Treasure Islands, Crown Colonies, Empire Tax Havens

[gnosticheresy_2]

Posting this here as it seems to fit, although I suppose it would also be quite at home in the End of the Wall St Boom thread, some very interesting stuff about the City of London. A must read

http://www.redpepper.org.uk/Confronting-the-city/

Confronting the city
Mat Little profiles Maurice Glasman, dubbed the father of 'Blue Labour' and learns more about Glasman's plans to clean up the City of London

'They think I'm a communist', smiles Maurice Glasman impishly. Gazing through horn-rimmed spectacles, the genial politics lecturer from London Metropolitan University does not make the most fearsome of revolutionaries.

His front door is pink, and his front room a beguiling mess of books, children's toys and old jazz records. There no bust of Marx, but there is a Tottenham Hotspur pendant hanging from the wall.

The 'they' in question are the Corporation of London, the ancient political entity that represents the City of London. Accustomed to anonymity, the Corporation has been unnerved by the persistent desire of Glasman and his associates at campaigning group London Citizens to open up a political dialogue. The aim is some kind of recompense for the banking bail out. But incensed by the group's anti-usury campaign, which demands a cap on interest rates at 20 per cent, and was launched provocatively at a synagogue in the City, officials stormed out of meetings. 'Last week they were so beside themselves with fury they threatened to cut off all relations with us,' Glasman says.

For 900 years the City has eluded control by the British State, says Glasman. William the Conqueror overwhelmed the rest of England but 'came friendly' to the City. Charles the First attempted to send the army into the City and precipitated the Civil War. The City chartered the Empire-building East India and Hudson's Bay Companies. It committed treason by supporting George Washington in the American War of Independence and brokered the peace. No government since Charles the Second - barring the symbolic banning of City banquets after the Second World War by Attlee - has made any attempt to interfere with the City's privileges, he says.

Nowadays, its role is assumed to be largely ceremonial. But quaint medieval trappings mask real, undiluted power, says Glasman. The Lord Mayor may wave to the crowds each November as he processes in a state coach to pledge allegiance to the Crown. But he is also a global lobbyist for the UK financial sector, spending a third of the year overseas. This 'non-political' figure is, according to the Corporation of London, treated as a Cabinet level minister abroad, as he expounds the "values of liberalisation" and opens markets for City businesses.

At home, the City possesses the Remembrancer, the oldest lobbyist in the world, dating from the 14th century. He is paid by the Corporation to lobby government and Parliament. He has, in the words of the Corporation,' day to day contact with officials in government departments responsible for developing government policy' as well as a role in the drafting of legislation. He has a seat behind the Speaker in the House of Commons and has the power to enter the chamber and brief MPs during debates.

Glasman wants a single London Mayor, based in the Mansion House and an all London Parliament in the Guildhall. In this, he says, he is merely trying to make good the attempt by Charles the First in 1632 to unify London by asking the City to extend civic rights to thousands of refugees from enclosure in Whitechapel, Clerkenwell and Southwark. The City refused. Now Glasman think it's time to ask again.' I don't want to see the Corporation of London abolished, but expanded,' he says.

One London government would mean the City's assets - its funds and global property portfolio, thought to encompass substantial parts of London, New York, Hong Kong and Sydney - would pass to the population of the capital. The City has never published an inventory of its assets but they generate £600 million a year in interest; Glasman says the chair of the corporation's finance once told him the full amount was 'truly colossal'. Such a transfer of wealth would mean a draining of its influence. 'The City's power would be diminished,' says Glasman, 'and the financial sector would have to work with the same rules as everyone else, through the British Bankers Association, for example.'

[vanlose kid]

Posting this here as it seems to fit, although I suppose it would also be quite at home in the End of the Wall St Boom thread, some very interesting stuff about the City of London. A must read

http://www.redpepper.org.uk/Confronting-the-city/
...

thanks. great find. posting it in full.

*

Confronting the city
Mat Little profiles Maurice Glasman, dubbed the father of 'Blue Labour' and learns more about Glasman's plans to clean up the City of London

'They think I'm a communist', smiles Maurice Glasman impishly. Gazing through horn-rimmed spectacles, the genial politics lecturer from London Metropolitan University does not make the most fearsome of revolutionaries.

His front door is pink, and his front room a beguiling mess of books, children's toys and old jazz records. There no bust of Marx, but there is a Tottenham Hotspur pendant hanging from the wall.

The 'they' in question are the Corporation of London, the ancient political entity that represents the City of London. Accustomed to anonymity, the Corporation has been unnerved by the persistent desire of Glasman and his associates at campaigning group London Citizens to open up a political dialogue. The aim is some kind of recompense for the banking bail out. But incensed by the group's anti-usury campaign, which demands a cap on interest rates at 20 per cent, and was launched provocatively at a synagogue in the City, officials stormed out of meetings. 'Last week they were so beside themselves with fury they threatened to cut off all relations with us,' Glasman says.

But it's not just Glasman's campaigning activities that have cast him as a modern-day Spartacus in City eyes. It's also his determination to hold the City accountable for the crash. To him, the worst global economic crisis since the '30s is the culmination the City's decades-long striving to free finance from all regulation, a model assiduously exported around the globe. 'The Corporation of London is responsible for the entire economic policy and all its consequences, that we've lived through for the last 30 years,' he says. 'It's time for a reckoning.'

Glasman's City odyssey began in 2000 when he joined the opposition to plans to demolish part of Spitalfields Market, which adjoins the City. He advised campaigners to apply for a planning review just before building was due to start. Usually such delays stop developments in their tracks because companies cannot afford to pay workers to do nothing. But not in this case. 'The work was halted while there was a review, and I was amazed that all the workers there were paid, everything was fine,' he says. 'I couldn't understand where they money came from for millions of pounds of idle workers. I looked into it and realised it was the City of London that was funding the project.'

The Lord Mayor, Glasman discovered, has at his disposal the City Cash, a fund which generates £200m in interest alone. But no one knows the real size of the City's assets because it's never been in debt, and never taken a loan. Even Parliament is not entitled to ask. 'It was at that point I began to realise I was dealing with something strange and outside my experience,' he says. 'Both the political and academic person in me realise this was more interesting that I ever expected.'

For 900 years the City has eluded control by the British State, says Glasman. William the Conqueror overwhelmed the rest of England but 'came friendly' to the City. Charles the First attempted to send the army into the City and precipitated the Civil War. The City chartered the Empire-building East India and Hudson's Bay Companies. It committed treason by supporting George Washington in the American War of Independence and brokered the peace. No government since Charles the Second - barring the symbolic banning of City banquets after the Second World War by Attlee - has made any attempt to interfere with the City's privileges, he says.

Nowadays, its role is assumed to be largely ceremonial. But quaint medieval trappings mask real, undiluted power, says Glasman. The Lord Mayor may wave to the crowds each November as he processes in a state coach to pledge allegiance to the Crown. But he is also a global lobbyist for the UK financial sector, spending a third of the year overseas. This 'non-political' figure is, according to the Corporation of London, treated as a Cabinet level minister abroad, as he expounds the "values of liberalisation" and opens markets for City businesses.

At home, the City possesses the Remembrancer, the oldest lobbyist in the world, dating from the 14th century. He is paid by the Corporation to lobby government and Parliament. He has, in the words of the Corporation,' day to day contact with officials in government departments responsible for developing government policy' as well as a role in the drafting of legislation. He has a seat behind the Speaker in the House of Commons and has the power to enter the chamber and brief MPs during debates.

Glasman believes the fruit of this influence has been the relentless promotion of the financial sector at the expense of the rest of the British economy, and the progressive freeing of finance from regulation. The City funded events, hosted meals and underwrote think tanks in order to persuade the Thatcher government to introduce the 'Big Bang', which ended national regulation of capital flows. It pushed for privatisation in policy papers and lobbying. It helped ensure that the Financial Services Authority's constitution did not 'discourage the launch of new financial products' and 'avoided erecting regulatory barriers.'

