INVERSION

Subsidizing the Corporate One Percent:   Subsidy Tracker Top 100 Parent Companies

8/18/14 Tax Burden in U.S. Not as Heavy as It Looks, Report Says

Democrats and Republicans, who have routinely provided lip service to the idea of lowering rates, but taken no action.

Prof. Edward Kleinbard says that despite the American tax code’s high tax rate, loopholes make United States corporations more competitive than their overseas competitors, not less. KLEINBARD former chief of staff to the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation, makes a captivating argument in an academic paper that the United States tax code — counter to the conventional wisdom — is not impeding global competitiveness. In fact, the opposite is true. Professor Kleinbard contends that most United States multinational companies don’t pay anywhere near 35 percent. Companies paid, on average, 12.6 percent, according to the Government Accountability Office, which last measured it in 2010, by deliberately stashing piles of cash abroad.  Professor Kleinbard argues that lower tax rates are not driving companies to inversions; instead, he contends it is all the money that companies have overseas — some $2 trillion — and don’t want to bring back to the United States despite protestations by many chief executives that they wish they could. American companies are “unencumbered by any of the anti-abuse rules to which non-U.S. multinationals domiciled in jurisdictions with better designed territorial systems might be subject.”

Professor Kleinbard makes a tantalizing argument that all that cash “trapped” overseas isn’t really trapped. In fact, he says that some American companies have found a way to use it — in the United States.  “As Apple Inc. demonstrated in 2013, large multinational firms often can access their offshore earnings without incurring a tax cost, simply by borrowing in the United States and using the earnings on the offshore cash to pay the interest costs,” he explained. The tax code allows a company to include interest earned on its offshore cash pile in the United States parent’s income. That “offsets the tax deduction for the interest expense on the firm’s U.S. borrowing, and the firm is left in the same economic position as if it had simply repatriated the cash tax-free.”

• The U.S. cracks down on rich tax evaders
• 2012 List of richest in 50 states.
• Ken Dart's net worth at $6.6 billion, ranking Michigan 21st among states' wealthiest people. He renounced his U.S. citizenship to get out of the obligation - just move out of the country! A bill likely to become law aims to close the loophole on those who expatriate themselves. June 15, 2008

To Get Rich an Educated Citizenry Must:

1) REMEMBER THAT THE MOST IMPORTANT LITERACY SKILL IS KNOWING HOW TO READ BETWEEN THE LINES.

2) THE MOST IMPORTANT THINKING SKILL IS NOT TO BELIEVE EVERYTHING YOU READ BUT TO RESEARCH AND CHECK THE FACTS FOR YOURSELF.

3) CURRICULUM MUST BE TAUGHT WITH AN INTERDISCIPLINARY POINT OF VIEW
You must be able to learn about something in context in order to see the big picture, otherwise it is only a bunch of fragmented pieces of data - NOT INFORMATION, and I believe is only good for keeping knowledge secret.

NO PROTECTION FROM PRIVATE DEAL SCAMS

4/2014 For private deals, no one is watching the watchdogs: 
From 2006 to 2009, Provident Asset Management raised $485 million from 7,700 investors who were drawn to its promises of annual returns as high as 18 percent on oil and gas assets. Law firm Mick & Associates helped. Provident paid Mick to provide "due diligence" reports to help brokers decide whether to recommend the investments to their clients.​ Bryan Mick, the 49-year-old lawyer who heads the Omaha, Nebraska, firm that bears his name, said it isn't his job to catch frauds. He added that alerting regulators to any red flags raised in his reports would violate attorney-client privilege.​ He's right about his limited duties as a watchdog. Mick's firm and other third-party due diligence providers for private placements aren't covered by any regulatory regime that would require them to report suspicious activity to regulators, law enforcement officials or investors.​
 

The International Swaps and Derivatives Association (ISDA) 

