506. Five Hot Scams to Avoid

                BROWDERBBOOKS

                                 Wild New York

WiDo Publishing, the publisher of my latest novel, Forbidden Brownstones, is eager to read the sixth title in my Metropolis series of historical novels set in nineteenth-century New York: Lady of the Chameleons.  I want them have a crack at it, before I approach other small presses.

        I am also promoting my nonfiction title New Yorkers: A Feisty People, and preparing a new paperback edition of a work that is no longer being sold by its original publisher; more of that anon.  All of which keeps me pretty busy.

                 Five Hot Scams to Avoid

The AARP Bulletin, which addresses the needs and concerns of senior citizens, is good at warning seniors of scams that target them.  The issue of April 2021 features an article on frauds and presents a list of "hot" currents scams. Here are five that should concern not just seniors but everyone.

• ZOOM phishing: You get an e-mail with the ZOOM logo telling you to click a link because your account is suspended. Doing so lets scammers download malicious software into your computer, access your personal information, or search for passwords to hack into your other accounts.  Defense: Never click on links in unsolicited e-mails.
• Covid-19 vaccine card cons: Many who get vaccinated post selfies on social media displaying their vaccination card. Scammers pounce on it, retrieve valuable data for identity theft, break into your bank accounts, get credit cards in your name, etc.  Defense: To inform friends of your vaccination, use a selfie with a generic vaccination sticker.
• Medicare card come-ons: You get an e-mail or phone call, or someone knocks on your door, claiming to be from Medicare and offering all sorts of pandemic services if you verify your Medicare ID number.  Defense: Delete the e-mail, hang up the phone, shut the door.  Medicare will never contact you to obtain your Medicare number without your permission.
• Cash-transfer app swindles: You transfer money using tools like PayPal, CashApp, and others. A scammer then asks you to return the money, explaining it was an accident.  But the transfer was made with a stolen debit card whose funds will be removed from your account.  Defense: Be diligent before hitting "accept," or even disable all incoming requests on your app and use it only to send money.
• "Account problem" text: You get a text message saying there's a problem with your internet account, credit card, or bank account, and asking you to click on a link to provide personal information.  Defense: again, don't click on links in unsolicited e-mails and texts.  Contact your bank or credit card company to see if there is really a problem; there probably is not.

These are only some of the current hot scams.  Always be diligent.  Always think twice and three times before clicking on an unsolicited link.

        That same April 2021 issue of the AARP Bulletin does an exposé of international phone scammers based in India and preying on Americans.  It tells how a tech-savvy Irishman became so angry at these scams that he used his techie skills to get into their computers, film them without their knowledge, and expose their scams.  What especially infuriated him was seeing them laugh when an elderly victim, unable to pay a huge fee for bogus services rendered, burst into tears.  In the end the Irishman exposed one notorious team of scammers and got the Indian authorities to arrest them and shut their operation down.  

        But that's only one team of scammers out of thousands, and only someone with the Irishman's technical skills and fierce determination would take the time to do anything about the problem.  Most of us can only absorb the urging to be constantly diligent and hope.  Recently I got word by e-mail of a serious problem with my bank account.  I didn't click on the link, contacted my bank online, discovered no problem, then went back and deleted the e-mail.  And a very convincing e-mail it was.  These people are clever.  Ruthless, but clever.  Beware.

©  2021  Clifford Browder

505. Killing

 BROWDERBOOKS

In the past week I held a contest online to create a logo for myself and my books; designers offered me 35 designs.  I consulted some friends, showing them two runners-up, but in the end I chose a different one entirely.   

I 

I have also found a tag line or slogan: 

BROWDERBOOKS: Wild New York

So now I have to figure out how to use them, the logo and the slogan.  Stay tuned.

                            KILLING

In this country executions have often been public.  As for lynchings, by their very nature they were public events, and even celebrations.  Postcards often showed the dangling hanged bodies of the victims, usually  black males, with a host of smiling white witnesses, including even women and children.  One wonders at the state of mind not only of those posing proudly near the dangling bodies, but also of those who sent the postcards by mail.  Who did they send them to, and with what scribbled message?  One appears online, on a postcard from Waco, Texas, dated 1916: “This is the barbecue we had last night.  My picture is to the left with a cross over it.  Your son, Joe.”

         The postcards were also kept as souvenirs and in time became collectors’ items.  It is worth noting that the Nazis never stooped to selling souvenirs of the death camps.  In the U.S., by 1908 the postcards had become so common, and to many so repugnant, that the U.S. Postmaster General banned them from the mails.  After that they continued to be sold in antique stores whose proprietors whispered to prospective buyers that they were available, though not on display.  These souvenirs so offend me that I cannot reproduce them here.  Nor would they be appreciated today by the residents of the communities involved, which were by no means all in the South.  These celebratory killings occurred also in Cairo, Illinois (1909), Anadarko, Oklahoma (1913), Duluth, Minnesota (1920), and Marion, Indiana (1930).  They are accessible online at Wikimedia Commons, for those who want to see them.  I have seen them once and received their message, and that is quite enough.

