seemed to have had enough of the bullying by the NRA and they called for the expansion of mandatory background checks for nearly all gun-sale transactions. The Manchin-Toomey background-check bill was supported by nearly 90% of Americans. Polls show that a majority of Americans also supported a ban on the sale of assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition clips.

On Wednesday a bill to expand background checks was filibustered by Republicans, so it needed 60 votes to move forward. The senate voted for the bill 54-46. Yes, a clear majority of senators voted to move forward with the background-check bill but because of the Republican filibuster, the bill was killed. The senate also voted “down” the amendment to limit the capacity of ammunition clips 54-46.

90% of Democrats voted in favor of the bill, and 90% of Republicans voted against the bill that 90% of Americans supported.

For some smart commentary about how undemocratic the senate is and how the arguments of gun-control opponents are intellectually unsound, watch these two excellent segments from Thursday’s edition of The Daily Show.

First Jon,

and now John…

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds at The Paramount Theatre, Seattle April 2013

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Nick Cave Paramount marqueeTickets for this show went very fast. The Paramount website says the band requested ticketless sales and a four-seat limit. Fans only. No re-entry. No scalpers. Ticket buyers had to show up in person with ID to claim their tickets. The Paramount staff was very good at getting people through the ticket pick-up lines that were organized alphabetically, so it didn’t take long to get into the venue. (There were paper tickets, but fans didn’t get them until right before they were scanned at the door.)

Sharon Van Etten came on stage at 8:00 p.m. and played a short set accompanied by only her percussionist. She played guitar and sang around six songs, and her voice sounded magnificent. I really like the way she sounds on her album Tramp, but last night she sounded better than she does on her album. Maybe it’s the size of the venue and the charge she got from such an appreciative and respectful audience that made her voice so strong and clear. I hope her producer can capture it on her next album. I wish I had written down the names of the songs she played, but I didn’t, so no setlist. The last song she sang was a new one that she said her boyfriend said sounded like she was ripping off Nick Cave. I thought it was her best song.

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds took the stage at 9:01 p.m, and Sharon Van Etten joined them as a backup singer. That’s her second from the left.

Nick Cave 2About these photos: I took all but one of them with a Sony Cybershot using a 10X zoom. The camera has a hard time auto-focusing because of the colored lights, and Nick moves around a lot, so yes they are a little blurry. Best I could do though. Megan Seling posted some much clearer photos by Beth Crook on The Stranger’s “Line Out” blog.

Nick opened the show with three tracks off the new album, Push the Sky Away. First was ”We No Who U R”, a tranquil song with sparse instrumentation. Next was “Jubilee Street” that starts out quiet and gradually builds into a rumbling, almost blues number accented by the very raw and loud guitar playing of Warren Ellis.

“Wide Lovely Eyes” is a happier, more upbeat song from the album, and it was followed by the epic “Higgs Boson Blues” that name drops Robert Johnson and the Devil, alludes to Martin Luther King at the Lorraine Motel, places Hannah Montana in the African Savannah, and ends with Miley Cyrus floating in a swimming pool in Toluca Lake.

During the song Nick moved all around the stage whipping his microphone chord in and out of his way, and Warren Ellis played some wicked loud riffs on electric guitar. Nick did stop near center stage and kneeled down in front of the audience to grab hold of a woman’s hand and hold it to his chest as he sang “Can you feel my heart beat? Can you feel my heart beat?” No doubt she did. So did the rest of us in the form of Martin Casey’s powerful bass playing.

Nick Cave 1For the cacophonous part of the show Nick drew from his catalogue of classic Bad Seeds songs starting with ”From Her to Eternity”, followed by “Red Right Hand” featuring Warren Ellis going nuts on both violin and guitar, then “Deanna” and a short non-introduction to “Jack the Ripper”. (He started to say something but stopped. He’s just not into introductions.)

