Activists Get Personal to Derail Trump Tax Cuts - NBC News

Activists Get Personal to Derail Trump Tax Cuts

by BENJY SARLIN

WASHINGTON — As President Donald Trump visits North Dakota on Wednesday to pitch lower tax rates, progressive activists are gearing up for war.

"Not One Penny," a coalition of left-leaning advocacy groups and labor unions, is running a TV spot in the area pushing Sens. John Hoeven, R-N.D., and Heidi Heitkamp, D-N.D., to oppose a "Republican tax bill that gives billions to the richest."

"The campaign is pretty simple," Nicole Gill, executive director of coalition member Tax March, said in an interview. "We have one demand: Not one penny in tax cuts go to millionaires, billionaires, and wealthy corporations. That’s it."

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The ad buy, while only five-figures, is an early preview of what promises to be a massive fight over taxes. Progressive groups, buoyed by an Obamacare victory in which grassroots activists played a major role, are hoping they can carry their momentum into scuttling the next major item on Trump’s agenda.

In interviews with NBC News, progressives working on the campaign identified three broad ways they plan to undermine Trump's tax push.

1. Make it personal with Trump's finances

Trump and allied groups have framed their tax efforts as a way to "unrig" the system by eliminating deductions that corporations can exploit in favor of simpler system. Progressive groups hope to counter this message by instead emphasizing the raw overall gains large corporations and wealthy individuals stand to make under GOP proposals.

In making the case that Trump’s cuts will benefit the rich, activists say the president's own finances will play a starring role.

"The more Trump decides to talk cutting taxes for the rich and wealthy, the more the public is going to ask the obvious question, which is 'How much do you stand to gain?'" Gill said.

Previous tax proposals backed by Trump would slash taxes for "pass-through" businesses, which are a key part of his real estate empire, and eliminate the alternative minimum tax, which required Trump to pay $31 million in his leaked 2005 tax filings.

The president has not publicly released his taxes, breaking with decades of precedent, meaning that there’s no way to know for sure how much he might benefit from a Republican plan.

Some of the same activists working on the Not One Penny campaign helped organize Tax Day demonstrations in April demanding Trump make his taxes public. Expect similar efforts to gain steam as a bill moves closer to passage, especially given Trump's grumbling response to the April protests.

2. Hold the line with Democrats

Stopping a tax package won’t be easy.

Compared to health care, cutting tax rates is a more traditional GOP cause, which could make it harder to find wavering senators and representatives. And while even red-state Democrats opposed Obamacare repeal from the start, there are some cracks on taxes that progressive groups are working to address early.

The Not One Penny coalition ran an ad against Rep. Tim Ryan, D-Ohio, last week, for example, after he expressed support for cutting corporate tax rates.

Three Democratic senators, including North Dakota’s Heitkamp, declined to sign onto a letter by Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., demanding that any tax overhaul be deficit-neutral and not lower tax bills for the top 1 percent of earners. Heitkamp, like non-signers Senators Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., and Joe Donnelly, D-Ind., faces a tough 2018 race in a state Trump won handily. She is scheduled to ride with Trump on Air Force One on Wednesday to attend his rally in her home state.

"There’s no Democrat that should be out there talking about that and the Ryan ad buy is an example of how we intend to hold Democrats accountable," said Chad Bolt, policy manager at Indivisible, a grassroots movement that formed in response to Trump's election.

Bolt's group launched a new website this week, TrumpTaxScam.org, that provides activists with talking points for calls to Congressional offices. Similar phone banking efforts played a major role in the health care debate.

3. Make tax cuts a life-or-death issue

Organizers think they have an opportunity to make Trump’s tax reform push as radioactive as GOP health care legislation with the right message.

Trump and Republicans in Congress are still working out the details of their tax bill. They face tough decisions ahead, including whether to pass revenue-neutral reform that lower rates by eliminating deductions elsewhere — setting up some painful choices — or to fall back on temporary cuts that add to the debt.

