Today in 1965, Britain’s Tailor and Cutter Magazine ran a column asking the Rolling Stones to start wearing ties. The magazine claimed that their male fans’ emulating the Stones’ refusal to wear ties was threatening financial ruin for tiemakers.
To that, Mick Jagger replied:
“The trouble with a tie is that it could dangle in the soup. It is also something extra to which a fan can hang when you are trying to get in and out of a theater.”
Jagger is a graduate of the London School of Economics. Smart guy.
Today in 1965, the members of the Rolling Stones were fined £5 for urinating in a public place, specifically a gas station after a concert in Romford, England.
Today in 1967, Britain’s New Musical Express magazine announced that Steve Winwood, formerly of the Spencer Davis Group, was forming a group with the rock and roll stew of Jim Capaldi, Chris Wood and Dave Mason, to be called Traffic …
The AV Club discusses one of Irish music’s most popular songs:
“Whiskey In The Jar” has had one of the longest, most colorful histories of any Irish song. The thousands of versions of the tune include not only the rock ’n’ roll ones everyone knows—mainly by Thin Lizzy and Metallica—but they also include The Dubliners’ revered folk take, The Grateful Dead’s rehearsal version, bedroom covers, raucous bar-band versions, spritely Irish-punk covers, and live acoustic renditions. The song’s wide-ranging surface appeal is obvious: It’s a rollicking tune that’s fun to sing, especially while hoisting a pint or two. But that “Whiskey In The Jar” has become so revered is also somewhat mystifying: How did a centuries-old folk tale about an Irish criminal who plunders and robs people he encounters—and then gets shipped off to jail after his woman betrays him—endure and become a cover staple?
Certainly its simple foundation and nod to tradition has something to do with it. The song was particularly popular in American folk circles in the ’50s and ’60s, when Burl Ives, The Brothers Four, and The Limeliters covered it as “Kilgary Mountain,” and Peter, Paul, And Mary recorded it as “Gilgarra Mountain.” Yet “Whiskey In The Jar” is also quite malleable, which has allowed it to transcend genres and eras. The Pogues teamed up with The Dubliners for a slightly disheveled, folky version that hit No. 4 in Ireland in 1990, while bluegrass icon David Grisman and Jerry Garcia collaborated on a light-footed take in the mid-’90s, around the same time Pulp did a predictably droll version of the song. A mid-’00s cover by Belle And Sebastian was sighing and slightly desperate, while ’80s new-wavers Simple Minds amped up the urgency for a U2-esque, spacey version in 2009. Even Kings Of Leon’s 2003 single “Molly’s Chambers” has ties to the song; the title is a reference to a phrase from Thin Lizzy’s version, and zeroes in on the temptation aspect of the tune.
Naturally, the evolution of “Whiskey In The Jar” itself is also complicated. Folklorists point out that the rough outline of the “Whiskey In The Jar” story dates back to 1650 and the exploits of a vile criminal named Patrick Flemming, an Irish highwayman who maimed and killed civilians galore before being executed—caught only because his weapon was intentionally dampened so it would malfunction. A tune called “Patrick Flemmen He Was A Valiant Souldier” appears in the early 1680s in conjunction with an English broadside ballad, “The Downfal Of The Whiggs, Or, Their Lamentation For Fear Of A Loyal Parliament”—but the actual text of the “Patrick Flemming” tune surfaced in a later collection of ballads kept by noted curator Sir Frederick Madden, and adds the detail of the betrayal by a woman. This woman had a name (Molly) by a circa-1850s broadside ballad called “Sporting Hero, Or Whiskey In The Bar”; in other variations, she came to be known as “sportin’ Jenny” or just “Jenny.” The author of the 1960 book Irish Street Ballads includes the tune “There’s Whiskey In The Jar,” and notes his Limerick-based mother learned the song in 1870 from a native of Cork. Over time, the villainous plundering became a simpler, man-on-man crime—and the person being robbed generally tended to be English, frequently a higher-up in the army (e.g., “Captain Farrell,” “Colonel Pepper”).
But because “Whiskey In The Jar” is considered to be a traditional, there’s no definitive version of the song or its lyrics. In truth, chronicling the variations of the song in popular music just during the last half-century or so is mind-boggling. Sometimes when the protagonist’s lady rats him out for his plundering, his weapon does work, and he kills the person who confronts him. In some cases, he languishes in prison for his crimes; in other cases, he manages to escape with his AWOL-from-the-army brother and they both hide in the mountains. And depending on the version of the song, either the main character would rather be dabbling in sex and drinking above all, or else he’s just a hooligan who’s unruly on whiskey.
Despite this bawdy and violent origin, the song tends to end up a lighthearted celebration of debauchery, a communal sing-along that’s like a drunk Grimm’s fairy tale. In a recent interview with The A.V. Club, Thin Lizzy founding member/original guitarist Eric Bell underscored this point by noting the song’s importance to the band’s native Ireland. “There’s lots of Irish folk songs, like drinking songs,” he said. “Everybody has a few drinks and they go down to the pub. It’s just part of the Irish tradition. It’s the same with America—you’ve got your bluegrass music, your country music. It’s part of America.”
Thin Lizzy’s 1972 take on “Whiskey In The Jar”—which hit No. 1 in Ireland and went top 10 in the U.K.—is widely considered to be the definitive rock ’n’ roll version of the song, and for good reason: At the time, its combination of old and new sounds was revolutionary. “For a folk song to become a hit in the ’70s—but played on electrical instruments, not traditional instruments, like bodhráns and Irish pipes and violins and fiddles—our version was extremely modern,” Bell described. “Still, it somehow kept that Irish feel.”
As the guitarist tells it, his band covering “Whiskey In The Jar” happened “purely by accident,” during an otherwise uneventful rehearsal at a London pub. “We used to work original stuff, [but] on this particular day, it just wasn’t happening. We were going to pack up, and Philip [Lynott, vocalist] put down the bass and picked up the other six-string guitar, and he just started messing about with various stupid songs. About 20 minutes later, he started singing ‘Whiskey In The Jar’ as one of those stupid songs. Me and [drummer] Brian Downey, at this point we were extremely bored, and we started playing along with him a little bit.”
