It's not secret. Just don't tax anybody

Some folks think that cheating on taxes is okay,
but only if that cheater is a multi-national
corporation.
Successive Western governments (except Canada)
had slowly done away with any and all regulations
regarding business behaviour. When that wasn't
good enough, they just didn't enforce their own laws.
To wit: how many bankers from 2008 have gone to jail?
I rest my case.
Now businesses are using their best Cheshire cat
smiles to tell us that we don't need to police their
behaviour. we don't need badges, or police,
is what they say.

But, we do need badges to get control
over cheating corporations (cuz our
countries are going broke- DUH!)
and companies (and crooked countries)
will be saying we don't need badges,
cuz there's no cheating going on



Being that we are the rest of the planet,
we of the 99.9%, are suffering with our good future

speeding off into the sunset.
We now discover
that the European Commission and the OECD
have finally started to smell some of the millions of
tax rats in their, and our, vicinity.

Nice gatto.

you wan some leche?

unfortunately, we're dealing with big corps who

have thousands of lawyers and accountants, so they

function like Speedy Gonzalez.

They still need to be convinced that corporation
exist solely to hoover up money, so that cheating the
tax man and workers is all part of their game.
These big, uncontrollable institutions (e.g OECD)
could be, and usually are as crooked as the
corporations (e.g. banks) that seem to fund their
existence.

That incriminating evidence having been stated,
it's nice to see that, thanks to the Tax Justice
Network, and some brave whistleblowers who
have changed the course of history (by making it
very hard for governments to continue to ignore
corporate crime) some of this bullshit is at least
being labelled as "tax bullshit."

If you go to a pliable government like:

Jersey (as in the UK island)

Luxembourgh

Switzerland

Ireland

 you can strike a deal with that government
for you specifically to benefit from a bespoke
arrangement that suits your business. That is
not to say that the Double Irish tax scam
which is a return ticket junket for your money to:

Ireland

Switzerland

Ireland

that helps your profits shed some "weight" so that
you profits look slimmer than they are, is one of
those bespoke deals. The Double Irish is an
off-the-shelf tax scam.

No, these individual deals, done in secret until a
fellow  named Antoine Deltour
who worked at Price Waterhouse Coopers
of Luxembourg
decided to make himself famous by
telling all of us what PWC was "doing"
as in breaking tax laws.

According to the TJN
the Euro Commission has decided that
these Comfort Letters are:
"unlawful state aid"
 "harmful tax practice"
"against EU competition rules"
"undermines competition"
"a subsidy"

The TJN themselves described them as
distorting competition especially since
they're not available to smaller companies
that cannot settle such secret deals. That
also makes it detrimental to other EU states
that will lose tax money because of this
loophole.

What freaks me out is that if all companies
could cheat everybody's governments, equally,
the EU would be fine with that. It doesn't matter
that companies are bending the laws of
physics by saying "I'm not here for tax
purposes," that destroys social democratic
benefits that we expect like education
and healthcare and infrastructure.



The OECD also did some dangerous
truth-telling, but they've been lobbied
to death. The created the BEPS rule.
(Base Erosion and Profit Sharing). This
rule means that big companies need to report
their activity so that countries can share this
and tax companies MORE (lobbyists have pushed
this to include only HUGE corporations).

Even as a kid, I eventually saw behind the OECD's
nice graphs to see that they were a big-boy
club, promoting big cheating. Not so, apparently.
But they're not omnipotent. They cannot make
laws, but by promoting truth and labelling cheating,
they are finally joining the 99.9% in saying
"if workers get screwed, companies should not
screw countries as well," which is not quite a Utopian
argument.

There is no single country on their side
so they cannot start to squeeze tax
cheating. The problem according to
the TJN is that the OECD supports an
arms-length role of taxation. TJN thinks
that the OECD should push for a
Single-entity taxation that would not
allow Starbucks UK to buy coffee from
Starbucks Swisse in order save on UK
corp tax.
So, the companies would not be able to
hide itself in 200 pieces. This will nail
them eventually. If it's employed.