One emerging plan is to tie tax breaks that add to the deficit to cuts to Medicaid and Social Security disability benefits that the White House and Congress have proposed elsewhere. The goal is to try to lend the issue the same physical urgency as the health care fight, which featured disabled Americans protesting Medicaid cuts at lawmakers’ offices and town halls.

"We’re talking about threats to people’s lives, health, and livelihoods," said TJ Helmsetter, communications director at Americans for Tax Fairness.

Myanmar: Who are the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army? - BBC News

Myanmar: Who are the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army?

6 September 2017

More than 100,000 Rohingya people have fled their homes since 25 August. They are trying to escape violence, following a military counter-offensive against Rohingya militants who attacked police posts.

The insurgents claim to be acting on the behalf of Myanmar's Rohingya - but who are they?

Who are Arsa?

The Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (Arsa) operates in Rakhine state in northern Myanmar, where the mostly-Muslim Rohingya people have faced persecution. The Myanmar government has denied them citizenship and sees them as illegal immigrants from Bangladesh.

Clashes erupt periodically between ethnic groups but in the last year, an armed Rohingya insurgency has grown. Arsa, previously known by other names including Harakah al-Yaqin, has killed more than 20 police officers and members of the security forces.

On 25 August it attacked police posts in Rakhine state, killing 12 people in its biggest attack so far. In turn, this prompted a counter-insurgency clampdown from the security forces.

What sparked the latest violence?

The government calls it a terrorist organisation and says its leaders have trained abroad. The International Crisis Group (ICG) also says the militants have trained abroad and released a report in 2016 saying the group was led by Rohingya people living in Saudi Arabia. The ICG says Arsa's leader is Ata Ullah, who was born in Pakistan and raised in Saudi Arabia.

However a group spokesman countered this, telling the Asia Times newspaper that it had no links to jihadist groups and only existed to fight for Rohingya people to be recognised as an ethnic group.

What kind of weapons do they have?

The government says the 25 August attack was done with knives and home-made bombs.

Their weapons appear to be mainly home made but the ICG report suggested they were not completely amateur and showed some evidence of help from veterans of other conflicts, including people from Afghanistan.

When did Arsa start?

The spokesman who talked to the Asia Times said Arsa had been training people since 2013. But their first attack was in October 2016, when they killed nine police officers.

What are its aims?

Arsa says its aims are to "defend, salvage and protect" the Rohingya against state repression "in line with the principle of self-defence".

Arsa also rejects the terrorist label, saying it does not attack civilians. However, there are reports of it killing informers while training members

The ICG says Arsa members are young Rohingya men angered by the state's response to deadly riots in 2012. Young men trying to escape the area used to be able to do so by boat to Malaysia, but the Malaysian navy blocked that route in 2015, which led to thousands of people being stranded at sea and, the group says, others considering violence.

This is in the context of extreme poverty, statelessness and restrictions on Rohingya people's movement. The security forces crack down heavily on violence; a UN report in February described the "devastating cruelty" of soldiers who had beaten, raped and killed people in the region while it was in lockdown following the October 2016 attack.

Hounded and ridiculed for complaining of rape

The UN's special rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar has said the scale of the destruction now is "far greater" than last year.

What effect has the insurgency had so far?

The attacks on security forces have prompted a crackdown from the military, who say they are fighting against civilian-attacking militants. More than 100,000 Rohingya people have fled their villages and crossed the border to Bangladesh, where refugee camps are full. Many of them say the military, assisted by Buddhist monks, have razed villages and killed civilians. The government says Buddhists and Hindus have also fled attacks in the area.

Media access to Rakhine, where the violence is, is severely restricted, making it hard to verify the situation on the ground.

Campaigners and politicians around the world have expressed concern at the refugees' situation, warning of a lack of shelter, water and food. There are reports of children being injured in landmines as they try to leave the country.

A UN representative, and the Nobel Peace laureate Malala Yousafzai, called on leader Aun Sang Suu Kyi to stop the violence. Ms Suu Kyi has previously said there is "a lot of hostility" in the area but ethnic cleansing is "too strong a term" to use.

