Category Archives: Kleptocracy

All Covid-19 prediction models biased and useless: BMJ

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The author of an appraisal of prediction models for Covid-19 diagnosis and prognosis published in the British Medical Journal on April 7, 2020 concludes:

“All 31 reviewed prediction models were found to have a high risk of bias, and evidence from independent external validation of these models is currently lacking. However, the urgency of diagnostic and prognostic models to assist in quick and efficient triage of patients in the covid-19 pandemic might encourage clinicians to implement prediction models without sufficient documentation and validation. Although we cannot let perfect be the enemy of good, earlier studies have shown that models were of limited use in the context of a pandemic,69 and they could even cause more harm than good.70 Therefore, we cannot recommend any model for use in practice at this point.“

So, a quarter of a billion people will starve, and at least as many will be pushed close to starvation; global food production and industry will be crippled; and the university “experts” who provided the intellectual heft for this monstrous project are now proved to be bogus propagandists of the science-industrial complex.

This time, we don’t need “show trials” ala 2008, when the small-fry “fried” while the mafia dons walked.

Instead, I suggest a targeted campaign against the major scientific mouthpieces for lock-down, starting with Neil Ferguson. At the very least, his OBE should be rescinded and his faculty position terminated.

FIRE THE FRAUD FERGUSON.

Scientist Behind Mass Lock-downs funded by Gates Foundation, CDC, NIH

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Update 2, May 7, 2020:

My original post was published on April 24, 2.34 AM.

I now see that Armstrong Economics spotted the Imperial College funding on the Gates Foundation website on April 9. I saw the same thing but on the Imperial College website.


On April 25, Business Insider picked up the Gates-Ferguson funding tie and buried that at the bottom of a long article lauding Ferguson’s work in saving tens of thousands of lives.


On April 30, Jon Rappaport, an investigative reporter/blogger references the BI report in an article (see update1) denouncing Ferguson in much the same terms .

Update 1, May 1, 2020:

Jon Rappaport now has a piece at his blog making the identical claim I make below: the fraud Ferguson has jiggered his models for the big vaccine payola for Gates and his fellow globalists.

ORIGINAL POST

Neil Ferguson, OBE, is the Imperial College epidemiologist whose computer forecast of half a million British deaths changed UK policy on Covid-19 from encouraging herd immunity to locking down the entire population. Aptly enough, the concept of a lock-down and the word itself are borrowed from prison life.

I suggest that lock-down at the very least is what Ferguson himself deserves, for prostituting science in the service of big business and instigating a genocidal public policy.

At Imperial, Ferguson heads the MRC Center for Global Disease Analysis, where research focusses on the most significant of the arboviruses – viruses transmitted by insects – the flaviviruses of dengue, yellow fever, and zika.

The MRC webpage states:

“Work across these three diseases shares a number of commonalities – most notably, our focus on elucidating the demographic and climatic drivers of transmission, characterising spatiotemporal hetergeneity in transmission intensity and understanding patterns of disease persistence. To achieve such a broad scale of activities, we collaborate with numerous public health agencies (e.g. WHO, CDC, GAVI) and fellow researchers around the world. Our research is funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the US National Institutes of Health and the MRC.“

Put succinctly, Ferguson’s work looks for how population and climate drive the transmission of disease. When the funding for his research depends on the Gates Foundation, which is committed to global population reduction and doomsday climate panic, the public is entitled to question its disinterestedness. As alarming is Ferguson’s extensive collaboration with WHO (currently headed by a non-physician and former Ethiopian minister with extensive ties to the Gates Foundation, the Buffett Foundation, and the Aspen Institute ), with the CDC (dominated by mammoth pharmaceutical and vaccine companies), and with GAVI (another Gates vaccine brainchild). These ties suggest even more that Dr. Ferguson is a captive of the vaccine industry and the Gates depopulation agenda.

At Voltaire Network, Thierry Meyssan, has summed up Ferguson’s history of failed mathematical modeling:

“Professor Ferguson is still the European reference for epidemic modelling.
- Yet it was he who, in 2001, convinced Prime Minister Tony Blair to have 6 million cattle slaughtered to stop the foot-and-mouth epidemic (a decision that cost 10 billion pounds and is now considered an aberration).
- In 2002, he calculated that mad cow disease would kill about 50,000 British people and another 150,000 when transmitted to sheep. There were actually 177.
- In 2005, he predicted that bird flu would kill 65,000 Britons. There were a total of 457.”