In a fateful twist, then-Thin Lizzy manager Ted Carroll happened to be coming up the stairs at the time with a new amplifier for Bell. Overhearing the jam session, he pressed the group on what they were playing, Bell recalls. “We said, ‘Whiskey In The Jar.’ He said, ‘You’ve got your first single to record for Decca in about six weeks. Have you got an A-side?’ and we said, ‘Yeah, ‘Black Boys In The Corner.’ He said, ‘Have you got a B-side?’ We said, ‘Not at the moment.’ He said, ‘Start thinking about rearranging ‘Whiskey In The Jar.’ We couldn’t believe that he wanted us to record that song.”
Six weeks later, when Thin Lizzy went to record “Black Boys In The Corner,” the band still didn’t have a B-side, so “Whiskey In The Jar” it was. Unlike the popular ’60s version by The Dubliners, however—a twee, brisk take on the song that was relatively unconcerned with prison time—the band’s approach was from a much different, moodier place. Lynott’s vocals are soulful and impassioned, and deeply invested in the tragic storyline. His delivery humanizes the narrator and sympathizes with his anguish over being double-crossed by his lady: “And I got drunk on whiskey-oh / And I loved, I loved, I loved, I loved, I loved, I loved my Molly-o.” At the very end, the band throws in a reference to another standard trope well-known in Irish folk circles, the “dirty old town.” The lyric—“And she wheels a wheelbarrow through that old dirty town / Oh, it’s a dirty old town”—can be interpreted as longing for freedom, or a dig on Molly that she too is stuck in a hellhole of her own doing.
Thin Lizzy’s version remains distinctive as well due to the guitar parts Bell added atop the basic melody: a keening, mournful wail as an intro; a lively, rippling guitar line cascading throughout the song; and an on-the-edge-of-a-squall bridge with jammy, bluesy roots. Guitar-wise, Bell called it “one of the most difficult songs I’ve ever worked on in my life, to try and come up with original ideas for.” In fact, in order to hit on the right formula, he had to avoid approaching the song like a guitarist would.
“We were gigging one night, Thin Lizzy in England,” he recalls. “And on the way home, Philip used to play cassettes in the car when we were traveling. He had different people that he was into: Janice Brown, The Rolling Stones, [Jimi] Hendrix, Bob Marley. And he was also into Irish songs, [like] the Chieftains. As we were traveling home that night, he put the Chieftains cassette on. I got this idea to approach the intro as an Uilleann pipe—you know, Irish pipes—rather than thinking as a guitar player.”
In an interview with The A.V. Club, guitarist Richard Fortus, who played with Thin Lizzy in 2011 and currently performs in Guns N’ Roses, noted the significance of these varied influences coming together. “That whole Irish rock band thing—[Thin Lizzy] were the first ones to really do it,” he says. “At that time, artists like Van Morrison—he was trying to sound American. [Thin Lizzy] were the first ones to break through with that Celtic vibe. Their version of it is just so great.”
Despite the respectful origins and fresh take on the song, not everyone was thrilled with Thin Lizzy’s version, especially the old guard. “Everybody that’s heard ‘Whiskey In The Jar,’ heard The Dubliners’ version: banjos, tin whistles, and so on and so on,” Bell said. “We came along and completely and totally rearranged that song. A lot of Irish people didn’t really like it, you know?… We were told we bastardized it. An awful lot of Irish people said that to us, actually used that word. [Assumes a stern Irish grizzled accent.] ‘Jesus, lads, you bastardized that song.’” …
“Whiskey In The Jar” becoming a hit was also polarizing internally for Thin Lizzy, both a blessing and a curse. Bell said the song helped bolster his reputation as a musician and keep him financially solvent. (“It’s sort of helped me pay the rent the last 20 years. Before ‘Whiskey In The Jar,’ I hadn’t a pot to piss on, really.”) But Thin Lizzy failed to immediately follow up “Whiskey In The Jar” with another huge U.K. hit (although a subsequent pair of singles, including the now-classic “The Rocker,” hit the Top 15 of the Irish charts).The band was saddled with a one-hit wonder reputation perpetuated by the press, as Lynott noted in a 1976 interview. “I was conscious that the media saw that we didn’t follow up ‘Whiskey In The Jar,’” he said. “And we didn’t in terms of record sales. The only place we seemed to be happening was on the street. But, you know, that’s Thin Lizzy summed up for you. Like an album and three singles after ‘Whiskey In The Jar,’ man, you’d get people mentioning ‘Whiskey Jar’ in interviews—and I’d go ‘Oh Jeezuz.’ That was how far behind the press got on the band. They really lost contact.”Moving immediately into performing at larger venues also did a number on the band. “There would be about 800 people there to see us, and they didn’t know what to expect,” Bell recalled. “We just walked out and we did our set that we always played in the pubs and clubs: rock music, blues, some original stuff. Nobody took a blind bit of notice of us—maybe 30 people standing watching us playing. Then at some part of the night, I went [sings the start of “Whiskey In The Jar”] and 1,000 people turned up, appeared right in front of us, and stood and went crazy until the song ended. Then we started playing our own blues and stuff again—and they all disappeared again. That’s what it was like. We went through this major change, of being a rock-blues band to a band that had their first hit record. It really, really throws you.”Still, “Whiskey In The Jar” was perhaps the first chance many had to discover Thin Lizzy. Witnessing the band perform on Top Of The Pops in 1972 became a life-changing experience for Northern Ireland native Ricky Warwick. He is now the frontman of Black Star Riders, the moniker under which the current Thin Lizzy lineup—including guitarist Scott Gorham, who replaced Bell when he left the group in 1973— releases new music and plays shows.
“The first time I saw Thin Lizzy in black and white on TV was playing ‘Whiskey In The Jar,’” Warwick told A.V. Club. “I was just captivated by the sound and also by the way Phil looked, because he was so different-looking to any sort of rock & roller at that time. The whole thing just captured my imagination. That was the first time I heard the song, and I fell in love with it straightaway. It was the sound, it was that guitar hook, it was the whole vibe of it, it was Phil’s voice. Everything was captivating to me.”
