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Showing posts with label finance. Show all posts
Showing posts with label finance. Show all posts

Tuesday, 4 June 2019

Eliminating Free Speech The Smart Way

Jeff Thomas
International Man

Left-wing activists have recently been increasingly active in seeking to limit opposing political viewpoints, in order to create a more ubiquitous “groupthink.” One effort in accomplishing this has been to propose the creation of a “Human Rights Committee” in order to monitor the economic transactions of “white supremacist groups and anti-Islam activists.”

This should not be surprising, as, throughout the former Free World, collectivists are, increasingly, coming out of the closet and seeking to eliminate any and all opposition to their cause.

And this should not, in itself, be alarming, as it should be both predictable and understandable that any politically driven group, be it left-leaning or right-leaning, would seek to gain an advantage over its opposite number.

What may be a real cause for alarm, however, is that those whom they are trying to rope into their effort are banks and corporations… and that they’re succeeding without a shot being fired.

It might be hoped that those champions of industry and commerce would at least put up a perfunctory fight, but clearly, this is not the case. They’re not only caving in; they’re entirely on board.

As an example, MasterCard is considering the selective restriction of individuals from their services and funds. Those individuals would be the ones that held unacceptable political views.

But they’re not the first in the queue to economically force people to have “correct” views. PayPal and Patreon have barred selected individuals from receiving payments through their services when those individuals have been identified as holding “extreme views.” More alarmingly, they’ve been supported in this decision by the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

Journalist Ben Swann has commented that this means that the US government has granted “big corporations the ability to control what voices are heard.”

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The 4 Skills Every 18 year-old Should Have | COACH RED PILL

Comment: Don't always agree with this guy but he has a lot of good practical advise for young men.  He's also being covertly censored by the Youtube-Google monopoly so give him some support.

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Monday, 20 May 2019

The Spider's Web: Britain's Second Empire (Documentary)



At the demise of empire, City of London financial interests created a web of secrecy jurisdictions that captured wealth from across the globe and hid it in a web of offshore islands. Today, up to half of global offshore wealth is hidden in British jurisdictions and Britain and its dependencies are the largest global players in the world of international finance. 
 
The Spider's Web was written, directed and produced by Michael Oswald, you can sponsor his future films on Liberapay (supports one time donations) and Patreon: https://liberapay.com/IndependentPOV https://www.patreon.com/independentdo... 
 
Share this documentary with your friends, and ask sites to feature it:  
https://twitter.com/spiderswebfilm  
 
 
 
The Spider's Web was substantially inspired by Nicholas Shaxson's book Treasure Islands you can read an extract of it here: https://www.theguardian.com/theguardi... 
 
Translate this documentary here on youtube or contact us for the .srt file 
 
contact@independentpov.org 
 
For those interested to learn more about tax justice and financial secrecy, read about the Tax Justice Network's campaigning and regular blogs - become part of the movement for change and listen to the Tax Justice Network's monthly podcast/radio show the Taxcast https://www.taxjustice.net/taxcast/ 
 
 
Review on Open Democracy: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/open... 
 
Website: www.spiderswebfilm.com 
 
German Version: https://youtu.be/1ZZR8vBKqwc 
 
Subtitles: French, Spanish, German, Italian, Russian, Arabic, Korean, Hungarian, English, Turkish, Portugese.

Friday, 3 May 2019

‘Dystopian approach’: SEC gives blessing to MasterCard’s idea of cutting off right-wingers



RT

Blocking payments to individuals or groups by financial service firms impedes freedom of speech in a free society, journalist Ben Swann has told RT, following reports that MasterCard is allegedly on course to censor the far-right. 

The New York-based firm is reportedly being forced by left-leaning liberal activists to set up an internal “human rights committee” that would monitor payments to “white supremacist groups and anti-Islam activists.”

“The problem is that everyone has their own views and, in a free society, the idea of a free society is that you are free to have your belief systems, as long as you’re not harming anyone else physically,” Swann told RT America. “But your belief system belongs to you and you have the right be wrong. White supremacists have the right to be wrong.”

MasterCard is not the only holder of purse-strings that is mulling the selective banning of individuals from their services and funds. Patreon and PayPal have previously barred individuals from receiving payments using their platforms, due to their extreme views.

But unlike crowdfunding platforms, being cut off from one of the leading American multinational financial services corporations will, most likely, have a much greater impact on the financial stability of an individual or a group, especially after the US Securities and Exchange Commission reportedly blessed MasterCard’s undertaking. By doing this, Swann believes the government granted “big corporations the ability to control what voices are heard.”

