Global Occupy Movement #25 Belastingvlucht

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Op zondag 5 augustus 2012 18:52 schreef Terecht het volgende:

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Vetgedrukt: wat bedoel je daarmee?

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Kun je hiermee ook de ASML's en Shell's van deze wereld opbouwen? De fysieke en intellectuele infrastructuur die daarvoor nodig is, is gigantisch.

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Op maandag 6 augustus 2012 17:42 schreef Fledderjon het volgende:

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Zowel op lokaal, als op globaal niveau hebben politieke instanties weinig zeggenschap meer. Neem nu de Nederlandse staat al voorbeeld, deze bestaat niet meer: het heeft geen instrumenten meer (allemaal geprivatiseerd), geen guldens meer (euro) en geen eigen wetgeving (zeventig tot tachtig procent komt uit Brussel). De Keizer heeft geen kleren aan.

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Wat er nog gebeurt op lokaal niveau heeft niets te maken met Politiek in de breedste zin van het woord, maar is verworden een bureaucratische rompslomp. Het is een vorm van sociaal management, waarbij menselijke waarden geen enkele rol spelen.

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Maar ook op globaal niveau zien we de invloed van de grootste instanties in het niet vallen bij corporatieve belangen; neem nu je eigen voorbeeld. Shell heeft vandaag besloten om een gedeelte van haar kapitaal uit de Eurozone weg te sluizen. Een volkomen begrijpelijke en rationele strategie voor een Corporatie wiens interesse voorbij het sociale reikt, totaal ontworteld van enige territorialiteit. Dit zou rampzalige gevolgen kunnen hebben voor het al onstabiele economische klimaat in de Eurozone.

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De Europese Commissie, laat staan het Europees Parlement (als enige instituut dat direct door de Europese bevolking verkozen is) zijn totaal niet in staat een antwoord op dit soort scenario's te formuleren. Hetzelfde geld voor een inval in Irak; deze actie is op geen enkele manier politiek te verantwoorden, toen niet, en nu, naar bijna 10 jaar zien we wereldwijd de destructieve gevolgen van een dergelijk buitenlands beleid.

Politiek < Corporatieve belangen = politiek management

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TrapWire tied to anti-Occupy Internet-spy program

How do you make matters worse for an elusive intelligence company that has been forced to scramble for explanations about their ownership of an intricate, widespread surveillance program? Just ask Cubic, whose troubles only begin with TrapWire.

Days after the international intelligence gathering surveillance system called TrapWire was unraveled by RT, an ongoing investigation into any and all entities with ties to the technology has unturned an ever-increasing toll of creepy truths. In only the latest installment of the quickly snowballing TrapWire saga, a company that shares several of the same board members as the secret spy system has been linked to a program called Tartan, which aims to track down alleged anarchists by specifically singling out Occupy Wall Street protesters and the publically funded media — all with the aid of federal agents.

Tartan, a product of the Ntrepid Corporation, “exposes and quantifies key influencers and hidden connections in social networks using mathematical algorithms for objective, un-biased output,” its website claims. “Our analysts, mathematicians and computer scientists are continually exploring new quantification, mining and visualization techniques in order to better analyze social networks.” In order to prove as such, their official website links to the executive summary of a case study dated this year that examines social network connections among so-called anarchists, supposedly locating hidden ties within an underground movement that was anchored on political activists and even the Public Broadcasting Station [.pdf].

“Tartan was used to reveal a hidden network of relationships among anarchist leaders of seemingly unrelated movements,” the website claims. “The study exposed the affiliations within this network that facilitate the viral spread of violent and illegal tactics to the broader protest movement in the United States.”

Tartan is advertised on their site as a must-have application for the national security sector, politicians and federal law enforcement, and makes a case by claiming that “an amorphous network of anarchist and protest groups,” made up of Occupy Oakland, PBS, Citizen Radio, Crimethinc and others, relies on “influential leaders,” “modern technology” and “illegal tactics” to spread a message of anarchy across America.

“The organizers of Occupy Wall Street and Occupy DC have built Occupy networks through online communication with anarchists actively participating in the movements’ founding,” the executive summary reads. On the chart that accompanies their claim, the group lists several political activism groups and broadcast networks within a ring of alleged anarchy, which also includes an unnamed FBI informant.