11/11/14 Banks accept derivatives rule change to end 'too big to fail' scenario

The $700 trillion financial derivatives industry has agreed to a fundamental rule change from January to help regulators to wind down failed banks without destabilising markets.  The International Swaps and Derivatives Association (ISDA) and 18 major banks that dominate the market will now allow financial watchdogs to apply temporary stays to prevent a rush to close derivatives contracts if a bank runs into trouble, the ISDA said on Saturday.  A delay would give regulators time to ensure that critical parts of a bank, such as customer accounts, continue smoothly while the rest is wound down or sold off in an orderly way.  That would help to avoid the type of market chaos sparked by the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008 and also end the problem of banks being considered too big to fail.  The Financial Stability Board (FSB), a regulatory task force for the Group of 20 economies (G20), had asked the ISDA to make the changes with the aim of ending the too-big-to-fail scenario in which banks are propped up with taxpayer money to avoid market disruption.  Under the new contract terms, default clauses in derivatives contracts such as interest rate or credit default swaps would be suspended for a maximum of 48 hours.

POWER: Fortune 500 companies receive $63 billion in subsidies 2/26/14 
25,000 major taxpayer subsidy deals over the last two decades study.

Techtopus wage suppression --  Don't Pay them and control their jobs.
No One Goes To Jail: The secret wage-theft agreements between Apple, Google, Intel, Adobe, Intuit, and Pixar (now owned by Disney) are described in court papers obtained by PandoDaily as “an overarching conspiracy” in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act and the Clayton Antitrust Act, and at times it reads like something lifted straight out of the robber baron era that produced those laws. Today’s inequality crisis is America’s worst on record since statistics were first recorded a hundred years ago — the only comparison would be to the era of the railroad tycoons in the late 19th century.​

CAPTIAL GAINS TAX

Park Avenue: money, power and the American dream - Why Poverty?

2012 The capital gains tax is one of the most lucrative perks in the tax code for wealthy Americans, with half of all capital gains flowing to the top 0.1 percent of taxpayers, according to the Washington Post. The way you get rich in this world is not by working hard,” said Marty Sullivan, an economist and a contributing editor to Tax Analysts. “It’s by owning large amounts of assets and having those things appreciate in value.” Set up a "Blind" Family Trust. http://www.washingtonpost.

Shell Company Towers of Secrecy Own Real Estate

How to Break the Wall Street to Washington Merry-Go-Round The revolving door between the big banks and the Federal Reserve isn't just unseemly — it's a time bomb. Here's how to fix it.

INTERNATIONAL BANKERS
299 Park Avenue 17th Floor New York, NY 10171
Tel: (212) 421-1611 Fax: (212) 421-1119 Email: iib@iib.org

XXX

LOOPHOLES USED BY BILLIONAIRES

MAKE SURE YOU READ CHAPTER 7: HOW THE RICH PROTECT THEMSELVES

Off Shore Tax Shelters Explained

Secrecy creates an environment where fraud, tax evasion, money laundering and other forms of corruption thrive. 

The oil industry has been tax exempt since the 1920s. When the income tax was created in 1913 or 14, it was intended to capture economic rents. But the big rent extractors, oil and gas and minerals, got away with avoidance.

GETTING ENOUGH MONEY TO OFFSET WAR DEBT

Panama wasn’t designed to launder money. It was designed to launder earnings – mainly by the oil and the gas industries, and the mining industry. 

