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reiderwriter · 8 months

Note

NSFW Prompt Requests - I’m in dyer need of 127 or 150 if you’d be so kind?🥵

A/N: I feel like I say "I got a bit carried away" in every single one of these authors notes, but this one I think I really did...

Word Count: 3k

#127: "I can taste myself on you."

#150: "Stop clenching, baby, you're already tight enough as it is."

Summary: You're hot for teacher. So is every other girl on campus. Your Professor, however, is absolutely oblivious until you spell it out for him...

Warnings: Professor x Student, age gap, oral (M receiving), face-fucking, no birth control/ condoms, creampie, male whimpering and moaning mentioned a lot, PinV sex, both of them are Switches idc idc 18+ MINORS DNI

Check out my other stuff on my masterlist!

You had been in his class for around three weeks when you decided you couldn’t take it anymore. If you were going to keep up your GPA and progress in your grad programme, you were going to have to either drop the class with Professor Reid, or persuade him to put you out of your misery.

You’d been intrigued by the course to start with, of course, which is why you’d picked up the criminology elective when it wasn’t a required class. But it was only available this semester as he was only Guest Lecturing while on leave from his job at the BAU, and getting that kind of insight from an actual industry professional rather than an academic really couldn’t hurt, right? You’d thought that until you’d seen him.

Expecting some older man with a stuffy tone and a disdain for modern technology, you’d been roughly awoken when he walked into the lecture hall on the first day and you found yourself hanging on to his every word as he read through your syllabus. You were spot on with the technophobia, but for everything else, you were blissfully incorrect. He was, quite possibly, the hottest man you’d ever seen in your life. You weren’t secretive about your thing for older men, joking all the time about your “daddy kink,” but you’d never had a thing for one of your actual professors before, and it was driving you insane.

It didn’t help that the word had travelled around the entirety of your campus as well, with multiple girls turning up to audit the class after the first week. You’d been green with envy since you’d seen them mooning over the man, and you’d felt disgusted with yourself almost instantly. He was your professor, he was damn good at his job, but he was so deliciously tempting that you couldn’t find it within yourself to actually pay attention in his classes. You knew it was only a matter of time until the man, who you realised was obviously blind to how attractive he was to a bunch of twenty-somethings with a penchant for danger and a willingness to try all kinds of new things, would catch on to how many of his students were openly lusting for him.

You hoped that you had learned enough in his classes on behaviour that you could accurately hide your feelings and thoughts, however sinful and objectively obvious they were. Your hopes were crushed on that fateful day three weeks into the semester.

You’d woken up on the wrong side of the bed already. Your alarm hadn’t gone off, your clothes were all still wet inside the washing machine in your apartment meaning you had to throw on a short skirt and pray you didn't flash anyone, and your roommate hadn’t closed the fridge properly the night before, so the milk you wanted to use in your morning coffee had spoilt. After dragging yourself into class, the last thing you’d wanted to see was twice as many students auditing the class as the previous week.

To give it to the man’s obliviousness, he hadn’t noticed until about two thirds of the way into the class, when he asked a student why they weren’t taking notes. He’d seemed confused. You were almost furious that he didn’t know what effect he was having on you, on every girl in the vicinity, but, more importantly, you. Unable to help yourself, you let out a scoff that gained his attention.

“Is there something wrong with the class materials Miss…” he trailed off, waiting for you to supply your name to him.

“Oh, no, uh, Y/N. My name is Y/N, there’s nothing wrong, sir. I’m sorry.” His lips twitched as you replied, but he went on with his class, as you sunk into your chair in shame. You were going to have to drop the class now. He must hate you, or think you were stupid, or think that you hated him, and your thoughts were spiralling so out of control that you hadn’t noticed the class had ended, and he was calling up at you from the lecturing desk.

“Miss Y/N, are you okay?” He asked, and his goddamned eyes were filled with such concern you hated that every part of your body was screaming with desire for him. Unable to respond, he tried again.