Although emails uncovered in a hack last year waged at Strategic Forecasting, or Stratfor, suggested that Occupy groups had been under private surveillance, the latest discovery of publically available information implies that the extent to which the monitoring of political activists on American soil occurred may have extended what was previously imagined.

Things don’t end there, though. While the TrapWire tale is still only just beginning, the Ntrepid Corporation made headlines last year after it was discovered by the Guardian that the company was orchestrating an “online persona management” program, a clever propaganda mill that was touted as a means “to influence regional and international audiences to achieve U.S. Central Command strategic objectives,” according, at least, to the Inspector General of the US Defense Department [.pdf]. The investigation eventually revealed that the US Central Command awarded Ntrepid $2.76 million worth of taxpayer dollars to create phony Internet “sock puppets” to propagate US support.

One year later, the merits of Tartan’s analytics are now being brought into question, but so are the rest of the company’s ties. A trove of research accumulated by RT, Project PM founder Barrett Brown, PrivacySOS.org and independent researchers Justin Ferguson and Asher Wolf, among others, has linked Tartan with an even more unsettling operation.

Margaret A. Lee of Northern Virginia is listed on several websites as serving on the Ntrepid board of directors as secretary, a position she held alongside Director Richard Helms, CFO Wesley R Husted and President Michael Martinka. And although several parties are going to great lengths to deny the ties, a paper trail directly links Lee and company to Abraxas — and thus Cubic — and, of course, TrapWire, the very surveillance system that is believed to be blanketing the United States.

According to the Commonwealth of Virginia’s State Corporation Commission, TrapWire Inc. was registered to Margaret A Lee on March 7, 2009. Other publically available information reveals that, at least at one point, Wesley Husted served as chief financial officer for TrapWire, Inc., where Richard H Helms held the title of CEO.

Various sources have since claimed that Helms, a former CIA agent that once ran the agency’s European division, has severed ties with TrapWire, yet the other connections remain intact.

In RT’s earlier research in the TrapWire case, it was revealed that TrapWire’s parent company, Cubic Corporation, acquired an online identity masking tool called Anonymzer in a 2010 merger, and also controls the fare card system at some of the biggest public transportation systems in the world. According to the latest findings, Cubic’s control extends beyond just that, though. Under their Ntrepid branch, Cubic controlled an operation that spied on political activists with FBI informants and attempted to link them to crimes across America.

Whether or not the TrapWire system was implemented in such operations is unclear, and Cubic continues to maintain that they are not involved with the surveillance network.

Last week, Cubic Corporation issued a press release claiming, “Abraxas Corporation then and now has no affiliation with Abraxas Applications now known as Trapwire, Inc.”

“Abraxas Corp., a risk-mitigation technology company, has spun out a software business to focus on selling a new product,” the article reads. “The spinoff – called Abraxas Applications – will sell TrapWire, which predicts attacks on critical infrastructure by analyzing security reports and video surveillance.”

Not only does a 2007 report in the Washington Business Journal insist that the companies are practically one in the same, though, but a 2006 article in the same paper reveals that Abraxas had just acquired software maker Dauntless. Researchers at Darkernet have since linked Lee, Husted and Helms to the Abraxas Dauntless Board of Directors as well.

Justin Ferguson, the researcher who first exposed TrapWire two weeks ago, has noted that Lee, Helms and Husted were listed on Abraxas Dauntless’ filings with Virginia as recently as December 2011. They also are all present on the TrapWire filings dated September 2011 and the latest annual filing made with the Florida Department of State, Division of Corporations on behalf of Ntrepid.

Nevertheless, in a conversation this week with Project PM’s Barrett Brown, Cubic Corp. Communication Director Tim Hall dismisses this ties again.

“There is no connection at all with Abraxas Applications and Trapwire and or Ntrepid,” Hall allegedly insists, according to audio uploaded to YouTube.

Brown, on his part, says he has obtained Cubic’s 2010 tax filings that show that Ntrepd, like Abraxas, is “wholly owned” by Cubic.

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'Een referendum over de euro, alstublieft, om politici uit hun schuilkelders te trekken'

Waar blijven de inhoudelijke analyses, de bevlogen betogen voor of tegen Europa, vraagt columnist René van Leeuwen zich af. Juist nu zou er de tijd voor zijn. Er is een oplossing: houd een referendum.

