Sunday, March 30, 2014

China’s Renminbi Challenges US Dollar Hegemony? Chinese Currency Trade in Major Financial Centers

London, Frankfurt, Toronto, Vancouver and San Francisco Battle to Become Western Centers for Chinese Currency Trade

By Washington's Blog

Global Research, March 29, 2014

Washington's Blog

Region: Asia, Canada, Europe, USA

Theme: Global Economy

Germany, England, Canada and the U.S. are all vying to become Western centers for the Yuan trade.

Germany

Bloomberg reports today:

Germany’s Bundesbank and the People’s Bank of China agreed to cooperate in the clearing and settling of payments in renminbi, paving the way for Frankfurt to corner a share of the offshore market.
***
The central banks signed a memorandum of understanding in Berlin today, when Chinese President Xi Jinping met German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the Frankfurt-based Bundesbank said in an e-mailed statement.
Germany’s financial capital prevailed over Paris and Luxembourg in a euro-area race to win trade in renminbi, which overtook the euro to become the second-most used currency in global trade finance in October, according to the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication.
***
Deutsche Boerse AG, which operates the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, also signed an agreement with Bank of China, expanding a partnership that will make it easier for Chinese issuers and Asian investors to access European capital markets, including stock listings.
***
German companies including Siemens AG, the country’s biggest engineering company, and Volkswagen AG are embracing the renminbi internally as a third currency for cross-border trade settlements.

England
The BBC pointed out Wednesday:

The Bank of England has agreed a deal with the People’s Bank of China to make London a hub for Chinese currency dealing.
The memorandum of understanding, to be signed on Monday, sets out settlement and clearing arrangements for the renminbi, or yuan, in London.
The signing is expected to be followed by the appointment of a London clearing bank for yuan.
62% of yuan payments outside of China already take place in London.
***
Last year the UK and Chinese central banks signed a three-year currency swap arrangement worth 200bn yuan which allows them to swap currencies and can be used by firms to settle trade in local currencies rather than in US dollars.

The International Finance Corporation, the private sector arm of the World Bank, this month issued a 1bn yuan bond in London, the first by an international financial institution.
The Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, said: “Connecting Britain to the fastest growing parts of the world is central to our economic plan.

Canada
The Globe and Mail noted last month:

Two Canadian cities are vying to become North America’s primary centre for trading the Chinese yuan, an effort that has received federal backing amid a broader desire by Ottawa to strengthen ties with Beijing.
***
No city in North or South America has yet developed as a major [yuan] settlement centre.
***
Both Toronto and Vancouver see an advantage in being located in a common time zone with a large number of companies trading with China, be they American retailers or Chilean copper miners. Toronto has sought to seize on its status as Canada’s major financial centre. Vancouver, meanwhile, argues its advantages stems from its existing volumes of trade finance, its substantial Chinese-speaking population and an incentive program that exempts foreign exchange trading from provincial taxes.
B.C. also took a lead in the RMB market in November when the provincial government launched a “dim sum” – or RMB-denominated – bond worth nearly $425-million. It was the first triple-A rated foreign government to do so.

U.S.

The U.S. isn’t ready to cede the North American yuan trade to Canada.
According to the San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco is also bidding to become a yuan trading center.
The times, they are a changing …

