it's like the rule pamphlet for Monopoly

It's chapter 5 of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange rule
book.

You would think that a law or two would be necessary
to stop the rapacious futures trading. Max Keiser says
the productive economy takes futures up the butt,
because they can ruin production prices.

Anyway, it's nice that there's a rule book, rather
than a stuffy law book.
Of course, according to Eric Hunsader, the Super
Nanex Man, the rules are being broken every day
under the nose of a pretty-boy pussy regulator,
Bart Chilton.

To educate us all, he sent out chapter 5 of the
"rule" book, the rule book that is followed
only by exception.

[the rules that are ignored are circled]

inflation deflation test

which of these two phenomena are you witnessing?

it depends on your income level.

it's a tale of two cities.

In one city, the citizens have had no growth for 40 years.
Their paychecks have stayed almost constant while inflation
has gone up massively.
They have made up for the shortfall by using credit to buy
groceries.
Before the 2008 crisis, they were overleveraged with a huge
mortgage and probably credit cards maxed.
Now, they're deleveraging. Selling the house and moving into
the car. pawning granny and most of the junk they piled into
their houses, over the good years.
That means they're suffering deflation because their part of
the economy is suffering from falling prices, for assets like
houses (which they owe a ton of money on).

If you own capital, a company, a bank or are one of the
lazy rich, you're going through  mild inflation because
you're offshoring your profits, so you don't waste your
money on public stuff like schools, that you don't use.
You've recently been given millions or billions by the
government to make it seem as if we have a strong
economy.
That means you're investing in whatever gives you a
return, so your inflating bubbles in real estate, the stock
market, and call girl (madame) fees. But you don't care because
you're flush with money. If you try to get the government
to pay for your losses due to inflation, you'll likely
cause a revolution, so be careful.

If you can't understand me, let Jim Rickards tell you.
He's at the 13:30 point in this video

Spool up the film, boys:

trade deals are race to lowest common denominator

And they're sprinting nowadays, thanks to their hard work
in the Reagan/Thatcher scam-ocracy. Trade deals were
designed to help companies become rich, for the rich
to move their money across borders easily , avoiding tax
and to scam workers out of a living.

And that's just the first line of goals. Now we're dealing
with bankers running our countries, big companies
bullying and blackmailing our politicians and workers
on pogey.

One deal , this may all change, but if a sensible American
senator is presenting the stark truth, then there is hope.
Trade is not trade god if it destroys your country.
Globalisation is not good if it destroys your country.

that's especially true if you're a developing country. Listen
to the economist Ha-Joon Chang at a recent talk. He laid
out what development requires, and that's planning and
regulation, firstly

let's cut to the video:

checkit: Alan Grayson

U.S. Congressman for Florida's 9th District

Time to End the Free Trade Sellout

Posted: 05/09/2013 3:15 pm

Alan Grayson

Until Friday, you have the chance to make your voice heard about a pending massive corporate giveaway now being promoted by the U.S. Trade Representative. It's a chance that you should take.

The agreement the trade representative  is seeking comments on is the "Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership." Even the title makes you ill, doesn't it?

Known as a "NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) with Europe," the "partnership" is actually a deal between multinational corporations and their minions in government. It features "investor-state" dispute resolution, which would permit foreign corporations to file lawsuits to prevent government actions that they don't like, such as health, environmental and safety regulations. If this sounds crazy, that's because it is.

But there's a twisted corporate "logic" behind it.

Trade policy has historically been associated with tariffs. But since President Richard M. Nixon invented a new way of negotiating trade deals in the 1970s, these deals have attacked what's known as "non-tariff barriers" to trade.

Interesting concept, but it has degenerated into handcuffs on government, slapped on at will by special interests. Let's say your country or state passes a consumer protection law -- such as one that says fishing companies must label tuna caught using methods that kill dolphins. A Mexican corporation that sells tuna in the United States might declare this is a "non-tariff barrier" to trade, undercutting Mexican sellers of tuna versus American ones (though it applies equally to both).

Under the guise of a "free trade" agreement, the government could be sued, and have the dolphin-safe tuna law overturned.

This actually happened, in 2012. The World Trade Organization ruled against the American dolphin-safe tuna labeling law. So this is not just a theoretical possibility. "These provisions elevate corporations to the level of nation states and allow them to sue governments over nearly any law or policy which reduces their future profits," the Sierra Club warns.

Canada has been sued under a similar clause in NAFTA for refusing to export its water. Canada has also  been sued for keeping a pollutant out of its gasoline supply, and for taxing windfall profits by oil companies. This next wave of trade agreements may prioritize corporate rights over the privacy of our personal data, restrict regulation on fracking and (as Senator Elizabeth Warren [D-Mass.] has warned) roll back much-needed rules on large banks.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has probably never met a regulation it didn't want to repeal or violate. The chamber is even arguing that the Volcker Rule, which restricts gambling with tax-payer protected deposits by large banks, violates U.S. trade policy.

