Lynn Nottage‘s tense, intense thriller about the horrors of rape in the Congo is guaranteed to leave a knot in your stomach. If you‘ve avoided reading the newspaper stories, you can catch up right here. The play aspires to be a modern version of Brecht‘s “Mother Courage.” “Plus ça change, plus c‘est la même chose.” The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Could there be love under so much mean-spiritedness and cruelty? Was there something about this corner of rural Ireland that left so many inhabitants so bereft of human kindness? In Martin McDonagh’s first rate dark comedy, The Cripple of Inishmaan, Aaron Monaghan gives a bravura performance as Cripple Billy, who desperately wants to be valued for himself and not by his infirmity.
But he must navigate the shoals of a town where most of those around him lack civility, much less compassion.
The mood is surreal in Richard Greenberg’s fast-paced, sharply acted, quirky drama of love twisted into domination. The setting is naturalistic enough – a wood dock back-dropped by cedars at a summer home across the lake from a Catskills hotel. But the witchy, controlling Eva Adler (a biting Mercedes Ruehl), who presides over the scene, could blot out the sun as she does the life of her daughter and her chances with young men who deign to wander over from the hotel. Ruehl as Mother Eva makes Mama Rose (Gypsy) look like a wimp.
Feb 11, 2009 –
The U.S. government might finally get a powerful tool against offshore tax evasion by mega-wealthy individuals and corporations. The worst most miscreants face now is negotiated pay-ups years after they are caught.
A bill introduced last week by Senators Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) would make tax evasion using international transfers a criminal money-laundering offense.
The law aims at cases in which money passes through tax havens. It targets not just the evaded taxes, but any money that is part of the scam.
Feb 8, 2009 –
At a time when New York State’s budget is reeling from Wall Street tax losses — Wall Street pays 20 to 30 percent of revenues — you’d think Governor David Paterson would want to recoup all the evaded taxes he could get. That doesn’t seem to be the case when it comes to corporations that launder their profits offshore.
Paterson refused to deal with the issue and instead answered a question I hadn‘t asked. I wonder why. Does that mean he won’t go after corporate tax evaders? Here is the exchange from the Council‘s transcript of David Patterson meeting.
Inter Press Service (IPS), Feb 5, 2009 –
President Barack Obama said he would crack down on firms that use offshore centres to evade taxes. He could begin with a New York subsidiary of one of the world’s largest private banks, which used a Cayman Islands company to shift its profits.
Why would a New York investment fund manager run operations through an office in the Caymans? This type of structure is for optimising taxes, explained Max Obrist, a Cayman Islands official of the global Julius Baer Group (Zurich).
He told IPS that generating the income where a company was actually based, you would pay much more taxes. Obrist was describing a company shifting claimed earnings to tax havens to evade home taxes. He allegedly helped Julius Baer Investment Management (JBIM) New York do just that.
A revival of this impressive dance-theater piece first presented in 1984, is a powerful, sensual, emotional evocation of man‘s trajectory from heaven to hell, from the innocence of joy to repression and brutality. The eleven dancers of the company are notably talented, able to bend their bodies to gracefully walk doubled over as animals or pre-humans in the scene of origins, to move and twist with grace, to fly upside-down on wires, to present faces as expressive as their bodies as they show the pinched and frightened visages of people under repression. It‘s a performance you will not forget.
As U.S. workers are fired by corporate executives who take multi-million-dollar bonuses, “Billy Elliot, The Musical” seems made to order for the current American stage. It is a call for solidarity against those in power. It‘s a very British class-conscious play, with workers raising their fists to a giant puppet of 1980‘s Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. It also tells a universal truth that political struggles must also defend personal freedom.
