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So you want to join Anonymous?

You can not join Anonymous. Nobody can join Anonymous.
Anonymous is not an organization. It is not a club, a party or even a movement. There is no charter, no manifest, no membership fees. Anonymous has no leaders, no gurus, no ideologists. In fact, it does not even have a fixed ideology.

All we are is people who travel a short distance together - much like commuters who meet in a bus or tram: For a brief period of time we have the same route, share a common goal, purpose or dislike. And on this journey together, we may well change the world.

Nobody can speak for Anonymous. Nobody could say: you are in, or you are out. Do you still want to join Anonymous? Well, you are in if you want to.

How to get in contact with others?
Anonymous has no centralized infrastructure. We use existing facilities of the Internet, especially social networks, and we are ready to hop on to the next one if this one seems compromised, is under attack, or starts to bore us.

At the time of this writing, Facebook, Twitter and the IRC appear to host the most active congregations. But this may change at any time. Still, these are probably the best places to get started. Look for terms like "anonymous", "anonops" and other keywords that might be connected to our activities.

How do I recognize other Anonymous?
We come from all places of society: We are students, workers, clerks, unemployed; We are young or old, we wear smart clothes or rugs, we are hedonists, ascetics, joy riders or activists. We come from all races, countries and ethnicities. We are many.

We are your neighbours, your co-workers, your hairdressers, your bus drivers and your network administrators. We are the guy on the street with the suitcase and the girl in the bar you are trying to chat up. We are anonymous. Many of us like to wear Guy Fawkes masks on demonstrations. Some of us even show them in their profile pictures in social networks. That helps to recognize each other.

Have you been infiltrated?
If you talk to another Anonymous, you will never know who he is. He may be a hacker, cracker, phisher, agent, spy, provocateur - or just the guy from next door. Or his daughter. It is not illegal to be Anonymous. Nor is it illegal to wear Guy Fawkes masks. Keep that in mind. If you personally have not been involved in illegal activities, you have nothing to worry, no matter whom you talk to; If you have, it is wise not to talk about it. To no one.

How do I protect my privacy?
Invent an alias, a nick, a pseudonym ... call it as you will, just invent something. Then register a mail account in that name with one of the big mail providers. Use this email address to register your Twitter, Facebook, etc. accounts. Make sure to clear all cookies before you start using your new identity, or better use a different web browser for Anonymous than for your other activities.

If you have higher needs for security, ask us about encryption, steganography, TOR, etc. Many of us know how to use them.We will always respect your need for privacy. We will never ask for your personal information. If we do, we will not expect a truthful answer; And neither should you.

What is the right thing to do?
The only person who can tell you what is right for you is yourself. This is also the only person you should follow. We have no leaders. You are also the only person responsible for your actions. Do what you think is right. Do not what you think is wrong.

How many Anonymous are there?

We are more than you think. We are more than anybody thinks. We are many.

And you are now one of us. Welcome to Anonymous.

Canadian negotiations with tax havens will benefit firms

Tax lawyers are preparing clients for the possible advantages that might flow from a new brand of agreement the government of Canada is signing with tax havens. They're called Tax Information Exchange Agreements or TIEAs, and they open the door for Canadian multinational companies to set up shop in tax havens without running afoul of Canadian tax rules. "That means Canadian corporations will have a lot more choice," says David Cooke, a director in the Bermuda office of global law firm Conyers Dill & Pearman Ltd. For years, Canada has been signing dual taxation treaties with a variety of jurisdictions. Such treaties allow Canadian companies to set up shop in foreign locales and have their overseas income taxed in that foreign jurisdiction at the local tax rate. Because income tax has already been paid to the foreign jurisdiction, Canada doesn't demand another round of tax when the income comes home to Canadian shareholders as a dividend.

http://www.vancouversun.com/business/Dual+treaties/4488387/story.html

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UBS client sentenced to probation for tax evasion charge

A client of UBS AG, a Swiss bank, has been sentenced to three years probation for using an offshore account to hide funds from the U.S. government. Jeffrey Chatfield, an American citizen who lives in San Diego, California, is also ordered to pay the Internal Revenue Service more than $96,000, as a penalty for not filing Report of Foreign Bank and Financial Accounts, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Chatfield also filed false tax returns for the years 2000 through 2008. He did not inform the IRS that he had offshore accounts in the Bahamas and Switzerland from banks such as UBS and Credit Suisse, according to the news source. Currently, UBS is working with the U.S. government by giving names of account holders that have overseas accounts in an initiative to help the United States fight tax evasion.

http://www.taxlawhome.com/Tax-News/800464021/UBS-client-sentenced-to-probation-for-tax-evasion-charge