Companies will try to ply new tricks to
fool any such system. So, OECD has
basically done nothing other than warn
corporations where some countries might
go, law-wise.
Even countries have taken this BEPS and
made it into a pylon, to be worked around.
So, the UK has its so-called Google Tax
designed to make Google happy.

Not good enough for the "21st century",
according to the TJN.

It is weird that corporations are not just
acting like fascists and totally ignoring the
OECD altogether. We are making progress.

I still think , though, that polite society:

workers

savers

democratic voters

the environment

communities

are all being treated like Comfort Women.

Slaves to be Screwed at will 

it's food, not profit

So, what is this planet for? What is its purpose?
Does everything we see exist so that somebody
can make profit from it?

If we agree to work for rich people or institutions
in exchange for pieces of shiny paper, or coins,
we then should be able to thrive and help others
to thrive as well. This is especially true of the
purveyors of the food that we eat, the supermarkets.

In Canada, there has been a law for decades that
allows soup kitchens to pick up restaurant leftovers
and use them to feed the poor. However, supermarkets
that are now international behemoths that stash their
profits in the Caymans, are not proper community
members. I've written of the giant sucking sound
when supermarkets in the UK take our money
and send it to London, on its way to the Carib.

Well, at least, these rapacious institutions that
deal in our basic necessities should give their
old food to the poor. Well, we have stories
here in the UK where dumpster divers were
charged with break and enter, where Tesco
locks its dumpsters so that people cannot
access the perfectly edible garbage that
their central planning committee forces them
to throw away, lest the name Tesco be
besmirched.

Anyway, here is a story of a literal nobody
who had some ideas and got elected. Here
is what he did to improve the law in France
forcing stores to surrender their surplus food.

checkit:  Guardian
Man who forced French supermarkets to donate food wants to take law global

Arash Derambarsh, a local councillor who kickstarted fight against food waste in his Paris suburb, wants to convince more countries to follow France’s example
People shop in a supermarket in southern France.
People shop in a supermarket in southern France. Photograph: Rremy Gabalda/AFP/Getty Images
Kim Willsher in Paris
Monday 25 May 2015 13.42 BST
Last modified on Tuesday 26 May 2015 00.40 BST

Arash Derambarsh said it was “scandalous and absurd” that food is wasted and in some cases deliberately spoiled while the homeless, poor and unemployed go hungry.

Derambarsh – a municipal councillor for the “Divers Droit” (diverse right) in Courbevoie, north-west of Paris – persuaded French MPs to adopt the regulation after a petition gained more than 200,000 signatures and celebrity support in just four months.

The amendment was approved as part of a wider law – the Loi Macron – that covers economic activity and equality in France and is expected to be passed by the national assembly on Tuesday, entering the statute books shortly afterwards.

It will bar supermarkets from throwing away food approaching best-before dates and deliberately poisoning products with bleach to stop them being retrieved by people foraging through bins.

Now Derambarsh wants to convince European countries and the wider world to adopt similar bans. “Food is the basis of life, it is an elementary factor in our existence,” he told the Guardian.
Arash Derambarsh with food collection
Arash Derambarsh began his drive to fight food waste and food poverty in Courbevoie. Photograph: Bertrand Guay/AFP

“I have been insulted and attacked and accused of being naive and idealistic, but I became a local councillor because I wanted to help people. Perhaps it is naive to be concerned about other human beings, but I know what it is like to be hungry.

“When I was a law student living on about €400 a month after I’d paid my rent, I used to have one proper meal a day around 5pm. I’d eat pasta, or potatoes, but it’s hard to study or work if you are hungry and always thinking about where the next meal will come from.”
France to force big supermarkets to give unsold food to charities
Read more

Derambarsh started his campaign by collecting and distributing unwanted food from his local supermarket. “Every day we’d help around 100 people. Half would be single mothers with several children, pensioners or public workers on low salaries, the other half would be those living on the streets or in shelters,” he said.
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Derambarsh is planning to table the issue – via the campaign group ONE, founded by U2 singer Bono – when the United Nations discusses its Millennium development goals to end poverty in September as well as at the G20 economic summit in Turkey in November and the COP21 environment conference in Paris in December.