"Panama, and hence Panamanian companies, were set up initially to register oil tankers and mineral ships in order to give the appearance of taking all of their profits on the transporting the oil, or the copper or other minerals, from third world countries to the United States and Europe. Oil companies don’t pay the tax collector in Europe anything. They don’t pay the American government an income tax either. All their earnings are reported as being made in the tankers, which are registered in countries that don’t tax income.
The entire balance-of-payments deficit of the United States in the 1950s and the ‘60s, right down to the early ‘70s, was military spending abroad on Vietnam War.  Either the dollar was going down or the United States had to sell gold. That’s what finally led Nixon to take the dollar off gold in 1971. But for many years the United tried to fight against doing that.
The State Department came to Chase, and said, we’ve got to figure out some way of getting enough dollars to offset the military deficit. They found the way to do it. It was to make the United States the new Switzerland of the world.
I was asked to make a calculation of how much criminal capital there is in the world. How much the drug dealers made, how much the criminals all over made, how much the dictators secreted away. How much goes to Switzerland, and how can U.S. banks get this criminal money in the United States?  The end result was that the U.S. Government went to Chase and other banks and asked them to be good American citizens and make America safe for the criminals of the world, to safeguard their money to support the dollar in the process. You usually have not only one or two, but often three or four centers in a “veil of tiers.” The idea is not to put money into the United States directly.
You can look and see how much American stock, how many American bonds, how many American bank deposits all come from these islands. The magnitude is so enormous that this is what has been supporting the dollar.  Congress is right behind this. In the 1960s it recognized that basically, criminals are the most liquid people in the world. They don’t want to tie down their money and property, because property can be seen, it’s visible. Finance in the balance of payments reports is called “Invisibles.” If you’re a criminal, you want to have your finance invisible in order to keep it safe. And the safest investment is U.S. Treasury bonds.  So there was an argument in Congress in the 1960s: Do we want to have 15% tax withholding on the Treasury bonds, especially to foreigners? It was pointed out that most foreigners who hold Treasury bonds actually are criminals. So Congress said, we need criminal money. We are not going to withhold criminal taxes. We’re going to make crime tax-free. We’re going to tax American industry, we’re going to tax American labor, but not foreign criminals, because we need their money. So we’re not going to withhold what they hold through their fiduciary accounts in Delaware, which was the main at that time, or New York, or London branches of U.S. banks. The London branches of U.S. banks were the single major depositors and source of revenue of growth in the 1960s for Chase, Citibank and others. They were called eurodollars. The eurodollars flowing into these branches were very largely from drug dealing and arms dealing, and third world dictators in Africa and other places.  So under U.S. pressure, the international banking system was set up to facilitate the money laundering of drug capital. The reason the Americans and the Canadians were not particularly noteworthy in the law firm’s records is the Panamanian law firm’s records was that its role was to set up money laundering for foreigners, to conceal their means of getting money. But the oil industry doesn’t conceal it. The oil industry declares all of the income it gets, and the mining industry declares all the income that it gets from the Panamanian shipping companies, from the Liberian shipping companies. But because Panama and Liberia don’t have an income tax, there’s no tax liability for this. It’s stolen fair and square from the tax collector, just like California Senator Hayakawa said America had stolen Panama fair and square from Colombia." source

How to Pay No Taxes: 10 Strategies Used by the Rich

“Grat” tax loophole 

Walton grantor retained annuity trust makes it easy it for the wealthy to bypass estate and gift taxes. Federal law requires billionaires  who want to leave fortunes to their children to pay estate or gift taxes of 40 percent on those assets. By shuffling  company stock in and out of trusts YOU CAN AVOID THIS.
JPMorgan Chase & Co. helps so many clients use the trusts that the bank has a special unit dedicated to processing GRAT paperwork, says Joanne E. Johnson, a JPMorgan private-wealth banker​. Goldman Sachs disclosed in a 2004 filing that 84 of the firm’s current and former partners used GRATs. Blankfein has transferred more than $50 million to family members with little or no gift tax due, according to calculations based on data in his SEC filings.​ 2009 Families may pay anywhere from $5,000 to “hundreds of thousands of dollars” in legal and other fees to set up one or more GRATs.

NING and DING TRUST
Wealthy Americans looking to avoid state income taxes are moving billions of dollars in assets to trusts in no-tax states such as Delaware, Nevada and Alaska. 

This type of trust may be domiciled in any state that has no fiduciary income tax on its trusts and which allows self-settled asset protection trusts, which are trusts that the settlor sets up for the benefit of himself and are protected from the settlor’s creditors.  So, all along, the same type of trust could be domiciled in other favorable jurisdictions such as Nevada, Alaska and South Dakota.  Notwithstanding the marketing done by Delaware, there were similar trusts set up under the laws of these other favorable jurisdictions.

In early 2012, Chief Counsel Advisory 201208026 was issued which created a shock among the estate planning community.  This Advisory held that retaining only a testamentary power of appointment avoids a taxable gift over the remainder interest in the trust, but is not enough to avoid a taxable gift of the interest held for the current beneficiaries.  Thus, if this is the IRS’s position, the settlor must also retain a lifetime power that would cause an incomplete gift.  However, the problem is that just about any retained lifetime power would also cause the trust to be a grantor trust for income tax purposes.