Tuesday, 19 March 2019

JPMorgan Managing Director Dies Suddenly; Has Links to Other JPM Deaths

Pam Martens
Wall St. On Parade

When you are the largest bank in the United States and you’ve been compared to the Gambino crime family in a book by two trial lawyers; when you’ve pleaded guilty to three criminal felony counts brought by the United States Justice Department in the past five years; when you’ve paid over $30 billion in fines over charges of crimes against the public and investors since 2008; and when you’ve had an unprecedented string of employees leaping to their death from buildings, dropping dead at home or on the street, and two alleged murder-suicides by employees — all in just the past five years – one might think that law enforcement might show some interest – especially since this employer – JPMorgan Chase – holds tens of billions of dollars of Bank-Owned Life Insurance (BOLI) on its workers. (This death benefit, by the way, pays tax-free to the corporation, not the employee’s family.)

But when it comes to JPMorgan Chase and law enforcement, there does not seem to be a morsel of curiosity over the continuing sudden deaths of its computer technology workers – no matter how high up the corporate ladder they rank or how many floors they are alleged to fall to their death.

Take the case of Douglas (Doug) Arthur Carucci, age 53, who died on Saturday, March 9 under what Sarah Butcher at eFinancial Careers calls “tragic” and unexpected circumstances. Carucci is believed to have been a resident of Manhattan with his wife, Cindy.

We called the New York City Police Department and were told they had no information in their database about the death of a Douglas Carucci in March 2019. We next emailed the New York City Medical Examiner’s office – which is mandated under law to investigate all deaths from accidents or sudden deaths. Aja Worthy-Davis, the Executive Director for Public Affairs of the Medical Examiner’s Office responded as follows:

“There is no OCME record of this individual (under the name shared). Please keep in mind that the OCME does not investigate (or keep records of) all deaths within the City of New York. The OCME is specifically responsible for investigating only NYC-based deaths occurring from criminal violence, by accident, by suicide, or in any unusual or suspicious manner.”

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Thursday, 7 February 2019

There's No Good Reason to Trust Blockchain Technology

Bruce Scheneier
wired.com

In his 2008 white paper that first proposed bitcoin, the anonymous Satoshi Nakamoto concluded with: “We have proposed a system for electronic transactions without relying on trust.” He was referring to blockchain, the system behind bitcoin cryptocurrency. The circumvention of trust is a great promise, but it’s just not true. Yes, bitcoin eliminates certain trusted intermediaries that are inherent in other payment systems like credit cards. But you still have to trust bitcoin—and everything about it.

Much has been written about blockchains and how they displace, reshape, or eliminate trust. But when you analyze both blockchain and trust, you quickly realize that there is much more hype than value. Blockchain solutions are often much worse than what they replace.

First, a caveat. By blockchain, I mean something very specific: the data structures and protocols that make up a public blockchain. These have three essential elements. The first is a distributed (as in multiple copies) but centralized (as in there’s only one) ledger, which is a way of recording what happened and in what order. This ledger is public, meaning that anyone can read it, and immutable, meaning that no one can change what happened in the past.

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Thursday, 27 September 2018

EU, Russia, Iran, and China Unveil New Global Payment System Independent of the US

AntiMedia

(ZHE) — In a stunning vote of “no confidence” in the US monopoly over global payment infrastructure, one month ago Germany’s foreign minister Heiko Maas called for the creation of a new payments system independent of the US that would allow Brussels to be independent in its financial operations from Washington and as a means of rescuing the nuclear deal between Iran and the west.
 
Writing in the German daily Handelsblatt, Maas said “Europe should not allow the US to act over our heads and at our expense. For that reason it’s essential that we strengthen European autonomy by establishing payment channels that are independent of the US, creating a European Monetary Fund and building up an independent Swift system,” he wrote.

Maas said it was vital for Europe to stick with the Iran deal. “Every day the agreement continues to exist is better than the highly explosive crisis that otherwise threatens the Middle East,” he said, with the unspoken message was even clearer: Europe no longer wants to be a vassal state to US monopoly over global payments, and will now aggressively pursue its own “SWIFT” network that is not subservient to Washington’s every whim.

Many discounted the proposal as being far too aggressive: after all, a direct assault on SWIFT, and Washington, would be seen by the rest of the world as clear mutiny against a US-dominated global regime, and could potentially spark a crisis of confidence in the reserve status of the dollar, resulting in unpredictable, and dire, consequences.
 