'Over a period of 500 years the City has supported deregulation at every turn', states Glasman. At the time of the crash regulations in the City of London were softer than they were on Wall Street. 'The consequences of this are massive,' he says. 'You had fraudulent products - the cause of the crash - debt being repackaged as an asset and then being used as leverage. The assets they held and credit they generated were on a ratio of 50-1. There was no effective regulation of this, no effective oversight.'

This year, to his surprise, the Corporation started answering Glasman's letters for the first time. Then in June, they agreed to meet him and London Citizens. He senses apprehension. 'They have been exposed by the bailout', he says. 'They have refused more than ten years of requests from us and suddenly they agree to meet. I think they are concerned that the political parties will move to a more manufacturing, less financially-based economy.'

It is a grudging relationship. Corporation officials have walked out of meetings only to return ten minutes later. None of London Citizens' demands - a living wage for the City's other workforce of security guards, cleaners and cooks , the transfer of assets to build affordable housing and the 20 per cent interest cap - is close to being accepted. But Glasman's ultimate ambition would probably have the Lord Mayor reaching for his pearl-encrusted ceremonial sword.

The Square Mile is a city within a city. London's other Mayor, Boris Johnson, has no jurisdiction over the capital's thirty-third borough, which even boasts its own police force. And while Johnson has to answer questions in Parliament each year, the Prime Minister and Chancellor - in their annual Guildhall and Mansion House speeches - both come to the City to justify how they are serving the interests of finance.

The City may have a population smaller than Norwich in the 9th century but the Corporation towers above, in influence and wealth, any other institution of municipal government in the capital.

As Glasman puts it, 'There is the City of London but London was originally called the London County Council, then the Greater London Council. Now it called the Greater London Authority. And it has no status at all. While the City is a commune, autonomous of government, the GLA is a more akin to an elected quango, subordinate to the state.'

Glasman wants a single London Mayor, based in the Mansion House and an all London Parliament in the Guildhall. In this, he says, he is merely trying to make good the attempt by Charles the First in 1632 to unify London by asking the City to extend civic rights to thousands of refugees from enclosure in Whitechapel, Clerkenwell and Southwark. The City refused. Now Glasman think it's time to ask again.' I don't want to see the Corporation of London abolished, but expanded,' he says.

One London government would mean the City's assets - its funds and global property portfolio, thought to encompass substantial parts of London, New York, Hong Kong and Sydney - would pass to the population of the capital. The City has never published an inventory of its assets but they generate £600 million a year in interest; Glasman says the chair of the corporation's finance once told him the full amount was 'truly colossal'. Such a transfer of wealth would mean a draining of its influence. 'The City's power would be diminished,' says Glasman, 'and the financial sector would have to work with the same rules as everyone else, through the British Bankers Association, for example.'

It's not hard to see why the City would regard this as the kind of nightmare of expropriation thought to have passed safely into history with the Berlin Wall. But Glasman's reputation as a Marxist in misplaced. He is director of the faith and citizenship programme at London Metropolitan University, and has joined forces with London Citizens, an alliance of faith groups, schools and trade union branches, inspired by the US community organising movement that trained the young Barack Obama. And while he does confess an intellectual allegiance to an émigré economist who settled in England, it is isn't Karl Marx. Glasman's main debt is to Karl Polanyi, whose work The Great Transformation sought to explain the collapse in the nineteenth century liberal economy into depression and war. Markets turn both people and nature into commodities, with consequences lethal to both, argued Polanyi, and they needed protection in a regulated economy.

In fact Glasman espouses a 'very conservative socialism' rooted in family, the work ethic and mutualism. He considers family life and faith institutions as 'huge moral resources' in resisting capitalism. 'You need faith communities, unions, families, local people with long-term relationships with each other, trying to live their lives without being commodified', he says. 'But for the Left the minute you mention family and faith, you are automatically considered to be reactionary'.

Yet beneath his conservatism lurk some very radical proposals. The problem with the bail out, he says, is it did not change the banks' corporate governance and the same irresponsible interests are still dominant. Inspired by the co-determination model of the West German economy after the Second World War and the original ideals of Solidarity in Poland, he believes in a new balance of power in the way companies are run. All institutions, public and private, with more than fifty workers, should be governed by boards made up of equal representatives of owners, workers and the locality in which they are located.

Glasman has grouped these ideas under the rubric of Blue Labour, in contrast to the Red Toryism of 'progressive Conservative' Philip Blond. He will present them to a seminar at Number 10 in February, that will be attended backbench thinkers Jon Cruddas and James Purnell, as well as energy secretary Ed Miliband. 'For the first time leading Labour politicians are listening', Glasman remarks.

Glasman expects a 'shabby compromise' with the powers that be. But he is determined not to let the Corporation of London off the hook. 'Everything depends on how we narrate the crash .... Do we narrate it as just one of those things, say we depend on financial services for our wealth and get on with it, or do we narrate it as the culmination of a catastrophic period of English history, where we've become politically powerless, where work has been degraded, where the pressure is on every individual to sell themselves to make ends meet, to pursue short-term financial ends rather than the common good? And that now has to change.'

•

[vanlose kid]

re the title of the thread: one thing that many of lose sight of or pass over is the "interesting" and curious fact that the City of London is in fact a tax haven. it is not a part of the UK, nor of England.

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Welcome to London, the onshore tax haven
Overseas billionaires and Brits alike are cashing in on non-domicile status, and a Treasury crackdown has only made things worse, writes Nick Mathiason


Nick Mathiason
The Observer, Sunday 8 July 2007

London, the great global financial centre, has another claim to fame: it has become the fastest growing destination for international tax avoiders. The world's super-rich and an elite cadre of financiers working in the Square Mile are increasingly using non-domicile tax status to sidestep paying tax on their fortunes.

Thanks to 208-year-old laws designed to ensure British colonialists kept their overseas income intact, billionaires are now flocking to London [the City, that is] in rapidly increasing numbers.

Those benefiting from non-dom status have rocketed over the last five years. The Treasury, responding to questions lodged by The Observer under Freedom of Information legislation, confirmed that 112,000 individuals indicated non-dom status in their self-assessment returns in the tax year to April 2005. This is a 74 per cent increase over 2002's figures.

And tax experts confirm that there has been a dramatic surge in claimants in recent months - prompted, ironically, by a Treasury and Inland Revenue crackdown on UK citizens holding offshore accounts.

In March, the Revenue offered an amnesty to Brits avoiding tax offshore. The deal was simple: to escape an investigation, those with money in tax havens would agree to pay backdated tax plus a smaller fine than they would otherwise have been liable for.

But rather than recouping hundreds of millions of pounds in extra tax through the amnesty, the Treasury faces the prospect of losing millions.

'People are telling the Revenue that they meant to sign non-dom forms - that not filling them in was an oversight. The amnesty is pushing people further offshore,' says one tax expert.

The result is that there are more people claiming non-domicile status, putting their money out of reach of the taxman for at least 20 years (the length of time for which the status applies). A senior tax adviser says: 'There has been a rush of people claiming non-dom and the amnesty is one of the main reasons.'

The other factor leading to the increase in non-dom numbers is growing interest from overseas investors in the London property market. Unlike UK citizens, non-doms escape tax on income from property or capital gains.

It is not only the international jet set who claim non-dom status; it is also available to some of the most powerful figures in the City. Talking to fund managers and traders, a picture emerges of a culture in which administrators provide the infrastructure to ensure Square Mile professionals are fast-tracked through the system.

'It's part of the environment,' admits a senior City fund manager. 'My understanding is that it's reasonably prevalent in the City. To be honest, it's seen as one reason why London has continued to be successful as a venue for high-value employees who can be located anywhere in the world. I think it's why a lot of businesses like to be based in London; there's a strong sense that if it was to be removed an element of the [City's] attractiveness would lessen.'

That may be, but the Treasury admitted to The Observer earlier this year that no economic assessment of the benefit non-doms bring to the UK economy has been undertaken. The Treasury has, however, worked out how much money the UK is missing out on as a result of non-dom status, but has blocked the paper's attempt to get that figure. The Treasury has just three people working on its ongoing review of non-dom rules. The review was launched in 2001 and has failed to reach any conclusions.

