Treasure Islands, Crown Colonies, Empire Tax Havens

[vanlose kid]

The truth about tax havens

What do we really know about tax havens? In an extract from his new book, Nicholas Shaxson explains how they work and why they are so rife with secrecy, corruption and intimidation

Nicholas Shaxson The Guardian, Saturday 8 January 2011


In 2009 I met a former private banker, Beth Krall, to explore a question that had been nagging me: how do bankers who shelter the wealth of gangsters and corrupt politicians justify what they do? We met one Sunday in Washington DC. She had left private banking and joined the non-governmental sector. Dressed in a striking black-and-white coat, she still looked very much the stylish international financier. Aged 47, and with nearly 24 years in the banking business, Krall (not her real name) was still coming to terms with her past life.

Krall's last offshore posting was in the Bahamas, an island archipelago with over 300,000 residents that has been an important offshore centre since the golden age of American organised crime. A few months earlier, a practitioner in the Caymans had warned me to watch out for my personal safety if I went "asking all these questions" in the Bahamas. Krall said she was unsure what might happen to her if she went back, as she was partly breaking the private bankers' code of silence. "I don't want to have concrete shoes put on me," she said without smiling. One reason for her fear was something that had angered her in the first place: so many of the people she dealt with were powerful members of society in their home countries.

Krall took her banking exams straight after school, and then worked for a number of banks before moving to Cititrust in the Bahamas, where she ran evaluations and accounting for their mutual funds business.

From this point, Krall declined to name her employer. She became a client relationship manager with the private banking arm of a well-known international bank in the Bahamas. They worked with what are euphemistically known as managed banks or shell banks, an offshore speciality. These have no real presence where they are incorporated, so they can escape supervision by regulators.

The terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001 prompted the US to legislate against shell banks. A bank in the Bahamas must now employ two senior bankers and keep its books and records there to be judged real enough to do business. "That means a bank maybe with a room or suite in a building, with two people in it – that's a bank now," Krall said. She directed me to the website of a Bahamas-based trust company that will provide you with exactly that: the appearance of being a real bank – including two staff members as directors and a place to keep the books. Such a setup can allow business almost as usual, yet still tick the regulators' boxes.

Krall moved to a big European bank, again as a client relationship manager – in effect, someone who finds wealthy clients and keeps them happy. Trawling for business, she was routinely pointed towards Latin America, where she travelled frequently. "On the immigration form you would write that you were going for pleasure, though your suitcase would be full of business suits and portfolio evaluations, or marketing materials and presentations explaining the advantages of a trust in the Bahamas." The client's name didn't appear on their portfolio evaluation: in fact, the bank would not even record it as the account name. It was nerve-racking, sometimes, going through airports, but she always got through unchallenged.

Despite her growing qualms, Krall ended up working for a boutique Swiss private bank in the Bahamas. This was no ordinary bank, and was the only one where she actually saw a suitcase full of cash. "My bank never once had a client walk through the door," she said. "The bankers and their clients go on big-game hunting trips, or to the ballet in Budapest. That is where it happens."

Her colleagues hailed from old European aristocratic circles. While Krall was perfectly good at her job and had close working relationships with top lawyers, asset managers and so on, a gap remained. "They went to parties with royalty, with ambassadors," she said. "I wasn't in their circle."

At the time, laws in the Bahamas were being tightened a little, following a feeble global crackdown, and she moved sideways in the bank to work as a compliance officer. These days, offshore bankers make a big show of their know-your-customer rules to keep out the bad money. Depositors may have to supply a certified copy of a passport, for example, and divulge where their money came from. Jurisdictions such as the Bahamas and the Cayman Islands put these requirements into their statutes, and banks employ compliance officers such as Krall to enforce this. That, at least, is the theory. But there are many ways around the restrictions.

Krall was supposed to check for suspicious movements through the accounts – of which there were plenty. She raised many red flags. "They [her managers] would say, 'This was a commission'." Were these bribes? Commissions on what? "I went back, and never got an answer." One Swiss-based trust company that had a relationship with her bank displayed almost nothing on its website, bar some photos of a nice fountain in Geneva. "The crap they brought to us was unbelievable. There is no way a responsible trustee should take this on. You would have no idea who the trust settlors were, what the assets were or where they came from. I objected strongly, but the bank took them on."

There is something about island life that stifles dissent. In the island goldfish bowl, you cannot hide. The ability to sustain an establishment consensus and suppress troublemakers makes islands especially hospitable to offshore finance, reassuring international financiers that local establishments can be trusted not to allow democratic politics to interfere in the business of making money.

John Christensen, Jersey's former economic adviser-turned-dissident, describes encountering extremist right-wing offshore attitudes when he returned to his native island in 1986 after working overseas as a development economist. It was the year of the City of London's Big Bang of financial deregulation, and he found the tax haven amid a spectacular boom. Old houses, tourist gift shops and merchant stores in Jersey's beautiful capital St Helier were being knocked down and replaced by banks, office blocks, car parks and wine bars. He went to an employment agency and they told him he could have any job he wanted. The following day he had three offers. In his work he soon became aware of practices such as reinvoicing, in which trading partners agree on a price for a deal, then record it officially at a different price in order to shift money secretly across borders.

As the river of money flowing into Jersey became a tide, he expressed unease about the origins of some of it, much of it from Africa, but he was brushed aside.

The concentration of extremist attitudes in Jersey was self-reinforcing, as Christensen explains. "Most liberal people like myself left," he said. "My socially liberal friends from school, almost all of them left Jersey to go to university, and almost all of them didn't go back. I can't tell you how dark it felt." He almost left, but was persuaded to stay by academic researcher Mark Hampton, who was putting together a framework for understanding tax havens and convinced him how important it was to understand the system from the inside. "I went undercover," Christensen said, "not to dish the dirt on individuals and companies, but because I couldn't understand it – and none of the academics I spoke to could either. There was no useful literature."

Jersey is riddled with elite, secretive insider networks, typically linked to the financial sector. After being appointed economic adviser in 1987, Christensen found that many people who came to see him wanted him to join their Masonic lodge, and gave him the secret signal. "Their thinking is very much of the old-boy network – you are either one of us or you are against us," he continued. "It means they can trust you to do the right thing without having to be told – an insidious meaning of the word 'trust'."

Unaccountable elites are always irresponsible, and I got my own flavour of Jersey's mouldy governance on the first day of a visit in March 2009, when the Jersey Evening Post carried a front-page story headlined "States in shambles", referring to the States Assembly, Jersey's parliament. "The States resembled a school playground yesterday as foul language and personal insults flew across the chamber," it said. Senator Stuart Syvret, a popular but controversial politician, had complained in the assembly that the health minister was whispering in his ear.

Syvret, the newspaper reported, stood up and said: "On a point of order, I am sorry to interrupt the minister. But the minister to my right, Senator Perchard, is saying in my ear: 'You are full of fucking shit, why don't you go and top yourself, you bastard.'" Senator Perchard responded by saying: "I absolutely refute that. I am just fed up with this man making allegations." The BBC, which was broadcasting the sitting live, had to apologise for the language.

Syvret has been a regular victim of efforts to suppress dissent. "Any anti-establishment figure here is bugged," said Syvret. "There is a climate of fear. Anyone who dares disagree is anti-Jersey, an enemy of Jersey. You are a traitor, disloyal. There is all this Stalinist propaganda." A few weeks after my visit eight police officers arrested Syvret and held him for seven hours while they ransacked his home and personal files, including his computer.

In October 2009, having been accused of leaking a police report about the conduct of a nurse, Syvret fled to London and claimed asylum at the House of Commons, saying he could not get a fair trial in Jersey. British Liberal Democrat MP John Hemming put Syvret up in his flat, declaring that "we should not allow him to be extradited, to be prosecuted in a kangaroo court". When Syvret returned in May 2010 to fight an election he was arrested at the airport. "This is a society with no checks and balances, run by an oligarchy," Syvret said. "It is a one-party state, and it has been for centuries."

At the Smugglers' Inn on Jersey's beautiful coast, I sat with John Heys, a tour guide at the world-famous Durrell zoo, and his friend Maurice Merhet, a retired printer and pig farmer. The two had spoken out – in letters to the Jersey Evening Post and in other forums – and have been decried, publicly and regularly, as traitors. Both described the same climate of fear that Syvret had: the dread of being squeezed out of a job, of never getting anywhere, of being blacklisted.

Heys showed me an email from a government minister to a dissident friend who had, in a cheeky Christmas message to the minister, pointed out the large sums stashed away in Jersey amid global poverty. The minister responded – mistakes included: "Hi Traitor, Please refrain from sending me your unsolicited garbage … I am surprised you still decide to live in this 'tax haven' island … ifs its so bad why do you not leave to live somewhere else … good riddance I would say … but perhaps NOT because you get a damm good living here, no doubt perhaps funded by banks and your morgage lender … in fact my family have lived in Jersey for several generations and I am so very proud of it but to listen to traiterous idiots like you makes me furious. I would not have the nerve to wish you a happy christmas in fact I hope you continue to live a miserable existence in your traiterous world."

One night in 1996, towards the end of his time in Jersey, Christensen opened the books for a reporter from the Wall Street Journal, who was investigating an alleged fraud ring involving American investors and a Swiss bank operating out of Jersey. The story, headlined "Offshore hazard: Isle of Jersey proves less than a haven to currency investors", ran on the front page several months later. Jersey's finance industry and politicians went into spasm. This was one of the first times Jersey's supposedly clean and well-regulated finance sector had been challenged in a serious global newspaper. The end of the article quoted a senior civil servant. Everyone in Jersey was sure it was Christensen. He knew that, in talking to the reporter, he had effectively resigned.

Finance can take advantage of insularity, timidity and moral shortsightedness, but the ethos of the Jersey establishment derives ultimately from the offshore industries and their onshore controllers, not from innate island character. Offshore repression can happen in larger jurisdictions, too. Rudolf Elmer, a Swiss banker who had worked for banks in several offshore centres before becoming a whistle-blower on some of the corruption he had seen, felt the pressure in Switzerland, a country of eight million people.

