“MOVE TO HIGHER GROUND & MOVE YOUR MONEY ON-SHORE!”

Based on forecasts of the Internet, increasing surveillance and as supposed futurists, for years we have advised adventurous clients to move their money on-shore, as global tax authorities circle tax-havens and tighten the net. The second part of our daily gloomy mantra has been “…and move to higher ground.” 

Nobody has moved their money on-shore and only one client family has moved to higher ground – above possible sea level rises due to global warming. Our persistent, prophetic, truly wise advice has been largely ignored, and even cruelly mocked.

But our reputations may be saved by today’s report from MCCIP, The Marine Climate Change Impacts Partnership, which charts the 200 miles northerly migration by fish to escape warming seas. Canadian and Scandinavian fisheries report cod shoals moving north – and Mediterranean species are being fished off southern England and Ireland, 200 miles from home. Ally this news to last year’s remarks by that most diplomatic, non-controversial, and widely loved observer, David Attenborough, that the Arctic Ice is melting rapidly, and the mockery may turn to wild applause – or at least a grudging acknowledgement. 

When the seas warm-up - the ice melts and sea-levels rise. The immediate impact and process is mapped in my E-book, OUT OF THE DEPTHS, available for a risibly small price from Amazon-Kindle.

Will the second part of our Cassandra-like advice – “Move your Money On-Shore” (before the taxman gets you) be confirmed by events? I think so, so act on the advice now.  Sorting out The Money-Economy is a pre-requisite condition for building the marvellous future promised in AD2516-After Global Warming, where 11 billion souls have great, long lives in a world that functions without money. Also, as it happens, available from Amazon-Kindle for a mere peppercorn. Buy now to avoid disappointment.

Two hundred miles north and south is the distance that climate scientists calculated 20 years ago that the deserts would migrate as the world warms; swallowing Spain, Italy and Southern France – some USA States and South Africa. Intelligent cooperation over water, and trickle-irrigation will avoid disaster – as long as the mad Money-Economy is fixed.

9 May 2012.

OFF-SHORE FUNDS - MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING?

The Guardian, my favourite independent newspaper, possibly the best newspaper in the world, reports the OECD has recalculated bank deposits in Tax Havens at $2.7 trillion – down from the 2009 estimated $11 to $18 trillion. The OECD presented the new numbers to the G20 meeting in Cannes. Does this dramatic 75% fall in (reports of) tax-free cash sloshing around the globe mean we should abandon attempts to repatriate the funds and invest them into industries in the originating nations?

SLIDE 11 - The $18 trillion Tax- Haven cash is 30% of the annual global $60 trillion production. The GGDP surplus p.a. is about 1% - for 30 years siphoned to tax-havens (30 years x 1% = 30%).

http://www.noelhodson.com/Money-Wars-2012-V5SHORT.pdf

  

No – actually. In 2010, from 2009 statistics (we all know that all statistics are wrong, but they are all we have) in Money-Wars (slide 11 of 23) we calculated that the OECD’s $18 trillion made sense, and it forms a part of the better documented $82 trillion in the Bond Markets (the Free Markets), that slosh around the globe – ever hopeful of finding a totally safe nation that can be fooled into being on the edge of bankruptcy and thus have to pay 7.5% for the next 50 years to Bond holders.

The sensible logic is that the annual surpluses from our national economies, about 1% a year, for the past 30 years have been siphoned off-shore – with tax relief given in the home nations.  The 1% surplus is the liquidity of any economy – which has gone missing and been siphoned away.

It is in the annual siphoning paperwork (transfer pricing, officers, controllers, resident status) that long established tax laws are most likely to have been breached, creating Back-Duty tax cases, which assess the tax-relief granted, the ongoing unpaid taxes, plus compound interest, plus penalties – that in most cases add up to the total capital siphoned out.  