'The argument for maintaining non-dom status is that it attracts entrepreneurs,' says Vince Cable, the Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesman. 'If it becomes a tax dodge, this is inappropriate - and, more and more, it seems to be the case that this is what it has become.'

Non-domicile status is self-assessed. Forms are easy to download from the web and there are just 19 questions. One tax expert says it is easy to convince the Revenue that a claimant is based overseas, whether it is through a relative or a series of overseas investments. In addition, the Revenue makes very few checks on status.

Many senior City figures qualify for non-dom tax exemptions, including Dominic Murphy, the UK boss of private equity giant KKR. And it is widely thought that the Chancellor's City adviser Sir Ronald Cohen and a large collection of Labour Party donors do too. In the House of Lords, Baroness Gardner of Parkes is a non-dom, though she says she is not 'super-rich'.

Earlier this week, new Chancellor Alistair Darling made it clear that nothing must harm the international pre-eminence of the City and he warned against 'knee jerk' reactions to calls to amend the regulations, though he did not totally rule out reform.

The Inland Revenue says: 'We cannot comment on whether any increase in non-dom applications is prompted by offshore arrangements or is linked to stamp duty avoidance. The latest figure published in Hansard for those who claim non-dom status on their tax returns relates to 20004/05 and is 112,000. We are compiling comparable figures for 20005/06 at the moment and expect a figure to be available later on in the year. We cannot speculate as to whether it will be higher or lower than the 2004/05 figure, nor can we speculate on the reasons behind any increase or decrease.'

But the issue is causing increasing international concern as governments struggle to collect tax. An international taskforce is now set to probe the UK regime and the use of tax havens.

Other critics say the non-dom rule is harmful because it widens the gap between rich and poor, which has increased sharply in the last 10 years. In addition, it is a source of resentment within the City. Two employees can be paid the same amount of money gross, but take home vastly different salaries as a result of the rules.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2007/ju ... .business1

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[vanlose kid]

The City of London Corporation: the state within a state

When people ask - as they often do these days - which is the biggest tax haven in the world, our answer is almost invariably the City of London. The City hosts Britain's largest offshore financial centre and is intimately linked to satellite tax havens across most time zones, ranging from Hong Kong and Singapore in the East, to the British Virgin Islands, the Turks & Caicos Islands, Bermuda, the Cayman Islands and the Bahamas in the West. All of these havens are in some respects the Frankenstein creations of the City, as are the Crown Dependency islands (Guernsey, Isle of Man and Jersey) which are easily accessible in less than one hour by jet from London.

Often called The Square Mile, the City is a geographically defined area of the London metropolis. The City is not a London borough, and unbeknownst to almost everybody outside the UK (and to most British people) it has its own distinctive political representative body, the City of London Corporation, which in addition to holding some rather unusual powers - such as the power to organise its own police force - is probably the most powerful and self-interested political lobby in the world.

Despite being at the heart of the London metropolitan area, the City has a tiny resident population, estimated at 7,800 in 2006. This is because real estate prices are so astronomical that the City is dominated by office blocks. By day the population swells to around 450,000, almost all directly or indirectly employed by the financial sector. This influx of day-time workers plays a crucial role in shaping the politics of the Corporation, since, unlike every other local authority in the UK, voting rights for the 100 elected members of the Corporation's Court of Common Council are given to both individual residents and businesses, with the latter outnumbering the former. Businesses are allocated votes according to a sliding scale determined by employee numbers, so businesses employing fewer than ten people are allocated one vote, whilst a business employing 3,500 staff can cast 79 votes.

Not surprisingly, this electoral system has attracted sharp criticisms. As far back as the 1890s a Royal Commission recommended that the Corporation should be amalgamated into the rest of London's machinery of government, but this was strongly resisted by vested interests, and subsequent reforms have been minimal. The Rough Guide to England is coruscating in its comments on how the Square Mile is governed:

"Nowadays, with its Lord Mayor, its Beadles, Sheriffs and Aldermen, its separate police force and its select electorate of freemen and liverymen, the City of London is an anachronism of the worst kind. The Corporation, which runs the City like a one-party mini-state, is an unreconstructed old boys' network whose medievalist pageantry camouflages the very real power and wealth which it holds."

John McDonnell MP, an economist who has warned for many years about the dangers inherent in Britain's laissez faire attitude towards banking regulation, describes the Corporation as "a group of hangers-on, who create what is known as the best dining club in the City ... a rotten borough."

Unsurprisingly, given the voting strength of banks, insurers, accounting firms and related financial intermediaries, the Common Council is dominated by their class interests. And come hell or high water this class doesn't miss a single opportunity to grab tax breaks and special treatment. In the midst of what may well prove to be the worst financial crash since the 19th Century, Alderman Ian Luder, the current Lord Mayor of London, made a speech to international bankers. An accountant by profession, Mr Luder is a tax specialist, and the real meat of his speech focused on tax policy: or more exactly on resisting any attempt by the UK government to tax the profits generated in London. Here is what he said on the subject:

"There are some indications that the Government has learned not to kill the Golden Goose although it leers at it from time to time."

(his timing is exquisite; given the massive cost to the general public of bailing out this particular golden goose, whose goose one might ask?)

Luder continues:

"Tax exemption for foreign dividends is very good news, as is simplified asset management taxation and stamp duty land tax relief for alternative finance investment bonds.

Most importantly, I would add to that the welcome review of the controversial taxation of Controlled Foreign Companies laws and the promise of a clear move towards a territorial approach to taxing foreign subsidiaries. This is very welcome as it hopefully marks the end of trying to tax companies worldwide profits, a fact which has been the prime cause of the well publicised exodus of a number of headquarters of UK-based international groups.

The Chancellor has the opportunity to create a streamlined, principles based tax regime for foreign profits and to turn the UK into a destination headquarters of choice. We will be encouraging him to do so."

And indeed the Lord Mayor and his feudal entourage, plus the cheerleaders of the financial press, and all the king's horses and all the king's men, will never cease in their efforts to encourage the Chancellor to continue to give the City endless tax breaks, not to mention the 'light-touch' regulation which has contributed to the City's status as the big daddy of all tax havens and the largest offshore financial centre.

The City of London Corporation ranks as a political power without rival in Britain, possibly in the world. It has used its power to exert enormous political influence to resist regulation and extract tax exemption. It has fostered criminality by ensuring that the City ranks amongst the least accountable of financial centres on the face of the earth. Eva Joly, the indefatigable examining magistrate who investigated the Elf-Aquitaine scandal, singled out London as the tax haven she found particularly obstructive to investigators: ‘The City of London, that state within a state which has never transmitted even the smallest piece of usable evidence to a foreign magistrate’ (quote taken from Poisoned Wells by TJN's Nick Shaxson)

Can things change? Read this new Guardian Article, Labour candidates challenge City bankers' elite that runs Square Mile.

"Labour is to fight to break the grip of a bankers' elite controlling the City of London by putting up for the first time a slate of party candidates to run the Corporation of London."

A new challenge for the City? Do turkeys vote for Christmas? The likelihood of bankers and financial intermediaries electing representatives capable of achieving even the mildest of reforms, let alone the wholesale changes required to make the City responsive to public interest are close to zero.

And the chances of the UK government taking active steps to rein in the City's powers and privileges are also close to zero, since this government and its predecessors, have been almost wholly captive to the interests of financial capitalism. How right Michael Heseltine was when he quipped - in the context of John Smith's efforts to woo the City - that "never have so many crustaceans died in vain." The celebrated Prawn Cocktail Offensive marked the end of the Labour Party and the birth of New Capital.

