It‘s that time of the year when the UN General Assembly opens and heads of state and foreign ministers meet up at parties and quiet gatherings and even give a few public speeches around town. A popular stop is the Council on Foreign Relations, where anyone representing an establishment view is assured of a warm welcome.
French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, famous as the founder of Médecins Sans Frontieres (actually he was one of 12 doctor and journalist founders), spoke at the Council on Tuesday. In his introduction Felix Rohatyn, the prominent investment banker, US ambassador to France in 1997-2000 and now an advisor to the chairman of Lehman Brothers, said, “There are very few people who act according to their principles. Bernard Kouchner acts on his principles, and that‘s a very rare virtue, especially in a politician.”
I was hopeful that Minister Kouchner, a Socialist who has joined a conservative government, would display these principles in his answer to my question about a corruption scandal that could be the French Watergate. However, the minister displayed the not-so-rare political attribute of solidarity with high-level officials who want to suppress evidence of corruption.
There’s an astonishing article in the Washington Post’s Business Section (Risk. Now They See It. Now You Don’t.Sept 16, 2007)
The Post, which has never, ever, railed against tax havens, is now suggesting that their use to cheat tax authorities and investors threatens the entire global financial system. Of course, it doesn’t put it so starkly, but that’s the gist.
The Post says, Over the past few years, major banks figured out how to use conduits and structured investment vehicles to earn big fees while playing cute little games of tax and regulatory arbitrage and keeping it all pretty much hidden from investors.
Where does The Post think those off-balance-sheet investment vehiclesare?Most of Enron’s were in Grand Cayman. The Post should connect the dots. Tax and regulatory arbitrage plus hidden plus off-balance-sheet investment vehicles = offshore.
Why did regulators tolerate the use of offshore? Because global tax evasion and avoidance of regulation is something corporations want. That’s what offshore secrecy is for. Now, will Congress act, in spite of corporate power, when there is a threat to the entire global financial system?
In a new play by a Palestinian-American woman, two characters say in unison: Oppression is like a coin maker. You put in human beings, press the right buttons and watch them get squeezed, shrunk, flattened till they take the slim shape of a two-faced coin, one side is a martyr, the other a traitor. All the possibilities of a life get reduced to those paltry two.
In a strange coincidence — or maybe not so strange — that is also the theme of a play written in 1990 by an Israeli man. Both were commenting on the murderous violence that had engulfed Palestinians. Betty Shamieh wrote The Black Eyed after the 2001 attack on the World Trade Centre. Ilan Hatsor wrote The Masked a decade earlier during the first intifada. Both plays have made their way to off-Broadway in New York.
U.S. officials from the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation met with Munich prosecutors this week regarding the 1.3-billion-dollar bribe fund run by Siemens, the German multinational technology company.
After talking to the Germans about tracking the financial flows of the largest illicit slush-fund ever discovered, the U.S. investigators would do well to visit Luxembourg on Germany’s western border.
There they could seek information from Clearstream, the international financial clearing house, that might tell them how Siemens moved so much money and where it went. That is because Siemens has the unusual status of being one of only four non-financial companies among 2,500 Clearstream members. It gained membership on the insistence of a former CEO who was fired after a scandal.
Siemens, the German-based multinational technology company that made massive payoffs to get international contracts, has, according to the German press, a bribery slush fund of more than $1.3 billion. It moved money through a network of front companies, mostly in offshore Liechtenstein and the United Arab Emirates. Siemens is being investigated by the U.S. Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission as well as by public prosecutors in Germany and Italy.
How did Siemens officials move so much money about? Investigators ought to take a look at Siemens‘ transactions through Clearstream, the international financial clearing house in Luxembourg, whose clients do not undergo the same due diligence scrutiny that regular banks apply.
Siemens is one of only four non-financial companies (out of 2500) with Clearstream accounts. Here — published for the first time — are listings of Siemens’ Clearstream accounts for 1995, 2000 and 2001.
Two Broadway plays, Frost/Nixon and Talk Radio, expose how the media and its stars, at both the high and the low end, manipulate politics to turn news stories into emotional confrontations.
The goal in each case, of course, is to reach the highest entertainment level — and the biggest buck.
Frost/Nixon by British playwright Peter Morgan takes place in 1977. British talk show host David Frost (Michael Sheen), trying desperately for a comeback, wheedles and bribes disgraced ex-President Richard Nixon (Frank Langella) to submit to hours of interviews whose high-spot turns out to be a confession to the crimes of Watergate.
Politics and psychology are a profitable combination. We see them again in Eric Bogosian’s Talk Radio, where Barry Champlain (Liev Schreiber) is the host of the call-in show, Night Talk.
