The first lesson of international business is that the monopolies that drive the commercial trading system only hold loyalty to the god of capital. Making money means retaining a profit on trading transactions of business companies. The notion of MAKING MONEY means something very different to the financial empires that speculate on currencies, commodities, bonds and equities. When the two worlds come together to celebrate the common interest of their pirate culture, the Davos port of call, is a necessary winter holiday.

No doubt, the world’s financial outlook is still bleak. The needed measures and will to repudiate the ill gained debt bubble, that has much of the world facing insolvency, is a taboo alternative. The proverbial can that cannot be kicked far enough down the road of postponement keeps the party going for a little while longer. The life style of the super wealthy accustomed to flying into the Alpine village on Gulfstream V’s, hardly relate to the plight of people eating cat food. No surprise, this is the reality that escapes normal reporting.

However, what happens when the EU collapses and nation-states return to their own national currencies? The cardinal rule of the financial buccaneers is to keep the serving of the interest on the debt instruments that they hold as assets, paid by their captive debtors.

When the Fox Business Channel sends a Warren Buffet “groupie” like Liz Claman to cover this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, you know you will get soft interviews and approving reporting. The same can be said of the coverage by most of the financial media. Watching questions at a press conference usually provided a strong sucking sound coming from the journalists in a desperate hope to gain favor among the titans of financial business.

It is refreshing to read in The Economic Times an account about Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron. His slamming of the eurozone as uncompetitive and branding a planned transaction tax “madness”, strays from the strategic objectives of the financial elites. The financial speculation leveraged by the City of London brought the UK to the brink of collapse. Nevertheless, as a lone voice that squelches a retooled “Tobin Tax”, Cameron deserves credit. He may just be serving his own domestic political interest, but any opposition to refloating the debt with another round of additional taxes, is a positive. Even if he falls far short with true systemic solutions, the road to global taxation needs derailing. Cameron scornfully dismissed French-led plan:

“Even to be considering this at a time when we are struggling to get our economies growing is quite simply madness,” he declared.

“Of course it’s right that the financial sector should pay their share. In the UK we are doing exactly that through our bank levies and stamp duty on shares. And these are options which other countries can adopt.”

The legally protected financial bandits are dedicated to the extraction of even higher taxes in order to rollover maturing obligations. As the EU economy falters and shatters, who will bail out the bankrupt economies? The answer may not exist. John Quelch, the dean of the Shanghai-based China Europe International Business School offers the following assessment in Forbes,

“Last year at Davos, there was wishful thinking about China. Surely China would stumble on its relentless path to economic superpower status, and give the West some breathing space to reboot and revitalize?

This year at Davos, there is also wishful thinking about China, but of a different kind. How can China save the world economy? Surely the Chinese can consume more? And can’t the Chinese government do even more than it already has to prop up the Euro and invest in more Euro denominated assets?”

When people mature in their economic understanding, the harsh reality hits them. The criminal elites who designed this perverted global monetary system actually benefit with a total collapse of the nation states. A total implosion of world markets will not bring down the crooks that already own most of the choice global assets.

Davos is not about advancing productive international business. It is about plotting the next global crisis that drives the plutocrats to demand control that is even more draconian and punitive. Trade often brings mutual benefits when the marketplace operates with balance and equilibrium. However, when cartels dominate commerce and transnational corporatists force monopolistic restraints upon competing enterprises, the net result dampens alternative markets.

The way to view the business practices of the authoritarian model of the privileged Davos cabal is to see their relationships and overlapping confederations as a filtering system that expels any opposition to their long-term plans for both economic and political domination.

The analogy that describes this difference is seen in the protective environments that the Davos connections operate as compared to the meager existence of the average consumer. The vast multitude is preoccupied with economic survival. This sharp contrast with the self-appointed shapers of the world financial system, know of no such constraint.

Businesses that actually produce a product or useful service never bridge the gap between practical consumable innovations and the monetary manipulators that feed off the dynamic and industrious efforts of legitimate commercial enterprises. The money interests that dominate gatherings like Davos bring little to the advancement of actual commerce. Wealth creation is different from the accumulation or theft of riches.

