Ah, the old classic "the 16th Amendment was never really ratified" argument. A perennial loser when it is brought up in court.
It is such a weak argument that now I'm wondering if that site is as sloppy in their research on the other interesting articles I found there, like the ones about how there were more white slaves than black slaves in the US, or how the Rothschilds control the US, or chemtrails are real and drenching the population with mercury (to accomplish one or more of: make it hard to prove that mercury in vaccines is a source of harm, to reduce the population, or centralize power with the UN), or a bunch of stuff on the Pope, the Freemasons, and the Illuminati that was sufficiently incoherent that I couldn't quite tell what they were claiming.
Are you sure that the site is not meant as on over the top satire of conspiracy theories?
The 16th Amendment was passed in response to SCOTUS's ruling in Pollock. Pollock held that a tax on income derived from property (i.e., rental income) was effectively a property tax, and therefore a direct tax, requiring apportionment to the states. This is why the 16th Amendment says "power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived" (emphasis added). There was prior precedent that income taxes per se were constitutional (Springer v US, per Wikipedia). Furthermore, Pollock's reasoning itself is pretty close to bunk--I wouldn't expect SCOTUS to uphold it even without the 16th Amendment.
Oh god, rereading the article, it gets worse:
> Can a law declared unconstitutional in 1895 be constitutional in 1913 and beyond?
Yes, if there is a change in the constitution explicitly done so as to render it constitutional. But it's also not like SCOTUS itself hasn't changed its mind on what's constitutional and unconstitutional in the past (see Commerce Clause jurisprudence for an example of where unconstitutional interpretations have become constitutional).
Uber has its corporate head quarters for the EU in Amsterdam. For a company the size of Uber to have 50 different entities is not particularly special, you will find several other American multinationals there with the same number (for example, one for each jurisdiction they operate in).
The term "shell companies" seems to imply something nefarious, and that may very well be the case, but in itself having 50 entities in The Netherlands is not really a sign of that.
It's also important to point out that they do not chose The Netherlands for low corporate tax rates, they are not the lowest in the EU by far, but because of "tax rulings". Those are agreements they can make with the tax authorities that ascertain them how much tax they will pay this year as long as revenue, costs, etc, stay within a certain bandwidth. In the US it can take over a year for them to get any certainty on what their tax bill would be for the previous year.