We Don’t Run This Country for Corporations

Elizabeth Warren
RINF Alternative News
Hobby Lobby doesn’t want to cover its employees’ birth control on company insurance plans. In fact, they’re so outraged about women having access to birth control that they’ve taken the issue all the way to the Supreme Court.
I cannot believe that we live in a world where we would even   consider   letting some big corporation deny the women who work for it access to the basic medical tests , treatments or prescriptions that they need based on vague moral objections.
But here’s the scary thing: With the judges we ‘ve got on the Supreme Court, Hobby Lobby might actually win.
The current Supreme Court has headed in a very scary direction.
Recently, three well-respected legal scholars examined almost 20,000 Supreme Court cases from the last 65 years. They found that the five conservative justices currently sitting on the Supreme Court are in the top 10 most pro-corporate justices in more than half a century.
And Justices Samuel Alito and John Roberts? They were number one and number two.
Take a look at the win rate of the national Chamber of Commerce cases before the Supreme Court. According to the Constitutional Accountability Center, the Chamber was winning 43% of the cases in participated in during the later years of the Burger Court, but that shifted to a 56% win-rate under the Rehnquist Court, and then a 70% win-rate with the Roberts Court.
Follow these pro-corporate trends to their logical conclusion, and pretty soon you’ll have a Supreme Court that is a wholly owned subsidiary of big business.
Birth control is at risk in today’s case, but we also need to worry about a lot more.
In  Citizens United , the Supreme Court unleashed a wave of corporate spending to game the political system and drown the voices of middle class families.
And right now, the Supreme Court is considering  McCutcheon v. FEC , a case that could mean the end of campaign contribution limits — allowing the big guys to buy even more influence in Washington.
Republicans may prefer a rigged court that gives their corporate friends and their armies of lawyers and lobbyists every advantage. But that’s not the job of judges. Judges don’t sit on the bench to hand out favors to their political friends.
On days like today, it matters who is sitting on the Supreme Court. It matters that we have a President who appoints fair and impartial judges to our courts, and it matters that we have a Senate who approves them.
We ‘re in this fight because we believe that we don’t run this country for corporations – we run it for people.
Elizabeth Warren was assistant to the president and a special adviser to the Treasury secretary on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Full Documentary: The Pirate Bay – Away From Keyboard

in Top Headlines 2013/02/10

The documentary TPB AFK:The Pirate Bay Away from Keyboard is a film about internet culture – and inevitably about sharing information online. The nature of the problem in the documentary is the paradigm shift of the internet, where the possibility to share information is out of sync with the right to share information.

TPB AFK: The Pirate Bay Away From Keyboard

By using a Creative Commons license they are making it legal for the audience to copy and share the film.
Share it with the world! Support the filmmakers of this free film here: www.tpbafk.tv

Proof Corporate Tax Cuts Have Done More Harm Than Good

Richard (RJ) Eskow
RINF Alternative News
The taxes paid by corporations today are near record lows as a percentage of the United States’ total tax bill, even as they are recording massive profits. Yet the unemployment rate is still high. However, if we turned back the clock on corporate tax rates and returned to Nixon-era levels and closed loopholes, millions of American jobs would be created, according to The Disappearing Corporate Tax Base, a new report released today.

The study, produced by the Center for Effective Government and National People’s Action, highlights the damage done by hewing to a central conservative tenet, that “cutting corporate taxes will stimulate job creation and grow the economy.” The report shows the aftermath of a lower corporate tax rate on state budgets, and argues that a slight increase in the corporate share of federal revenues would restore cuts to education and public services and add an additional 3.2 million jobs.
With the onset of the Great Recession came budget cuts in the states. While states were buoyed somewhat by the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act, those dollars have stopped flowing, based on the belief that the one shot of stimulus in 2009 would be enough to kickstart our economy. For a few people it was; looking to Wall Street, the stock market has never been healthier. Corporate profits are booming and executives are receiving huge bonuses for the success of their products. Yet 10 million Americans remain jobless. A new Washington political class forced caps and cuts on the budget, but shielded corporate loopholes. This has led to decreased spending in many areas, including education, in the years after the stimulus was enacted.
As federal aid to states declined, many Republican-led states have rolled back taxes, on the theory that doing so would benefit their state’s economy and create jobs. One such state, Kansas, has been considered to be a model for business-friendly tax policy, with Governor Sam Brownback receiving an “A” from the Cato Institute on his bold tax cut initiative in 2012. Fast-forward two years and the impact of these cuts can be seen more clearly.
Among these cuts was a tax exemption on corporate profits that are passed directly to individual owners – an extreme measure not done by any other state. According to a report by the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, the cuts to revenues have acted as a mini-recession for the state of Kansas, and prevented it from moving away from the recession-era cuts to services as quickly as it could have without this tax cut.
As tax cuts for corporations gained more steam, another revenue mechanism had to pick up the slack, and as detailed in the NPA report, taxes on working Americans more than filled in that hole. What that essentially means is hard-working American employees were stuck with the tax bill as corporations were free to use loopholes to their advantage to keep money from government coffers. The report points out the seemingly infinite loop of agreeing to close tax loopholes for a decreased corporate rate, only to introduce new loopholes that must be closed in the future by decreasing the corporate tax rate, of course.
National People’s Action and the Center for Effective Government argue that by returning to an Eisenhower-, or even a Nixon-era level of what corporations paid as a percentage of America’s bills, corporations could smooth over the scars of the Great Recession and fill in the gaps of lapsed services by increasing tax revenues by $464 billion (Nixon) to $683 billion (Eisenhower).
National People’s Action proposes to raise $200 billion in corporate taxes to close the funding gaps created since the recession. They do this by closing three loopholes:

