My thanks to Len, D, and Brian for their research, the fruits of which appear here.
Remember: “War” is for the purpose of declaring martial law. Declaring martial law is for the purpose of announcing the fall of the cabal and the return of the Republic.
No need to worry. This is what we’ve been waiting for.
Fact: Women and Children are being TRAFFICKED through the border… OUR Why Part 5
Published by Operation Underground Railroad on Tue, 28 Sep 2021
Hit graphic to watch video.
(https://hooktube.com/bejIIWovF3o)
In our WHY series, O.U.R. founder Tim Ballard explains why border traffic matters and how it is affecting children. The #1 goal should always be to protect the children of the world. We as a nation need to ask ourselves when making policy, “is this best for the children?”
Check out these related videos:
MODELING AGENCY SHUT DOWN…Operation Blackwrist – O.U.R. Update
https://youtu.be/XNGaWAtDlmo
To truly heal…
https://youtu.be/5vL6XgI7c_U
Nicolas Veniamin interviews Janet Ossebaard and Cynthia Koeter, producers of The Fall of the Cabal.
Haven’t watched yet, but comes recommended.
Hit graphic to watch video
(https://hooktube.com/sL7qFI-jXww)
Mandate or Freedom: An open letter to corporate CEOs
Jon Rappoport, October 15, 2021
(https://blog.nomorefakenews.com/2021/10/15/mandate-or-freedom-an-open-letter-to-corporate-ceos/)
Let’s be frank. Who in his right mind would appeal to corporate CEOs on fundamental issues of ethics and freedom?
But this is 1776.
We’re at the crossroads.
Are you going to order your employees to take the COVID vaccine? Are you going to fire those who won’t? Are you going to take away their freedom, for a vaccine that has already caused 700,000 injuries?
And by the way, that number represents vast underreporting. The well-known Harvard Pilgrim study concludes vaccine injuries should be multiplied by 100 to arrive at a true number.
Let’s get real. There will be many lawsuits filed from many quarters, to stop a vaccine mandate; but the outcome of these legal actions is vastly uncertain. Therefore, you CEOs must…
Stand up and refuse. Stand up and say you will not impose a mandate on your employees, NO MATTER WHAT.
No mandates, no more lockdowns, no further destruction of the economy, no destruction of millions more lives.
Except in a few states, governors can’t be relied on. You CEOs are a prime line of defense, if you have the courage. If you don’t, if your hard-charging reputations are built on a foundation of sand, if your prime loyalty is to a federal government that offers you cash bailouts in return for treachery against the system of free enterprise—what is left of it—then you are lost in a darkness of your own making.
Do you remember these words? “And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.”
This was the final thought expressed in the Declaration of Independence by the signers.
Do those words ring hollow for you now? Is that where we are?
Are you going to let a boot stamp on your face forever?
Are you going to grind your boot on the very freedom that allowed your company to grow and prosper?
Are the echoes of 1776 so faint in your minds, you can’t imagine how this dire 2021 has anything to do with you?
You need to step forward and make bold uncompromising statements and pledges: No mandates. No lockdowns. No destruction of the right to earn a living. No federal dictatorship. No backing down.
You and your fellow CEOs must leave your offices and travel across the country and tell the people you’re on their side, and you must mean it. This is not your usual public relations campaign. This is honesty and honor and duty. If you have it in you.
First, there was the story of a virus. Then a story of a test for the virus. Then the story of case numbers. Then, the masks and lockdowns and distancing and blasting of the economy. Then the vaccine. Then the announced vaccine mandate. Hasn’t it occurred to you that this serial story, with each succeeding phase, is really the pretext for tyranny and dictatorship and takeover?
You have to start forging new alliances that go far beyond your workaday world; alliances with nurses, pilots, sheriffs, soldiers and others who are refusing the vaccine. Alliances with unions who are pushing back against the mandate.
It’s not, strictly speaking, your “business,” but business in America is heading toward the edge of a cliff, in case you hadn’t noticed.
Here’s the story of one your own. Alfie Oakes. He has 3,200 employees. His store is based in Florida. He owns 3,000 acres of farmland and a food processing plant. Watch him speak in this video. He understands what’s at stake. He knows this is 1776. He’s a good man who’s doing the right thing. He’s a hero.
We are talking about values. We are not talking about political correctness or endlessly sucking on the teat of socialism.
I realize many of you CEOs have embraced a form of socialism already—a close collaboration with government—because you believe it is the best guarantee for your survival. But you’re wrong. You’re wrong in strategic terms, and wrong when it comes to values and principles.
You now have to revolutionize your thinking. You have to help overcome the forces you’ve been aligning yourself with.
You have to find, embrace, and work with the people, wherever they are, whoever they are, who stand for freedom. And the work you do must be conceived along new lines.
“I’m the CEO of XYZ. I stand here today talking to you, alongside sheriffs, policemen, union workers, nurses, soldiers, business owners, parents, state representatives; people who want freedom in America again. We’re pledged to stand against vaccine mandates, lockdowns, closures, and all the failed measures that have kept us in isolation. We’re taking back what is ours. You’re going to hear from these people standing up here. You’re going to understand how their stories of freedom denied are your stories…”
This is an issue of character.