The insurmountable resolution of the world debt bubble is evident to everyone. Yet the banksters care little for solutions, especially since their efforts are the true cause of the coming disaster. The Chinese controlled model will not rescue the globalist trading system. What the Davos elites have in mind is to convert independent economies into subservient appendages of a top down dependent debtor society.

Lowering the standard of living for Western economies is an unpleasant fact. The masters of manipulation desire this outcome. Until society recognizes that the debt created financial system is the root cause of the next planned panic, none of us will be safe from the crony state/capitalist juggernaut.

James Hall – February 1, 2012

http://www.batr.org/negotium/020112.html

As historical memory diminishes and the lessons of past centuries are forgotten, the practice of systematically destroying economic independence grows. Forget about real prosperity, the concept of interdependence, coined in popular parlances by the Trilateral Commission, has made the United States economy a post industrial dependency and a bankrupt debtor. The global corporatists despise protective tariffs because these excise taxes must be paid by foreign manufacturing enterprises. Since the rush to escape American shores, the transnational ventures seek not just cheap labor, but scheme to evade any effective regulations for the paradise of third world exploitation.

America’s economy was built under the shield of tariffs. The nation became the greatest industrial engine and traded profitably with the rest of the world, when reasonable excise and duties were charged on products entering this country. Just remember, the budgets of government were paid without an income tax under this system of tariffs. Who can logically argue that the deception of Free Trade benefits our population, when the current record of trade deficits continues unabated?

Tariffs for Survival or Profits for Multinationals provides evidence that tariffs are the best method to combat the deficiencies of the Free Trade ruse.

“There is nothing free about the loss of living wage jobs and the demise of independent production capacities. The notion that America is best served when multinational ‘stateless’ corporations are allowed to leave our shores and dump their foreign built products back upon the society that developed, financed and provided a ready market, is insane.”

The mumbo jumbo of corporate economists, employed by financial institutions is nothing more than jive by paid shills to defend an indefensible system. Use common sense. Any economy that is systemically stuck with mounting trade deficits is going broke. As long as the American marketplace has the desire to buy foreign made products and the money to pay for them, the game will last a little longer.

However, as a nation, the country is broke and the day when the dollar loses its reserve currency status is nearly upon us. Trading countries want to sell their goods to Americans. These countries will continue to do so even after adding a fair excise tax for the privilege of exporting their items to the largest market in the world.

Yes, the cost to consumers may rise, but the balance of deficits will fall dramatically and would push the buying power of the currency higher, which will allow for purchases in more valuable dollars. The other worthwhile consequence is that offshore manufacturers will want to build plants, create products and employ American workers here at home. The invigoration of domestic growth can and would develop when the labor force is able to get back to work.

The chart that shows world GDP when compared to trade under free trade agreements demonstrates that much of the world is not bound to the restrictions that favor globalist enterprises. Then ask why is it so important for the United States to have free trade agreements with other countries, which result in opening up our markets for dumping products that force out our own production and close domestic businesses?

The false argument that free trade and a cheap dollar foster American exports is one of the most destructive myths that the corporatists spin.

Domestic exports are a very low percentage of national output and even if the dollar was to lose, 90% of its international exchange rate value products will not be exported because the country is phasing out most manufactured goods. The notion that exporting our natural gas resources will help is extreme lunacy in an infinite asylum of national denial.

In the Varying Verity series the following, written ten years ago, remains true today.

“The method to adopt for restoring a viable domestic economy would require reforms that drastically lower, if not abolish, personal income taxation – be linked to the passage of Pro-Competitive ad valorem Tariffs in the form of a national import sales tax. We all share in the goal of smaller government, less regulation and free usage of our own money. We have a mutual interest in building a domestic economy that will create higher wage scales and more retained after tax income for the greatest number of our own population. When the best jobs become government work, our society is doomed and reduced to the median worldwide income levels.”