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Op donderdag 23 augustus 2012 15:56 schreef Papierversnipperaar het volgende:

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Gawker publishes audits of Mitt Romney's offshore financial accounts

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The fund has assets of $3.7bn and according to the documents "intends to conduct it operations so that it will not be engaged in a United States trade or business and, therefore, will not be subject to United States federal income or withholding tax on its income from United States sources".

A recent investigation by Vanity Fair magazine concluded that Romney had $30m invested in the Cayman Islands alone. Bain Capital, Romney's former employer, controls at least 138 funds in the Caymans.

The Romneys are also investors in Absolute Capital Return Partners, a Delaware-based partnership that uses a technique called equity swapping to avoid tax. Equity swaps allow investors to exchange gains and losses on investments without taking ownership of the asset. The Internal Revenue Service has expressed concerns that swaps may have allowed investors to avoid paying billions of dollars on dividends.

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Vrijwillige 'helmen' houden Chileense agenten in de gaten

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De gehelmde vrijwilligers nemen nooit deel aan de protesten en komen ook niet tussenbeide. Ze zijn er slechts om te registreren wat er gebeurt tijdens de rellen tussen betogers en de steeds harder optredende politie.

De 'helmen', zoals ze genoemd worden, zijn burgers van allerlei pluimage en leeftijden. Er zitten zakenmannen en arbeiders tussen, universiteitsstudenten en gepensioneerden, maar allemaal beschouwen ze hun werk als cruciaal, schrijft The New York Times.

Chileense studenten en scholieren trokken vorig jaar al de straat op om hervormingen te eisen op universiteiten en scholen. De studenten pleitten voor gratis, gelijkwaardig en kwalitatief hoogstaand openbaar onderwijs. De reactie van de overheid was aanvankelijk terughoudend, en de betogers konden min of meer hun gang gaan.

Dit jaar heeft de regering echter een zero-tolerance-beleid afgekondigd voor het opnieuw bezetten van scholen en onderwijsgebouwen en worden speciale politie-eenheden ingezet om de gebouwen met geweld te ontruimen. Vaak vallen er tientallen gewonden, en worden honderden arrestanten meegenomen voor verhoor.

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Alleen de hoogste inkomens zagen hun koopkracht vorig jaar stijgen

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Het CBS heeft voor de berekeningen van de koopkracht de Nederlandse bevolking ingedeeld in tien delen, zo vat persbureau Novum samen. Alleen het tiende deel met het hoogste inkomen zag de koopkracht stijgen, de volgende tien procent met een inkomen tussen de 83 en 108 duizend had dezelfde koopkracht als een jaar eerder. De overige tachtig procent had minder te besteden.

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World's richest woman says poor should have less fun, work harder

Just in case you were beginning to think rich people were deeply misunderstood and that they feel the pain of those who are less fortunate, here's the world's wealthiest woman, Australian mining tycoon Gina Rinehart, with some helpful advice.

"If you're jealous of those with more money, don't just sit there and complain," she said in a magazine piece. "Do something to make more money yourself -- spend less time drinking or smoking and socialising, and more time working."

Yeah, let them eat cake.

Rinehart made her money the old-fashioned way: She inherited it.

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Op vrijdag 31 augustus 2012 20:21 schreef Papierversnipperaar het volgende:

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Apple granted a patent to wirelessly disable cameras on iphones in certain locations

Apple was granted a patent last week that will enable it to wirelessly disable the camera on iphones in certain locations, sparking fears that such techniques could be used to prevent citizens from communicating with each other or taking video during protests or events such as political conventions and gatherings.

The camera phone has revolutionized the flow of information in the digital age. Any time a major event takes place, news networks and video websites are immediately inundated with footage and photographs from the scene.

That could all change in the future however, with a flick of a switch, according to U.S. Patent No. 8,254,902, published on Tuesday, titled, “Apparatus and methods for enforcement of policies upon a wireless device.”.

In other words, an encoded signal could be transmitted to all wireless devices, commanding them to disable recording functions.

Obviously, the way this will be applied will depend on what is determined to be a sensitive area by the relevant authorities.

To put it bluntly, the powers that be could control what you can and cannot document on your wireless devices according to their own whims.