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Tax Holiday for $1 Trillion May Lure Back Profits Without Growth

Google Ireland is not a branch office of the U.S.-based search giant Google Inc. (GOOG) It's a separate corporation, and American tax collectors can't touch a dime that Google Ireland earns from its core business until it sends profits back home to the mother ship in Mountain View, California. The term of art for bringing the money back is repatriation -- the same as for a soldier captured abroad. U.S. multinationals have more than $1 trillion in profits stashed in overseas subsidiaries. Some of the companies with the most money squirreled away say they're prepared to bring a big chunk of it home. All they want in return is a temporary tax break that wouldn't cost the U.S. Treasury anything, since it's money that would otherwise be kept abroad and not taxed at all. The tax break would actually raise billions of dollars from applying the reduced tax rate to the money that's been repatriated.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-03-17/tax-holiday-for-1-trillion-may-lure-profits-without-spurring-u-s-growth.html

Over £10 billion sent from Italy to offshore bank accounts last year

In a financial report released on Monday, the police said that nearly €50 billion (£42 billion) of income was undeclared in Italy in 2010, almost twice as much as the year before. Of the unreported money, over €10 billion (£9 billion) was sent abroad to avoid tax. Liechtenstein and Switzerland were the main recipients of the money, receiving 26 and 25 per cent respectively, while seven per cent was sent to Britain and another six per cent to Panama. Like many European countries, Italy has put increased effort into fighting tax evasion and avoidance since the beginning of the economic crisis. Authorities have particularly targeted Switzerland, one of few countries with which Italy does not have a tax treaty, and whose shared border with Italy makes it an obvious choice for wealthy Italians looking to stash their assets abroad.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/offshorefinance/8298889/Over-10-billion-sent-from-Italy-to-offshore-bank-accounts-last-year.html

Hiding Money Overseas? You're Taking a Big Chance

In the last three years, there have been a series of prominent cases in which formerly secretive banks, including UBS and Julius Baer in Switzerland and the LGT Group, the Liechtenstein royal bank, have had to notify clients that former employees had taken their account data and were about to make it public. And now the founder of WikiLeaks has indicated that he has another trove of documents from Julius Baer that he could release any day. Yet some wealthy people continue to turn to offshore accounts, including growing numbers who are now going to Singapore and Hong Kong in the wake of the crackdown on private banking in Switzerland. Asher Rubinstein, a lawyer in New York who specializes in complicated tax matters, said he had people come into his office who were willing to risk disclosure. He said most people who asked about opening an account offshore or declaring an existing one realized the risks they were taking.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/05/your-money/taxes/05wealth.html

The Ruinous Fiscal Impact of Big Banks

The newly standard line from big global banks has two components - as seen clearly in the statements of Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase and Robert E. Diamond Jr. of the British bank Barclays at Davos last weekend. First, if you regulate us, we'll move to other countries. And second, the public policy priority should not be banks but rather the spending cuts needed to get budget deficits under control in the United States, Britain and other industrialized countries. This rhetoric is misleading at best. At worst it represents a blatant attempt to shake down the public purse. Start with the bankers' point about budget deficits and spending cuts. Public deficits and debt relative to gross domestic product have ballooned in the last three years for one simple reason - the big banks at the heart of our financial system blew themselves up. On this point, the conclusions of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, which appeared last week, are very clear and utterly compelling. No one forced the banks to take on so much risk. Top bankers lobbied long and hard for the rules that allowed them to behave recklessly. And these same people effectively captured the hearts, minds and, some would say, pocketbooks of the regulators - in the sense that a well-regarded regulator can and often does go work for a bank afterward.

http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/03/the-ruinous-fiscal-impact-of-big-banks/?src=busln

New US Tax Rules Will Cost Banks Billions

U.S. banks with operations abroad and foreign banks working inside the U.S. face "billions of dollars in aggregate" compliance costs because of new tax rules being put in place in less than two years, a tax and compliance expert told Dow Jones Newswires. The U.S. Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, or FATCA, is set to come into effect from 2013 as part of an effort to clamp down on tax havens. FATCA goes far beyond the 2001 Patriot Act, which required all U.S. financial services firms to establish money-laundering programs and to beef up scrutiny of private bank accounts opened for senior foreign political figures, their relatives and close associates. It will levy a 30% withholding tax on foreign institutions that don't agree to give the U.S. information about accounts they hold for U.S. citizens, may even run counter to bank secrecy laws in some countries, such as Switzerland. The alpine nation has made concessions on its strict laws governing client confidentiality, but still rejects exchanging information automatically with foreign tax authorities.

http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20110204-707909.html

Recently some colleagues were asking me tough questions about Capital Conservator, an offshore service provider company, that we've been recommending, here on OffshoreNet, for several years, so I sent them the following questions.