"The Volcker Rule's discriminatory provision," the chamber has asserted, "certainly does, at a minimum, send the wrong message internationally and gravely complicates the long-standing U.S. goal of liberalizing trade in financial services."

Why are we even thinking about handing over our sovereign rights to huge corporations who care nothing about us? It's not as if these agreements bring us any net economic benefit. Since NAFTA went into effect in 1994, the United States has lost almost four million manufacturing jobs. Moreover, huge U.S. subsidies for corn have helped to make it impossible for millions of Mexican families to survive on the farm.

the slow game of chess that is tax justice

As we've all said, our economy is a game of Monopoly.
Well, I've got another metaphor which helps to explain
the difficulty in getting justice when the criminals are
friends with the government.

And we're talking the biggest mafia in the world, Banksters.

But riding on their coattails are big retailers that also want
to offshore their profits to avoid contributing to the
society that allows them to do business and pay
minimum wage to its employees.

So, when the government's crime fighters do not want to
prosecute financial crime, it's up to UK Uncut to take
the government to court.
This time it was for the deal the HMRC cut with Goldman
Sachs where they saved £20 million in tax that they should
have paid. And this was largely due to bullying from GS.

UK Uncut lost the court case because HMRC can indeed
do whatever the f$%^&ck it pleases. But, in dragging the
HMRC out from under a rock, UK Uncut have shown
the world how HMRC runs it's corrupt little shop.

And that is a small but necessary victory on the way to
bigger victories for tax justice.

Checkit:  Press Association

Campaigners lose tax deal challenge

1 hour 31 minutes ago.

Campaign group UK Uncut Legal Action has lost its High Court challenge over the legality of the "sweetheart" tax deal between HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) and Goldman Sachs.

A judge was told the 2010 deal, worth up to £20 million, was allowed to proceed to avoid "major embarrassment" to Chancellor George Osborne and the tax authorities after the bank became "aggressive" and allegedly made threats.

UK Uncut asked Mr Justice Nicol, sitting in London, to declare that HMRC's decision to let the deal go through was legally flawed and involved a breach of statutory duty. The judge ruled the deal was "not a glorious episode in the history of the Revenue" but it was not unlawful.

Tax authority lawyers defended the settlement, saying it was among five big business deals declared "reasonable" by a 2012 report of the National Audit Office (NAO) .

 UK Uncut says it is wrong to allow rich companies to avoid paying millions in tax while the Government imposes tough austerity measures on the poor and ordinary taxpayers are pursued for every penny.

 Murray Worthy, a director of UK Uncut Legal Action, said after Wednesday's hearing that he was disappointed with the ruling. But he added: "This case has shown that the Government's tough talk on tax is just that - talk not substance."

 HMRC said in a press statement: "Large business tax settlements are a vital part of how HMRC secures tax revenues for the country and without them Britain's public finances would be seriously damaged."

 Anna Walker, campaigns director of UK Uncut Legal Action, said: "Obviously, while we are deeply disappointed that this deal has not been declared unlawful, the judge's ruling that top HMRC officials played politics with major tax deals to protect (Mr) Osborne's reputation is a major victory in exposing the truth behind these secret deals.

 "Despite not having won the case today, we still feel that this judgment has demonstrated that the Government is making a political choice to cut legal aid, public services and the welfare system, rather than take action to make corporate giants... pay their fair share of tax."

 Solicitor Rosa Curling, of law firm Leigh Day, which represented UK Uncut Legal Action, said: "This is a disappointing decision but it has been an extremely important case to fight. It has forced HMRC to reveal the process by which it reached a deal with Goldman Sachs, a settlement which let the bank off an estimated £20 million tax owed."

my store is a warehouse, I mean, a post box in Basel

I don't know the details of the offshoring or tax
arbitrage that particularly Internet based companies
are using to avoid taxes, like Amazon, Google &
sellers of Swiss-grown coffee, Starbucks.

If high street stores have to pay full corporation tax,
if they are a corp, then why don't Amazon, for ex?

They apparently take orders that "fall out of the sky",
having come from the UK, by fibreoptic phone line,
at the Amazon offices in Ireland, a low tax
and "offshore" whorehouse on the Euro-17
PIIGS playlist. It's a miracle of accounting.
Erin go brastrap.

That shop fulfills the order and sends the
product to the UK buyer and he feels
pretty intelligent for screwing the main street
store that pays its employees minimum wage,
but in so doing is cheating himself out of a
pension, health care and education, by degrees.

That will not appear on the bill, you Amazo-morons,
but you can't hide your guilt any more. It's all
over those newspapers that you read for free
on the 'Net.

So, something has to be done to discern the tax
owed by these fly-by-night 'Net corps. You have
to redefine revenue source, expenses, doing
business, and so on.