Warwick noted that Black Star Riders currently close their set with “Whiskey In The Jar” (which, of course, stays faithful to the Thin Lizzy version). He witnesses the song’s enduring popularity every night—and has his own theory as to why it endures. “It’s that Irish drinking thing, it absolutely is,” Warwick said. “You have the nautical lyrics in the chorus, which is very much Irish folklore—diddly-um, diddly-i [and] musha-ring-dam-a-do-dam-a-die. It’s almost like rhyming with the music, and it really doesn’t mean anything, it’s just a drinking song.
“But also, the verses have a lot of meaning,” he continued. “It’s the Irish villain robbing the English general and getting one over on the English, which the Irish always love to do. It’s a magical story—it’s timeless. That song comes on, no matter where you are, and especially if it’s cranked up loud, people just want to drink and have a good time, and raise their fists in the air.”
Although “Whiskey In The Jar” was always huge in Ireland, the U.K., and Europe, the song surged worldwide in the late ’90s thanks to Metallica’s slash-and-burn take on Thin Lizzy’s version, from the 1998 B-sides/covers album Garage Inc. “I can’t speak for them, but I know Thin Lizzy’s always been a big band for Metallica,” Bob Rock, who produced the first disc of Garage Inc. with frontman James Hetfield and drummer Lars Ulrich. Rock told A.V. Club: “That particular song, they really liked the fact it was Eric Bell [on the track]—kind of an earlier song of [Thin Lizzy’s]. We just tried to do it justice. It was one of the most simple ones on the album, because their heart was in it.
“All the lyrics and the imagery, with the farm and the field, really was what got James [Hetfield] into it as well,” Rock continued. “It was really a live performance of [Metallica] playing it, which you hear, the enthusiasm and the excitement.”
Metallica’s version of the song honors the spirit of Thin Lizzy’s deliberate approach, whether it’s Ulrich’s fat drum splashes or the precision with which the band emulates and amplifies Bell’s original guitar parts. Metallica’s cover has a looser, elastic feel, however—matching the debauched party scenes depicted in the song’s video—and revels in its villainous ways. Even when reaching the song’s denouement, when the narrator is in jail, the band takes a defiant stance. Of course, this again has much to do with the vocals: “Whiskey In The Jar” features peak Hetfield vocal enunciation, from his sharp-cornered delivery of the “musha-ring-dam-a-do-dam-a-die” lyric—a part Rock stressed they “had to make sure James could own that… We wanted to make sure we got that right”—and the syllabic uprising he employs on words such as “jar-uh.”
“We treated it like it was a Metallica song, in a way,” Rock said about the band’s approach. “Sometimes [when bands are covering other] records, maybe [they] do it quickly, because it’s not theirs. We actually made sure that we took time to make sure everything was right, and it was a record everybody could be proud of. That’s the difference. It probably shows in what comes across—we tried to make a great record.”
“Whiskey In The Jar” was the second song from Garage Inc. to hit No. 1 on the Billboard Mainstream Rock Tracks chart, and nabbed Metallica the 2000 Grammy Award for Best Hard Rock Performance. Certainly Metallica’s status as one of the biggest bands in the world helped propel the song to such great heights. But why did this version resonate so widely?
“It’s kind of folky,” Rock described. “And it gets corny, but folk music and that kind of traditional song makes you feel good. It’s very powerful and very happy, what we did, but we didn’t take away from the song. Traditional songs like that resonate through generations. It resonated with the Pogues; they did it with The Dubliners, a different generation. Metallica did theirs. It’s kind of the great thing about music—and particularly traditional music—is to carry it through generations, so other people actually get a chance to hear that stuff.”
But Metallica’s version of the traditional standard offered Bell a bit of a surprise: “Years later, after I left Thin Lizzy, I was doing a tour with my own band in Sweden,” he recalled. “People came to the changing room after the gig to talk and have autographs and so on. Everyone that came into the changing room said, [assumes Swedish accent] ‘Eric, have you heard Metallica’s version of ‘Whiskey In The Jar’? And I said, ‘Who? Metallica?’ I had never heard of Metallica in my life, because I’m not into that type of music. So when I got back to England I thought, ‘Wow, I must check this band out.’”
Once he checked out the album, he was in for another surprise. “Thing was, on the sleeve notes of the album, it said, ‘Whiskey In The Jar’ and then in brackets, [Traditional Arrangement, Metallica.]” So I put it on and—gotcha. That’s my riff; I made that up. I phoned up Thin Lizzy’s management and I said, ‘Listen, I was in Sweden and there’s a band called Metallica…’ and they said, ‘Yes, we know, our lawyers are talking to their lawyers at the moment.’” Surpassing any legal issues, Metallica performed the song live in Dublin in 1999 with Bell on guitar.
It’s understandable why Bell and other past and present members of Thin Lizzy are so protective of “Whiskey In The Jar,” and not just for financial reasons. “There’s [been] many, many different versions of it through the years,” Black Star Riders’ Warwick said. “It’s just part of our culture. Music’s so ingrained in our society—in every street, every bar, every house, there’s a musical instrument, or there’s music going on. You just grow up with it—it’s part of who you are, what you are. People think of us as a nation of fighters, [but] we’re a nation of dreamers as well.” “Whiskey In The Jar”’s longstanding value to Irish culture remains immeasurable; it represents what makes the country and its artistic output influential and meaningful, in any rendition.
The NCAA Division I men’s basketball tournament starts today, if you don’t count the “first four” games earlier this week.
I have for a few years posted on this blog one or more (per tournament) brackets, because I am fine with public self-deprecation. I am not doing that this year, though my opinion about self-deprecation hasn’t changed.
Given the traveshamockery of the NCAA’s seeing Wisconsin — the team that finished second in the Big T1e4n, one of the Power Five conferences, and second in the Big T1e4n tournament — 32nd, lining up a second-round loss to Villanova Saturday, I refuse to support the tournament. I will not watch any game that doesn’t include Wisconsin, including the Final Four. (I have to work late Monday nights anyway. The last national championship game I saw was 2015, and I didn’t watch the 2013 or 2014 title games.)
One assumes the Badgers’ poor seeding is the result of their poor play in February. What that means, of course, is that no other month of the season apparently matters. Your conference record? Irrelevant. Whom you beat? Who cares? The entire season? So what?