Where did Rupert Murdoch get $5 billion to buy up the Wall St. Journal? Beyond normal profits, his coffers were stuffed by dodging taxes in the U.S. and elsewhere. Some of that is your money!
The Economist, in 1999, investigated Murdoch’s corporate tax affairs and discovered that a collection of 800 offshore companies help him cut corporate taxes to 6%!
The United States is famous as a country that denies the validity of class. But you’d get a different idea at theaters across New York, where two new plays and a revival look head-on at the way wealth, status and power affect people’s lives.
The new original works are Radio Golf and In The Heights, while the revival is A Moon for the Misbegotten. They’re either on Broadway or moving there shortly.
Speech to conference on Taming the Giant Corporation, organized by Ralph Nader and The Center for Study of Responsive Law, Washington DC, June 8, 2007
The tax haven racket is the biggest scam in the world. It‘s run by the international banks with the cooperation of the world‘s financial powers for the benefit of corporations and the mega-rich. This talk is about strategy, but first you have to know the target, and most Americans, including progressive activist Americans, don‘t know what I‘m going to tell you. And that‘s part of the problem.
Between 1996 and 2000, of U.S. and multi-national corporations operating in the United States, with assets of at least $250 million or sales of at least $50 million, nearly two-thirds paid no U.S. income tax. Over 90 percent reported owing taxes of under 5 percent. One year, six in ten paid less than a million.
This is the dirty little secret of globalization: the end of controls on capital flows and the expansion of the tax haven system from 25 years ago to where it has more than doubled to about 70 tax havens.
The system is a major reason for the growing inequality in the U.S. and between the West and the developing worlds.
The system has given the big banks and corporations and the super-rich mountains of hidden cash they use to control our political systems.
President Bush‘s attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, has come under fire for politicizing the U.S. Justice Department for his dismissals of eight U.S. attorneys, apparently because they didn‘t target Democrats. But using the Justice Department for political ends isn‘t simply an invention of Gonzales or of the President; it‘s an old Bush family tradition.
In politicizing the Justice Department, Bush takes a page from his father. The George H.W. Bush Justice Department 25 years ago balked at investigating and prosecuting the key players in the scandal of the criminal, terrorist-friendly bank, BCCI, and moved only, and in limited fashion, after New York District Attorney Robert Morgenthau forced its hand.
Bush had a strong reason to want Justice to block pursuit of the case: the CIA used BCCI for its black ops, including funneling some of the $2 billion Washington sent to client Osama bin Laden and running money for the illegal Iran-Contra operation.
Eugene O‘Neill‘s play is a sharp political commentary about class, poverty and gender. That overlays what director Howard Davies projects as a story of personal relationships, a male-female pas de deux, with an interfering father thrown in.
It is 1923. The 30-ish Josie Hogan (an assertive, moving, dignified Eve Best) is helping her self-involved father Paul (played by Colm Meaney with a sense of true male entitlement) scrape survival out of a hard scrabble Connecticut farm.
Josie and Paul see their “way out” as Jim Tyrone (Kevin Spacey), a rich, alcoholic, third-rate actor whose inheritance makes him the Hogans‘ landlord.
But the cards are really held by T. Stedman Harder (Billy Carter), the owner of a neighboring estate, who is defined by his pretentious first initial and his position as an executive with Standard Oil.
The international focus on fundamentalist Islam might obscure the fact that western nations have their own experiences with fundamentalist religion — among them the country whose government has most targeted radical Islam, the United States.
As recently as 1999 the Kansas Board of Education voted to delete the teaching of evolution from the state’s science curriculum.
A sense of continuing conflict — not to mention the hardly-veiled contempt many educated people here have for the fundamentalists — is palpable among the New York audiences filling the Lyceum Theatre on Broadway to see a riveting star-studded production of Inherit the Wind. The production is a revival of the 1955 play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee that tells the story of what came to be known as The Scopes Monkey Trial.
In the play, science teacher Bert Cates (Benjamin Walker) is jailed for the crime of explaining evolution to his students. Help comes quickly from a Baltimore newspaper which hires Henry Drummond (portrayed by Christopher Plummer as a wry, sophisticated lawyer) to defend the young man. To chronicle the story, it dispatches its prize reporter, smartly played by Denis O’Hare as a sarcastic, fast-talking cynic.
Paul Hewson, known as Bono, the rock star, is complaining that the seven wealthy nations in the G-7 which had promised to double aid to the developing world by 2010, are more than half behind target. The countries are the United States, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, and Japan.
Bono‘s protest might be taken more seriously if he and his U2 band were not participating in the system that deprives developing countries of far more than western aid – much of which has to be repaid.