The cheap and cheerful solution is the following
set of questions that a taxman can ask. I'm not
surprised that HMRC has not thought of this:

1. you take UK orders online, but do you have
a warehouse in the UK?
answer: YUP (Amazon does, for sure)
2. why do you have a UK warehouse?
answer: it's cheaper to ship to UK customers
3. So, you don't want to post them from
your offices in Ireland?
answer: what are you? stupid?
4. Okay, you're essentially doing business
in the UK, like a main street store, except
your staff are too busy and too ugly to be
shown to the public, and because you
think you're swift hiding them in a service
warehouse. Well, you ain't fooling this
blogger. Pay up, Amazon. Amazing, innit?
answer: but, but, I'm calling Dave
5. F^&*k you. pay up now. not at the end of
the year, cuz you'll hide your money offshore,
when it belongs to me. Pay at source,
fuddermucker, just like your starving employees.

Knowing your rights as they disappear out the window

An education

I can only echo the great work by
Scriptonite blog

this stuff works in the UK, but our leaders
are comparing notes, so, soon...



George Carlin at 5:00


checkit: Scriptonite
Police State UK: The Rights You Didn’t Know You’d Lost
Recent decades have seen a dramatic curtailing of hard won civil liberties. These restrictions have been inadvertently cushioned by the expansion of the internet and the ability to exercise some of these rights by proxy on the web. Today we look at the scale of the civil liberties confiscations.
What are Civil Liberties Anyway?
PS2
“Civil liberties is another name for the political freedoms that we must have available to us all if it to be true to say of us that we live in a society that adheres to the principle of representative, or democratic, government.” ~ Professor Conor Gearty
These liberties can loosely be described as the right to vote, the right to life, the prohibition of torture, security of the person, the right to personal liberty and due process of law, freedom of expression and freedom of association.
In the UK they were developed through the English Charter of Liberties which extended rights to the nobility and church officials from 1100AD. Between 1213 and 1215AD groups from across England came together to draft the Magna Carta which extended a fuller group of protections and rights out to further groups. The 18th and 19th centuries saw workers movements develop to enshrine labour conditions and the rights to collective bargaining through unions and the right to strike. The first and second world wars motivated a final revolution in civil liberties including rights to healthcare, education, equal opportunities in the workplace and so on. In 1998, New Labour signed the European Convention on Human Rights into British Law with the Human Rights Act. This meant that there was legal underpinning to this bill of rights, which enshrined our civil liberties.
But before and since 1998, these rights have been eroded at a terrifying pace, particularly compared with the glacial rate at which they developed in the first place.
The ability to express our thoughts in blogs and rally in protest by hashtag may have numbed us to the reality of a bonfire of our liberties. We’ve been tweeting while Rome burned.
Personal Liberty and Due Process before the Law
PS3
Since 1649 and the passing of the Habeas Corpus Act, citizens have been protected from false and arbitrary imprisonment and restriction of their personal liberty by the presumption of innocence until proof of their guilt is established by a jury of their peers in an independent court. Yet successive governments have passed legislation which seriously undermines this principle, and allows the state and its police force to restrict liberty and confine citizens without interference by the courts.
Detention without Charge
Prior to 1984, a person could not be held by police for longer than 24 hours without a criminal charge being made against them. The Thatcher government extended this to four days. New Labour extended this first to seven days, then to 14 days, and finally sought the power to detain citizens without charge for up to 90 days, at the request of the police. Whilst the Blair government was defeated on 90 days, the period was doubled nevertheless to 28 day. The Coalition allowed this legislation to expire in 2011, returning the period to 14 days, only to apply for permission to extend to 28 days in the same year.
Meanwhile, the Anti Terrorism and Security Act 2001 allowed for indefinite detention of non British citizens suspected of committing terrorist acts, where there was not enough evidence to proceed to a court of law.
Unlawful Imprisonment
The Control Orders passed in the Terrorism Act 2006 meant anybody suspected of terrorist related activities by the Home Secretary, but without any kind of trial, can be electronically tagged, monitored, be restricted from making phone calls, using the internet, be banned from certain kinds of work, can be restricted from going certain places, have one’s passport revoked and be under a duty to report to the police.
The current government did not extend the life of Control Orders, but replaced them with TPIMS. This saw two improvements, a two year time limit and approval of a judge required. However, a recent review of TPIMS reported that the burden of proof required to administer such an order was too low and that the extreme restrictions were neither necessary nor working.
Secret Courts
The 700 year old UK tradition of open justice has been withering on the vine with successive legislation since 1997 which allowed ‘Closed Material Proceedings’ or Secret Courts into the Justice system. First introduced in 1997 for immigration trials, they were later used for Control Order and TPIM related charges. Yet, in a stunning move this month, the Coalition government and parliament approved legislation to apply Secret Courts in civil cases. Henceforth, if a citizen takes the British government or its officials to court in cases of torture, rendition, or a whole host of other reasons, the government is able to present evidence to the judge which the claimant, defendant, media and public will never be privy to. It will allow the government to resist due scrutiny for its role in torture, rendition and other crimes. The Rev Nicholas Mercer, a lieutenant colonel who was the army’s most senior lawyer during the last Iraq war, told the Daily Mail:
“The justice and security bill has one principal aim and that is to cover up UK complicity in rendition and torture. The bill is an affront to the open justice on which this country rightly prides itself and, above all, it is an affront to human dignity.”
Freedom of Expression and Assembly
PS4
Perhaps the most readily noticeable restrictions on our liberties to those engaged in campaign and protest, has been in the arena of Freedom of Expression and Assembly. The rise in so called ‘anti-terror’ legislation throughout the period of the New Labour government has had a massive impact on our ability to organise sizable demonstrations, marches and actions without the threat of increasing militarised police force.