Surely, you must acknowledge that our country is desperately in need of a dramatic job growth strategy. Hopefully you will accept that private employment enterprises are preferable to public section government make work positions. Certainly you must see the sense in lowering the trade deficits that are bankrupting our economy. Need more proof?

Look at the steady rise in the trade deficit for the last two years. With a November 2011 trade deficit of -$47.8 Billion Dollars, just how much of our wealth and resources need to be transferred overseas to narrow this real world wealth destroyer? The answer is that the deficit curve will never turn down until rational protective tariffs are levied on imports.

How can America exist as a viable economy, when our money sinks in purchasing power and the country must import consumable goods, especially when we have no money to pay for the products?

Obviously going into further debt is no alternative if the economy is to survive. This current course guarantees a lower standard of living and a dismal future for your children.

Whenever the topic of establishing reasonable protective tariffs comes up, you hear the claim that the Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1930 deepened the depression. Ian Fletcher in Protectionism Didn’t Cause the Great Depression debunks this misnomer.

“The Smoot-Hawley tariff was simply too small a policy change to have so large an effect as triggering a depression. For a start, it applied to only about one-third of America’s trade: about 1.3 percent of our GDP. One point three percent! America’s average tariff on goods subject to tariff went from 44.6 to 53.2 percent — not a very big jump at all. America’s tariffs were higher in almost every year from 1821 to 1914. Our tariffs went up in 1861, 1864, 1890, and 1922 without producing global depressions, and the great recessions of 1873 and 1893 spread worldwide without needing the help of any tariff increases.

If Smoot-Hawley had caused a global trade disaster, it would necessarily have been by triggering a sharp decline in American imports of goods subject to the increased tariff. Did this happen? The data say no.”

Do not be deceived by the globalists. Sensible tariffs are a solution. Trade deficits are the problem. Liberate yourself from the Free Trade agreements that only produce high unemployment and perpetual poverty.

James Hall – January 25, 2012

http://www.batr.org/negotium/012512.html

Duane Morris LLPEric SinrodUSA
January 18 2012

Source: http://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=701f3890-aaa5-4195-8a27-4707b3401f24&

Just when was it that the United Snakes of America declared war on the Coeur d’Alene Mining District, and why?

We were ruminating, fulminating on these weighty questions last week. Pretty clearly, the opening salvo was fired in the final decade of the 19th Century, when Federal troops were dispatched under a declaration of martial law to lock up 600 miners here who were striking for decent wages.

Then of course during World War II there was the undeclared conscription of lead and zinc miners here who were prevented from taking better paying jobs in the shipyards of Puget Sound to keep wresting rocks from our earth that could be smelted into bullets and cartridges to kill Germans and Japanese.

For that trouble, we were rewarded, in 1984, by being declared a federal Superfund site by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and we have been struggling under the EPA’s yoke ever since as have some 70 mining companies who produced bullet-makings for the government in the 1940s, most of them mom-and-pop operations. Or was it in 1991, when agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation swooped down upon us, shutting down our card games and seizing our slot machines, in their assault on our laissez-faire way of life?

Was it just last year, when the US EPA sweated a $200 million settlement out of Hecla Mining Co. for alleged “environmental damages” for having the temerity to mine silver, lead and zinc in the Silver Valley? (That amount, ironically, is about what Hecla intends to spend extending the life of the Lucky Friday by some 30 years.)

Or was it just last week, when the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration shuttered the Lucky Friday mine for up to a year on an utterly vacuous claim that is main vertical access way, the Silver Shaft, had miraculously become unsafe  overnight? This is the same MSHA that inspects the shaft every three months, most recently a month ago. What changed in 30 days to render the Silver Shaft unserviceable? According to MSHA, 30 years’ accumulation of crud leaking from sand lines that have built up along the mile-deep, 18-foot cylindrical shaft’s concrete liner.