I am aware that UW is probably not as good as sixth through 10th best in Division I, which is what you’d expect a Power Five runner-up to be. That translates to a second or third seed, which is better than the various power ratings. But if you believe those, which generally had UW in the early 20s, then UW should have gotten a sixth seed. There is a huge difference between a sixth seed (which gets you an 11th-seed first-round game, then a game between the 14th or third seeds, then most likely the second seed) and an eighth seed, particularly when the selection committee deliberately put UW into the same regional as Villanova, the overall number one seed. There is only one reason to do that, and that’s to get rid of that team as soon as possible because the NCAA doesn’t like UW’s style of play or Greg Gard’s suits or whatever stupid rationale the selection committee wants to use.
So I don’t care who wins the tournament. Except for UW games (and that’s a big if too), I won’t be watching it.
Because I was working (and even had I not been working I have an actual life), I did not watch MSNBC’s revealing Donald Trump’s 2005 income taxes Tuesday night.
Fortunately for those who care, Legal Insurrection did so you and I didn’t have to:
Rachel Maddow has a history of claiming big scoops which then flop.
The White House says President Donald Trump made more than $150 million in income in 2005 and paid $38 million in income taxes that year.
The acknowledgement comes as MSNBC host Rachel Maddow says she has obtained part of Trump’s 2005 tax forms.
The White House is pushing back pre-emptively, saying that publishing those returns would be illegal.
It says, “You know you are desperate for ratings when you are willing to violate the law to push a story about two pages of tax returns from over a decade ago.”
… As she was stalling, her secret source and guest published the information on his own website, which The Daily Beast then posted before Maddow made the reveal:
Donald Trump earned more than $150 million in the year 2005—and paid just a small percentage of that in regular federal income taxes. Daily Beast contributor David Cay Johnston has obtained what appear to be the first two pages of Trump’s 2005 federal income tax return, and published an analysis of those pages on his website, DCReport.org. The Daily Beast could not independently verify these documents.
The documents show Trump and his wife Melania paying $5.3 million in regular federal income tax—a rate of less than 4% However, the Trumps paid an additional $31 million in the so-called “alternative minimum tax,” or AMT. Trump has previously called for the elimination of this tax….
Trump’s 2005 return also shows that he’d continued to benefit from the roughly $916 million loss he reported in his 1995 return—published last year by The New York Times. Using a loophole Congress closed in 1996, Trump converted that loss into a tax credit for the same amount he could offset against income.
Tucker Carlson also reported on the story as Maddow was stalling …
So there was no there there.
If anything, Maddow helped Trump by showing the paid $38 million in taxes on $150 million of income. Hardly the narrative the Democrats like.
Not only did Maddow get scooped on her own scoop, there are two inconvenient facts, reported by Chicks on the Right:
The big story of the night is President Trump’s 2005 tax returns. As it turns out, he paid $38 million in taxes on over $150 million of income. Zero Hedge broke this down– he paid “$5.3 million in regular federal income tax, and an additional $31 million of ‘alternative minimum tax,’ or AMT.” …
Ah yes. Wasn’t Obama’s effective federal income tax rate 18.7 percent in 2015? And who could forget about everyone’s favorite senile socialist, Bernie Sanders?
The Journal reports that because of losses in previous years, Mr. Trump’s adjusted gross income in 2005 was just $48.6 million. MSNBC may have just produced the greatest argument ever against the Alternative Minimum Tax. Does anyone this side of Bernie Sanders—or come to think of it, Rachel Maddow—think that the Internal Revenue Service should confiscate 78% of someone’s adjusted gross income?
We learned last night that Hillary Clinton’s claims about Mr. Trump’s taxes were off target. But another person who should be feeling at least a little embarrassed is the American media’s most beloved billionaire, Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett. In the heat of the campaign last year Mr. Buffett, a Democratic donor, released his 2015 tax returns and challenged Mr. Trump to do the same.
Mr. Buffett is estimated by Forbes to be worth around $78 billion, or roughly eight times Mr. Trump’s most optimistic assumptions about his own wealth. Yet in October Mr. Buffett revealed that he paid just $1.8 million in federal taxes in 2015, less than 5% of what Mr. Trump had paid a decade earlier, not even adjusted for inflation. Of course this is just one year of tax data on Mr. Trump and as a businessman who’s had his share of failures, he may have paid little or nothing in other years. But $38 million is a big tax bill for anybody, at any time.
Along with putting to rest the canard that the President doesn’t pay taxes, perhaps last night’s MSNBC show will finally persuade media folk like Charlie Rose to stop treating Mr. Buffett as the conscience of American business. Many journalists have fallen for Mr. Buffett’s folksy pitch for higher tax rates because he creates the impression that he is representative of a much larger group of people who are unfairly denying Washington its needed revenue. While it’s true that our complicated tax code benefits people rich enough to hire the brightest accountants and tax attorneys, Mr. Buffett is in a class by himself.
Whether rates go up or down is largely irrelevant to the sage of Omaha, because he manages to report a remarkably small income for someone with such gargantuan assets. Maybe Mr. Trump should ask him how he does it.
If journalists start applying the same standards to Donald Trump that they apply to Mr. Buffett, that would absolutely count as news. Well done, Ms. Maddow.
The added inconvenient fact for liberals is that all of Trump’s 2005 income came from the private sector, something neither Sanders nor Obama could claim.
So once again idiot liberais have made Trump look sympathetic. You need not be a Trump non-fan or fan to see some holes in this. Dan Mitchell sees them:
Interestingly, it appears that Trump pays a lot of tax. At least for that one year. Which is contrary to what a lot of people have suspected – including me in the column I wrote on this topic last year for Time.
Some Trump supporters are even highlighting the fact that Trump’s effective tax rate that year was higher than what’s been paid by other political figures in more recent years.
But I’m not impressed. First, we have no idea what Trump’s tax rate was in other years. So the people defending Trump on that basis may wind up with egg on their face if tax returns from other years ever get published.
Second, why is it a good thing that Trump paid so much tax? I realize I’m a curmudgeonly libertarian, but I was one of the people who applauded Trump for saying that he does everything possible to minimize the amount of money he turns over to the IRS. As far as I’m concerned, he failed in 2005.
