Oregon’s 1994 Death with Dignity Law

How to Die in Oregon

Directed by Peter D Richardson (2011)

Film Review

On September 19, the End of Life Choice Act referendum will be on the ballot in New Zealand. This documentary profiles Oregon’s 1994 Death with Dignity law (enacted by citizens initiated referendum). The latter permits doctors to prescribe a lethal quantity of barbiturates to allow terminal patients to end their lives. Unlike doctor-assisted suicide, patients must be able to self-administer the lethal cocktail. In 1994, Oregon, Switzerland, and the Netherlands were the only jurisdictions that allowed terminal patients to end their lives. As of 2011, a surprisingly small number of Oregon patients had taken their lives under the law.

The film profiles three terminally ill individuals who have secured lethal barbiturate prescriptions after satisfying specific medical criteria and the trained patient advocates who offer reassurance and counseling to all patients in the program. The filmmakers follow one patient and his family through the entire process.

They also interview opponents of right-to-die laws. The most concerning argument against them is the possibility a budget-strapped state will offer state sanctioned suicide as an alternative to expensive treatment regimes and good palliative care. In fact one Oregon patient shows filmmakers a letter from the Oregon Health Plan denying him a second round of chemotherapy and offering assisted suicide as a possible alternative.*

The film also profiles a Washington State woman campaigning for Washington State’s Death with Dignity referendum (approved in 2008), after watching her husband suffer horribly with terminal brain cancer.

---

*When he goes public with the letter, the OHP decides to allow the chemotherapy.

Anyone with a public library card can view the full film free on Kanopy. Type “Kanopy” and the name of your library into your search engine.

Paradise Papers Expose Trump Administration Tax Cheats

10 Minutes: the Paradise Papers

Press TV (2018)

This short video provides a capsule summary of the Paradise Papers, 13.4 million electronic files leaked in November 2017 about the wealthy tax dodgers who use offshore tax havens to avoid taxes and conceal illegal financial dealings.

Although the Paradise Papers scandal has received less publicity than the Panama Papers did in 2015, its list of culprits is far more comprehensive. At the top are the Queen of England, Madonna, Bono, Apple, Nike, the Queen of Jordan, the ministers of finance of Canada and Brazil, US Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross (who used tax havens to conceal illegal dealings with sanctioned Russian businessmen) and Gary Cohen, who wrote Trump’s new tax law. The EU has slapped a $13 billion fine on Apple for tax evasion, which they refuse to pay.

Analysts who have studied both the Paradise and the Panama Papers estimate that approximately $7.8 trillion is held in offshore tax havens or 10% of global GDP.

The best known tax havens are Ireland, the Netherlands, Switzerland and British-controlled Cayman Islands, Bahama, Jersey and the Isle of Mann. There is growing pressure on the British government to crack down on tax and banking policies in their tax haven colonies.

Hidden History: Spices, Colonization and the East India Companies

Nathaniel’s Nutmeg: How One Man’s Courage Changed the Course of History

By Giles Milton (1999)

Book Review

Nathaniel’s Nutmeg is about the conquest of the the Banda Islands in the East Indies (aka the “Spice Islands”), the enslavement of the indigenous Bandanese and the ferocious 17th century wars between Holland and Britain over the nutmeg monopoly. Milton’s book is derived mainly from original journals, diaries and letters of explorers and merchant seaman, and official British and Dutch East India Company archives.

It’s always puzzled me why spices such as pepper, cloves, mace and nutmeg were so highly valued when Europeans already had the ability to preserve meat and fish with salt? Milton clears this up by reminding us that salting meat without benefit of preservatives or aromatic spices leaves the unpleasant tang of putrefied flesh. Nutmeg was especially prized after Elizabethan physicians began prescribing it as the only certain cure for bubonic plague.

Shipping nutmeg overland resulted in a 60,000 percent mark-up – after Turkish traders and Venetian middlemen took their cut. This price gouging was the main impetus driving Europeans determination to find a sea route to the “Spice Islands.”

Competing Claims on the Spice Islands

Nathaniel’s Nutmeg traces the expeditions of all the Spanish, Portuguese, English and Dutch explorers seeking an ocean route to the East Indies and the merchant bankers who financed them. Portuguese explorers were the first Europeans to set foot in the Banda Islands in 1511. However, unlike the English and Dutch, they lacked financial backing to set up permanent trading posts and settlements.