Given that the major technology companies are set to make wireless connectivity a major feature of the latest cameras, this development does not bode well for photographers and citizen journalists who are already experiencing a major crackdown on their first and fourth amendment rights.

Michael Zhang at Tech site Peta Pixel notes:

If this type of technology became widely adopted and baked into cameras, photography could be prevented by simply setting a geofence around a particular location, whether its a movie theater, celebrity hangout spot, protest site, or the top secret rooms at 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino, California.

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Occupy gaat stempassen vernietigen

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Zondagmiddag organiseert de protestbeweging Occupy een manifestatie in Utrecht, waarbij onder andere stempassen verbrand worden. De betogers willen mensen bewust maken van het feit dat hun stem eigenlijk niets uitmaakt in het huidige systeem.

'Je kan je afvragen hoeveel invloed jij hebt op politici in het huidige systeem. De invloed van de kiezer op de Tweede Kamer is door het kiesstelsel behoorlijk ingedamd', meent organisator Dhjana Samshuijzen. 'Bovendien is het maar de vraag hoeveel invloed politici hebben op bedrijven en dergelijke.'

De beweging roept zoveel mogelijk mensen op om mee te lopen vanaf het Jaarsbeursplein naar het Neude. Daar zullen verschillende mensen spreken en workshops worden gegeven. Zo zal er een workshop 'creatieve destructie van de stempas' worden aangeboden.

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Op zondag 9 september 2012 10:53 schreef Papierversnipperaar het volgende:

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Op zondag 9 september 2012 11:11 schreef Lavenderr het volgende:

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Een workshop om een papiertje te verbranden?

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Op zondag 9 september 2012 12:07 schreef mossad_agent het volgende:
Ik zie het meer als; nutteloos, zoals je verwacht van Occupy maar dat wist je natuurlijk al

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Op zondag 9 september 2012 12:23 schreef Gray het volgende:

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Net als stemmen.

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Op zondag 9 september 2012 12:30 schreef mossad_agent het volgende:

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Nou... ben ik het niet mee eens. Immers iemand die niet stemt geeft zijn stem aan een partij waar hij niet voor wil stemmen, voorts heeft iemand die niet stemt, ook geen reden om kritiek te leveren. Immers op het moment dát je je stem kúnt laten gelden doe je het niet.

Als je stemmen op een grote partij onzin vind, hetgeen ik mij goed kan voorstellen omdat zij aan het eind toch zo draaien en beloftes weggooien om maar op het pluche te zitten, stem dan bijvoorbeeld op een Piratenpartij. Zoals al eens geopperd... de ene zetel van de PvdD heeft meer invloed op de kamer dan de 31e zetel voor de VVD of PvdA.

Kortom, ik zou wél stemmen, echter niet op een van de heersende partijen, mijn stem gaat dan ook naar een one issue partij. Een partij die zelf al aangeeft geen oplossing te hebben voor de financiele vraagstukken maar wel staat voor vrijheid op het internet, hetgeen ik weer belangrijk vind.

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Primary Greek tax evaders are the professional classes

Greece is riddled with corruption, but a study shows that banks, politicians and professional workers are largely to blame

There is one good reason for Greece to stay in the euro: to combat corruption. It is a sad fact that the country is riddled with it and needs outside pressure and support to sort things out. Athens is not the only place in Europe wrestling with corruption, but we'll come to that later.

Even if Greece and its prime minister, Antonis Samaras, could overcome the huge loss of pride and reap some of the economic benefits of quitting the single currency, they would still be left with a corrupt economy, much of which strengthens the power of unions and trade associations.

City economists tend to ignore the problem when they assess the pros and cons of euro membership. They have arrived at the collective opinion that leaving the eurozone is the best, if not the only, option for Athens. Central to the argument is that an independent drachma would immediately be devalued, making Greek exports more competitive and at a stroke wiping out many, if not all, of the country's debts.

There is also a political dimension that is centre stage at the moment, following proposals for closer union and control from Brussels and, in Greece's case, by the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

Yet these economists ignore the challenges that beset a nation where very few people pay their taxes, where public-sector jobs are secured through family ties and where contracts for work, public or private, are rarely signed without someone in a position of power asking for a backhander.

Greek banks are at the centre of the problem, as in Italy and Spain, where bankers perpetuate all the worst corrupt practices.