This is federal government arrogance at its height. It is brazen and it reeks of ass-covering. It is also ineptitude at its height, to the detriment of some 200 Hecla Mining Co. employees and a like number of Cementation Corp. contract workers who were at work sinking the new No. 4 Shaft internal winze. As of late last week, Hecla miners were barred by MSHA even from maintaining the critical pumps to keep water out of the lower workings of the Lucky Friday, where most of the machinery is. The 4 Shaft is collared on the 4,900-foot level and most of the current ore hauling was being done on the 5,900-level to the Silver Shaft.

Miners tell this reporter that scaling-off accumulations of sand-line leaks has been an ongoing maintenance procedure since the Silver Shaft – unique to a district where wood-lined, rectangular (and infinitely more maintenance-intensive) shafts are the norm – was commissioned in 1983. Hecla, treading lightly, says it doesn’t consider the MSHA closure order politically motivated. We beg to differ. It is all about politics. In the wake of the April, 2011 death of drift-miner Pete Merek on the 5900-level, MSHA directed Hecla to re-route that heading into uncharted territory. Following MSHA’s orders led to a pair of rock-bursts in November and December last year, the latter of which injured seven men. Our friendly local miners figure that MSHA’s order to close the Silver Shaft is directly connected to its mandated screw-ups on the 5900 – essentially to distract attention from the injuries the agency’s order caused. Some early scuttlebutt that MSHA had been pestering Hecla to clean up the Silver Shaft likely is rumour-mongering by the federal agency. But MSHA doesn’t pester: it writes citations, issues orders and demands fines; it doesn’t give advice.

Years ago MSHA was staffed by inspectors who’d spent years underground breaking rock for a living. They knew the art of the possible and the practical, and could with considerable moral authority cite a company that was bending the rules to the detriment of safety. The new breed of cat is different: college boys with little or no experience in the reality of hard-rock mining. The hard-rock miners they are ostensibly there to protect hold their ineptitude and their rule-book rigidity in contempt.

So, 3.5 million ounces of silver production from the Lucky Friday will be held off the books of America’s export balance sheet this year. Our silver consumption will continue at or above its current rate, so we’ll have to import more silver, and print more paper dollars to pay for it – which just drives up the price of milk and gasoline for all of us and the 400-plus miners now on the bricks.

No doubt some Goldman-Sachs-style short-seller made off like a bandit when the MSHA order caused Hecla’s stock to crater from $6 to nearly $4 in a day’s trading last week. Given the cozy cronyism between Wall Street and the United Snakes Government these days, might we wonder if more than just politics were involved?

This wasn’t a war that the hardy people of northern Idaho started, back in the 1890s, or the 1980s, the 1990s, or just last week. We’d rather be known as the culture that brought decent working conditions, women’s suffrage, and other enlightenments to the nation’s conscience. But it is a fight we need to finish, and finish decisively.

“e-dinar is the name of an internet based electronic payment and exchange system that facilitates online transactions 100% backed by physical gold and silver. The physical gold and silver bullion is held securely in internationally renowned bullion repositories.”

How is the Islamic dinar used?

1. The Islamic Dinar can be used as saving.
2. It can be used to pay zakat and dowry as required by Islamic Law.
3. It can be used to buy and sell as it is a legitimate medium of exchange.

The e-dinar web site also offers the new Kelatan gold dinar and silver dirham coins.

Shopping local provides a greater return to New Orleans economy

Buying at large box stores is a way of life for many consumers. Wal-Mart, Home Depot and Target are routine locations to spend your hard-earned dollars on items of necessity. However, what happens to the profits when the sale is completed and the bills are paid? Does the money stay in the local community, where the transactions are generated, or are they filtered off to the treasury of public companies that dominate the economy? The pitiful answer, well known to the chagrin of the small business enterprises, is a prime reason why the middle class is vanishing.

For several decades, the corporatist expedited their transfer of the manufacturing sector overseas. The resulting elimination of high paying jobs and benefits is a direct result of the Free Trade policy designed to impoverish ordinary families. The importation of slave labor products that fill the shelves of the internationalist chain stores resulted into the removable of domestic items, not solely because of the cost of goods, but by a designed objective to reduce the standard of living in our country.