So – the apparent 75% reduction actually reflects that funny-money is constantly shifting from tax-havens to Bond, Shares & Commodity Markets, to on-shore banks, etc. The $18 trillion siphoned in the past 30 years, could and should be subjected to forensic audits – and repatriated. The secret and intelligence services could easily track it down, as few bank computer operators will risk making fraudulent entries to obscure the trails.

Another Guardian article, about Facebook, tells us 2 billion people are on-line, and that 1 in 3 use Facebook. Maybe Facebook can track the Funny-Money.

TAX AND ECONOMICS ARTICLES 29TH APR 13

PHARAOHS & MONETARIST BULLSHIT.

This weekend, allegedly left-wing Francois Hollande beats right-wing Nicolas Sarkozy by 52% to 48%, for the French Presidency and allegedly left-wing Labour Councillors take control of Chipping Norton’s local government in the extremely right-wing heartland and homeland of conservative  UK Prime Minister David Cameron’s country seat. In Greece, as their elections take the country to the left, a middle-class dentist shoots himself, “because I can see no way out of debt”.  The poor, short-sighted man could not face being a Greek beggar. He did not know that everything changes and he did not have the courage to join the fight, stop being a victim, and shout for socio-economic fairness and justice. He must have believed the idiotic dogmatic bullshit that “The money has run out.”

TAX AND ECONOMICS ARTICLES 29TH APR 13

In these cases “Left” means loosening monetary constraints and “Right” means ever greater tightening and austerity. The alleged “reason” for austerity in the UK, as most right-wingers endlessly whine and bleat is that “…we inherited a huge deficit from the Labour government…” (Blah! Blah! Blah! Yeh! Yeh! Yeh! – just do your damn jobs or get out!). These miserable, intellectually challenged, Alzheimer’s raddled, idiot CAN’T-DO austerity apologists have forgotten that it was the bankers who lost all the money. The City of London allegedly “lost” (or transferred to tax-havens via back-to-back contracts) more than £1 trillion in 2008/09, requiring UK.Gov to borrow from the alleged "International Markets" to save the banks – and to continue to finance the enormous, greedy, unwarranted, endless, distorted, insane “rewards” of the talentless, risk-free nonentities who, as soon they have the keys to the corporate safes, steal as much money as they can, as quickly as possible, betray their work colleagues, suppliers, shareholders, customers and countrymen, avoid paying any tax to their communities, sabotage their own companies and sneak off to Tax-havens – while unemployment accelerates out of control and our young people despair of the future. Even the alleged safe-keepers, the major shareholders, including our pension funds (our saved money) are all in on the self-reward gravy train and do nothing that stops the thieving, as they too gouge out huge, selfish, unneeded, tax-minimised “rewards”.

At the base of this Austerity -V- Expansion war is the definition of money. What is it? How can it disappear? Where is it? Who has got it? Why do governments and banks not have enough of it?  We live in the wealthiest, most automated, most productive, most informed and fastest growing economy ever – and yet have persistent, endemic poverty such as 35 million Americans on Food-Stamps and millions of families in loan–shark debt traps being paid less than a living wage; which means – for the slow witted and low IQs among us - that they can’t live. What are governments and corporate bosses doing?

Money is a set of political decisions. In a well run economy it is the accurate bookkeeping record of all the wealth and current transactions in the real economy. The real-economy is the real goods and services owned and transacted – money is a set of IOUs that keep track. Money cannot be “lost” but it can be rationed.

When the Egyptians learned how to tame the River Nile and produce surpluses and became very wealthy – a major chunk of their wealth was diverted into assuring the royal families of eternal life by building pyramids. These immense public projects needed immense resources – men, stone, wood, paint, gilding, sarcophaguses, embalming and funerary art. The food, clothing and housing of the workforce was authorised by the Pharaoh of the day, who effectively issued IOU’s (money) to the public granaries, wine-stores, weavers, clothiers etc. for the all the supplies needed for these large infrastructure projects. This monetary expansion, quantitative easing, additional economic activity not only did not bankrupt the nation – but despite the silly underlying concept, made Egypt ever more successful – over a thousand or more years. The activity provided jobs, focused talent and education, created national pride, tourist attractions, medical advances, writing, the arts and military might; and transported the bosses to Heaven - maybe.