Given the high degree of political party dependence on funding from City interests; given the unhealthy revolving door between front-bench posts and City boardrooms; given the endless barrage of special interest pleadings from "independent" think tanks and financial journalists with close links to City institutions; given the deep-rooted belief that what is good for the City is good for Britain, we can expect to see business as usual for the foreseeable future.

http://taxjustice.blogspot.com/2009/02/ ... ithin.html

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[vanlose kid]

LSE holding a public lecture in february, for anyone interested in the vicinity:

Department of Law public lecture

Date: Tuesday 1 February 2011
Time: 6.30-8pm
Venue: Hong Kong Theatre, Clement House
Speakers: Dr Maurice Glasman, Nicholas Shaxson

The City of London is an offshore island inside the British nation state, floating partly free from the democratic rules and restraints that bind the rest of us and fed by a network of tax havens around the world. Nicholas Shaxson and Maurice Glasman look at how this secretive network emerged and came to underpin the City's fearsome political and economic powers today.

Maurice Glasman, recently appointed Labour Peer and Reader in Political Theory at London Metropolitan University. He is the author of Unnecessary Suffering.

Nicholas Shaxson is the author of Treasure Islands: tax havens and the men who stole the world (Bodley Head) and Poisoned Wells, the Dirty Politics of African Oil, an associate fellow of the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) and an
experienced journalist.

This event is free and open to all with no ticket required. Entry is on a first come, first served basis. For any queries email events@lse.ac.uk or call 020 7955 6043.

Media queries: please contact the Press Office if you would like to reserve a press seat or have a media query about this event, email pressoffice@lse.ac.uk

http://www2.lse.ac.uk/publicEvents/even ... 0vHKT.aspx

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[vanlose kid]

Revealed: 50% of Tory funds come from City
Donations from the financial sector have risen steeply since David Cameron became leader of the Conservative party

Nicholas Watt and Jill Treanor
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 8 February 2011 22.00 GMT

In 2005, when David Cameron became Tory leader, the City gave the party £2.7m, or 25% of its funds. That figure rose to £11.4m in 2010. Photograph: Michel Euler/AP

Financiers in the City of London provided more than 50% of the funding for the Tories last year, new research revealed last night, prompting claims that the party is in thrall to the banks.

A study by the Bureau for Investigative Journalism has found that the City accounted for £11.4m of Tory funding – 50.79% of its total haul – in 2010, a general election year. This compared with £2.7m, or 25% of its funding, in 2005, when David Cameron became party leader.

The research also shows that nearly 60 donors gave more than £50,000 to the Tories last year, entitling each of them to a face-to-face meeting with leading members of the party up to and including Cameron.

The study shows the impact that Michael Spencer has had on party funding. He was appointed by Cameron as Tory treasurer in an attempt to reduce the influence of Lord Ashcroft, the party's former deputy chairman. Spencer was asked by Cameron to increase the number of relatively small donations of £50,000 to curb the influence of large donors such as Ashcroft, and for these smaller donations the City was place to look.

But there were still big City donations last year. David "Spotty" Rowland gave more than £4m. Stanley Fink, a hedge fund manager who was appointed the Tory treasurer last year in succession to Spencer, gave £1.9m while George Magan gave £485,000. Magan was also given a peerage.

The research comes at an awkward time for the coalition. Yesterday, George Osborne put an extra £800m tax on bank balance sheets for this year, increasing the bank levy from £1.7bn to £2.5bn. The move was immediately denounced by unions as being politically motivated, coming as it did just hours before Osborne's first encounter with the new shadow chancellor, Ed Balls, in the Commons.

In parliament, Balls lambasted Osborne for making the announcement about the levy at breakfast time, rather than in next month's budget, describing it as a "mini budget". He also said that even without the increased bank levy, Osborne had cut tax for banks this year because he had not reintroduced Labour's bank bonus tax and was also cutting corporation tax.

Osborne, however, was adamant that banks would pay more tax under the coalition than they would have done under Labour and insisted that he would not sign an agreement with the banks until he thought he had a "good" deal.

Meanwhile, the government and the banks are continuing talks over an agreement on bankers' bonuses and lending. An agreement on the so-called Project Merlin is to be announced within the "next week", Treasury officials said.

In response to the news of City donations to the party, John Cryer, a member of the Treasury select committee, said: "With over half of Conservative party funds coming from the City, it's no wonder this Tory-led government is letting the banks off the hook. George Osborne is giving the banks a tax cut compared to last year and is refusing to adopt Labour's plan to repeat last year's £3.5bn bank bonus tax as well as the bank levy. Even with yesterday's panic announcement the Tory-led government is taking less from the banks than the Labour government did last year. And there is still no sign of a deal on increased bank lending, greater transparency and restraint on bonuses. People will now suspect that the real reason why George Osborne has been so soft is that he cannot afford to upset his paymasters."

A Tory party spokesman said: "On the very day that the chancellor raised another £800m in tax from bankers – having already introduced the toughest rules on bankers' pay anywhere in the developed world – it beggars belief that anyone could claim that donors to the Conservatives are influencing policy. It would be more pertinent to ask why Labour continue to allow their policy to be dictated by the unions, who provide 80% of their funds."

Labour saw its business donations plummet after Tony Blair left and Gordon Brown struggled in the polls. Unions account for most of the party's funding.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011 ... ial-sector

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[gnosticheresy_2]

http://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/Corporat ... whatis.htm

The City of London provides local government services for the financial and commercial heart of Britain, the 'Square Mile'. It is committed to supporting and promoting 'The City' as the world leader in international finance and business services through the policies it pursues and the high standard of services it provides. Its responsibilities extend far beyond the City boundaries in that it also provides a host of additional facilities for the benefit of the nation. These range from open spaces such as Epping Forest and Hampstead Heath to the famous Barbican Arts Centre.

Download the Supporting and Promoting the City brochure (PDF 900kb) for further information.

The City of London combines its ancient traditions and ceremonial functions with the role of a modern and efficient local authority, looking after the needs of its residents, businesses and over 320,000 people who come to work in the 'Square Mile' every day. Among local authorities the City of London is unique; not only is it the oldest in the country but it operates on a non-party political basis through its Lord Mayor, Aldermen and members of the Court of Common Council. The Lord Mayor in particular plays an important diplomatic role with his overseas visits and functions at the historic Guildhall and Mansion House for visiting heads of State.

In addition to the usual services provided by a local authority such as housing, refuse collection, education, social services, environmental health and town planning, the City of London performs a number of very special functions. It runs its own police force and the nation's Central Criminal Court, the Old Bailey. It provides five Thames bridges, runs the quarantine station at Heathrow Airport and is the Port Health Authority for the whole of the Thames tidal estuary. Three premier wholesale food markets ( Billingsgate, Spitalfields and Smithfield) which supply London and the South East with fresh produce also belong to the City of London. Many of these services are funded from the City of London's own investments at no cost to the public.

The City of London is committed to an extensive programme of activities designed to assist its neighbours to combat social deprivation so that they can benefit from the wealth the 'Square Mile' generates. Staff and members of the City of London have, through centuries of careful stewardship, ensured that the 'Square Mile' has continued to thrive. Today's City of London, through its philosophy of sustainable development, aims to share these benefits with future generations of residents, businesses and workers.

The City of London: a unique authority.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_London_Corporation

The corporation is unique among UK local authorities for its continuous legal existence over many centuries, and for having the power to alter its own constitution, which is done by an Act of Common Council.

[wintler2]

Mega-rich family hires the wrong crook to manage their tax dodging and it all turns to shit, but tries to hide behind court orders barring any pulication. Turns into another case of a superinjunction creating 'Streisand Effect' of increased publicity, with the web then subverting legal abuse of power. And The Times is for it! Crazy days, where has Antiaristo got to ..

http://guernseytrustvictims.blogspot.com/2011/04/sunday-times-of-london-editorial.html

SUNDAY TIMES OF LONDON EDITORIAL AGAINST ZAM v CFW & TFW SUPERINJUNCTION INVOLVING CHARLES MARTYN-HEMPHILL SCANDAL CASE
Here's what the Times wrote in their editorial about Justice's Tugendhat's unprecedented assault on Freedom of the Press, Freedom of Speech, and Freedom of the Internet and Freedom to speak to your elected representative:

THE SUNDAY TIMES OF LONDON
London, April 2 2011

“What did the President know,” the Senate committee investigating the Watergate scandal asked of Richard Nixon, “and when did he know it?” Were the same question asked of the British public today, the answer far too often would be “too little, if they were allowed to know it at all”.