In 2004 Elmer noticed two men following him to work. Later, he saw them outside his daughter's kindergarten, then from his kitchen window. His wife was followed in her car. The men offered his daughter chocolates in the street and late at night drove a car at high speed into the cul-de-sac where he lived. The stalking continued, on and off, for more than two years. The police said there was nothing they could do. In 2005, they searched his house using a prosecutor's warrant, and he was imprisoned for 30 days, accused of violating Swiss bank secrecy, which is, as he put it, "an official violation, like murder".

"I was thinking of suicide at this stage," he said. "I would be looking out of the window at 2am. They intimidated my wife, children and neighbours. I was an outlaw. I was godfather to a child whose father is in finance. He said I have to stop – 'you are a threat to the family'." A relative was pressured at work to avoid contact with Elmer; after one warning he left the office in tears. "I was bloody naive to think that Swiss justice was different," Elmer said. "I can see how they might control a population of 80,000 people in the Isle of Man, but eight million? How can a minority in the banking world manipulate the opinion of an entire country? What is this? The mafia? This is how it works. Jersey, the Cayman Islands, Switzerland: this whole bloody system is corrupt."

This is an edited extract from Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men Who Stole the World by Nicholas Shaxson, published by The Bodley Head this week, price £14.99. To order a copy for £11.99 with free UK p&p go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846.

For more information see treasureislands.org

http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2 ... NTCMP=SRCH

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[vanlose kid]

The truth about tax havens: part 2
A second extract from Nicholas Shaxson's book explains how a mafia scheme became a pillar of the financial system – and how the government let it happen

Nicholas Shaxson guardian.co.uk, Sunday 9 January 2011 22.09 GMT

The offshore world is all around us. More than half of world trade passes, at least on paper, through tax havens. More than half of all banking assets and a third of foreign direct investment by multinational corporations are routed offshore. An impression has been created in sections of the world's media, since a series of stirring denunciations of tax havens by world leaders in 2008 and 2009, that the offshore system has been dismantled, or at least tamed. In fact quite the opposite has happened. The offshore system is in very rude health — and growing fast.

It is no coincidence that London, once the capital of the greatest empire the world has known, is the centre of the most important part of the global offshore system. The City's offshore network has three main parts. Two inner rings – Britain's crown dependencies of Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man; and its overseas territories, such as the Cayman Islands – are substantially controlled by Britain, and combine futuristic offshore finance with medieval politics. The outer ring comprises a more diverse array of havens, such as Hong Kong, which are outside Britain's direct control but have strong links.

This network of offshore satellites does several things. First, it gives the City a truly global reach. The British havens scattered all around the world's time zones attract and catch mobile international capital flowing to and from nearby jurisdictions, just as a spider's web catches passing insects. Much of the money attracted to these places, and the business of handling that money, is then funnelled through to London.

Second, this British spider's web lets the City get involved in business that might be forbidden in Britain, providing sufficient distance to allow financiers in London plausible deniability of wrongdoing. Much (but not all) of the financial activity hosted in these places breaks laws and avoids regulation elsewhere.

The three crown dependencies in the inner ring are substantially controlled and supported by Britain but have enough independence to allow Britain to say "there is nothing we can do" when other countries complain of abuses run out of these havens. They channel very large amounts of finance up to the City of London: in the second quarter of 2009 the UK received net financing of $332.5bn (£215bn) just from its three crown dependencies. Jersey Finance promotional literature makes the point plainly. "Jersey," it says, "represents an extension of the City of London."

The 14 overseas territories, the next ring in the spider's web, are the last surviving outposts of Britain's formal empire. With just a quarter of a million inhabitants between them they include some of the world's top secrecy jurisdictions: the Cayman Islands, Bermuda, the British Virgin Islands, the Turks and Caicos islands and Gibraltar.

Just like the crown dependencies, the overseas territories have close but ambiguous political relationships with Britain. In the Caymans the most powerful person is the governor, appointed by the Queen. The governor handles defence, internal security and foreign relations; he appoints the police commissioner, the complaints commissioner, the auditor general, the attorney general, the judiciary and other top officials. The final appeal court is the privy council in London.

It is the world's fifth largest financial centre, hosting 80,000 registered companies, more than three-quarters of the world's hedge funds, and $1.9tn (£1.2tn) on deposit – four times as much as in New York City banks.

The third, outer ring of the British spider's web includes Hong Kong, Singapore, the Bahamas, Dubai and Ireland, which are fully independent though deeply connected to the City of London.

In the Caribbean, the modern offshore system traces its origins back to the time when organised crime took an interest in the US tax code.

When Al Capone was convicted of tax evasion in 1931, his associate Meyer Lansky became fascinated with developing schemes to get mob money out of the US in order to bring it back, drycleaned. A slick mafia operator, Lansky would beat every criminal charge against him until the day he died in 1983. Lansky began with Swiss banking in 1932, where he perfected the loan-back technique.

First he moved money out of the US in suitcases, diamonds, airline tickets, cashiers' cheques, untraceable bearer shares or whatever. He would put the money in secret Swiss accounts, perhaps via a Liechtenstein Anstalt (an anonymous company with a single secret shareholder) for extra secrecy. The Swiss bank would then loan the money back to a mobster in the United States and the money would return home, clean.

By 1937 Lansky had started casino operations in Cuba, outside the reach of the US tax authorities, and he and his friends built up gambling, racetrack and drugs businesses there. It was, effectively, an offshore money-laundering centre for the mob.

Lansky then moved to Miami and plotted to find his next Cuba, small enough and corrupt enough to be able to buy the political leadership, and close enough to the United States for the gamblers to come and go at will.

The Bahamas, the old staging post for British gun-running to the southern US slave states of the Confederacy, was perfect. Lansky set about making this British colony, now dominated by an oligarchy of corrupt white merchants known as the Bay Street Boys, the top secrecy jurisdiction for north and south American dirty money.

A quaint memo from a Mr WG Hulland of the Colonial Office to a Bank of England official in 1961, just as Lansky began major operations there, illustrates the uneasy nature of this encounter between the British upper classes and American organised crime: "We feel that this [lack of provision of an effective regulatory system] might be a grave omission, since it is notorious that this particular territory, in common with Bermuda, attracts all sorts of financial wizards, some of whose activities we can well believe should be controlled in the public interest."

London did nothing, and Lansky built his empire. Yet many locals were unhappy. In 1965 Lynden Pindling, a populist Bahamas politician, threw the ceremonial speaker's mace out of a parliament window in a dramatic power-to-the-people gesture. He was elected prime minister in 1967 on a platform that included hostility to gambling, corruption and the Bay Street Boys' mob connections.

Yet as it happened there was a reassuringly British place just next door, where the locals were far more friendly: the Cayman Islands.

Milton Grundy, an influential Caribbean offshore lawyer and author of several books on offshore finance, remembers first arriving in the Caymans. Cows wandered through the town centre, there was one bank, one paved road and no telephone system. In 1967 the Caymans published its first trust law, which Grundy drafted, and which a British Inland Revenue official subsequently said "blatantly seeks to frustrate our own law for dealing with our own taxpayers". Within just a few months Grand Cayman was connected to the international phone network and the airport was expanded to take jet aircraft.

Some have argued that Britain set up the offshore networks simply out of a short-sighted desire to find a way for its overseas territories to pay their way in the world. After the second world war, an exhausted Britain found that its empire, once a source of great profits, was becoming more expensive and difficult to run, as locals began to agitate for independence. But the evidence points to a different, more troubling explanation for Britain's decision to turn its semi-colonies into secrecy jurisdictions.

The archives tell a consistent story about how the tax havens grew: private sector operators working in a zone of extreme freedom began to call the shots, with little opposition from Britain and its inexperienced emissaries.

In the archives, two schools of opinion emerge within the British civil service. On one side sits the Treasury, and especially its tax collectors in the Inland Revenue, who virulently opposed tax havenry and found the Cayman Islands especially obnoxious. The US authorities were clearly highly vexed too, and the British Foreign Office broadly opposed havenry, though its position was more nuanced.

On the other side sits the Bank of England, the most vociferous cheerleader for the new arrangements, and its far less influential supporter, the British overseas development ministry, which seems unperturbed by the possibility that local tax haven activities might foster massive capital flight from developing countries elsewhere. Battle lines were drawn; the exchanges become vigorous and even acrimonious.

The Inland Revenue was especially alarmed, while their mandarin bosses in the Treasury showed some, but rather less, concern. They put together a working party, whose report in 1971 said Britain should, in effect, stop encouraging tax havenry in its overseas territories, which in the case of the Caymans had become, as one internal memo in London put it, "quite uncivilised".

A letter marked secret from the Bank of England dated 11 April 1969 gives a better sense of the forces driving the changes in the Caribbean.

"We need to be quite sure that the possible proliferation of trust companies, banks, etc, which in most cases would be no more than brass plates manipulating assets outside the islands, does not get out of hand. There is of course no objection to their providing bolt holes for non-residents but we need to be sure that in so doing opportunities are not created for the transfer of UK capital to the non-sterling area outside UK rules."

The Bank of England's main concern at this time was that the new Caribbean centres were weak points: sources of financial leakage outside the sterling area. So in 1972 Britain shrank the area to Britain, Ireland and the crown dependencies, excluding the new havens.

The year the sterling area shrank, the British officials working against tax havens disappeared from the archive files. Their replacements seemed unaware of the 1971 report and only discovered it in 1977, sitting on the shelf, unimplemented. Again they expressed concerns – and again nothing was done. History repeated itself within and between the departments, all in less than 10 years. And, each time, the Bank of England fought the tax haven corner.

"This is no tropical paradise," said Kenneth Crook, the newly arrived British governor of the Cayman Islands in 1972. "I could enlarge, in terms of a magnificent but mosquito-ridden beach; of a fairly new but rather ill-designed and sadly neglected house; of a pleasant but very untidy little town; of swamp clearance schemes which generate smells strong enough to kill a horse; of an office which will one day ere long collapse in a shower of termite-ridden dust."

But on politics, and the strange relationship between Britain and its little quasi-colony, his tone hardens. "Caymanians don't want independence," Crook wrote. "They don't want internal self-government either – they are very unwilling to trust each other with effective power … they quite well understand that the British connection gives them a status which they would otherwise not command."

