Daily Archives: October 15, 2005

Tax Shelters: Miers to the Supreme Court While KPMG, etc. are Indicted?

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A rather amazing paradox: Harriet Mier’s Dallas law firm: Locke, Liddell & Sapp provided legal opinions for Ernst & Young’s tax shelters. The firm, unlike KPMG and it’s former partners, has not been indicted.
Allen Kenney has more (PDF):

“Ms. Miers was obviously not directly involved in the CDS opinions. Most otherwise sophisticated non-tax lawyers inside law firms wouldn’t be able to decipher what is or isn’t accurate in a lengthy tax opinion,” said Chuck Rettig, a tax litigator in the Beverly Hills, Calif., firm of Hochman, Salkin, Rettig, Toscher & Perez. “If [E&Y] approved something like CDS, it was historically unlikely to be significantly questioned by other professionals.”
However, members of the Senate Judiciary Committee might be forced to consider whether Locke’s involvement with the opinion letters affects Miers’s fitness to serve on the country’s highest court. President Bush has emphasized her experience managing a major law firm in defending her nomination.
“She had the opportunity to have her ethical antennas tweaked here,” said Paul Caron, a tax law professor at the University of Cincinnati and the operator of the popular “TaxProf Blog” Web site. “Those ethical antennas were, perhaps, not as sensitive that they should have been.”
One item on the Judiciary Committee’s questionnaire for Miers asks her to disclose if her firm has been subject to any investigations: “State whether, to your knowledge, you or any organization of which you were or are an officer, director, or active participant has ever been under federal, state, or local investigation for a possible violation of any civil or criminal statute or administrative agency regulation.” Another item asks Miers to provide the committee with any “unfavorable information that may affect your nomination.”

Telco and Cable Companies in the Internet Era

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Doc Searls is correct that internet providers should be racing to offer internet services rather than trying to resuscitate dying products:

Phone and cable companies will never be Internet companies. Never. Nor will Newspapers or TV networks. But the latter don’t matter as much, because they don’t deliver Internet service to homes and businesses. Phone and cable companies do. The Net depends on them.

If Phone and cable companies took the trouble to provide unencumbered symmetrical service — same speeds up and down — and stood prepared to help individuals and businesses of every size use the Net in original ways that they see fit — to engage in Free Enterprise in the open marketplace the Net truly is — countless ways of making money on service to those customers would manifest themselves to the providing companies.

For example, I would gladly pay $100 per month for a block of six IP addresses, no port blockages, and 1Mb of symmetrical service to my home. I would also gladly pay more on a tiered basis for higher levels of traffic and higher grades of provisioned service. Also perhaps for hosting. Offsite data backup (a potentially huge business for which high upstream speeds are required). And perhaps much more. And I’m sure there are millions of small businesses out there that would be glad to do the same. But most of us are stuck with a choice between 1) a shitty asymmetrical service from a phone company that wishes it could still charge for time and distance; and 2) and a shitty asymmetrical service from a cable company that wishes it were still just in the TV channel delivery business.

Locally, TDS, to their credit does offer 4MB symmetrical dsl service (4mbps up and down).