Stand Against Oppression - In Russia, In Britain, In America

Julian Assange, holed up in the Ecuadorean embassy in London as British police amass outside and await orders from the United States and Britain to break international law and seize him, spoke to supporters today:

"As WikiLeaks stands under threat, so does the freedom of expression and the health of all our societies. We must use this moment to articulate the choice that is before the government of the United States of America," he said.

"Will it return to and reaffirm the revolutionary values it was founded on or will it lurch off the precipice, dragging us all into a dangerous and oppressive world in which journalists fall silent under the fear of prosecution and citizens must whisper in the dark?

"I say it must turn back. I ask President Obama to do the right thing: the United States must renounce its witch-hunt against WikiLeaks."

There must be no "foolish talk" of prosecuting media organisations, be it WikiLeaks or be it the New York Times newspaper.

Assange also called on the US to end its "war on whistleblowers", and demanded that Bradley Manning, the US army intelligence analyst suspected of leaking the information, be released.

He has been charged with transferring classified data and delivering national defence information to an unauthorised source and faces up to 52 years in jail.

Assange described Manning as a hero and "an example to all of us", which drew cheers from scores of supporters.

"On Wednesday, Bradley Manning spent his 815th day of detention without trial," said Assange. "The legal maximum is 120 days."

Assange referred to recent jailings of people for exercising their freedom of speech and called for enthusiastic opposition to such oppressive actions.

"There is unity in the oppression. There must be absolute unity and determination in the response."

...

"I am here today because I cannot be there with you today. But thank you for coming, thankyou for your resolve, your generosity of spirit.

"On Wednesday night, after a threat was sent to this embassy, the police descended on this building. You came out in the middle of the night to watch over it, and you brought the world's eyes with you.

"Inside this embassy in the dark, I could hear teams of police swarming up inside the building through its internal fire escape.

"But I knew there would be witnesses, and that is because of you.

"If the UK did not throw away the Vienna Conventions the other night, it is because the world was watching. And the world was watching because you were watching.

"So the next time that somebody tells you that it is pointless to defend those rights that we hold dear, remind them of your vigil in the dark before the embassy of Ecuador. Remind them how, in the morning, the sun came up on a different world, and a courageous Latin American nation took a stand for justice."

Bloomberg - Cayman Island Tax Cheat

The Wikileaks source who has handed over the names of 2,000 individuals and institutions who have used the Cayman Islands as a venue to avoid paying taxes said the following today:

"Working in the Cayman Islands I realized that something was wrong... I want to let our society know what I do know because it's damaging our society in a way that money is moved away by financial institutions, multinational conglomerates and high-net-worth individuals, money is hidden in offshore ventures."

Guess who likes to use the Cayman Islands to avoid paying taxes on his philanthropic foundation?

Mike Bloomberg's idea of charity still stops at U.S. taxpayers. The latest filings for the mega-foundation run by New York's richest resident shows that he pumped a whopping $420 million last year into his do-gooder operation - cue the cheers! -- while parking $75 million in offshore tax havens -- Hiss! Boo!

You don't have to be a card-carrying Bloomberg Basher to think this is the bigger part of the story. Even the mayor's own Bloomberg News carries the Associated Press's story today by Sarah Kugler Frazier with a lede emphasizing the tax dodge:

"Mayor Michael Bloomberg's money managers invested more than $75 million of his money in offshore tax havens in 2009, according to his philanthropic foundation's latest tax forms, continuing an activity seemingly at odds with his public statements about the economy."

The response from City Hall spokesman Stu Loeser is that this is all designed for the public good: The mayor "pays an enormous amount in taxes, but his foundation's investment strategy, like those of many other large foundations, is designed to maximize the amount of money going to charity," Loeser told the AP.

Ah, yes - a foundation strategy to avoid paying federal, state and city taxes or, as we used to call this kind of thing back in the day, a foundation strategy to cheat on their taxes.

Bloomberg's excuse?

Hey, all the cool foundations do it!

Indeed they do.

And they are engaging in tax fraud.

Can't wait to see the names of the individuals and institutions Wikileaks divulges from the Cayman Islands tax cheat disks.

I'm not saying Bloomberg or his foundation are going to be on that list, but you can bet some of those foundations Bloomberg's spokesman Stu Loesser referred to in his "All the cool foundations are cheating on their taxes!" statement will be.

And regardless, Bloomberg uses all the usual tax dodges to cheat on his taxes:

According to an extensive review of the mayor’s financial records by The Observer, even as Mr. Bloomberg was trying to counter the loss of taxes and other income from the richest New Yorkers, the foundation he controls was in the process of shuttling hundreds of millions of dollars out of the city and into controversial offshore tax havens that would produce nothing at all for the city in terms of tax revenue.

