How Russia Inc. Moves Billions Offshore “You can rely on our legal system!”

Italian journalist tells court that city makes it easy for former Slovak Communists to launder money
 through front companies Hong Kong Banks Enable Money Laundering

This is about an excellent Reuters investigation into a Russian state scheme to buy expensive medical equipment – and send money to Swiss bank accounts. It is worth reading in its entirety, but we will hone in on this bit:

“According to the customs data, Petromed paid $195 million to a British company called Greathill Ltd. Greathill acted as an intermediary in buying equipment from Siemens and other suppliers.

The arrangement worked like this: The Russian state paid Petromed to supply medical equipment. Meanwhile, Greathill bought equipment from Siemens and other suppliers, according to Kolesnikov. In turn, Petromed bought the equipment from Greathill at much higher prices, up to double the going rate, according to customs documents. Bank records seen by Reuters support that account.
. . .
A trail of documents reviewed for this article suggests that Greathill was an equipment supplier only on paper. According to Kolesnikov, Greathill’s real function was to act as an intermediary “where profits could be made.” Putins & Laundering Comrades

Bloomberg: How Russia Inc. Moves Billions Offshore -- and a Handful of Tax Havens May Hold Key to Sanctions, by Jesse Drucker, Alan Katz & Andy Hoffman:

Two years ago, a Dutch law firm prepared a pitch in Moscow to Russian businesses: come to the Netherlands and we can help you avoid taxes and keep your assets safe. “You can rely on our legal system!” the firm, Buren van Velzen Guelen, said in a slide presentation.

Such appeals have worked on a grand scale. Russia’s biggest oil, gas, mining and retail companies -- including some run by billionaires close to President Vladimir Putin -- have moved tens of billions of corporate assets to the Netherlands and other European countries often used for tax avoidance and capital flight, such as Luxembourg, Cyprus, Switzerland and Ireland. The firms include OAO Rosneft (ROSN), OAO Gazprom, OAO Lukoil and Geneva-headquartered Gunvor Group Ltd., which was co-founded by a Putin associate now under U.S. sanctions.

A Theory of Boardroom Justice. Something tells me Jerry Cohen would not have been surprised.

 There is a real danger that corporate leaders, making decisions that seem correct behind closed doors, end up being tone-deaf in a soundproof room. When the doors open and the decisions are announced, it is clear that board members are often deeply disconnected from the world’s economic and social realities.

Consider executive pay packages. Board remuneration committees can explain them logically with complex formulas to justify them, and yet often they are completely out of line with common sense.

The popularity of pets, nature films, zoos, wildlife tourism show how much we like to look at animals. Why? Evolution has an answer... With love from Russian Zoo Keeper Vlado

Putin & His Commie Comrades

Piketty Capital @ Der Doom

Doom for democracy? Judt, Habermas, and Piketty warn that our system of government is irrational, dysfunctional, in trouble. Has it always been? We are all doomed


“It is an arduous thing to plead against abuses of a power which originate from your own country,” said Burke. By that standard, David Bromwich has had a very arduous decade... Nothing New Under The Sun

Over the past 80 years, U.S. gross domestic product has grown, in real terms, by a factor of 16. But more wealth has not meant more leisure. Cue the yuppie Kvetching

Accountants and tax advisers have blown the whistle on multimillionaire clients exploiting tax concessions in self-managed superannuation funds, urging the federal government to act against "tax leakage". Tax leakage: Multimillionaires exploiting superannuation.

Prophesy of Piketty ~ There are 4,400 words here, mostly on the FT kerfluffle, and Neil Irwin summarizes it here: “The short version: He doesn’t give an inch.

The Continuing Debate Over Thomas Piketty'sCapital in the 21st Century

Following up on my previous posts on the new book by Thomas Piketty (Paris School of Economics),Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Harvard University Press, 2014):

Wall Street Journal op-ed:  Piketty's Numbers Don't Add Up, by Martin Feldstein (Harvard):

Thomas Piketty has recently attracted widespread attention for his claim that capitalism will now lead inexorably to an increasing inequality of income and wealth unless there are radical changes in taxation. Although his book ... has been praised by those who advocate income redistribution, his thesis rests on a false theory of how wealth evolves in a market economy, a flawed interpretation of U.S. income-tax data, and a misunderstanding of the current nature of household wealth.