At every turn the public’s right to know is being chiselled away by courts who prize privacy too readily over public discourse and free speech.

The menace of the SUPERINJUNCTION — a gag that has been rendered all the more toxic for the media being prevented from reporting that it even exists — was given a novel and sinister twist this week when a rich financier made British legal history by winning anonymity in a libel case.

The man, who can be identified only as Mr ZAM, claims that he has been defamed, and threatened with blackmail, by two relatives in a row over a multimillion-pound family trust. This state sanctioned secrecy effectively grants anonymity to alleged blackmailers that they would not enjoy had Mr ZAM pursued his case (ZAM v CFW and TFW) in the criminal court.

Such is the inflation in the currency of secrecy that these twin injunctions have been joined by a gagging order so restrictive that it has been dubbed a HYPERINJUNCTION. It is a gag that seeks to prevent its subject discussing his case not just with journalists or lawyers (other than his own), but with any MP, lest the Member use parliamentary privilege to make the matter public. This amounts not only to a brake on free speech, but also a contempt of Parliament. Many question whether it is even lawful to bar a citizen from speaking to his or her MP.

Tackling this NEW SINISTER ASSAULT ON THE EROSION OF OPEN JUSTICE AND FREE DEBATE has been made more pressing after the recent use of parliamentary privilege by the Liberal Democrat MP John Hemming to identify Sir Fred Goodwin, the former chief executive of Royal Bank of Scotland, as having obtained a superinjunction.

IT IS BEYOND TIME THAT THIS TIDE OF SECRECY WAS REVERSED. Even Donald Rumsfeld would be shocked at how the British public are being kept in the dark. As judges grant more super-injunctions to frisky millionaire footballers, high-flying bankers and tycoons that enable these men (and they are mostly men) to shield their affairs from the public’s gaze — for no better reason than that it would embarrass them, or might dent their sponsorship deals were their affairs to come to light — the public not only don’t know who these people are, they don’t even know they don’t know.

We at The Times do know. But we are not allowed to let you in on the secret. So today we can publish a breakdown compiled by us of 30 cases of privacy injunctions granted by judges, but without identifying the applicants. Who knew that a right to privacy, spawned in the family courts to protect children, would come to be exploited by powerful bankers, footballers and celebrities to stifle public discourse and public understanding?

When recently giving the annual lecture to the Judicial Studies Board, Lord Neuberger of Abbotsbury, the Master of the Rolls, acknowledged concerns about how superinjunctions had developed into an “entirely secret form of procedure”. The courts have pitched themselves against the free press, the rights of Parliament and, worst of all, sided with the privileged few against the public. Injunctions; superinjunctions; now hyperinjunctions.

A handful of judges, unelected and uncontested, are creating a culture of secrecy in Britain.//

ALSO ON SUNDAY THE GUARDIAN WEIGHED IN AGAIN CALLING FOR AN END TO SUPERINJUNCTIONS LIKE THE CHARLES MARTYN-HEMPHILL ZAM v CFW & TFW SCANDAL HYPERINJUNCTION/SUPERINJUNCTION:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree ... njunctions

[vanlose kid]

started a thread with this, could've posted it in quite a few threads, but am adding it on to this one here...

The Real Housewives of Wall Street
Why is the Federal Reserve forking over $220 million in bailout money to the wives of two Morgan Stanley bigwigs?


America has two national budgets, one official, one unofficial. The official budget is public record and hotly debated: Money comes in as taxes and goes out as jet fighters, DEA agents, wheat subsidies and Medicare, plus pensions and bennies for that great untamed socialist menace called a unionized public-sector workforce that Republicans are always complaining about. According to popular legend, we're broke and in so much debt that 40 years from now our granddaughters will still be hooking on weekends to pay the medical bills of this year's retirees from the IRS, the SEC and the Department of Energy.

Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail?

Most Americans know about that budget. What they don't know is that there is another budget of roughly equal heft, traditionally maintained in complete secrecy. After the financial crash of 2008, it grew to monstrous dimensions, as the government attempted to unfreeze the credit markets by handing out trillions to banks and hedge funds. And thanks to a whole galaxy of obscure, acronym-laden bailout programs, it eventually rivaled the "official" budget in size — a huge roaring river of cash flowing out of the Federal Reserve to destinations neither chosen by the president nor reviewed by Congress, but instead handed out by fiat by unelected Fed officials using a seemingly nonsensical and apparently unknowable methodology.

Now, following an act of Congress that has forced the Fed to open its books from the bailout era, this unofficial budget is for the first time becoming at least partially a matter of public record. Staffers in the Senate and the House, whose queries about Fed spending have been rebuffed for nearly a century, are now poring over 21,000 transactions and discovering a host of outrages and lunacies in the "other" budget. It is as though someone sat down and made a list of every individual on earth who actually did not need emergency financial assistance from the United States government, and then handed them the keys to the public treasure. The Fed sent billions in bailout aid to banks in places like Mexico, Bahrain and Bavaria, billions more to a spate of Japanese car companies, more than $2 trillion in loans each to Citigroup and Morgan Stanley, and billions more to a string of lesser millionaires and billionaires with Cayman Islands addresses. "Our jaws are literally dropping as we're reading this," says Warren Gunnels, an aide to Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. "Every one of these transactions is outrageous."

Wall Street's Big Win

But if you want to get a true sense of what the "shadow budget" is all about, all you have to do is look closely at the taxpayer money handed over to a single company that goes by a seemingly innocuous name: Waterfall TALF Opportunity. At first glance, Waterfall's haul doesn't seem all that huge — just nine loans totaling some $220 million, made through a Fed bailout program. That doesn't seem like a whole lot, considering that Goldman Sachs alone received roughly $800 billion in loans from the Fed. But upon closer inspection, Waterfall TALF Opportunity boasts a couple of interesting names among its chief investors: Christy Mack and Susan Karches.

Christy is the wife of John Mack, the chairman of Morgan Stanley. Susan is the widow of Peter Karches, a close friend of the Macks who served as president of Morgan Stanley's investment-banking division. Neither woman appears to have any serious history in business, apart from a few philanthropic experiences. Yet the Federal Reserve handed them both low-interest loans of nearly a quarter of a billion dollars through a complicated bailout program that virtually guaranteed them millions in risk-free income.

The technical name of the program that Mack and Karches took advantage of is TALF, short for Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility. But the federal aid they received actually falls under a broader category of bailout initiatives, designed and perfected by Federal Reserve chief Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, called "giving already stinking rich people gobs of money for no fucking reason at all." If you want to learn how the shadow budget works, follow along. This is what welfare for the rich looks like.

In August 2009, John Mack, at the time still the CEO of Morgan Stanley, made an interesting life decision. Despite the fact that he was earning the comparatively low salary of just $800,000, and had refused to give himself a bonus in the midst of the financial crisis, Mack decided to buy himself a gorgeous piece of property — a 107-year-old limestone carriage house on the Upper East Side of New York, complete with an indoor 12-car garage, that had just been sold by the prestigious Mellon family for $13.5 million. Either Mack had plenty of cash on hand to close the deal, or he got some help from his wife, Christy, who apparently bought the house with him.

The Macks make for an interesting couple. John, a Lebanese-American nicknamed "Mack the Knife" for his legendary passion for firing people, has one of the most recognizable faces on Wall Street, physically resembling a crumpled, half-burned baked potato with a pair of overturned furry horseshoes for eyebrows. Christy is thin, blond and rich — a sort of still-awake Sunny von Bulow with hobbies. Her major philanthropic passion is endowments for alternative medicine, and she has attained the level of master at Reiki, the Japanese practice of "palm healing." The only other notable fact on her public résumé is that her sister was married to Charlie Rose.