By the end of 2008, the Bloomberg Family Foundation had transferred almost $300 million into various offshore destinations—some of them notorious tax-dodge hideouts. The Caymans and Cyprus. Bermuda and Brazil. Even Mauritius, a speck of an island in the Indian Ocean, off the coast of Madagascar. Other investments were spread around disparate locations, from Japan to Luxembourg to Romania.

...

BEYOND THE U.S. BORDER, in places like the Caymans, the climate for charities is much more inviting. Nonprofits like the Bloomberg Family Foundation are tax-exempt, but some investments that aren’t related to an organization’s core mission can be subject to a levy called the Unrelated Business Income Tax (UBIT, for short). So to avoid more than 40 percent in federal and local taxes on unrelated businesses, nonprofits use a legal loophole, routing investments through offshore tax havens.

“It cleanses the unrelated business taint from the total return,” Harvey Dale, of the N.Y.U. School of Law, told The Observer. “You invest in the same thing through an offshore entity. You are making the same investment; you are just putting an intermediary entity in the middle. Instead of investing directly in the hedge fund, you invest in the foreign entity, which, in turn, invests in the hedge fund.”

“Is (using the loophole) allowable under the law? Yes,” said tax expert Dean Zerbe, a former staffer at the Senate Finance Committee. “Is it something that is a best practice, particularly by an elected official? I think they should look very hard when they are engaging in this kind of activity. What does it say to the average New Yorker?”

The foundation’s tax returns indicate that Mr. Rattner’s team migrated much of its money to large hedge funds with ostensible island charters, including several in the Caymans, two of which list an address at P.O. Box 309 of the Ugland House, a building that “houses” an estimated 12,000 to 18,000 foreign businesses.

...

But tax havens—despite the protestations of the president, a slew of senators and at least one district attorney—remain legal. “I made a lot of effort to shut down that loophole,” former district attorney Robert Morgenthau told The Observer.

Mr. Morgenthau said he’d spoken generally about offshore loopholes to four U.S. secretaries of the Treasury, twice to the commissioner of the general revenue and, as it happens, to Mr. Bloomberg himself. The mayor seemed uninterested in the offshore issue, he said. “I’ve talked to the mayor about it, and the budget director,” Mr.

Morgenthau said. “We did get help from the State Division of Taxation and Finance. But nothing from the city.”

Gee - I can't imagine why Bloomberg wouldn't want to help Morgenthau close the tax dodge with 12,000-18,000 businesses "housed" in it.

Oh, right - because his foundation has a P.O. Box there.

Bloomberg is a tax cheat and a crook.

In addition, as he screams about falling tax revenue and the need for budget cuts and layoffs, he is a hypocrite.

Were he to close the tax loophole that allows companies based in NYC to skirt tax laws by using Ugland House in the Caymans, maybe the city wouldn't need to cut the budget so much or lay any employees off.

But that would mean ending a tax dodge he and his Wall Street and corporate criminal friends have been enjoying for years and there is NO way Bloomberg is going to do that.

So instead we have to wait and see who is on the Wikileaks: Cayman Islands Edition list and shame the crooked bastards into paying their taxes.

Because how much you wanna make a bet that Barack Obama's government is NOT going to go after any of the tax cheats named on the Wikileaks list?

How much you wanna bet they go after Wikileaks instead?

Data I Can Believe In

Could our financial, political and corporate elites be about to experience a "data accountability" moment?

LONDON — A former senior Swiss bank executive said on Monday that he had given the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, details of more than 2,000 prominent individuals and companies that he contends engaged in tax evasion and other possible criminal activity.

Rudolf M. Elmer, who ran the Caribbean operations of the Swiss bank Julius Baer for eight years until he was dismissed in 2002, refused to identify any of the individuals or companies, but he told reporters at a news conference that about 40 politicians and “pillars of society” were among them.

He told The Observer newspaper over the weekend that those named in the documents come from “the U.S., Britain, Germany, Austria and Asia — from all over,” and include “business people, politicians, people who have made their living in the arts and multinational conglomerates — from both sides of the Atlantic.”

Mr. Elmer handed two computer disks to Mr. Assange at the news conference, the first significant public event the WikiLeaks founder has held since he was arrested in London in early December after Swedish prosecutors sought to have him extradited on charges of sexual crimes there. He has denied the charges but was briefly jailed last year before bail was granted.

Wearing the same dark blue suit he has worn through his legal battles, Mr. Assange said that WikiLeaks would verify and release the information, including the names, in as little as two weeks. He mentioned possible partnerships with financial news organizations and suggested he would consider turning the information over to Britain’s Serious Fraud Office, which investigates financial corruption.