What I found most striking about Milton’s accounts of these voyages was the massive mortality rate (from scurvy caused by vitamin C deficiency). Any expedition lasting longer than three months could count on losing 50-75% of their sailors. James Lancaster, commander of the first expedition organized by the Britishc East India Company, accidentally found a cure for scurvy (oranges and lemons or their juices) in 1601. Owing to his failure to publicize this discovery, it would be another 170 years before Captain James Cook officially “discovered” it.

The British and Dutch East India Companies

The charter Elizabeth I signed in 1600 granted the British East India Company a total monopoly of trade over the East Indies and all the countries and ports of Asia and Africa and America. It awarded the Company massive powers, including the right to set up foreign trading posts and settlements and protect them with military force. In 1602, Holland granted the Dutch East India Company comparable privileges. Intense rivalry between the two would lead to four Anglo-Dutch wars beginning in 1652. All were fought entirely at sea between the English and Dutch navies.

England Takes Possession of Manhattan

In 1667, England and Netherlands ended the so-called “Nutmeg Wars” by signing the Treaty of Breda. The Treaty allowed the English to retain New Netherlands (Manhattan Island) and the Dutch to retain Europe’s primary source of nutmeg, the Banadanese island of Run. Henry Hudson had claimed Manhattan Island for the Dutch during an unsuccessful 1609 expedition to find a Northwest Passage to the Pacific Ocean.

By 1667, the English were happy to relinquish Run, after successfully transplanting nutmeg seedlings to their territories in Ceylon and on the eastern coast of India.

How Big Corporations Avoid Tax

The Tax Free Tour

Film Review

VPRO-Marijee Meerman 2013

The Tax Free Tour is an hour long Dutch documentary (in English) about the highly specialized field of corporate tax avoidance. I found it astounding how many American corporations use overseas tax havens to avoid paying tax in the US. Some of the better known names include Walt Disney, Wells Fargo, Google, AT&T, Apple and even companies that promote themselves as socially responsible, like Starbucks and Amazon.

Apple, one of the worst offenders, pays only 1.9% of their annual income in corporate tax. As a US company headquartered in Silicon Valley, Apple should be liable to the standard 35% corporate tax rate. Their secret is diverting nearly all their income to a subsidiary in Ireland (which has one of the lowest corporate tax rates) – after first passing their royalty income through a Netherlands subsidiary (the Dutch charge virtually no tax on intellectual property revenue), a company listed in Virgin Islands and back to Ireland. In the accounting trade, this is known as a Double Irish with a Dutch sandwich.

The filmmakers calculate that profits offshored for tax avoidance purposes totaled more than $20 trillion in 2010. Approximately 100 of the world’s largest companies have subsidiaries in the Netherlands, owing to their low taxes on intellectual property royalties. Walmart has six Dutch companies, even though they don’t have a single Dutch store. Starbucks also diverts all their royalty income to the Netherlands. Because they have a trademark on “frappuccino,” they declare a certain percentage of the price as a “royalty” (and pay no tax on it).

My favorite part is near the end when a British Select Committee challenges a Starbucks executive on his claim that their British coffee houses have been running at a loss for fifteen years. After asking why they don’t close their British stores, she gets him to admit they avoid $1.6 million pounds in corporate taxes by diverting their UK income to the Netherlands. He won’t tell her how much tax they pay the Dutch government. Allegedly Starbucks and the Dutch government have a secret agreement not to disclose the amount. The committee chair sternly reminds the executive of all the free public services Starbucks receives in the UK, at the expense of other taxpayers.

Amazon avoids corporate tax by diverting a sizable portion of their revenue to Luxemburg. Google shelters their profits in Bermuda. Other favored corporate tax havens include Cyprus, the Cayman Islands, Mauritius, Singapore, Hong Kong, the UAE and Kenya.

The irony is that most of this income can’t be transferred to shareholders. Paying it out as dividends would necessitate repatriating the revenue to the company’s home country – and paying the prevailing corporate rate. Thus much of this money is loaned (as treasury bonds) to deeply indebted western countries – who struggle to balance their books owing to the trillions of dollars lost from tax avoidance.

Crossposted at Daily Censored