It's hard to imagine a pair of people you would less want to hand a giant welfare check to — yet that's exactly what the Fed did. Just two months before the Macks bought their fancy carriage house in Manhattan, Christy and her pal Susan launched their investment initiative called Waterfall TALF. Neither seems to have any experience whatsoever in finance, beyond Susan's penchant for dabbling in thoroughbred racehorses. But with an upfront investment of $15 million, they quickly received $220 million in cash from the Fed, most of which they used to purchase student loans and commercial mortgages. The loans were set up so that Christy and Susan would keep 100 percent of any gains on the deals, while the Fed and the Treasury (read: the taxpayer) would eat 90 percent of the losses. Given out as part of a bailout program ostensibly designed to help ordinary people by kick-starting consumer lending, the deals were a classic heads-I-win, tails-you-lose investment.

So how did the government come to address a financial crisis caused by the collapse of a residential-mortgage bubble by giving the wives of a couple of Morgan Stanley bigwigs free money to make essentially risk-free investments in student loans and commercial real estate? The answer is: by degrees. The history of the bailout era reads like one of those awful stories about what happens when a long-dormant criminal compulsion goes unchecked. The Peeping Tom next door stares through a few bathroom windows, doesn't get caught, and decides to break in and steal a pair of panties. Next thing you know, he's upgraded to homemade dungeons, tri-state serial rampages and throwing cheerleaders into a panel truck.

It was the same with the bailouts. They started out small, with the government throwing a few hundred billion in public money to prop up genuinely insolvent firms like Bear Stearns and AIG. Then came TARP and a few other programs that were designed to stave off bank failures and dispose of the toxic mortgage-backed securities that were a root cause of the financial crisis. But before long, the Fed began buying up every distressed investment on Wall Street, even those that were in no danger of widespread defaults: commercial real estate loans, credit- card loans, auto loans, student loans, even loans backed by the Small Business Administration. What started off as a targeted effort to stop the bleeding in a few specific trouble spots became a gigantic feeding frenzy. It was "free money for shit," says Barry Ritholtz, author of Bailout Nation. "It turned into 'Give us your crap that you can't get rid of otherwise.' "

The impetus for this sudden manic expansion of the bailouts was a masterful bluff by Wall Street executives. Once the money started flowing from the Federal Reserve, the executives began moaning to their buddies at the Fed, claiming that they were suddenly afraid of investing in anything — student loans, car notes, you name it — unless their profits were guaranteed by the state. "You ever watch soccer, where the guy rolls six times to get a yellow card?" says William Black, a former federal bank regulator who teaches economics and law at the University of Missouri. "That's what this is. If you have power and connections, they will give you a freebie deal — if you're good at whining."

This is where TALF fits into the bailout picture. Created just after Barack Obama's election in November 2008, the program's ostensible justification was to spur more consumer lending, which had dried up in the midst of the financial crisis. But instead of lending directly to car buyers and credit-card holders and students — that would have been socialism! — the Fed handed out a trillion dollars to banks and hedge funds, almost interest-free. In other words, the government lent taxpayer money to the same assholes who caused the crisis, so that they could then lend that money back out on the market virtually risk-free, at an enormous profit.

Cue your Billy Mays voice, because wait, there's more! A key aspect of TALF is that the Fed doles out the money through what are known as non-recourse loans. Essentially, this means that if you don't pay the Fed back, it's no big deal. The mechanism works like this: Hedge Fund Goon borrows, say, $100 million from the Fed to buy crappy loans, which are then transferred to the Fed as collateral. If Hedge Fund Goon decides not to repay that $100 million, the Fed simply keeps its pile of crappy securities and calls everything even.

This is the deal of a lifetime. Think about it: You borrow millions, buy a bunch of crap securities and stash them on the Fed's books. If the securities lose money, you leave them on the Fed's lap and the public eats the loss. But if they make money, you take them back, cash them in and repay the funds you borrowed from the Fed. "Remember that crazy guy in the commercials who ran around covered in dollar bills shouting, 'The government is giving out free money!' " says Black. "As crazy as he was, this is making it real."

This whole setup — in which millionaires and billionaires gambled on mountains of dangerous securities, with taxpayers providing the stake and assuming almost all of the risk — is the reason that it's insanely premature for Wall Street to claim that the bailouts have actually made money for the government. We simply can't make that determination until the final bill comes in on all the dicey securities we financed during the bailout feeding frenzy.

In the case of Waterfall TALF Opportunity, here's what we know: The company was founded in June 2009 with $14.87 million of investment capital, money that likely came from Christy Mack and Susan Karches. The two Wall Street wives then used the $220 million they got from the Fed to buy up a bunch of securities, including a large pool of commercial mortgages managed by Credit Suisse, a company John Mack once headed. Those securities were valued at $253.6 million, though the Fed refuses to explain how it arrived at that estimate. And here's the kicker: Of the $220 million the two wives got from the Fed, roughly $150 million had not been paid back as of last fall — meaning that you and I are still on the hook for most of whatever the Wall Street spouses bought on their government-funded shopping spree.

The public has no way of knowing how much Christy Mack and Susan Karches earned on these transactions, because the Fed has repeatedly declined to provide any information about how it priced the individual securities bought as part of programs like TALF. In the Waterfall deal, for instance, we know the Fed pledged some $14 million against a block of securities called "Credit Suisse Commercial Mortgage Trust Series 2007-C2" — but that data is meaningless without knowing how many units were bought. It's like saying the Fed gave Waterfall $14 million to buy cars. Did Waterfall pay $5,000 per car, or $500,000? We have no idea. "There's no way of validating or invalidating the Fed's process in TALF without this pricing information," says Gary Aguirre, a former SEC official who was fired years ago after he tried to interview John Mack in an insider-trading case.

In early April, in an attempt to learn exactly how much Mack and Karches made on the TALF deals, Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa wrote a letter to Waterfall asking 21 detailed questions about the transactions. In addition, Sen. Sanders has personally asked Fed chief Bernanke to provide more complete information on the TALF loans given not only to Christy Mack but to gazillionaires like former Miami Dolphins owner H. Wayne Huizenga and hedge-fund shark John Paulson. But Bernanke bluntly refused to provide the information — and the Fed has similarly stonewalled other oversight agencies, including the General Accounting Office and TARP's special inspector general.

Christy Mack and Susan Karches did not respond to requests for comments for this story. But even without more information about the loans they got from the Fed, we know that TALF wasn't the only risk-free money being handed over to Wall Street. During the financial crisis, the Fed routinely made billions of dollars in "emergency" loans to big banks at near-zero interest. Many of the banks then turned around and used the money to buy Treasury bonds at higher interest rates — essentially loaning the money back to the government at an inflated rate. "People talk about how these were loans that were paid back," says a congressional aide who has studied the transactions. "But when the state is lending money at zero percent and the banks are turning around and lending that money back to the state at three percent, how is that different from just handing rich people money?"

Those kinds of deals were the essence of the bailout — and the vast mountains of near-zero government cash turned companies facing bankruptcy into monstrous profit machines. In 2008 and 2009, while Christy Mack was busy getting her little TALF loans for $220 million, her husband's bank hauled in $2 trillion in emergency Fed loans. During the same period, Goldman borrowed nearly $800 billion. Shortly afterward, the two banks reported a combined annual profit of $14.5 billion.

As crazy as it is to lend to banks at near zero percent and borrow back from them at three percent, one could at least argue that the policy may have aided American companies by providing banks more cash to lend. But how do you explain the host of other bailout transactions now being examined by Congress? Like the Fed's massive purchases of securities in foreign automakers, including BMW, Volkswagen, Honda, Mitsubishi and Nissan? Or the nearly $5 billion in cheap credit the Fed extended to Toyota and Mitsubishi? Sure, those companies have factories and dealerships in the U.S. — but does it really make sense to give them free cash at the same time taxpayers were being asked to bail out Chrysler and GM? Seems a little crazy to fund the competition of the very automakers you're trying to rescue.

