Like U.S. Multi-Billionaire Oligarch Bill Gates, the U.S. Multi-Billionaire Oligarch Mark Zuckerberg apparently has avoided paying a fair share of local, state and federal taxes in the USA by setting up a "charitable" organization. As Inside Philanthropy media site editor David Callahan noted in his 2017 The Givers: Wealth, Power, and Philanthropy In A New Gilded Age book:
"On December 1, 2015, Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan pledged to use 99 percent of their shares in Facebook to make the world a better place...These shares were worth about $45 billion...
"...ProPublica's Jesse Eisenberg...blasted the couple's choice to create a limited liability corporation, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, to handle their good works. That structure would allow them to avoid taxes, as well as oversight, said Eisenberg, since LLCs don't have to disclose their activities...Eisenberg wrote that `we are turning into a society of oligarchs. And I am not...excited...to welcome the new Silicon Valley overlords.'
"Other critics echoed these points...with charges that Zuckerberg and Chan's `non-charity charity,' as The Atlantic dubbed it, amounted to tax avoidance and an undemocratic power grab...
"...Many funders, particularly the newer givers arriving on the scene with huge fortunes, don't reveal much about their giving, and nonprofit laws allow rivers of money to sluice through society in opaque ways...Philanthropists often operate subtly, working behind the scenes to set agendas and shape decisions...Their fingerprints can be hard to see...These givers are becoming more powerful while ordinary Americans struggle to get their voices heard at all..."
The same book also observed:
"Many techies like to think they are on a grand mission to improve life on earth...But the moral blind spots...can be enormous. For instance, Facebook and Google...have both engaged in elaborate tax avoidance schemes using offshore subsidiaries..."
No comments:
Post a Comment