Bono is a tax dodger. As a result of a change in Irish law that limits the tax exemption for artists and musicians to a punitive $625,450, Bono’s U2 has moved its music publishing company registration to the Netherlands, where the tax on its multi-million dollar income will be about 5 percent. To dodge taxes on non-royalty income, Bono‘s company has used offshore nominees.
Conflict historically has aroused playwrights’ passions — think Aristophanes’ famous War and Peace trilogy written more than 2,000 years ago.
In that tradition, New York stage voices are being raised against war in two revivals that clearly retain their relevance today.
Journey’s End, a gripping play about World War I written in the 1920s, is spare and direct, unsettling the audience with the prosaic waiting game of war. And The Brig details the numbing banality of military cruelty as the Living Theatre revives its famous gritty production of the 1960s.
Kenneth Brown’s play The Brig, staged by The Living Theatre, is a numbing expression of the banality of cruelty institutionalized by the U.S. military.
A cell with five double-decker bunks is enclosed by a chain-link fence, and the area outside, concrete floor or gravel exercise yard, is separated from the audience by barbed wire. Ten men, who have committed unknown, apparently minor infractions, are confined for up to 30 days to suffer dehumanizing treatment at the hands of guards who punctuate their disapproval with punches to the stomach.
The guards turn basic minutiae of life – dressing, showering, shaving, smoking – into opportunities for control and humiliation. There is a Nazi sort of order, efficiency and gratuitous cruelty. The spectacle is a macabre dance, a cacophony of voices, repetition, and tension that sears and stuns audiences.
It‘s the ordinariness that at the end is so unsettling. This is not a Hollywood-style swagger tale about intrepid fighter pilots or its 70‘s version of pot-smoking infantrymen. No glamour or anti-glamour here.
Director David Grindley stages a story of prosaic people caught up in the military aspect of a political game whose purpose is far beyond them. These British soldiers – superbly portrayed by a uniformly excellent cast — just focus on staying warm and alive and carrying out orders. It is a powerful and often poetic production.
When it comes to tax cheats, the government has been vocal about catching the little guys but doesn’t spotlight the big-time frauds, like Swift Boat financier Sam Wyly (shown here), who happens to be a top-tier Republican contributor.
Wyly cheated the U.S. of at least $300 million in taxes. The money that paid for the Swift Boat campaign was your money!
But Wyly was not only the financier of the scam to discredit John Kerry during the 2004 presidential campaign. He and his brother were George W. Bush’s ninth greatest career contributors, Bush Pioneers, who collected $100,000 for the 2000 and 2004 presidential campaigns. They also funded other leading Republicans. Sam Wyly, since 1997 has given Republicans more than $1 million and his brother Charles and wife have donated more than $1.3 million. That‘s your money!
Wyly did his cheating through an offshore scheme that hid $1 billion in family profits via Isle of Man shell companies that existed only on paper, were registered under front men to hide the Wylys’ names, and were used to carry out transactions and launder money. And that’s only the hidden income that was found. The Dallas mogul, with a $1 billion admitted net worth, may be guilty of the biggest personal tax fraud in U.S. history.
Details of personal lives overwhelm epic of politics and action
Tom Stoppard‘s theater trilogy about Russian radicals and reformers of the 19th century is a drawing room drama of the upper class overlaid with the revolutionary ideas that set the stage for the Russian revolution. The content is disappointing, a Russian history “lite” that seems to want to make viewers feel as if they are getting to know the shapers of history without being forced to concentrate too seriously or for too long on their actions and ideas.
Characters are placed and moved through stylized vignettes as if in a diorama, in tableaux. The pageants are beautiful, but sometime they lack substance. Often there are pronouncements instead of dialogue. In spite of purporting to present to us the ideas and history of the figures he depicts, Stoppard appears fascinated primarily by the personal and especially love lives of the famous.
The best part of the production is the stunning staging by director Jack O‘Brien. While the “revolutionaries” are prancing around declaiming about life, illusion and art and how they will save the downtrodden, behind a gauzy curtain we see lines of people immobile, dressed in sepia shrouds, like spirits. The serfs remain a silent backdrop.
The NY Times reports today that Charles Prince, CEO of Citigroup, is planning to cut the corporation‘s compliance staff. Reporter Eric Dash says it‘s “to keep the bank from getting bogged down” because “the compliance overhang has made it difficult to be competitive” and “unnecessarily slowed the company down.”
Translation: other banks are laundering profits or running scams to help clients cheat tax authorities and investors, and they make good money at it. Why shouldn‘t we?
Dash noted that Citigroup had beefed up its compliance staff after scandals, including its dealings with Enron. He skimps on details: that Citigroup set up offshore shell companies to help Enron cook the books.