And then there are the bailout deals that make no sense at all. Republicans go mad over spending on health care and school for Mexican illegals. So why aren't they flipping out over the $9.6 billion in loans the Fed made to the Central Bank of Mexico? How do we explain the $2.2 billion in loans that went to the Korea Development Bank, the biggest state bank of South Korea, whose sole purpose is to promote development in South Korea? And at a time when America is borrowing from the Middle East at interest rates of three percent, why did the Fed extend $35 billion in loans to the Arab Banking Corporation of Bahrain at interest rates as low as one quarter of one point?

Even more disturbing, the major stakeholder in the Bahrain bank is none other than the Central Bank of Libya, which owns 59 percent of the operation. In fact, the Bahrain bank just received a special exemption from the U.S. Treasury to prevent its assets from being frozen in accord with economic sanctions. That's right: Muammar Qaddafi received more than 70 loans from the Federal Reserve, along with the Real Housewives of Wall Street.

Perhaps the most irritating facet of all of these transactions is the fact that hundreds of millions of Fed dollars were given out to hedge funds and other investors with addresses in the Cayman Islands. Many of those addresses belong to companies with American affiliations — including prominent Wall Street names like Pimco, Blackstone and . . . Christy Mack. Yes, even Waterfall TALF Opportunity is an offshore company. It's one thing for the federal government to look the other way when Wall Street hotshots evade U.S. taxes by registering their investment companies in the Cayman Islands. But subsidizing tax evasion? Giving it a federal bailout? What the fuck?

As America girds itself for another round of lunatic political infighting over which barely-respirating social program or urgently necessary federal agency must have their budgets permanently sacrificed to the cause of billionaires being able to keep their third boats in the water, it's important to point out just how scarce money isn't in certain corners of the public-spending universe. In the coming months, when you watch Republican congressional stooges play out the desperate comedy of solving America's deficit problems by making fewer photocopies of proposed bills, or by taking an ax to budgetary shrubberies like NPR or the SEC, remember Christy Mack and her fancy new carriage house. There is no belt-tightening on the other side of the tracks. Just a free lunch that never ends.


http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/ne ... t-20110411

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[Stephen Morgan]

http://stuartsyvret.blogspot.com/

Money talks.

And its vocabulary has long been deeply understood by generations of English gentlemen – no matter what masking dialect has been used as cipher.
Thus, no matter that Empire has waxed and waned – and colonial rackets and adventures have been planted, blossomed and withered these passing few centuries – the British elite have been careful to maintain a few quasi-legal jurisdictions around the world – micro-realms of largely fictitious constitutional basis – that are the protectorates and dependencies of power back in London.
For as long as the local elites of these tiny islands continue to provide a loyal service to the rich British elites – for example, enabling them to dodge taxation, and to provide an environment in which they can discreetly engage in their predilections for sodomising orphans and sea cadets – then the miniature oligarchs of places like Jersey are guaranteed protection. No matter just how nakedly lawless their own conduct.

[gnosticheresy_2]

The medieval, unaccountable Corporation of London is ripe for protest

It's the dark heart of Britain, the place where democracy goes to die, immensely powerful, equally unaccountable. But I doubt that one in 10 British people has any idea of what the Corporation of the City of London is and how it works. This could be about to change. Alongside the Church of England, the Corporation is seeking to evict the protesters camped outside St Paul's cathedral. The protesters, in turn, have demanded that it submit to national oversight and control.

What is this thing? Ostensibly it's the equivalent of a local council, responsible for a small area of London known as the Square Mile. But, as its website boasts, "among local authorities the City of London is unique". You bet it is. There are 25 electoral wards in the Square Mile. In four of them, the 9,000 people who live within its boundaries are permitted to vote. In the remaining 21, the votes are controlled by corporations, mostly banks and other financial companies. The bigger the business, the bigger the vote: a company with 10 workers gets two votes, the biggest employers, 79. It's not the workers who decide how the votes are cast, but the bosses, who "appoint" the voters. Plutocracy, pure and simple.

There are four layers of elected representatives in the Corporation: common councilmen, aldermen, sheriffs and the Lord Mayor. To qualify for any of these offices, you must be a freeman of the City of London. To become a freeman you must be approved by the aldermen. You're most likely to qualify if you belong to one of the City livery companies: medieval guilds such as the worshipful company of costermongers, cutpurses and safecrackers. To become a sheriff, you must be elected from among the aldermen by the Livery. How do you join a livery company? Don't even ask.

To become Lord Mayor you must first have served as an alderman and sheriff, and you "must command the support of, and have the endorsement of, the Court of Aldermen and the Livery". You should also be stinking rich, as the Lord Mayor is expected to make a "contribution from his/her private resources towards the costs of the mayoral year." This is, in other words, an official old boys' network. Think of all that Tory huffing and puffing about democratic failings within the trade unions. Then think of their resounding silence about democracy within the City of London.

The current Lord Mayor, Michael Bear, came to prominence within the City as chief executive of the Spitalfields development group, which oversaw a controversial business venture in which the Corporation had a major stake, even though the project lies outside the boundaries of its authority. This illustrates another of the Corporation's unique features. It possesses a vast pool of cash, which it can spend as it wishes, without democratic oversight. As well as expanding its enormous property portfolio, it uses this money to lobby on behalf of the banks.

The Lord Mayor's role, the Corporation's website tells us, is to "open doors at the highest levels" for business, in the course of which he "expounds the values of liberalisation". Liberalisation is what bankers call deregulation: the process that caused the financial crash. The Corporation boasts that it "handle[s] issues in Parliament of specific interest to the City", such as banking reform and financial services regulation. It also conducts "extensive partnership work with think tanks … vigorously promoting the views and needs of financial services." But this isn't the half of it.

As Nicholas Shaxson explains in his fascinating book Treasure Islands, the Corporation exists outside many of the laws and democratic controls which govern the rest of the United Kingdom. The City of London is the only part of Britain over which parliament has no authority. In one respect at least the Corporation acts as the superior body: it imposes on the House of Commons a figure called the remembrancer: an official lobbyist who sits behind the Speaker's chair and ensures that, whatever our elected representatives might think, the City's rights and privileges are protected. The mayor of London's mandate stops at the boundaries of the Square Mile. There are, as if in a novel by China Miéville, two cities, one of which must unsee the other.

Several governments have tried to democratise the City of London but all, threatened by its financial might, have failed. As Clement Attlee lamented, "over and over again we have seen that there is in this country another power than that which has its seat at Westminster." The City has exploited this remarkable position to establish itself as a kind of offshore state, a secrecy jurisdiction which controls the network of tax havens housed in the UK's crown dependencies and overseas territories. This autonomous state within our borders is in a position to launder the ill-gotten cash of oligarchs, kleptocrats, gangsters and drug barons. As the French investigating magistrate Eva Joly remarked, it "has never transmitted even the smallest piece of usable evidence to a foreign magistrate". It deprives the United Kingdom and other nations of their rightful tax receipts.

It has also made the effective regulation of global finance almost impossible. Shaxson shows how the absence of proper regulation in London allowed American banks to evade the rules set by their own government. AIG's wild trading might have taken place in the US, but the unit responsible was regulated in the City. Lehman Brothers couldn't get legal approval for its off-balance sheet transactions in Wall Street, so it used a London law firm instead. No wonder priests are resigning over the plans to evict the campers. The Church of England is not just working with Mammon; it's colluding with Babylon.

If you've ever dithered over the question of whether the UK needs a written constitution, dither no longer. Imagine the clauses required to preserve the status of the Corporation. "The City of London will remain outside the authority of parliament. Domestic and foreign banks will be permitted to vote as if they were human beings, and their votes will outnumber those cast by real people. Its elected officials will be chosen from people deemed acceptable by a group of medieval guilds …".

The Corporation's privileges could not withstand such public scrutiny. This, perhaps, is one of the reasons why a written constitution in the United Kingdom remains a distant dream. Its power also helps to explain why regulation of the banks is scarcely better than it was before the crash, why there are no effective curbs on executive pay and bonuses and why successive governments fail to act against the UK's dependent tax havens.