Tom Stoppard‘s adaptation of Chekov‘s “The Cherry Orchard” is the perfect companion piece to his 2002 Russian trilogy, “The Coast of Utopia.” The trilogy told about the formation and early activities of the 19th- century Russian revolutionaries who fought the aristocratic class headed by the Czar. Chekov‘s 1904 play describes the frivolous, aristocratic leisure class which hasn‘t a clue that it is being swept away by embryonic capitalists, while downtrodden workers and peasants wait in the background, ready to join up with Stoppard‘s radicals.
This is yet another Forbidden Broadway production in which the numbers are sometimes better than the musicals they satirize. And they are always on target about the shows and the theatrical culture. The performers, Christina Bianco, Jared Bradshaw, Gina Kreiezmar and Michael West, start out by introducing themselves and declaring, “We‘ll do twelve steps the Fosse way!” Here are some of my nutty favorites. Alas, you can‘t really get a sense of it without the music. (Check out the show‘s website for some songs.)
Con men make good anti-heroes. At a time when the country is focused on a spectacular one that cheated people of billions, it’s instructive to take a look at the genre. Pal Joey, the Richard Rodgers-Lorenz Hart 1940 musical given a moody revival by director Joe Mantello at the Roundabout Theatre, is about a sleazy character on the make for money and success. Joey’s take was a lot smaller than Bernard Madoff’s, but the essential immorality of the character – and the con man’s ability to charm and persuade — is the same. The new book is by Richard Greenberg, based on the original by John O’Hara.
Inter Press Service (IPS), Jan 19, 2009 –
U.S. Senators at Timothy Geithner’s confirmation hearing for Treasury Secretary Wednesday may want to ask him about a failure to act that is costing the U.S. a lot more than the amount he evaded on taxes.
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which he has led since 2003, conducts the operations on Wall Street of the Federal Reserve in Washington, the country’s central bank.
The New York Fed under Geithner’s presidency has failed to stop massive naked short selling of U.S. Treasury bonds that threatens the stability of the market and sale of the bonds.
Ironically, the scam, enabled by a lack of regulation at the behest of Wall Street brokerage houses, makes it more expensive for the U.S. to bail out those same financial institutions.
Personal demons rooted in a childhood traumatized by religion and repressed sexuality move this powerful play by Peter Shaffer, first staged in 1973. It is vividly directed by Thea Sharrock who brings an emotional intensity to the mysterious tale.
A troubled 17-year-old youth, Alan Strang (Daniel Radcliffe) is brought by a judge (Kate Mulgew) to the office of an overworked psychiatrist in a provincial hospital in southern England. He has blinded a stable of six horses. Slowly, through importuning, bribes of small gifts and even hypnotism, the psychiatrist, Martin Dysart (Richard Griffiths) gets him to see through his nightmares and tell what brought him to commit this horror.
Evening Standard (London), Jan 6, 2009
Gordon Brown and Barack Obama are both promising to crack down on the use of offshore tax havens. But putting those tough words into practice is another matter.
One of the world’s biggest private wealth management groups circulates funds via offices in the Cayman Islands, claiming they take major investment decisions ” when the main work is apparently carried out in London.
With offices in London and across the globe, Swiss-based Julius Baer banking group invests over $300 billion ( £208 billion) in assets on behalf of institutions and wealthy individuals. Profits in 2007 were more than $1.1 billion.
In London, one of its units was known as Julius Baer Investors or Julius Baer Investment Management (JBIM) until a management buyout in 2007. It was renamed Augustus Asset Managers, is based in Bevis Marks in the City, and is still 10% owned by Julius Baer.
From London, Augustus controls assets of $12 billion but claims its profits are generated elsewhere, offshore at a Cayman Islands Baer subsidiary called Baer Select Management.
Why? Simple, really. “If you would generate all the income in London, you would pay much more taxes,” acknowledged Max Obrist, a Cayman Islands executive of Julius Baer.
TV interview about the Allen Stanford case and the Sodexo kickbacks revealed by whistleblowers Jay and John Carciero on Conversations with Harold Channer, Oct 29, 2009, MNN – Channel 34, New York. You Tube. One hour. And more.