Martin Sandbu, chief leader writer on economics at the Financial Times, recently chided the southern Europeans for not jumping at the chance to join a European banking union. He argued that the loss of control over a crucial pillar of the economy to a higher EU authority was worth it when set against the chance to end the insidious and corrupt relationship between bankers, politicians and the professional classes, which had so far proved impossible to break.

It may seem conspiratorial to argue that corruption is at the heart of the Greek malaise, but it is one of the main reasons Berlin is adamant Athens has had all the help it is going to get, without some evidence the cuts are going through. For German politicians, cuts to sacred state subsidies and increases in tax revenues are a crude indicator that corruption is being tackled, however tentatively.

Supporting the view that Greece is beyond helping itself, an in-depth study of how Greek banks, politicians and professional workers behave was published last week by two economists from the Booth school of business at the University of Chicago and a Greek academic based at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute.

Interestingly, their report, Tax Evasion Across Industries: Soft Credit Evidence From Greece, which documents the hidden, non-taxed economy, blames the current malaise not on dodgy taxi drivers or moonlighting refuse collectors, but on the professional classes.

They found that ¤28bn (£22.4bn) of tax was evaded in 2009 by self-employed people alone.

As GDP that year was ¤235bn and the total tax base was just ¤98bn, it is clear that this was a significant sum. At a tax rate of 40%, it amounted to almost half the country's budget deficit in 2008, and 31% in 2009.

The chief offenders are professionals in medicine, engineering, education, accounting, financial services and law. Among the self-employed documented in the report are accountants, dentists, lawyers, doctors, personal tutors and independent financial advisers.

The authors, Adair Morse and Margarita Tsoutsoura from the Booth school of business and Nikolaos Artavanis from Virginia Tech, were given unprecedented access to the records of one of the top 10 Greek banks. They found that, when professionals approached the bank for a loan or mortgage, their tax returns showed their debts almost exceeded their incomes ( debt payments ate up 82% of their incomes). For the beleaguered tax authority, this meant their income was too low to qualify for income tax.

On average, they found the true income of self-employed people to be 1.92 times their reported income. Under generally accepted loan criteria, home ownership figure than the UK (80% versus 68%).

customers would need to show that their debts, after their mortgage payments were taken into consideration, were less than 30% of their income.

Of course, several countries lost control of banking regulation in the runup to the financial crash, including the UK, Ireland and Spain. But it is noticeable that the two countries that have so far done the least about the corrupt relationship between banks and their customers – Greece and Spain – are the two countries in the worst trouble.

Unlike Ireland, which has exposed a wealth of corrupt practices, Spain continues to hide the extent of its bad loans, especially to property developers who are friends of the bank chiefs who sanctioned their loans.

To emphasise the global scale of the problem, the authors point out that World Bank studies show that 52% of corporations worldwide hide some of their income from the tax authorities, and 36% of European companies do so. Corruption is everywhere as companies and individuals seek to preserve their status, incomes and standard of living.

Brussels, while enforcing strict rules on Athens, has struggled to contain the rampant corruption that infects its own business and farming subsidies. With that in mind, it may seem a bit rich to lecture the Greeks, but an appreciation of paradox has never been the eurocracy's strong point.

The Greeks have begun to crack down on tax evasion. Only this weekend, raids on 11 people found tens of millions of euros' worth of undeclared property and assets in New York, London and various offshore tax havens.

The Greek finance ministry's financial crimes unit conducted the raids, and says it has many other groups in its sights.

However, broader attempts to crack down on the professions were blocked last year by the Greek parliament. MPs voted against a bill mandating tax audits on people who had incomes below a minimum threshold. The bill targeted 11 professions, including vets, architects, engineers, economists, doctors, lawyers and accountants.

The authors found, almost as an aside to their central examination of tax evasion, that the occupations represented in parliament "are very much those that evade tax, even beyond lawyers".

They said: "Half of non-lawyer parliamentarians are in the top three tax-evading industries, and nearly a super-majority in the top four evading industries."

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Op maandag 10 september 2012 00:07 schreef ohokok het volgende:
heb jij ook nog een mening over hoe en wat, papierversnipperaar? ik zie je alleen maar linkjes strooien.
ik lees het niet eens, duurt me te lang. waar gaat het over?