Could bitcoin be the next gold? - Bloomberg

Could bitcoin be the next gold?The idea has a lot of intuitive appeal. Gold bugs and bitcoin fetishists tend to share a deep distrust of fiat currency and the nation state, an impregnable bullishness about their favored asset class, and an obsessive attention to details of market movements combined with a blithe disinterest in bigger-picture issues.The idea has become particularly popular as the value invested in bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies has marched upward over the past year. Even after this week's selloff, prompted by China declaring initial coin offerings illegal, the value of all cryptocurrencies in circulation is around $155 billion, according to Coinmarketcap.com.

Digital Revolution

The value of all bitcoins in circulation is moving close to the value of gold held by ETFs

That may sound small compared to the $7.8 trillion notional value of the world's 187,200 metric tons of gold. At the same time, it's already about a tenth the value of the 40,000 tons of yellow metal used for investment as bullion bars and coins, and has overtaken the amount held in gold exchange-traded funds. At more than $78 billion, Bitcoin alone isn't far from overtaking the $90 billion-odd invested in all gold ETFs.There are two main reasons to doubt bitcoin's viability as an investment. One is an engineering issue: Its creaky infrastructure is likely to be a turn-off for all but the hobbyist fringe. Another is more philosophical: Digital currencies have no fundamental value, so have no place in a portfolio.Both objections are weaker than you might think.Take infrastructure. It's certainly true that bitcoin's operations are surprisingly clunky. Just confirming a single transaction typically takes more than an hour or longer -- it briefly took more than a day at one point last month, according to software company Blockchain.info.

Creeping Toward the Future

Confirming transactions in bitcoin can take longer than a day

Having said that, financial markets are generally built on similar Rube Goldberg foundations. It's comically difficult for ordinary investors to buy an actual barrel of crude oil, as Tracy Alloway of Bloomberg News found out a few years back. The economist John Maynard Keynes, according to one possibly apocryphal story, once measured up the storage capacity of the chapel of King's College, Cambridge after coming perilously close to having to take delivery of a month's worth of the U.K.'s wheat supply. Completing transactions in the real world is often so clunky that some banks are already exploring using, um, blockchains instead.What makes markets investable for the most part is not their physical foundations, but the superstructure of derivatives contracts, exchanges and clearing houses built on top.To date, the world of bitcoin exchanges has been the wild west. When Mt. Gox filed for bankruptcy in 2014, it said it had lost 850,000 coins worth more than $450 million. Another $70 million-odd was stolen in a hack of Bitfinex last year. The likes of Deribit and Bitmex have been offering bitcoin futures and options for some time, but major institutional investors are only going to participate if they think the clearing and settlement process is rock-solid and the exchange itself reliably solvent.Change on that front is imminent. The Chicago Board Options Exchange is planning to start offering cash-settled bitcoin futures by next April, CNBC reported last week. Trading platform LedgerX LLC last month won regulatory approval from the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission to act as a clearing house for derivatives settled in digital currencies. The ability to short or take leveraged positions in digital currencies could open them to a far wider array of investors.

What, though, is the value of a digital currency? It's a fair question, but one that could equally be leveled at gold. Since Richard Nixon ended the fixed $35 an ounce convertibility of gold in 1971, its value has risen at times (the 1970s, the 2000s) and fallen at others. The best argument to justify investing in gold these days is not that it's an eternal "store of value" but that its very weirdness makes it special: According to modern portfolio theory, you should buy the shiny stuff not for its superior investment returns, but because it doesn't correlate much to other asset classes such as stocks, bonds and commodities.

Give and Take

The correlation between returns on the S&P 500 index and alternative assets doesn't display a strong pattern

Source: Bloomberg, Gadfly calculations

However, while gold did exhibit weak or negative correlations to returns on the S&P 500 for much of the 1980s and early 1990s, it's been positively correlated for extended periods since then. During gold's 2012 run-up, the two moved more or less in tandem. If gold deserves investment dollars because its inconsistent correlation with equities helps diversify portfolios, the same argument can be made for bitcoin, too.Digital currencies may be as vulgar as the original barbarous relic, but neither is going away any time soon. If that makes investors in both look less like seers and more like problem gamblers betting on where a fly will land -- well, welcome to financial markets.

