FATCA, Immigration, and Political Dance Videos… Our 2013 Efforts

Despite an insanely busy and awesome year (I’m a very lucky dude), we managed to put together three videos, a new amazon broadsheet, and a bunch of blog posts.

I am most proud of our efforts against FATCA. FATCA is a crazy law that the United States Congress has decided to impose on the entire world. We are building a world-wide empire subject to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). I kept running into FATCA in my work as a legal consultant, and I realized that this stuff really needs to be described in layman’s terms. The US government says that it just goes after US tax cheats. Nobody likes them, so most journalists haven’t looked into it too much. When you look into the details, however, it becomes clear that there is a lot more going on. Its implementation involves over 500 pages of regulation, numerous agreements between the US government and other countries, and eventually individual agreements between the IRS and every bank in the world. We have tried to boil the regulations down to a four minute video, with a lot of swearing. To provide a more detailed and level-headed view, we’ve also published a new essay for the Amazon kindle.

We published two videos earlier in the year. I had noticed that all the really popular videos on youtube are music videos. So in a perhaps unwise fit of late night creativity we made one. In a more serious effort, we weighed in on the US immigration debate. Some say the video is a bit boring, but it deals with some important facts that Congress is ignoring in their discussions. Watching the video will make you more informed on the topic than most of Washington, DC.

Well that’s about it for 2013. We’ve got some new approaches and issues to tackle in 2014. It should be fun! We’ve now got a mailing list, which you can see to your left. Sign up if you want to be made aware of our future efforts. Thanks for watching and reading!