Trusts created by people before death typically come in two forms -- grantor trusts and non-grantor trusts.

The income generated by grantor trusts that isn’t distributed to beneficiaries is typically considered taxable income to the person who put the assets into the trust. The initial contribution of assets is, in many cases, considered a gift for estate tax purposes. For example, records released during the 2012 presidential campaign showed that Mitt Romney used a grantor trust to pass wealth to his children, moving some assets before they rose in value and paying annual income taxes on trust earnings as a way of making an additional tax-free gift. A non-grantor trust works the other way. The trust pays income taxes on any gains, with the top federal income tax bracket of 39.6 percent starting at $12,150 of income in 2014.The NING and DING are hybrids, structured so the individual retains enough control to avoid gift tax and cedes enough control to avoid income tax.

Getting ‘Both’

“That’s like threading a needle being able to get both of those things at once,” Redd said. The gift is considered incomplete, meaning that it hasn’t fully passed to heirs and isn’t subject to the U.S. gift tax. That’s because the person establishing the trust retains some ability to decide who gets how much money. In the IRS ruling involving Lipkind’s client, the man with four sons has the sole power to use the money for the health, education or support of his children. For income tax purposes, however, the trust is considered a non-grantor trust and pays its own taxes on undistributed income. That’s because the person establishing the trust gives up the ability to get money back from it without the agreement of a committee of family members. The crucial fact is that the income tax liability belongs to the trust, not the individual. 

How Banks Help You Get Rich with Tax Havens Off Shore Banking  
INTERNATIONAL BANKING OFFERS TAX EVASIONS AND TAX HAVENS

INSIDER TRADING

Congress: Trading stock on inside information 11/13/11
http://www.cbsnews.com

Schweizer says he wanted to know why some congressmen and senators managed to accumulate significant wealth beyond their salaries, and proved particularly adept at buying and selling stocks.

Schweizer: There are all sorts of forms of honest grafts that congressmen engage in that allow them to become very, very wealthy. So it's not illegal, but I think it's highly unethical, I think it's highly offensive, and wrong.

Steve Kroft: What do you mean honest graft?

Schweizer: For example insider trading on the stock market. If you are a member of Congress, those laws are deemed not to apply.

Schweizer: There are all sorts of forms of honest grafts that congressmen engage in that allow them to become very, very wealthy. So it's not illegal, but I think it's highly unethical, I think it's highly offensive, and wrong.

Kroft: So congressman get a pass on insider trading?

Schweizer: They do. The fact is, if you sit on a healthcare committee and you know that Medicare, for example, is-- is considering not reimbursing for a certain drug that's market moving information. And if you can trade stock on-- off of that information and do so legally, that's a great profit making opportunity. And that sort of behavior goes on.

Kroft: Why does Congress get a pass on this?

Schweizer: It's really the way the rules have been defined. And the people who make the rules are the political class in Washington. And they've conveniently written them in such a way that they don't apply to themselves.

"Nobody would talk to us."

That's what 60 Minutes correspondent Steve Kroft says happened when he tried to get members of Congress to talk about "insider trading" on Capitol Hill. It turns out that it is not illegal for member of Congress to make stock trades using inside information they learn while working on legislation, and Steve had some questions about some specific stock trades.
Steve Kroft reports that members of Congress can legally trade stock based on non-public information from Capitol Hill. Washington, D.C. is a town that runs on inside information - but should our elected officials be able to use that information to pad their own pockets? As Steve Kroft reports, members of Congress and their aides have regular access to powerful political intelligence, and many have made well-timed stock market trades in the very industries they regulate. For now, the practice is perfectly legal, but some say it's time for the law to change.
The next national election is now less than a year away and congressmen and senators are expending much of their time and their energy raising the millions of dollars in campaign funds they'll need just to hold onto a job that pays $174,000 a year. Few of them are doing it for the salary and all of them will say they are doing it to serve the public. But there are other benefits: Power, prestige, and the opportunity to become a Washington insider with access to information and connections that no one else has, in an environment of privilege where rules that govern the rest of the country, don't always apply to them.

