INFORM's Secret Life series is truly the gift that keeps on giving. Every week, more people watch our short, lively films and learn how important making the RIGHT choices in their daily lives is to protecting our planet.
Take plastic bags: here in New York City, we are offered them several times a day. We accept them without a thought, carry them home, throw them in the trash and forget about them. Then what happens?
Well, many of the 100,000,000 plastic bags used annually in the United States end up in places they shouldn't be — as this picture, taken in Brooklyn, illustrates.
Our next SLife video, The Secret Life of Plastic Bags, will give the scope of the problem and show viewers what they can do to be part of the solution.
We know that 267 species of marine life are threatened by the massive amount of plastic in our oceans. Together, let's leverage the power of media to help them. If they could thank you, they surely would.
Thanks from the INFORM team for your support, and best wishes for 2012!
The Obama administration’s counterterrorism accomplishments are most apparent in what it has been able to dismantle, including CIA prisons and entire tiers of al-Qaeda’s leadership. But what the administration has assembled, hidden from public view, may be equally consequential.
In the space of three years, the administration has built an extensive apparatus for using drones to carry out targeted killings of suspected terrorists and stealth surveillance of other adversaries. The apparatus involves dozens of secret facilities, including two operational hubs on the East Coast, virtual Air Force cockpits in the Southwest and clandestine bases in at least six countries on two continents.
Europe: Updates. In an interview with a French daily on 25 December, International Monetary Fund (IMF) Managing Director Christine Lagarde stressed that Europe's financial crisis is turning into “a crisis of confidence in public debt and the solidity of the financial system.
Greece: According to an IMF source involved in discussions with Greece, the situation in Athens is “deteriorating” and “a further 10-15 billion euros ($13.1-19.6 billion) still needs to be found.” Banks may be asked to agree to write off 65 % instead of 50% of Greece's debt.
France: The French National Institute for Statistics and Economic Studies (INSEE) said on 26 December that there were 29,000 new job seekers “without any occupation” in November, up 1.1% over October. The year-on-year increase reached 5.2%. In total, 2,844,800 people did not have any occupation, the highest such figure since November 1999.
An economist at the French Observatory of Economic Conditions speculated that France's unemployment rate — which currently stands at 9.3% — will reach 10.7% by the end of 2012, and predicted that Paris will not succeed in bringing the deficit down to 3% of GDP by 2013.
Spain: At a news conference on 26 December, Spanish Economy Minister Luis De Guindos said that the Spanish economy had suffered a “relapse” and would record negative growth in the fourth quarter of 2011. De Guindos warned that “the next two months are not going to be easy, neither from a growth nor a jobs point of view.”
Comment: According to the Financial Times and multiple economists the fate of the euro depends on what happens in Italy. This week Italy intends to auction bonds worth Euros 20 billion. The market reaction to the auction will be an important indicator of whether the central bankers have found a way to stabilize the financial crisis, or have just made it worse.
All analysts of European economics predict a recession in 2012. They differ only about how severe it will be. In an integrated global economy, the ripple effects from Europe will drag the US and the Chinese economies, among all others.
Phi Beta Iota: Christine Lagarde, perhaps because she is a woman with a smaller ego and larger intuition than most men, appears to be the first Epoch A leader to “get” that we are all calling into question the very existence of the Western financial system that is rooted in fraud, waste, and abuse. When she begins to point to Iceland as an example, and to demand that Western countries arrest and try Goldman Sachs, Morgan, Citi-Bank, Bank of America, and other officials for high crimes against the public, the healing can begin. Until then, the West is avoiding the fundamentals.
Whenever I watch the Republican presidential debates, my mind is drawn to that important children’s book, The Emperor’s New Clothes. The six sock-puppets who have thus far managed to survive the musical-chairs comedy ballet wow Mr. and Mrs. Boobus with their visions of a violent, intrusive, policed, and war-loving America that equals, if not exceeds, what Barack Obama has been able to generate. It was but four years ago that John McCain choreographed his campaign around the lyrics “bomb, bomb, bomb Iran.” That so few people were repulsed by such psychopathic utterances is but one of many symptoms of a society in moral, spiritual, and intellectual collapse. The domestic police-state so passively accepted by most Americans – and insisted upon by the voices of the political establishment – reminds me of the comment made by the Prince of Wales in the 1934 film, The Scarlet Pimpernel: “if a country goes mad, it has the right to commit every horror within its own walls.”
