Liberty and justice for all United States persons abroad

The Isaac Brock Society

44 thoughts on “Calling Soloman Yue: John McCain SUPPORTS FATCA in contravention of RNC resolution.”

  2. FATCA’s implementing regulations have created multiple loopholes, with no statutory basis,in the law’s disclosure requirements. Among other problems, the FATCA regulatory loopholes will require disclosure of only the largest dollar accounts; they will permit banks to ignore, in most cases,bank account information that is kept on paper rather than electronically; they will allow banks to treat accounts opened by offshore shell entities as non-U.S. accounts even when the entity is owned by a U.S. taxpayer; and the remaining disclosure requirements can be easily circumvented by U.S. persons opening accounts below the reporting thresholds at more than one bank.

  3. McCain is a RINO of the NeoCon Leftist kind.

    When I lived in Toronto, I used to joke with folks that the difference between Canadian and USSA politics was that in the States there are “Right and Left” parties while in the Canada there are “Left, Lefter and Leftist.”

    McCain is a Canadian pol masquerading as a US pol.

    The Boot-Strap Expat
    http://thebootstrapexpat.com/

  4. McCain was never a Republican in practice, only name. Ask anyone who lived in Arizona, or even in neighboring California where I am from.

  5. How informed are these people running America? Credit Suisse couldnt hand over information because they would have been criminally prosecuted in Switzerland for doing so.
    Does everything in this world have to run by American standards? God help us. Then everybody will be running around with guns in their pockets too, and schools will be debating creationism versus evolution? ( roll eyes here)
    But besides everything else in the way of absurdity – US jails are full, arent they?

  6. The US will soon have to put people on prison ships and send them to offshore penal colonies just like the British did.

    All empires become more oppressive over time, the US is no exception.

  7. John McCain doesn’t like expats, especially those who left the US for Canada during the Vietnam war.

    A friend of mine who knows McCain well, said he is very vindictive and has a real mean streak in him.

  8. I was just in North Carolina last week. I cannot say the things I heard people tell me they would like to do to Obama. Life there is incredibly terrible with no relief in sight. They had no idea the USSA was chasing people born there for money. The people of the USSA are worried they are the most hated country in the world. I simply said, it is not the “people” of the USA, just the sick and immoral government that WILL make people hate the USA. I myself, will never hate Americans as I consider them my family. They just have a very sick and misguided government right now.

  9. Nobody down there seems to have a clue what FATCA will really do and what it really will not do!

    And as messed up as it seems at times I much prefer Canadian’s politics to what goes on in the U.S. these days. Sadly both are getting closer and closer to a completely corrupt system. Still, the last thing Canada needs to do is to start running things the way they do in the U.S.

    @Polly, agree with you one hundred percent. The U.S. jails it’s citizens at a rate much higher than the rest of the world despite not having the largest population. You can thank the three strikes for that and the stupid “War on drugs” No they are not informed down there including congress who knows next to nothing about how FATCA broke the laws of other nations nor do they care if that is the case.

    John McCain well….his day is almost done. All this does is tell me that you have D.’s supporting FATCA while DA tries to amend it and you have some R’s for it while OR tries to repeal it. In the end nobody is going to care about “U.S. persons” abroad until election time when this will be used as an election issue. Even then…we’ll likely end up demeaned even further if it comes up. If it becomes too burdensome FOR THEM they’ll repeal.

    Besides with things like this going on.:https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/
    it’s going to be very difficult for anyone to protest or voice opposition to anything. The opinion shapers have been hard at work on this issue and just about everything else unless you want to talk trivial junk like Rob Ford and Justin Beiber. The Stasi would’ve envied some of the control the U.S. now has on public opinion and some of the fear they have on those engaged political debate and discussion.

    It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

  10. It appears, that after reading McCain and Levin’s report, they think ALL countries are Switzerland. All countries will suffer for the Swiss bank’s actions. The references to “violations” of US tax laws seem to stem from the Swiss. The world will pay for this in McCain’s eyes….

  11. They are being willfully blind. What happened with UBS was done mostly by those living inside the U.S. and those people should be their targets. Not every citizen living in every nation all over the world.

    It’s quite sick that the U.S. is claiming to fret so over banking practices outside the U.S. when it is the U.S. bankers who have engaged in many, many criminal actions and just got bailed out for doing so. Championing FATCA does nothing but make U.S. politicians look sadly ill informed, ignorant and purposefully protecting their own *inside the borders* while criminalizing the rest of the world.