Today’s well paid, overpaid, fully pensioned world leaders – in business and government – lack any vision, direction, ideas or understanding of wealth creation. The majority of them are simply scooping up as much cash as possible, as fast as possible, climbing the golden ladder to the steel-ceiling, clambering through and smashing down the trapdoors – onto the heads, hands, children and lives of the rest of the world.  Then they whinge and trot out their self-serving bullshit economics, “…the money has run out”. The money has not run out – it cannot run out – it should expand with our successful real-economy – the richest 1% is choosing to keep what they’ve got and bully and starve the 99%.  They want to stop the clock – freeze the process – with themselves at the top – for ever.

This is the wealthiest society ever and the real-economy is expanding fast. The bookkeeping, money-economy has to be reformed to keep pace. It is time to repatriate the past 30 years of siphons to tax-havens; bring the cash ($11 to $18 trillion) back to the originating economies, invest it in projects in those economies, and thereby re-balance all the economies around the world. Then we can continue to build a marvellous future for all.

7 May 2012.

HELP - How can I spend £3,500 a day?

Boardroom Pay – Shareholders Revolt

This morning in the UK, the Conservative-Liberal coalition licks its wounds after being thrashed in the local elections in which they are losing hundreds of local-council seats to Labour. Will public schoolboys Prime Minister Cameron and Deputy Clegg now do a U-Turn and allow the UK economy to expand?

Meanwhile, in Boardrooms, top directors are weeping and nursing their injuries after their wrists have been slapped with a wet flannel by powerful shareholders “outraged” at excessive executive pay. The shareholders are institutions, insurance giants and pension funds etc, that hold big chunks of shares – on behalf of the bewildered public. Those same institutions also dole out excessive pay to their executives – and many share the same conspiratorial remuneration-committee non-executive directors who, for a mere £50,000 a year or so, in three days work, will calculate that quite newly elevated, ordinary, talentless, risk averse plodders MUST be paid £3,500 a day – or they will emigrate to Rockall or China leaving our nations in ruins. And, of course, if they have to spend £3,500 a day on themselves – an onerous task - the executives cannot be expected to actually turn up for work.

…So we might be forgiven for not wholly believing that the wet-flannel wielders mean what they say.

And, of course, the revolting shareholders (or the executives representing the shareholders) decisions are not binding on the criticised corporations, they are only advisory.

How should it work?  The most important socio-economic function of corporate executives is to provide jobs – to create jobs – to manage workers – to run effective organisations. Their joint pay should be a percentage of the wages paid to ordinary workers, adjusted by the numbers of jobs they manage and capped against average pay by, say, 5 times. E.g. – If BT employs 80,000 people in the UK, on average wages of £35,000 a year, the entire executive group, say 100 mangers, should earn 80,000 x £200 or £160,000 each – but capped to 5 times the average pay. If the workforce declines – so does the executive pot.

Shareholder power must be reformed by law to overcome the divide & rule tactics of executives.

4 May 2012.

TAX AND ECONOMICS ARTICLES 29TH APR 13

The rich will always be with us

The UK Sunday Times Rich List was, it seems, published last week, concluding that 0.001% of citizens, about 1,000 individuals among 63M souls, own or are worth £414BN – enough to pay off the UK deficits several times over. Some of the Blessed 1,000 are drones – in hugely overpriced banking, rip-off gambling hedge-funds, fiddling the books and other parasitical activities – and many own vital industries contributing fairly to society.

