U.S. Indicts Wegelin Bank for Helping Americans Avoid Tax

By Lynnley Browning

The United States indicted Wegelin, the oldest Swiss private bank, on charges that it enabled wealthy Americans to evade taxes on at least $1.2 billion hidden in offshore bank accounts, the U.S. Justice Department said on Thursday.

The announcement, by federal prosecutors in Manhattan, represents the first time an overseas bank has been indicted by the United States for enabling tax fraud by U.S. taxpayers.

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Related reading:

Swiss Bank Wegelin Charged With Helping U.S. Tax Evasion
Bloomberg Businessweek (3 Feb 12)

Solari Report Blog Commentaries

Wegelin Clients Pulled $4 bln, Prompting Sale-paper
(31 Jan 12)

Where Can We Look For Hope?
(12 Jan 12)

Panetta Believes Israel May Strike Iran This Spring

By The Telegraph

United States Defense Secretary Leon Panetta believes there is a growing possibility Israel will attack Iran as early as April to stop Tehran from building a nuclear bomb, according to reports.

The Washington Post first reported that Panetta was concerned about the increased likelihood Israel would launch an attack over the next few months. CNN said it confirmed the report, citing a senior Obama administration official, who declined to be identified.

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Related reading:

Military Brass Can Earn More Pension Than Pay
The Voice of Tucson Citizen (2 Feb 12)

Solari Report Blog Commentaries

Why I’m Suing Barack Obama
(17 Jan 12)

Panetta to Offer Strategy for Cutting Military Budget
(4 Jan 12)

Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act Threatens Activism

(photo: Advocacy for Animals – Britannica)

By Will Potter, Jurist

A recent undercover investigation into one of the nation’s largest egg producers, Sparboe Farms, documented hens mangled in cage wire, many with open wounds, and chicks having their beaks burned off by workers. This is just one of many investigations by animal welfare advocates that have exposed standard industry practices, created national dialogue about factory farming and in some cases prompted criminal charges. Newly released FBI documents show that the government is less concerned about these abuses and more concerned about the economic loss caused to businesses. The FBI has also been keeping files on factory farm investigators, and recommends prosecuting them as terrorists

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Quote du Jour

“The government is run by special interests clawing away at a shrinking pie and things are becoming quite vicious.”

~ Ron Paul

Related reading:

Ron Paul
Wikipedia

Ron Paul 2012
Wakeupstupid (2 May 2011)

A Culture of $20 Scams

By Catherine Austin Fitts

At Solari, we watch our vendor and financial accounts like a hawk. We find it is the only way to stop a contagion of mistakes, frauds and scams that just keep growing throughout the economy.

Today, one of our team members was finding and reversing a series of fraudulent credit card charges over the last three days. Each was $25. These are the kinds of charges that the fraudsters hope are too small to be noticed. We notice because we find letting these slip is a prelude to more, larger charges.

We made a command decision to cancel the card and arrange for a new card. Dealing with this, then accounting for and distributing the new cards and changing existing subscriptions will take 5 to 10 staff hours.

Then, an hour later, we discovered that the corporate motel where I am staying in California has decided to charge $25 per day for incidentals. They are proposing to charge $25 per day for weeks on a cumulative basis. This balance is now growing towards over $500. They are also charging for the incidentals daily. A movie is $16.98 plus tax. One long distance call was $30. Then when I leave, they say they will credit back $500 plus.

Since I did not agree to provide short term financing to the company, I will have the phone, TV, Internet and room service turned off for my room, then see about the deposit. The Solari bookkeeper spent an hour running this down today. I will spend more time tomorrow. Figure 2 staff hours and then more if I need to go further to get this changed.

The last two times I stayed in this area, I tried to find non-corporate residential solutions, they did not work. So this time I went through Priceline and landed in this corporate chain. I should know better than to trust a large corporate provider.

Since I was doing The Solari Report tonight from the motel and it appears that a long distance call for 90 minutes was going to be quite expensive, I decided to get a phone card at Rite Aid on the way home. I always have three phones for The Solari Report – so a phone plus two backups.  That was lucky, because the phone card did not work and I was not prepared to forego an ounce of gold to use the hotel phone without it.

I bought a 350 minutes card for $20. I called the bridge line tonight and was informed after the initial number connected that I had 290 minutes remaining. That means the connect fee was 60 minutes for the first call.  Then it turns out the access number for the bridge line will not work with the phone card. So the phone card was worthless for this purpose. Count .75 staff hour wasted to stop at Rite Aid, buy the Prepaid Long Distance Rite Aid Phone Card, account for the purchasing of the card and to get the card working. I am sure I will use it again — if the connect fees don’t wipe out all the minutes just by making a small number of calls to people who are not available.