An estimated 7.1m tonnes of food is binned in France each year – 67% of it by consumers, 15% by restaurants and 11% by shops. The figure for food waste across the EU is 89mtonnes while an estimated 1.3bn tonnes are wasted worldwide.

it's not a conspiracy when you can prove they want you dead

Nobody's perfect, but I still believe that
Varoufakis was the idea guy to play the
role of Finance minister for his
homeland in the Troika Imperial Period
of the EU's short history, and it will be
short when compared to all but
Weimar Germany.

It was up to Varoufakis to decide whether
to keep doing as
the corrupt Fin Mins had done in other
Greek governments and play along,
as if the country was not being enslaved.

Well, Varoufakis proved even to
neo-liberals that Greece is being
unfairly enslaved. He kept doing
this, and keeps doing this,
in different venues and media.

One of his fine arguments is this
one in Project Syndicate. Despite being
an objectivist by nature of his work, he
can clearly show the motives of the troika.
brilliant.

So, Germany won the battle, but Varoufakis
will win the war. As we speak, the Volkswagen
crisis is showing us again how lax
government creates crises. And the "Greek"
crisis is actually a banking crisis.

checkit: Project syndicate
Yanis Varoufakis is Greece's finance minister.
MAY 25, 2015 57
Austerity Is the Only Deal-Breaker
ATHENS – A common fallacy pervades coverage by the world’s media of the negotiations between the Greek government and its creditors. The fallacy, exemplified in a recent commentary by Philip Stephens of the Financial Times, is that, “Athens is unable or unwilling – or both – to implement an economic reform program.” Once this fallacy is presented as fact, it is only natural that coverage highlights how our government is, in Stephens’s words, “squandering the trust and goodwill of its eurozone partners.”
But the reality of the talks is very different. Our government is keen to implement an agenda that includes all of the economic reforms emphasized by European economic think tanks. Moreover, we are uniquely able to maintain the Greek public’s support for a sound economic program.
Consider what that means: an independent tax agency; reasonable primary fiscal surpluses forever; a sensible and ambitious privatization program, combined with a development agency that harnesses public assets to create investment flows; genuine pension reform that ensures the social-security system’s long-term sustainability; liberalization of markets for goods and services, etc.
So, if our government is willing to embrace the reforms that our partners expect, why have the negotiations not produced an agreement? Where is the sticking point?
The problem is simple: Greece’s creditors insist on even greater austerity for this year and beyond – an approach that would impede recovery, obstruct growth, worsen the debt-deflationary cycle, and, in the end, erode Greeks’ willingness and ability to see through the reform agenda that the country so desperately needs. Our government cannot – and will not – accept a cure that has proven itself over five long years to be worse than the disease.
Our creditors’ insistence on greater austerity is subtle yet steadfast. It can be found in their demand that Greece maintain unsustainably high primary surpluses (more than 2% of GDP in 2016 and exceeding 2.5%, or even 3%, for every year thereafter). To achieve this, we are supposed to increase the overall burden of value-added tax on the private sector, cut already diminished pensions across the board; and compensate for low privatization proceeds (owing to depressed asset prices) with “equivalent” fiscal consolidation measures.
The view that Greece has not achieved sufficient fiscal consolidation is not just false; it is patently absurd. The accompanying graph not only illustrates this; it also succinctly addresses the question of why Greece has not done as well as, say, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, or Cyprus in the years since the 2008 financial crisis. Relative to the rest of the countries on the eurozone periphery, Greece was subjected to at least twice the austerity. There is nothing more to it than that.
Following Prime Minister David Cameron’s recent election victory in the United Kingdom, my good friend Lord Norman Lamont, a former chancellor of the exchequer, remarked that the UK economy’s recovery supports our government’s position. Back in 2010, he recalled, Greece and the UK faced fiscal deficits of more or less similar size (relative to GDP). Greece returned to primary surpluses (which exclude interest payments) in 2014, whereas the UK government consolidated much more gradually and has yet to return to surplus.
At the same time, Greece has faced monetary contraction (which has recently become monetary asphyxiation), in contrast to the UK, where the Bank of England has supported the government every step of the way. The result is that Greece is continuing to stagnate, whereas the UK has been growing strongly.
Fair-minded observers of the four-month-long negotiations between Greece and its creditors cannot avoid a simple conclusion: The major sticking point, the only deal-breaker, is the creditors’ insistence on even more austerity, even at the expense of the reform agenda that our government is eager to pursue.
Clearly, our creditors’ demand for more austerity has nothing to do with concerns about genuine reform or moving Greece onto a sustainable fiscal path. Their true motivation is a question best left to future historians – who, I have no doubt, will take much of the contemporary media coverage with a grain of salt.
Read more at http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/greece-government-reforms-by-yanis-varoufakis-2015-05#6uUPZgu7WS3gLMpu.99