Add to this frightful give away trade bias towards importing products from the third world is the irrational practice of public subsidies for attracting chain store development in local communities.

Stacy Mitchell makes valid points in Don’t Subsidize Big Boxes at Local Shops’ Expense,

“Sifting though the postmortem news of Borders Group’s demise, I came across a local newspaper story about a California town that had spent $1.6 million to lure a Borders bookstore to a local shopping center. According to the paper, government officials in Pico Rivera in 2003 agreed to pay part of a new Borders store’s operating expenses by providing a $10,833 monthly subsidy for the next 15 years.

Wal-Mart Stores (WMT) has been a frequent recipient. From 2008 through 2009, the company pocketed $7.9 million in tax exemptions from local development agencies in New York, according to data from the state comptroller. Wal-Mart also received $1.8 million in tax credits and rebates in 2009 to build five supercenters in Louisiana, records kept by the state’s Board of Commerce & Industry show. Last year, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported that the city of Bridgeton, Mo., approved a $7.2 million deal to finance construction of a single Wal-Mart supercenter.

Other big retailers have been at the public trough, too. Target (TGT) picked up $1.4 million in local tax breaks to build a store in the small town of Kenner, just outside New Orleans, according to the Times-Picayune. Amazon (AMZN) secured a five-year sales tax exemption from the South Carolina legislature in exchange for opening a distribution center in the state.”

Corporate welfare is a major factor in the demise of tangible free enterprise. The notion that corporations merit subsidizes to attract their business is an even more hideous concept.

The article Shopping with Local Merchants Benefits Economy, Environment by Beth Turner illustrates the bad economics that actually hurt local economies.

“According to Tulsa-Centric, a company created to support local businesses, “For every $100 you spend at a local merchant, 68 of those dollars return to the community. When spent at a national chain, only $43 stay in the community.” This doesn’t even take in to consideration how much we’re lessening our carbon footprint by cutting down on shipping, hauling and packaging.”

Following up on the ill served Borders experience, further evidence is cited in the EXECUTIVE SUMMARY – ECONOMIC IMPACT ANALYSIS Local Merchants vs. Chain Retailers.

1) Local merchants generate substantially greater economic impact than chain retailers.

2) Development of urban sites with directly competitive chain merchants will reduce the overall vigor of the local economy.

3) Modest changes in consumer spending habits can generate substantial local economic impact.

“For every $100 in consumer spending at Borders, the total local economic impact is only $13. The same amount spent with a local merchant yields more than three times the local economic impact.”

The economic formula for the Wal-Mart business model is to undercut everyone. Volume of sales and products translates into one stop shopping. Their dominance from this type of operation drives out the merchant shopkeeper. Is this really free enterprise or is it a well staged blueprint to impoverish local economies, financed with government subsidies, on the back of the taxpayer?

The consequence of the box store economy is that the chain stores set the wage scale. Small business entrepreneurs are force out of business and relegated to hired help status. The velocity of money slows as local disposable income shrinks due to the lower prices charged by the chains. The tax incentives and exemptions only benefit the mega stores, while the former owners of eliminated businesses and the customers who flock to the lowest price bear the costs in their property and state taxes.

Over the last decades, this pattern plays out in every community. The demise of viable local economies is visible in the decay and dependency culture that replaced the independent merchant marketplace. Wall Street’s propensity to drive out small business and supplant global franchised outlets is a major factor in the systematic reduction of the domestic standard of living.

It is not by chance that the elites of finance promote a scorched earth policy for Main Street. Their desire to cheapen products and wangling the public into an addiction of buying junk is a given. What not well understood is that the super center is a fortress ready for a barbarian assault. Their high wall of pricing protection relies upon cheap imports. Nevertheless, the weak dollar exchange rate is in the process of an inevitable total demise. As the dollar panic accelerates and the loss of purchasing value quickens, the cost of imports will spike. The foreign manufacturers will experience a sharp decline in sales and their factories will slow down or close.