I become exasperated reading or listening to chuckleheaded people who are unable – or unwilling – to distinguish the peaceful and voluntary nature of a free market, from the violent and coercive character of the corporate-state system that long ago took over our economic lives. Murray Rothbard’s words come to mind, wherein he observed that it was no great wrong to not understand economics, but that one ignorant of the subject ought not be offering advice on such matters. I would no more go to a lawyer, or an orthodontist, or Lew Rockwell, to have brain surgery performed on me, than would I take seriously the prescriptions offered by economic ignoramuses on how to “grow” an economy (an idea as absurd as that of misguided, controlling parents who believe it is their role to “grow” their children).
An Act To Criminalize Chartered, Incorporated Business Entities
a work-in-progress
Richard L. Grossman
West Hurley, NY
October 2011
As of 12:01 a.m. on July 4, 2012, no incorporated business shall exist or operate within the United States and its territories, or within any State or municipality.
As of 12:01 a.m. on July 4, 2012, all existing business corporation charters granted by the United States, and by all States, shall be null and void.
Neither the United States nor any State shall issue new charters for incorporated businesses. Any chartered, incorporated business entity — domestic, foreign, alien — existing and operating after the above date shall be deemed a violent, criminal, and terrorist conspiracy. Its directors and executive officers must be charged with
ecocide, criminal conspiracy and crimes against humanity.
No directors or executive officers of unchartered, unincorporated business entities which may succeed outlawed
chartered, incorporated business entities shall be empowered, enabled or protected
a) by laws, constitutional language or doctrine, jurisprudential precedent, custom, habit, or police power of the 50 States or of the United States which had previously defined, privileged and empowered chartered, incorporated businesses;
b) by laws, constitutional language or doctrine, jurisprudential precedent, custom, habit, or police power of the 50 States or of the United States which had previously bestowed illegitimate legal authority upon chartered, incorporated businesses;
c) by laws, constitutional language or doctrine, jurisprudential precedent, custom, habit, or police power of the 50 States or of the United States which had previously enabled directors and executive officers of chartered, incorporated entities to deny employees standing before the law and fundamental Constitutional authority;
d) by laws, constitutional language or doctrine, jurisprudential precedent, custom, habit, or police power of the 50 States or of the United States which had previously denied people sovereign authority to define and govern our work and workplaces, our communities, our municipalities, our States, our Nation;
e) by laws, constitutional language or doctrine, jurisprudential precedent, custom, habit, or police power of the 50 States or of the United States which had previously denied people of this land our sovereign authority to define elections, to define legislative processes, to interpret laws;
f) by laws, constitutional language or doctrine, jurisprudential precedent, custom, habit, or police power of the 50 States or of the United States which had decreed the private ordering of our economy; that is, which constitutionalized corporate directors’ authority to make decisions on investment, technology, production,
destruction, and the nature – organization of human labor.
As of 12:01 a.m. July 4, 2012, owners of stock in previously incorporated business entities, and entity directors and executive officers, shall forever be liable for all debts, liabilities, assaults, denials, harms, invasions and usurpations committed by any and all successor business entities. The courts of all 50 States and of the
United States shall not be open to stockholders or directors or officers or agents of formerly-incorporated chartered business entities for any claims whatsoever.
Municipal, State and United States officials (elected and appointed) who fail to implement and sustain the prohibition — and criminalization — of chartered, incorporated business entities after 12:01 a.m., July 4, 2012, shall promptly be indicted and speedily tried for the crime of villainous usurpation — perfidious, felonious,
illegitimate rule exceeding their proper authority — as well as for the crime of dereliction of duty.