Mr. Elmer, who previously provided documents from his former employer to national tax authorities including the Internal Revenue Service in the United States, said he had turned to WikiLeaks to “educate society” about what he considers an unfair system that serves the rich and aids those who seek to launder money.

His recent offers to provide further data to universities and governments were spurned, he said, and he thought that the Swiss media had failed to cover the substance of his accusations. “The man in the street needs to know how this system works,” he said, referring to the offshore trusts that many “high net worth individuals” around the world use to evade taxes.

...

The offshore banking industry has come under increasing pressure in recent years amid accusations that places like the Caribbean, with looser financial laws, allowed investors to avoid taxes and that some banks helped to create complex webs of companies and trust funds there to confuse tax authorities abroad.

In 2009, Bradley Birkenfeld, a former private banker for UBS, disclosed some of the industry’s illegal tactics and forced the bank to turn over details of several thousand client accounts to the I.R.S. as part of a legal settlement. UBS agreed to pay a $780 million fine and admitted criminal wrongdoing.

Still, Mr. Assange said in London on Monday, financial institutions usually “operate outside the rule of law” because of their economic power. WikiLeaks itself has been “economically censored,” he said, by companies like Visa and MasterCard, which stopped processing donations to it late last year in response to its release of hundreds of thousands of classified United States documents on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and thousands of State Department cables.

WikiLeaks, perhaps signaling a new focus, has also said it would release information from an American bank, thought to be from a Bank of America executive’s hard drive, early this year. But, Mr. Assange said, the site is not fully “open for public business” owing to the weight of the existing leaks it is struggling to process.

Will the very same news outlets dying to print the names and "value-added" ratings of NYC teachers publish the names of the thousands of tax cheats, criminal companies and fraudsters Wikileaks is about to drop on the public?

Because THIS kind of data IS an accountability moment.

You know, the kind of thing they claim to be doing by printing names and rankings of teachers despite the fact that the ratings have a 35% margin of error?

WikiLeaks Founder Arrested

That didn't take long:

LONDON (Reuters) - WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been arrested by British police on a European warrant issued by Sweden over allegations of sex crimes including rape, London's Metropolitan Police said Tuesday.

Swedish prosecutors issued the arrest order for the 39-year-old Australian who is wanted in Sweden on suspicion of committing sexual crimes, which he denies.

Police said Assange, at the center of a row over the release of secret U.S. diplomatic cables, had been arrested at about 9.30 a.m. (0930 GMT) Tuesday by appointment at a London police station under a European Arrest Warrant.

"He is accused by the Swedish authorities of one count of unlawful coercion, two counts of sexual molestation and one count of rape, all alleged to have been committed in August 2010," London police said in a statement.

He is due to appear before City of Westminster Magistrates Court in London later Tuesday.

Is it a coincidence that Assange is arrested NOT before he dumps the documents about U.S. foreign policy onto the world but before he dumps the documents about the banking system and specifically one U.S.-based bank onto the Internet?

I think not.

The Masters of the Universe can allow the curtain to be drawn back on U.S. foreign policy.

They CANNOT allow the curtain to be drawn back on how the banskters operate.

The Establishment Goes Into Overdrive To Destroy Assange And WikiLeaks

Here is how the Kaplan University Post reported how bad things have gotten for Assange and his organization:

GENEVA -- WikiLeaks' elusive founder, his options dwindling, has turned to Switzerland's credit, postal and Internet infrastructure to keep his online trove of U.S. State Department cables afloat.

Supporters say Julian Assange is considering seeking asylum in Switzerland. He told a Spanish newspaper that he faced "hundreds of death threats," including some targeting his lawyers and children, aside from the pressure he is getting from prosecutors in the U.S. and other countries.

After a number of web companies dropped WikiLeaks, much of the site's traffic was coming through the wikileaks.ch Web address Sunday. The address is controlled by the Swiss Pirate Party, a group that formed two years ago to campaign for freedom of information. The site's main server in France went offline but it remained reachable through a Swedish server.

The site showed Assange had begun seeking donations to an account under his name through the Swiss postal system in Bern, the Swiss capital, while also using a Swiss-Icelandic credit card processing center and other accounts in Iceland and Germany. He lost a major source of revenue when the online payment service provider PayPal cut off the WikiLeaks account over the weekend.

...

In an online chat with El Pais in Spain, Assange said the hunt for him was tough. He remains free while his website spews daily embarrassment and potential diplomatic damage to the U.S.

