Glenn Greenwald: With Liberty and Justice for Some

http://us.macmillan.com/withlibertyandjusticeforsome/GlennGreenwald

From "the most important voice to have entered the political discourse in years" (Bill Moyers), a scathing critique of the two-tiered system of justice that has emerged in America

From the nation's beginnings, the law was to be the great equalizer in American life, the guarantor of a common set of rules for all. But over the past four decades, the principle of equality before the law has been effectively abolished. Instead, a two-tiered system of justice ensures that the country's political and financial class is virtually immune from prosecution, licensed to act without restraint, while the politically powerless are imprisoned with greater ease and in greater numbers than in any other country in the world.

Starting with Watergate, continuing on through the Iran-Contra scandal, and culminating with Obama's shielding of Bush-era officials from prosecution, Glenn Greenwald lays bare the mechanisms that have come to shield the elite from accountability. He shows how the media, both political parties, and the courts have abetted a process that has produced torture, war crimes, domestic spying, and financial fraud.

Cogent, sharp, and urgent, this is a no-holds-barred indictment of a profoundly un-American system that sanctions immunity at the top and mercilessness for everyone else.

El gobierno de las palabras. Política para tiempos de confusión

http://www.juancarlosmonedero.com/2011/06/gobiernodelaspalabras/

Segunda edición aumentada y corregida. Madrid. Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2009 y 2011.

Descargar prefacio del libro (PDF)

Este libro destaca que nunca tan pocos engañaron a tantos. En nombre de la democracia y la soberanía el Estado moderno cede a la dictadura de los mercados. El pensamiento moderno, exhausto, cede las soluciones racionales a supercherías y sectarismos, remedos de espiritualismo de consumo rápido y libros de autoayuda. Época de transición y confusión. ¿Y si la reinvención de la política fuera un antídoto?

Frente a soluciones individuales, ésta es una propuesta de “autoayuda colectiva”. La que convierte la resignación y el cansancio en combustible para la democracia. Para la vida buena. Para recuperar la alegría de la política.

En las revoluciones en el mundo árabe, la diferencia entre un contratista o un mercenario la marcaba el bando en el que se peleaba. En la Roma clásica, a los esclavos se les llamaba instrumenti vocali; en la Alemania nazi, no se gaseaban personas sino unmenschen. En las barriadas pobres de América Latina, los niños de la calle ya han sido condenados a muerte cuando se les dice desechables.

El lenguaje que creemos hablar, en realidad nos habla. Si el tiempo es oro ¿cómo encontrar cuándo escucharnos? Biendecir es dialogar; maldecir, monologar. Sólo el diálogo construye la felicidad. En su soliloquio, Hamlet enloquecía. Don Quijote, cuerdo, hablaba con Sancho Panza. Tiempo de despensar las palabras que la política convirtió en callejones sin salida.

Enlaces relacionados: Entrevista en ATTAC TV

Earth Grab: Geopiracy, the New Biomassters and Capturing Climate Genes

http://fahamubooks.org/book/?GCOI=90638100969040

Authors: Diana Bronson, Hope Shand, Jim Thomas, Kathy Jo Wetter

This three-part book 'pulls back the curtain on disturbing technological and corporate trends that are already reshaping our world and that will become crucial battlegrounds for civil society in the years ahead.'
Vandana Shiva, Founder, Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology

'Geopiracy' analyses how Northern governments and corporations are cynically using growing concerns about the ecological and climate crisis to propose geoengineering 'quick fixes'. These threaten to wreak havoc on ecosystems, with disastrous impacts on the people of the global South. As calls for a 'greener' economy mount and oil prices escalate, corporations are seeking to switch from oil-based to plant-based energy.

'The New Biomassters' exposes how a biomass economy based on using gene technologies to reprogramme living organisms to behave as microbial factories will facilitate the liquidation of ecosystems. This constitutes a devastating assault of the peoples and cultures of the South, accelerating the wave of land grabs that are becoming common in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

'Capturing Climate Genes' shows how the worlds largest agribusiness companies including Monsanto, BASF, Dupont and Syngenta are pouring billions of dollars into, and claiming patents on, what are claimed to be 'climate-ready crops'. Far from helping farmers adjust to a warming world – something peasant farmers already know how to manage – these crops will allow industrial agriculture to expand plantation monocultures into lands currently cultivated by poor peasant farmers. These crops are not a solution to growing hunger, they will feed only the gluttony of corporate shareholders for profits.