Nick Cave 3

Following the sonic maelstrom that is The Bad Seeds, Nick sat down at the piano and took off his suit jacket. The crowd cheered the jacketless Mr. Cave, and he responded with “Really? Is that all it takes?” Nick played piano and sang three songs, “Love Letter”, “People Ain’t No Good”, and “No More Shall We Part”.

He eased back into full-band mode again with “The Weeping Song” followed by “The Mercy Seat” delivered to us as a howl from Hell.

The band started into a slow blues groove, and Nick strutted around the stage as he got into character to tell his version of the story of a killer named ”Stag” Lee Sheldon, better known to Nick fans as the bad motherfucker called “Stagger Lee”. The band exploded in shrieks of noise to highlight the end of each verse. Before the final verse of the recorded version of the song, Nick knelt down and wrapped his free arm around a fan at the edge of the stage and pulled him in tight against his body as he sang, ”

Just then Billy Dilly rolls in and he says, “You must be That bad motherfucker called Stagger Lee.”

Stagger Lee

“Yeah, I’m Stagger Lee, and you better get down on your knees and suck my dick because if you don’t, you’re gonna be dead,”

Said Stagger Lee

Billy dropped down and slobbered on his head and Stag filled him full of lead

Oh yeah

Followed by more high-decibel “gun shots” and electric screams from the band.

But that wasn’t the end of the song. The band quieted down and Nick began a new verse:

In come the devil said “I’ve come to take you down Mr. Stagger Lee. I’ve come to take you down Mr. Stagger Lee”.

Well those were the last words that the Devil said, ’cause Stag put four holes in the motherfuckers head.”

That’s right, Stagger Lee is badder than the Devil.

And what better place to end a set? They left the stage and came back after a few minutes for the two-song encore. Nick’s ode to Elvis, “Tupelo” was first, and the show ended with the title track from Push the Sky Away.

Nick Cave 5

Here’s the setlist:

We No Who U R
Jubilee Street
Wide lovely Eyes
Higgs Boson Blues
From Her to Eternity
Red Right Hand
Deanna
Jack the Ripper
Love Letter
People Ain’t No Good
No More Shall We Part
The Weeping Song
The Mercy Seat
Stagger Lee
Encore
Tupelo
Push the Sky Away

And when I find some more reviews I’ll link to them here.

Review for City Arts by Rachel Shimp.

Bobby Switchblade over at Will the Fire described the sound quite well.

It sounded like so much electricity was being channeled through the monitors that it could only process it by funneling it all into one disorienting din that reminded me of films that depict the heavy ringing in your ears that can follow exposure to a bomb blast or gun shot. Despite the array of instruments being played on stage, the sound they created became one giant gong amplifying the song’s sense of simultaneous implosion, explosion and disintegration.

Seattle Post Intelligencer review.

KEXP review.

Back Beat Seattle review and lots of photos by Dagmar.

YouTube videos of the concert: Deanna, Love Letter, Tupelo, Stagger Lee

NRA and GOP demonstrate their paranoia on guns to the world.

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The United Nations General Assembly voted 154-3 with 20 abstentions for the first international treaty to regulate the global arms trade. The treaty is designed principally to curb the supply of arms to terrorists, rogue regimes and human rights abusers such as Assad in Syria, warlords such as the groups in Africa who kidnap young boys to become brutal soldiers, and organized crime.

The United States played a key role in shepherding the treaty through to a vote, yet will likely not ratify it, which requires a two-thirds majority in the US Senate, because of opposition from paranoid Republican lawmakers doing the bidding of the even more paranoid leadership of the NRA.

These paranoids, you see, continue to believe, against all the evidence and the credible assurances to the contrary contained in a definitive paper by the American Bar Association’s Center for Human Rights, that the treaty could be used to supersede their rights under the Second Amendment.

In opposing the treaty, the GOP and NRA zealots join such worthies as North Korea, Iran and Syria who all voted against it in the UN.

It should come as a shock that senior Republican senators would join the truly deranged people who lead the NRA to oppose a treaty whose only opponents in the UN were countries which have regimes we count among the craziest and/or most murderous in the world. It should, but of course it doesn’t.