Conviction for villainous usurpation or dereliction of duty shall result in immediate removal from public office, forfeiture of all accumulated and future pensions and benefits, plus extreme public
obloquy…for starters. ##
NOTES:
1. As the 19th Century began, constitutions, laws and customs in the new United States denied the overwhelming majority of humans standing and equality before the law, along with authority to vote.
II. As the 19th Century ended, legislative laws, judge-made laws, propaganda, armed might and persistent violence by the corporate class had transformed the United States from a minority-ruled Slave Nation into a minority-ruled Corporate Nation. This despite valiant mass resistance and magnificent people’s struggles. The emerging Corporate State — like the previous Slave State — was impressively constitutionalized.
III. In a Corporate State, law, culture, contrived celebration and tradition illegitimately clothe directors and executive officers of chartered, incorporated businesses in governing authority. This is usurpation. A Corporate State nurtures, enables and expedites such illegitimate governing authority by violence enforced by courts, jails,
police and military force, and by historians. Less-overtly ferocious institutions — forprofit and nonprofit — routinely reinforce that reality.
IV. In a Corporate State, law, culture and tradition enable corporate directors and executive officers to deny true self-governing authority to majorities of sovereign people, despite people assembling over and over and over again to petition governments in village squares and marbled halls.
V. Like kings and tyrants before them, corporate directors and their operatives wield the law of the land, constitutions, elections, lawmaking, jurisprudence, education and “legal” violence to rule the many. They lord over all species, rivers, oceans, mountains, Earth materials, biological and natural systems.
VI. Elected and appointed officials in villages, towns, counties, cities and states and the United States administer this Corporate State on behalf of the nation’s minuscule corporate class. They do not have our consent.
VII. Neither do they represent the majority of life that is non-human — flying people, standing people, crawling people, flowing people, creeping people. They do not represent Earth’s biological or natural systems. By aiding, abetting and enabling corporate directors and executives, public officials are complicit in denial of Earth’s living
realities. Like corporate directors and executive officers, these government officials have been acting beyond their legitimate authority. They are usurpers.
VIII. Corporate directors and executives, in consort with public officials, have long been denying sovereign people access to justice; access to commensurate legal, electoral, and judicial remedies. They have long been denying people’s sovereign authority to govern our communities, states and nation.
IX. Generation after generation, this tiny minority has trained the rest of us not to see, not to think, not to act commensurate with Earth’s — and our — realities. This Act To Criminalize Chartered, Incorporated Business Entities is offered as a step toward changing how we see, think, organize.
Two headlines. Similar stories. The first from Switzerland:
US OFFERS SWISS BANKS A DEAL
The United States authorities have offered to lift the threat of legal action against 11 Swiss banks in exchange for information, a Swiss paper reported on Sunday.
This is part of a very long story. The US Justice Department has been doing everything it can to get the names of US citizens who have Swiss bank accounts. The DOJ damn near busted UBS over this a few years back. Now they are going after the other Swiss banks. The lawyers at the DOJ don’t kid around:
“Give us the names or we’ll sue the shit out of you”.
This second story ratchets things up a bit and brings it home:(Link)
FEDERAL JUDGE GREEN LIGHTS IRS SEARCH FOR CALIFORNIA GIFT TAX CHEATS
A federal district court judge has given the Internal Revenue Service permission to serve a “John Doe” summons on the California State Board of Equalization demanding the names of residents who transferred property to their children or grandchildren for little or no money, from 2005 to 2010.
The IRS has used John Doe summons to seek lists of American taxpayers unreported offshore accounts at Swiss Bank UBS and at HSBC’s bank in India.
Phi Beta Iota: While it makes sense for the IRS and DOJ to go after tax cheats, what does not make sense is the government's selling us all out to allow speculators to destroy the economy and pay no taxes at all. What these two stories really tell us is that the Obama Administration is continuing to protect the criminals of high finance and their Congressional partners in crime, while seeking its revenue from the “little people.”
Two headlines. Similar stories. The first from 