Ultimate Big Brother 'basics are in place'

From 'Electronic Police State' report cites U.S.

In what may be the first assessment of its kind, a private company that offers a range of privacy products for computers and other technology is ranking the United States No. 6 in the world for having the most aggressive procedures for monitoring residents electronically.

The report, called The Electronic Police State [pdf], assesses the status of governmental surveillance in 52 nations around the globe for 2008.

The document was released Cryptohippie, Inc., which was set up in 2007 through the acquisition of several little-known but highly regarded providers of privacy technologies.

Not surprisingly, China and North Korea ranked No. 1 and No. 2, with Belarus and Russia following up. But the United Kingdom ranked fifth followed by the United States.

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Kent State: 39 years after 4 students were slain we're still asking 'why?'

2009 Commemoration Headlines

Filo and Vecchio return to KSU

Inextricably linked by the annals of history for the past 39 years, Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer John Filo and his subject, Mary Vecchio, were reunited Tuesday at Kent State University.

The last time he saw her on the campus was through the lens of his camera as he took his historic picture on May 4, 1970, after the shootings on campus that left four dead and nine wounded.

Filo, then a senior photojournalism major, is now photography director for CBS in New York. Vecchio, then a 14-year-old runaway from Florida, is a respiratory therapist in Florida.

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Kent State marks anniversary of 1970 shootings

KENT -- Today is the 39th anniversary of the 1970 National Guard shootings that killed four Kent State University students during an anti-war protest.

On May 4, 1970, four students were killed and nine others were wounded, one of whom suffered permanent paralysis.

Some of the students who were shot had been protesting against the American invasion of Cambodia, which then-President Richard Nixon had just announced in a television address on April 30.

Other students who were shot had merely been walking nearby or observing the protest from a distance.

The event is commemorated in the Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young song "Ohio."

KSU will hold its annual symposium marking the anniversary.

© 2009 The Associated Press

How tax havens helped to create a crisis

By Sol Picciotto (Financial Times)

5 May, 2009

Banks employ large teams of highly paid people to devise transactions mainly for the purpose of avoiding tax. These activities seem to be far more profitable than the humdrum business of managing payments and channelling savings towards investment. Why?

The answer shows the close link between tax avoidance and the speculation that has fuelled financial instability for 30 years. There were clearly other causes of the current crisis but the faults of the international tax system were a big contributory factor.

International tax co-ordination depends on treaties based on a model devised 80 years ago. To prevent double taxation, the treaties generally give governments the right to tax returns from an investment in the investor's country of residence. Business profits, meanwhile, are taxable in the “source” country where the activity takes place.

But for most of the past century, international investment was dominated by multinational corporations, which could choose the location of their sources of funds and organise their affiliates' capital structures. This enabled them to devise techniques to ensure that they were not taxed unfairly, as they saw it, exploiting ambiguities in the concepts of residence and source using legal entities formed in convenient jurisdictions. Such methods were also pioneered, with rather less legitimacy, by wealthy people resentful of high income taxes.

The relaxation and final abandonment of exchange controls in the 1970s led to the blossoming of “offshore” finance and a boom in tax havens. These depend on both outright tax evasion and the exploitation of grey areas by tax avoidance. Since large multinationals are as much financial as business entities, they have freedom to devise complex financial structures – financial institutions, such as banks, even more so: in recent separate surveys by the US Government Accountability Office and the Tax Justice Network, the largest user of tax havens in every country surveyed was a bank. Tax authorities have enormous problems puzzling out these structures. If they can, it is often hard to characterise them as shams.

The leading countries themselves are also host to major financial centres, from which most of these activities are directed. The revenue authorities in these countries, not least the US and the UK, have been cowed into accepting these activities for fear of losing finance business.

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And, from Lies, damned lies and tax haven nonsense

Something pernicious is going on in the undergrowth. British tax havens are trying to establish clear blue water between their activities and those of their commercial rivals in Austria, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg and Switzerland. This is based on lies. "We are transparent they say: we do not have banking secrecy and we have signed up to tax information exchange agreements that meet the OECD standard."

Let's nail this nonsense before it goes any further. The British tax havens do not rely on banking secrecy, because they use a far more secretive mechanism for protecting their tax evading clients. This mechanism is called a trust. Trusts are a British common law entity which extend as far back as the Crusades to Palestine. But they have become the basis of highly abusive practices because they are not registered with any public authority and they are not required to reveal any information on public record. Trusts provide the underpinning for the British tax evasion industry, which is probably the largest in the world when you take account of all the British satellite tax havens on the Crown Dependencies and Overseas Territories.

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How Obama's tax reforms could impact Microsoft's bottom line

By Todd Bishop (Tech Flash)

10May, 2009

President Obama's proposal to overhaul U.S. tax policy on international profits, unveiled last week, has raised objections from big companies that would end up paying considerably more in taxes under the plan. One is Microsoft, whose financial statements provide a case study in the benefits and drawbacks of the current system.

Microsoft in its 2008 fiscal year reduced its effective tax rate by 7 percent, or more than $1.6 billion, as a result of foreign earnings taxed at lower rates, according to its latest annual report. That and other factors cut Microsoft's tax bill to $6.1 billion last year, on $23.8 billion in pre-tax income. That's an effective tax rate of less than 26 percent, compared with the U.S. statutory rate of 35 percent.

By comparison, five years earlier, Microsoft trimmed only 1 percent from its tax bill as a result of international earnings. The subsequent increase in tax savings accompanied an overall jump in Microsoft's business overseas. But the company also was among those listed on a recent Government Accountability Office report on large U.S. corporations with subsidiaries in notorious tax havens.

The debate hinges on policies that let companies with international operations avoid higher U.S. tax rates by reinvesting their foreign earnings overseas.

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Atlantic nuclear submarine accident

A TMS interview with Jan Oberg, Founder of the Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research (TFF), about the Nuclear Submarine collision in the Atlantic Ocean, 3-4 February.

~ Source: The Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Reseach ~