Wednesday, February 12, 2020

The Looming Tax War: THIS TOWN AIN'T BIG ENOUGH FOR BOTH OF US!!! ...



Receiving a Freudian bank slip


While earthquake watchers head for the hills.



Up to 85 per cent of bikies apprehended for crime before turning 33


Outlaw motorcycle gangs are "one of the most high-profile manifestations of organised crime," with new data showing gang members were more than twice as likely to commit crime as non-members in the community.

Via Tyler Cowen: Dietrich Vollrath, Fully Grown: Why a Stagnant Economy is a Sign of Success is now out, my previous review is at that link, an excellent book on economic growth and it will make my best of the year list.

 Karl Marx’s gravesite requires 24 hour surveillance to protect it from the people.


IT’S MORE DANGEROUS THAN WE THINK:  Surviving Our Own Secrets in a Complex World Full of Danger.
AND MORE COMPLEX: Totalitarianism and Ignorance.

Foreign Affairs Cover 3While the trade war between China and the United States has hogged headlines and driven market anxieties over the past year, an equally large threat to the global economy has gotten little attention: a looming tax war. Since the early twentieth century, countries have largely agreed on how to tax income earned by multinational corporations that conduct business across borders. But this long-standing regime is coming apart, imperiling the broader international economic order.
The digital age, however, has generated new concerns for these long-established norms. The Internet and advances in telecommunications have smoothed the way for businesses to participate meaningfully in the economic lives of countries where they have no physical presence—and to do so without paying significant income taxes in those countries. European governments, especially the French government, have attempted to impose digital services taxes on giant technology firms. Their efforts have rankled the United States, which views such new taxes as unfairly singling out U.S. companies.

More On The Tax Whistleblower's Complaint Against The Mormon Church's $100 Billion Investment Fund

WSJFor more than half a century, the Mormon Church quietly built one of the world’s largest investment funds. Almost no one outside the church knew about it.
Some of that mystery evaporated late last year when a former employee revealed in a whistleblower complaint with the Internal Revenue Service that the fund, called Ensign Peak Advisors, had stockpiled $100 billion. The whistleblower also alleged that the church had improperly used some Ensign Peak funds. Officials of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, colloquially known as the Mormon Church, denied those claims.
They also declined to comment on how much money their investment fund controls. “We’ve tried to be somewhat anonymous,” Roger Clarke, the head of Ensign Peak, said from the firm’s fourth-floor office, above a Salt Lake City food court. Ensign Peak doesn’t appear in that building’s directory.
Interviews with more than a dozen former employees and business partners provide a deeper look inside an organization that ballooned from a shoestring operation in the 1990s into a behemoth rivaling Wall Street’s largest firms.

People have to be vigilant too. She’ll be right mate isn’t an antidote. Demanding good governance is the most powerful act of resistance there is.

Australian democracy is at risk. If we want to save it, we must all play a part

The creation and adoption of surveillance  systems based on Artificial Intelligence often feels like it’s widely outpacing the speed at which cities and countries can legislate any kind of control. So it’s always an encouraging sign when new well considered decisions are rendered and put the public good and human rights first. 
The current system, established through decades of practice and convention, provides a basis for determining which country can tax income earned in one jurisdiction by a business that resides in another. The regime rests on the norms set in domestic tax laws as well as a patchwork of almost 4,000 bilateral treaties. For decades, the system was stable and functional enough that no one other than international tax lawyers even talked about it.

One such decision is the Dutch courts’ ruling that a welfare surveillance system violates human rights.

A Dutch court has ordered the immediate halt of an automated surveillance system for detecting welfare fraud because it violates human rights … The case was seen as an important legal challenge to the controversial but growing use by governments around the world of artificial intelligence (AI) and risk modelling in administering welfare benefits and other core services. 

It’s especially encouraging since disfranchised and minority populations are usually the ones facing the brunt of surveillance, with little recourse for corrections and / or without the means to pursue legal options.

Deployed primarily in low-income neighbourhoods, it gathers government data previously held in separate silos, such as employment, personal debt and benefit records, and education and housing histories, then analyses it using a secret algorithm to identify which individuals might be at higher risk of committing benefit fraud. 

One hopes the decision will have repercussions far outside the Netherlands.

Alston predicted the judgment would be “a wake-up call for politicians and others, not just in the Netherlands”. The special rapporteur presented a report to the UN general assembly in October on the emergence of the “digital welfare state” in countries around the globe, warning of the need “to alter course significantly and rapidly to avoid stumbling, zombie-like, into a digital welfare dystopia”. 

National Archives permitting deletion and destruction of gov docs - The New York Times Opinion – Matthew Connelly – professor of history at Columbia.- “…In 2017, a normally routine document released by the archives, a records retention schedule, revealed that archivists had agreed that officials from Immigration and Customs Enforcement could delete or destroy documents detailing the sexual abuse and death of undocumented immigrants. Tens of thousands of people posted critical comments, and dozens of senators and representatives objected. The National Archives made some changes to the plan, but last month it announced that ICE could go ahead and start destroying records from Mr. Trump’s first year, including detainees’ complaints about civil rights violations and shoddy medical care. It’s not just ICE. The Department of the Interior and the National Archives have decided to delete files on endangered species, offshore drilling inspections and the safety of drinking water. The department even claimed that papers from a case where it mismanaged Native American land and assets — resulting in a multibillion-dollar legal settlement — would be of no interest to future historians (or anyone else). Virtually all the papers of the under secretary of state for economic growth, energy and environment are also being designated as “temporary,” despite the incredibly broad responsibilities of that office — from international aviation safety to foreign takeovers of American firms. 

Ethics in Australian public life have reached an all-time low

They were in fact employed by a company registered in a Caribbean island tax haven, untraceable and unaccountable. Who else got dudded here?

Who knew crime could be so romantic


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