Tax Loopholes and Revolving Doors (Occupy K Street)

September 29, 2021 3:33 AM

How Accounting Giants Craft Favorable Tax Rules From Inside Government [ungated] - "Lawyers from top accounting firms do brief stints in the Treasury Department, with the expectation of big raises when they return."

also btw...

• This Is How America's Richest Families Stay That Way [ungated] - "The longer we fail to constrain inherited wealth, the sooner the dream of a democratic society dies."
• Occupy Wall Street Changed Everything [ungated] - "Ten years later, the legacy of Zuccotti Park has never been clearer."
• Did Occupy Wall Street mean anything at all? [ungated] - "A look at the legacy of the movement that swept the world, ten years on."
• Inside the rise and fall of Occupy Wall Street, and why even its organizers won't say it worked [ungated] - "A decade after the Occupy Wall Street movement started, its organizers reflect on the movement — and why the gap between rich and poor hasn't changed."
• Occupy Ten Years On: An Interview With Winnie Wong - "Talking with the veteran organizer and Bernie Sanders campaign staffer about the quiet revolution that started a decade ago in Zuccotti Park."
• It's been 10 years since Occupy Wall Street — What's changed? - "The movement's lofty goals of creating a more equitable economy have gone unfulfilled, but the politics of 'the 99 percent' have gained traction over the past decade."
• Occupy Wall Street at 10: What It Taught Us, and Why It Mattered - "It basically started the wave of activism that revived the left—and taught people to get serious about power."
• 'Another World Is Possible': How Occupy Wall Street Reshaped Politics & Kicked Off New Era of Protest - "Occupy Wall Street 'broke the spell' protecting the economic status quo and marked a major shift in protests against capitalism."
• The news media: watchdogs prefer the paywalled garden - "'What happens when journalism is everywhere?', Mathew Ingram asked in 2011. Nine years and one Trump term later, the answer is here."
• That Time Marshall McLuhan Predicted Social Media - "The global village is not created by the motor car or even by the airplane. It's created by instant electronic information movement. The global village is at once as wide as the planet and as small as a little town where everybody is maliciously engaged in poking his nose into everybody else's business. The global village is a world in which you don't necessarily have harmony."[1]

posted by kliuless (6 comments total)

See also - FDA employees who go to work for pharma, EPA to polluter, and in the case of Obama care, VP of a heath insurance company to senate staffer who wrote Obamacare back to the insurance business (i.e. the reason single payer wasn't allowed to be mentioned).
posted by 445supermag at 6:54 AM on September 29, 2021 [3 favorites]

This is a well-known tactic - so much so, there is a term for it: "regulatory capture" - occurs very frequently. (I am more familiar with the ones who pollute(d) the FCC and the CRTC)
posted by rozcakj at 7:36 AM on September 29, 2021 [6 favorites]

Half the reason DC hated Trump so much was his crude, provincial approach to corruption.
posted by Reyturner at 8:38 AM on September 29, 2021 [6 favorites]

Beyond provincial, he was only in it for himself and to a lesser extent his family. Even the wealthy have a problem with corruption that specific.
posted by kokaku at 9:54 AM on September 29, 2021 [2 favorites]

If you have a LinkedIn account you can play a fun game of going to https://www.linkedin.com/company/us-treasury/people/ and searching firm names to know how many alums are there....and doing the reverse for any firm to see how many ex-Treasury folks are there (order of magnitude estimates, and you'll get everyone from the receptionist to general counsel unless you filter further etc but still quite eye opening)
posted by inflatablekiwi at 10:00 AM on September 29, 2021 [2 favorites]

Is this just as prevalent in other countries?

Also, there's a plausible argument that you need people with industry experience on the regulatory side in order to fight fire with fire. Even if DC only serves to highlight how spectacularly this fails.

It seems like one of those hard problems. Quis custodiet, indeed.
posted by Reasonably Everything Happens at 6:20 PM on September 29, 2021