Now that the U.S. Congress is investigating the truth of President George W. Bush’s statements about the Iraq war, they might look into one of his most startling assertions: that there was a link between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.
Critics dismissed that as an invention. They were wrong. There was a link, but not the one Bush was selling. The link between Hussein and Bin Laden was their banker, BCCI. But the link went beyond the dictator and the jihadist — it passed through Saudi Arabia and stretched all the way to George W. Bush and his father.
Los legisladores de Estados Unidos que investigan la veracidad de los argumentos del presidente George W. Bush para invadir Iraq deberÃan analizar una de sus afirmaciones más resonantes: la del vÃnculo entre Saddam Hussein y Osama bin Laden.
Los crÃticos de Bush desacreditaron tal aseveración, a la que calificaron de invención. Estaban equivocados. El vÃnculo existÃa, pero no era el que el presidente le vendió al público.
It‘s a fascinating tale, and Doug Hughes‘ direction engrosses us even if we might predict the ending. Flashbacks show the path of anger and despair to self-destruction.
Russia, through its energy company Rosneft, has started to recover the multibillion-dollar oil company Yukos that was stolen from it in the mid-90s. It is buying the assets in auctions. Indignant protests are heard from westerners.
Funny there was no indignation from western officials when Mikhail Khodorkovsky and other oligarchs, with the help of crooked President Boris Yeltsin, were appropriating Russian national oil and mineral wealth for kopeks on the ruble.
A Khodorkovsky company ran an auction at which a Khodorkovsky shell company won Yukos, paying $309 million for a controlling 78 percent. Months later, Yukos traded on the Russian stock exchange at a market capitalization of $6 billion.
In view of the news that Billionaires for Bush were among those targeted by spies run by NYC Mayor Bloomberg and his Police in the months up to the 2004 Republican Convention, here’s a reminder of the Billionaires’ dangerous tactics.
What would you choose for the opening music of a play about Dick Cheney and George Bush? “Money makes the world go around…” from “Cabaret,” of course. In the tradition of good satire, this tongue-in-cheek play-length musical skit by The Billionaire Follies, the performing wing of Billionaires for Bush, is witty political commentary and enormously entertaining. This is “Dick Cheney’s Holiday Spectacular 2006!”
Swiss travel the world to help mega-rich evade taxes
The NY Times headline yesterday said, “Discreet Swiss Banks Now Offering Sophisticated Investment Vehicles.” Further down, the story noted that Geneva has becomes an “aggressive haven for the global elite.” And, “Now the Swiss can be found throughout the world, selling more sophisticated investment vehicles to attract high-net-worth individuals, mostly multimillionaires.”
So what is the real story about? The headline should have been, “Discreet Swiss travel the world to help the mega-rich evade taxes.”
How else has bank-secrecy Switzerland, with only 7.5 million people, become the third-largest asset manager in the world, after the United States and Britain, with global banking assets under management of $5.5 trillion?
It moved money through a network of front companies, mostly in offshore Liechtenstein and the United Arab Emirates. Siemens is being investigated by the U.S. Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission as well as by public prosecutors in Germany and Italy. 
Frost/Nixon by British playwright Peter Morgan takes place in 1977. British talk show host David Frost (Michael Sheen), trying desperately for a comeback, wheedles and bribes disgraced ex-President Richard Nixon (Frank Langella) to submit to hours of interviews whose high-spot turns out to be a confession to the crimes of Watergate.
Bush had a strong reason to want Justice to block pursuit of the case: the CIA used BCCI for its black ops, including funneling some of the $2 billion Washington sent to client Osama bin Laden and running money for the illegal Iran-Contra operation.
In that tradition, New York stage voices are being raised against war in two revivals that clearly retain their relevance today.
(shown here), who happens to be a top-tier Republican contributor.
Reporter Eric Dash says it‘s “to keep the bank from getting bogged down” because “the compliance overhang has made it difficult to be competitive” and “unnecessarily slowed the company down.”
Critics dismissed that as an invention. They were wrong. There was a link, but not the one Bush was selling. The link between Hussein and Bin Laden was their banker, BCCI. But the link went beyond the dictator and the jihadist — it passed through Saudi Arabia and stretched all the way to George W. Bush and his father.
The command that dismisses his assistant is Exit!
Yukos that was stolen from it in the mid-90s. It is buying the assets in auctions. Indignant protests are heard from westerners.
Further down, the story noted that Geneva has becomes an “aggressive haven for the global elite.” And, “Now the Swiss can be found throughout the world, selling more sophisticated investment vehicles to attract high-net-worth individuals, mostly multimillionaires.”