         I have told elsewhere, and more than once, how my father was a hunter and fisherman, and raised his two sons to be the same.  With me, it didn’t take.  Though he taught me to use a shotgun at age 16, I had no desire to kill the blackbirds that he hoped would appear overhead in autumn fields where we patiently waited, or the occasional rabbit that scurried away from us.  And I hated the pain in my shoulder from the recoil of the shotgun, when fired.  Though in his will he left his guns to me and my brother, we were quite happy to sell them.  Sad.  In this regard (and others), we were not the sons he had wanted.  The guns involved, by the way, were shotguns used for trap shooting and hunting.  He had no interest in handguns, much less automatic weapons (unheard of in his time), and would be dismayed by their availability today.

The legendary Annie Oakley shooting a shotgun before spectators
in Pinehurst, NC, date unknown.  What she's shooting at isn't clear.

  
       So I am not a killer?  Wrong.  Under certain circumstances I can kill with gusto.  But only the roaches that at one time infested my apartment, in an old building whose cracks and crevices – too many to ever be filled – provide them with nesting spaces where they can rest up by day and prepare for their nocturnal forays.  When, heeding the bladder imperative, I went to the bathroom at night, I surprised gangs of them in the wash basin and tub and either chased  them into a waiting glue trap, or – BAM BAM BAM – pounded them with the smooth cap top of an empty medicine bottle.  Many escaped, but not all.  Still, I am not an indiscriminate killer.  Roaches, yes; spiders, no.  Spiders I always spare, though I may relocate them to a green plant or release them to the world outside.  Any bug that kills flies and mosquitos is a friend of mine.

© 2021 Clifford Browder

504. Kill

BROWDERBOOKS

My historical novel Forbidden Brownstones has received two more good reviews.

No matter what journey you’re looking to undertake, this author provides love, drama, mystery, action, death, prejudice, and unforgettable emotion. —  Editorial review for Reader Views by Amy Lignor.

A must read…. I could feel the movement, the jazz of the black culture where characters swayed with the rhythm of life after years of slavery facing adversity no white person in the book could ever understand or even thought to ask. — Five-star editorial review for Reedsy Discovery by Karina Holosko.

Available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and WiDo Publishing

                                KILL

Kill: the word in English, a monosyllable, has a directness to it that no other language I know of can match.  It is blunt, keen, harsh.  Shakespeare is aware of this when, in Act 4, Scene 6, he has Lear say

And when I have stol'n upon these sons-in-law,
Then, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill!

But we also use it more gently.

·      “He made a killing in the market.”

·      “We’re just killing time.”

·      Fred Trump to his son Donald: “Be a killer.”

·      “You kill me.”

In none of these is it a matter of depriving someone or something of life.  What the last one means depends on the context.  It is very twentieth-century, very American; I heard it in the movies.  It means “You’re overdoing it, but I’m not fooled.”

         Have I ever seen a killer?  Yes, but not a human.  At the Aquarium at Coney Island I have seen a shark swimming in a tank.  His supple, streamlined body, his eye, his jaw with jagged, inward-curved teeth – all these features suggest a living machine designed to hunt and kill.  And the more a victim struggles to escape, the more those teeth cut into him, rendering escape impossible.

Vahe Martirosyan

         Humans have tried to create machines for killing, so they don’t have the grim responsibility of hacking off a head, or firing a gun, or pulling a lever that sends the doomed man’s body plunging into space.  The electric chair, once so highly esteemed in progress-addicted America, has proven untrustworthy, as evidenced by gasps and twitchings of the victim.  

Man in an electric chair, 1908.

            But the French came up with a far more efficient device, evidently invented by a surgeon named Antoine Louis, but promoted by a deputy in the National Assembly, Dr. Joseph Ignace Guillotin.  A child of the Enlightenment, Guillotin was shocked by the thought of the condemned being broken on the wheel, or drawn and quartered, or burned at the stake, or drowned.  He hoped that a more humane method of execution would ultimately lead to abolition of the death penalty.  On October 10, 1789 – three months after the storming of the Bastille – he  addressed the reform-minded Assembly, declaring, “With my machine I take off your head in the twinkling of an eye, and you never feel it.”  He and his machine were mocked at first, but on June 3, 1791, the Assembly made the guillotine the only means of legal criminal execution.  Workers shunned the job of making it, until a German harpsichord maker agreed, on condition of anonymity, to manufacture it.  It was tested on animals and human corpses, perfected, and then busily employed in killing the Revolution’s innumerable victims, the king and queen among them, followed by the fanatical Robespierre.

Showing Louis XVI's head to the crowd.  A German engraving, 1793.

         Legend has it that Dr. Guillotin not only gave his name to the machine, but died by it as well.  No, he died in 1814 of natural causes at age 75.  Embarrassed by their connection to it, his family asked the government to change the machine’s name, and when the government refused, they changed their name instead.  But the guillotine was the standard form of execution in France until the death penalty was abolished in 1981.  And Hitler loved it; during his rule, thousands died by it.