More Evidence Suggests E-Cigarettes Help Some Smokers Quit - Forbes

More Evidence Suggests E-Cigarettes Help Some Smokers Quit

Tara Haelle , CONTRIBUTOR

I offer straight talk on science, medicine, health and vaccines.

Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

Since the arrival of e-cigarettes, debates have raged in public health and research circles about their value and risks. Can they actually help people stop smoking for good? How much harm can they cause? How does that harm compare to the harm from smoking tobacco cigarettes? Do e-cigarettes increase the risk that kids will start smoking? A cherry-picker could find studies to support any position on any of these questions, but it takes time for enough researchers to conduct enough high-quality studies that a consensus can emerge. On the first question — can e-cigarettes help some people quit smoking — that consensus is increasingly pointing to “Yes.”

But — as with so much in health and behavior research — it depends. A new study whose methods are more granular than in past studies has started to tease out what makes the difference and who is most likely to benefit. The basic finding: the more days you use e-cigarettes, the more likely you are to successfully quit.

“Results revealed that greater frequency of e-cigarette use beyond ever use [using one at least once] and especially with 20 or more days of use in the past month was strongly associated with both having made a quit attempt and a greater likelihood of three months or more of cigarette smoking cessation,” wrote David T. Levy, PhD, and his colleagues at the Georgetown University Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center. “The consistency of positive associations with quit attempts or cessation success suggests that more frequent e-cigarette use may be effective as a smoking cessation aid.”

These results supported the findings of another recent study in BMJ that assessed e-cigarette and tobacco smoking rates across the US population over five years.

The research, funded by the National Institute of Drug Abuse and the National Cancer Institute (no industry!), was published today in the journal Nicotine & Tobacco Research. By no means will this study put to rest the debate between those who say e-cigarettes can’t be a cessation tool and those who say it can (including thousands of people on Twitter who will tell you in a heartbeat, multiple times, that it helped them). But one of its most important contributions is providing a template for how to study this question in a more detailed way than past observational studies.

“An important part of our study was to distinguish the effect of e-cigarette use on quit attempts and quit success by separating considering the smokers who might attempt to quit and those that have actually made a quit attempt,” the authors wrote.

The researchers used the same data source as the BMJ study and even past studies finding less evidence for e-cigarettes as smoking cessation tools, the Tobacco Use Supplement survey used in the annual Current Population Survey conducted by the Census Bureau. This survey asks detailed questions about smokers’ habits, quit attempts and quit success.

The data for this study came from the 2014-2015 survey and included 23,633 smokers, just under half of whom (10,973) had attempted at least once to quit smoking. Most of those who tried to quit didn’t succeed, a total of 8,419 people. But 1,596 people had remained successful for at least 3 to 12 months, 623 of them had quit one to three months before the survey, and 335 had just quit within the past month. By analyzing survey responses in these individual groups about who had used e-cigarettes and how often, the researchers were able to analyze the link between e-cigarettes and quitting more closely.

They found that smokers who used an e-cigarette only once or a few times were less likely to successfully quit, a possible reason for some past studies’ findings that e-cigarettes didn’t help if those studies lumped together people who had ever tried an e-cigarette and those who used them more frequently. But for those who used e-cigarettes more often, especially the longer they used them, the success rate went up. Each additional day of e-cigarette used increased the odds of successfully quitting by about 5%, the researchers found. Using e-cigarettes for at least five days in a month increased the odds of quitting by 59%, and using them at least 20 days more than doubled the odds.

These calculations also took into account other factors that could have influenced people’s success rates, including the average price of cigarettes in their state, laws in their state related to smoking, use of smokeless tobacco, how often they smoked, gender, age (broken down into very small groups), race/ethnicity, income, educational level, marital status, employment status and living in a rural or urban area. The others suggested that a study in 2010 using the same data source might have found e-cigarettes less helpful at helping people quit because e-cigarettes were not as sophisticated as they are today, especially in delivering bigger doses of nicotine.