Q: Were CC bank accounts frozen in 2010? If so for how long? and were losses experienced by customers?
A: No CC accounts have ever been frozen anywhere and not one customer has lost one penny. Because of the problems in Macedonia, in which CC was never charged, but suffered collateral damage, Citibank and HSBC primarily, waged a war against us blocking our outgoing wires, so there were delays but no losses.

Q: Were there card product failures in 2010?
A: No, when we refused to let CSC debit our account for alleged "fraud" claims from Citibank without ANY evidence whatsoever, they canceled our account. Before that cancellation took effect we already had a new card program with Loyal Bank and have a second one with another bank already signed, which should come online within 30-45 days, and are negotiating a Visa program with a Russian Bank.

Q: What steps have been taken to avoid potential problems in the future?
A: We do no banking in CC's name. CC is now only a marketing company. All banking is done in the name of 4 other NZ Trust Companies, all of which have been approved by the NZ Government as regulated Financial Service Providers. Further, we receive incoming wires at one bank, and send outgoing wires from other banks. We currently have 3 banks. This makes it much harder to have the problems we experienced in the past. Everything is diversified, but centrally controlled. Also, our investment accounts are in different company names than our main banking accounts, and our gold accounts in yet another company name.

Q: CC has moved offices, to where? and why?
A: CC closed its Uruguay office because the hard-left government there made it impossible to work there. They were removing all of the financial privacy laws and the Banco Central wanted to regulate us even though we did NO financial inter mediation there. We still have people working for us in Uruguay as contractors from their homes. We also have offices in San Jose, Costa Rica, Valencia, Spain, Novi Sad, Serbia, and are in the process of opening offices in Larnaca, Cyprus and Zug Switzerland in the next 30-60 days.

Q: CC is offering new products, what are they and who are they designed for?
A: CC offers the following products:

• trust banking accounts in USD, EUR, GBP, CHF, AUD and NSD. The majority of our outgoing wires are received in 1-2 banking days.term deposits in USD, EUR and GBP that are 100% Central Bank guaranteed


• precious metals purchasing


• online investment accounts that the client can manage, but without disclosing his identity to the broker. We have one in Gibraltar now and will have a second (Not Thales) in Panama shortly, which will even accept "physical certificates" for stocks.
• MasterCards in EUR and USD.


• Cirrus/Maestro Cards in EUR & USD.


• No name Cirrus/Maestro Cards in EUR & USD.


• Soon an Instant Issue No Name MasterCard.


• A full range of offshore companies, trusts and foundations in multiple jurisdictions.


• High-level international asset protection and tax reduction structures that have withstood scrutiny even by the IRS and US bankruptcy courts intact and unscathed.


• Nominee director and owner services for qualified clients.


• Live customer service in Spanish and English 16 hours during banking days. Portuguese by appointment.


• Prospective customers who prefer not to send documents through the post or by courier can personally present them at our growing number of customer contact centres where they will be copied and accepted for due diligence purposes.


• Our target clientele includes high net worth individuals who require sophisticated international structures; legitimate businesses with international clients who prefer to only pay taxes on their domestically generate income, and active investors who want to do so anonymously and on a tax free basis.

A: Clearly the growth of "Big Brother" and the loss of privacy is the greatest threat. CC addresses this threat by constantly adjusting its financial partners, offices and modes of operation to offset these threats. CC has no particular loyalty to any country and will reinvent itself where ever the climate is favorable for its work. By splitting into multiple offices, we reduce our profile even more and can do some aspects of our business more easily and legally in one place rather than another. Like a multi-national corporation, we put different departments in the places they can operate most freely and with the least interference.

Q: Do you foresee a time when bank privacy will no longer exist?
A: No, while Panama can afford to "sell out" because its chief revenue is from the canal, many smaller states need the "offshore" industry as a mainstay of their economy. Witness the fact that Liechtenstein has chosen to go just the opposite direction of Switzerland, and small pacific countries like the Cook Islands and Vanuatu, have increased their offshore industry. Because of their relative isolation, it is very difficult to put much pressure on them. Additionally, jurisdictions like Cyprus and Gibraltar are reinventing their previous offshore regimes as low tax onshore regimes. Also, the US has taken no steps to change its offshore status for all non-US persons.

Q: What is the greatest value proposition of CC?
A: All of the services noted above can be accessed with one application in the most private means available today by skilled professionals.