“If you have the time, would you like to come talk to me in my office? I’ve been told I’m a pretty good listener.” You should’ve said no, just based on the ridiculous scenes filling your mind, but you didn’t hesitate to nod your approval. You picked up your bags and made your way down the steps to where he was waiting with all of his stuff near the front door. He opened the door for you, and you felt your heart race as you awkwardly slid by him in the doorway. He had to be a fucking gentleman, too, right?

You followed him as he made his way to his office, staying silent the entire way. He looked like he wanted to make small talk but didn’t know how, choosing instead to just mirror your silence. When you reached his office, he apologised for the mess and showed you inside, letting you take a seat on the couch whilst he put all his things away. The room was littered with books of all sizes, and you noticed that the titles didn’t seem to have one common subject linking them all, or even, in fact, seem to be written in the same language. You spotted a beaten up copy of War and Peace on his desk next to an obviously used coffee mug, and some paper files that looked to be the reading from that morning’s class.

“Sorry, I didn’t exactly plan on having guests, uh, make yourself comfortable?” He asked it as a question, and loosened his tie as he said it. You stared at the small patch of skin on his neck, your eyes lingering just a moment too long before you remembered you were in a room with an actual FBI Profiler, and that if your thoughts were any louder, he’d handcuff you himself. As tempting as that was, you really didn’t want your Professor knowing about all the ways you’d imagined him fucking you.

“Professor Reid, I’m sorry, I have to leave, and- and I think I have to drop out of the class.” You stood up suddenly, and he stood up too from his place at his desk, shocked at your sudden anxious outburst.

“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that, is there something wrong? Did I make you uncomfortable?” he asked taking a step closer to you, but you took a step back again, accidentally pressing your back against one of his many bookcases in your haste to avoid him.

“Yes! I mean no, it’s not your fault that I’m uncomfortable. I’m not uncomfortable, really!” He had the look of a kicked puppy on his face now, and you realised this man would be the death of you. You weren’t even sure what it was about him that entranced you enough to stay and continue the conversation.

“I can’t focus in your classes, Professor,” you sighed out, letting your eyes drop with the embarrassing confession.

“That’s perfectly fine, many people struggle to pay attention in college classes. Is there anything I can do in my lectures to accommodate to your needs?” Your eyebrows screwed up in frustration with his obvious professional kindness.

“No, Professor, I’m sorry, unless you stop looking like that there’s nothing you can do.” You ran a stressed hand through your hair as you begged your mouth to shut and stay shut.

“...What?” The confused tone in his voice let you know that he had no clue at all what you meant by your words, but he didn’t go further. You chanced a glance up at his face, and were met with a small blush rising to his cheeks, as you watched the words process in his brain.

“Professor, every single person in that class that is attracted to men would kill to do absolutely sinful things to you. You’re like the campus’s collective wet dream right now. You had to know that, right?” You sigh out, finally putting the man out of his misery.

“Oh. No. No, no, I didn’t. Know that, I mean, I didn’t…Is that why there are so many people auditing the class? They want to…. Do that with me?”

“Fuck you, Professor. They want to fuck you. You can say it, we’re both adults.” You resigned yourself to the fact that this conversation was probably going to haunt every waking hour for the rest of your life, and just let it happen, pushing through the cringe to help him come to certain realisations.

“And that’s why you want to drop the class?” he asked finally, looking back up at you.

“Yes.”

“Because you want to…fuck me?”

Your mouth dropped open at his words, as you desperately tried to back track, but all that came out was hot air and blubbering sounds as you felt your brain short circuit like his had just moments before.

“I mean… I guess,” you finally stuttered out, your fight or flight instinct begging you to just run, but something deeper, something carnal planting you in position and making movement in that moment impossible.

“Oh…. right.” He nodded at you, his lips spread in a thin smile as he nodded at you awkwardly. You stood there together in silence for a minute, but it became clear soon that the logical part of your brain was no longer in control of your mouth.

“Can I?” you asked, almost startled at your own boldness.

“Excuse me?” he said, his voice raising higher in tone at the incredulity of your statement.