But let’s set politics aside and focus on the fact that Trump coughed up $38 million to the IRS in 2005. If that’s representative of what he pays every year (and I realize that’s a big “if”), my main thought is that he should move to Italy.
Yes, I realize that sounds crazy given Italy’s awful fiscal system and grim outlook. But there’s actually a new special tax regime to lure wealthy foreigners. Regardless of their income, rich people who move to Italy from other nations can pay a flat amount of €100,000 every year. Note that we’re talking about a flat amount, not a flat rate.
Italy on Wednesday (Mar 8) introduced a flat tax for wealthy foreigners in a bid to compete with similar incentives offered in Britain and Spain, which have successfully attracted a slew of rich footballers and entertainers. The new flat rate tax of €100,000 (US$105,000) a year will apply to all worldwide income for foreigners who declare Italy to be their residency for tax purposes.
Here’s how Bloomberg/BNAdescribed the new initiative.
Italy unveiled a plan to allow the ultra-wealthy willing to take up residency in the country to pay an annual “flat tax” of 100,000 euros ($105,000) regardless of their level of income. A former Italian tax official told Bloomberg BNA the initiative is an attempt to entice high-net-worth individuals based in the U.K. to set up residency in Italy… Individuals paying the flat tax can add family members for an additional 25,000 euros ($26,250) each. The local media speculated that the measure would attract at least 1,000 high-income individuals.
Think about this from Donald Trump’s perspective. Would he rather pay $38 million to the ghouls at the IRS, or would he rather make an annual payment of €100,000 (plus another €50,000 for his wife and youngest son) to the Agenzia Entrate?
Seems like a no-brainer to me, especially since Italy is one of the most beautiful nations in the world. Like France, it’s not a place where it’s easy to become rich, but it’s a great place to live if you already have money.
But if Trump prefers cold rain over Mediterranean sunshine, he could also pick the Isle of Man for his new home.
There are no capital gains, inheritance tax or stamp duty, and personal income tax has a 10% standard rate and 20% higher rate. In addition there is a tax cap on total income payable of £125,000 per person, which has encouraged a steady flow of wealthy individuals and families to settle on the Island.
Though there are other options, as David Schrieberg explained for Forbes.
Italy is not exactly breaking new ground here. Various countries including Portugal, Malta, Cyprus and Ireland have been chasing high net worth individuals with various incentives. In 2014, some 60% of Swiss voters rejected a Socialist Party bid to end a 152-year-old tax break through which an estimated 5,600 wealthy foreigners pay a single lump sum similar to the new Italian regime.
If you think all of this sounds too good to be true, you’re right. At least for Donald Trump and other Americans. The United States has a very onerous worldwide tax system based on citizenship.
In other words, unlike folks in the rest of the world, Americans have to give up their passports in order to benefit from these attractive options. And the IRS insists that such people pay a Soviet-style exit tax on their way out the door.
The Organization Man, whom we first met in 1956, is still very much with us. And his eccentric career since that time partly answers a question that mystifies many contemporary conservatives: Given that progressives profess to hate corporations, why are our corporate leaders so progressive? It is easy to understand their taking a self-interested stand against the Trump administration over things such as the H-1B program and visa waivers, which interfere with their access to workers and customers, respectively. But 130 corporate leaders — including the CEOs of American Airlines and Bank of America — getting together to come down on North Carolina over public-bathroom rules that annoy transgender activists? Together with business leaders who have no presence in North Carolina and nothing to do with the state or its politics?
Is it only cravenness — or something more?
In the progressive lexicon, the word “corporation” is practically a synonym for “evil.” Corporations, in the progressive view, are so stoned on greed and ripped on ruthlessness that they present an existential threat to democracy as we know it. When the Left flies into a mad rage about . . . whatever, the black-bloc terrorists don’t burn down the tax office or the police station: They smash the windows of a Starbucks, never mind CEO Howard Schultz’s impeccably lefty credentials.
Weird thing, though: With the exception of a few big shiny targets such as Koch Industries (the nation’s second-largest privately held concern, behind Cargill) and Walmart (the nation’s largest private employer), the Left’s corporate enemies list is dominated by relatively modest concerns: Chick-fil-A, which, in spite of its recent growth spurt, is only a fraction of the size of McDonald’s or YUM Brands; Hobby Lobby, which is not even numbered among the hundred largest private U.S. companies; Waffle House, a regional purveyor of mediocre grits and a benefactor of Georgia Republicans. Carl’s Jr. was founded by a daily communicant and Knight of Malta, a man who had some not-very-progressive opinions about gay rights. But even in its new role as part of a larger corporate enterprise (the former CEO of which, Andrew Puzder, had been nominated for secretary of labor), the poor man’s answer to In-N-Out is not exactly in a position to inflict ultramontane Catholicism on the world at large, though the idea of a California Classic Double Inquisition with Cheese is not without charm.
Far from being agents of reaction, our corporate giants have for decades been giving progressives a great deal to celebrate. Disney, despite its popular reputation for hidebound wholesomeness, has long been a leader on gay rights, much to the dismay of a certain stripe of conservative. Walmart, one of the Left’s great corporate villains, has barred Confederate-flag merchandise from its stores in a sop to progressive critics, and its much-publicized sustainability agenda is more than sentiment: Among other things, it has invested $100 million in economic-mobility programs and doubled the fuel efficiency of its vehicle fleet over ten years. Individual members of the Walton clan engage in philanthropy of a distinctly progressive bent.