“Regardless, he became an adviser to the World Bank and many governments. It was he who sent a confidential note to French President Emmanuel Macron on March 12 announcing half a million deaths in France. In panic, the latter took the decision for generalized confinement that same evening. It was also Professor Ferguson who publicly announced on March 16 that, if nothing was done, there would be as many as 550,000 deaths in the United Kingdom and as many as 1.2 million in the United States, forcing the British government to review its policy.”

NOTES:

“The simulations driving the world’s response to COVID-19: How epidemiologists rushed to model the coronavirus pandemic,” David Adam, Nature, April 2, 2020

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01003-6

“Neil Ferguson, the liberal Lysenko,” Thierry Meyssan, Voltaire Network, April 20, 2020

https://www.voltairenet.org/article209749.html

Libertarian Republic On Steve Bannon’s Art Of The “New Deal”

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Libertarian Republic gets it right:

Taking Bannon at his own word, and in the context of 1930s, it sounds a lot like the rhetoric coming from Germany pre-World War II. His rhetoric matches the anger, scapegoating, and emotional ploys spoken in the early days of Adolf Hitler‘s rise.

While this may seem pejorative, or hyperbolic, let us look at how the Mises Institute, an Austrian Economic think tank, explains 1930 Germany’s economic situation.

In the 1930s, Hitler was widely viewed as just another protectionist central planner who recognized the supposed failure of the free market and the need for nationally guided economic development. Proto-Keynesian socialist economist Joan Robinson wrote that “Hitler found a cure against unemployment before Keynes was finished explaining it.”

What were those economic policies? He suspended the gold standard, embarked on huge public-works programs like autobahns, protected industry from foreign competition, expanded credit, instituted jobs programs, bullied the private sector on prices and production decisions, vastly expanded the military, enforced capital controls, instituted family planning, penalized smoking, brought about national healthcare and unemployment insurance, imposed education standards, and eventually ran huge deficits. The Nazi interventionist program was essential to the regime’s rejection of the market economy and its embrace of socialism in one country.

Now compare that to how Bannon and Trump have described their plans and vision for having won the White House.

  1. 1 Trillion Dollar Infrastructure matches the huge public works programs
  2. “The globalists gutted the American working class and created a middle class in Asia,”  along with Trumps promises to coerce business back into the US, matches protection of industry from foreign competition,
  3. “With negative interest rates throughout the world, it’s the greatest opportunity to rebuild everything,” added to Trumps call to continue borrowing, matches expanding credit and the continuance of large deficits
  4. “Rebuild everything. Shipyards, iron works, get them all jacked up,” matches the instituted jobs programs
  5. Trumps possible control of capital through protectionist trade.
  6. The comment by Bannon about being in power for the next “50 years” sounds awfully similar to the how Nazi’s described the Third Reich. “It is our will that this state shall endure for a thousand years. We are happy to know that the future is ours entirely!” – Triumph of Will (1935)

This not to say that Bannon or Trump should be compared to Nazis or that they have come close to committing the acts against humanity that occurred in that period of history. Rather it is a simple question which compares the rhetoric being used by the two administrations in their rise to power. After all, this perspective is a simple look back at history, so as to learn from it and utilize it to spot potential issues in the future. If we willfully ignore details, even if just as a safety measure, then we leave ourselves at risk of missing what could’ve been right under our nose. Famed philosopher George Santayana once said, “Those that fail to learn from history, are doomed to repeat it.”

The Sandy Foundation Of Tamil Politics

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From Scroll.in, a fascinating look into the sand mafia that rules Tamil Nadu (and many other Indian states) and its impact on politics and the environment there:

However, people in villages see this money [Lila: from the sale of sand from dried up river beds] circulating. A part of it, they say, goes to local party workers. A farmer from a village near Karur claimed that “about Rs 1,000 from each unit is shared amongst the local party workers: Rs 25 to the person in the village, Rs 150 to the taluka head, Rs 350 to the district members, and so on.” This is echoed by both researchers and politicians like K Kaliyan of the Communist Party of India (Marxist).

Abhijit Sen, a former member of the erstwhile Planning Commission, said India’s political parties “maintain their party cadres predominantly through the construction sector”. In Punjab, people close to the ruling Akali Dal control both sand mining and stone crushing. In West Bengal, syndicates control urban infrastructure projects. Another part of this money, said the researcher, goes into fighting elections. Be it for campaigning or for paying voters in cash.

These questions – about money flowing from sand mining to AIADMK’s cadre and being used in elections – were listed in the questionnaires sent to Jayalalithaa, Venkataramanan and Arumugasamy. This article will be updated when they respond.

