Debt and Power: An Interview With Micheal Hudson explains how the ancient approach to managing debt is far superior to ours

If the reality gets too much open a book to escape

Future historians will surely see us as having created in the media a Frankenstein monster whom no one knows how to control or direct, and marvel that we should have so meekly subjected ourselves to its destructive and often malign influence.

— Malcolm Muggeridge, born on this date in 1903

1. Accountants at centre of multi-million-dollar 'dummy director' scam shut down

   An accounting firm at the centre of a massive tax avoidance scheme that exploited homeless and drug addicted people has its registration cancelled in the wake of an ABC investigation.

   
   

   
   

   Bitcoin And Shares In Art – Is The Idea Dead?

   

   Two years ago this was a hot idea as a way of expanding the art market. You could own shares in works of art. But then bitcoin value cratered and things have stalled… – The Art Newspaper

   
   

   • Who the UK government's coronavirus economic measures leave behind  (25 Mar 2020)
   • Tax justice and the coronavirus (25 Mar 2020)
   • Covid-19: 80% rule salary payments liable for income tax and NICS  (25 Mar 2020)
   • Every cent lost to tax havens could be used to strengthen our health and social system  (25 Mar 2020)
   • Routine Activity Theory And Tax Evasion  (25 Mar 2020)
   • Putin calls for 15% tax on offshore funds as part of plan to fight coronavirus  (25 Mar 2020)
   • We can't afford tax havens in the age of #Coronavirus  (24 Mar 2020)
   • HMRC pledges 'step change' in tackling tax avoidance schemes  (20 Mar 2020)
   • HMRC targets PAYE data to spot tax avoidance  (19 Mar 2020)
   • Forty years of neoliberalism have shaped our individualistic response to coronavirus  (17 Mar 2020)
   • UK Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak on COVID19 response (17 Mar 2020)
   • Opinion: How Jackson Hole has become a tax haven  (17 Mar 2020)

   
   

   
   

   PAUL MALONE.Who’s pushing foreign influence in Australia?

   
   

   Posted on 26 March 2020

   
   

   In seeking to target foreign interference in Australia, the Federal Government has two countries in its sights, but it’s not just the Russians and Chinese who play the interference game. Continue reading →

   
   

   
   

   
   
   

   JOHN TAN. John Mearsheimer: Foreign policy hawk? Controversial as ever. Part 1 (of 2):

   
   

   Posted on 26 March 2020

   
   

   His theory of offensive realism is the most aggressive of all foreign policy theories. He believes China’s continued rise will likelylead to a muscular contest; and he has enraged the Israel Lobby in Washington. But his story is much more nuanced…Continue reading →
   
   

Vuillard sees a poignancy even in the tacky and banal. I still prefer my surrounding stripped-down, but a Vuillard interior is like to an alien and beautiful world. I think of these lines from W.H. Auden’s “Canzone” (1942):

“We are created from and with the world

To suffer with and from it day by day:

Whether we meet in a majestic world

Of solid measurements or a dream world

Of swans and gold, we are required to love

All homeless objects that require a world.”

Ed Yong, one of the best science writers out there, has constructed "a rough preliminary portrait of SARS-CoV-2": where it came from, what makes it unusual, what it does inside a person, etc.