France Begins Taxing Financial Transactions

By LUIS MIRANDA | THE REAL AGENDA | AUGUST 2, 2012

France has implemented –beginning today — a new financial transactions tax, a levy of 0.2% to be paid by investors whose shares belong to businesses with headquarters in the country.

Transactions in shares of companies whose market value is below EUR 1,000 million (1,230 million) will be exempt.
The application of a tax on financial transactions in Europe has not been possible so far due to the refusal of countries like the United Kingdom. At least nine nations that defend their implementation want to be forerunners in the application of taxes on financial transactions under the “enhanced cooperation” program.

The government of President François Hollande also decided to implement a new tax of 0.01 percent to certain high frequency business transactions, as well as some business with unpaid insurance (CDS) on government borrowings from the European Union (EU).

Unlike what happens in transactions with shares, this tax affects only companies and individuals subject to tax in France. For now, the government will not tax purchases of shares from companies and regular government bonds.

The application of the tax on financial transactions had been adopted under the former conservative government of President Nicolas Sarkozy. His Socialist successor wanted to make it applicable as soon as soon as possible and extend its reach to all financial transactions.

Banker-Controlled System is Fraudulent and the Cause of the Crisis

By LUIS MIRANDA | THE REAL AGENDA | JUNE 1, 2012

It took almost 100 years for the globalists in control of the financial and banking systems to realize that their fraudulent debt-based scheme can no longer be utilized to exploit the people and the resources of the planet. Back in 1913, rubber barons and the global novelty decided that they were going to control the issuance and flow of money with a system that would perpetually maintain all nations of the world in debt with the supranational financial institutions founded by international private banking entities. These entities would create the money out of thin air, lend it to their slave, dependent nations for a juicy profit while ensuring that future generations would have to work all of their lives to pay them interests on the never ending debt.

Today, most main stream media omitted the annual Bilderberg meeting in Virginia, United States, but did make time to promote the fact that the same banking organizations that brought the global economy to a halt, are finally convinced that their model does not work anymore. It is important to understand that when they say it does not work, it implicitly means that they can’t keep on defrauding the world with it. What the main stream dinosaur media is not telling the people is that the current global mafia intends to implement a new system under which they will remain in control, but with more power and more enslavement. Both the heads of the International Monetary Fund and European Central Bank have said that it is time to end the remaining nation-states and give way for a world financial organization that will dictate economic, environmental and financial policies, which will be indeed under the control of the same monopoly men.

Mario Draghi, president of the European Central Bank, labeled the current system imposed by central bankers themselves as “unsustainable” and once again blamed the governments of the nations that did not accept the bankers’ directives as responsible for the dire global economic and financial crisis. He said leaders have been slow to respond to the sovereign debt crisis, which was also manufactured by international banking institutions. “The configuration we had for 10 years, which was considered sustainable, has been shown now to be unsustainable unless further steps are undertaken,” said Draghi. He forgets to mention the fact that it was the bankers that created and sold derivatives and credit default swaps as the newest and trendiest forms of investment to later run away with the people’s money in the form of pension funds, retirement accounts, social security savings and so on. Another important detail left out by Draghi is that the globalization of the economy has served as a perfect platform to gain even more control.

After creating the problem, the bankers presented their rescue and austerity programs as a “solution” to kick start the economy, but as it turns out, it was all about the consolidation of indebted nations such as Iceland, Greece, and the new ones to come soon such as Spain, Portugal, France, the United States and Germany. Austerity came in the form of cuts to the entitlement programs upon which millions of people depend in those countries, and the rescues of international banks in the form of financial bailouts. As things stand today, the bankers were helped and the people were dumped. But trillions of dollars in financial rescue packages were not enough for the bankers. They wanted more. They wanted total control. Since their rescue programs did not render total control now they bankers are shifting to plan B, which includes the complete acquisition of other nation-states through a perpetual state of war that justifies their theft of natural resources and the centralization of all human activity.

After creating and selling the problem through continuous threats that warned about the complete collapse of the global financial system – a situation they sought and provoked — should governments choose not to bail the banks out, globalists like Herman Van Rompuy, Jean Claude Trichet and José Manuel Barroso tried to create panic so politicians would adopt the so-called austerity measures and illegally carried out the rescue of banks that were too large to go bankrupt. After bankers bet on toxic financial products which they knew would not stand a simple smell test, they ran away with 97 percent of investors’ money by risking people’s money in transactions that involved as little as 2 or 3 percent of their own cash.

