Friday, May 30, 2014

Thursday, May 29, 2014

Capital Controls Rolling Into High Gear Under FATCA

The traditional banking system was already bad enough, but now with banks around the world rushing to comply with the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) it is beginning to reach extreme levels.  And it isn't just affecting the most financially restricted people on Earth: US citizens ... it is affecting everyone.

Take myself for example.  I operate numerous businesses worldwide.  I am a Canadian citizen as well as the citizen of a Caribbean country and our business operations are also operated out of a non-tax jurisdiction in the Caribbean.  On top of that we hold no bank accounts, whatsoever, in the US ... instead, we have bank accounts all over the world.

Yet, in the last two months we have had our accounts or transactions frozen, denied or questioned in different jurisdictions at least ten times.  And we have had countless other problems over the last two years.

Here are just a list of the most recent:

We got FATCA'ED.  We received a FATCA notice from one of our banks in Eastern Europe.  They told us that we must comply and contact them immediately.  We contacted them and let them know that the company is not a US company and no US citizen is involved with the company nor the bank account.  They told us that one of the phone numbers they had on file for us was a US number and therefore they'd have to close our account. We informed them that the number they had was a virtual Skype number, one of many we have, that forwarded to the property departments in our companies around the world. We are still dealing with this issue.


Read the entire article

Wednesday, May 28, 2014

Tuesday, May 27, 2014

Is Democracy Another God that Failed?

On Memorial Day weekend, scores of thousands of bikers arrived here for their annual Rolling Thunder tribute to America’s veterans, especially those lost in our wars or left behind.

But this year the tribute has been sullied by a squalid scandal in the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Sick vets seeking medical care at the Phoenix VA hospital were put on waiting lists, but never got to see a doctor. Dozens died. Then waiting lists were altered to make it appear that VA staffers had not failed in their duty to provide the vets access to care in the required 14 days. Some vets suffered for months before dying.
There is truly something rotten in the state.

But, rest assured, this scandal of deceit, dishonor and betrayal is not going to go away soon.

For unlike Benghazi and the IRS scandals, the major media are looking into how widespread was this practice of denying care to vets and doctoring waiting lists to lie about what was done, and not done, at the VA hospitals. And as this is both an easily understood and deeply emotional issue, the public is fully engaged.

Our commander in chief wisely used his weekend to visit our troops in Afghanistan. But between Memorial Day and June 6, when the president speaks at Normandy on the 70th anniversary of D-Day, this metastasizing scandal is going to bleed his administration.


And this crisis gripping the second largest Cabinet department underscores a larger truth.

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Friday, May 23, 2014

The Specter Haunting Europe

Memorial Day will likely bring alarmist headlines in the elite media about a populist fever raging in Europe, and manifest in the shocking returns from the elections for the European Parliament.

Marine Le Pen’s National Front may run first in France, and Nick Farage’s UK Independence Party first in Britain.
What is happening in Europe?

In his unpublished “Leviathan and Its Enemies,” my late friend Sam Francis wrote of the coming crisis of the “soft managerial state,” of which the European Union is a textbook example.

Oswald Spengler used the word “Civilization” to describe “the terminal phase of a cultural organism,” wrote Francis. In 1941, Pitirim Sorokin described the characteristics of a Spenglerian “Civilization”:

“[C]osmopolitanism and the megalopolis vs. ‘home,’ ‘race,’ ‘blood group’ and ‘fatherland’; scientific irreligion or abstract dead metaphysics instead of the religion of the heart; ‘cold matter-of-factness’ vs. reverence and tradition and respect for age; internationalist ‘society’ instead of ‘my country’ and state (nation); money and abstract values in lieu of earth and real (living) values; ‘mass’ instead of ‘folk’; sex in lieu of motherhood … and so on.”

Between the managerial state and the civilization and culture that preceded it, the polarities are stark.

Yet they mirror the clashes of today as the European Union of Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman’s vision exhibits unmistakable symptoms of disintegration and decay.

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Wednesday, May 21, 2014

Doctor Strangelove returns as General Breedlove

In Stanley Kubrick’s 1954 madcap dark comedy “Dr. Strangelove,” the clearly demented main character is a former scientist for Adolf Hitler who ends up as a military adviser to a fictional American president involved in a nuclear standoff with the Soviet Union. The Strangelove character was not merely a figment of Kubrick’s otherwise brilliant imagination. Dr. Strangelove, who urges a massive nuclear strike on the Soviet Union, is based on two immigrant Cold Warriors from Europe possessing doctoral degrees: Dr. Henry Kissinger, the Machiavellian national security adviser President Richard Nixon and Russian affairs adviser to President Barack Obama, and Dr. Edward Teller, the father of America’s hydrogen bomb. In real life, Kissinger, a German and an alleged Jew, and Teller, a Hungarian, brought their anti-Russian European political “baggage” to bear on America’s policy toward Moscow during the height of the Cold War. Kissinger and Teller, like the revenge-seeking Nazi, Strangelove, wanted Russia punished for personal political reasons. 