“Can I fuck you? If I do, maybe I’ll be able to, you know, pay more attention in class. Get it out of my system, you know.” Growing emboldened by your own words, you took another hesitant step towards him, reaching your hand up to gently touch his arm. His jaw clenched at the contact, but he didn’t move away, didn’t suggest you stop right there and forget this conversation ever happened.

“Please, Professor Reid. Please fuck me,” you trailed the hand up his arm and back down his chest as he stood there just watching you beg for him. You discarded your bag on the chair, and keeping your eyes focused on his, trailed both of your hands down to his belt, slowly enough that he could push you away at anytime.

“Do you know what you’re doing, Miss Y/N?” He asked quietly, and you smiled, finally happy to get a reaction from him. The smile had dropped from his lips and there was something suddenly dark in his tone that had you clenching around nothing.

“Yes, Professor,” you said, letting your hands start working on his belt, undoing it agonisingly slowly as you watched him control his breaths. When you finally had it undone, you finally looked up at him again, and gave him a smile as innocent as you could muster.

“You have my permission,” he whispered into your ears as he gently put a hand on your head and pushed you down to your knees, perching himself on the edge of the desk. You wasted no time then, desperate to live out each and every single one of your fantasies with him. Reaching into his pants, you found him already hard and pulsing, and you released his cock from its confines quickly. Spitting into your hand, you gave him a few quick strokes as you watched him grow even bigger under your touch.

Letting out some sinful breathy moans, you looked up at him, head thrown back and eyes screwed shut as you finally reached your tongue out to lick at the tip of his cock. He twitched at the contact, and you felt the warmth pooling between your legs as you watched his each and every reaction. Finally wrapping your lips around him, you decided to put him out of his misery, sinking down on his dick an inch at a time until he was hitting the back of your throat. He was delightfully vocal the whole time, moaning and whimpering so much that you almost pulled off him completely and begged him to fuck you raw. But the taste of his cock was intoxicating and you wanted more and more of him. After a few minutes of your agonisingly slow pace, you felt his hips beginning to buck up to match your pace as he began to face-fuck you. He grabbed a handful of hair, and you did your best to relax your throat, stabilising yourself by placing one hand on his thigh and sinking deeper into your open hips on the floor.

His eyes were still screwed close, but he was moaning out your name now, with a few expletives thrown in too, having done a complete 180 from the few minutes earlier when he’d hesitated to even say the F word in conversation. You felt he was getting close when he started thrusting deeper, sloppier in his movements and more breathy in his moans. He suddenly pulled out of your mouth and lifted you to your feet, bringing you face to face with him.

“We didn’t… we didn’t say where I would, um…” he tried to say but you pushed up onto your toes and pressed a hot kiss to his mouth, your tongues quickly twinning as he returned it in kind. You stood there, lips locked and breathless in that space for quite some time, neither of you caring about the lack of oxygen you were getting. Finally, using the hand that was still fisted in your hair he pulled you away from his lips, and you whimpered pathetically at the loss of contact.

“I can taste myself on you,” he panted into your neck as he held you close, the words sending a shiver down your spine and forcing another moan out of your mouth. The pain from his tight grip in your hair only heightened your pleasure as he moved his lips back to your exposed neck and continued his ministrations.

“Please, professor….” you begged again, desperate for his attention. “Please fuck me.”

Without removing his lips from your neck, he quickly moved the two of you back to the couch you’d been sitting on before, guiding you into his lap, his cock still hard and free from his pants. Your skirt spread open, and your hard landing meant you could feel all of him pressed against you. You thanked the gods for your suddenly well-timed laundry efforts as he grabbed the base of his cock and started teasing you through your panties. You were sure they were soaked through as you sat in his lap, grinding down on his perfect cock, his mouth still pressed into your neck.

“Fuck me, please fuck me,” you moaned, and he complied, finally hooking a finger under the seam of your panties and moving them to the side as he pushed up into you with another throaty moan.