Right to Protest
Thatcher’s Public Order Act 1986 sought to prevent the effectiveness of public protest (such as the Miners Strike) by making it law that in order to be lawful, protest organisers had to give police six days advance notice of their action. Since this time, successive governments have used upgrades to the Public Order Act to undermine the right to peaceful protest.
The Serious and Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 granted a number of powers to police and restrictions on protesters.
In response to the protest of Brian Haw who spoke to parliament from Parliament Square for several years as a protest against the crimes of the Iraq War, the Act applied special restrictions on protest within a designated area of 1km of any point of Parliament Square. Basically, it is now almost impossible to protest outside our parliament without being arrested.

Bankster Crime wave, part 4 How to take over a country

We know that the City of London has always
been a financial cesspool. But the monster
is now reaching out to other countries in the
West that enjoy the rule of law (the one which
says that the rich have no laws).
So, the future Euro banking centre will likely
be in Ireland now that it has been taken over
by the Troika, in the name of broke German
banks that are looking for refuge.

Ghost companies hang out together in the Shadow World.

checkit:  Irish times

No desks. No staff. No tax. Ireland’s shadow banks

Ireland’s unregulated and barely visible ‘shadow banking’ industry is 10 times the size of our GNP. Is it a benefit or a threat to the economy?

Carl O'Brien, Caelainn Barr

Sat, May 11, 2013, 08:40

First published: Sat, May 11, 2013, 01:00

So many companies are listed in the marble-tiled, plant-filled foyer that there are no brass plates or printed guides. Instead, it takes a computer to search through them all. This is 5 Harbourmaster Place, a Celtic Tiger-era chrome-and-glass building at the edge of the International Financial Services Centre, in Dublin.

It might not look big enough to house them all, but this modest-sized building is home to about 250 companies. One is Orpington Structured Finance I. It has gross assets of €1.7 billion, which would make it one of the most valuable firms in Ireland. Except it has no employees. It has no buildings or machinery. Nor does it pay any tax.

It is one of hundreds of so-called financial-vehicle corporations, which are companies set up to house or trade in securitised investments, in other words to package and resell loans.

It’s part of a much wider area of financial activity known as shadow banking, a term coined five years ago when the US economist Paul McCulley defined the area as the “whole alphabet soup of levered-up non-bank investment conduits, vehicles and structures”.

The term spread almost as fast as the financial crisis, and regulators and governments have been mobilising ever since to try to map this largely uncharted world.

It’s big business: the total value of assets in the Republic’s shadow-banking sector, at €1.7 trillion, is almost 11 times the State’s gross national product, which is the total value of all products and services produced in a single year.

Supporters of low taxes and multinational-friendly policies say these companies help create much-needed jobs in a country with 14 per cent unemployment and stagnant growth. The wider IFSC employs an estimated 32,000 people, for example, and contributes about €1 billion in corporation tax. Of those employees, about 1,000 work in companies linked to the securitisation industry. If Ireland weren’t courting this kind of business, the argument goes, it would end up in rival jurisdictions, such as the UK or the Netherlands.

But detractors question whether the benefits really stack up.

Much shadow-banking activity is set up to attract little, if any, tax. This reliance on aggressive tax avoidance, critics say, distorts the country’s industrial policy and leaves it vulnerable to appealing changes in tax rates around the world.

 Moral argument

 There is also a moral argument: companies and people who don’t pay a fair proportion of tax shift the burden on to those who do. At a time when PAYE workers and the middle classes are bearing the brunt of tax increases, many grumble that corporations are able to escape without paying their share.

On Tuesday, at a meeting of the EU’s finance and economics ministers, issues such as aggressive tax avoidance and profit-shifting across borders will be out of the shadows and in the spotlight.

In its role as president of the council of the European Union, the Government says it is leading efforts to tackle this area.

Yet Ireland has been under pressure from some of its neighbours to tackle its low-tax regime and plug loopholes such as the “double Irish”, which allow Google and other US multinationals to lower their tax liabilities dramatically.