In all the chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order

My first word, everyone’s first word, was air.

A house manifesting creativity has disorder at its heart. As Carl Jung once put it, “in all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order”.

Freeing a new order from a messy environment is precisely what a painter like Lucian Freud did with chromatic gunge. Gardeners everywhere mix tons of dirt with blood and bonemeal to achieve beauty. Cooking means broken eggs, spilled milk, scattered flour. So, even if we subscribe to order, chaos is its prerequisite, a crucible of potential.

The celebration of mess is at least as old as the Enlightenment age. Alexander Pope found the chaos of variety reassuring:

Not chaos-like together crushed and bruised;

But, as the world, harmoniously confused:

Where order in variety we see;

And where, though all things differ, all agree...

Bad tax laws are worse than the pop stars who skirt them

Politicians thrive on ambiguity that costs the economy dear, writes Paul Johnson

A much-loved pop star is judged to have invested in a tax-avoidance scheme. Pressure groups, opposition politicians and front pages demand the government make good its pledge to crack down on tax dodgers. The prime minister weighs in: let national treasure Gary Barlow – ageing boy-bander turned charity fundraiser – pay back the, well, national treasure but keep his gong.

Bad Tax Laws Encourage Avoiders

Howell House looks like a train wreck ...

Crowd Funding a Movie Non-fiction such as Cold River

“Rock and Roll Philosopher” Grant Maxwell has compiled a list of the top 15 philosophical songs. I suspect many philosophers would give this list the other kind of “R and R,” namely a revise and resubmit ... Princip was the one who pulled the fatal trigger, leading to the first World War. As perhaps the most influential teenager in history, one might expect him to be the subject of an extensive literature (Gavrilo was two years younger than Milan and Ondrej)

"Hype is an overrated and overused tool, but the power of compelling narrative endures, hence the sprouting of new Swedish literary agencies with names like Partners in Stories and Storytellers. They have an eye to lucrative film rights, of course, but few would deny the seductiveness of a good plot."

The Swedish Book Review is out with several takes on books you may want to watch for. (via The Literary Saloon, the place to go for translated fiction.)

This is where we are in the world today. We self-publish our own books. We can solicit our own funds for movies. We can circumvent the nightly news, if it still exists.

Here's a trio, who have made award-winning documentaries in the past, wanting to blow the lid off the media silence on the man they call the most prolific serial killer in America.

There are at least two angles on the media silence on this case. The biggest one is that Gosnell is an abortionist operating within the scope allowed by those who have argued they want abortions in our country to be safe and rare. This man's clinic was nowhere near safe, so the political agenda doesn't support exposing him at the risk of undermining the most scared battleground for the political left.

The second angle is not as politically defined as the first. It's what Ann McElhinney describes in the video below. The women who were murdered were poor, unseemly, and minority--the kind that gets killed everyday in some cities, so what's the news? You might think those who cry loudly about the rights of woman and minorities would cry out about this too, but perhaps their classism gets in the way. Maybe it just doesn't trump the first angle. Abortionists are priests in the Church of Ne're Do Ill. The blood on their hands is only red fruit punch.

If you have the funds to contribute to this, I encourage you to consider it.

The “art” in Sartre ...

“Poetry makes nothing happen,” Auden once wrote. But then he never got a chance to read “In Praise of Air,” a poem by Simon Armitage just installed on a building along a busy road at the University of Sheffield, England, and billed as the world’s first bit of air-cleansing verse.
Open Culture has posted the doodles of Jean-Paul Sartre (via Peter Gratton). While not as skillful as those of Jorge Luis Borges or as striking as those of Franz Kafka, they do have a certain whimsical air to them. Some research suggests that doodling enhances one’s concentration and memory, so if you see people doodling while you are giving a talk, don’t assume they aren’t paying attention. Just ask Jesse “During talks, I draw heads” Prinz.