The model of the common welfare economy – 15 cornerstones

http://www.gemeinwohl-oekonomie.org/en/

1. Collectively Shared Values
2. Reversing Incentive Frameworks
3. Economic Constitutional Convention
4. Common Welfare Balance
5. Rewarding Common Welfare
6. Utilization of Financial Surplus
7. Liberation from Force of Continual Growth
8. Limitation of Income and Wealth
9. Democratization and Public Ownership of Large-scale Enterprises
10. Democratic Commons
11. Democratic Bank
12. Advancement of Democracy
13. Democratic Conventions
14. Five New Obligatory Subjects in School
15. Social Leadership Skills

It’s All Connected: An Overview of the Euro Crisis

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/10/23/sunday-review/an-overview-of-the-euro-crisis.html

European leaders are meeting this week to deal with growing debt problems rattling investors worldwide. Here is a visual guide to the crisis.

Circuses Without Bread

The barefaced lie about Gadaffi being killed in the crossfire bodes ill for the openness, transparency and good government we can expect to see now in Libya. But today I am worrying about the effect on our society of human death as entertainment. I have never been an apologist for Gadaffi, but if his regime tortured and murdered, the remedy is not to torture and murder him – even the Nazis were given due process.

This murder is becoming the norm. It was a NATO air strike which took out Gadaffi’s escaping convoy and first wounded him. Two days ago two teenage sons of Anwar al-Awlaki, the radical US/Yemeni cleric executed without trial last week, were executed by a US drone attack as they had dinner. They were aged 16 and 19. They had committed no crime I can find alleged against them. There has been no publicity.

All this killing brings triumphalist politicians smirking on our screens. We seem to have become as dehumanised as ancient Rome. Little human pity is expressed for the way Gadaffi was killed – indeed there is notably less media reflection of pity or revulsion than there was at the (at least judicial) hanging of Saddam Hussein. Is that a measure of the descent into bloodlust barbarism in our society? The complete lack of empathy towards the traveller families being torn from their homes at Dale Farm is part of the same brutalism towards “the other”. Why don’t we go the whole way and have them eaten by lions in the ring?

History shows that bloody appetite once aroused feeds upon itself. We have already had Defence Secretary Hammond on Sky News today positing NATO action now against Syria, while the current US proto-pretext for attacking Iran – the fantasy plot against the Saudi Ambassador – is as believable as Gadaffi’s death in the crossfire.

More death is on the way, to keep the circus going. Then the crowds may not notice there is no bread – no jobs, and their earnings and income eaten up by huge state enforced transfers to the bankers, whether by bailouts or “quantitive easing”.

Quantitive Easing is the best con of all for the ruling classes. In the UK, the £225 billion of printed money to date under quantitive easing has been – every single penny – given to the bankers. Good money for bad, used to buy up the junk bonds which the bankers bought in their terrible investment decision making, and for which fake assets they had awarded themselves many, many billions in personal bonuses. They are rescued from the consequences of their disastrous judgements by the Bank of England printing (in old parlance) new, good money to buy the rubbish they invested in. The result – more rounds of huge personal bonuses for celebrating bankers!! Hooray!!! For you and I, stagflation.

30 months ago, when I explained that Q.E. was another huge transfer to the bankers and predicted it would lead to stagflation, I was widely ridiculed across the web. Now we have the stagflation and everything I predicted has come to pass.

All of which you would normally expect to make people pretty unhappy at the biggest transfer of wealth from poor to rich in history.

Quick! More War! More Militarism! More Blood! More Executions! More Victory for Democracy! Keep the Peasants Happy!
Get a Move On There! Come On!! Come On!! More Blood!! More Blood, Quick, Damn You!!