For now, Sen’s observation triggers a fresh question. If a ruling party depends on the mining of a mineral resource to maintain itself, what is the fallout?

What it all means

Some years ago, farmers from 12 villages in Ettayapuram Taluk of Tuticorin district decided to stop sand mining. Among other things, they seized earthmovers and trucks. In response, said an article by R Seenivasan, a PhD Candidate with the University of Westminster, the farmers “were slapped with criminal charges and branded as ‘extremists’ who take ‘law into their hands’. Many farmers were sent to jail for days and charged for ‘unlawful assembly, rioting, obstructing government work and officers,’ under various penal sections of the Indian penal code.”

This is a common refrain. The police similarly slapped cases on the women of Kalathur, a village on the Palar, when they protested last year against sand mining. When this reporter met V Chandrasekhar, who has been agitating against sand mining in Villupuram and Pondicherry, it was shortly after Jawaharlal Nehru University student leader Kanhaiya Kumar was beaten up in the Patiala House complex. “That happens every day here. The police is an instrument of the state. No one would dare go to the police here,” said Chandrasekhar.

This pattern, of siding with the miners and not with the locals, shows up in poor supervision of sand mining. As the PUCL study found, sand was being mined till almost a 10 metre depth in the Palar. It also shows in the state government’s support for sand mining over, say, environmental concerns.

Responding to a petition filed in the Madras High Court by the Cauvery Neervala Athara Pathukappu Sangam, a non-profit in Erode, the state government argued that sand mining doesn’t need an environment clearance since quarrying operations were carried out by the PWD scientifically.

When the court insisted on an environmental impact assessment, a lawyer in the Madurai court who fought against sand mining, told Scroll on the condition of anonymity, the state government rushed through an environmental clearance in just three months.

Scroll asked Jayalalitha, Rama Mohana Rao, Venkataramanan and Arumugasamy for their comment on the charges that the state government and the ruling party have acted in a manner which benefits sand miners and not local communities. There was no response.

The combined fallout of all this has not been pretty. As these quarries scour their way along Tamil Nadu’s rivers, the state’s water crisis is worsening. Groundwater levels, for instance, are collapsing across the state. That said, the ravages of sand mining go beyond ecological damage. The state’s villages and politics have been damaged as well.”

Infosys Foundation Chair Joins Tirumala Temple Trust

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The chairman of the Infosys Foundation has joined the board of the largest and richest temple trust in India and the second-richest in the world.

From The Hindu:

The appointment of Infosys Foundation chairperson Sudha Narayana Murthy as a member of the Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams Trust Board is being seen as an initiative that will bolster the image of the board.

The nomination of Ms. Murthy, a prolific writer, philanthropist, and member of public health care initiatives of the Gates Foundation, meets the long-standing demand that only iconic personalities with a religious bent of mind be nominated to the board.”

The Hindu piece doesn’t tell you exactly who Mrs. Narayana Murthy is. She is the wife of the Infosys co-founder, and Infosys is one of the leading business consulting and outsourcing companies in India.

Narayana Murthy, often regarded as the father of Indian IT, figured prominently in Thomas Friedman’s “The World Is Flat” (which I have trounced on several occasions). Murthy, a Kannada Madhwa Brahmin, may be an entrepreneur but he is a self-proclaimed socialist.

He, like fellow-globalist Nandan Nilakeni, the other co-founder of Infosys,  is also an ardent promoter of the digitilization and e-surveillance of India.

Nilekani heads the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) which, along with the RBI, is the driving force between the imposition of the national biometric ID card, Aadhar. His former boss, Narayan Murthy, formerly headed the National Payments Corporation (NPC), the umbrella outfit that covers all retail payment systems like merchant cards, ATMs, etc.

Nilekani is a Konkani Brahmin and second-generation Fabian Socialist:

His father worked as a general manager of Mysore and Minerva Mills and subscribed to Fabian Socialist ideals that influenced Nilekani in his early years.”

The Hindu article also doesn’t mention the significance of the Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams (TTD).

They oversee the work of the second richest and most visited religious center in the world, taking in some 130 million rupees a month (about 13 crore rupees or nearly 2 million dollars). The trust earned 2600 crore rupees (26 billion dollars) last year.

The trust oversees not only the Tirumala temple in Andhra Pradesh, but Hindu temples all over the world. Besides this, it is involved in numberless charitable works and in the propagation and preservation of Hindu and Sanskrit classics.