Although Ireland has avoided being labelled a tax haven by international bodies such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, some academics say it deserves the name.

Nicholas Shaxson, an associate fellow of the UK think tank Chatham House and the author of Treasure Islands , a book about the offshore system, says Ireland is a tax haven by his definition in light of the country’s regulation of financial services.

“What I have seen in Ireland does fit so closely the pattern I’ve seen again and again in tax havens, which is this willingness to do what the financiers want, really not ask any questions, and to have all sorts of measures for keeping Irish democracy out and keeping debate out of the way,” he says.

“That’s by either doing things behind closed doors and the shaping of a national consensus that ‘this is the goose that lays the golden egg and we mustn’t do anything to trouble it’ . . . to arguments that all this stuff is going to go overseas if we touch it, so let’s not rock the boat.”

Shaxson calls this “the captured state”: a world in which policymaking has been largely taken over by financial interests that can pick and choose between jurisdictions and in effect write the laws they need. “That happens in its purest form in the very small tax havens where there is just no local democracy to do anything. There is a little bit of a counterweight but it isn’t very strong in Ireland.”

Others go further still. Dr Conor McCabe of the Equality Studies Centre at University College Dublin, who is a campaigner in the area of tax justice, says companies can ride roughshod across competing jurisdictions, extracting what they want and contributing little. “They want all the pluses of a modern democracy while seeking to reduce their obligations to zero. They are behaving like parasites,” says McCabe.

The financial services sector insists Ireland has benefited hugely from its competitive tax regime through large-scale employment and investment.

“Ireland is not a tax haven. It has an excellent network of treaties with other jurisdictions and operates a simple and transparent corporation-tax system,” says Fergal O’Brien, the chief economist with the employers’ group Ibec, which represents financial services.

 

Bankster Crime wave, part 3 Machines cannot front-run

It takes a human to program an HFT machine to trade
before the secret trade information is presented
to the rest of the public, outside of politicians
and their bankster buddies.

So, they get all the profits.



The Facebook IPO had that , and many other
broken laws to account for.
Again, no charges.

Checkit: Nanex 

~ 15-May-2013 ~ You are not Fooling Anybody

RT Prime Interest:

    HFT is also prevalent in futures, and so in that regard, Bart Chilton, a commissioner of the CFTC, has said he wants to put a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval on every algo. And this seems maybe a little unfeasible, what are your thoughts on how to reign in some of the damage that you see these algos posing?

Hunsader:

    OK. Bart, listen. I don't understand why it's taking you this long to find these things [manipulation], they're so obvious to us, who have been in the industry for a long time, and they are obvious to traders who work with and see market data. There is no excuse for this, these are just blatant, and it's getting even more blatant, the manipulation going on.

    You know you can talk all you want, but when Adam Clark-Joseph puts out a paper that shows the top HFT's take liquidity 59% of the time, and they are successful by using exploratory trading, which is a manipulative strategy, and when that paper comes out of the CFTC's academic program, using CFTC data, and your response is to curtail or severely curb academic's access to this data, you are not fooling anybody.

Bankster Crime wave, part 2 Send in the Mystery Machine

I am here doing my duty , echoing the hard
work of investigators in the Sam Spade
mould, who discover economic crime and
yet the police refuse to get their man, unless
he has stolen a water bottle.

There are ghost companies. They are located
in a country for tax reasons and don't even need
to rent an office, or even buy a chair. They are
represented by a post box.

It was like the Apocalypse when Nicholas Shaxson
showed his Youtube audience that Boots, a UK
retail pharmacy institution had been "reduced" to
a post box on the side of a building in some
Swiss city.

Investigator vs police

Investigator: Okay, so I located the box. Who does it belong to?
Police: Dunno
I: Where is the company registered?
P: Dunno
I: Some info was leaked from a tax haven by ICIJ
P: Dunno. What about it?
I: We found out who the post box belongs to
P: Whataboutit?
I: Let's arrest them
P: They're in the Caymans
I: NO, you moron. The company is registered there. They are
 having lunch in Bloomsbury, right now.
P: They'll get indigestion
I: They're breaking morality laws
P: But no legal ones right?
I: Perhaps
P: Go to your member of parliament, den
I: Right. Go back to sleep

checkit:  Tax justice

Where there's muck, there's brass plates: on the trail of UK ghost companies

The UK's investigative and satirical magazine Private Eye has produced a major new investigation into corporate crime, handled via the United Kingdom. The subtitle of the piece 'how UK ghost companies made Britain the capital of corporate crime" is quite apt, notwithstanding the best efforts of jurisdictions like New Zealand to outdo the UK.