 

Source:  http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2011/10/circuses-without-bread/

Addicted to tax havens: The secret life of the FTSE 100

http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2011/oct/11/ftse100-subsidiaries-tax-data

ActionAid have produced another fine report, this time about the use of tax havens by multinational corporations listed on the FTSE 100. The statistics are staggering: for example more than half of the financial sector's overseas subsidiaries are in tax havens. More precisely:

• The FTSE 100 largest groups registered on the London Stock Exchange comprise 34,216 subsidiary companies, joint ventures and associates.
• 38% (8,492) of their overseas companies are located in tax havens.
• 98 groups declared tax haven companies, with only two groups, Fresnillo and Hargreaves Landsdown, who did not.
• The banking sector makes heaviest use of tax havens, with a total of 1,649 tax haven companies between the ‘big four’ banks. They are by far the biggest users of the Cayman Islands, where Barclays alone has 174 companies.
• The biggest tax haven user overall is the advertising company WPP, which has 611 tax haven companies.
• The FTSE 100 companies make much more use of tax havens than their American equivalents.
• There are over 600 FTSE 100 subsidiary companies in Jersey (more than in the whole of China), 400 in the Cayman Islands and 300 in Luxembourg – all tiny tax havens.

Alongside the financial sector, oil and mining companies are also huge users: TJN recently noted that they are often headquartered in Canada, and ActionAid noted that

"BP and Shell have almost 1,000 tax haven companies between them, including more than 100 in the Caribbean (hardly a major source of oil)."

(Recently we noted the huge role that the Netherlands plays in hosting offshore subsidiaries of oil companies, and another report by Publish What You Pay Norway noted the huge role played by Delaware too.)

ActionAid points to the artificiality of it all:

"In locations such as Mauritius, Jersey and Delaware we have identified hundreds of subsidiaries owned by dozens of different multinationals that are registered at a handful of individual addresses, belonging to offshore law firms."

And to the crucial development angle:

Corporate tax avoidance, one of the main reasons companies use tax havens, has a massive impact on developing and developed countries alike. The lack of transparency makes it difficult for developing country tax authorities to identify and collect taxes owed by global companies operating in their countries.

All credit to ActionAid for this:

This research is based on information that had never been disclosed, let alone analysed, until this year.11 UK law compels companies to report all of their subsidiary companies, together with their country of registration. When we looked for this information in early 2011, we discovered that more than half of the FTSE 100 were not complying with this legal obligation. When enquiries to individual companies failed to persuade them to disclose the information, we submitted complaints to Companies House, forcing the disclosures as part of companies’ annual returns and sparking Business minister Vince Cable to announce an investigation.

The Guardian, reporting this, (and providing a listing of the FTSE 100 and their subsidiaries) notes that:

"There is no standard definition of what constitutes a tax haven."

Indeed. We use the terms 'tax haven' and 'secrecy jurisdiction' interchangeably, and recently produced a two-pager (as part of our Financial Secrecy Index) entitled What is a Secrecy jurisdicsion? which says exactly that, and explores ways to think about the phenomenon.

Also see The Independent reporting on this, along with the Press Association, and Metro.

Older reports, involving the use of companies in tax havens by Swiss, US, France, and the Netherlands, are here. Further information on Spain, is here.

Source: http://taxjustice.blogspot.com/

"Propaganda has become the primary means by which the wealthy communicate with the rest of society. Whether selling a product, a political candidate, a law, or a war, seldom do the powerful delivery messages to the public before consulting their colleagues in the public relations industry."

"Psywar" Film by Scott Noble

Putting Brussels' lobbyists on the map

Our unique new guide to the hidden world of corporate lobbying in Brussels is now available, highlighting the players, the locations, and the tactics used by big business to influence decision making in the European Union. 

 

http://www.corporateeurope.org/publications/putting-brussels-lobbyists-map

The new edition of the Lobby Planet to Brussels’ EU quarter features a guide to some of the biggest lobby players operating in Brussels, as well as three thematic tours, highlighting the carbon lobby, the finance lobby and the agribusiness lobby. The guide also features a specially-commissioned cartoon of Brussels’ lobbyists at work, and full colour maps to guide you through the streets and squares of the EU quarter.

There are an estimated 15-30,000 lobbyists targeting EU decision makers in Brussels, mainly representing business interests, making the EU quarter home to one of the highest concentrations of lobbyists in the world. The Lobby Planet guides you through the maze of the EU institutions, the lobby groups, the agencies and the company offices which make up their lobbying world.

The first edition of Corporate Europe Observatory’s Lobby Planet guide was produced in 2004, and proved an eye-opener to many who were unaware of the scale of industry lobbying in Brussels. The number of lobbyists in the EU capital has grown significantly since then and there are growing calls for greater transparency and stricter rules on lobbying. Download a copy of the Lobby Planet to Brussels' EU quarter here: Lobbycracy 

CEOlobbylow.pdf