There are arguments about precise definitions of personal wealth but the Blessed 1,000 undoubtedly wield and direct great economic power. Society needs these rich-nodes of independent wealth to counterbalance and be alternative investment centres to the vast cumbersome wealth of government. While it is true that most major industries are born from long term, futuristic government backed risk investment, (Christopher Columbus, Walter Raleigh, Captain Cook, Empire Building, Scientific Research, The Spitfire, Wars, The Jet Plane (post-migrant recognition), NHS, North Sea Oil, Computer Industry (posthumous recognition), British Leyland (ouch!), the BBC, BT, BP, Nuclear Power, Gas, Electricity, Water, Railways, Agriculture, etc.), the entrepreneurs do thereafter bring the products to the people for their enjoyment – usually efficiently and sustainably. Industrial heroes, industrial leaders, major employers, innovators and entrepreneurs fully deserve their enviable day-to-day rewards, their power and their alleged “wealth”- which in reality is mostly shares in corporate organisations employing millions of people, which few of us would care to work hard enough to own, control and manage. 

The social contract goes awry, as it has done this decade, when the Blessed 1,000 and the Government (“2,000 top civil servants are fiddling their taxes”) shovel their assets into elevated off-shore, off-planet tax-havens, convert as much into cash as they can, pull up all the ladders, slam down the steel trapdoors, cut themselves off from the communities that have enriched them, and refuse to pay taxes or to re-invest in those communities. Currently this self-elevation into the International Super-Rich, into the Drones Class, is denying jobs for up to 40% of 15 to 25 year olds, paying millions of families less than a living wage, trapping them in loan-shark debt, letting infrastructure crumble and sabotaging vital social organisations. Angry critics from the 99.999% might holler a vulgar Manchester imperative “S**t! Or get off the pot!”

In previous centuries, the Blessed 1,000 were mostly pillars of their communities who built Model Villages, Town Halls, free schools, hospitals and infrastructure. That was and is the economic justification for allowing their glorious power to continue. In France they broke the contract and suffered the guillotine, in Russia and the Colonies they suffered confiscation, expulsion and death – and today around the world, radical governments are wresting land and utilities from private hands – for better or worse.

Power and Responsibility are opposite sides of one coin. Power without responsibility will always self-destruct. The rich will always be with us - as long as they act responsibly.

3^rd May 2012

Benevolent viruses? Not on your life!

Wednesday 2^nd May 2012.

Sickness & Diseases - Health & Miracles

Having dispensed the forgiveness of all sins to all mankind (on the Internet) in yesterday’s blog, I was reminded again, by a TV documentary of an American asking what wiped out the entire Mayan population in Mexico in 1210AD – that we love a really nasty, deadly global pandemic. Several million Mayans died – (they are the ones like the Incas who built stepped pyramids and revelled in gory human sacrifice) – but they died not of The Black Death, The Plague, Spanish Flu or German Measles imported by the Conquistadores, but died of drought; in the middle of a tropical rain forest. Apparently when the North Pole gets very cold, the rains fail in Mexico and the Mayans had no rivers, lakes or aquifers and relied on cisterns and ponds to store the winter rain. Three years of drought killed almost everything.

But I digress. The researchers found a large pit full of skulls – heads without bodies; the type of mindless violence we like to indulge in, in hard times, when we have no TV game shows to amuse us – and speculated if they would find a deadly virus or bacterium in the bones. Similarly, about ten years ago, Norwegian scientists dug up deep-frozen human corpses in Greenland that had died in the Spanish Flu global pandemic in 1918-20 (after World War One). They did find dangerous bugs related to H5N1, or the killer bird-flu. Naturally the diggers and medics took precautions against being infected. They fully believed, they “knew”, and were counting on the fact that the bugs, germs, viruses or bacteria when thawed from the bones would still be viable and capable of starting another pandemic.

It is now widely accepted by science that our DNA, within our cells, bathed in seawater, has acquired and tamed and married innumerable bits of virus DNA or RNA – many of which were once dangerous enemies to us – and would have caused pandemics. It is also accepted that we swap DNA continually, all the time – through body contact, food sharing, water and breathing; criminals famously daub DNA on every surface, for the convenience of detectives. When dealing with bones from diseased victims, we have recently learned to be cautious. Those invisible, minuscule, squirming, reproducing, parasitic nasty life-forms, packets of foreign DNA, can do us to death. We are all quite comfortable with the knowledge that the bones of old sinners can fatally infect us with their altered or malevolent packets of DNA.  We gleefully list the 100 top killer diseases – and try to avoid and eradicate them.