Don't froth at the mouth

In being against the system that we see killing off
the middle class, worldwide, as if they're reading
from the same hymn book, I have always been
wary of seemingly disingenuous people who
may act like they're anti-oligarch, but actually
they're plants or nuts, or otherwise wasting our
time.

The Alex Jones persona, which I don't buy,
is one of those cases. He uses alot of the
buzzwords of the misinformed semi-educated
ranters, like "Illuminati". He's also too bombastic
to be believable. He seems to be looking to
flush out gun-mad crazies for the feds to pick up.
In which case, he's employed.

There was also a supposed Iraq-war vet whose
name escapes me. He had a nice little protest against
the behaviour rules in the Lincoln memorial
wherein he was nearly choked to death. He was
talking right for a while, but then pulls up in
Washington with a gun. So, since he's not dead
or in Guantanamo, he's also a plant who was
put there to flush out the crazies.

I think Michael Krieger covers the side of this
anti-establishment wave that is happy saying
"oh, it's the Illuminati" "we can't do anything".
or they invoke the name of the Rothchild family,
instead of the fractional reserve banking system
with private central banks that are part of
our (corrupt) system. But you have to believe
that it can change, or at the very least, be
detoured around. Otherwise, you're just a
happy victim.

To a great degree, we feel powerless, but
if we are a society of laws, then we are run
by politicians, despite the fact that those
politicians go to the Bilder meetings and the
G8/G20 meetings to learn how to defraud
their own citizens. There has to be something
we can do, even if we decide to leave this
corrupt system for dead, before it blows up.

Here's one dangerous Roth child:

David Lee Roth 

I still like this music,

but holy geez, the singer!

[the singer. dangerously androgynous, and lip syncing]

Another Wrath child



It's incredible how mundane some of the music I listened to
actually is, or just beyond androgyny crazy. No wonder
the music industry makes money off kids. We're stupid.

checkit: Lib blitz

Martin Armstrong Asks: “Rothschilds – Fact or Disinformation to Protect the Guilty?”
Michael Krieger | Posted Wednesday Mar 11, 2015 at 5:56 pm

Regular Liberty Blitzkrieg readers will be aware that I very much enjoy reading the opinions of Martin Armstrong, a man with such an interesting and unique life story, I won’t even attempt to do it justice here. Not only have his major “macro turn dates” impressed me all the way back to my prior career on Wall Street, he doggedly refuses to limit his thinking to any type of narrow minded, dogmatic viewpoint, no matter what genre of viewpoint that may be. While I disagree with him on several issues, he tends to see the realities of the macro world around us from a perspective quite similar to my own. He doesn’t try to make world events fit into a predetermined viewpoint, but rather tries to look at each distinct global event or emerging meme with as little bias as possible.
Within the anti-establishment world in which I proudly reside, many people look for simplistic narratives. Ironically, these narratives are often as silly and narrow-minded as those who pledge allegiance to the fraudulent Republican or Democratic parties. For some, it’s the Jews. If you don’t think the Jews run the world and are the root of all evil, you must be a CIA shill or “working for them.” For others, it’s the Arabs or Muslims, and so on and so forth. Another bizarre obsession is this notion that a small group of families hiding in the shadows hold all the real money and power on earth, and that these are the ones actually ordering the billionaires around. The family most often named as the kingpins of this pyramid are the Rothschilds.