Financial Documents Suggest GOP Rep. Bachus Profited from 'Insider Trading' on TARP Bailout by Wynton Hall

U.S. Representative Spencer Bachus (R-AL) had access to highly sensitive financial information during the 2008 bailout debates that may have helped him earn tens of thousands of dollars by trading stock options, even as most Americans' portfolios took a beating. On Sunday, Rep. Bachus's trading behavior came under fire in a 60 Minutes report based on Throw Them All Out, the book by investigative journalist and Breitbart editor that has triggered a political earthquake in Washington. Schweizer, who is also a Breitbart editor, devotes a significant portion of the book to exposing possible congressional insider trading.

Business is just Business - I must admit that given the choice between doing business with violent gangs or with banks I'd chose the gangs.
 

30+ years have taught me that bankers can't be trusted. ~ anon

FINANCIAL LITERACY - FAMOUS QUOTES

Origins of Private Banks, Wealth of the First American Families Wealth, Pirates, Opium, Smugglers, Slavery, Rum, Sugar, Taxes, Trade Routes, NAFTA, GATT, Transfer, Tax Shelters, Kingdoms, Societies, the Fed, Fraturnities, Skull and Bones and the Land Grant College Act.

If you dont read the newspaper you are uninformed.
If you do read the newspaper you are misinformed.”
~ Unknown

FINANCIAL LITERACY and The Politics of Knowledge 

WHO IS ALLOWED TO KNOW?

What can so-called literate adults do?
by Frank Foreman
We're often told that such and such a percentage have "basic" literacy, that so and so percent are "proficient," but we're rarely given the actual questions, or maybe just one or two.

An interdisciplinary approach to learning allows you to see things in context, connect the dots, see the big picture. This is the value of the Educational CyberPlayGround Financial Literacy Curriculum.

As more and more people awaken, like the Red Pills in The Matrix, to discover that they have been commodified, dehumanized, chopped, bundled, bought, and sold as means to grow Corporate capital, used as fuel for a reckless financial bubble to enrich the 1%, more people are being politically radicalized, and embracing the persona, and the narrative, of revolution.

These guys on Wall Street are not winning they're cheating.

Wall Street Cheat Codes:
At last count, there were 245 millionaires in congress, including 66 in the Senate.

FREE MONEY. Ordinary people have to borrow their money at market rates. Lloyd Blankfein and Jamie Dimon get billions of dollars for free, from the Federal Reserve. They borrow at zero and lend the same money back to the government at two or three percent, a valuable public service otherwise known as "standing in the middle and taking a gigantic cut when the government decides to lend money to itself."
Or the banks borrow billions at zero and lend mortgages to us at four percent, or credit cards at twenty or twenty-five percent. This is essentially an official government license to be rich, handed out at the expense of prudent ordinary citizens, who now no longer receive much interest on their CDs or other saved income. It is virtually impossible to not make money in banking when you have unlimited access to free money, especially when the government keeps buying its own cash back from you at market rates.
Most of the too-big-to-fail banks are nonetheless still functionally insolvent, and dependent upon bailouts and phony accounting to stay above water. Where do the protesters go to sign up for their interest-free billion-dollar loans?
CREDIT AMNESTY. If you or I miss a $7 payment on a Gap card or, heaven forbid, a mortgage payment, you can forget about the great computer in the sky ever overlooking your mistake. But serial financial fuckups like Citigroup and Bank of America overextended themselves by the hundreds of billions and pumped trillions of dollars of deadly leverage into the system -- and got rewarded with things like the Temporary Liquidity Guarantee Program, an FDIC plan that allowed irresponsible banks to borrow against the government's credit rating.
This is equivalent to a trust fund teenager who trashes six consecutive off-campus apartments and gets rewarded by having Daddy co-sign his next lease. The banks needed programs like TLGP because without them, the market rightly would have started charging more to lend to these idiots. Apparently, though, we can't trust the free market when it comes to Bank of America, Goldman, Sachs, Citigroup, etc. In a larger sense, the TBTF banks all have the implicit guarantee of the federal government, so investors know it's relatively safe to lend to them -- which means it's now cheaper for them to borrow money than it is for, say, a responsible regional bank that didn't jack its debt-to-equity levels above 35-1 before the crash and didn't dabble in toxic mortgages. In other words, the TBTF banks got better credit for being less responsible. Click on freecreditscore.com to see if you got the same deal.