"We have hundreds of specific death threats from U.S. military militants. That is not unusual, and we have become practiced from past experiences at ignoring such threats from Islamic extremists, African kleptocrats and so on," he said.

"Recently the situation has changed with these threats now extending out to our lawyers and my children," he added. "However, it is the specific calls from the elites of U.S. society for our assassination, kidnapping and execution that is more concerning."

.

Isn't it great to be a citizen of the freest, bestest country in the whole world?

Maybe Killing Assange Won't Work After All

Some people like Jonah Goldberg have been calling for the murder of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange as revenge for dumping all the U.S. government documents relating to the Iraq war, the Afghan war and U.S. foreign policy.

But Assange says he has an insurance plan:

Julian Assange apparently has a back-up plan if WikiLeaks gets taken down.

The secretive Australian who has been in hiding to avoid rape charges in Sweden, as well as any shadowy assassins who may want to rub him out, had a massive "doomsday file" posted online which may contain all of the leaked documents in unredacted form.

A file named insurance.aes256, which was posted in July, is more than a gigabyte in size and encrypted with a 256-digit key, according to Fox News.

"Julian's a smart guy and this is an interesting tactic," said Ben Laurie, a London-based computer security expert who has advised WikiLeaks. "He will hope it deters anyone from acting against him."

Assange spoke of the mystery file earlier this year, noting that it could be opened easily, if WikiLeaks revealed the password.

"All we have to do is release the password to that material, and it is instantly available," he said.

Meanwhile, his whistle-blower group continues to struggle to remain online. The site recently moved to new servers in France and obtained a domain via Switzerland (www.wikilinks.ch), and suffered another outage on Sunday when its servers went down.

The website has been repeatedly attacked by hackers since it unleashed more than 250,000 documents last week full of classified cables and secret files.

"I think [Assange] is a high-tech terrorist," said Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell on CBS' "Face the Nation" on Sunday.

"Julian Assange is engaged in warfare," argued Newt Gingrinch on Fox New, calling his actions "information terrorism, which leads to people getting killed."

Assange is a terrorist but the soldiers who shot two innocent Reuters journalists and innocent Iraqis, including children, as captured in this video here and here and released by WikiLeaks are "heroes."

What a world we live in.

Ron Paul Defends WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is under attack from all sides.

The Obama administration is considering criminal charges against Assange.

Inrterpol is seeking Assange on what seem to be trumped up sexual assault charges.

Many establishment Republicans and Democrats in Washington have called for Assange to be arrested.

Some have gone even further.

Sarah Palin said Assange - an Australian citizen - should be charged with a treason against the United States (NOTE TO SARAH: Only U.S. citizens can be charged with treason against the United States.)

National Review's Jonah Goldberg has called for the murder of Assange:

I'd like to ask a simple question: Why isn't Julian Assange dead? . . . WikiLeaks is easily among the most significant and well-publicized breaches of American national security since the Rosenbergs gave the Soviets the bomb. . . .

So again, I ask: Why wasn't Assange garroted in his hotel room years ago?

It's a serious question.

Townhall's John Hawkins wrote a piece entitled "5 Reasons The CIA Should Have Already Killed Julian Assange:

1) Julian Assange aided the Taliban and risked the lives of Afghans who helped American forces

2) Killing Julian Assange would send a message

3) You can't run a government without secrets

4) Releasing the information to the world is even worse than giving it to a single foreign government

5) We need to regain the confidence of our allies who've been burned by these leaks

Countering the hysteria and outright insanity emanating from Democrats and especially his fellow Republicans over the WikiLeaks document dumps, Ron Paul defended Assange:

Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) is taking a stand as one of Julian Assange’s few defenders in Washington, arguing that the WikiLeaks founder should get the same protections as the media.

Attorney General Eric Holder said this week that the Justice Department is examining whether Assange can be charged with a crime for posting hundreds of thousands of leaked government intelligence documents and diplomatic cables.

Many Republicans have gone even further in their attacks on Assange, especially former Arkansas GOP Gov. Mike Huckabee, who said this week that the source who leaked to the WikiLeaks founder should be tried for treason and executed if found guilty.

But in a Thursday interview with Fox Business, Paul said the idea of prosecuting Assange crosses the line.

“In a free society we're supposed to know the truth,” Paul said. “In a society where truth becomes treason, then we're in big trouble. And now, people who are revealing the truth are getting into trouble for it.”

“This whole notion that Assange, who's an Australian, that we want to prosecute him for treason. I mean, aren't they jumping to a wild conclusion?” he added. “This is media, isn't it? I mean, why don't we prosecute The New York Times or anybody that releases this?”

