From Muskogee Phoenix

This is in response to Mr. Kesserling’s letter concerning Republicans and his perception of Ugland House in the Cayman Islands.

Ugland House is an office building in George Town, Grand Cayman. Maples and Calder, a leading international law firm advising financial, institutional and business clients around the world, is the sole tenant at Ugland House.

The building has been the subject of highly-charged and unfair comment in press and political circles.

Amongst other things, companies registered at Ugland House have been described as “shells”, owned by individuals to evade tax and take advantage of secrecy laws.

This is not the case and mischaracterises the true purpose of setting up Cayman companies.

The roles of the Cayman Islands and its registered office function are almost identical to the roles of Delaware and Delaware-based registered agents in the United States.

According to Division of Corporations of the State of Delaware: “The State of Delaware is a leading domicile for U.S. and international corporations. More than 850,000 business entities have made Delaware their legal home. More than 50 percent of all publicly-traded companies in the United States including 63 percent of the Fortune 500 have chosen Delaware as their legal home.

More than 200,000 entities alone have an address at 1209 Orange St., Wilmington, Delaware — almost 10 times the number of registered entities at Ugland House in the Caymans.

Investors and their advisors choose the Cayman Islands for many prudent commercial and business reasons, one of which is tax neutrality, but not tax evasion.

Investors are still responsible for taxes in their home country.

The rest of your numbers I have no idea where they come from.

But let’s look at Social Security.

Mr. Kesserling, you may not want to accept the facts, but the very first president to begin raiding the Social Security fund was a Democrat by the name of John F. Kennedy. History will show you that virtually every Democratic president since has raided Social Security.

Stop already with bashing the Republicans and accept reality.

H.R. FORD

For more on this story go to:

http://muskogeephoenix.com/opinion/x596957731/THE-PEOPLE-SPEAK-Stop-bashing-GOP-and-accept-reality

Related story:

THE PEOPLE SPEAK — Why are Americans voting Republican?

From Muskogee Phoenix

According to the Government Accountability Office, there is a five-story building in the Cayman Islands called the Ugland House, and is home to 18,857 corporations. The amount of the many corporations are holding in off-shore accounts is estimated at $1.6 trillion.

Corporations now pay less than 7 percent on the average in taxes, while they used to pay anywhere from 30 percent to 91 percent in the past.

It is noted that the Bank of America committed fraud, was bailed out by the government, and then paid no taxes on its $4.4 billion profit. According to the Economic Policy Institute, in 2000, the average CEO is paid 383 times more than the average worker. Back in 1965 CEOs were paid only about 20 times more than the average worker.

According to the greed of those freeloading, tax dodging corporations, and the highly overpaid CEOs, they are telling the ordinary American worker that they have to sacrifice even more to preserve the corporate wealth. They are asking the Republicans in Washington to lower any and all help to the low-paid Americans. The problem is that the Republicans are heeding their request. An illustration of this is that the tax breaks for Exxon Mobile were $4.1 billion between 2008 and 2010, while the company paid no taxes at all in 2009.

In another study by the Economic Policy Institute, the average CEO pay from 1978 is up 867 percent compared to the 5.4 percent gain by the average worker.

We are told that we can no longer afford Social Security, that we pay into all our working life, while if the corporate tax loopholes were closed it would pay for Social Security 10 times over.

Why are the American workers still voting for these Republicans? They need to be put out of office.

GEORGE M. KESSELRING

For more on this story go to:

http://muskogeephoenix.com/opinion/x1724760305/THE-PEOPLE-SPEAK-Why-are-Americans-voting-Republican