Please note that enormous amounts of gold, silver, and other donations flow into the temple coffers regularly:

While gold alone is estimated to add up to one tonne a year in offerings, silver, diamond and other items also flow into the temple trust’s exchequer. “In the case of property deeds, due procedure is followed by the concerned department to transfer the title,” noted an official.”

and this:

The temple trust said in April that it had deposited 1,311 kg of gold with Punjab National Bank under India’s Gold Monetisation Scheme. The deposit apparently is under a three-year short-term programme that earns the trust an annual interest of 1.75 percent.

In a statement, the temple’s investment committee expressed satisfaction at the interest rates earned from its investment so far. Further, it sought a shorter investment time frame between one to three years for depositing its yearly turnout of gold. The temple trust may negotiate with banks that would offer higher interest rates.

The trust, which seeks gold, not cash, in interest on its gold deposits, has chosen the government’s monetisation scheme’s three year short-term programme primarily for that benefit. Evincing interest to plough in more gold as deposits, it has requested the Reserve Bank of India to extend the same for other gold monetisation programmes that range from medium to long terms.”

Sudha Narayana Murthy replaces mining baron Shekhar Reddy on the board. Reddy was arrested in December 2016, for allegedly laundering money.  A widely circulated picture showed him standing in front of the Tirupati temple with current chief minister O.P Paneerselvam.

 

 

CDC Plagiarizes Indian Scientist’s Litchi Diagnosis

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Yet more evidence of the extent of brazen IP theft from non-Western, especially developing Asian countries,  in elite Western institutions, this time involving Western and Indian-origin scientists at the Center for Disease Control in the US, deploying the resources of the Indian government to poach from Indian scientists:

The story began in 2013 when, faced with recurrent deaths of children due to a mysterious brain disease in litchi-harvesting belts of Muzaffarpur, the Bihar government and the health ministry of the central government turned to veteran virologist Dr T Jacob John. They could not have got a better expert: Dr John, since his MBBS way back in 1958, followed by a PhD in 1976, has a long and distinguished career in public health. In a way, he was the brain behind the polio vaccination campaign.

What could be the cause of deaths? The prime suspect was some yet-to-be-identified virus. The next suspect was the fruit itself, that is, some substance in it – it could be a toxin in litchi or something in the pesticide used. Other suspects were bats which were eating litchis and hence probably passing on some disease to children who ate the bat-eaten litchis. The common factor to all deaths was that the children were dying in the litchi-belt during the litchi harvesting season of May and June, recalls Dr John.

He camped at Muzaffarpur, met villagers and began his work. He ruled out the virus angle and was zeroing in on a chemical within litchi. “A similar disease was caused by another fruit called ackee that belongs to the same plant family as litchi. This disease was metabolic and was called hypoglycaemic encephalopathy, or ‘Jamaican vomiting sickness’. So I was able to rule out virus in the very beginning,” he says.

His hunch was that it was worth looking for a toxin within the fruit. He suggested this in a report in May 2014 – in the leading journal of its kind in India, Current Science, published by the Current Science Association in collaboration with the Indian Academy of Sciences. He and his co-researcher, Mukul Das, wrote:
“In animal experiments, MCPA (the hypoglycin found in ackee) and MCPG (the hypoglycin in litchi) have been shown to induce encephalopathy and hypoglycaemia. Encephalopathy is explained by the mitochondrial inhibition of fatty acid-oxidation and accumulation of toxic metabolites. Our hypothesis is that the Muzaffarpur AES is caused by MCPG in lychee. However, we do not know if it is present only in the seed or also in the edible fruit flesh and if unripe lychee has more MCPG than ripe fruits.”
Their conclusion: “…tightly  restricted seasonality and geographic distribution as well as sparing of children below 2 years support the diagnosis of acute non-infectious encephalopathy as against viral encephalitis.”

In September 2014, doctors John, Das and Arun Shah published further findings on the toxin hypothesis in the same journal.
They, however, were in for a shock when they found the same findings reproduced in an American journal a few months later – without any credit, acknowledgement or reference to their research.

Akash Srivastava, who is with the National Centre for Disease Control of the health ministry, along with a team of researchers published this set of findings in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR), a journal published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) of the US government. The March 2015 report arrived at the same conclusion, that the brain disease among children in Muzaffarpur was not caused by a virus but by some toxin within litchi seeds or fruit, and the condition was hence not a viral disease but a metabolic disorder called hypoglycaemic encephalopathy.

Dr John and his co-authors took up the matter in a letter published in Current Science in September 2015. It asked: “Publishing on hypoglycemic encephalopathy, borrowing information without giving credit: Is Current Science invisible?”