Paul followed up with a post to his Twitter account Friday morning: "Re: WikiLeaks — In a free society, we are supposed to know the truth. In a society where truth becomes treason, we are in big trouble.

As Glenn Greenwald pointed out at Salon, Defense Secretary Bob Gates has called the dangers of the Wikileaks "significantly overwrought" and the consequences for American foreign policy "fairly modest."

Significantly overwrought...fairly modest..."

Yet Gates' bosses in the administration plan on bringing charge against Assange and some conservatives are calling for the CIA to assassinate Assange.

So good for Ron Paul for going on FOX News and defending Assange and the right to free speech at a time when jumping on Sister Sarah's bandwagon is the most politically expedient thing one can do.

WikiLeaks And Education Reform

Jay Ackroyd on the rationale behind the WikiLeaks document dumping:

Plucking from Assange's writing, this analyst notes that the goal is not the leaks themselves, but the disruption of the permanent, invisible government that persists despite electoral results, and is deeply dependent on secrecy. Citing Theodore Roosevelt:

Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people....To destroy this invisible government, to befoul this unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of statesmanship.

Let's expose the permanent, invisible government - the unholy alliance between corrupt business, corrupt billionaire philanthropy, corrupt corporate media and corrupt politics - that has been bringing us all the top-down, corporate-friendly, pro-privatization education reforms next.

A WikiLeak document dump on BloomKleinMurdochFentyRheeGatesBroadWaltonBushObamaDuncan - that would be fantastic.

WikiLeaks Doc Dump: BoA?

Speculation on just which bank WikiLeaks plans to nail in the next document dump.

Raw Story says it may be Bank of America.

How exciting!

You know, I wonder if they have any NYCDOE documents to dump?

WikiLeaks To Expose U.S. Banks Next

This I like:

After spilling information on everything from the love life of a dictator to top state secrets, WikiLeaks has a new target: a major U.S. financial firm.

In an interview with Forbes published on Monday, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said the site would release tens of thousands of documents in early 2011 that he claimed would be comparable to the Enron trial.

"It will give a true and representative insight into how banks behave at the executive level in a way that will stimulate investigations and reforms, I presume," he promised.

Assange confirmed to Forbes that the upcoming leaks were about a U.S.-based financial institution, but refused to give any more detail about which bank it was.

While WikiLeaks made its name on publishing secret military and government documents, Assange says he has a huge amount of documents revealing private sector secrets too – in fact, he told Forbes, 50 percent of "whistleblower" submissions he has received are non-governmental documents.

The WikiLeaks founder warns that the next batch of documents he'll release will reveal flagrant violations, unethical practices and internal executive decision making structures.

"You could call it the ecosystem of corruption," he told Forbes.

In the near future, Assange said Wikileaks may be focusing its efforts on exposing secrets about finance and the private sector, including banks across the world and other major companies.

"We have a lot of finance related things," he said. "Of the commercial sectors we've covered, finance is the most significant."

Assange justified the future havoc he will wreak with his philosophy that leaking the information will mean good business for people who embrace ethical business practices and treat their employees well. After all, according to him, happy employees don't leak documents that will hurt their employer.

"Let's say you want to run a good company," he said. "It's nice to have an ethical workplace. Your employees are much less likely to screw you over if they're not screwing other people over."

No wonder the government wants to put him in jail and Peter King says WikiLeaks is a terrorist organization.

They're scared witless by this stuff.

Money For Empire, Schools For Free

I haven't dug into the Wikileaks story yet, but the Guardian is reporting it this way:

The United States was catapulted into a worldwide diplomatic crisis today, with the leaking to the Guardian and other international media of more than 250,000 classified cables from its embassies, many sent as recently as February this year.

At the start of a series of daily extracts from the US embassy cables – many designated "secret" – the Guardian can disclose that Arab leaders are privately urging an air strike on Iran and that US officials have been instructed to spy on the UN leadership.

These two revelations alone would be likely to reverberate around the world. But the secret dispatches, which were obtained by WikiLeaks, the whistleblowers' website, also reveal Washington's evaluation of many other highly sensitive international issues.

These include a shift in relations between China and North Korea, high-level concerns over Pakistan's growing instability, and details of clandestine US efforts to combat al-Qaida in Yemen.

Sounds like fun Sunday night reading!

I have two comments here before signing off for the night:

A) If the Change We Can Believe In guy won, how come we still engage in cowboy shit all around the world?

B) We spend all this money on Empire, we spend little on important things here at home - you know, maybe Arne Duncan wouldn't have to cheerlead class sizes of 50 if we spent just a little less on our world empire (which is crumbling and only benefits Microsoft, Monsanto, Big Pharma, the financial industries and the war industries anyway.)

Just saying.