“Yes, thank you. Thank you Professor, thank you.” You moaned out in bliss as you sank further and further down on him, pushing further than any man had been. before.

“Stop clenching, baby, you’re already tight enough as it is,” he ground his teeth in a hiss, and you moaned at his words, the pervertedness of them shooting straight to your core.

“Can’t…help myself. You feel so good, sir.” He started moving then, holding your waist as he started lazily thrusting upwards. After having your mouth wrapped around him, he knew that too much too soon would mean that this wouldn’t last long, and you had begged him nicely, so he wanted this to feel as good for you as it did for him. Gripping one of your hips tightly in one hand, he let the other fall under your skirt, and started pressing into your clit. You threw back your head at the contact and started riding him, matching each of his upward thrusts with a downward thrust of your own, letting his thumb gain speed as it followed you up and down.

“Fuck, professor, thank you…I’m gonna cum, fuck, thank you so much,” you stuttered out as you could feel your orgasm rip through you, collapsing into his arms as he thrust quicker into you now.

“Y/N, where… where should I….” His voice trailed off, and after a few seconds regaining your sanity after your climax, you finally answered the question he’d been desperately trying to answer.

“Inside… Inside me, Professor Reid, it’s okay…” he whimpered at that, at each thrust he pushed into you, his head falling to the crook in your neck and your hands stroking the hair at the base of his neck as you clenched around him again, finally pulling the desire out of him. He came noisily, even with his face buried in you, moaning so delightfully you knew the sound would be your new distraction for the next three weeks.

When he finally regained his composure, he let his hands drop from your waist, his head rolled back on the couch, and you fell with him, wrapping yourself around him as if you never wanted this coupling to end. You stayed there, head resting on his chest, listening to his heartbeat, and drifted to sleep.

You awoke an hour later, but there was no sign of the Professor. He’d cleaned you up somehow, because there was no unpleasant feeling between your legs, and he’d wrapped a blanket around you as you slept, making sure you were comfortable. Collecting your things and making to leave, you almost convinced yourself that it had all been another fantasy, and that you were becoming seriously delusional about the man. As you approached the door, however, you spotted a small note taped to the handle, and quickly pulled it into your hands.

Miss Y/N,

Thank you for visiting me today. I hope you decide to stay in the class, I certainly could learn a thing or two from you.

- Spencer Reid.

P.S. You’re lucky I’m an MIT Graduate with a job in the FBI. There’s a security camera in my office.

#spencer reid #criminal minds #spencer reid x reader #spencer reid fanfic #spencer reid smut #criminal minds fanfiction #mgg #criminal minds fandom #spencer reid x self insert #spencer reid x y/n #spencer reid x reader smut #spencer reid x you #spencer reid x oc #spencer reid fanfiction #spencer reid criminal minds #dr spencer reid #criminal minds fic #criminal minds smut #professor spencer reid

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dontmeantobepoliticalbut · 1 year

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Doug Mastriano lost by a lot.

But some of his supporters wrongly believe the results are inaccurate, and they think they’ve found a way to do something about it. So now election denial groups are flooding Pennsylvania courts with petitions seeking to force hand recounts under a little-known provision of state election law.

It’s not clear the effort will succeed in requiring counties to retally their votes — some courts have already thrown out the requests — and they certainly won’t give Mastriano, the defeated Republican nominee for governor, the 781,000 votes by which he lost to Democratic Gov.-elect Josh Shapiro. Recounts change election results very little, if at all.

But the baseless efforts threaten to sow confusion about the validity of this month’s election, tie up state courts, and disrupt officials’ ongoing work to audit and certify results by Monday’s deadline. It’s the latest front for an election denial movement that helped lift Mastriano to prominence, and has repeatedly tried to find and exploit vulnerabilities in the state’s election system.

The groups — organizing over social media and some claiming they are working in conjunction with Mastriano’s campaign — filed more than 100 petitions in at least a dozen counties over the last week, according to interviews and court records. Elections officials said they heard of at least 17 more counties where petitions have been filed and records weren’t immediately available.