Suddenly, the banks and their institutions are no longer capable of supporting the sand castles built over pillars of overconfidence, greed, hubris and financial degeneration. “Can the E.C.B. fill the vacuum left by lack of euro area governance?” he asked. “The answer is no.” Of course not. A new system is needed that allows the banks to operate with even less accountability and more liberty to continue taking risks by mortgaging the future of the working classes all around the world. Just as in the recent past, the bankers are warning that inaction, debt liquidation or more effective regulations would mean a generalized contagion of banks and economies which would happen more easily and rapidly due to the interconnectedness of the global economy. Banks are seeking complete deregulation and self governance, as supposed to accountability to governments. But it was precisely lack of regulation, malinvestment and self governance what allowed the bankers to do what they did, submit the world into a deep black hole of debt from which there is no way out.

The elimination of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, which had successfully curbed the bankers’ hunger for risky business, triggered a chain of events that is still ongoing. Banks in need of rescues because supposedly are too big to fail, governments without cash to meet their obligations, pension funds whose coffers are empty, run-away financial corruption, toxic and artificial investment products, insane leveraging, you name it. “It was the largest transfer of money from the working classes to the richest people in human history,” says Russ Roberts, the host of Econtalk. “It was bad for Democracy and for Capitalism.” The solution, according to the bankers however, is to create an insurance fund, which will be paid for by taxpayers from around the world, to assure banks there will always be a rescue plan ready to pull them out of their risky investments. That will not only effectively create the financial incentive to further centralized economic power, but will also eliminate the natural free-market accountability process, the barrier not to bet more than you can possibly pay. A global financial fund will prompt bankers to risk even more, because they can count on a working class that will provide the fruit of their labor to bail them out whenever they need.

Allan Greenspan, the head of the Federal Reserve Bank in 2008 said in Congressional hearings that he did not know what had happened, that he thought the bankers were able to regulate themselves. He said he believed the banks had the ability to assess their own risk. And they did. That is why for every 100 dollars that banks malinvested, only three dollars or so were from their own money. The rest was money from governments, pension funds, savings accounts and so on. Greenspan was the man sitting on the golden chair of the Federal Reserve when the largest banking deregulation process took place under previous administrations, and he knew exactly the potential that such deregulation would create for financial institutions to run unchecked with zero need for accountability. Now that their system has been uncovered as fraudulent, the bankers are using more colorful analogies to describe the supposed threats that would emerge should governments decide not to surrender their sovereignty completely. The latest of those is that the debt crisis is a ’time bomb’. Bankers do not want to buy government debt back and so they are labeling that proposal as the trigger that will detonate the ‘time bomb’.

The initiative to make banks buy the debt back, would not be a solution to the sovereign debt crisis, though. In fact, it would actually perpetuate the debt-based system, because governments would be able to create more debt, which will result in a deeper crisis, as they will be unable to make bond payments. The banks will then be left holding the bag, an outcome usually reserved for the working classes. The ideal scenario would be that banks were forced to buy back the current debt, which they created in the first place, and governments adopted sane fiscal and monetary policies without creating more money out of thin air. Of course, the banks will not allow that to happen, because it will reduce their control over the financial system. Independent, debt-free governments that adopt responsible fiscal and monetary policies would eliminate the need for the current debt-based system, and therefore erase the control the bankers have amassed up until now. The liquidation of debt by letting banks and other institutions fail and go bankrupt would allow the world economic system to begin fresh and operate on a clean, disinfected environment, where artificially created economies would not exist anymore and countries would run their businesses based on existence of resources, production capacity, real gross domestic product, the balance of sales and purchases, bilateral and multilateral commercial negotiations and so on.

“The crisis we’re now in was caused by people taking excessively risky bets with other people’s money,” says Roberts. He adds that a good question to ask is why did people allow the banks to take such high leveraged bets with their money. It was like a poker game where the banks only risked about 3 percent of their own money, while investors took the fall with 96 or 97 percent of their money. But instead of being punished for taking those risks, the banks were rewarded by receiving bailouts. Although the mathematical calculations used by banks to assess market risk and asset value are considered to be fraudulent, they are still used to evaluate investment opportunities. But when those opportunities were shown to be just risky bets, based on fraudulent calculations, the banks were told it was fine, because governments had come to their rescue. They were allowed to sell liabilities as assets making people take very high risks in exchange for a promise to get a miniscule return, if any at all. “I think they believed the government would bail them out in the case of a downturn,” asserts Roberts. As he sees it, the markets are now governed by crony capitalists, and the crony part must be taken out before things can go back to real Capitalism.