         If the guillotine is so painless and efficient, why hasn’t it been adopted here?  Because, I think, it’s messy.  Heads roll, blood flows, the body is mutilated.  With hanging, at least the corpse is intact.  We like neat, bloodless executions, even if the victim gasps and twitches.  A nasty business, no matter how you look at it.  

         Dr. Guillotin wanted executions to be private, but the Revolution made them public, so the populace could cheer when the executioner showed them the severed head of the king or some other victim of significance.  The tricoteuses of the executions, those fiercely knitting Madame Defarges, have themselves become legendary.

        Today, in America, killing by the state is as controversial as ever.  Some states have banished the death penalty; others, like Texas, glory in it.  And just as controversial is abortion: some states ban it, some do not.  That these issues are fiercely debated is understandable: human life is at stake.  And for me, they aren't easy.  I marvel at those who come down on one side or the other without hesitation.  In any discussion of the death penalty or abortion, I am haunted by the thought of kill. 

©  2021 Clifford Browder

503. You Pay Taxes; They Don't. Corporations that pay no federal income tax.

        YOU  PAY  TAXES; THEY  DON'T

Corporations that pay no federal income tax

April brings Easter and thoughts of rebirth and growth, but it also brings the dreaded fifteenth, when federal and state income taxes are due.  Most of us grumble, sweat, and pay.  Or hire an accountant who grumbles for us, sweats and (with our money) pays.  But that's not everyone, far from it.  People with low income don't pay; no problem.  Genuine nonprofit organizations, if they don't engage in lobbying, don't pay; no problem.   But how about corporations -- those monster entities that are out to make a profit for shareholders and their richly compensated executives?  How about them?  Some of them, including some of the biggest in the world, quite legally pay nothing, not one skinny cent.  Who are they, and what gives?

Here are the top ten, in terms of their US income (in millions), as of 2018, the last year for which information is available.

Company	U.S. Income
1. Amazon.com	$10,835
2.  Delta Air Lines	$5,073
3.  Chevron	$4,547
4.  General Motors	$4,320
5.  EOG Resources	$4,067
6.  Occidental Petroleum	$3,379
7.  Honeywell International	$2,830
8.  Deere	$2,152
9.  American Electric Power	$1,943
10.  Principal Financial

Some of these are new to me, but others are not.  That Amazon -- that giant of the Internet, the inescapable tyrant monopoly of our time -- should head the list is simply amazing.  That Delta, Chevron, and GM should be there likewise astonishes.  

Mention of John Deere, the manufacturer of agricultural machinery, is of special interest to me, since it has survived and flourished, whereas its no. 1 competitor of many years, the International Harvester Company, the huge blue-chip maker of agricultural machinery, construction equipment, and trucks, did not.  But what is, or was, that to me?  Everything, since my father, an attorney specializing in the complexities of railroad law, worked all his life for Harvester.  In the form of his salary, Harvester money saw my family through the Depression; I was raised on it.  But this massive corporation, dating back to when Cyrus McCormick invented the reaper and made a fortune from it, did not evolve with the times.  By the 1980s a combination of problems brought about its collapse and it ceased to exist under the venerable name "International Harvester."  But Deere, its savvy smaller competitor, is still alive and kicking, as its avoidance of taxes would seem to indicate.  

(Forgive the above digression.  My Midwestern roots incline me to insert Chicagoland stories whenever possible.  The McCormicks of Chicago far surpass the Astors and Vanderbilts of New York in providing juicy scandals to the gossip mills, as I have mentioned at times in the past.  But that, and how my father was the secretary of a railroad that no one outside of Chicago ever heard of, and how and why I, a nerdy bookworm, learned to shoot a shotgun at age 16, are stories for another time.)

So let's return to my subject, giant corporations that quite legally don't pay the federal income tax.  How can this be?  First of all, the Trump tax bill of December 2017 lowered the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%, which was more in line with tax rates in other developed countries.  Beyond that, it usually involves clever manipulation of deductions and tax credits, to the point where the corporation can claim a rebate to be applied against taxes in future years.  Not that they care to discuss the matter.  Questioned about its tax immunity, for instance, Deere declined to answer.  But the US is notorious for allowing corporations to take advantage of its tax laws.  And corporations have teams of lawyers and accountants who know how to play the game.

"Only little people pay taxes," said Leona Helmsley, the hotel magnate known also as the Queen of Mean.  This remark, cited in her court case, helped get her convicted of income tax evasion and reduced her to tears in pleading for leniency -- to no avail; she ended up in federal prison.  The feds simply could not let her get away with such a comment, undermining as it did the whole federal system of taxation.  But given the immunity of many corporations to the federal income tax, one has to ask: was Leona wrong?  At the very least, she was a fool to say, before witnesses, a truth that others knew to keep to themselves.

Source note: This post was inspired in part by Kathryn Kranhold's article, "You Paid Taxes. These Corporations Don't," published online on April 19, 2019, by The Center for Public Integrity.  The facts cited by the post come from this article.

© 2021 Clifford Browder