The petitions largely follow a similar format — and in many cases use the same boilerplate legal document with blank fields for individual filers to complete.

“These orchestrated moves to delay certification of the vote at the county level are a deliberate attempt to flout the will of the people as expressed in the election results,” the Pennsylvania Department of State, which oversees elections, said in a statement.

A precinct’s results can be recounted under state election law if three voters from the precinct pay $50 and file a petition in county court saying they believe “fraud or error” occurred there.

The provision is rarely used. In the past, it has triggered recounts primarily in small, local races, said Democratic elections lawyer Adam Bonin, who has used it in razor-thin races for school board and township commissioner.

“For races that are actually incredibly close — we’re talking about single-digit races for local office — in those circumstances you do want to make sure that every machine’s results were transcribed accurately, that every paper ballot was scanned correctly by the machine, and there were no accidental errors in arithmetic,” Bonin said.

But some elections officials have worried for years that bad-faith actors could attempt to weaponize the law in statewide or national elections. Word started to spread last week among county elections officials that election denial activists were using recount petitions in an organized way for the first time on a large scale.

“It’s their latest bright idea,” one county elections director told The Inquirer, calling it a “merry-go-round of nonsense.”

In Bucks County, the onslaught started last Thursday, and within a day 18 recount petitions had been filed. Voters filed 12 in Allegheny County on Friday. Montgomery County received 37 in a span of two days. Chester 11. And in Berks County, a group calling itself the Pennsylvania Liberty Fund said it organized 30 more.

“It’s a lot of the same groups and same individuals … they’re finding things in the law and they’re using it to bog us down,” said Sean D. Drasher, the elections director for Lebanon County, which has recount petitions in five precincts. They were all dropped off at the same time by one person, Drasher said.

Few of the voters who filed recount petitions were willing to discuss it, or whether they were working with organized groups. Those that did cited vague concerns about voting machines and poll workers.

Barbara Canete, a Bucks County Republican committee person who filed a recount petition in Bristol Township, said she heard about the effort through “grassroots groups” that had been preparing for months. Like most petitions reviewed by The Inquirer, Canete’s sought a hand recount of the governor’s race specifically, though some also requested recounts in other races.

“Behind the scenes, I think there are things happening that aren’t really on the up and up,” she said.

Signs of broader organizing have proliferated online and quickly spread among conservative groups on social media.

A Facebook group called “We The People of Columbia County PA” posted a “call to action” last week seeking recruits for recount petitions in that Northeastern Pennsylvania county. It said Audit the Vote PA, an organization that has repeatedly peddled election conspiracy theories and allied itself with Mastriano, would reimburse voters for the $50 filing fee when possible. Audit the Vote’s cofounder Karen Taylor filed her own recount petition in Westmoreland County.

The Facebook post, which was deleted this week, also encouraged voters to email an address associated with Mastriano’s campaign for links to the required forms. The Mastriano campaign did not respond to questions about its involvement.

In Bucks County, the conservative group “Right for Bucks” hosted a virtual event this month with Audit the Vote seeking recruits to participate in an unspecified “election challenge.” It later provided boilerplate recount petition forms on its website.

Most local Republican Party officials have steered clear of publicly endorsing the recount push, with some dismissing it as a fringe idea. But in Berks County, the local GOP committee is openly backing the effort.

“No one is alleging the 2022 election is stolen,” party chairman Clay Breece said in a statement that also sought donations to fund the work. “We are asking for a court order to open the ballot boxes so the paper ballots are manually counted by human beings to verify that the machines are working as advertised.”

But some of the most persistent and pernicious attacks on Pennsylvania’s election system, officials and experts say, are the ones couched as simply seeking transparency. They can erode trust in the system, and recount and audit requests, when organized, can overwhelm elections offices.

Public records requests poured into county elections offices this summer, which one official likened to a “denial-of-service” attack that tries to crash a web server by overloading it with traffic. The wave of recount petitions feels like the latest front in that, elections officials said.