Epictetus, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein — they’re just some of the philosophers known for putting big ideas into small packages. They are great to read, yet the aphoristic or epigrammatic style is not very common among philosophers today. Sydney Morgenbesser comes to mind as a more recent master of the philosophical quip (e.g., “Of course pragmatism is true; the trouble is it doesn’t work.”). Fans of this genre should be aware that Jerry Dworkin has put together Philosophy: A Commonplace Book, which is a goldmine of philosophers’ aphorisms, quips, jokes, insults, and the like.

There is probably more out there, given that we live in an age of a new literary art form, the tweet, and I imagine that there are good providers of philosophically-related insight or amusement on Twitter. For example, check out this article in the LA Times on @NeinQuarterly (“At Starbucks I order under the name Godot. Then leave.”). Of course you all already follow @dailynouseditor. But who out there in Twitterdom should philosophers follow for the occasional pause to reflect–or chuckle?

This is a very different kind of Game of Thrones spoiler. Francis Schmidt, associate professor of art and animation at Bergen Community College in New Jersey, was suspended without pay for a photo he shared on Google+, where it was seen by several colleagues. The photo? A picture of his daughter wearing a Game of Thrones t-shirt with the words “I will take what is mine with fire & blood” written on it. The quote is from Daenerys Targaryen, mother of dragons, rightful heir to the blah blah blah… in other words, a character on the show.  The dean of the college took the posting of the photo as a threat, and according to Inside Higher Ed, a security official at the school “said that ‘fire’ could be kind of a proxy for ‘AK-47s.’”

Are you familiar with Hanlon’s Razor? One version is this: never assume malice when incompetence will do. This is generally a good heuristic, I’ve found.

This case sounds like incompetence, right? Except for: “Schmidt believes he was targeted in part because he filed a grievance against the college a week before the post for being passed up for a sabbatical.” Hmmm.

There are other reports of the story at TechDirt and Gawker. (via Michaela McSweeney)

Sarsha Simone Sings No More Drama Sarsha brought drama

Sarsha Simone Sings No More Drama

Sarsha brought drama to The Voice stage with Mary J Blige's R'n'B hit. Sasha

Sarsha Simone is hoping that she is that one voice he wants with her fierce performance of No More Drama – but will.i.am continues to hold out for that one thing, leading Ricky to ‘break the rules’ by offering to work with Sarsha on her career! There is a new book called The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age, coming out on July 8th from Harvard Business Review Press...

A SINGING nun who has charmed audiences across Italy with romping renditions of Alicia Keys' No One and Cyndi Lauper's Girls Just Want To Have Fun heads into the finals of TV talent show The Voice as an unusual front-runner

My cousin Andrej Imrich is pleased

Ricky Martin he sings with The Voice Of Italy. Ricky ... - YouTube

► 4:47► 4:47

www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2ipi4stzE0

May 29, 2014 - Uploaded by HOTWORDPERU

Ricky Martin he sings with The Voice Of Italy. Ricky Martin he sings with Suor Cristina Scuccia ...

“She has that perfect balance of soul and control and her voice is as highly individual as our
own Kylie Auldist and Lanie Lane.” – John Hardaker, The Orange Press Sydney Sarsha Simone the Septembers

CODA: The Voice is a popular televised singing competition on NBC. The finale of its sixth season aired last night, and the winner is Josh Kaufman, who took part in the competition while taking a break from pursuing his master’s degree in philosophy at Northern Illinois University. You can watch Mr. Kaufman talking about his philosophy studies here, and see him singing Stevie Wonder’s “Signed, Sealed, Delivered,” which may or may not have been about his master’s thesis.

How much it costs to hire your favorite singer -  this story with some interesting numbers.

Los Lobos and George Clinton and Bone Thugs and Harmony and Toots and the Maytals charge in the 20-35k range for appearances; that’s not so much considering what you get.  Fountains of Wayne (remember them?) goes for 20-30k.

De la Soul goes for 15-20k, as do the Indigo Girls, and for Jefferson Starship it may go up to 25k.  The English Beat and PM Dawn (still underrated, apparently) cost only 5-10k.

Bruce Springsteen is a million dollars and up.  Many artists I have never heard of go for 200k and up.

Dave Matthews tribute band is 10k, while Dave Matthews is $1 million and the voice of Jozef Imrich is priceless ...