Nothing of substance seems to have changed, as a senior Caymanian politician, who asked not to be named, explained to me in 2009. "The UK wants to have a significant degree of control," he said, "but at the same time it does not want to be seen to have that control. Like any boss, it wants influence without responsibility; they can turn around when things go wrong and say 'it's all your fault' – but in the meantime they are pulling all the strings."

This attitude of the locals towards Britain reassures investors, but the political bedrock underpinning the world's fifth biggest financial centre is Britain's role. If Caymanians gained full control, most of the money would flee.

While these changes were happening in the Caribbean, something similar was under way far closer to the City of London, in the crown dependencies. A constituent's letter forwarded and endorsed by Tony Benn, then an MP, to the then chancellor, Denis Healey, about a tax conference in Jersey, gives a flavour: "I am somewhat surprised to see a Mr Gent from the Bank of England giving advice on how to avoid paying tax. I wonder if this is really part of the Bank of England's duties? Mr Gent suggests that the Bank of England will not be prepared to pass on information required by the Inland Revenue! Does the UK Treasury have no control over the Bank of England? Surely Bank employees should not be working against government policy? And just what sort of arrangements and deals are made at these events 'behind the scenes'?

"It really is just a bit too sordid to be true."

As in the Caribbean, offshore banking blossomed here from the 1960s, when merchant banks such as Hambros and Hill Samuel opened for deposits.

Foreign travel was getting easier and more British expatriates opened accounts in Jersey, where the banks were reliable and comfortingly British, but where bank interest was untaxed and secret. Many did not declare their income to their countries of residence, often poverty-racked African nations, knowing they would not be caught.

Martyn Scriven, secretary to the Jersey Bankers' Association, described how Jersey's network grew. "The biggest business developer is client recommendation," he said. "The client will say, 'I'm happy, and I'd like to introduce you to my friend' – and you build it up like that. You get some seriously interesting people … someone who goes abroad as a rigger 20 years ago for Shell may now be in charge of the company's west Africa operations … We gather deposits from wealthy folk all around the world, and the bulk of those deposits are sent to London. Great dollops of money go into London from here."

As in the Caymans, Jersey has carefully protected the ambiguous relationship with Britain. Jersey's most senior public sector officials are appointed in London; its laws are all approved by the privy council in London, and Britain handles Jersey's foreign relations and defence, and the lieutenant governor represents the Queen.

As in the Caymans, Britain goes to great lengths to hide its control. And, as with the Cayman Islands, the relationship with the mother country reassures the wealthy and the financial services industry that Britain will step in if needs be, to protect the tax haven from external attacks. Their money is safe in Jersey.


This is an edited extract from Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men Who Stole the World by Nicholas Shaxson, published by The Bodley Head this week, price £14.99. To order a copy for £11.99 visit http://www.guardianbookshop.co.uk.

For more info see treasureislands.org

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011 ... NTCMP=SRCH

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[vanlose kid]

Elizabeth's Pirates: The Rogue State

Read the full interviews of the historians who appeared on the Elizabeth's Pirates documentary.

An illegitimate queen
Elizabeth I became queen, aged 25, on 17 November 1558, following the death of her half-sister Mary I. Both were daughters of Henry VIII, and both came to the throne despite having been declared illegitimate – Mary when Henry divorced her mother, Catherine of Aragon, and Elizabeth when her mother, Anne Boleyn, was beheaded.

'Bloody Mary', who reigned only briefly from 1553 to 1558, died an unpopular queen due to her restoration of Catholicism and vicious persecution of Protestants. By contrast, Elizabeth's coronation in 1559 was marked by widespread expressions of popular support. Her first acts as monarch included returning England to the Protestant faith and reimposing the use of English instead of Latin in church services, editions of the Bible and The Book of Common Prayer.

Clash with Catholicism
The clash with Catholicism was to dominate Elizabeth's entire reign, leading ultimately to war with Catholic Spain. Mary's husband, Philip II of Spain, was one of many suitors rejected by Elizabeth, whose refusal to marry led her to become known as the 'Virgin Queen'. Her rejection of Philip (though not her rejection of marriage altogether) was widely welcomed in England, not least because Philip and Mary had led the country into a war against France that it could ill afford – and which cost it Calais, its last territory on the continent.

The Spanish superpower
State finances were a continuing problem under Elizabeth. Philip's revenues, for example, were ten times greater than those of the English monarch. The Spanish Armada that set sail for war with England in 1588 cost four million ducats, 100 times the cost of Elizabeth's defences. Spain, drawing on huge revenues from its plunder of the Aztec and Inca empires of central and south America, was the European superpower of its day.

The English 'rogue state'
Elizabethan England, in contrast, was something of a rogue state. Without colonies or overseas interests of its own to exploit, it had to look elsewhere for sources of revenue. When the Netherlands rose up against their Spanish masters in 1566, Elizabeth sided with them against Spain. When he started to fund Protestant privateers – licensed pirates – she encouraged Prince William, the leader of the revolt, to attack Spanish ships. English ports provided safe harbours for the privateers, and English captains and crew soon began to join them.

Pirates and privateers
Among the first English privateers was Francis Drake. In 1567, he and his cousin John Hawkins had tried to break the Spanish monopoly of the African slave trade to the Americas. When they arrived off the coast of New Spain (Mexico) the following year, the Spanish opened fire and they were driven away. Drake turned his hand instead to licensed piracy.

For Elizabeth, who pretended to the Spanish that she could do nothing to stop it, this piracy provided a ready source of revenue. By licensing the privateers to rob Spanish ships, she was able to cream off huge sums for her exchequer. When Drake set sail for the Strait of Magellan in 1577, eventually raiding Peru and the west American coast before circumnavigating the world and returning to England, the booty was sufficient to enable Elizabeth to pay off the entire national debt. Drake was given £10,000 – an enormous sum in those days – for himself. His crew got nothing.

Meanwhile, Walter Ralegh, a generation younger than Drake, was establishing himself as a major backer of privateering expeditions. He earned Elizabeth's favour with his personal charm, and confirmed it with his ruthless suppression of Catholic rebellion in the first English colony, Ireland. Most notoriously, in 1580 he butchered 600 people, including women and children, on a site that is still known as the 'field of skulls' in Ireland today. Ralegh built up an immense fortune through the monopoly on wine sales and cloth granted to him by the queen, together with his privateering licences. Elizabeth benefited from her share of the profits.

The Armada and war
Philip's patience with Elizabeth's excuses about piracy eventually wore thin, and by the mid-1580s, he had begun to prepare for war. In 1587, Elizabeth's execution of the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots, her cousin, provoked outrage among Catholics. And Drake's surprise attack on the Spanish fleet at Cadiz in the same year not only yielded half a million stolen ducats for the English treasury; it also made certain – once the 24 ships that had been put out of action had been repaired or replaced – that the Spanish Armada would set sail for England in 1588.

The defeat of the Armada did not mean the end of war with Spain. Indeed, Drake's attack on Lisbon in 1589 (the Spanish and Portuguese thrones had been united in 1580) ended in disaster with thousands of English killed. Drake was called before the Privy Council in disgrace.

In Ireland, too, where colonists such as Ralegh were encouraged as a bulwark against Spanish or French involvement, the Nine Years' War (also known as Tyrone's Rebellion) from 1594 to 1603 saw out the last years of Elizabeth's reign.

Shift of power
The licensed piracy of Drake, Ralegh and others and Spain's defeat in the war that it had triggered heralded a dramatic change in the European balance of power.

Spain, which had previously been able to exploit the treasures of the New World almost as it pleased, was losing its dominant position. Within a few years of Elizabeth's death, the Netherlanders were able to assert their independence from Spain and would soon develop an empire of their own. And although the first English colonies in the Americas – established by Ralegh in the 1580s – failed, it would not be long before others succeeded, sowing the seeds of the new English empire overseas.

Trade and wealth
At home, the privateers brought a double bonus to Elizabethan England. As well as the booty from their raids, they also helped to turn England – and London in particular – into a centre of trade and commerce. The capital's population increased fourfold during the 16th century, reaching almost 200,000 by Elizabeth's death in 1603. The population of England increased from three to four million.

The wealth showed itself in the lifestyle of the rich and influential. The Elizabethan 'prodigy houses', such as Longleat, Wollaton and Hardwick, are among the most sumptuous palaces ever built in England. The 'Elizabethan Renaissance' also saw a great flowering in the arts, most famously through the likes of Marlowe, Jonson and Shakespeare.

Poverty and oppression
The seeds were also being sown for the revolution and civil wars of the next century. Population growth brought with it a growth in poverty, too – as the rich got richer, the poor got poorer. This was made worse by the enclosure of open field systems, forcing thousands off the land, and a succession of poor harvests, particularly in the 1590s.

Elizabeth passed a series of 'Poor Laws' that provided for parish relief for those considered to be 'deserving poor' but cracked down hard on those deemed to be 'undeserving'. Just as Drake's sailors got nothing out of his privateer's booty, neither did the bulk of Elizabeth's subjects get anything out of the increasing wealth of her reign.

http://www.channel4.com/history/microsi ... .html#priv

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[vanlose kid]

wanted to post more on this, and the tangents to it, especially an overview making use of antiaristo's material, but haven't really had the time. anyway, i'm posting a link to his megathread (the "dead horse" he was flogging for years) just to frankenstein or lazarus that part of the bigger picture, or is that the bigger part of the picture? hmmm.

here's the thread: http://rigorousintuition.yuku.com/topic ... of-Finance

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here's a bit on the powers of the privy council, and although, to my current knowledge, the order of the privy council re teh cahgos Islands (Diego Garcia and the rest of the atolls) has been overturned in court i very much doubt the court ruling will stick. --- the case is still running at the EU Court of Human Rights (iirc).

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Chagos Islanders – Prerogative and Judicial Review
February 11, 2007
February 2007

On 5 February 2007, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office began their appeal against a High Court ruling of May 2006 (see below) which stated that the exclusion of the Ilois people from the Chagos Islands was unlawful. 2000 people were moved from the archipelago in the late 1960s and sent to Mauritius and the Seychelles, after the UK government secretly leased Diego Garcia to the US to use as an air base. The base has been used to launch bombing raids in both Iraq and Afghanistan and the Islanders are excluded on the grounds that their presence on the Chagos Islands would represent a security threat to the base – albeit one posed from 150 miles away.