Today, NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander for Europe and chief of the U.S. European Command, four-star Air Force General Philip Breedlove, is attempting to reprise the movie role of Dr. Strangelove, his almost namesake. Just as Dr. Strangelove cited a “mine shaft” gap with the Soviets arising from a lack of underground facilities for the protection of American men and women who would repopulate the world through proper “breeding techniques,” Breedlove has stated that NATO must match Russian troop deployments in western Russia with a commensurate buildup of NATO troops in its east. 

Breedlove has stated that NATO’s military presence in Eastern Europe will continue with air, land and sea deployments until at least December 31 and possibly beyond. Sounding a lot like Dr. Strangelove in his analysis of the perceived Russian “threat” to Ukraine and NATO, Breedlove pulled out the best talking points from the RAND Corporation. Breedlove in a news conference held this month with Canada’s top military commander, Chief of the Defense Staff Tom Lawson. Breedlove said, “Based on the new paradigm that we see Russia has presented . . . we are all going to have to re-evaluate some of the decisions that we have made for structure, for positioning, for readiness, and . . . even more important in the short term, our force responsiveness will need to be re-evaluated.” 

In other words, Breedlove sees something akin to a “mine shaft” gap with the Russians and the deployment of U.S. and other NATO troops and planes to Romania, Estonia, Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, and Bulgaria. So far, Hungary and Slovakia have resisted calls by outgoing NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the Danish neo-conservative puppet prime minister for President George W. Bush’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, to station NATO troops in both countries. 

Breedlove (like the fictional Strangelove vis-a-vis the USSR) is in the perfect position to hype up a situation brought on by wanton U.S. and European Union interference in the affairs of Ukraine. In April, Breedlove hearkened back to every Cold Warrior’s masturbatory visions of U.S.-Soviet battles in the Fulda Gap of Germany in having a vision of 40,000 Russian troops on the move into Ukraine and a NATO military response. After meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel in April, Breedlove hyperventilated over a “potent mix of warplanes, helicopter units, artillery, infantry, and commandos with field hospitals and sufficient logistics” ready to move from Russia into Ukraine.

Read the entire article

Monday, May 19, 2014

The Return of Nationalism

It turns out that Francis Fukuyama, widely mocked post-9/11 for his proclamation that history has "ended," was right after all – but not in the way his journalistic interpreters imagined. Fukuyama’s thesis was that the ideological struggle over the forms of governance had been decisively won by the forces of liberal democracy: this, he averred, was the lesson of the Soviet implosion, and the earlier destruction of the fascist regimes of Germany, Italy, and Japan. Yet he did not say, as widely believed, that the passing of history would mean the end of international conflicts:

"There would still be a high and perhaps rising level of ethnic and nationalist violence, since those are impulses incompletely played out, even in parts of the post-historical world. Palestinians and Kurds, Sikhs and Tamils, Irish Catholics and Walloons, Armenians and Azeris, will continue to have their unresolved grievances. This implies that terrorism and wars of national liberation will continue to be an important item on the international agenda. But large-scale conflict must involve large states still caught in the grip of history, and they are what appear to be passing from the scene."

Nationalism, ensconced in the religious and ethnic identities that would replace the ideologies of the twentieth century, would still retain its hypnotic power, and perhaps even get a fillip from the "boredom" ensuing from a world reduced to economic calculation and the care-taking of "the museum of human history," as he put it. In this sense, Fukuyama has been proven right: the conflicts that are tearing apart the Middle East, for example, fit his scenario to a tee. What I fear he got wrong is the idea that these conflicts will not involve large states, and that the scale of potential tragedy is much bigger than he dared imagine.

Nationalism has indeed returned with a vengeance, and it is rearing its head on a global scale, from eastern Europe to Eastasia. The dangers it poses are equal in scope to anything that confronted us during the cold war era, if not more so.

Where Fukuyama was wrong – very wrong – was his overoptimistic take on the evolution of large states which were supposedly not "caught in the grip of history." Recent events tell a different story.


Take India, where Narendra Modi, the candidate of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), has just won an overwhelming victory which has propelled that nation of 1.269 million square miles and 1.237 billion inhabitants to the right – the far right – for the first time in modern history. Modi is a charismatic demagogue whose tenure as governor of Gujarat was marked by a pogrom of Muslims carried out by Hindu fanatics who murdered thousands as Modi’s police looked on. As a result Washington denied Modi a visa and he was barred from entering US territory. 