As with any research question, it will require many more studies to parse out who e-cigarettes can help quit smoking and the best way to use them, and too little information exists about long-term potential for harm from e-cigarettes. But all the evidence to date suggests that e-cigarettes are not nearly as harmful and life-threatening as tobacco use, so e-cigarettes appear to be a viable quitting option, the researchers note, for those who don’t succeed with other methods.

China ICO ban will help prevent crypto scams but could create regulatory competition, experts say - CNBC News

China ICO ban will help prevent crypto scams but could create regulatory competition, experts say

China banned initial coin offerings (ICOs) earlier this week in a move to prevent money laundering and illegal activities.

ICOs allow organizations to raise investment by selling new cryptocurrencies, which are similar to bitcoin.

Luke Graham | @LukeWGraham

China's banning of initial coin offerings for new digital currencies may stop scams and improve the market but these ICOs are very much here to stay, industry experts told CNBC.

ICOs allow organizations to raise investment by selling new cryptocurrencies, similar to bitcoin, in return for cash or other established digital currencies. However, the People's Bank of China ruled earlier this week that the practice, which has become popular around the world, as well as in China, constitutes illegal fundraising.

Around $1.78 billion has been raised through ICOs since 2014, according to data from the CoinDesk ICO tracker. However, a major issue is that many ICOs could be scams, with no hope of backers receiving a return on their investment.

"There's no secret that a lot of the initial coin offerings, with ads on Facebook promising huge discounts and returns, are nothing but a scam," said Sasha Ivanov, CEO of blockchain company Waves, in an email.

"The Chinese government could cope with those companies working in a shadow zone of the law, but they have finally lost patience, as more and more companies tried to raise millions for nothing."

Ivanov says the move will be helpful for the industry, and predicts that regulated ICOs will be allowed in China in the future.

One company affected by the ban is online lending platform Blackmoon Crypto. It recently raised more than $9 million in an ICO pre-sale. The company has now halted its planned promotional activity within China. It will also prohibit Chinese citizens taking part in its token sale on September 12 and will refund citizens who took part in the pre-sale.

"Blackmoon Crypto will continue to take very seriously all initiatives of global regulators and will comply with the upheld requirements. As a professional in the industry, we welcome the cleansing of the market from scrupulous participants and are ready to cooperate with regulators," said the company's CEO Oleg Seydak in an email.

The purpose of ICOs

Part of the problem regulators may have is that ICOs cover a wide range of activities, according to Linus Lindgren, strategic investor and advisor at BTCXIndia.

"One side of the spectrum would be to sell parts of future revenue of a company via issued tokens to investors who look to speculate in the value of such tokens. The other side of the spectrum could be charities issuing 'thank you' tokens in exchange for donations. In between, there are many varieties and mixes of these," he told CNBC via email on Monday.

"The discussion to be had now is where on the 'token spectrum' regulators will draw the line, and where and how these activities should be regulated."

The move by China received mixed reactions. Cryptocurrencies fell on the move as it created negative market sentiment. Bitcoin hit a low of $4,037 on Tuesday but has recovered to around $4,500 on Wednesday.

Some, such as David Moskowitz, co-founder and CEO of blockchain-powered social network Indorse, welcome the move as a way to protect consumers from fraudulent ICOs.

"We hope the authorities will recognize the potential of the sector for economic growth and technological development, and enact rules which will allow for the safe and secure future of the industry," he said in an press statement.

Others were more skeptical, pointing out that the ban could lead to competition with other countries that are more welcoming for ICOs.

"Some governments and incumbents will try to shut down this movement, and come to unreasonable extremes in order to do so. However, thanks to the internet and cryptography, there's no going back," said Luis Cuende, co-founder and project lead at blockchain developer Aragon, in an email.

"Eventually, some other governments will embrace token sales and crypto in general, creating jurisdictional competition, and forcing the incumbents to be reasonable."