Capitalism is a profit and loss system. The prospect of good returns is an incentive to take risk, and the losses are calls for prudence. When the incentive to be prudent is eliminated because there is a government, entity or Fund that will bail out a bank or a whole system, it destroys the financial system, and that is what happened in 2008. Governments, at the behest of the powerful banking cartel covered the risks taken by banking institutions and by doing so eliminated the need for prudence and responsibility.

Taxed to Death Americans Renounce their Citizenships

REUTERS | APRIL 17, 2012

A year ago, in Action Comics, Superman declared plans to renounce his U.S. citizenship.

“‘Truth, justice, and the American way’ — it’s not enough anymore,” the comic book superhero said, after both the Iranian and American governments criticized him for joining a peaceful anti-government protest in Tehran.

Last year, almost 1,800 people followed Superman’s lead, renouncing their U.S. citizenship or handing in their Green Cards. That’s a record number since the Internal Revenue Service began publishing a list of those who renounced in 1998. It’s also almost eight times more than the number of citizens who renounced in 2008, and more than the total for 2007, 2008 and 2009 combined.

But not everyone’s motivations are as lofty as Superman’s. Many say they parted ways with America for tax reasons.

The United States is one of the only countries to tax its citizens on income earned while they’re living abroad. And just as Americans stateside must file tax returns each April — this year, the deadline is Tuesday — an estimated 6.3 million U.S. citizens living abroad brace for what they describe as an even tougher process of reporting their income and foreign accounts to the IRS. For them, the deadline is June.

The National Taxpayer Advocate’s Office, part of the IRS, released a report in December that details the difficulties of filing taxes from overseas. It cites heavy paperwork, a lack of online filing options and a dearth of local and foreign-language resources.

For those wishing to legally escape the filing requirements, the only way is to formally renounce their U.S. citizenship. Last year, IRS records show that at least 1,788 people did, and that’s likely an underestimate. The IRS publishes in the Federal Register the names of those who give up their citizenship, and some who renounced say they haven’t seen their name on the list yet.

The State Department said records it keeps differ from those published by the IRS. They indicate that renunciations have remained steady, at about 1,100 each year, said an official.

The decision by the IRS to publish the names is referred to by lawyers as “name and shame.” That’s because those who renounce are seen as willing to give up their citizenship primarily for financial reasons.

There’s also an “exit tax” for the very rich who choose to leave. During the last 25 years, a number of millionaires and billionaires have renounced their citizenship. Among them: Ted Arison, the late founder of Carnival Cruises and Michael Dingman, a former Ford Motor director.

But those of more modest means renounce, too. They say leaving America is about more than money; it’s about privacy and red tape.

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The Evil that is Democratic Thought

by Sartre
Infowars.com
December 6, 2011

The mantra that democratic rule exists in the realm of governmental affairs has proven false. The fact that deficit spending is commonplace and acceptable to their populace links the social democracies in a feudal structure that most are unwilling to acknowledge. The practice of debt created bank money underlies every social policy and expenditure. The notion that paying for public projects, based upon popular support and taxes, is extinct. Destroying domestic currencies and obligating future generations to the debt slavery of past failed projects, has replaced the work ethic. Democracies pledge subsidies without labor and security absent of personal freedom.

Is this the promise for a society based upon individual dignity, or is this the formula for subsistence survival of servile serfs?

One of the consistent symptoms of self-delusion in the postmodern global society is the denial that evil is not real. The very term evil offends sophisticates that revel in God is Dead mindset. Friedrich Nietzsche’s proposition that the idea of God is dead now rules much of the planet. The end result is that eternal standards of ethics and morality are rejected and situational whims that foster unsavory appetites are adopted. Under the inevitable void in ethical principles, the discipline of epistemology and the search for truth becomes impossible. Knowledge is never relative; it is everlasting and founded upon permanent reality. Contrary to the Transhumanist vision for mankind, human nature is undeviating in its common and shared traits and foibles. The most pronounced shortcoming in all of us is the tendency to accept or even commit evil, in the normal course of our behavior.

