TurboTax and H&R Block under investigation

Thanks to a series of reports by ProPublica about how the tax preparation companies are thwarting efforts to provide free tax filings, the IRS has launched an investigation into TurboTax and H&R Block.

Amid calls for investigations from members of Congress, the IRS announced late Friday that it has convened a team of senior leaders to review concerns raised about its Free File public-private partnership with the tax software industry, following a series of ProPublica stories.
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[A]s we have reported, use of the free option, which was never high, has dropped sharply in the past decade. Insiders say that Intuit and H&R Block deliberately steered users away from the Free File option and to paid products. At least five of the companies in the Free File program added code to their free websites effectively hiding them from Google and other search engines.

The move is a sharp break for the [IRS], which as recently as April 26 defended Free File as a “successful program and partnership that’s benefited millions of taxpayers.”

It remains to be seen if this review is just a means for the IRS to mollify critics until this fuss goes away or if they will take meaningful action.

Beating the drums for war with Venezuela

The Trump administration is currently beating the drums of war on two fronts: Venezuela and Iran. The US media love war and war talk since that drives up ratings. One of the surest signs of preparation for war is when the US media falls in line whenever the US government starts issuing threats to other nations about possible invasions. The media then uncritically parrots the government’s talking points and even goes further and makes stuff up. Take this report from CNN from Sunday that has this sentence.

It comes as pressure is mounting on Maduro to step down, following elections in January in which voters chose opposition leader Juan Guaido over him for president.

There are two falsehoods in just that single sentence. There were no elections in Venezuela in January and in the last election in 2018, Guaido didn’t even run. Furthermore, Maduro was elected as president in the last election while Guaido has never been elected president. As Jason Ditz writes:
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New UN warnings on harm to the planet

Pretty much everyone who follows the news would be aware of the new report released by the United Nations yesterday about the impact of climate change, this one focusing on what is happening to the biodiversity of the planet. You can read the summary of the report here with the full 1,500 page report to be released in September. This news report outlines the major findings.

Humans are transforming Earth’s natural landscapes so dramatically that as many as one million plant and animal species are now at risk of extinction, posing a dire threat to ecosystems that people all over the world depend on for their survival, a sweeping new United Nations assessment has concluded.
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Its conclusions are stark. In most major land habitats, from the savannas of Africa to the rain forests of South America, the average abundance of native plant and animal life has fallen by 20 percent or more, mainly over the past century. With the human population passing 7 billion, activities like farming, logging, poaching, fishing and mining are altering the natural world at a rate “unprecedented in human history.”

At the same time, a new threat has emerged: Global warming has become a major driver of wildlife decline, the assessment found, by shifting or shrinking the local climates that many mammals, birds, insects, fish and plants evolved to survive in. When combined with the other ways humans are damaging the environment, climate change is now pushing a growing number of species, such as the Bengal tiger, closer to extinction.
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Scientists have cataloged only a fraction of living creatures, some 1.3 million; the report estimates there may be as many as 8 million plant and animal species on the planet, most of them insects. Since 1500, at least 680 species have blinked out of existence, including the Pinta giant tortoise of the Galápagos Islands and the Guam flying fox.

Though outside experts cautioned it could be difficult to make precise forecasts, the report warns of a looming extinction crisis, with extinction rates currently tens to hundreds of times higher than they have been in the past 10 million years.

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Great moments in Christianity

The Atlanta Journal Constitution reported that “The mayor of Hoschton, a nearly all-white community 50 miles northeast of Atlanta, allegedly withheld a job candidate from consideration for city administrator because he was black.”

City councilman Jim Cleveland defended the mayor, saying:

“I’m a Christian and my Christian beliefs are you don’t do interracial marriage. That’s the way I was brought up and that’s the way I believe,” he said. “I have black friends, I hired black people. But when it comes to all this stuff you see on TV, when you see blacks and whites together, it makes my blood boil because that’s just not the way a Christian is supposed to live.”

Satanic Temple recognized by the IRS as a church

In a significant development, the Satanic Temple has been recognized by the IRS as a church. The decision has sparked a debate as to what constitutes a church. For too long, religions have claimed a privileged place in society, without having to really justify why they should be given preferential treatment. The Satanic Temple has been steadily contesting that claim by logical extension, that there is no way to draw a clear line that separates those institutions that are traditionally recognized as religions from other groups that share broadly similar characteristics.
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Shutting down social media to reduce unrest

Social media has been blamed for spreading false stories that can inflame tensions and has led to great violence in places like Myanmar and Sri Lanka. After the recent bombings that killed 253 people in the latter country, the government shut down nearly all the social media platforms to prevent retaliatory violence. It later lifted the bans but yesterday briefly re-imposed the bans following violence between different group in one of the regions where a church was bombed on Easter Sunday. Schools are due to re-open today but bomb scares, the heavy security presence, and ongoing searches have made the atmosphere tense and people are being urged to avoid gathering in large numbers.
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The arrival of ‘pointillist empires’

It is clear that China is slowly changing that balance of power on many fronts. Last week saw the Chinese hosting a summit on its Belt and Road Initiative in which China invests heavily in infrastructure and other development projects in countries around the world, cementing economic links. Despite heavy US lobbying against participating in it, 125 nations attended and signed on.
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Film review: Knock Down the House (2019)

I just watched this documentary that follows four insurgent women candidates who bucked the Democratic party establishment by challenging long-standing incumbents in primary elections in 2018. The four are Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in New York City, Amy Vilela in Las Vegas, Nevada, Cori Bush in St Louis, Missouri and Paula Jean Swearingen in West Virginia. The film follows them from the time they declare their candidacies until the primary results are announced.
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Meanwhile, over in England …

… elections were held for local offices and the Conservatives took a major shellacking, losing 1,269 seats leaving them currently holding 3,559. Labour lost too but just 63 seats, leaving them with 2,020, but they must be disappointed that the disgruntled Conservative voters did not switch to them. The big winners were the Liberal Democrats, the Greens, and assorted others who gained 676, 185, and 285 seats respectively. This is a resurrection of sorts for the Liberal Democrats, who had been given up for dead after being thoroughly repudiated in the last national elections following their disastrous coalition with David Cameron’s Conservative party.
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All you wanted to know about the NRA implosion

Tim Dickinson and Andy Kroll at Rolling Stone have done a deep dive into the infighting within the NRA that resulted in the ouster of Oliver North as president and the multiple investigations and lawsuits now underway. At bottom is the familiar story of top executives (such as CEO Wayne LaPierre), contractors (such as its public relations firm Ackerman McQueen and outside counsel William Brewer), and board members (such as president Oliver North) of a big tax-exempt organization abusing their tax-exempt status by living high off the hog at the expense of their members and taxpayers.
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