In fact, just going down the list of largest U.S. companies (by market capitalization) and considering each firm’s public political activism does a great deal to demolish the myth of the conservative corporate agenda. Top ten: 1) Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, is an up-and-down-the-line progressive who has been a vociferous critic of religious-liberty laws in Indiana and elsewhere that many like-minded people consider a back door to anti-gay discrimination. 2) When protesters descended on SFO to protest President Donald Trump’s executive order on immigration, one of the well-heeled gentlemen leading them was Google founder Sergey Brin, and Google employees were the second-largest corporate donor bloc to President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign. 3) Microsoft founder Bill Gates is a generous funder of programs dedicated to what is euphemistically known as “family planning.” 4) Berkshire Hathaway’s principal, Warren Buffett, is a close associate of Barack Obama’s and an energetic advocate of redistributive tax increases on high-income taxpayers. 5) Amazon’s Jeff Bezos put up $2.5 million of his own money for a Washington State gay-marriage initiative. 6) Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has pushed for liberal immigration-reform measures, while Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz pledged $20 million to support Hillary Rodham Clinton and other Democrats in 2016. 7) Exxon, as an oil company, may be something of a hate totem among progressives, but it has spent big — billions big — on renewables and global social programs. 8) Johnson & Johnson’s health-care policy shop is run by Liz Fowler, one of the architects of Obamacare and a former special assistant to President Obama. 9) The two largest recipients of JPMorgan cash in 2016 were Hillary Rodham Clinton and the Democratic National Committee, and the bank’s billionaire chairman, Jamie Dimon, is a high-profile supporter of Democratic politicians including Barack Obama and reportedly rejected an offer from President Trump to serve as Treasury secretary. 10) Wells Fargo employees followed JPMorgan’s example and donated $7.36 to Mrs. Clinton for every $1 they gave to Trump, and the recently troubled bank has sponsored events for the Human Rights Campaign, GLAAD, and other gay-rights groups, as well as donated to local Planned Parenthood franchises.
Even the hated Koch brothers are pro-choice, pro-gay, and pro-amnesty.
You may see the occasional Tom Monaghan or Phil Anschutz, but, on balance, U.S. corporate activism is overwhelmingly progressive. Why?
For one thing, conservatives are cheap dates. You do not have to convince the readers of National Review or Republicans in Valparaiso that American business is in general a force for good in the world. But if you are, e.g., Exxon, you might feel the need to convince certain people, young and idealistic and maybe a little stupid in spite of their expensive educations, that you are not so bad after all, and that you are spending mucho shmundo “turning algae into biofuel,” in the words of one Exxon advertisement, and combating malaria and doing other nice things. All of that is true, and Exxon makes sure people know it. The professional activists may sneer and scoff, but they are not the audience.
Even if it were only or mainly a matter of publicity (and it isn’t — Shell, among other oil majors, is putting real money into renewables and alternative energy), big companies such as Exxon and Apple would still have a very strong incentive to engage in progressive activism rather than conservative activism.
For one thing, there is a kind of moral asymmetry at work: Conservatives may roll their eyes a little bit at promises to build windmills so efficient that we’ll cease needing coal and oil, but progressives (at least a fair portion of them) believe that using fossil fuels may very well end human civilization. The nation’s F-150 drivers are not going to organize a march on Chevron’s headquarters if it puts a billion bucks into biofuels, but the nation’s Subaru drivers might very well do so if it doesn’t.
The same asymmetry characterizes the so-called social issues. The Left will see to it that Brendan Eich is driven out of his position at Mozilla for donating to an organization opposed to gay marriage, but the Right will not see to it that Tim Cook is driven out of his position for supporting gay marriage. For the Right, the question of gay marriage is an important moral and political disagreement, but for the Left the exclusion of homosexual couples from the legal institution of marriage was something akin to Jim Crow, and support for it isn’t erroneous, it is wicked. Even those on the right who proclaim that they regard the question of homosexual relationships as a national moral emergency do not behave as though they really believe it: Remember that boycott of Disney theme parks launched with great fanfare by the American Family Association, Focus on the Family, and the Southern Baptist Convention back in 1996? Nothing happened, because conservative parents are not telling their toddlers that they cannot go to Disney World because the people who run the park are too nice to that funny blonde lady who has the talk show and dances in the aisles with her audience.
The issues that conservatives tend to see as life-and-death issues are actual life-and-death issues, abortion prominent among them. But even among right-leaning corporate types, pro-life social conservatism is a distinctly minority inclination.
And that is significant, because a great deal of corporate activism is CEO-driven rather than shareholder-driven or directly rooted in the business interests of the firm. Like Wall Street bankers, who may not like their tax bills or Dodd-Frank but who tend in the main to be socially liberal Democrats, the CEOs of major U.S. corporations are, among other things, members of a discrete class. The graduates of ten colleges accounted for nearly half of the Fortune 500 CEOs in 2012; one in seven of them went to one school: Harvard. A handful of metros in California, Texas, and New York account for a third of Fortune 1000 headquarters — and there are 17 Fortune 1000 companies in one zip code in Houston. Unsurprisingly, people with similar backgrounds, similar experiences, and similar occupations tend to see the world in a similar way. “A new breed of chief executive is emerging — the CEO activist,” wrote Leslie Gaines-Ross, of Weber Shandwick, a global PR giant that advises Microsoft and had the unenviable task of working with Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services on the ACA rollout. “A handful of CEOs are standing up and standing out on some of the most polarizing issues of the day, from climate change and gun control, to race relations and same-sex marriage.” Hence chief executives’ joining en masse the great choir of hysteria on the question of toilet law in the Tar Heel State.
Whereas the ancient corporate practice was to decline to take a public position on anything not related to their businesses, contemporary CEOs feel obliged to act as public intellectuals as well as business managers. Many of them are genuine intellectuals: Gates, PepsiCo’s Indra Nooyi, Goldman Sachs’s Lloyd Blankfein. And, like Hollywood celebrities, almost all of them are effectively above money.
Some of them are rock-star entrepreneurs. But most of them are variations on the Organization Man, veterans of MBA programs, management consultancies, financial firms, and 10,000 corporate-strategy meetings. If you have not read it, spare a moment for William H. Whyte’s Cold War classic. In the 1950s, Whyte, a writer for Fortune, interviewed dozens of important CEOs and found that they mostly rejected the ethos of rugged individualism in favor of a more collectivist view of the world. The capitalists were not much interested in defending the culture of capitalism. What he found was that the psychological and operational mechanics of large corporations were much like those of other large organizations, including government agencies, and that American CEOs believed, as they had believed since at least the time of Frederick Winslow Taylor and his 19th-century cult of “scientific management,” that expertise deployed through bureaucracy could impose rationality on such unruly social entities as free markets, culture, family, and sexuality. The supplanting of spontaneous order with political discipline is the essence of progressivism, then and now.