They noted, “Annual seasonal outbreaks of what was popularly called acute encephalitis syndrome in Muzaffarpur, Bihar were clinically diagnosed in 2013 by us as non-infectious, toxic, hypoglycemic encephalopathy… The toxin was pinpointed as methylenecyclopropylglycine (MCPG). Thus, our first publication in May 2014 in Current Science was a breakthrough after many groups of investigators had failed for many years to diagnose the disease or provide any plausible causative associations.

“In 2014, we confirmed with clinical evidences that the disease is indeed hypoglycemic encephalopathy and the patients could be saved with prompt correction of hypoglycemia. These results were published, again in Current Science, in August 2014.” But in January 2015, MMWR came out with a report by a large group of investigators, stating that the disease is acute hypoglycemic encephalopathy with putative association with litchi, as if they were the first to arrive at such a conclusion.”

“Our 2013 investigations which appeared in May 2014 in Current Science were a watershed. But the studies of Shrivastava et al published in January 2015 in MMWR have not cited our earlier contributions – one reason could be that Current Science is invisible in the usual biomedical literature surveys. However, when we conducted a simple literature search through a popular search engine, we found references to both our papers.”

When Governance Now contacted  MMWR, its executive editor Charlotte Kent replied promptly on December 2 saying that matter would be investigated. “We received your two emails from today about the MMWR report, “Outbreaks of Unexplained Neurologic Illness – Muzaffapur, India, 2013-14”. We are planning on investigating the concern you raised,” she said in an email. MMWR has not sent any further information on the matter since then. Srivastava, meanwhile, did not reply to the emailed queries.

Several questions are raised by this incident, especially since the parallel research published by CDC was also done with help of Indian government bodies.

Dr John also rues the fact that this episode pits Indian scientists against each other. He says that ultimately it proves that Indians can do their research and reach the truth without external help. However, he adds that distortion of truth does leave a bitter taste in the mouth and is just not done in science.

An ethical scientist would not claim credit for someone else’s work, says the veteran virologist.“

 

No Cash Transactions Above 3 Lakhs ($4447)

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Finance Minister Arun Jaitley’s 2017 budget proposes a ban on any cash transaction in a day over 3 lakhs rupees (about $4446.75).

This is far worse than any restriction in the US, where cash transactions above $10,000 are not banned, but simply reported by the bank to the IRS.

Like demonetization, the new ban is an unnecessarily coercive, intrusive, and punitive move, with entirely foreseeable and counterproductive results.

By completely banning cash transactions above 3 lakhs, the government is actually unraveling the last stitch of credibility holding its efforts together.

Large cash transactions are not going to disappear. All that will happen is that they will not pass through banks at all.

Instead, a new parallel economy will spring up.

Large purchases have hitherto involved a percentage of the price being reported and taxed (the white part) and the rest being paid under the table (the black part).

Now you can be assured that come April 1 there will be no “white” part at all.

It will be all black.

Just as the printing of new currency notes was the pretext whereby fake notes, excess currency, and chaos have been slyly injected into the system leaving no one sure of just how much cash is in circulation at all, so too the new tax will create a new layer of impenetrable fog under cover of which the enemies of India’s aam admi will operate with impunity.

Those enemies, let us be clear, operate not just from terrorist outposts in Bangladesh or Pakistan, but from the seat of the international cabal’s financial shock-and-awe machinery in India: that is, from the RBI, the finance ministry, and the Prime Minister’s Office.

New Notes: 50% Security Features Already Counterfeited

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More evidence from the Hindu that Demonetization was a either one of the most colossal blunders of modern Indian history or a sophisticated attack on the Indian economy:

The Border Security Force (BSF) and the National Investigation Agency (NIA) intercepted four consignments of  2000 notes between December 2016 and January this year from areas near Malda district.

With the quality of the fakes improving over time, the seizure has set alarm bells ringing for intelligence agencies and security forces.

“The notes have copied the geometric patterns and the colour scheme both on obverse and the reverse side including watermark, and the exclusive number pattern of the 2000 currency. Unlike samples seized elsewhere which were scanned or colour photocopies, these have been printed using sophisticated dyes,” a senior security officer said.

More than half of the 17 RBI-listed security features have been replicated.”

The notes were seized from Mohammad Ashraful and Ripon Sheikh from Malda district.

Please note that Malda district is in West Bengal. It shares a 223 km in total international border with Bangladesh and is a hub of the fake currency racket.

This 12 sq-km triangle with 18 villages, 40km from Malda town, have turned into the entry point of 40% fake Indian notes being pumped into the country through the porous border.