STUPIDITY INSURANCE. Rolling Stone editors put it last week, "something for nothing is Wall Street's official policy." In fact, getting bailed out for bad investment decisions has been de rigeur on Wall Street not just since 2008, but for decades.
Time after time, when big banks screw up and make irresponsible bets that blow up in their faces, they've scored bailouts. It doesn't matter whether it was the Mexican currency bailout of 1994 (when the state bailed out speculators who gambled on the peso) or the IMF/World Bank bailout of Russia in 1998 (a bailout of speculators in the "emerging markets") or the Long-Term Capital Management Bailout of the same year (in which the rescue of investors in a harebrained hedge-fund trading scheme was deemed a matter of international urgency by the Federal Reserve), Wall Street has long grown accustomed to getting bailed out for its mistakes.
Here's how the New York Times explained the bailout:

To limit damage from Dexia's collapse, the bailout fashioned by the French and Belgian governments may make these banks and other creditors whole that is, paid in full for potentially tens of billions of euros they are owed. This would enable Dexia's creditors and trading partners to avoid losses they might otherwise suffer...

When was the last time the government stepped into help you "avoid losses you might otherwise suffer?" But instead of being asked to "suck it in and cope" when that bet failed, the banks instead went straight to Washington for a bailout -- and got it.
UNGRADUATED TAXES. I've already gone off on this more than once, but it bears repeating. Bankers on Wall Street pay lower tax rates than most car mechanics. When Warren Buffet released his tax information, we learned that with taxable income of $39 million, he paid $6.9 million in taxes last year, a tax rate of about 17.4%.
Most of Buffet's income, it seems, was taxed as either "carried interest" (i.e. hedge-fund income) or long-term capital gains, both of which carry 15% tax rates, half of what many of the Zucotti park protesters will pay. As for the banks, as companies, we've all heard the stories. Goldman, Sachs in 2008 � this was the same year the bank reported $2.9 billion in profits, and paid out over $10 billion in compensation -- paid just $14 million in taxes, a 1% tax rate.
Bank of America last year paid not a single dollar in taxes -- in fact, it received a "tax credit" of $1 billion. There are a slew of troubled companies that will not be paying taxes for years, including Citigroup and CIT.
When GM bought the finance company AmeriCredit, it was able to marry its long-term losses to AmeriCredit's revenue stream, creating a tax windfall worth as much as $5 billion. So even though AmeriCredit is expected to post earnings of $8-$12 billion in the next decade or so, it likely won't pay any taxes during that time, because its revenue will be offset by GM's losses.
GET OUT OF JAIL FREE. One thing we can still be proud of is that America hasn't yet managed to achieve the highest incarceration rate in history -- that honor still goes to the Soviets in the Stalin/Gulag era. But we do still have about 2.3 million people in jail in America. Virtually all 2.3 million of those prisoners come from "the 99%." Here is the number of bankers who have gone to jail for crimes related to the financial crisis: 0.
Millions of people have been foreclosed upon in the last three years. In most all of those foreclosures, a regional law enforcement office -- typically a sheriff's office -- was awarded fees by the court as part of the foreclosure settlement, settlements which of course were often rubber-stamped by a judge despite mountains of perjurious robosigned evidence. That means that every single time a bank kicked someone out of his home, a local police department got a cut. Local sheriff's offices also get cuts of almost all credit card judgments, and other bank settlements. If you're wondering how it is that so many regional police departments have the money for fancy new vehicles and SWAT teams and other accoutrements, this is one of your answers.
What this amounts to is the banks having, as allies, a massive armed police force who are always on call, ready to help them evict homeowners and safeguard the repossession of property. But just see what happens when you try to call the police to prevent an improper foreclosure. Then, suddenly, the police will not get involved. It will be a "civil matter" and they won't intervene.
The point being: if you miss a few home payments, you have a very high likelihood of colliding with a police officer in the near future. But if you defraud a pair of European banks out of a billion dollars  -- that's a billion, with a b -- you will never be arrested, never see a policeman, never see the inside of a jail cell.
Your settlement will be worked out not with armed police, but with regulators in suits who used to work for your company or one like it. And you'll have, defending you, a former head of that regulator's agency. In the end, a fine will be paid to the government, but it won't come out of your pocket personally; it will be paid by your company's shareholders. And there will be no admission of criminal wrongdoing.
But the bankers on Wall Street don't live in that heavily-policed country. There are maybe 1000 SEC agents policing that sector of the economy, plus a handful of FBI agents. Source Rolling Stone Magazine