For decades, you’ve thought of your relationship with the public as Public Relations, with all the manipulations that profession entails.
This is 1776. You can’t travel that way anymore.
“THESE are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated.”
Do you want to keep selling what you’ve always sold, until the people’s money to buy your goods runs out? Because surely you realize this is the Plan. One government restriction and interference after another, until the only alternative is a structured and managed economy, from the top down.
Are you willing to live with that?
Those of us who are awake and have eyes to see can fight this war without you. We’re not waiting to reclaim our freedom. I write this letter because you can, if you will, become our allies.
Or you can sink into a pool of obscurity and never be heard from again.
Not even footnoted in the books of history.
What are you going to do now, in this crisis?
You have a chance to be great. You have a chance to help save this country. Somewhere inside you, haven’t you always wanted a battle worthy of your deepest efforts?
You can form a line, beyond which the wolves in power cannot cross.
In this hour, the authentic spirit of America reaches out to you.
The spirit of freedom, which never dies, taps you on the shoulder.
Will you turn away, or will you come to the aid of your country?
Will you try to maintain your customary position, with blinders on, only to realize, soon, that your position is untenable; or will you forge a new connection with The People and pledge your fortunes, your honor, and your lives to a new Declaration of Independence from this latest version of the Crown, which seeks to colonize us in a landscape of despair?
Whether you choose to retreat or advance, you’re risking everything you’ve earned. In the one case, you willingly surrender it, because as sure as the sun comes up, the government is going to keep devising ways to take it from you. In the other case, you risk it all for the right reason:
The dream of what America should stand for.
What the Pandora Papers Tell Us About Ourselves
Chris Winters, Yes! Magazine, Oct 14, 2021
(https://www.yesmagazine.org/opinion/2021/10/14/tax-evasion-pandora-papers-united-states)
The wealthiest people in the world hide their wealth. This is common knowledge, as is the need to reverse the trend of growing wealth inequality.
Yet even knowing this, the Pandora Papers exposé by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists is still jaw-dropping. Journalists from 150 news organizations around the world obtained the offshore financial records of more than 330 public officials, including 130 people on Forbes Magazine’s list of billionaires, in more than 90 countries and territories.
The reporting was based on 11.9 million financial records that reveal a yet-unknown amount of hidden wealth that could reach into the trillions. Globally, anywhere from $5.3 trillion—about 6.25% of the world’s Gross Domestic Product—to as much as $32 trillion has been thought to be held in offshore tax havens.
And the real shocker is that these records were held by just 14 financial services firms. This is barely scratching the surface of a vast invisible economy of, by, and for the ultra-rich.
Indeed, as The Washington Post pointed out, some well-known Americans like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Warren Buffet do not appear in the leaked documents. Even Donald Trump is only tangentially mentioned.
That doesn’t mean America’s wealthiest people aren’t making use of offshore accounts. But it’s also true that many Americans don’t have accounts in those places, as they’re often attractive primarily to wealthy people in countries with less-robust financial sectors, and where graft and corruption are commonplace.
And as other investigations have revealed, America’s billionaires already pay such a low effective tax rate that they don’t necessarily need to hide their money overseas.
But where there’s a need, there will be a market, if not for Jeff Bezos, then for the thousands of other billionaires around the world.
A widespread vehicle the ultra-rich use to hide their wealth is trusts—accounts that hold someone’s wealth, but are managed by third parties, providing a legal gray area as to who legally owns the capital. And one of the U.S. jurisdictions that has been most aggressive in drawing in the trust industry is South Dakota, which is home to 103 trust companies holding about $367 billion in assets, the most of any state.
“States have been putting legal frameworks together to attract global capital since the 1980s and 1990s,” says Chuck Collins, the director of the Program on Inequality and the Common Good at the Institute for Policy Studies and author of The Wealth Hoarders: How Billionaires Pay Millions to Hide Trillions.
South Dakota was an early adopter in that regard, repealing its usury laws that capped the amount of interest banks could charge in 1980. Financial firms took note of the newly deregulated state, and Citibank’s credit card division was the first to decamp for the lucrative pastures of Sioux Falls. The bank, then and now the largest issuer of credit cards in the U.S., had lost hundreds of millions of dollars because the inflation rate was higher than New York’s cap on interest that could be charged on debt.
“That’s why they can charge 27% interest on your late credit card,” Collins says.
Since then, South Dakota has continued to make itself attractive to financial services, including offshore trust providers, joining a race to the bottom of jurisdictions competing for lucrative tax offshoring.
That’s similar to policies enacted by some other states, such as Delaware’s notoriously permissive tax code, which has made it attractive to people and corporations setting up anonymous limited liability companies.