  13. Recently CBC radio dedicated a program that called attention to the overcrowding of provincial correctional facilities, over half of the prison population is in remand awaiting charges. I have a relative who is a Corrections officer who complains constantly of how conditions have deteriorated in the jails. They are used to warehouse the mentally ill, drug addicts and a disproprtionate number of blacks and natives. Harper has copied everything that was wrong in the American prison system and applied it in Canada.
    http://nupge.ca/content/4268/statistics-canada-inmates-remand-outnumber-those-serving-sentences

  14. Not to get too off topic but a few US states like New York actually have substantially falling prison populations. However, this is posing quite a dilemma as back 20 and 30 years ago many new prisons were built in rural areas of Upstate as prison populations were increasing. Often these “new” prison facilities became major sources of local employment as local manufacturing industries declined.

    As prison populations fall in New York many of these “rural” prisons are now facing closure and the rural economies they once supported are being devastated It is important to note that New York and New England are often the “exception” to what is going on in America. A long time US Senator from New York State named Daniel Patrick Moynihan once stated who could roughly determine the amount of social ill in any city or town in America but asking how far it was from the US border with Canada.

  16. @Disgusted RE Prison Overcrowding

    http://www.vice.com/en_ca/read/whos-getting-rich-off-the-prison-industrial-complex
    Who’s Getting Rich off of America’s Prison-Industrial Complex?

    (or why mutual funds are morally wrong)
    Retired People and Probably You;
    The Vanguard Group and Fidelity Investments are America’s top two 401(k) providers. They are also two of the private prison industry’s biggest investors.

    Prison industrial complex video
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZ3oJGqr6ls
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFNmjxDalAg

  18. Actually, not to condone tax evasion etc but it seems the CDN govt could learn a few things from the Swiss government. And I’ve only read 13 pp so far……..

  19. Lots of hilarious quotes starting from page 91, if you’re still burying your head in the sand and dreaming that minnows abroad are just bycatch and they’re “really” trying just to go after Homeland Whales:

    Since 2002, Credit Suisse’s policy was that “all new bank relationships with US Persons
    … are to be opened within, managed and monitored by the dedicated US Center of Competence
    in Zurich or Geneva,” meaning the SALN desk. This “concentration” policy was intended to
    ensure that U.S. accounts were overseen by Swiss bankers with specialized training in U.S. legal
    and regulatory requirements. This policy, however, was largely ignored. … [Credit Suisse’s] U.S. Persons Policy contributed to this practice by excluding U.S. nationals residing outside of the United States from its definition of “U.S. person,” which meant the concentration policy did not apply to them and their accounts did not have to be opened at SALN.

    Of course, if any of their writing staff had actually read 26 USC 7701(a)(30), they’d realise that it’s U.S. citizens and not “U.S. nationals residing outside of the United States” who are subject to tax … i.e. excluding people from American Samoa described in 8 USC 1408. Just one small symptom of their big, sloppy, what-the-****-ever approach.

  21. Thanks for the heads-up on Ways and Means Committee tax reform draft, Shadow Raider.

    How do the Ways and Means Committee submissions and now tax reform draft fit with the Senate Finance Committee submissions?

  22. @calgary411, I have no idea. Ways and Means and Finance both talk to the Joint Committee on Taxation, but I don’t know if they talk to each other. Max Baucus was supposedly working together with Dave Camp, but even then they had different proposals in certain areas. The new chairman Ron Wyden said that he wants to deal with “tax extenders” (temporary provisions in the tax code that get renewed almost every year) before tax reform, and he changed the top staff of the Senate Finance Committee, so I don’t know what they are going to do with the previous submissions.

  23. All those submissions were a lot of work!

    At any rate if the U.S. goes to RBT tomorrow I’ll eat your hat, I’ll eat ALL the hats. They are so exceptional..I so hope I am wrong. In which case I prefer toques.

  24. Thanks, Shadow Raider.

    Atticus, LOL. Would we see anyone who had some common sense for RBT, especially seeing powerful submissions including Patricia’s?

  25. The Staff Report is incredibly depressing. Its references to the fact that Credit Suisse did not include US citizens living abroad in its definition of “US persons” until 2012, that Credit Suisse did not always obtain W-9s from US persons (or more recently, written representations from US persons that they were in compliance with their US tax obligations), and most depressing of all, that (overlooking FBARs entirely) the FATCA thresholds are too low because they would allow a US couple living abroad to have $1m in 3 accounts which would not be reported to the IRS by their FFIs, suggest to me that any RBT proposals are dead in the water. US citizens living outside the United States are more clearly in the firing line than they have been before, even if only four percent of the 2009 OVDP participants were resident outside the US. The report authors seem to conclude without examination that because most US persons living abroad have “foreign” accounts, most US persons living abroad are hiding income/assets. As Stephen Mopsick pointed out elsewhere, the fundamental element of trust between the government and the taxpayer which is the foundation of a self-assessment system, is gone in the international arena for good.

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