How deep does the corruption go?
To Sanders, the conclusion is simple. "No one who works for a firm receiving direct financial assistance from the Fed should be allowed to sit on the Fed's board of directors or be employed by the Fed," he said. The Fed outsourced virtually all of the operations of their emergency lending programs to private contractors like JP Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, and Wells Fargo. The same firms also received trillions of dollars in Fed loans at near-zero interest rates. Altogether some two-thirds of the contracts that the Fed awarded to manage its emergency lending programs were no-bid contracts. Morgan Stanley was given the largest no-bid contract worth $108.4 million to help manage the Fed bailout of AIG.

GAO Fed Investigation
July 21, 2011
The first top-to-bottom audit of the Federal Reserve uncovered eye-popping new details about how the U.S. provided a whopping $16 trillion in secret loans to bail out American and foreign banks and businesses during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. An amendment by Sen. Bernie Sanders to the Wall Street reform law passed one year ago this week directed the Government Accountability Office to conduct the study. "As a result of this audit, we now know that the Federal Reserve provided more than $16 trillion in total financial assistance to some of the largest financial institutions and corporations in the United States and throughout the world," said Sanders. "This is a clear case of socialism for the rich and rugged, you're-on-your-own individualism for everyone else."
Among the investigation's key findings is that the Fed unilaterally provided trillions of dollars in financial assistance to foreign banks and corporations from South Korea to Scotland, according to the GAO report. "No agency of the United States government should be allowed to bailout a foreign bank or corporation without the direct approval of Congress and the president," Sanders said.
The non-partisan, investigative arm of Congress also determined that the Fed lacks a comprehensive system to deal with conflicts of interest, despite the serious potential for abuse.  In fact, according to the report, the Fed provided conflict of interest waivers to employees and private contractors so they could keep investments in the same financial institutions and corporations that were given emergency loans. Report

The age old tried and true ways to get rich. Cheat, Steal, Pirate, Plunder and buy off the political process with donations to your politician.

29 Harley Street London

29 Harley Street On a central London street renowned for high-class healthcare sits a property that houses 2,159 companies. This prestigious address been used so many times as a centre for elaborate international fraud.
“Before the digital age this was often a costly and laborious task,” lamented the World Bank’s 2015 Doing Business report, which included a case study of Britain’s deregulation of the sector. “It involved visits to Companies House, long lines and the higher costs associated with postal mail. Company founders often had to hire solicitors to handle paperwork.”  In 2001, the government did away with all that, and Companies House – the institution that registers British corporations, after which the name of Formations House is presumably modelled – introduced online applications. A boom began, and there are now 3.5m companies registered in the UK. company formation agents signed up people who, for a fee, would declare themselves directors of newly created companies. Edwina Coales, a serial director of companies registered at 29 Harley Street, is or has been an officer at 1,560 of the companies listed on the Companies House website.
Formations House has abided by the letter of British law, but successfully created structures that are all but impossible to penetrate for anyone trying to discover who really owns them.  “If organised crime depends on financial secrecy, untraceable shell companies are the most important means of providing it,” wrote the authors of a 2012 study of company formation agents, Global Shell Games. “Shell companies that cannot be traced back to their real owners are widely held to be one of the most common means of laundering money, giving and receiving bribes, busting sanctions, evading taxes, and financing terrorism.”