Sir Sydney Kentridge QC representing the Islanders is arguing that the order in council, made under the royal prerogative but applied with extraterritorial effect was “repugnant” and ultra vires.[Cf., antiaristo on Hollick, East Anglia, and Blair, ultra vires, here]The focus is on the constitutional position of such a prerogative power and the fact that there is no precedent for using it to exclude an entire population.

John Howell QC, representing the FCO, argues that the decision of May 2006 represents a “revolutionary” legal change that would affect all British overseas territory”.”

The appeal continues in the High Court listed as C1/2006/1465 The Queen on the application of Bancoult -v- The Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs. [link.]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/sout ... 333223.stm
“In a damning verdict [of May 2006], the High Court …overturned orders in council made by Tony Blair’s administration in 2004 which reversed a previous court decision and banned anyone from living on the islands, known officially as British Indian Ocean Territory. The orders, made under the royal prerogative, allowed the Government to dispense with the inconvenience of parliamentary oversight.” Thus in R (Bancoult) v Secretary of State for Foreign Commonwealth Affairs [2006] EWHC 1038 (Admin), the Court held that “The suggestion that a minister can, through the means of an Order in Council, exile a whole population from a British Overseas Territory and claim that he is doing so for the ‘peace, order and good government’ of the Territory is, to us, repugnant” (para 142).

The Court also reaffirmed the CCSU position – the modern approach to judicial review was that Orders in Council could be challenged. In Bancoult (No 2) the Orders were challenged on the basis of irrationality which did not include the Court making an assessment of the defence interests of the UK or the US and as such did not involve those matters of government policy which the courts have frequently held to be non-justiciable.http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jh ... xnews.html
November 2000

“The May 2006 ruling represents “the second time the islanders have won a ruling that their eviction was unlawful.”In 2000, the High Court ruled that a 1971 Immigration Ordinance banning people without permits from entering or remaining in the colony was unlawful.”See: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4760879.stm

In R (Bancoult) v Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs [2001] QB 1067 – the Court held that “the 1971 Ordinance fell outside the power conferred by the 1965 Order to make laws for the “peace, order and good government” of the Territory. Such a power required its people to be governed, not removed; and the political reasons for removal, although dictated by pressing considerations of military security, could not by any forensic test of reasonableness be said to touch the peace, order and good government of the Territory. Accordingly the relevant provision of the 1971 Ordinance was quashed.”

See also:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/1004840.stm
The response of the Government to the decision was to legislate:“in June 2004 two Orders in Council were made – a Constitution Order and a subsidiary Immigration Order – the effect of which was to deny any person the right of abode in the Territory and to prohibit entry into or presence in the Territory without a permit. The Government explained that it had decided that resettlement could not be permitted and that the decision had therefore been taken to legislate to prevent it and to restore full immigration control over the Territory. This was because it was considered that any attempt to resettle any of the islands would compromise the security of the base at Diego Garcia and prejudice the military operations there.”

See excellent analysis of the 2001 and 2006 decisions in the speech of Lord Justice Richards of 7 June 2006, referred to in the section of this blog relating to judicial review and prerogative power.http://www.judiciary.gov.uk/publication ... 070606.htm

http://catherinem.wordpress.com/2007/02 ... al-review/

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latest on the Chagos Islands:

WikiLeaks cables: Mauritius sues UK for control of Chagos islands
Leaked document shows Foreign Office official told US that marine reserve would end evicted islanders' claims
Richard Norton-Taylor and Rob Evans guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 21 December 2010 21.30 GMT Article history
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/de ... NTCMP=SRCH

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I was duped by FCO over Chagos Islands
Share The Guardian, Wednesday 8 December 2010 Article history

Forty years ago, thousands of people were forcibly and illegally removed from their homeland, the British Indian Ocean Territory, to make way for Diego Garcia, a US military base. The expulsion has been described by some as UK foreign policy's darkest day. Since then the islanders have fought for the right to go home. They won it from the high court, but the privy council took it away. It now seems, from US information released by WikiLeaks (Foreign Office accused of misleading public over expelled 'Man Fridays', 4 December), that the Foreign Office has no regrets over its illegal action, and has been planning to destroy the islanders' campaign by making their former home a marine sanctuary, in which no one would be allowed to live.

As a long-term advocate of conservation, I am horrified that the UK government has used this to keep the islanders from returning to their rightful home, and that I was duped into supporting the creation of the marine sanctuary under false pretences. According to the leaked documents, Colin Roberts, the FCO's director of overseas territories, told the US that there would be no "Man Fridays" on the islands and said: "We do not regret the removal of the population." The FCO described the all-party parliamentary group campaigning for the Chagos people's right to return as a "persistent" but relatively non-influential group. I now regret my support of the marine sanctuary and look forward to joining the islanders in their campaign to return home.

Ben Fogle

Joint patron, UK Chagos Support Association

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WikiLeaks: Foreign Office accused of misleading public over Diego Garcia
UK official told Americans that marine park plan would end the 'Man Fridays'' hopes of ever returning home
Rob Evans and Richard Norton-Taylor guardian.co.uk, Friday 3 December 2010 17.56 GMT Article history
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010 ... NTCMP=SRCH

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working on more, anyone care to chip in go ahead.

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[vanlose kid]

by the way, there was a discussion of things related to this on a different but recent thread, and this remarks by Joe Hillshoist stuck with me 8well, actually, his last three, but i'll just quote the one):

The autistic fixation with "law" is fascinating to me.

Laws a pretty fundamental human thing. We've been using it for 30 or 40 thousand years.

thread link: viewtopic.php?f=8&t=30784&start=15

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i don't know much about the freeman on the land movement, and the point of it all, but i do see that some of them are trying to address some of the questions antiaristo raises.

anyway, in the wake of a complete societal breakdown, a breakdoqn of laws, the law that matters is the one that can be enforced (by power of arms) and if that law happens to be imperial and maritime?

you get the picture.

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[vanlose kid]

more on the Privy Council.

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Let's abolish this absurdity
A member of the privy council calls for the ending of the odd circle which surrounds the monarch


Roy Hattersley The Guardian, Thursday 14 December 2000 03.12 GMT

It would be wrong to pretend that I was not pleased to join the privy council. In truth I was delighted. After "shadowing" Margaret Thatcher for three years, I had hoped to replace her at the Department of Education. But Harold Wilson, offended by a speech in which I had attacked the public schools, exiled me to the Foreign Office to do penance as minister of state. The official letter, telling me that the Queen was "minded" to make me Right Honourable, was, I thought, proof that the prime minister had forgiven me.

I was wrong. Joining the privy council did, however, improve my formal status. As soon as I promised to defend the Queen against "all foreign princes, persons, prelates, states or potentates" I became Right Honourable for life. From then on every postman knew that I was (or had been) a big noise in Whitehall and Westminster. And that is the privy council's principal purpose. Membership is a medal. Old politicians wear the distinction as if it were part campaign ribbon and part wound stripe.

Traditionalists and romantics still pretend that the privy council is more than a footnote to the "dignified" - that is to say outdated - part of our constitution. Harold Wilson once assured Richard Nixon that, because he was addressing ministers who had taken the privy council oath, he could speak freely about nuclear strategy. No doubt the secrets of the Pentagon remained secure. But I doubt if it was the promise "not (to) know or understand of any manner of thing to be attempted, done, or spoken against Her Majesty's person, honour, crown, or dignity royal" which prevented the president's audience from running out of Downing Street to phone the Soviet embassy.

Quoting those words from the privy council's oath is certainly an offence and possibly treason. Members are required to "keep secret all matters committed and revealed unto you or that shall be treated secretly in council". So I should not describe the Gilbertian meeting at which I promised to "defend all jurisdictions, pre-eminences and authorities granted to Her Majesty".

I can, however, reveal that, during the rehearsal which preceded the main event, the secretary to the council felt it necessary to explain why he was anxious about what was to follow. Wallace Rawling, prime minister of New Zealand, had been made Right Honourable in absentia. He would therefore be "sworn" separately. The Queen did not like the privy council to drag on.

Joel Barnett (chief secretary to the Treasury) then explained that he wished to swear his oath of allegiance on an Old Testament. Brian O'Malley (minister of state at the Department of Social Services) added that he must have a Douay Bible. Shamed by their bravery into confessing my own heresy, I exercised the dissenter's right to affirm. That left a judge to perform the usual ritual in the first of five separate ceremonies.

The Queen remained calm. But, as we left the audience chamber, Jim Callaghan, one of the old hands who had been on duty that day, led me towards an archbishop (I think he was York) who was about to do what is required of archbishops before they assume their archdioceses. Putting an avuncular arm round my shoulder, Jim enquired "Have you met Roy Hattersley? Her Majesty had to keep you waiting because he wouldn't swear on the Bible".

In the 25 years since that fateful day, I have attended only one privy council meeting. Like most cabinet ministers I was reluctant to waste my time - though at least (unlike some of my colleagues) I was never required to travel to Balmoral for a pointless ceremony which is, at best, a convenient legal fiction built round the senior ministers, judges and archbishops who become Right Honourable as a matter of course.

At worst the privy council is neither an instrument of baronial tyranny nor the last bastion of monarchist power. It is simply pointless. The usual complaint against it (normally made by Tony Benn) is that it is the institution through which orders in council are made and the royal prerogative exercised - both potential abuses of our parliamentary system. But the blame lies with ministers. The privy council only provides the flummery which camouflages their autocracy.

Orders in council are often no more than the mechanism which activates secondary legislation - clauses of an act of parliament which come into force when the orders are made. The real danger to democracy is the royal prerogative. It began life as the instrument by which the monarch overruled Lords and Commons. But after the sovereignty of parliament was established, ministers, acting in the monarch's name, used the prerogative to legitimise decisions which they took without parliamentary approval.

Ten years ago, a progressive chief constable - who did not wish to change the character of his police force by equipping it with CS gas - was warned that, unless he "voluntarily" accepted the Home Office's instruction, the policy would be imposed on him "under the royal prerogative". There was even some talk of John Major using the device to ratify the Maastricht Treaty if the House of Commons would not pass the necessary resolution.