The solution to this contraction that relies upon the “as needed” inventory and container ship delivery paradigm is the return to a domestic manufacturing and a merchant economy. When the financial bubble bursts, and the chain stores close, where will you buy items for everyday use? Learn this lesson now and shop local whenever you can.

James Hall – January 11, 2012 　

Original: http://www.batr.org/negotium/011112.html

Greenberg Traurig LLP J. Daniel WalshUSA December 29 2011

U.S. Commercial Gaming. It means that states can now pass laws authorizing the licensure of intrastate Internet gambling. Pursuant to Nevada statutes, on December 23, 2011, Nevada’s Gaming Commission adopted regulations to license online poker websites for intrastate play, and will be positioned to regulate interstate play should federal law authorize the same. In addition, Internet gaming or poker bills are pending in at least four other states: New Jersey, California, Florida and Iowa. It also may be that states could compact with each other to allow interstate provision of such games based on a revenue-sharing formula, similar to the multi-state lottery offerings like Powerball.

State Lotteries. States can now sell lottery tickets on the Internet, and several states, including New York and Illinois, have laws in place that allow this. While there is little controversy surrounding the sale of time-drawing tickets on the Internet, sales of virtual instant scratch-off tickets are likely to be far more controversial, as such a ticket makes a computer function in a manner identical to a slot machine. The National Association of Convenience Stores and its state chapters are likely to be vehemently opposed to scratch-off tickets on the Internet. Companies that provide services to state lotteries are likely to push states toward expanding their lottery offerings on the Internet. There will likely be state-by-state battles between commercial and lottery gaming interests as to whether states should license commercial operators to go on the Internet, or provide the games themselves through their lotteries — such fights are occurring in Canada and Europe today.

Tribal Gaming. The implications for tribal gaming are less clear. Under the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act (IGRA, 25 U.S.C. § 2701 et seq), if a state provides or licenses gaming, the tribe is supposed to be allowed to provide similar games on its reservation land.⁴ Tribal governments will likely argue that if a state lottery offers Internet gaming within a state, or if the state licenses commercial operators to accept Internet wagers, then a tribal government located within that state should be able to license its gaming enterprise to accept Internet play from anywhere in that state. However, some states will likely argue that tribes should only be allowed to accept Internet play from the reservation, as wagers from off the reservation are not “Indian gaming” as defined by IGRA.

Offshore Internet gaming operators. Some will hail this as a victory for offshore Internet gaming operators who have accepted non-sports Internet bets from the U.S. To be sure, such operators relied on legal opinions that maintained that the Wire Act only applied to sports betting, and the DOJ action validates those opinions. However, DOJ maintains that nearly all states have laws that prohibit the acceptance of wagers, except when such wagers are accepted pursuant to a state license, and that those prohibitions also apply to individuals outside the state who accept wagers from individuals within the state. The so-called “Black Friday” indictments of April 15, 2011, of individuals associated with the three largest U.S.-facing Internet poker sites did not reference the Wire Act, but instead relied on IGBA.

 Federal Legislation. Several bills have been introduced in Congress to license and regulate Internet gaming. In the current Congress, H.R. 1174 (Campbell-Frank) would have the Treasury Department license and regulate all forms of Internet gaming except sports betting. H.R. 2266 (Barton) would have the Commerce Department approve state gaming commissions to issue licenses to accept Internet poker bets, such that any operator licensed by an approved state could take play from any state that hadn’t opted out of the federal system.5 Some (particularly lottery interests) argue that new DOJ position means no federal legislation is needed. Others (mainly Nevada commercial gaming interests) argue that it means federal legislation is needed now more than ever. We believe the new DOJ position will provide impetus for hearings on Capitol Hill, and for a renewed push from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada to pass federal legislation to license and regulate Internet poker on an interstate basis.

The original article appeared on Lexology and is much longer. To read the full article, visit: http://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=7e3d929f-05ba-428e-b713-3e05ad4ef01c