Malda, particularly the three Kaliachak blocks, have always been known as the smuggling point for fake currencies, but the situation has taken a turn for the worse in the past five years. According to a recent NIA report, 80% fake currencies are sneaked into the country through the 172-km porous border along Malda district, and 55-60% of the consignments from Bangladesh are circulated from the villages in 12 sq-km triangle.”

While demonetization had a temporary effect on Malda’s flourishing fake currency business,  it was expected that the trade would resume in the space of 1-3 months.

“We are looking at a time frame of one month to three months before we make the first seizure of a fresh consignment of fake Indian currency, this time most likely Rs 100 notes,” said a senior BSF officer who did not want to be identified.”

But it’s not the 100, but the  new 2000, that has had half the security features successfully faked. Which leads one to question the whole rationale of demo itself, because a large bill of that kind would be much more attractive to counterfeiters in the first place.

Meanwhile the network of couriers dispersing the notes continues:

“The movement is done in chains,” explained a security official who did not want to be identified. “From the point of origin of the consignment in Bangladesh to the destination in Kaliachawk, there would be no less than 20 to 25 couriers in each chain. Each person in the chain normally covers a distance of 100 meters to hand over the consignment to the next one in the chain. It is an intricate network and very difficult to trap and dismantle.”

 

 

US Now World’s Biggest Tax Haven

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Bloomberg:

“The U.S. failure to sign onto the OECD information-sharing standard is “proving to be a strong driver of growth for our business,” wrote Bolton’s chief executive officer, Ray Grenier, in a marketing e-mail to bankers. His firm is seeing a spike in accounts moved out of European banks—“Switzerland in particular”—and into the U.S. The new OECD standard “was the beginning of the exodus,” he said in an interview.

The U.S. Treasury is proposing standards similar to the OECD’s for foreign-held accounts in the U.S. But similar proposals in the past have stalled in the face of opposition from the Republican-controlled Congress and the banking industry.

At issue is not just non-U.S. citizens skirting their home countries’ taxes. Treasury also is concerned that massive inflows of capital into secret accounts could become a new channel for criminal money laundering. At least $1.6 trillion in illicit funds are laundered through the global financial system each year, according to a United Nations estimate.

Offering secrecy to clients is not against the law, but U.S. firms are not permitted to knowingly help overseas customers evade foreign taxes, said Scott Michel, a criminal tax defense attorney at Washington, D.C.-based Caplin & Drysdale who has represented Swiss banks and foreign account holders.

“To the extent non-U.S. persons are encouraged to come to the U.S. for what may be our own ‘tax haven’ characteristics, the U.S. government would likely take a dim view of any marketing suggesting that evading home country tax is a legal objective,” he said.

Rothschild says it takes “significant care” to ensure account holders’ assets are fully declared. The bank “adheres to the legal, regulatory, and tax rules wherever we operate,” said Rees, the Rothschild spokeswoman.

Penney, who oversees the Reno business, is a longtime Rothschild lawyer who worked his way up from the firm’s trust operations in the tiny British isle of Guernsey. Penney, 56, is now a managing director based in London for Rothschild Wealth Management & Trust, which handles about $23 billion for 7,000 clients from offices including Milan, Zurich, and Hong Kong. A few years ago he was voted “Trustee of the Year” by an elite group of U.K. wealth advisers.

In his September San Francisco talk, called “Using U.S. Trusts in International Planning: 10 Amazing Feats to Impress Clients and Colleagues,” Penney laid out legal ways to avoid both U.S. taxes and disclosures to clients’ home countries.

In a section originally titled “U.S. Trusts to Preserve Privacy,” he included the hypothetical example of an Internet investor named “Wang, a Hong Kong resident,” originally from the People’s Republic of China, concerned that information about his wealth could be shared with Chinese authorities.

Putting his assets into a Nevada LLC, in turn owned by a Nevada trust, would generate no U.S. tax returns, Penney wrote. Any forms the IRS would receive would result in “no meaningful information to exchange under” agreements between Hong Kong and the U.S., according to Penney’s PowerPoint presentation reviewed by Bloomberg.

Penney offered a disclaimer: At least one government, the U.K., intends to make it a criminal offense for any U.K. firm to facilitate tax evasion.

Rothschild said the PowerPoint was subsequently revised before Penney delivered his presentation. The firm provided what it said was the final version of the talk, which this time excluded several potentially controversial passages. Among them: the U.S. being the “biggest tax haven in the world,” the U.S.’s low appetite for enforcing other countries’ tax laws, and two references to “privacy” offered by the U.S.