The philosophy of history has long struggled with ethics in politics. Yet, the champions of the modern state cling to the suspect claim that legitimacy of a political regime stems from the public authority of citizens reflected by their democratic will of consent. The essential question posed, that few will address, rests upon the ultimate nature of any political structure. Can a democracy be moral, when selfish sycophants shout and pose as the voice of the people?

Tyler S. Moselle in a paper, Natural Evil in Politics, concludes.

A Theory of Natural Evil in Politics

“We have seen various moderns approach the question of natural evil in politics with direct reference to eternal essence. The general modern trend refers to attempts to turn back to eternal essence as naturally evil due to inadequacies in human reason, conceptions of justice, or physical necessity (self-interest and survival). Yet, none of the moderns destroy a natural link to justice or evil in politics – they merely shift the grounds of the debate. Conceptions of radical freedom with no essence preceding existence still affirm notions of responsibility and ethics.

The liberal conception of injustice often attempts to defend itself with teleological justifications (via Kant and Hegel) that can be linked to the classical conception of the eternal ideas. Machiavelli and Nietzsche turn against eternal essence and being in unique ways in an effort to affirm the physical over the intangible. Most importantly, we have seen that Hume’s attack on essence preceding existence is not so devastating. We addressed an alternative through Noam Chomsky’s work synthesizing a conception of natural evil in politics through anarchism and activism. We offered a sustained argument for progress which turns against the conservative arguments of eternal being and unchanging essence from the classical conception. Now it is time to sketch a brief theory of natural evil in politics.

Natural evil in politics is the following: the extreme periphery against the middle ground. Plato establishes the difficulty and problems in nature when seeking to reconcile eternal being with becoming. Aristotle puts forth a practical vision of the political regime based on moderation.

Confucius establishes a natural right teaching that focuses on the middle way. The moderns push for the physical over the metaphysical and make an argument for harmonizing the extremes or at least reveal that both the extreme periphery and the stable middle are the solid core. Hume makes the eternal essence of classical metaphysics applicable but does not destroy it.

Chomsky provides an applicable model of testing the theory of natural evil against reality while retaining conceptions of natural justice and eternal ideas as a basic standard. The arguments for historical progress reveal compromises that underscore the harmony of the radical few who push for progress in the name of the eternal essence of ideas while being stabilized by the unradical many and the becoming of reality. This is not determinism but the basic realization that the extreme periphery and the solid core fuse into a symbiotic whole as prefaced in the introduction”.

Mr. Moselle uses the term progress as a theme if not a goal. Can such an objective be applied to a nanotechnology state that seeks to remake human nature into a transhumanist cyborg robot? There is no escape from asking and seeking an answer to the philosophical inquiry of the evil nature in each of us. When maniacal scientists dream of their benign Frankenstein creatures free of original sin, they verify that human progress is attainable only in their own demented minds.

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More Taxes for a Dying Economy

By Jim Kuhnhenn
Associated Press
September 18, 2011

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama is expected to seek a new base tax rate for the wealthy to ensure that millionaires pay at least at the same percentage as middle income taxpayers.

A White House official said the proposal would be included in the president’s proposal for long term deficit reduction that he will announce Monday. The official spoke anonymously because the plan has not been officially announced.

Obama is going to call it the “Buffett Rule” for Warren Buffett, the billionaire investor who has complained that rich people like him pay a smaller share of their income in federal taxes than middle-class taxpayers.

Buffett wrote in a New York Times op-ed piece last month that he and his rich friends “have been coddled long enough by a billionaire-friendly Congress.”

The measure would be in addition to $447 billion in new tax revenue that Obama is seeking to pay for his short-term spending and tax cutting plan to jump start the economy.

House Speaker John Boehner said Thursday he would oppose tax increases to reduce the deficit. Boehner has urged Congress’ deficit “supercommittee” to lay the groundwork for a broad overhaul of the U.S. tax code.

The panel has almost unlimited authority to recommend changes in federal spending and taxes and is working against a deadline of Nov. 23.

Boehner said the panel has “only one option, spending cuts and entitlement reforms,” a reference to government benefit programs such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

Any broad compromise that clears the bipartisan committee is almost certain to require Democratic agreement to savings from programs such as Social Security and Medicare, along with Republican acquiescence to additional revenues, although any such trade-offs are rarely discussed openly until the last possible moment in negotiations.

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