The article is not online, unfortunately, so if you're in the UK you'll have to go out and buy a copy on the newsstands - it's available now. There's far too much in here to give it full justice, but a couple of paragraphs should give a sense of what's going on here:

    “Limited liability partnerships”, of which Vector Aerospace LLP was one, joined the lexi- con of British corporate law only in 2000 as a result of heavy lobbying from Britain’s big accountancy partnerships, which wanted to limit their liability for carrying out dodgy audits without becoming limited companies and so incurring extra taxes. [See Treasure Islands, and the Ratchet chapter, for the extraordinary story of how the accountancy firms got Britain to enact its LLP laws.] The new corporate vehicle allowed them to have it both ways by stipulating that an LLP would have limited liability but would not be a taxable entity itself (see Partnerships in crime).

    The new hybrid had great appeal: not just to respectable accountants, but also to those who were up to no good. For if an LLP’s members can also claim that they are not taxable in the UK, there is nothing to trouble the taxman and no inconvenient questions will be asked by the authorities about what the LLP is up to.

This is pure tax haven activity, and Britain is rapidly heading down this road. One last TJN-related section from the story:

    "In 2009/10, a study by campaigning accountant [and a TJN Senior Adviser] Richard Murphy found that of the 2.6m companies on the UK companies register, just 69 percent were even asked for a tax return by the authorities and only 45 percent actually submitted one. While it is impossible to measure precisely how many of Britain’s ghost companies are part of interna- tional criminal networks, it is in these helpfully crowded and murky waters that some of the world’s most serious organised crooks swim undetected."

. . . . and much, much more: this is just a taster. You can see the authors, Andrew Bousfeld and Richard Brooks, in a short video clip here. Among other things they watch a postman stuff large quantities of letters through a letterbox, and they're clearly visible through the glass door.

"All these letters have landed face down," Brooks says ruefully: "that's what you call tough sh*t."

The text piece finishes like this:

    "Epic levels of money laundering, illicit arms dealing, frauds, counterfeiting and government corruption are the result, all thriving on emasculated British company law and political and official indifference. A clean-up is indeed badly needed. Right here and right now."

Bankster Crime wave, part 1 The City of Mamon

The articles get ever more eloquent and well-
referenced and yet nothing can make the
government move to stop the crimes caused
by the bankers.

Well, if we don't fight, austerity is going to be our
undertaker.

So, I can only echo the work of the brave people
at the coalface of white collar crime.

In this first one, we see how the City of London,
that is the head of the British offshoring
octopussy, and then some, actually runs the country.

Read 'em: Rowans blog

The City of London and the Offshore sector - The Enemy Within

The City of London, the world's biggest tax evasion facilitator and money laundry has just been given some more good news, courtesy of George Osborne and the Coalition Government. The Chancellor of the Exchequer has just sent them a lightly coded message that their offshore revenue stream is guaranteed for the foreseeable future!

George Osborne has just chaired a G7 ministers' meeting at which the question of tax evasion and aggressive tax avoidance was on the agenda!

The Huffington Post reports that "...Osborne G7 Talks Sees Chancellor Criticised After Dodging Details On Tax Avoidance..."

Regular readers of this blog will recall my observations last week ("Lies, Damned Lies, and Civil Service Misinformation") about the likelihood of the UK Government doing anything too aggressively to challenge the offshore-sector and its control of the tax evasion/aggroidance (my shorthand for aggressive tax avoidance schemes) industry !

And so it has proved

George Osborne has now been criticised for failing to set out any concrete steps to promote economic growth or tackle tax avoidance during G7 talks, despite his insistence that the meeting with finance ministers and central bank chiefs was "successful and constructive."

Using such weasel words, and playing up the meeting for all it's worth, Osborne sought to make a great deal of how the meeting had made real steps in the debate on fiscal evasion issues.

....

Mr Osborne said British overseas territories "need to do more" to end tax evasion.

Well, that's like saying the Taliban needs to do more to encourage greater female emancipation in Afghanistan!  Ambitious, possibly; desirable, certainly; but ultimately futile and illusory!

Asked about the future of tax havens such as Jersey or the Cayman Islands, he said he had already been "very tough" in his message to them but wanted to see more action.

"...Of course we would like these jurisdictions to do more..," he said.

"...We want them to commit to some of the existing agreements that are in place on tax information and transparency and we have these initiatives which we are pursuing in the G8, for example around beneficial ownership, which we would also expect all jurisdictions to be able to sign up to..."

None of these comments amount to a row of beans in reality. He can send all the tough messages he likes, he can want them to do more, and sign up to vague initiatives about beneficial ownership, but this isn't going to change the reality of the situation that the offshore sector survives and thrives because wealthy people put their money there secure in the knowledge that it will be secure and kept in complete confidence

I have already discussed the futility of these plans at some length in a previous blog and nothing I read here from Osborne is going to change my views one iota. Because then comes the reality interlude, when the real world politique creeps in! He says;

"...Of course you have to respect that many of these territories have important industries and we don't want to unnecessarily damage them..."