No government could have survived so gigantic an affront to parliamentary government. But the royal prerogative is still used to legitimise smaller acts of autocracy. In other democracies, appointments to the cabinet are ratified (or not) by the legislature and dates of elections are decided by statute. In Britain, ministers take office and parliament is dissolved under the royal prerogative. Do not blame "the Queen in council". Power lies with politicians. So does the opportunity for power's abuse.

That does not mean that its judicial committee - which meets from time to time to consider cases of especial constitutional significance - is either powerless or pointless. But, like the House of Lords "acting in its judicial capacity", it is just a fancy name for a collection of senior judges. The aura of the privy council is attached to both institutions because of two peculiarly English diseases - the belief that association with the sovereign reinforces authority and the conviction that antiquity increases respect.

So the privy council is not just an anachronism. It is one of those elements in our constitution which, because they have arcane rules and archaic associations, exist to prove that real power lies in places remote from everyday life. The mystery and magic of the monarchy and everything which flows from it are meant to be living proof of the distinction between them and us. The privy council is part of the deferential society. A genuinely radical government - anxious to promote the idea either of equality or meritocracy - would politely suggest to the Queen that she confirmed her desire to modernise the monarchy by announcing that she no longer needed "privy" advisers.

Yet most meetings of the privy council, although shrouded in secrecy, are concerned only with trivia. The one item of business which I recall was "to appoint the chaplain of Wadham College, Oxford", a duty to which the Queen reasonably reacted by asking "Why do I do this?" Michael Foot, lord president of the privy council, was ready with an explanation. "Wadham," he began, "was my college".

There followed a fascinating account of Oxford history from medieval times. We had just arrived at the Reformation when the Queen - with brilliant timing and perfect courtesy - thanked him and declared the privy council over. That is exactly the right attitude towards the whole unnecessary business.

Those Right Honourables

There are currently just over 500 members of the privy council, including all senior members of past and present governments. This "magic circle", with regency offices in Carlton Gardens near Buckingham Palace, has a staff of two dozen officials, mostly dealing with miscellaneous appeals and university matters. The Labour government's leader of the house, Margaret Beckett, has the job of organising regular meetings of privy councillors with the Queen. The members, who only ever meet in full on the monarch's death or announcement of intention to marry, include:

Prince Charles

Prince Philip

The Archbishop of Canterbury

The Archbishop of York

The former Archbishop of York, the Right Rev Lord Habgood

The Earl of Airlie, hereditary peer and royal lord-in-waiting

Lord Ackner, former law lord

Sir William Aldous, appeal judge

Sir Robin Auld, appeal judge

Lord Bingham, lord chief justice

Sir Gordon Bisson, New Zealand appeal judge

Sir Thomas Eichelbaum, lord chief justice of New Zealand

Lord Ampthill, hereditary peer and deputy speaker of the Lords

Sir Jeremy (Paddy) Ashdown, former Liberal party leader

Jeremy Thorpe, former Liberal party leader

James Bolger, former prime minister of New Zealand

Betty Boothroyd, former Speaker of the Commons

Tony Benn, former Labour minister

Barbara Castle, Baroness Castle of Blackburn, former Labour minister

Alun Chalfont, Lord Chalfont, former Labour minister

Tony Blair, prime minister

Paul Boateng, home office minister

Lord Camoys, hereditary peer and lord-in-waiting

Lynda Chalker, Baroness Chalker of Wallasey, former Conservative minister

Edward du Cann, former Conservative minister

Margaret Thatcher, former Conservative prime minister

Toby Low, Lord Aldington (until his death this month)

Jonathan Aitken (until his resignation after a conviction for perjury)

Other privy councillors include:

Chataway, Sir Christopher

Clarke, Kenneth

Cockfield, Lord

Cook, Robin

Cooper, Sir Frank

Cowen, Sir Zelman

Cradock, Sir Percy

Cranborne, Viscount (also known as Lord Gascoyne-Cecil)

Crawford and Balcarres, Earl of

Cunningham, Jack

Davies, Denzil

Davies, Ronald

Deedes, Lord

Devonshire, Duke of

Dobson, Frank

Fellowes, Lord

Ferrers, Earl

Field, Frank

Foot, Michael

Fowler, Sir Norman

Fox, Sir Marcus

Gowrie, Earl of

Gummer, John

Hague, William

Hailsham of St Marylebone, Lord

Hale, Dame Brenda

Harman, Harriet

Hattersley, Lord

Healey, Lord

Heseltine, Michael

Hoffman, Lord

Holme of Cheltenham, Lord

Irvine of Laing, Lord

Janvrin, Sir Robin

Jay of Paddington, Baroness

Jowell, Tessa

Kaufman, Gerald

Kennedy, Charles

Kinnock, Neil

Lamont of Lerwick, Lord

Lane, Lord

Lange, David

London, the Bishop of

Longford, Earl of

MacGregor, John

Mandelson, Peter

Mara, Ratu Sir Kamisese

Mellor, David

Merlyn-Rees, Lord

Murray of Epping Forest, Lord

Owen, Lord

Palliser, Sir Michael

Patten, Christopher

Perth, Earl of

Peters, Winston

Pindling, Sir Lynden

Portillo, Michael

Prescott, John

Quin, Joyce

Scarman, Lord

• A full list of the privy council members can be read at the Privy Council Office Secretariat.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2000/dec/1 ... hy.comment

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[madeupname452]

Thanks for this thread VK

i don't know much about the freeman on the land movement, and the point of it all, but i do see that some of them are trying to address some of the questions antiaristo raises.

http://www.ukcolumn.org/articles/living-rule-law
Laws and Statutes - a useful exposition

http://weareangry.co.uk/Portals/23/activeforums_Attach/FREEMAN_-_Freeman_Guide.pdf
The True Structure of Authority
A Short Guide to the Law
Know Your Rights...
A Short Guide to the ‘Person’
A Short Guide to Legalese
Are Governments Trading for Profit?
A Short Guide to Contracts
Standing in Court
The Banking System
A Short and Friendly Guide to Dealing With Policy Enforcers
Constructing a Notice of Understanding and Intent and Claim of Right

http://spiritualeconomicsnow.net/?p=164
COURT: Who’s Who and What to Say

http://captainranty.blogspot.com/2010/12/are-you-still-dead.html
understand that you are dead, and what that means legally

links found at popular blog http://captainranty.blogspot.com/

[vanlose kid]

Thanks for this thread VK

i don't know much about the freeman on the land movement, and the point of it all, but i do see that some of them are trying to address some of the questions antiaristo raises.

http://www.ukcolumn.org/articles/living-rule-law
Laws and Statutes - a useful exposition

http://weareangry.co.uk/Portals/23/activeforums_Attach/FREEMAN_-_Freeman_Guide.pdf
The True Structure of Authority
A Short Guide to the Law
Know Your Rights...
A Short Guide to the ‘Person’
A Short Guide to Legalese
Are Governments Trading for Profit?
A Short Guide to Contracts
Standing in Court
The Banking System
A Short and Friendly Guide to Dealing With Policy Enforcers
Constructing a Notice of Understanding and Intent and Claim of Right

http://spiritualeconomicsnow.net/?p=164
COURT: Who’s Who and What to Say

http://captainranty.blogspot.com/2010/12/are-you-still-dead.html
understand that you are dead, and what that means legally

links found at popular blog http://captainranty.blogspot.com/

thanks for the links mun542, will be checking this out.

by the way, until recently i had no idea there was a freeman movement in the us, and reading about them you can really see they're american.

the freeman stuff i've seen has been uk set, they seem to be on an entirely different wavelength. -- not that much gun talk either.

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[vanlose kid]

Rare glimpse into offshore world of big money and low taxes

Tax gap reporting team The Guardian, Friday 13 February 2009

One of the more fascinating sets of records disclosed by Rudolf Elmer is, he says, the confidential investor list of an offshore fund run by the Carlyle Group.

This prominent private equity operation in Washington DC counts presidents and prime ministers among its advisers, and Elmer's list opens the door to a rarely seen offshore world of big money and low taxes.

Carlyle sources did not challenge the authenticity of the list when we showed it them. They emphasised instead that all their activities in the Caymans were perfectly legal and normal.

The fund bought and sold shares in US start-up firms from its offices in Washington DC. But an offshore paper entity in the Caymans, TCG Ventures Ltd, was nominally running the show.

TCG's correspondence was administered by Swiss bank officials actually living on the islands, in return for a fee. This helped the foreign investors to minimise their tax bills and protected them from the American courts.

US tax authorities accepted this legal fiction, although the set of rules which allowed it has since been changed.

Carlyle emphasises that the American tax authorities lost nothing from this arrangement. What seems clear, however, is that such an offshore structure makes it in effect a voluntary matter for some foreign investors to disclose their profits to tax authorities in their home countries.

The fund, Carlyle Venture Partners, put together 67 wealthy companies and individuals to invest approximately $230m.

According to the documents, investors included the Saudi prince Talal bin Abdul-Aziz ($1m); two companies advised by Prinz Michael von und zu Liechtenstein ($7m); the late Akram Ojjeh, who earned a fortune brokering arms deals in the Middle East ($2m); the Kuwaiti state's sovereign wealth fund ($10m); and London-based Saudi companies linked to the Bin Laden family construction group ($2m).

There are American names on the list. Felix Smolka, a hotelier in Boca Raton, Florida, was listed as the contact point for two anonymous entities who tipped in $1m each, Durant Trading LC and Milestone Development Corporation. Smolka told the Guardian that both were offshore companies which he did not own: he was merely an "investment adviser" to one and a "contact" for the other.

The list of investors also includes anonymous companies and trusts from Panama, Liechtenstein, the British Virgin Islands and the Channel Islands, each with its own secrecy laws that conceal the real owners.

In an extreme example of offshore "layering", one person invested his Carlyle Group $1m into the Caymans through an anonymous company in Panama. The contact name given to Carlyle transpires in turn to be merely that of a firm of administrators in Liechtenstein, most notoriously secretive of all havens.