It is hardly a new idea. The old robber barons were far from being free-enterprise men: J. P. Morgan and Andrew Carnegie, like many businessmen of their generation, believed strongly in state-directed collusion among firms (they’d have said “coordination”) to avoid “destructive competition.” You can draw a straight intellectual line from their thinking to Barack Obama’s views about state-directed “investments” in alternative energy or medical research.
It is not difficult to see the temptations of that approach from the point of view of a Bill Gates or a Warren Buffett: The decisions they have made for themselves have turned out well, so why not empower them, or men like them, to make decisions for other people, too? They may even be naïve or arrogant enough to believe that their elevated stations in life have liberated them from self-interest.
Populists of the Trump variety and the Sanders variety (who are not in fact as different as they seem) are not wrong to see these corporate cosmopolitans as members of a separate, distinct, and thriving class with economic and social interests of its own. Those interests overlap only incidentally and occasionally with those of movement conservatives — and overlap even less as the new nationalist-populist strain in the Republican party comes to dominate the debate on questions such as trade and immigration. Under attack from both the right and the left, free enterprise and free trade increasingly are ideas without a party. As William H. Whyte discovered back in 1956, the capitalists are not prepared to offer an intellectual defense of capitalism or of classical liberalism. They believe in something else: the managers’ dream of command and control.
The conversation we’ve been having about Wall Street in this country for the past decade has become so utterly hyperbolic and polemic that if you’re like most people, amid all the outrage you’ve totally lost the thread of the discussion. Maybe you think the whole system is rotten to the core. Maybe you think, sure, there’s greed, excess, and bad behavior on Wall Street, with nary a consequence for those responsible, but is the right answer to these problems to break up the big banks? Maybe that’s about when you just checked out.
Even the phrase “Wall Street” conjures confusion. What are we talking about? The actual place? Just the very biggest investment banks, or the smaller ones, too? Does the term include hedge funds and private-equity firms?
Are we talking about the entire New York finance community? Do we include the banks, hedge funds, and private-equity firms in the rest of the country? What about the financial system of the entire globe? What are we even referring to anymore?
The questions keep piling up. Maybe we can define what we mean by Wall Street, but even if we do, how should we feel about it? Should we be angry that Wall Street seems to be nothing more than a festering, open wound of rampant self-interest and malfeasance? Or should we be happy that Wall Street has become a convenient metaphor that politicians use to park blame for every bad economic thing that has befallen the country in recent years?
Or could it be that Wall Street is something altogether very different? Is Wall Street the left ventricle of capitalism, the brilliantly designed engine that powers innovation, job growth, and wealth creation and that has become the most sustained way by which billions of people the world over have been lifted out of poverty and given a chance at a better, more economically fulfilling life?
Is Wall Street a cause for celebration or denigration?
This is a fundamental question that has become so supercharged that most people haven’t a clue how to answer it. Or don’t dare to try. But if pressed, their instinct would be to agree with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosopher, who once said that “finance” is “a slave’s word,” while the profession itself is nothing more than “a means of making pilferers and traitors, and of putting freedom and the public good upon the auction block.”
The modern-day equivalent of this sentiment can be found in the musings of Bernie Sanders, the U.S. senator from Vermont and former Democratic presidential candidate, whose stump speeches during the 2016 presidential campaign condemned Wall Street relentlessly. “Greed, fraud, dishonesty and arrogance, these are the words that best describe the reality of Wall Street today,” he said in January 2016. And then he paid homage to one of the most recognizable cultural touchstones about modern Wall Street when he referred to the famous “Greed is good” scene in Wall Street, the 1987 Oliver Stone film, where Gordon Gekko, played with oleaginous glee by Michael Douglas, lectures Bud Fox, his young and aspiring apprentice (played by Charlie Sheen). “So, to those on Wall Street who may be listening today, let me be very clear,” Senator Sanders continued. “Greed is not good. In fact, the greed of Wall Street and corporate America is destroying the fabric of our nation . . . We will no longer tolerate an economy and a political system that has been rigged by Wall Street to benefit the wealthiest Americans in this country at the expense of everyone else.”
Senator Sanders used his growing political power to influence the anti–Wall Street rhetoric of the Democratic Party’s 2016 platform. “To restore economic fairness,” the platform reads, “Wall Street cannot be an island unto itself, gambling trillions in risky financial instruments and making huge profits, all the while thinking that tax-payers will be there to bail them out again. We must tackle dangerous risks in big banks and elsewhere in the financial system.” And to do this, the Democrats advocated “breaking up too-big-to-fail financial institutions that pose a systemic risk to the stability of our economy” and an “updated and modernized” version of the so-called Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, which forced the separation of investment banking from commercial banking for the next sixty-six years, until its repeal in 1999. Plugging his new book, Our Revolution: A Future to Believe In, after the election of Donald Trump, Senator Sanders continues to lambast Wall Street. Hell, Wall Street has grown so unpopular that even the 2016 Republican Party platform called for the reinstatement of Glass-Steagall. Just think about that for a moment. Rest assured, Trump’s victory does not necessarily mean that the populist anger directed toward Wall Street dissolves overnight.
So, is Senator Sanders correct? Is Wall Street actually rigged to benefit the rich in America at the expense of everyone else? Or is what Wall Street does in its many guises a monumentally important, utterly irreplaceable way that capital gets allocated in the most efficient, fairly priced manner from the people who have it to the people who want it?
To be sure, there are many crucial challenges facing the world today—among them climate change, income inequality, suppression of human rights, nuclear proliferation, and political unrest—but our collective failure to decide whether Wall Street is a force for good or one for evil, whether it should be celebrated or dismantled, certainly ranks high among them and effectively precludes us from having a much-needed debate about what Wall Street does right, and should be encouraged, and what Wall Street does wrong, and should be eliminated.
People get rightfully befuddled by most of the words used by Wall Street bankers, traders, and executives. If you’re like most people, though, once you hear the term “leveraged buyout” or “credit default swap,” your eyes glaze over and you mentally check out. Or maybe you are just utterly confused by the fact that after attacking Wall Street mercilessly during his campaign, Donald Trump has surrounded himself with Wall Street veterans.