Offshore tax havens, which loses $90 billion a year in U.S. tax revenues,
The executive pay loophole that allows corporations to deduct “performance bonuses” from their tax receipts,
The stock-based pay loophole that allowed companies to deduct billions from their tax bill in 2012 alone.

The $200 billion raised through this program would be the salve to losses that occurred in the Great Recession. Under their estimates, a $36 billion-dollar increase would allow America “to refill the 667,000 jobs school teachers, first responders, librarians, highway crews, caretakers of public parks, and other state and city workers lost to budget cuts.”
Using the American Society for Civil Engineers’ number of $125 billion a year over the next eight years to improve U.S. infrastructure, an estimated additional 2.5 million jobs would be created, and America’s waterways, bridges, roads and schools would be updated to modern standards.
It is time to give up on the nonsense of cutting corporate taxes to increase jobs, because we have seen that this is not working. If it did, where are all the jobs? Why are 10 million Americans without work? It clearly isn’t working in Kansas. Millions of Americans could be put to work if these proposals were eliminated, and cuts to our state and local budgets would be reversed, allowing for a higher American quality of life. All that is standing in the way is a nonsensical conservative tenet.
Richard (RJ) Eskow is a well-known blogger and writer, a former Wall Street executive, an experienced consultant, and a former musician. He has experience in health insurance and economics, occupational health, benefits, risk management, finance, and information technology. Richard has consulting experience in the US and over 20 countries.

IBM Head: Stop Fighting And “Embrace” Total Biometric Surveillance Because It Cannot Be Stopped

& this IS from the same co. that "worked" wit the NAZIS ... right !

in Breaking News

Steve Watson
A leading IBM official has urged the world to “embrace” ubiquitous surveillance of the public through biometrics, because, he argues, it is too late to fight against it.
“…trying to stop this would be fighting the wrong battle.” said Peter Waggett, Programme Leader at IBM’s Emerging Technology Group.
“We’re fighting the wrong battle when we ask should we stop people being observed. That is not going to be feasible. We need to understand how to use that data better,” Waggett added, speaking at a Nesta panel debate on biometrics.
“The information is out of the bottle already — we have to deal with the issues surrounding it now. Embrace the challenge of what we’ve got, embrace understanding it and focus on what we can do with that new data.” he argued, urging people to stop worrying about preventing such surveillance from becoming a societal norm.

BIOMETRICS Becoming a REALITY - Is This The END OF PASSWORDS & BIG BROTHER's Dream Come True?