Well, I should think not, and that is the underlying hidden message he has to send them, because these offshore areas generate a huge amount of money which the City of London, the enemy within, is waiting to receive. But at the same time, Osborne has to play the Perfidious Albion games! So he reverts to the default mode and trots out the shibboleths again.

"...But it is necessary to collect tax that is owed and it is necessary to reduce tax avoidance and the crown dependencies and the overseas territories need to play their part in that drive and they need to do more..."

"... We all agreed on the importance of collective action to tackle tax avoidance and evasion..," he said.

Well, no doubt they did, as they peeled their Plovers' eggs, and shovelled down the Boeuf a la Bordelaise! It's not difficult to agree to an assertion as bland as that, after all, ask yourself, what was being agreed to?

"It is incredibly important that companies and individuals pay the tax that is due and this is important not just for Britain and for British taxpayers but also for many developing nations as well."

You will note that the emphasis here is on the "...tax that is owed..." but expecting the crown dependencies and the overseas territories to do anything about it, has the same element of successful expectation as being the voting returning officer at the turkey farm when the Christmas vote is announced!

It is this kind of state-sponsored double-speak that makes the UK look positively mendacious. It is the kind of statement that is drafted by some clever young Treasury policy wonk who knows full well there isn't the slightest intention by anyone in Government to do the least thing about it

And why?

Because the UK Government is a hostage to the City of London and the City now ultimately determines all financial policies, and that is why I term them 'the enemy within'. The Government has quietly surrendered the lead role in defining the UK's future to the City of London, a non-elected, non-transparent, undemocratic group of elites, and the Government will dance to their tune.

This is why the Government's threats to break up the 'too big to fail, too big to jail' banks into small regional hubs is met by two fingers from Threadneedle Street! This is why the proposal to ring-fence the retail banks is met be a resounding raspberry from Throgmorton Avenue!

You see, the City of London no longer needs the UK, the boot is on the other foot, the UK needs the City! I used to believe that the Government was Sovereign, that Parliament was the final arbiter, and that confronted with a vague threat to 'take our business elsewhere' if too much pressure was applied to the City institutions to reform their game, was an empty threat, and I have previously urged the Government to call their bluff!

But I was wrong! The Government dare not call their bluff because the City of London isn't just a bunch of buildings inside four postal codes; it is a concept of enormous power, an exclusive entity, a very private members-only club into which outsiders are not invited to enter; it is a powerful clique which exerts huge influence and pressure; it is a Mafia! Even Her Majesty the Queen requests formal permission to enter the City of London on a special formal occasion (permission is always granted)!

The City doesn't exist to support this country, it exists for its own financial interests and the rest of us can go take a hike! It could, within a relatively short space of time, go offshore itself, indeed, it has already been described as the most powerful off-shore jurisdiction on earth! You don't need to be a palm-fringed island in the Caribbean to be an off-shore centre. The City has its own laws, and it only obeys those ones which Parliament enacts, when it pleases the suits so to do!

The amount of money that the City turns over each year is counted in Trillions of Pounds. As a fee, tribute, (bribe) to the UK Government to allow them to continue, the City contributes about 12% of the nation's GDP, in terms of the tax it agrees to pay on such profits as it sees fit to declare. The rest of its proceeds are very carefully squirreled away and are held in secure and confidential circumstances, and no-one is going to examine them!

The great financial crisis has brought the role of the City and its functions into greater notice and under more scrutiny, but we should not hold our breath hoping that Cameron or Osborne are going to do anything to bring this criminogenic enterprise to heel! They simply do not have the power to do it, and that is the problem.

When the Prime Minister or the Chancellor go down to the City to speak at their tables, you will note the degree of respect which is afforded to the men and women in fancy dress! They have to be respectful, because the City might take their ball away and go and play elsewhere, and they know that would be disastrous for them.

 So they pay lip-service to the conventions, and they make sure they protect the City from any attempts that somewhere called 'Brussels' might make to impose their will on the City of London. Transaction taxes! Not on your Nellie, monsieur. Capital adequacy rules! Only if everyone else is signed up to the same calculations, mein herr!  Anti-money laundering regulations! Now you are being fanciful, old boy!

In a time of the worst financial crisis any of us have ever experienced; at a time when we can see no light at the end of the austerity tunnel, the City of London continues to pursue its own path and writes its own pay cheque! Don't expect it to change its ways, because this is how it has always been done, the City of London is another country, and it is immune from the ordinary rules of engagement that attach to those outside the Square Mile.

5 quid? no. three quid? How about a deuce?

This is my latest understanding of charity work.

Charities are a business. They need to keep the money
flowing in and will use paid sales people to keep
it coming in.

I inadvertently found evidence of this when I
went to give a cheque to a group I respected.
I walked right into a Phugger boiler room, and
walked right out.

Phugger?

