STEPHEN C. WEBSTER, - The Raw Story
Stephan: It is not just the banks, and other financial institutions. It is also private individuals, the new aristrocracy of a world dominated not by nations, but by virtual corporate states, sometimes owned and run by one individual or family. At its top this is wealth at a literally unimaginable level. It's not just the biggest toys, as media portrays it. It is a different way of looking at the world, of looking at the world... as a world. A bigger neighborhood.
I have found hubub over Romney's many homes, each with its own staff to be very revealing, but not for the reasons usually discussed.
Romney is actually a small version of the form. Two hundred and fifty million, to someone with say 17 billion controlling corporations all over the world, is not that impressive. In the game, but not on the varsity.
People who are contained within national boundaries, which is to say the 99 per cent of us, live in a different sphere. The elite hide their money away from contributing to the health of their country because nation states, and national wellness are not the priorities they were 50 years ago. This doesn't seem to have dawned on many people yet, but it will become more obvious with time. Who can go to the moon will soon define it.
Nations’ problems of debt and deficit could be easily solved by applying taxes to profits held in offshore tax havens, where the global business elite have hidden up to $32 trillion to skirt their responsibilities to tax agencies all over the world, the liberal-leaning Tax Justice Network reported this week.
The Tax Justice Network said that its estimates of wealth held in offshore havens ranged from $21 trillion to $32 trillion – the lowest of which is still massively larger than the roughly $11.5 trillion held in those same havens in 2005. The latest report refers to the practice of hiding wealth as ‘the dark side of globalization
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ELLEN BROWN, - Asia Times (Hong Kong)
Stephan: This is an excellent assessment, I think, of the Libor trend. Detailed and well-researched, it presents this complex situation in clear language. It is not a simple story, except for this: It is entirely a demonstration of what happens when profit and not national wellness is the first priority.
Because few were held to account the banking system, both nationally and internationally, continues to be profoundly dysfunctional. Lack of regulation, as this period has clearly shown, is not good for the world's financial structure. They may want no regulation, but it isn't good for them, and it leads to this, and all the rest of the last 30 years, since Reagan began dismantling regulation. We must break this cycle.
Ellen Brown is an attorney and president of the Public Banking Institute, PublicBankingInstitute.org. In Web of Debt, her latest of 12 books, she shows how a private cartel has usurped the power to create money from the people themselves, and how we the people can get it back. Her websites are webofdebt.com and ellenbrown.com.
At one time, calling the large multinational banks a ‘cartel’ branded you as a conspiracy theorist. Today the banking giants are being called that and worse, not just in the major media but in court documents intended to prove the allegations as facts.
Charges include racketeering (organized crime under the US Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO), antitrust violations, wire fraud, bid-rigging, and price-fixing. Damning charges have already been proven, and major damages and penalties assessed. Conspiracy theory has become established fact.
In an article in the July 3 Guardian titled ‘Private Banks Have Failed – We Need a Public Solution’, Seumas Milne writes of the London Interbank Offered Rate (Libor) rate-rigging scandal admitted to by Barclays Bank:
It’s already clear that the rate rigging, which depends on collusion, goes far beyond Barclays and indeed the City of London. This is one of multiple scams that have become endemic in a disastrously deregulated system with in-built incentives for cartels to manipulate the core price of finance.
… It could of course have happened only in a private-dominated financial sector, and makes a nonsense of the bankrupt free-market ideology that still holds sway in public […]
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TRAVIS WALDRON, - Think Progress/AlterNet
Stephan: How absurd can the economics of the new Virtual State economy get? How disdainful of any national allegiance can a Virtual Corporate state be of a national geographical one? Read this and you will understand.
Over a four years period from 2008 to 2011, Corning Inc. was one of 26 companies that managed to avoid paying any American income taxes, even though it earned nearly $3 billion during that time. In fact, according to Citizens For Tax Justice, the company received a $4 million refund from 2008 to 2010. That didn’t stop Susan Ford, a senior executive at the company, from telling the House Ways and Means Committee this week that America’s high corporate tax rate was putting her company at a disadvantage:
American manufacturers are at a distinct disadvantage to competitors headquartered in other countries. Specifically, foreign manufacturers uniformly face a lower corporate tax rate than U.S. manufacturers, and virtually all operate under territorial systems which encourage investment both abroad and at home.
Ford told the committee that Corning paid an effective tax rate of 36 percent in 2011, but as CTJ notes, she is counting taxes on profits earned overseas that haven’t yet been paid and won’t be unless the company decides to bring the money back to the United States. Corning’s actual tax rate in 2011, according to CTJ’s analysis, was actually negative 0.2 percent.
The territorial system Ford testified […]
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Stephan: Today's edition is focused on the national and international financial structure because I believe a major change has occurred. The national geographical states, most of which came into being only since the 1840s, and which have dominated the geopolitical stage are now being subordinated to vassal status, in service to the emergent Virtual Corporate States, that are controlled by a small group of individuals, through the corporations that are the expressions of their power.
Along with climate change and the rise of the soft police state, this triumvirate are largely shaping the world we live in.
There is a small window of opportunity in which ordinary people can shape this, without great bloodshed. Much will depend on the election in November.
-- Stephan
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DAVID SESSIONS, - The Daily Beast
Stephan: This is a very interesting essay, about a subject that receives far too little attention. In my opinion it constitutes a significant trend. Just as the financial programs of the Right have failed so it positions on abstinence, and its no abortion rigidity are also be shown as the failures they are in the real world. (see Social Values, Social Outcomes, http://www.explorejournal.com/article/S1550-8307%2811%2900346-6/fulltext and The Rise of American Theocracy, and the Implications for Science and Healthcase, http://www.explorejournal.com/article/S1550-8307%2811%2900106-6/fulltext.) It is creating an existential crisis in the Right, as this essay describes, and that is an important trend.
Their theological line against premarital sex is falling on the deaf ears of young believers, some of whom get pregnant and have abortions, thanks to their ignorance about contraception. Now, evangelicals are debating whether churches can embrace contraception as a backup plan.
It’s no secret that evangelicals have a big problem on their hands when it comes to young people and sex. The facts are staggering: despite almost universal affirmation that premarital sex is a sin, 80 percent of unmarried evangelicals (PDF) are having it, and 30 percent of those who accidentally get pregnant get an abortion, according to one survey. U.S. states where abstinence is emphasized over contraception in school sex ed-almost all in the heavily evangelical South-have teen birth rates as high as double (PDF) those of states with a comprehensive curriculum. Though an overwhelming majority believe premarital sex is wrong, white evangelicals are sexually active at a younger age than any demographic besides African-Americans, and are one of the least likely groups to use contraception.
The fact that true love isn’t waiting has concerned evangelicals for years, but the issue is gaining new attention because such a significant number of Christians’ unplanned pregnancies end in abortion. The scramble to […]
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