The world is a strange place, and I don’t claim to know anything but an infinitesimally small fraction of what there is to know. While I certainly won’t rule out the possibility that there are some extraordinarily rich people who stay behind the scenes and exert tremendous influence, my response is: Who cares?
As Eleanor Roosevelt eloquently noted:
“Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.”
I agree 100% with the above quote. People who obsess about getting rid of specific people, or groups of people, as the answer to systemic problems aren’t thinking big enough. Slavery was an idea and an institution that existed in human civilization from the beginning. It was only after bloody conflicts and an evolution in consciousness, that humanity agreed it was unacceptable. You could’ve chopped to bits slave-master after slave-master, but as long as the institution remained in place and acceptable there would be plenty of people more than happy to take their place. Similarly, there are plenty of people who would happily become 18th century style slave-masters in 2015 if given half the chance.
So if you want real change, you need to attack systems, ideology and paradigms. Sure, I certainly call out some of the worst defenders and profiteers of the status quo all the time on this site, but I don’t for a minute think that simply getting rid of these individuals will change anything permanently unless we alter people’s hearts and minds first, and then the system itself second.
A great example of how dangerous and counterproductive an obsession with the “Rothschilds, Rockefellers, etc” can be, was evidenced here on this site a month ago. In the post titled, Meet the Extreme Super Rich – A List of the 80 People Who Own as Much as the World’s Poorest 3.6 Billion. Here are a couple of screen shots from the comment section.
Think about how completely unproductive these comments are. Even if they are 100% true, so what? Sheldon Adelson is #8 on that list, with an estimated wealth of $38 billion; and he is absolutely spending it, and absolutely directly influencing events on the world stage in a very negative way (see: Sheldon Adelson – The Dangerous American Oligarch Behind Benjamin Netanyahu).
Does it really matter if someone else is pulling his strings? In the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t. We already know how the oligarchs control the world through central bank money printing, wars, etc. These people must be battled in the world of ideas, not in the world of obsessing over shadowy families. That’s merely a waste of time and valuable energy.
Martin Armstrong seems to agree. Here are some excerpts from his post: Rothschilds – Fact or Disinformation to Protect the Guilty.
The conspiracy promoters are just not satisfied with the fact that we are screwed and perhaps nobody is in charge to stop or push anything. The days of the Rothschilds owning banks and financing wars is old history, Yet to this day, they paint this family as behind everything. This to me is PROPAGANDA for they are not even on center stage. Hey, as long as the get people to blame them, the NY Bankers are free to bribes all they want and politicians are for sale to the highest bidder. Sorry – but the Rothschilds have been long out-classed by New York. That was 19th century.
No family is worth $500 trillion and the Rothschild do not own every central bank. This is just total propaganda that is the perfect cover for those who are really screwing society. This is the oldest trick in the book – kids play this game: I didn’t do it, he did. Or how about – “The dog age it.”
He does not own the central banks and we had under contract over $3 trillion at Princeton Economics in the ’90s. Nobody has ever come that close to what we advised on. Even now, we are still being called in for advice on portfolios more than 100 times what RIT Capital Partners controls.