“While it sounds like it’s a very good way to keep an eye on government,” Drasher said, “it’s also a good way to be unaccountable and file paperwork harassing county governments.”

Local elections officials have already counted the results, checked their work and resolved any inconsistencies, recounted a sample of ballots as required by state law, and are conducting a statewide “risk-limiting audit” that’s considered the gold standard method of verifying election results.

County courts have yet to rule on the vast majority of recount petitions. But the few that have come before judges so far haven’t fared well.

A judge in Butler County threw out several recount petitions Wednesday, county solicitor H. William White III said. Three of the petitions there were submitted by voters who’d served as poll workers and signed off on their polling place’s results just days before they filed recount petitions alleging unspecified “fraud or error” in the precincts they worked in.

And a ruling Monday in Forest County might foreshadow a broader rejection of petitions across the state.

Common Pleas Court Judge Maureen A. Skerda dismissed two petitions there, citing language in the law that requires voters seeking to force a recount to either provide specific evidence of fraud or error, or to file petitions in every precinct where the election was held. That means petitions filed in the governor’s race with no specific fraud allegations would have to be filed in every one of the thousands of voting precincts across the state.

Mastriano, who conceded defeat five days after Election Day, lost by almost 15 percentage points.

“We’re way, way, way outside the margin of error, and these are just frivolous requests from people who can’t accept the results of an election,” said Northumberland County Clerk Nathan Savidge, a Republican. “Soon-to-be Gov. Shapiro blew Mastriano out of the water.”

#us politics #news #the inquirer #2022 #doug mastriano #pennsylvania #Josh Shapiro #2022 elections #2022 midterms #gubernatorial races #Adam Bonin #Audit the Vote PA #election conspiracists #election deniers #election denialism #Clay Breece #H. William White III #Judge Maureen A. Skerda

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don-lichterman · 2 years

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ELECTION SECURITY: Local officials would welcome post-election audit

Mike Wolanin | The Republic Then Bartholomew County Clerk Jay Phelps explains how the new Voter Verified Paper Audit Trail system works with the county’s voting machines at the Bartholomew County Clerk’s Office in Columbus, Ind., Thursday, Oct. 10, 2019. Bartholomew County election officials say they would welcome a post-election audit as Indiana’s secretary of state kicks off plans to double…

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#Audit #election #Local #officials #postelection #security

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beauty-funny-trippy · 3 months

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Trump mistakenly thinks the money he's referring to is supposed to go to NATO. It's not. It's the amount each country is voluntarily asked to spend on its own armed forces. Which means, there are no "delinquent" payments.

Obviously Trump is unable to understand even the basics of NATO or foreign policy. The whole purpose of NATO is to prevent wars, not "encourage" them. Trump's insane foreign policy of betraying our allies and befriending our enemies is unbelievably irresponsible and dangerous for America. Do we really want to elect a president whose foreign policy goal is to "Make Russia Great Again!"

Few people despise America more than Putin; and few people admire that brutal dictator more than Trump. Apparently Trump believes that throwing our friends at Putin's feet is a surefire way to impress his alpha-male idol, and perhaps get some help from Putin in the 2024 election.

And did you notice how Trump talks about betraying our allies? Not with somber reluctance. But rather, he literally encourages Putin to murder our friends with a disturbingly perverse tone of enthusiasm! Is he a candidate for president, or auditioning to be Marvel's next supervillain?

There is something seriously wrong with an American presidential candidate who has a greater loyalty to our enemies than to our friends, or even to our own country.

#NATO #video #news #donald trump #putin #meme #memes #politics #us politics #government #democracy #trump #democrats #republicans #aesthetic #television #beauty-funny-trippy #marvel #vladimir putin

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mostlysignssomeportents · 7 months

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Microsoft put their tax-evasion in writing and now they owe $29 billion

I'm coming to Minneapolis! Oct 15: Presenting The Internet Con at Moon Palace Books. Oct 16: Keynoting the 26th ACM Conference On Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing.