Solari has a GREAT team. We swarm through these issues each day with a great attitude and making things happen despite the waste of our time and resources. We pinch pennies and watch pennies, so that the skims and scams are minimized. Nevertheless, sometimes I have to shake my head and wonder how in the world our culture manages to get anything done.

Welcome to a world at war, $20 and $25 dollars at a time.

Jon Rappoport on Matrix Nuts & Bolts

By Catherine Austin Fitts

If I were to list the ten people whose brilliance and force of intellect had made the most powerful contribution to my health, wealth and well being, Jon Rappoport would most certainly be on that list.

For many years, while family, friends and colleagues tried to persuade me that all things wrong with the world were the result of accidental dynamics, Jon Rappoport’s investigative research broke through the lies and fog and documented the nuts and bolts of the systems that are centralizing power.

His insight, his research, his meticulous writings created a force field that provided a powerful intellectual covering. With Jon Rappoport around, the walls of the matrix could never close in on me.

For many years, Jon had detailed interviews anonymously with insiders – from the upper echelons of the establishment –  such as medicine, public relations, the church.  He would dig out from these interviews the nuts and bolts of how control is engineered in the day-to-day operations and rules of one cartel after another.

In hundreds of pages of interviews, not once did I spot a detail that was out of place with my personal experience with Washington, Wall Street, or the operations of the intelligence agencies and secret societies. In years of reading these interviews, I never found a flaw. The insights were powerful and Jon’s sense of humor and beautiful writing always made for a delicious experience.

To my knowledge, no one has done more to unpack the day-to-day control mechanisms that make up the matrix, particularly those that are ingrained at a cultural level where we have been trained to suppress ourselves.

Understanding these nuts and bolts is an invaluable step to seeing how our time, energy and assets are being drained. The next step, of course, is to reverse the drain, the primary focus of Jon’s later work and writings.

I had the opportunity to visit with Jon in California last year. I pleaded with him to put all of his interviews on a CD and make them available again. He has now done so, including packaging the interviews with outstanding audio seminars and a variety of other invaluable material. (click here). Please consider this a core resource of your definitive library on the “real deal.”

As part of the launch of this new collection, Jon is joining me on the Solari Report to talk about the most important insights that emerged from these interviews. Jon is a brilliant and profoundly humorous speaker, so you do not want to miss this one.

We will start with Money & Markets and Ask Catherine. Post your questions in the comments section for this blog post.

No Let’s Go to the Movies this week as I expect Jon and I to speak for extra time. For a taste of Jon’s power, here is a video interview we did when I visited him in California last year.

A free-ranging conversation between Jon Rappoport and Catherine Austin
July 2,2011

Talk to you Thursday!

Facebook Set to File For $5 Billion IPO

The “lead left” bank leads the IPO underwriting process — its name in the upper-left-hand corner of the actual prospectus — and typically receives higher fees than the other banks in the syndicate. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley had reportedly battled over that status for Facebook’s IPO. Previous reports suggested that Morgan Stanley won out because Facebook was displeased with Goldman’s botched, $1.5 billion private placement in the company shares last January, in which the bank ran afoul of SEC rules and was forced to close the offering off to U.S. investors.

Facebook will file its IPO prospectus with the Securities and Exchange Comission, which will scrutinize the company’s financial statements. Potential public market investors will also get a chance look at Facebook’s books for the first time.

PROSPECTUS (Subject to Completion)
Dated February 1, 2012

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Quote du Jour

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”

~ Upton Sinclair

Related reading:

Upton Sinclair
Wikipedia

Upton Sinclair Biography

Upton Sinclair, Politician
TIME (9 Aug 10)

Upton Beall Sinclair, Author
NNDB

Our Society Needs Muckrakers Like Upton Sinclair
SquidWho

Obama Approval Above 50% in 10 States and D.C. in 2011

By Jeffrey M. Jones

In 10 states plus the District of Columbia, a majority of residents approved of the job Barack Obama was doing as president last year, according to aggregated data from 2011. His greatest support came from District of Columbia, Maryland, and Hawaii residents, while Utah and Idaho residents gave him his lowest levels of support — below 30%.

[click on the image for a larger version]

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$10 billion Deutsche Boerse, NYSE Merger Blocked

By Yahoo Finance

The European Union on Wednesday blocked the Deutsche Boerse’s planned merger with NYSE Euronext, a $10 billion deal that would have created the world’s largest financial exchange operator.

Brief video about the merger reducing competion so EU did not approve it.  Maybe this helps German companies? Keeps some of the global consolidation at bay?

View video here