What is happening is very interesting. We have more people abandoning the banks as advisers today than perhaps at anytime in my career. This has been because they have woken up to the new way of doing business – transactional banking where the clients are the target. The good old days of relationship banking no longer exist among the NY money-center banks. Those days are long gone.
Pay attention to the REAL players. This nonsense is a total diversion from the truth. While you are pointing fingers at the Rothschilds, the NY boys are counting their money.
Certainly something everyone in the anti-establishment camp should think about deeply.
The Dissident Dad
Daniel Ameduri is the founder of the Newsletter Future Money Trends, where he has produced some of the most watched videos on the internet about liberty, inflation, gold, silver, and what he refers to as 'personal finance for doomers.' His first fictional video, "The Day the Dollar Died," has been watched by over 2.5 million people.
He considers himself a full time dad who works part time and has recently launched a new website called '28 Thousand Days' to help other individuals think for themselves and live the lives they choose, rather than using the road map the government and Wall Street have laid out for them.

the EU will solve the migrant crisis, in the year 2000 &never

the wonderful EU has taken great pains over the last
6 years to screw Greece and its economy. However,
when it comes to actually saving people, the
Commission is a bit slow.

They promise to solve this and plan that. However,
they have yet to lift a finger.

This week, I made an ignorant comment at the
EU Commission on twitter and received a
response in the form of a new article.
Unfortunately, the response was short on
specifics. it says essentially:

the EU plans to do decide about....
It's now October 2015 and the refugees
have been pouring in by the thousands a
day to Greece and Italy.

I suppose the EU remembers Greece, the
country that they are screwing. It's also
full of refugees who need care, when the
populace is on their last stitches of
clothing.

So, this time, here's some proof about
how slow the EU is. First text is from
the spring and the second is from
this week.

[lisping tough guy & perfect pawn & un-elected]
Oh, and if I can find it, last week Donald
Tusk, the new EU tough guy in the Greece
negotiations has said that these migrants
could ruin the EU. Ya. right. if you keep
sitting on your thumb, Tusk, it will ruin
the EU. Tusk is such a showboat, that I'll
dedicate this song to him, brass band and
marching, and everything:


2 stories
checkit: Guardian

EU plans migrant quotas forcing states to 'share' burden

Ian Traynor in Brussels

Sunday 10 May 2015 20.00 BST
Last modified on Monday 11 May 2015 10.28 BST

The EU’s executive body is to unveil radical new proposals on immigration, imposing migrant quotas on the 28 countries of the union under a distribution “key” system set by Brussels. The plan, which is supported by Germany and will be fiercely resisted by the new Conservative government, will be launched by the European commission on Wednesday in response to migrant boat crisis in the Mediterranean.

The bold move by Brussels comes as the EU draws up plans for military attacks in Libya to try to curb the flow of people across the Mediterranean by targeting the trafficking networks. The EU’s top diplomat is to unveil an attempt on Monday to secure a UN mandate for armed action in Libya’s territorial waters.

Britain is drafting the UN security council resolution that would authorise the mission, senior officials in Brussels said. It would come under Italian command, have the participation of about 10 EU countries – including Britain, France, Spain and Italy – and could also drag in Nato, although there are no plans for the initial involvement of the alliance.
Analysis Libya's people smugglers: military action won't stop this multifaceted trade
The smugglers are not one cohesive organisation, getting to the kingpins is near impossible, and air strikes won’t keep migrants from trying to make the trip
Read more

While there is broad support within the EU for the military plans, the proposals for sharing the immigration burden are highly controversial and divisive. On Sunday night the Home Office said the plans were unacceptable to the UK, putting Cameron on a collision course with German chancellor Angela Merkel and other EU leaders as he begins attempts to renegotiate Britain’s relationship with Brussels ahead of a promised in/out referendum in 2017.

“The UK has a proud history of offering asylum to those who need it most, but we do not believe that a mandatory system of resettlement is the answer. We will oppose any EU commission proposals to introduce a non-voluntary quota,” a spokesman said.

The policy document, obtained by the Guardian, demands new and binding rules establishing a quota system of sharing refugees among the member states. The migration agenda declares: “The EU needs a permanent system for sharing the responsibility for large numbers of refugees and asylum seekers among member states.” By the end of the year, Brussels is to table new legislation “for a mandatory and automatically triggered relocation system to distribute those in clear need of international protection within the EU when a mass influx emerges”.