If there's one thing I took away from Propublica's explosive IRS Files, it's that "tax avoidance" (which is legal) isn't a separate phenomenon from "tax evasion" (which is not), but rather a thinly veiled euphemism for it:

https://www.propublica.org/series/the-secret-irs-files

That realization sits behind my series of noir novels about the two-fisted forensic accountant Martin Hench, which started with last April's Red Team Blues and continues with The Bezzle, this coming February:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865847/red-team-blues

A typical noir hero is an unlicensed cop, who goes places the cops can't go and asks questions the cops can't ask. The noir part comes in at the end, when the hero is forced to admit that he's being going places the cops didn't want to go and asking questions the cops didn't want to ask. Marty Hench is a noir hero, but he's not an unlicensed cop, he's an unlicensed IRS inspector, and like other noir heroes, his capers are forever resulting in his realization that the questions and places the IRS won't investigate are down to their choice not to investigate, not an inability to investigate.

The IRS Files are a testimony to this proposition: that Leona Hemsley wasn't wrong when she said, "Taxes are for the little people." Helmsley's crime wasn't believing that proposition – it was stating it aloud, repeatedly, to the press. The tax-avoidance strategies revealed in the IRS Files are obviously tax evasion, and the IRS simply let it slide, focusing their auditing firepower on working people who couldn't afford to defend themselves, looking for things like minor compliance errors committed by people receiving public benefits.

Or at least, that's how it used to be. But the Biden administration poured billions into the IRS, greenlighting 30,000 new employees whose mission would be to investigate the kinds of 0.1%ers and giant multinational corporations who'd Helmsleyed their way into tax-free fortunes. The fact that these elite monsters paid no tax was hardly a secret, and the impunity with which they functioned was a constant, corrosive force that delegitimized American society as a place where the rules only applied to everyday people and not the rich and powerful who preyed on them.

The poster-child for the IRS's new anti-impunity campaign is Microsoft, who, decades ago, "sold its IP to to an 85-person factory it owned in a small Puerto Rican city," brokered a deal with the corporate friendly Puerto Rican government to pay almost no taxes, and channeled all its profits through the tiny facility:

https://www.propublica.org/article/the-irs-decided-to-get-tough-against-microsoft-microsoft-got-tougher

That was in 2005. Now, the IRS has come after Microsoft for all the taxes it evaded through the gambit, demanding that the company pay it $29 billion. What's more, the courts are taking the IRS's side in this case, consistently ruling against Microsoft as it seeks to keep its ill-gotten billions:

https://www.propublica.org/article/irs-microsoft-audit-back-taxes-puerto-rico-billions

Now, no one expects that Microsoft is going to write a check to the IRS tomorrow. The company's made it clear that they intend to tie this up in the courts for a decade if they can, claiming, for example, that Trump's amnesty for corporate tax-cheats means the company doesn't have to give up a dime.

This gambit has worked for Microsoft before. After seven years in antitrust hell in the 1990s, the company was eventually convicted of violating the Sherman Act, America's bedrock competition law. But they kept the case in court until 2001, running out the clock until GW Bush was elected and let them go free. Bush had a very selective version of being "tough on crime."

But for all that Microsoft escaped being broken up, the seven years of depositions, investigations, subpoenas and negative publicity took a toll on the company. Bill Gates was personally humiliated when he became the star of the first viral video, as grainy VHS tapes of his disastrous and belligerent deposition spread far and wide:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/12/whats-a-murder/#miros-tilde-1

If you really want to know who Bill Gates is beneath that sweater-vested savior persona, check out the antitrust deposition – it's still a banger, 25 years on:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/09/revisiting-the-spectacular-failure-that-was-the-bill-gates-deposition/

In cases like these, the process is the punishment: Microsoft's dirty laundry was aired far and wide, its swaggering founder was brought low, and the company's conduct changed for years afterwards. Gates once told Kara Swisher that Microsoft missed its chance to buy Android because they were "distracted by the antitrust trial." But the Android acquisition came four years after the antitrust case ended. What Gates meant was that four years after he wriggled off the DoJ's hook, he was still so wounded and gunshy that he lacked the nerve to risk the regulatory scrutiny that such an anticompetitive merger would entail.