However, despite the diplomatic consequences, Europe was intent on creating some loophole to the US ability to weaponize the global currency of account at will, something observed most recently as part of Trump’s latest sanctions on Iran, and as a result, late on Monday, the European Union said that it would establish a special payment channel to allow European and other companies to legally continue financial transactions with Iran while avoiding exposure to U.S. sanctions.

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Tuesday, 24 April 2018

This Is Not A Market

Raúl Ilargi Meijer
Automatic Earth

“[Price discovery] is the process of determining the price of an asset in the marketplace through the interactions of buyers and sellers”, says Wikipedia. Perhaps not a perfect definition, but it’ll do. They add: “The futures and options market serve all important functions of price discovery.”

What follows from this is that markets need price discovery as much as price discovery needs markets. They are two sides of the same coin. Markets are the mechanism that makes price discovery possible, and vice versa. Functioning markets, that is. 

Given the interdependence between the two, we must conclude that when there is no price discovery, there are no functioning markets. And a market that doesn’t function is not a market at all. Also, if you don’t have functioning markets, you have no investors. Who’s going to spend money purchasing things they can’t determine the value of? (I know: oh, wait..)

Ergo: we must wonder why everyone in the financial world, and the media, is still talking about ‘the markets’ (stocks, bonds et al) as if they still existed. Is it because they think there still is price discovery? Or do they think that even without price discovery, you can still have functioning markets? Or is their idea that a market is still a market even if it doesn’t function?

Or is it because they once started out as ‘investors’ or finance journalists, bankers or politicians, and wouldn’t know what to call themselves now, or simply can’t be bothered to think about such trivial matters?

Doesn’t a little warning voice pop up, somewhere in the back of their minds, in the middle of a sweaty sleepless night, that says perhaps they shouldn’t get this one wrong? Because if you think about, and treat, a ‘thing’, as something that it’s not at all, don’t you run the risk of getting it awfully wrong?

A cow is not a dinner table; but both have four legs. And “Art is Art, isn’t it? Still, on the other hand, water is water. And east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now you tell me what you know”. And when you base million, billion, trillion dollar decisions, often involving other people’s money, on such misconceptions, don’t you play with fire -or worse?

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Saturday, 20 August 2016

Pentagon can’t account for $6.5 trillion of taxpayer money

Comment: This is an unimaginable amount of money. They're at it again..."materially misstated". Talk about the rise of DoubleSpeak!

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RT

The Pentagon failed to account for $6.5 trillion in its financial statement, a recently-recovered Inspector General’s report on the 2015 fiscal year said. It reveals the audit of the Department of Defense was “materially misstated.” 

The army failed to provide “accurate, complete, timely and well-supported” documents that could have explained the use of trillions of dollars in quarterly and yearend adjustments.

The US military made $2.8 trillion in wrongful adjustments in one quarter alone in 2015, and $6.5 trillion for the year, but could not provide anything that would detail what it spent the money on. 

There were a total of 64,321 journal voucher (JV) adjustments made in the third quarter and 142,355 by the yearend, but only 7,083 of them were supported with detailed documentation of transactions.

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Sunday, 24 July 2016

Dark Money

Comment: Very valuable work by the Open Secrets team on the channels of corruption built into the American electoral system and how easily this "dark money" subverts democratic accountability. Read the whole series. Excerpt below from the first in the series.

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Open Secrets


What is Dark Money?

 

Dark Money refers to political spending meant to influence the decision of a voter, where the donor is not disclosed and the source of the money is unknown. Depending upon the circumstances, Dark Money can refer to funds spent by a political nonprofit or a super PAC. Here’s how:

  • Political nonprofits are under no legal obligation to disclose their donors. When they choose not to, they are considered Dark Money groups.
  • Super PACs can also be considered Dark Money groups in certain situations. While these organizations are legally required to disclose their donors, they can accept unlimited contributions from political non-profits and “shell” corporations who may not have disclosed their donors, in these cases they are considered Dark Money groups.
Dark Money groups account for staggering gaps in understanding exactly how each funding dollar is being spent during political elections. These gaps are becoming wider with every election cycle. Political organizations working to influence the 2016 elections outside party or official campaign structures spent more than $15 million in 2015, and only reported about $5 million of that to the Federal Election Commission (FEC). For comparison, that $5 million alone is more than ten times more than what had been reported at this point in 2011, before the last presidential election cycle. 

Click on image
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