“The presentation was drafted in response to a request by the organizers to be controversial and create a lively debate among the experienced, professional audience,” Rees said. “On reviewing the initial draft, these lines were not deemed to represent either Rothschild’s or Mr. Penney’s view. They were therefore removed.”

Sinister Agenda Behind DeMo

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Bill Engdahl rehashes the agenda behind DeMo, in a good piece, that like all Western  analysis, avoids mentioning the scores of people in India who have in real time deconstructed this operation as it occurred, instead, attributing it to investigation by a German economist.

Whether that is proof of disinformation or controlled opposition I do not know. But I always suspect people who publish misleading sources.

Nonetheless, the article is a good summing up of the agenda behind DeMo, while omitting the British angle and pinning the blame on “Washington” in the usual way of left-wing sites.

[Global Research based in Canada publishes useful pieces, slanted heavily toward Marxist or leftist analysis, thus avoiding the conspiracy tag.]

The Modi cash-less India operation is a project of the US National Security Council, US State Department and Office of the President administered through its US Agency for International Development (USAID). Little surprise, then, that the US State Department spokesman, Mark Toner in a December 1, 2016 press briefing praised the Modi demonetization move stating, “…this was, we believe, an important and necessary step to crack down on illegal actions…a necessary one to address the corruption.”

Keep in mind that USAID today has little to do with aiding poorer countries. By law it must follow the foreign policy agenda of the President’s National Security Council and State Department. It’s widely known as a conduit for CIA money to execute their dirty agendas abroad in places such as Georgia. Notably, the present head of the USAID, Gayle Smith, came to head USAID from her post as Senior Director at the US National Security Council.

German economist and blogger, Norbert Haering, in an extensive, well-documented investigation into the background of the bizarre Modi move to a cash-less India, found not only USAID as the key financial source of the project. He also uncovered a snake-pit of organizational vipers being funded by USAID to design and implement the India shock therapy.

USAID negotiated a co-operation with the Modi Indian Ministry of Finance. In October, 2016 in a press release USAID announced it had created and funded something it named Project Catalyst. The title of their report was, “Catalyst: Inclusive Cashless Payment Partnership.” Its stated goal it said was to bring about a “quantum leap” in cashless payment in India.

They certainly did that. Maybe two quantum leaps and some.

If we dig a bit deeper we find that in January, 2016, USAID presented the Indian Finance Ministry a report titled, Beyond Cash: Why India loves cash and why that matters for financial inclusion. Financial “inclusion” for them means getting all Indians into the digital banking system where their every payment can be electronically tracked and given to the tax authorities or to whomever the government sees fit.

Astonishingly, the report, prepared for USAID by something called the Global Innovation Exchange, admitted that “97% of retail transactions in India are conducted in cash or check; Few consumers use digital payments. Only 11% used debit cards for payments last year. Only 6% of Indian merchants accept digital payments…Only 29 percent of bank accounts in India have been used in the last three months.” The US and Indian governments knew very well what shock they were detonating in India.

The Global Innovation Exchange includes such dubious member organizations as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, a major donor to the Modi war on cash initiative of USAID. It also includes USAID itself, several UN agencies including UNICEF, UNDP, UNHCR. And it includes the US Department of Commerce and a spooky Maclean, Virginia military contractor called MITRE Corporation whose chairman is former CIA Director, James Rodney Schlesinger, a close associate of Henry Kissinger.

The USAID Project Catalyst in partnership with the Indian Finance Ministry was done, according to the USAID press statement, with a sinister-sounding organization called CashlessCatalyst.org. Among the 35 members of CashlessCatalyst.org are USAID, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, VISA, MasterCard, Omidyar Network of eBay billionaire founder Pierre Omidyar, the World Economic Forum-center of the globalization annual Alpine meetings.

War on Cash

However, a most interesting member of the USAID Project Catalyst together with the Indian Ministry of Finance is something called Better Than Cash Alliance. In point of fact the US-government-finance Project Catalyst grew out of a longer cooperation between USAID, the Washington-based Better Than Cash Alliance and the Indian Ministry of Finance. It appers to be the core public driver pushing the agenda of the global “war on cash.”

India and the reckless (or corrupt) Modi government implementing the USAID-Better Than Cash Alliance agenda is clearly serving as a guinea pig in a mass social experiment about how to push the cash war in other countries. The Better Than Cash Alliance is described by the UNCDF, which is its Secretariat, as “a US $38 million global alliance of governments, private sector and development organizations committed to accelerating the shift from cash to electronic payments.”