What's more, other companies got the message too. Large companies watched what happened to Microsoft and traded their reckless disregard for antitrust law for a timid respect. The effect eventually wore off, but the Microsoft antitrust case created a brief window where real competition was possible without the constant threat of being crushed by lawless monopolists. Sometimes you have to execute an admiral to encourage the others.

A decade in IRS hell will be even more painful for Microsoft than the antitrust years were. For one thing, the Puerto Rico scam was mainly a product of ex-CEO Steve Ballmer, a man possessed of so little executive function that it's a supreme irony that he was ever a corporate executive. Ballmer is a refreshingly plain-spoken corporate criminal who is so florid in his blatant admissions of guilt and shouted torrents of self-incriminating abuse that the exhibits in the Microsoft-IRS cases to come are sure to be viral sensations beyond even the Gates deposition's high-water mark.

It's not just Ballmer, either. In theory, corporate crime should be hard to prosecute because it's so hard to prove criminal intent. But tech executives can't help telling on themselves, and are very prone indeed to putting all their nefarious plans in writing (think of the FTC conspirators who hung out in a group-chat called "Wirefraud"):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/03/big-tech-cant-stop-telling-on-itself/

Ballmer's colleagues at Microsoft were far from circumspect on the illegitimacy of the Puerto Rico gambit. One Microsoft executive gloated – in writing – that it was a "pure tax play." That is, it was untainted by any legitimate corporate purpose other than to create a nonsensical gambit that effectively relocated Microsoft's corporate headquarters to a tiny CD-pressing plant in the Caribbean.

But if other Microsoft execs were calling this a "pure tax play," one can only imagine what Ballmer called it. Ballmer, after all, is a serial tax-cheat, the star of multiple editions of the IRS Files. For example, there's the wheeze whereby he has turned his NBA team into a bottomless sinkhole for the taxes on his vast fortune:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/08/tuyul-apps/#economic-substance-doctrine

Or his "tax-loss harvesting" – a ploy whereby rich people do a "wash trade," buying and selling the same asset at the same time, not so much circumventing the IRS rules against this as violating those rules while expecting the IRS to turn a blind eye:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/24/tax-loss-harvesting/#mego

Ballmer needs all those scams. After all, he was one of the pandemic's most successful profiteers. He was one of eight billionaires who added at least a billion more to his net worth during lockdown:

https://inequality.org/great-divide/billionaire-bonanza-2020/

Like all forms of rot, corruption spreads. Microsoft turned Washington State into a corporate tax-haven and starved the state of funds, paving the way for other tax-cheats like Amazon to establish themselves in the area. But the same anti-corruption movement that revitalized the IRS has also taken root in Washington, where reformers instituted a new capital gains tax aimed at the ultra-wealthy that has funded a renaissance in infrastructure and social spending:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/03/when-the-tide-goes-out/#passive-income

If the IRS does manage to drag Microsoft through the courts for the next decade, it's going to do more than air the company's dirty laundry. It'll expose more of Ballmer's habitual sleaze, and the ways that Microsoft dragged a whole state into a pit of austerity. And even more importantly, it'll expose the Puertopia conspiracy, a neocolonial project that transformed Puerto Rico into an onshore-offshore tax-haven that saw the island strip-mined and then placed under corporate management:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/27/boricua/#que-viva-albizu

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/13/pour-encoragez-les-autres/#micros-tilde-one

My next novel is The Lost Cause, a hopeful novel of the climate emergency. Amazon won't sell the audiobook, so I made my own and I'm pre-selling it on Kickstarter!

#pluralistic #irs #puerto rico #puertopia #microsoft #micros~1 #tax avoidance #tax evasion #pure tax play #big tech can't stop telling on itself #corporate crime #rough ride #the procedure is the punishment #steve ballmer #pour encouragez les autres

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