The Caymans host more than 9,000 private equity funds and about 80% of the world's hedge funds.


http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009 ... lyle-group

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[vanlose kid]

Isles of plenty
The Caymans: a Caribbean paradise ... operated in secret. A top Swiss banker turned whistleblower says he has the evidence


Tax gap reporting team The Guardian, Friday 13 February 2009


The Cayman Islands – Caribbean territories under ultimate UK control – are currently the target of reformers. Alastair Darling was yesterday challenged in the Commons over allegations that UK banks have been using the Caymans for massive tax avoidance schemes. Barack Obama, before he reached the White House, was one of the senators who singled out the islands as a blot on the US fiscal landscape which ought to be investigated.

The whistleblower's documents have been seen by the Guardian. They record the names and transactions of hundreds of companies, trusts, funds and wealthy individuals - information protected by local and Swiss secrecy laws.

Some of the paperwork concerns legal tax avoidance structures. Other files are alleged to point to potential illegal tax evasion by individuals around the globe.

The thousands of pages come from Rudolf Elmer, chief operating officer for the Julius Baer Swiss bank office in Grand Cayman until he was sacked in December 2002. Elmer, 53, and the bank have been involved in a long dispute. The bank accused him of forging documents and making violent threats. Elmer has accused the bank of hiring private investigators to harass him.

Elmer says his documents include all the back-up data held on Julius Baer's computer server in the Caymans at the time he was sacked, including accounts, correspondence, memos and resolutions dealing with 114 trusts, 80 companies, 60 funds and 1,330 individuals.

The bank says Elmer inappropriately obtained some documents as part of "a misguided campaign" against them. They reject his allegations as baseless and say their activities complied with all applicable laws and regulations.

In September 2005 the Swiss authorities held Elmer in custody for 30 days. They have indicated that they intend to charge him with breaking Swiss bank secrecy laws and with sending threatening messages to two Julius Baer officials.

Last year Elmer posted some documents on the Wikileaks website, which specialises in material from whistleblowers. Julius Baer got the site closed down for alleged breach of confidence, but Wikileaks had the California court order overturned on appeal.

The legal action drew the attention of the US Internal Revenue Service, who contacted Elmer. He is co-operating with the IRS, and with financial specialists in the office of Robert Morgenthau, the district attorney of New York; and with the powerful sub-committee on investigations chaired by Senator Carl Levin, which has a track record of probing offshore havens.

Elmer's disclosures follow the emergence of similar whistleblowers. One recently testified in the United States against the Swiss bank UBS, and another sold British and European authorities the contents of computer files from Liechtenstein bank LGT.

Elmer says his interest is in the network of tax havens. "People don't know how the system works. They may hear of some case, but the big picture always disappears into bank secrecy, professional secrecy with lawyers and accountants, and tax secrecy. But they need to know that this is a system which undermines our society, our democracy." He has lodged copies of files with Jack Blum, a veteran lawyer in Washington DC and an outspoken critic of the behaviour of tax havens.

Blum told the Guardian: "What Elmer is doing is extremely valuable in the process of educating people of the need for major reform. This is a system for enabling a certain class of people to avoid their societal duty, which is to pay tax."

We found and interviewed Elmer, now 53, at his new home on the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius. He used to be a part-time captain in the Swiss army, and is an accountant and auditor by training, and a lover of ballroom dancing.

He told us that originally, in 1987, he was proud to join the Zurich headquarters of Julius Baer, one of Switzerland's oldest and most respected private banks, handling some $38bn of assets, mostly for wealthy individuals.

But Julius Baer told the Guardian that Elmer had inappropriately retained documents when he was sacked by them in December 2002. They said many "were altered to create a distorted fact pattern or supplemented by forged documents".

Elmer responded to us that he had changed the titles of files to make them more easy to identify and also wrote spoof letters to tax authorities, for example purporting to be from penitent taxpayers confessing their evasion. He said he had not distorted or altered the contents of any internal document.

The bank suggested that since Elmer had forged spoof letters, they would be surprised if we placed any reliance on information from him. We invited them to identify any document referred to which they regarded as forged. They did not.

The documents include details of numerous trusts in which wealthy people have placed capital. This allows them lawfully to avoid paying tax on profits, because legally it belongs to the trust. In the same way, the capital can pass to heirs free of inheritance tax.

The trust itself pays no tax, as a Caymans resident. The trustees can distribute money to the trust's beneficiaries but it is essential the trustees exercise their own control over the trust's assets. If not, the assets become once more the property of the person who sets up the trust- and may be taxed.

The paperwork now being handed to US authorities appears to include several cases where wealthy individuals sought to use trust money as though it were their own. When we put these cases to the bank, they told us they did not consider it appropriate to discuss the affairs of their clients through the media.

Some documents refer to a Greek shipowner who placed $26.5m into a trust. Payments appear to be being made in and out without the knowledge of the trustees. The shipowner is said to have written letters referring to the trust as though it were a personal bank account. "The trust appears to be funding the settler's [founder's] shipping business," said one memo. Another speaks of "a risk that the structure could be regarded as a sham".

The Guardian emailed a summary of the documents to the shipping owner, who made no comment.

In other cases, the documents refer to:

• A memo by one Caymans financier, who did not leave a message on the answer machine of a UK client "in case the tapes are seized by the authorities".

• A memo about the affairs of a UK stockbroker whose trust was bluntly said to contain "undeclared money".

• Fears among Julius Baer staff that "we are rubber-stamping investment instructions" in relation to trusts set up by a London-based South American financier.

• Suspicions a German businessman sold a yacht which belonged to his trust and pocketed some of the cash for himself.

One file supplied to US authorities records concerns over a trust called Moonstone, opened on the instructions of the law firm of Dr Thomas Baer, former president of the Julius Baer bank, in the name of a man named Schuler. Caymans staff did not have a passport for Schuler and no way of knowing who he was. Nor were they able to verify where the money had come from. Dr Baer told us he could not discuss a case where documents might have been supplied by a criminal source and that he was bound by lawyer's confidentiality.

He added that Swiss banks were not allowed to open accounts without complying with "know your customer" rules; and that the leaked documents did not reveal what information was available to the bank in Switzerland, nor whether the required information was finally supplied to the Julius Baer Trust Company in the Caymans.

Other Elmer files refer to an alleged trust opened by a Mexican police chief accused of colluding with drug dealers; a Brazilian politician accused of corruption; and a trust allegedly established by Canadian businessman David Radler, now better known as the partner in fraud of former Daily Telegraph proprietor Conrad Black.

In respect of all of the contents of the files, Julius Baer told the Guardian: "All of the activities of our group companies and of the investment vehicles which you have referred to, including associated fee flows and interdependencies, are in full compliance with applicable laws and regulations. These activities are transparent to the regulatory and other governmental agencies in the jurisdictions in which they operate, to their respective external auditors and, with respect to investment vehicles, to investors in such vehicles."

Tax rate: 0%

Lawyers and accountants make up a tenth of the 52,000 population of the Cayman Islands, which are English-speaking, politically stable, in the US time zone, and with zero taxes. This British Overseas Territory with palm trees and luxury hotels, measuring less than 100 square miles, is the fifth largest financial centre on the planet. Tax Justice Network campaigners estimate that tax havens collectively hold more than $11.5 trillion. Some comes from tax avoidance. Each year the US may lose a total of about $100bn in potential taxes, France about $50bn, Germany $30bn, the UK between $20bn and $80bn - and the developing world loses up to $800bn in stolen capital. But in the Caymans, a prison sentence awaits anyone who discloses bank information.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009 ... an-islands

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[JackRiddler]

This is turning into a great collection. I cross-posted the first two to Wall Street, but please keep this up, thank you.

[semper occultus]

seconded - that book looks interesting

I presume you know Lucy Komisar ?

http://thekomisarscoop.com/

[vanlose kid]

This is turning into a great collection. I cross-posted the first two to Wall Street, but please keep this up, thank you.

wilco. thanks.

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[vanlose kid]

seconded - that book looks interesting

I presume you know Lucy Komisar ?

http://thekomisarscoop.com/

am working on it. thanks for the link. looks great. even more work.

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[vanlose kid]

i've decided to make this thread my joycean SoC thing and i'll by tying things together as i find related and relavant -- to bring out the pattern i see emerging.

the following is from this thread: viewtopic.php?f=8&t=30784&start=30

trying to keep this in context so i'm quoting my post first:

not that i think my weighing in here will make much of a difference, i'll do so anyway.

the freeman movement as preseneted by the MSM (and to an extent in their own words (a number of them)) seem to consist of kooks and gun mad hatters, but ... as far as i'm concerned, there's a there there.

their concern with the distinction between common law and corporate (admiralty) law/statutes does have some merit.

here are some outtakes from an old thread discussing one aspect of this, i.e. the "runaway jury". (nb! this is from the old board so i had to excise code and the formatting is gone):

chigger, as much as I admire Fitz, I don't think he would inform the jurors of these rights. Why? Because he's a prosecutor and would not like to lose control of the process. If someone were trying to pull the rug out from under him, he would simply go about trying to rectify the situation through conventional channels.Even if there were a runaway gj, remember the gj in the JonBenet Ramsey case? We never did get an answer as to whether they actually did indict one of the Ramseys. They may have and the prosecutor chose to ignore it. What if the Fitz gj returned an indictment he, or Abu Gonzales, didn't like?

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http://www.larryflynt.com/notebook.php?id=91

The prosecution saw it differently?

McKINLEY: They sure did. They sealed our indictment</strong>and said, "We're not going to do that." That scene is described in the book, which is where we got the title The Ambushed Grand Jury. The instructions state that in open court, after deliberations, the grand jury will hand its indictment to the prosecutor, and he shall sign it. Well, we handed it to him, and he refused to sign our indictment.

Is there some legal loophole that allows a prosecutor to ignore a grand jury's indictment?

McKINLEY: We're not sure. There are some legal issues in play here that really haven't been tested yet.(emphasis mine)

**********************************************

I cannot as of yet find legal citations on prosecutors being able to ignore indictments, but I'm working on it. Not saying this is what happened, but obviously there is precedent, regardless of whether it's legal.

to which antiaristo replies:

Good ol' Citizen Spook made a post about this very subject

As an aside, this caught my eye

[vk: CitizenSpook]They were common in the 19th century but have become rare since then.

Do you know from where you got your grand jury system?

You got them from England.

They were a traditional part of the English legal system.