The proposals will lay bare deep divisions between national governments over immigration, with the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, backing the scheme and Britain leading the resistance. Germany and Sweden between them take almost half the asylum seekers in the EU, and Berlin is predicting that the numbers this year could almost double to about 400,000 in Germany, two-thirds of the total number in the EU last year.

The commission paper says: “Some member states have already made a major contribution to [refugee] resettlement efforts. But others offer nothing.” It also insists that Europe has to open up legal avenues for migrants to enter the EU safely, a notion that is strongly opposed by Theresa May, the home secretary. “Such vulnerable people cannot be left to resort to the criminal networks of smugglers and traffickers. There must be safe and legal ways for them to reach the EU,” the document says.

Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, a leading hardliner on immigration, described the commission proposals as mad and pledged to defy Brussels. He said: “The European concept of ‘someone letting immigrants into their country’ and then ‘distributing’ them among the other member states is a mad and unfair idea.”

Brussels is proposing to invoke emergency mechanisms by the end of the month that will oblige the 28 countries to share the numbers of “persons in clear need of international protection” and “to ensure a fair and balanced participation of all member states to this common effort. This step will be the precursor of a lasting solution”.

The blueprint, to be unveiled by Dimitris Avramopoulos, the EU commissioner for migration, home affairs and citizenship, includes a distribution key system based on various criteria, from national wealth levels to unemployment rates, to determine what proportion of refugees each of the 28 countries should admit.

In New York on Monday, Federica Mogherini, the EU’s foreign and security policy coordinator, is to brief the UN security council on the plans for a chapter VII resolution authorising the use of force in Libya. The British draft is believed to call for the “use of all means to destroy the business model of the traffickers”.

This would entail EU vessels entering Libyan territorial waters, including the Royal Navy’s flagship HMS Bulwark and its three Merlin helicopters currently in Malta, and deploying helicopter gunships to “neutralise” identified traffickers’ ships used to send tens of thousands of migrants from sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East on the short but highly risky voyage from the Libyan coast to the shores of southern Italy.
People smugglers using Facebook to lure migrants into 'Italy trips'
Read more

Libyan militias, jihadi groups and Islamic State (Isis) affiliates, which are believed to be in cahoots with the trafficking networks, are said to have heavy artillery and anti-aircraft batteries deployed near the coast. Attacks on EU vessels and ships could trigger an escalation and force Nato to get involved, policymakers in Brussels said.

Following a visit to Beijing last week, Mogherini believes the Chinese will not block the mission in the security council. Her staff are also confident that Russia can be persuaded against wielding its security council veto despite the intense animosity between Moscow and the west over the Ukraine conflict.

The Italian government, which is leading the drive for military action and would command the mission, to be headquartered in Rome, said at the weekend that the Russians are “ready to cooperate”.

Libya’s ambassador to the UN, Ibrahim Dabbashi, told the Associated Press that he had not been consulted on the plans and opposed them.

Following intensive talks over the past week in Brussels, six EU states have committed to taking part, with several more expected to offer participation. All 28 member states are said in Brussels to support the proposed campaign.

The plans will be discussed by EU foreign ministers next week and put to an EU summit next month.

2
Council of Europe
PACE urges reform of ‘dysfunctional’ Dublin asylum system, creation of ‘European refugee’ status
29/09/2015
The EU’s Dublin system, which determines which country is responsible for treating asylum applications, is dysfunctional and ineffective and should be urgently reformed to ensure “equitable burden sharing” among member States, according to PACE.

“Recent events in Germany, Austria, Hungary and elsewhere show that the Dublin system has already collapsed and must be reformed as a matter of urgency,” said the Assembly, approving a resolution based on a report by Michele Nicoletti (Italy, SOC).

The parliamentarians urged the creation of a “European refugee” status, enabling beneficiaries of international protection to transfer residence and other rights between EU countries.

Other proposals included mutual recognition of positive national status-determination decisions, “joint” processing of asylum applications and other measures to ensure “burden sharing” across the continent.

Without reform, there was a risk states might suspend or withdraw from the Dublin system, which would cause “chaos and confusion”, the Assembly warned.