Charity + mugger= chugger
(they get you when you're shopping)

Phone + chugger= Phugger
(very common in Canada. Nobody answers the
phone any more, unless they have caller ID)

TV + chugger=  Tenderisers
(they're the ones that film starving kids, but don't
feed them, because that would be interfering)

Door-to-door + chugger= Duggers
(I did this for Greenpeace as a youngster,
until I realised that all my trainers were
high on pot)

I've noticed now that chuggers have been banned
from most shopping proms in the UK.

The Tenderisers are getting ever more cunning.
They used to say "for only a fiver a month",
but since 2008, people who are their main
targets, working and middle class people, are
getting ever more squeezed. So until recently
they were saying "for only 3 pounds" in their
usual syruppy voice that makes you want to
puke.

Things are getting ever tougher because they're
now, with a straight voice saying
"for only 2 pounds".
what the deuce?

[a different kind of mugging by the Deuce]

Why don't they go for the rich? the rich don't give.
They tend to run the charity, and make money
off it.

The rich give a lower percentage of their income,
and that's even with their offshoring bank accounts
and their government guaranteed monopolies.

Normal folks are the ones with heart.


checkit: Waging non violence
Is laughing the mic check of 2013?
Laura Gottesdiener
May 14, 2013
People scattered monopoly money on their way out of the New York Public Library after laughing at monopolist Carlos Slim. (WNV/Casper)
Last Thursday night’s event at the New York Public Library got a whole lot funnier when about 50 people staged a laugh-in against Mexican businessman Carlos Slim.
Famous (but not infamous enough) for being the world’s richest man, Slim was at the library to speak about his interest and recent investment in the free online courses of the Kahn Academy, yet his voice was drowned out by waves of laughter for the first 30 minutes of the event. Finally, a man rose and explained the joke to the befuddled audience.
“Carlos Slim, your charity is laughable,” activist Stan Williams declared. “But your monopolies are no laughing matter. You’re price-gouging your consumers and exploiting the Mexican people!”
Slim was attempting to recast himself as a philanthropist while stealing billions through his nearly complete control of Mexico’s telecommunications system. With the punchline delivered, the group then began marching around the room playing the Imperial Death March on plastic kazoos.
The action was organized by the coalition Two Countries One Voice and a cohort of New York City activists, including the Yes Men and, for full disclosure, me.
The idea for a laugh-in was inspired by an action in India in which hundreds gathered for a multi-day occupation outside of a then-governor’s office. The crowd had one goal: to laugh away the governor’s power to scare and control them. Andy Bichlbaum of the Yes Men explained that even uttering the governor’s name sparked uproarious laughter across the encampment.
“He didn’t immediately leave office,” Bichlbaum said. But when the next round of elections came, the governor was voted out.
The laugh-in against Carlos Slim deployed a similar atmosphere of levity to tackle serious issues: the fact that one man could be worth more than $70 billion dollars (more than half the GDP of his entire country), and a system in which charity is presented as the solution for mass poverty and systemic inequality.
Slim’s apparent generosity follows in a long tradition; charity has long been the way that the world’s top monopolists have cleansed their image, and it’s often used as the justification for why we should permit staggering wealth accumulation. In fact, the very location of the protest — the New York Public Library — is a monument to the robber-baron economic system of an earlier era. In the early 1900s, the Carnegie family provided millions in donations — today the equivalent of about a zillion dollars — for the creation of public libraries across New York. Sounds great, but it’s perhaps worth remembering that the Carnegies amassed their inconceivable wealth by crushing unions and exploiting workers as the expanded their steel and railroad empires. In one particularly flattering instance, known as the Homestead Strike of 1892, Carnegie quashed a workers’ protest by calling in thousands of men from the mercenary army Pinkerton first to fill the workers’ jobs and then to kill them. In order to shed themselves of these reputations, they funneled millions in dirty money into building libraries and public spaces — named, unsurprisingly, in their honor.
By investing in online free educational initiatives, Carlos Slim is playing a similar game, simply with less marble. With the increasing privatization of natural resources, educational systems and government operations (Slim’s telecommunications monopoly was sold to him by the Mexican government), the idea of public space is increasingly moving into the virtual plane. Hence Slim’s interest in free online education, and his desire to speak at an iconic educational institution alongside Salman Khan, the founder of the Khan Academy.
While online learning initiatives have their own murky implications for the future of public education, the laugh-in wasn’t a protest against Khan Academy. Rather, it was exposing the absurdity of Carlos Slim’s attempt to cleanse his image through charitable donations. According to Two Countries One Voice, the monopolist has effectively amassed his wealth by ratcheting up the prices for cell phone communications across Mexico, overcharging to the tune of tens of billions of dollars.
We think the all-too-common idea that people like Slim are a force for good in the world is pretty funny — and we bet more people will catch on to the joke soon enough.
Laura Gottesdiener is an organizer with Occupy Wall Street and a freelance journalist in New York City. She is the author of A Dream Foreclosed: The Fight for a Place to Call Home, forthcoming from Zuccotti Park Press.