Until the The CROWN supplanted the grand jury.

It was replaced by the CROWN Prosecution Service.

Decisions that until the 1930's were made by representatives of the commom people, are now made by appointees of the Crown.

Just one more example of how the Treason Felony Act has been used to progressively stifle democracy in England.

The Crown Prosecution Service SUCKS.

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here's the full blogpost by Citizenspook (with someembedded links) that antiaristo cited and linked:

Sunday, August 14, 2005
TREASONGATE: The Federal Grand Jury, FOURTH BRANCH of the US Government

If Patrick Fitzgerald is somehow illegally removed as Special Counsel in the Treasongate proceedings, the grand jury(s) he has impaneled will serve at the mercy of Fitzgerald's replacement, an individual who will have been brought in to shield the Bush administration from criminal prosecution for its many treasons. If that grand jury is aware of their true Constitutional power, it's possible they might stand up, fight, and win a legal battle that is long overdue.

Furthermore, all of us may one day serve as grand jurors in federal court, and I hope this article will educate the reader to his/her true power as granted by the Constitution. For that power, despite having been hidden for many years behind the veil of a legislative fraud, still exists in all of its glory in the 5th Amendment to the Constitution. The US Supreme Court has confirmed and reinforced that power.

So please, copy this report and paste it far and wide. It is not spin. It is not false. It is not for sale, it is not copyrighted by me, so paste and quote it freely. This report is the truth and we need truth, now, more than ever.

The Constitutional power of "we the people" sitting as grand jurors has been subverted by a deceptive play on words since 1946 when the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure were enacted. Regardless, the power I am going to explain to you still exists in the Constitution, and has been upheld by the United States Supreme Court despite the intention of the legislature and other legal scholars to make our power disappear with a cheap magic trick.

Repeat a lie with force and repetition and the lie becomes known as truth. In the case of the 5th Amendment to the Constitution, the power of the grand jury, to return "presentments" on its own proactive initiation, without reliance upon a US Attorney to concur in such criminal charges, has been usurped by an insidious play on words.

Most of this article is going to quote other scholars, judges and legislators as I piece together a brief but thorough history of the federal grand jury for your review. But the punch line is my personal contribution to the cause:

UNITED STATES CITIZENS SITTING AS FEDERAL GRAND JURORS ARE THE FOURTH BRANCH OF THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT.

My input into this vital fight is no more than the analysis of a few carefully used words. It only took a small sleight of pen back in 1946 to hide our power, and it won't take more than a few words to take that power back. But a proper overview is necessary for most of you who are unfamiliar with the issue at hand. So let me provide you with some history and then we'll see what went wrong and how to correct it.

HISTORY OF FEDERAL GRAND JURY POWER

I want to draw your attention to a law review article, CREIGHTON LAW REVIEW, Vol. 33, No. 4 1999-2000, 821, IF IT'S NOT A RUNAWAY, IT'S NOT A REAL GRAND JURY by Roger Roots, J.D.

"In addition to its traditional role of screening criminal cases for prosecution, common law grand juries had the power to exclude prosecutors from their presence at any time and to investigate public officials without governmental influence. These fundamental powers allowed grand juries to serve a vital function of oversight upon the government. The function of a grand jury to ferret out government corruption was the primary purpose of the grand jury system in ages past."

The 5th Amendment:

"No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury."

An article appearing in [url]American Juror[/url], the newsletter of the American Jury Institute and the Fully Informed Jury Association, citing the famed American jurist, Joseph Story, explained :

"An indictment is a written accusation of an offence preferred to, and presented, upon oath, as true, by a grand jury, at the suit of the government. An indictment is framed by the officers of the government, and laid before the grand jury. Presentments, on the other hand, are the result of a jury’s independent action:

'A presentment, properly speaking, is an accusation, made by a grand jury of its own mere motion, of an offence upon its own observation and knowledge, or upon evidence before it, and without any bill of indictment laid before it at the suit of the government. Upon a presentment, the proper officer of the court must frame an indictment, before the party accused can be put to answer it.' "

Back to the Creighton Law Review:

"A 'runaway' grand jury, loosely defined as a grand jury which resists the accusatory choices of a government prosecutor, has been virtually eliminated by modern criminal procedure. Today's "runaway" grand jury is in fact the common law grand jury of the past. Prior to the emergence of governmental prosecution as the standard model of American criminal justice, all grand juries were in fact "runaways," according to the definition of modern times; they operated as completely independent, self-directing bodies of inquisitors, with power to pursue unlawful conduct to its very source, including the government itself."

So, it's clear that the Constitution intended to give the grand jury power to instigate criminal charges, and this was especially true when it came to government oversight. But something strange happened on the way to the present. That power was eroded by a lie enacted by the legislative branch. The 5th Amendment to the Constitution still contains the same words quoted above, but if you sit on a grand jury and return a "presentment" today, the prosecutor must sign it or it probably won't be allowed to stand by the judge and the criminal charges you have brought to the court's attention will be swept away. And the reason for this can be found in a legislative lie of epic proportions.

Mr. Roots weighs in again:

"In 1946, the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure were adopted, codifying what had previously been a vastly divergent set of common law procedural rules and regional customs.[86] In general, an effort was made to conform the rules to the contemporary state of federal criminal practice.[87] In the area of federal grand jury practice, however, a remarkable exception was allowed. The drafters of Rules 6 and 7, which loosely govern federal grand juries, denied future generations of what had been the well-recognized powers of common law grand juries: powers of unrestrained investigation and of independent declaration of findings. The committee that drafted the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure provided no outlet for any document other than a prosecutor-signed indictment. In so doing, the drafters at least tacitly, if not affirmatively, opted to ignore explicit constitutional language."[88]"

Rule 7 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure (FRCP):

"An offense which may be punished by death shall be prosecuted by indictment. An offense which may be punished by imprisonment for a term exceeding one year or at hard labor shall be prosecuted by indictment..."

No mention of "presentments" can be found in Rule 7. But they are mentioned in Note 4 of the Advisory Committee Notes on the Rules:

"4. Presentment is not included as an additional type of formal accusation, since presentments as a method of instituting prosecutions are obsolete, at least as concerns the Federal courts."

The American Juror published the following commentary with regards to Note 4:

"[W]hile the writers of the federal rules made provisions for indictments, they made none for presentments. This was no oversight. According to Professor Lester B. Orfield, a member of the Advisory Committee on Rules of Criminal Procedure, the drafters of Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure Rule 6 decided the term presentment should not be used, even though it appears in the Constitution. Orfield states [22 F.R.D. 343, 346]:

'There was an annotation by the Reporter on the term presentment as used in the Fifth Amendment. It was his conclusion that the term should not be used in the new rules of criminal procedure. Retention might encourage the use of the run-away grand jury as the grand jury could act from their own knowledge or observation and not only from charges made by the United States attorney. It has become the practice for the United States Attorney to attend grand jury hearings, hence the use of presentments have been abandoned.' "

That's a fascinating statement: "Retention might encourage...the grand jury [to] act from their own knowledge or observation." God forbid, right America? The nerve of these people. They have the nerve to put on the record that they intended to usurp our Constitutional power, power that was intended by the founding fathers, in their incredible wisdom, to provide us with oversight over tyrannical government.

And so they needed a spin term to cast aspersions on that power. The term they chose was, "runaway grand jury", which is nothing more than a Constitutionally mandated grand jury, aware of their power, and legally exercising that power to hold the federal beast in check, as in "checks and balances".

The lie couldn't be inserted into the Constitution, so they put it in a statute and then repeated it. And scholars went on to repeat it, and today, as it stands, the grand jury has effectively been lied into the role of submissive puppet of the US Attorney.

The American Juror publication included a very relevant commentary:

"Of course, no statute or rule can alter the provisions of the Constitution, since it is the supreme law of the land. But that didn’t prevent the federal courts from publishing a body of case law affirming the fallacy that presentments were abolished. A particularly egregious example:

'A rule that would permit anyone to communicate with a grand jury without the supervision or screening of the prosecutor or the court would compromise, if not utterly subvert, both of the historic functions of the grand jury, for it would facilitate the pursuit of vendettas and the gratification of private malice. A rule that would open the grand jury to the public without judicial or prosecutorial intervention is an invitation to anyone interested in trying to persuade a majority of the grand jury, by hook or by crook, to conduct investigations that a prosecutor has determined to be inappropriate or unavailing.' [7]

What is the result? Investigating seditious acts of government officials can be deemed inappropriate or unavailing by the prosecutor, or the judge can dismiss the grand jurors pursuing such investigations. Consequently, corrupt government officials have few natural enemies and go about their seditious business unimpeded.

By the way, they made a rule to take care of runaways too, in 1946: Rule 6(g):

'At any time for cause shown the court may excuse a juror either temporarily or
permanently, and in the latter event the court may impanel another person in place of the juror excused.' Now judges can throw anyone off a grand jury, or even disimpanel a grand jury entirely, merely for exercising its discretion."

Now let me add my two cents to this argument:

Most of the discussion about Note 4 to Rule 7 of the FRCP takes for granted that the common law use of "presentments" (as codified in the 5th Amendment) was made "illegal" in 1946 by this act. Nothing could be more false. Note 4 does not contain language that makes the use of presentments "illegal", although it had chosen its words carefully to make it appear as if that is what the legislative branch intended. But let's look at Note 4 again:

"4. Presentment is not included as an additional type of formal accusation, since presentments as a method of instituting prosecutions are obsolete, at least as concerns the Federal courts."

The key word is, "obsolete". Obsolete means "outmoded", or "not in use anymore", but it does not mean "abolished" or "illegal". And therein lies the big lie. The legislature knew it could not directly overrule the Constitution, especially with something so clearly worded as the 5th Amendment, which grants a power to the people which has a long and noble purpose in criminal jurisprudence. But the federal beast legislative branch sought more power to protect themselves from the oversight of "we the people", and in its vampire like thirst for more governmental control, it inserted this insidious Note 4 in the hope that scholars and judges would play along with their ruse, or in the alternative, their ruse would appear to be legally viable.