But what of the old bones of Saints, or the DNA of living Saints?  Are there benevolent strands of DNA that we share? Can we be infected with goodness? If not -Why not?  

Our existence and reproduction are evidence that benevolent DNA is ubiquitous and universal. Our parents generally bequeath good or benevolent packets of DNA that enable our lives. By malevolent, I mean harmful to our life, and by benevolent mean life enhancing. Perhaps the company we keep is more important than we yet fully realise. Perhaps the famous billionaire recluse, Howard Hughes, had a point. And perhaps the millions of medieval pilgrims, walking thousands of miles to revere saintly remains, hanks of hair, cups used by Saints and chips off The True Cross and other Holy Relics, though mired in ignorance and deluded by spivs, had a glimmering.

But – NO!  We can believe in nasty killer pandemics; we love a great malevolent virus to fight; we like to be shocked as we pile up the innocent bodies – But benevolent viruses that help us? …Not on your life!

http://www.cellsalive.com/howbig.htm

SCALE: A human cell as big as a house contains bacteria as big as a football, viruses as big as golf balls and DNA strands like human hair. DNA is very small.

2^nd May 2012.

Thought Police on the Internet

File Sharing – Internet Shoplifting – A Question of Scale

It is difficult to sort the distortions from the outright lies from the statistical interpretations from the paranoid delusions from simple bullying power “you-will-obey-me”, in the file-sharing and internet censorship debates.

This week a UK court banned a long established film file-sharing website, requiring the website hosts or Internet Service Providers (ISP) to shut it down. Hollywood celebrates - impoverished youths, the odd shoplifter and penniless adults mourn. The victory for censorship is immediately followed up with strident calls to require all ISPs to censor content – pornography, violence, civil unrest, music swapping, sexism, dwarfism, chavism, personal insults, racial abuse, anti-Chinese Government content, criticism of UK.Gov, identifying idiot-gaps in USA fire-walls, Jeremy Hunt’ism, abortion advice, Evolution-Theory, free-encyclopaedias that bankrupt honest publishers, free tuition in hundreds of subjects – stealing students from college courses, medical-self-diagnoses, radical tweets and twitters calling for change, copying media reports - and so on – the list of would-be complaining censors is endless.

The main arguments for censorship are that file-swapping is stealing expensive content and will ruin the entertainment industry – and that vulnerable people must be protected from things they should not see, hear or speak. But, printed comics, magazines and books were for hundreds of years, and still are, swapped extensively without ruining the publishing industry. Kids copy music and give it to friends – as they always have done – yet the music recording industry is thriving and millionaire stars are in the ascendant. The creative-content industries have not shown that file-sharing damages their revenues; they would be only too happy to pay millions for campaigns to publicise their wares as widely as file-sharing does. Case not proven.

SINS - Schoolboys have shared grubby pornography since Adam – and posh, quality pornography adorns the walls of most stately homes, art galleries and glossy magazine covers; as it always has. These irreligious, sticky-handed “sins” cannot be blamed on the Internet. I blame the kids’, particularly the male kids’ deoxyribonucleic acid and their parents – and grandparents and all their heavy-breathing progenitors. Nubile females have danced, dressed, flirted and writhed provocatively since the beginning of time – the internet is not to blame for human sexuality. Maybe it is the intelligent designer who got it wrong. Horrifying weapons have been made, copied and used in terrible wars since Cain and Abel – the internet reflects the innate primitive human urge to maim and destroy to get what we want. Sins of violence are inherent and have traditionally been punished only when acted out. The internet thought-police are blundering into confusing fantasy with reality.

Obsessive surveillance and censorship of Internet content will lead to an alternative system being created that circumvents all “authorities”. Today’s youngsters, almost wholly disengaged from the old laws, business and politics, will go their own way.

1^st May 2012.