The Better Than Cash Alliance website announces that the alliance, created in 2012, is a “partnership of governments, companies, and international organizations that accelerates the transition from cash to digital payments in order to reduce poverty and drive inclusive growth.” It’s housed at the UN Capital Development Fund (UNCDF) in New York whose major donors, in turn, surprise, surprise, are the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and MasterCard Foundation. Among the Better Than Cash Alliance’s 50 members are, in addition to the Gates Foundation, Citi Foundation (Citigroup), Ford Foundation, MasterCard, Omidyar Network, United States Agency for International Development, and Visa Inc.

Recently the European Central Bank, which has held negative interest rates for more than a year, allegedly to stimulate growth in the Eurozone amid the long-duration banking and economic crisis of almost nine years, announced that it will stop printing the €500 note. They claim it’s connected with money laundering and terror financing, though it ominously echoes the Modi India war on cash. Former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, whose shady role in the 1990’s rape of Russia through his Harvard cronies has been documented elsewhere, is calling for eliminating the US $100 bill. These are first steps to future bolder moves to the desired Cash-less society of Gates, Citigroup, Visa et al.

US Dual Standard: Follow the money…

The move to a purely digital money system would be Big Brother on steroids. It would allow the relevant governments to monitor our every money move with a digital trail, to confiscate deposits in what now are legal bank “bail-ins” as was done in Cyprus in 2013. If central banks move interest rates into negative, something the Bank of Japan and ECB in Frankfurt are already doing, citizens have no choice than to spend the bank money or lose. It is hailed as a way to end tax avoidance but it is far, far more sinister.

As Norbert Haering notes, “the status of the dollar as the world’s currency of reference and the dominance of US companies in international finance provide the US government with tremendous power over all participants in the formal non-cash financial system. It can make everybody conform to American law rather than to their local or international rules.” He adds, referring to the recent US Government demand that Germany’s largest bank, Deutsche Bank pay an astonishing and unprecedented $14 billion fine, “Every internationally active bank can be blackmailed by the US government into following their orders, since revoking their license to do business in the US or in dollar basically amounts to shutting them down.”

We should add to this “benevolent concern” of the US Government to stimulate a War on Cash in India and elsewhere the fact that while Washington has been the most aggressive demanding that banks in other countries enact measures for full disclosure of details of Swiss or Panama or other “offshore” secret account holders or US nationals holding money in foreign banks, the USA itself has scrupulously avoided demanding the same of its domestic banks. The result, as Bloomberg noted following the suspiciously-timed Panama Papers offshore “leaks” of May, 2016, is that the United States is rapidly becoming the world’s leading tax and secrecy haven for rich foreigners.

Perversely enough, in 2010 the US passed a law, the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, or FACTA, that requires financial firms to disclose foreign accounts held by US citizens and report them to the US IRS tax office or the foreign banks face steep penalties. The EU signed on to the intrusive FACTA despite strong resistance. Then, using FACTA as the model, the Paris-based OECD drafted an even tougher version of FACTA in 2014 to allegedly go after tax avoiders. To date 97 countries have agreed to the tough OECD bank disclosure rules. Very few have refused. The refusers include Bahrain, Nauru, Vanuatu—and…the United States.

World’s Biggest Tax Haven

You don’t have to be a rocket scientist, a financial wizard or a Meyer Lansky to see a pattern. Washington forces disclosure of secret bank accounts of its citizens or companies abroad, while at the same time lifting control or disclosure inside the United States of private banking accounts. No surprise that such experienced private bankers as London’s Rothschild & Co. have opened offices in Reno Nevada a stone’s throw from Harrah’s and other casinos, and according to Bloomberg, is doing a booming business moving the fortunes of wealthy foreign clients out of offshore havens such as Bermuda, or Switzerland which are subject to the new OECD international disclosure requirements, into Rothschild-run trusts in Nevada, which are exempt from those disclosure rules.

Rothschild & Co. Director, Andrew Penney noted that as a result, the United States today, “is effectively the biggest tax haven in the world.” Today Nevada, Meyer Lansky’s money laundering project of the 1930’s with established legalized gambling, is becoming the “new Switzerland.” Wyoming and South Dakota are close on the heels.

One area where America’s institutions are still world class is in devising complex instruments of financial control, asset theft and cyber warfare. The US War on Cash, combined with the US Treasury and IRS war on offshore banking is their latest model. As Washington’s War on Terror had a sinister, hidden agenda, so too does Washington’s War on Cash. It’s something to be avoided at all costs if we human beings are to retain any vestige of sovereignty or autonomy. It will be interesting to see how vigorously Casino mogul Trump moves to close the US tax haven status. What do you bet he doesn’t?