Thursday, May 15, 2014

Orwell’s nightmare: The NSA and Google—Big Brother meets Big Business

“The Google services and apps that we interact with on a daily basis aren’t the company’s main product: They are the harvesting machines that dig up and process the stuff that Google really sells: for-profit intelligence.”—Journalist Yasha Levine 

“We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about.”—former Google CEO Eric Schmidt 

What would happen if the most powerful technology company in the world and the largest clandestine spying agency in the world joined forces? 

No need to wonder. Just look around you. It’s happened already. Thanks to an insidious partnership between Google and the National Security Agency (NSA) that grows more invasive and more subtle with every passing day, “we the people” have become little more than data consumer commodities to be bought, sold and paid for over and over again. 

With every smartphone we buy, every GPS device we install, every Twitter, Facebook, and Google account we open, every frequent buyer card we use for purchases—whether at the grocer’s, the yogurt shop, the airlines or the department store, and every credit and debit card we use to pay for our transactions, we’re helping Corporate America build a dossier for its government counterparts on who we know, what we think, how we spend our money, and how we spend our time. 

What’s worse, this for-profit surveillance scheme, far larger than anything the NSA could capture just by tapping into our phone calls, is made possible by our consumer dollars and our cooperation. All those disclaimers you scroll though without reading them, the ones written in minute font, only to quickly click on the “Agree” button at the end so you can get to the next step—downloading software, opening up a social media account, adding a new app to your phone or computer: those signify your written consent to having your activities monitored, recorded and shared. 

Read the entire article

Tuesday, May 13, 2014

Ukraine and America’s “Global War on Terrorism”. Is US-NATO Applying the “Syria Model” in Ukraine?

Neo-Nazi mobs in Odessa were involved, with the support of the Kiev regime, in a terrorist operation geared towards the killing of innocent civilians.

There was nothing spontaneous or accidental in this diabolical and criminal undertaking which consisted in the mass murder of federalist activists inside the House of Trade Unions. The building was set on fire quite deliberately as part of a carefully planned paramilitary operation.

People were trapped inside the building, burnt to death:
Survivors of the fire say they had to barricade themselves inside the House of Trade Unions, to hide from an aggressive mob, which had torched their tent camp. 
Radicals [Right Sector]then began throwing Molotov cocktails at the Trade Unions building, setting it on fire. Witnesses say that those who managed to escape the fire, were severely beaten outside by the besiegers of the burning building. (RT).
 America’s Neo-Nazi Government in Kiev is a reality. The body of evidence suggests that US-NATO is directly involved in the crackdown on so-called “pro-Russian” activists, advising both the Right Sector and the Kiev government’s National Guard.

The Neo-Nazi mobs in Odessa bear the hallmarks of  US sponsored terrorism (e.g Syria). The Right Sector terrorists are trained to commit atrocities against civilians. Confirmed by Germany’s Bild: “Dozens of specialists from the US Central Intelligence Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation are advising the Ukrainian government”.

Friday, May 9, 2014

Walter Jones Repels a War Party Attack

The GOP Beltway establishment is celebrating the victory of Thom Tillis, Speaker of the North Carolina House, over his Tea Party and Evangelical rivals in Tuesday’s primary for the U.S. Senate.

But the story ended less happily for the Beltway elite in the Tar Heel State’s 3rd Congressional District. There, the planned purge of Rep. Walter Jones was repulsed by his loyal Republican base.

Yet, this massively funded effort, to kill the career of a 20-year House veteran, whose father held the seat for decades before him, testifies eloquently to the intolerance of the ideological and monied elite of the party to which conservatives give allegiance.

Reportedly, a million dollars of super PAC money poured into the 3rd, from Republicans, in support of a brazen Big Lie campaign to paint Walter Jones as a liberal. But what is the Congressman’s real record?

In the Bush I era, he voted against No Child Left Behind.

In the Obama years, he voted against Obamacare and the bailouts of the big banks, Wall Street and Detroit. He voted against cap and trade, and TARP, the trillion-dollar stimulus package.

Jones voted against every increase in the debt ceiling in 10 years and refuses to vote for any U.S. budget not in balance. He stands against same-sex marriage, has a 100 percent rating from National Right to Life, and receives a consistent A from the NRA.

Read the entire article

Wednesday, May 7, 2014

Ukraine’s ‘Dr. Strangelove’ Reality

As much as the coup regime in Ukraine and its supporters want to project an image of Western moderation, there is a “Dr. Strangelove” element that can’t stop the Nazism from popping up from time to time, like when the Peter Sellers character in the classic movie can’t keep his right arm from making a “Heil Hitler” salute.