But now at last we begin to see it. It happens that the Lord Mayor's Show, in which the Corporation flaunts its ancient wealth and power, takes place on 12 November. If ever there were a pageant that cries out for peaceful protest and dissent, here it is. Expect fireworks – and not just those laid on by the Lord Mayor.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree ... y-medieval

[vanlose kid]

^^

gnostic, i'd just logged on to post that. cheers!

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highlight.

... [size=150]The City of London is the only part of Britain over which parliament has no authority. In one respect at least the Corporation acts as the superior body: it imposes on the House of Commons a figure called the remembrancer: an official lobbyist who sits behind the Speaker's chair and ensures that, whatever our elected representatives might think, the City's rights and privileges are protected...

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[vanlose kid]

just a notice:

Restore Democracy to the Square Mile
Anti-cuts activists have focused on banker greed and tax dodgers (the symptoms). Now it's time to focus on The City itself (the disease). Join us at the Lord Mayor's Show 12th November, as we lay out three concrete demands for democratic reform of the Corporation of London. We will then have an alternative Lord Mayor’s Parade to the Occupation at St. Paul's, where we will acclaim an alternative Lord Mayor for the People, chosen by the democratic will of the Occupation’s General Assembly.

democracy4thecity@gmail.com



http://www.reclaimthecity.org/

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[vanlose kid]

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stone by stone, brick by brick...

Occupy London protest issues demands to democratise City of London

Activists at St Paul's Cathedral call for end to Square Mile's 'unconstitutional power and influence'

Shiv Malik
guardian.co.uk, Friday 28 October 2011 10.07 BST

Activists who have occupied the grounds of London's St Paul's Cathedral have published their first list of demands, calling call for the democratisation of the Corporation of the City of London, the effective local authority which controls the UK's financial centre.

The attack on the square mile which has a series of ancient prerogatives including a "lobbyist" in the House of Commons follows Thursday's resignation of the canon chancellor, Giles Fraser, who also attacked the power of the City in an interview with the Guardian.

The statement has been signed by over half of the hundreds of activists at the Occupy London Stock Exchange protest.

The page-long list of demands says that democratic reform of The City Of London Corporation is "urgently needed" and describes City institutions as "unconstitutional and unfair".

The statement, which has been authored by 17 people over the last six days, also calls for an end to the corporations's own police force and judicial system which affords the square mile vast amounts of freedom to run its own affairs.

"The risk-taking of the banks has made our lives precarious – they are accountable to no one but themselves, unduly influencing government policy across the centuries both at home and abroad. This is not democracy," the statement adds.

The list, which is expected to be ratified before publication at a general meeting at 1.30pm on Friday, also called for:

• An end to business and corporate block-votes in all council elections, which can be used to outvote local residents.

• Abolition of existing "secrecy practices" within the City, and total and transparent reform of its institutions to end corporate tax evasion.

• The decommissioning of the City of London police with officers being brought under the jurisdiction of the Metropolitan police force.

• Abolition of the offices of Lord Mayor of London, the Sheriffs and the Aldermen.

• And a truth and reconciliation commission to examine corruption within the City and its institutions.

The statement has garnered support from authors and Blue Labour thinker Lord Maurice Glasman.

Glasman said: "Until today, the reclamation of the public space around St Paul's by protesters has been confused … It was better theatre than politics and that was frustrating because the backdrop, props and themes were superb."

Glasman said that St Paul's Cross was the site of the most ancient known democratic practice in the UK and it was the most appropriate spot to make a claim for the extension of citizenship.

"By declaring that the point of their protest is the democratisation of London the meaning of the occupation is transformed. It opens a prospect for civic renewal and the challenging of unaccountable power elites.

"The protesters have stumbled upon the source of financial power within the British state. This could get interesting," he added.

Nicholas Shaxson – the author of Treasure Islands, a book about the world of tax evasion – described the demands as "incredibly powerful".

"The City is something that has flown under the radar for so long, people have occasionally noticed the pomp and ceremony of the City but never really grasped what it is. This is a medieval commune dating back 1,000 years which represents the interest of international finance."

Shaxson added: "If you go to the City they will say, 'We're just a poor little local authority with a few thousands souls – don't worry about us.' But their influence runs far and deep both in the UK and overseas and they have supporters all over the place. They're not going to go away any time soon."

In an earlier interview with the Guardian, the St Paul's canon chancellor Giles Fraser said: "A great many people think that something has gone wrong in the City of London and that the wealth generated by the City does not exist for the benefit of us all."

Bryn Phillips, 28, a camp member who works in PR and is a co-author of the statement, said he hoped this would be "the beginning of the restoration of our democracy".

"It was drafted by 17 of us over six days and it has gathered even more signatures since we last spoke. We refuse to be evicted without first landing a blow to the corporation."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/oct/2 ... y-st-pauls

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[gnosticheresy_2]

City of London spending and income: where does the money come from, and where does it go?


What do you know about the City of London? What does it spend its money on and where does it come from?

The authority is in the news as focus shifts to its role in trying to remove the protesters in front of St Paul's Cathedral. It's an odd, 800-year-old body where businesses vote for councillors as well as residents. But it is also a major economic driver, contributing 2.4% to the national income.

Getting hold of the details of what the City spends and receives is not straightforward - it is not like other local authorities.

Firstly, it's a lot smaller. The City only has a 'night-time' resident population of 11,500 - during the working day, it swells to around 316,700.

You can get this digest, which shows exactly how it compares to other local authorities - although I'm not sure how useful it is to compare such a small population to Camden's 202,000 or Lambeth's 337,000 people.

Three funds are associated with the City of London Corporation.

One, the City Fund, goes toward the cost of the City of London's local authority, police authority and port health authority activities. It generates rental and interest income, and like other local authorities, receives grants from central government,

Another fund, the City Bridge Trust, is administered by the City of London to maintain five bridges which cross the Thames into the Square Mile. It is also used for charitable purposes in the greater London area.

A third fund, the so-called 'City's Cash', is a private fund built up over eight centuries. According to the City of London website


it derives its income mainly from property, supplemented by investment earnings

However, while critics of the City of London, such as Nicholas Shaxson, have noted that the total holdings of the City's Cash are around £1bn, they stress that a lack of a detailed breakdown prevents members of the public from determining what exactly it consists. Furthermore, while some details of its income and expenditure are available, Shaxson and others have called for a more detail breakdown. "Has it ever funded free market think-tanks, for example?," he asks.

The figures we can get hold of are the spending over £500 that the government has insisted every local authority publish. This lists every individual transaction made - and we've extracted January to September this year form the City website.

(see article for interactive chart thingy)

It's the best data we can get - there is this strategic budget which details £165.1m in services spending. But, besides the £500 figures, the data is universally in PDFs, which appear to be scans of images. The data below accounts for just over £105m in spending.

It is also the spending on local authority services - and would not include money spent on things outside local government spending, such as lobbying for the financial sector. And it only includes money spent from central government sources - and from the City fund.

The figures give us a rough breakdown of nine months of spending. Here are some of the key facts:

• The top supplier is law firm Clifford Chance, which was paid over £9m
• Another law firm is in the top five - SJ Berwin on £3.8m
• The biggest non-commercial organisations funded are the Museum of London (£1.9m) and the London Symphony Orchestra (£1.6m)
• The top area for spending is 'Central balance sheet', which covers £28,137,330.13. Can any of you help us break this down?

The City also spends £3.7m on roads, £3.5m on the arts and administered £1.147m of housing benefit in the period covered by this data. Plus it also covers a number of interesting areas:

• Barbican arts centre events - £3.3m
• Economic crime directorate - £3.2m
• Spitalfields market - £1.6m
• London Metropolitan archives - £818,019.93
• The Old Bailey - £1m
• Asylum seeker services - £263,191.02
• Counter terrorism - £686,080.84
• Heathrow airport's animal reception centre - £382,092.51
• Public relations - £691,408.73


Confused yet? We need your help too. The full data is below. What can you do with it?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog ... ing-income

I'm quite interested in this line of the income data::

REDACTED PERSONAL DATA £874,460.09