It is possible that, outside of a sense of moral indignation that the wealthy play by a different set of rules, a person of low to average income would not notice any direct impacts from wealth hoarding on their own standard of living. There are, however, four harms the practice of hiding wealth does to civil society, Collins explains:
1. When rich people don’t pay taxes, everyone else gets stuck with the bill for a nation’s expenses, everything from pandemic recovery funding to veterans’ health care, military expenditures, retirement programs such as Social Security, and so forth.
2. The hidden wealth system is how the wealthy Global North extracts value from the poorer Global South, continuing the harms of colonialism to those people who are most vulnerable to them.
3. Wealth offshoring enhances the power of kleptocrats around the world engaged in looting their nations for personal gain.
4. Finally, the practice fuels the extreme wealth inequality that creates dynasties of unearned inherited wealth and power, perpetuating the other three harms down through generations.
Plus, the offshoring system has consequences for the U.S. in its dealings with other nations.
“The U.S. can’t go around the world complaining of corruption when we’ve become a tax haven,” Collins says.
In 2016, the Panama Papers investigation was based on the largest leak of documentation that revealed a tiny slice of the vast amount of private wealth squirreled away in offshore accounts. That investigation, based on leaks from a single Panama law firm, Mossack Fonseca, had many real-world aftereffects, including the resignation of Prime Minister Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson of Iceland and the removal and later sentencing of Pakistan’s prime minister Nawaz Sharif to 10 years in prison.
The Panama release also precipitated changes to beneficial ownership laws in many countries to reveal who owns what, and a treaty between the U.S. and Switzerland to prevent Swiss bank accounts from avoiding oversight by U.S. tax authorities.
But it wasn’t enough. For example, the U.S. doesn’t have a reciprocal agreement with Switzerland to subject bank accounts to Swiss scrutiny, Collins says. And the release of the Pandora Papers this year has exposed just how little transparency is still out there, even in the U.S.
“We’re like the deadbeats, the laggards, and that’s what these global billionaires are taking advantage of,” Collins says.
Europe’s reaction to the Panama Papers exposé provides a way forward. “It mostly shamed Europe into changing their practices,” Collins says.
In response to the exposure, European governments strengthened multilateral conventions amongst themselves to allow joint tax investigations, and have since recovered hundreds of millions of dollars as a result of new probes. Even Panama signed a convention with multiple countries to share foreign taxpayers’ information, and the founders of the law firm at the center of that scandal now face arrest if they ever return to the European Union.
The U.S. needs to follow Europe’s example, Collins says, and then some. The Corporate Transparency Act, which Congress passed Jan. 1, 2021 as part of the annual defense authorization act, requires all businesses operating in the U.S. to file ownership information with the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, which is part of the Treasury Department. That law, enacted over Trump’s veto, closed a significant loophole, one which former president Trump (among many others) exploited to create hundreds of anonymous shell companies to hold his and his clients’ assets.
But it’s not the only loophole or harmful law that needs addressing, as the release of the Pandora Papers demonstrates. At the very least, the U.S. should put its own house in order and end the use of tax shelters within its borders. That, for starters, would give the country the moral authority to hold others to account.
Credit: Brett Jordan/Unsplash.
Can The Public Sector Displace Facebook’s Unprecedented Corporate Power?
Alex Cosh, The Maple, Oct. 15, 2021
(https://www.readthemaple.com/can-the-public-sector-displace-facebooks-unprecedented-corporate-power/)
“In most other sectors, when one company becomes so large with regard to something that’s so important to the public, they often are brought under public control, or public regulation.”
Facebook’s reputational crisis in recent weeks is renewing calls for more regulatory oversight over the company and, in some cases, proposals for establishing alternative, democratically controlled social media platforms.
This week, a Leger poll found that 78 per cent of Canadians believe Facebook amplifies hate speech, and 58 per cent think the company — which also owns Instagram and WhatsApp — should be broken up or regulated. Nearly one-third of Canadians feel the platform has a negative impact on their lives.
These unfavourable public perceptions of the social media giant follow a U.S. Senate testimony earlier this month by Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, who accused the company of knowingly allowing its products to stoke division, promote eating disorders among teenage girls and destabilize democracies.
“The company’s leadership knows how to make Facebook and Instagram safer, but won’t make the necessary changes because they put their astronomical profits before people,” Haugen told the Senate Oct. 5.
The day before Haugen’s testimony, an hours-long outage took Facebook and its family of apps offline, raising questions about how reliant much of the internet has become on the platform for everything from reading the news, to communicating with friends and family.
“When something we’ve become accustomed to disappears or is non-functional, and makes us aware of our reliance on it, it gives an opportunity to ask questions about do we really want to be so reliant on it,” James Turk, director of the Centre of Free Expression at X University, told The Maple.
Turk noted that a large number of small businesses rely on Facebook and Instagram to advertise and communicate with customers, meaning the domino effect of the outage was widespread.
Part of the problem, Turk explained, is that Facebook’s apps are so deeply integrated that when one fails, the others are at risk of falling with it. He noted that even Facebook staff could not use internal communication channels or use their staff badges to enter company buildings and conference rooms during the outage.
(Read more: https://www.readthemaple.com/can-the-public-sector-displace-facebooks-unprecedented-corporate-power/.)