But here’s the thing: If you like your iPhone (which you clearly do, because more than one billion iPhones have been sold worldwide since its inception in June 2007), or your wide-screen TV, or your car, or your morning bacon, or your pension, or your 401(k), then you are a fan of Wall Street, whether you know it or not. If you like the power and functionality of Facebook, Snapchat, and Twitter, you actually like Wall Street. None of these things would be even remotely possible to have, in the size and the scope that we have them, and as affordable and as easily accessible as they are, without the free flow of capital that Wall Street manages to provide nearly twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week to people who need it anywhere on the globe. The ability of Wall Street to provide capital when and where it is needed at a fair price isn’t a magic trick, or a strange form of alchemy, or something to be feared, or detested. It is an essential fact of modern-day life.
It should be celebrated.
At the same time, of course, Wall Street is a business, a big business. Everything it does is designed to make money, or is done with the hope of making money, just like any other business on Earth. It doesn’t deserve or warrant extra vilification as a result. For instance, it’s no surprise that Apple would not exist if it weren’t profitable, or weren’t able to convince investors that one day it would be (as companies such as Amazon have been able to do for years). The fact that Apple is one of the most profitable companies in the world enables it to hire the best, the brightest, and the most creative people and pay them well. Apple’s success allows it to buy new equipment and to build new plants—including a space-age, $5 billion circular headquarters in Cupertino, California—and, of course, it allows Apple to design and to build new groundbreaking products, such as the iPod, the iPhone, and the Apple Watch, and to dream about what the future will look like, whether it includes the Apple car or the Apple personal transporter, like The Jetsons.
I know that in the current political climate, that might sound like a heavy dose of corporate pabulum, courtesy of a Wall Street or Apple flack, but here’s the point: It’s absolutely, demonstrably true. Companies like Apple need Wall Street to achieve their destiny and to become great.
Here’s the part Bernie would hate but be unable to disprove: Very little of Apple’s success story—it is the world’s most valuable publicly traded company—could have been written without Wall Street. Even a quick perusal of Apple’s IPO prospectus—the document that is required to be filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) before a company’s stock, the value of a company after its debt and other obligations are satisfied, can be sold to the public and then traded—reveals the essential role that Wall Street played, and still plays, in figuring out, at each step of the way, how Apple—as well as millions of other companies around the world that want to be like Apple—gets the money it needs to operate and to achieve its dreams. This is not trivial. It is not unimportant. It is not evil. Nor is it meant to be mysterious. But very few people understand just how this happens or why it is essential. Instead, if they think about it at all, they probably see Wall Street bankers taking large fees for what seems like minimal risk (although there is certainly more risk than meets the eye). They chalk it up to “greedy bankers” and a “rigged” system and move on.
But the ongoing ability of companies to get the capital they need from the people who have it and want to invest it is one of the more amazing contraptions that the world has ever constructed. …
The Apple IPO, in December 1980, raised $102 million, of which some $83 million went to Apple, $12.4 million went to the venture capitalists who sold shares in the IPO, and the remaining $6 million went to the underwriters, led by Morgan Stanley and Hambrecht & Quist, as fees for their trouble. The Apple IPO was “hot,” meaning that both underwriters and investors wanted into the deal. Indeed, the sheer number of Wall Street banks involved in underwriting the deal was extraordinary: The prospectus lists nearly 140 banks from around the world that participated by selling stock to investors. Many of those underwriters—such as Barings Bank, Bear Stearns, and Lehman Brothers—are long gone, which shows that contrary to what you might think, Wall Street has always been a dangerous and risky place. And risks do have consequences, even for Wall Street.
The $83 million that Wall Street delivered to Apple was far more money than the company had ever raised in its four-year existence. For that reason alone, the IPO would have been considered a success. And Apple had plenty of uses for the money it raised: $7.85 million was used to repay its outstanding bank loan, and the rest of the money allowed Apple, essentially, to act as its own bank in financing its working capital needs. Apple also intended to use $11 million of the proceeds to fund big new projects in 1981. By any measure, the Apple IPO was an unqualified success: for the company, for the new investors, for the selling shareholders, and for the Wall Street banks that underwrote the deal.
I am not arguing that Wall Street is above reproach—far from it—but I am saying that the essential elements of Wall Street—Wall Street in its purest and most practical forms—must be preserved, encouraged, and praised, while the behavior that has caused one financial crisis after another in the past thirty years—rewarding bankers, traders, and executives with millions of dollars in bonuses for taking risks with other people’s money without any accountability—must be stopped. Consider this a plea for a calm, thoughtful examination of how Wall Street evolved from a handful of traders on a cobblestoned street that once connected the East River to the Hudson River in lower Manhattan to the global financial behemoth that exists today, with its metaphorical fingers in trillions of dollars of annual transactions.
Wall Street is the capital in capitalism, and even when we hate its greed and recklessness, we not only need Wall Street to exist but want it to thrive, even when we think, or are led to believe, that we don’t.
Our collective challenge is not to try to prevent another financial crisis from ever happening, as seems to be the new mantra of the most powerful Washington regulators: That seems inevitable whether you obliterate Wall Street or not. Rather, the overarching necessity is to regulate Wall Street in such a way that preserves the things that it does right while also making sure that the people who work there have the correct incentives to not do the things that lead to financial calamities, the pain of which seems to be unfairly felt most acutely by the rest of us. More specifically, it is the responsibility of the Justice Department to hold Wall Street bankers, traders, and executives responsible for their questionable, and sometimes criminal, behavior. Just because in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis the Justice Department, under the former attorney general Eric Holder, failed miserably in that important role doesn’t mean that Washington’s politicians and the powerful Wall Street regulators should therefore adopt policies that sharply curtail the great things Wall Street has done for centuries.
That’s the kind of thinking that not only penalizes Wall Street but also hurts the rest of us.
Today in 1955, Elvis Presley signed a management contract with Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk, an illegal immigrant from the Netherlands who named himself Colonel Tom Parker.
The number two single that day:
The number one British album today in 1969 was Cream’s “Goodbye,” which was, duh, their last album:
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 