Let's look at some authoritative legal resources which discuss Note 4:

Susan Brenner, THE VOICE OF THE COMMUNITY: A CASE FOR GRAND JURY INDEPENDENCE:

"Finally, federal grand juries' subservience to prosecutors was exacerbated when the federal system eliminated the use of presentments, which allowed a grand jury to bring charges on its own initiative. (N35) Now, federal grand jurors cannot return charges in the form of an indictment without a prosecutor's consent. (N36) Elimination of the presentment demonstrates the historical trend towards elimination of proactive features in the grand jury system."

Did Brenner fall for the lie or did she cleverly further it when she said, "[T]he federal system eliminated the use of presentments"? The federal system did no such thing. Note 4 said the use of presentments was "obsolete". First of all, Note 4 is not a law in itself. It is a Note to a law, and the law as written, does not have anything to say about presentments. You see the leap Brenner has made? The Constitution provides for "presentments", then the FRCP are enacted and the Rules therein do not mention presentments, nor due they ban presentments, and if they did, such a ban would be unconstitutional, since an administrative enactment regarding procedure can not overrule the Constitution.

Regardless, it's irrelevant, since the FRCP does not mention "presentments". Note 4 simply states that "presentments" allowed for in the 5th Amendment of the Constitution have become "obsolete", or outmoded, which is not to say that they were "eliminated". Shame on you Susan Brenner. You know damn well that the Constitution can only be changed by an official Amendment to it. Nothing can be "eliminated" from the Constitution by an administrative note.

The use of presentments had become obsolete because the grand jurors were not aware of their power. So the use of "presentments" became more and more rare, and then in 1946 the legislative branch seized upon the moment to make this power disappear by waving its magic wand over the Constitution.

Mr. Root got it wrong in the Creighton Law Review as well:

"Before the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure — which made independently-acting grand juries illegal for all practical purposes — grand juries were understood to have broad powers to operate at direct odds with both judges and prosecutors..."

The FRCP did not make it "illegal for all practical purposes". That's patently false. I don't know if Mr. Root, and/or Susan Brenner, were acting as the magician's assistant, but I can't imagine how these educated scholars could be so incredibly ignorant of basic Constitutional law. Give me a damn break.

But if enough people repeat the lie, the lie appears to be the truth.

But we have it on good authority, the Supreme Court, that the lie has no legal effect.

Justice Powell, in United States v. Calandra, 414 U.S. 338, 343 (1974), stated:

"The institution of the grand jury is deeply rooted in Anglo-American history. [n3] In England, the grand jury [p343] served for centuries both as a body of accusers sworn to discover and present for trial persons suspected of criminal wrongdoing and as a protector of citizens against arbitrary and oppressive governmental action. In this country, the Founders thought the grand jury so essential to basic liberties that they provided in the Fifth Amendment that federal prosecution for serious crimes can only be instituted by "a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury." Cf. Costello v. United States, 350 U.S. 359, 361-362 (1956). The grand jury's historic functions survive to this day. Its responsibilities continue to include both the determination whether there is probable cause to believe a crime has been committed and the protection of citizens against unfounded criminal prosecutions. Branzburg v. Hayes, 408 U.S. 665, 686-687 (1972)."

The Note 4 lie is smashed on the SCOTUS altar, "The grand jury's historic functions survive to this day." Take that Note 4!

The wonderful irony of the situation concerns the ultimate neocon Justice, one known as Antonin Scalia, who effectively codified the unique independent power of the Fourth Branch into the hands of all citizens sitting as federal grand jurors. In discussing that power and unique independence granted to the grand jury, the United States Supreme Court, in United States v. Williams, 504 U.S. 36 at 48 (1992), Justice Scalia, delivering the opinion of the court, laid down the law of the land:

"'[R]ooted in long centuries of Anglo-American history," Hannah v. Larche, 363 U.S. 420, 490 (1960) (Frankfurter, J., concurring in result), the grand jury is mentioned in the Bill of Rights, but not in the body of the Constitution. It has not been textually assigned, therefore, to any of the branches described in the first three Articles. It "`is a constitutional fixture in its own right.'" United States v. Chanen, 549 F.2d 1306, 1312 (CA9 1977) (quoting Nixon v. Sirica, 159 U.S. App. D.C. 58, 70, n. 54, 487 F.2d 700, 712, n. 54 (1973)), cert. denied, 434 U.S. 825 (1977). ' "

I submit to you that this passage sets the stage for a revolutionary knew context necessary and Constitutionally mandated to "we the people", THE FOURTH BRANCH of the Government of the United States. Besides, the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial branches, I submit that there is a fourth branch, THE GRAND JURY, and "we the people" when sitting as grand jurors, are, as Scalia quoted in US v. Williams, " a constitutional fixture in its own right". Yes, damn it. That is exactly what the grand jury is, and what it was always intended to be.

Scalia also stated, that "the grand jury is an institution separate from the courts, over whose functioning the courts do not preside..." Id.

And finally, to seal the deal, Scalia hammered the point home:

"In fact, the whole theory of its function is that it belongs to no branch of the institutional Government, serving as a kind of buffer or referee between the Government and the people. See Stirone v. United States, 361 U.S. 212, 218 (1960); Hale v. Henkel, 201 U.S. 43, 61 (1906); G. Edwards, The Grand Jury 28-32 (1906). Although the grand jury normally operates, of course, in the courthouse and under judicial auspices, its institutional relationship with the Judicial Branch has traditionally been, so to speak, at arm's length. Judges' direct involvement in the functioning of the grand jury has generally been confined to the constitutive one of calling the grand jurors together and administering their oaths of office. See United States v. Calandra, 414 U.S. 338, 343 (1974); Fed.Rule Crim.Proc. 6(a). [504 U.S. 36, 48] "

This miraculous quote says it all, "...the whole theory of its function is that it belongs to no branch of the institutional Government, serving as a kind of buffer or referee between the Government and the people." The Constitution of the United States, as interpreted by the Supreme Court, gives rise to a FOURTH BRANCH of Government, THE GRAND JURY. We the people have been charged with oversight of the government in our roles as grand jurors.

And at this critical time in American history, we must, for the protection of our constitutional republic, take back our power and start acting as powerful as the other branches of government.

The law is on our side. So please spread this knowledge as far and wide as you can. We the people have the right and power under the 5th Amendment of the Constitution to charge this government with crimes by returning presentments regardless of whether the US Attorneys or the federal judges agree with us. As the Supreme Court has so brilliantly stated, we are the "buffer between the Government and the people."

Take the reins America. Pass it on. The Fourth Branch is alive and kickin'.


by Citizen Spook

PLEASE REPOST and LINK

citizenspook@hotmail.com

http://citizenspook.blogspot.com/2005/0 ... ourth.html

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so, yeah, there's a there there, and it's well worth looking into. i think.

how the MSM portrays the freeman movement (as they've been gaining ground) may just be a way of covering the issues in kook.

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to which Wombat replied:

^^Sure, but "The Strawman Illusion" --- that's not MSM. The emails I'm getting from fucking rappers and promoters, those aren't MSM. And not once has the phrase "Grand Jury" come up in any of that material. I think the meme has a life entirely of it's own and I don't think it's on any solid legal ground.

I would like to be wrong, but I also suspect it would be easier to find a single proof of concept if I was.

now, i accept it as true that you haven't seen the term "grand jury" come up in the emails you've recieved from rappers, but then again, i never said there would be.

what i did say, in short, was that the distinction made between common law and jurisdiction and commercial (maritime/admiralty) law or statutory law seems to be real enough. that was the point i was trying to make.

i have reservations re the freeman movement as such myself. that being the case i still think that what they're concerned with, i.e. questions of jurisdiction and consent of the goverend to be governed is a real concern.

as for e.g. the question of taxes and the campaign against payment of the same, i can see where they're coming from (or maybe it's the case that i can see, for myself, reasons why i would question it).

looking at the broader picture, with the US as a case in point, we know e.g. that taxes are enforced on the public by the US government to fund expenses. in a void, or theoretically, assuming that the payments are a social contribution on the part of the public towards funding public works and services, that's all fine and dandy. but that's in a void.

one problem with that, in reality, today, is that

(1) the US gov raises money by e.g. selling bonds (IOUs, effectively) on the market or to the FED (same thing) which then lends money back to the US gov at interest (by printing it, out of the blue). and as security for that loan the US gov agrees to tax US citizens the loan plus interest to service it. that's a contractual obligation. -- now, how many US citizens know this?

(2) if you then take the US gov as a corporate entity, who are the corporate shareholders and how are they identified? they're US citizens with SSNs (among other things). if the US gov has no money in it's coffers (and it hasn't, Timmah Geithner says so himself) who do the FED to to recuperate what's outstanding?

(3) who owns the FED? does anyone know? do you, as a US citizen know that you're contractually obligated to service and repay that debt contracted on your behalf by the US gov? -- what part of the revunue generated through taxation goes first when "austerity" hits the fan? social services? medicare?

(4) and the money that the US gov borrowed from the FED, what does it go to? how about TARP? QE's I and II? the "war on terror"? -- how and when did anyone, any US citizen, knowingly, sign themselves and their children and possibly their children''s children's children up for this? -- do you think the FED or it's shareholders will rip up that contract?

knowing that, the jump people in the freeman movement make isn't that far fetched. because when you think about it, a great number of US citizens over several generations have been and are being born in debt. and it wil continue to be so for some time in the future.

here's a fitting quote by Jefferson on this:

"We must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt.
We must make our election between economy and liberty
or profusion and servitude.
If we run into such debt, as that we must be taxed in our meat and
in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and
our amusements, for our calling and our creeds...
[we will] have no time to think,
no means of calling our miss-managers to account
but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves
to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow-sufferers...
And this is the tendency of all human governments.
A departure from principle in one instance
becomes a precedent for [another ]...
till the bulk of society is reduced to be mere automatons of misery...
And the fore-horse of this frightful team is public debt.
Taxation follows that, and in its train wretchedness and oppression."

a pretty dire but clear warning, and a very good description of not only US citizens but at least half of the world's current population, don't you think?

corporate personhood is a legal fiction for corporations, what stretch of the imagination would it be to think that the same holds for corporate personhood established in the name of a living human being without he/she ever having given consent? a wild one?

the strawman (corporate person) is an illusion.

the question is who is under that illusion and has it legal standing?

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