This brutal Nazism surfaced again on Friday when right-wing toughs in Odessa attacked an encampment of ethnic Russian protesters driving them into a trade union building which was then set on fire with Molotov cocktails. As the building was engulfed in flames, some people who tried to flee were chased and beaten, while those trapped inside heard the Ukrainian nationalists liken them to black-and-red-striped potato beetles called Colorados, because those colors are used in pro-Russian ribbons.

“Burn, Colorado, burn” went the chant.

As the fire worsened, those dying inside were serenaded with the taunting singing of the Ukrainian national anthem. The building also was spray-painted with Swastika-like symbols and graffiti reading “Galician SS,” a reference to the Ukrainian nationalist army that fought alongside the German Nazi SS in World War II, killing Russians on the eastern front.

The death by fire of dozens of people in Odessa recalled a World War II incident in 1944 when elements of a Galician SS police regiment took part in the massacre of the Polish village of Huta Pieniacka, which had been a refuge for Jews and was protected by Russian and Polish partisans. Attacked by a mixed force of Ukrainian police and German soldiers on Feb. 28, hundreds of townspeople were massacred, including many locked in barns that were set ablaze.

The legacy of World War II – especially the bitter fight between Ukrainian nationalists from the west and ethnic Russians from the east seven decades ago – is never far from the surface in Ukrainian politics. One of the heroes celebrated during the Maidan protests in Kiev was Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera, whose name was honored in many banners including one on a podium where Sen. John McCain voiced support for the uprising to oust elected President Viktor Yanukovych, whose political base was in eastern Ukraine.

Monday, May 5, 2014

America’s Neo-Nazi Government in Kiev. Towards a Scenario of Military Escalation?

In recent developments, Obama has granted full support to the crackdown on so-called “pro-Russian” activists. This movement against America’s fascist regime in Kiev is widespread. It is not limited to “ethnic Russians” as conveyed by the media. The leaders of this movement are Ukrainians.

The Neo-Nazi mobs bear the hallmarks of  US sponsored terrorism (e.g Syria) trained to commit atrocities against civilians.  America’s Neo-Nazi Government in Kiev is a reality. Confirmed by Germany’s Bild: “Dozens of specialists from the US Central Intelligence Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation are advising the Ukrainian government”
“Citing unnamed German security sources, Bild am Sonntag said the CIA and FBI agents were helping Kiev end the rebellion in the east of Ukraine and set up a functioning security structure.”
Escalation

The killings of civilians in Eastern and South Eastern Ukraine by Neo-Nazi mobs and members of the civilian militia opens up the possibility of a broader conflict within Ukraine, which could potentially lead to escalation. Moreover, prevailing divisions within Ukraine’s  armed forces could lead to military action directed towards unseating the Kiev Neo-Nazi regime. 

Known and documented, escalation is part of a longstanding scenario of military confrontation directed against the Russian Federation.

Thursday, May 1, 2014

Some Basics of State Domination and Public Submission

Familiarity may indeed, as the saying goes, breed contempt, but it also breeds a sort of somnolence. People who have never known anything other than a certain state of affairs—even an extraordinarily problematic state of affairs—have a tendency not to notice it at all, to relate it, so to speak, as if they were sleepwalking through it. Such is the situation of modern people in relation to the state. They have always known it, and they take it completely for granted, regarding it as one might regard the weather: whether it brings rain or sunshine, lightning bolts or soothing spring breezes, it is always there, an aspect of nature itself. Even when it proves destructive, its destruction still qualifies as something akin to “acts of God.”

We relate to the state in this sleepwalking fashion, however, not because doing so is hardwired in our genes, but because our conditions of life and our long historical accommodation to living under the state’s domination predispose us to react to it in this oblivious manner. People who have lived in other circumstances, however, have reacted quite differently. Only when human populations adopted settled agriculture did they prove amenable to state domination. During the vastly longer epoch of human existence in small hunting and gathering bands, the state was impossible: people had few if any nonperishable stores of wealth to be plundered, and if someone attempted to impose state-like domination on a band, its members simply ran away, putting as much distance between themselves and the exploiters as necessary to escape the would-be state’s predation. (See, for example, James C. Scott’s recent analysis in The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia.)

For the past 5,000 to 10,000 years, however, ultimately for nearly all of the world’s people, the state has existed as an ever-present predator and all-around abuser of human rights, its power to dominate and plunder propped up by its adroit exploitation of people’s fears, many of which have been of the state itself, others of external threats to life and limb from which the state purported to protect its subjects. In any event, nearly everyone eventually became incapable of even imagining social life without a state.

For the few who have succeeded in wrenching themselves out of this dreamlike condition in relation to the state, however, two main questions come rushing to mind:
(1) Who do these people—that is, the state’s kingpins, Praetorian guards, bootlickers, and key private-sector supporters—think they are to treat us as they do?
(2) Why do nearly all of us put up with the state’s outrageous treatment?
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