“I’ve been working in biometrics for 20 years, and it’s reaching a tipping point where it’s going to be impossible not to understand where people are and what they are doing. Everything will be monitored.” Waggett continued.
Alarming to privacy advocates, Waggett’s words also carry more weight, given that he also heads the BSI British Standards Biometrics Committee - a Royal Chartered group that is concerned with developing formal standards in the area of biometrics and promoting their use by government and industry.
During the debate, as Wired reports, Waggett referred specifically to depictions of biometric technology in dystopian films such as Minority Report, arguing that such technology is now already in place and unavoidable.
In the film, adapted from Philip K. Dick’s story, the general populace is subjected to total surveillance in the form of Iris scanners linked to a biometric database. The surveillance is often dressed up as or doubled up with targeted advertising and the promotion of mass consumption.

Facial recognition camera that tracks your shopping habits

“The one thing they got wrong is you won’t recognise you’re being scanned — the flashing red light in the film is for effect, but all that’s now feasible.” Waggett stated, pointing specifically to mannequins already deployed in some stores that can gather age, sex and racial data on retail customers using facial recognition.
“The pressure to ID people is becoming more and important with things like the internet of things,” Waggett noted arguing that people’s biometrics should be made more readily available. “Google Glass wants to block facial recognition to stop people using invasive technology, but I think a lot of these things can be used for good.” Waggett added.
Waggett also spoke highly of other forms of biometric technology such as vehicles that interface with human brainwaves and heart rhythms.
“Biometric systems are becoming much more accurate and ubiquitous,” said Waggett. “It is impossible not to be identifiable by some kind of signal you’re leaving behind.”
IBM has most recently made headlines for being involved in the NSA surveillance scandal. The company is being sued by one of its shareholders over an alleged failure to disclose its involvement in the PRISM program. The company has denied that it co-operated with the NSA, and claims it has never given customer data, software source code or encryption keys to anyone.
Of course, the company’s shady past with regard to working directly with a tyrannical government to enslave and people is well known.
In this context, Waggett’s declarations on how we should all just stop worrying and learn to love the biometric surveillance grid will be greeted with great trepidation.
—————————————————————-
Steve Watson is a London based writer and editor for Alex Jones’ Infowars.com, and Prisonplanet.com. He has a Masters Degree in International Relations from the School of Politics at The University of Nottingham, and a Bachelor Of Arts Degree in Literature and Creative Writing from Nottingham Trent University.

Actual photo of Flight 370 clone at Tel Aviv airport:

Posted by George Freund on March 30, 2014

This was found on This Hebrew forum. It was promptly removed and cannot be found there anymore;(but that does not work with the web, heh.) When translated, other people ridicule the poster for taking a picture in a forbidden area.

The Malaysia airlines logo has been removed from the tail, but the general paint scheme remains.

Let’s hope we don’t see this one make a cameo appearance somewhere with “Allahu Akbar” painted on the tail. I have confirmed that it arrived at Tel Aviv with a blank white tail, which was repainted before it left America.

Plane history: It was first leased by Malaysia airlines. Then purchased by GA Telesis. Then, FIVE FULL YEARS before the absolute MINIMUM life span, was scheduled to be scrapped for parts (makes no sense at all, it could have flown for at least 10 more years), and then for some mysterious reason it showed up in France, only to end up in Tel Aviv. This is where it all gets odd – WHY would it be slated for scrapping in America while still far too new, only to end up in Israel just sitting there? Most probably this plane was indeed purchased for the reason most people suspect and the repainted tail was an inconvenience. WHY pull it from the forum it posted on if this picture was meaningless?

RED ALERT OPERATION CAPSTONE 2014

Posted by George Freund on March 28, 2014

This is a RED ALERT exercise starting NOW! It involves an EARTHQUAKE scenario magnitude 9.2. It involves the transfer of a NUCLEAR WEAPON! It involves the arrival of a BOEING 777 at Seattle, Washington from Japan coming in WITHOUT IDENTIFICATION CODE! This is the MOTHER OF ALL DRILLS with Infowars advising a FEMA CAMP scenario. Be forewarned. It could be highly likely the Boeing is MH370. It could be highly likely the nuclear weapon President Obama was advising about taking out New York City is in play.