Adam Curtis' Documentary

The Mayfair Set is a series of programes produced by Adam Curtis for the BBC, first broadcast in the summer of 1999.
The programe looked at how buccaneer capitalists of hot money were allowed to shape the climate of the Thatcher years, focusing on the rise of Colonel David Stirling, Jim Slater, James Goldsmith, and Tiny Rowland, all members of The Clermont club in the 1960s. It received the BAFTA Award for Best Factual Series or Strand in 2000.
This episode recounts the story of how James Goldsmith became one of the richest men in the world.

The Mayfair Set - Episode 1: Who Pays Wins (Part 1/6)

• Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6

The Mayfair Set - Episode 2: Entrepreneur Spelt S.P.I.V. (Part 1/6)
The second episode tells of rise of Jim Slater who became famous for writing an investment column in The Sunday Telegraph under the nom de plume of The Capitalist. A Public Business being treated as Family Business.

• Part 2 "Vulgar People" and "Vulgar Market Forces"
  - also see James Goldsmith - Capitalism and Vulgarity

• Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6

The Mayfair Set - Episode 3:  Destroy the Technostructure (Part 1/6)

• Part 2 Part 3 Drexel Deals Part 4
  Milken - access to the 600 billion pension fund money and the Corporation
  Part 5 Part 6

The Mayfair Set - Episode 4: Twilight of the Dogs (Part 1/6)

• Part 2 Part 3 Part 4
• Part 5 Globalism
  4:00 Who really controls Britain economy the government or the markets? Is this a red herring when the Bank of England is Britain?
  4:50 James Goldsmith: "The Market" took over the Bank of England. Global Markets are destroying Governments. Corporations were able to force Free Trade Treaties on the world which allowed them to move their factory to cheap labor around the world.
• Part 6

A prophetic interview with Sir James Goldsmith in 1994 PART 1

Sir James Michael "Jimmy" Goldsmith (26 February 1933 18 July 1997) was an Anglo-French financier. Towards the end of his life, he became a magazine publisher and a politician. In 1994, he was elected to represent France as a Member of the European Parliament and he subsequently founded the short-lived eurosceptic Referendum Party in Britain.

NAFTA was basically a scam from the get go. The purpose was to allow (((corporations))) to get richer by relocating their operations in Mexico and reselling the products in the US and Canada without having to pay tariffs. This increased profits because they could then avoid the heavy environmental and administrative regulations present here.

• NAFTA and Gatt  are Wrong
  In this interview, Sir Goldsmith discusses the ramifications of free-trade agreements that were about to take place in 1994 (GATT), as you can retrospectively see, he correctly predicted many of the things that happened after that.
  3:36 Cost of Labor is the only difference - the results being profit increases for the corporation. The result? What is the good of an economy that increases when everyone is out of work?
  5:00 China is a huge buying power but how do you benefit from that without destroying ourselves?
  7:28 Value Added: the value you add is shared between capital and labor and this gets shattered when you export the job chasing slave labor around the globe. That is the basis for equalibrium and having a stable society.
  8:87 What is the purpose of the economy? It's to serve the needs of it's society and provide prosperity, stability and contentment.
• PART 2 PART 3 PART 4 PART 5
• PART 6
  Speaks to Derivitives being too risky and that the financial system is dangerous - and this was in 1994!
  1:30 You Cannot enrich a county by imporverishing it's people. The health of an economy is measured by the profitablity of it's corporations. Profits are important, but even more important, is the health of the population in terms of participation. Which means prople have JOBS.
  2:00 Republican tax cuts -  When America needs infrastruture improvement this is when a massive amount of capital is migrated out of the country into the third world! The politicians have created a situation, a structure whereby responsible businessmen are forced to invest offshore or go bankrupt, because labor is so much cheaper. America is a leader and an example to the world but should not impose it's views as a colonial power.

Free Trade: Sir James Goldsmith US Senate Speech Nov. 15 1994 Part 2

• text alanwattsentientsentinel.eu
• Part 3
  1:50 The alternative is negotiated agreements between regional trading blocks who have similar economies so that we are not having labor compete, so each nation can import the product it needs without destroying jobs.