None can foretell the future, and yet the shape of what we face can be shrewdly estimated with enough attention to historical trends; with broad contextual understanding; and with sufficient insight into the character of leaders, their societies, and the structures which define their basis.

These estimates will be tempered by the sudden acts of nature, the sudden emergence of true leadership from unexpected quarters, or key breakthroughs in science. Still, we can hazard reliable views on the shape of the world in, say, a decade - in 2020 - if present trends and characters remain, and on a knowledge of certain baseline levels of wealth and capability which presently exist.

In 2011, the world will probably remain beset by the lingering of the present crisis of currency levels and economic performance. This is essentially a mass psychological crisis, based around the perceptions which create trust, particularly trust in asset values and institutions.

In some respect, historical trends have given populations in modern societies excessive trust in the ability of their institutions to remain operational, untended by their populations. As a result, governments have grown larger and less efficient, and have arrogated to themselves more and more of the resources of societies, thereby inhibiting productivity. At some point, those societies, when beleaguered and impoverished, lose faith in the institutions of governance and leadership succession.

It is possible that the end of the second decade of the 21st Century will see exactly that tipping point, at which faith - a psychological attribute - disappears, and either rigid reaction or anomie and chaos intervene. This forecast is based on the existing performance of most governments of modern economies, but reactions of their societies will vary based on their individual natures, their reserves of wealth, and the degree to which government and leaders can adapt radically to reignite and impart purpose and prosperity to their societies.

At present, in 2010, we see no major societies prepared to take such radical steps to reverse trends of social distrust in systems, and, indeed, the accumulation of laws and customs actually makes such radical action infeasible or unlikely, except in the event of major external threat, such as war.

This trend to inflexibility and resistance to radical change (which would entail discomfort and the removal of personal wealth) has reinforced a "business as usual" attitude. People rarely see the extent of change occurring around them; it is disguised by a continuity of visual references; and the presence of institutions which have not previously failed them.

In fact, it has been said of the modern era that institutions have evolved specifically to disguise change, because change appears threatening. Thus, when systems finally break down under the weight of debt, social change, and reaction, the event appears sudden and unexpected.

Some societies will merely erode into lower expectations of their own domestic and international capabilities, and well-being: many modern societies will allow themselves to decline in "a step of sighs", occasionally rebuilding to some degree, only to resume their downward steps, unless confronted with an existential challenge which forces them to cut away the inhibiting dross of years, and infuses them with the energy to respond.

So, then, the coming decade promises a continuation of the declining fortunes in major modern economies, absent the catalyst to reverse the trend.

And if Western societies falter, will new societies step forward to claim wealth and power? Not necessarily. There is no guarantee of continued growth in the People's Republic of China (PRC), the Republic of Korea (RoK), the Russian Federation, or India. Each has their frailties, and each is dependent on the global wealth to varying degrees.

Related articles

• Taking down America: four scenarios for the end of the American Century by 2025 (energybulletin.net)
• Alfred W. McCoy: The Decline and Fall of the American Empire: Four Scenarios for the End of the American Century by 2025 (huffingtonpost.com)
• The American Empire Is Going Down (lewrockwell.com)
• How America will collapse (by 2025) (salon.com)
• "We should respect our history but avoid being its captives" - Medvedev (rt.com)

If anyone still harbored any doubts that there is an urgent need to resolve the Middle East crisis one needs only look at the events that unfolded two weeks ago off the coast of Gaza when Israeli commandos stormed a Turkish relief vessel heading for the besieged Palestinian territory.

The end result of that operation, one which turned out to be a monumental public relations fiasco for Israel, was that it raised the level of animosity between Israel and Turkey, a level which was already dipping well into the red zone - pushing it another notch deeper into the danger zone.

One must not forget that Turkey is a full-fledged member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and that further schism between the Jewish state and a NATO country could have serious implications on the Alliance.

The North Atlantic treaty stipulates very clearly that an attack against one member of the Alliance is equal to an attack on all members. It is this unshakable tenet that has kept Western Europe - and Turkey - safe during the Cold War, acting as a strong deterrence and a reminder to the Warsaw Pact countries that any act of aggression against any member state would be regarded as an act of aggression against the entire Alliance. In essence NATO offered all its members the unwavering support military and political support of the United States of America.

So what would be the consequences in the unfortunate event that Israel found itself in an armed confrontation with Turkey? In which directions would the loyalty of the United States likely to turn? Will the United States respond to the obligations of the NATO charter, one which Washington was instrumental in establishing and rush to defend a country engaged in a military confrontation with a country which every administration has described as America's staunchest ally in the region, or would the United States risk fracturing NATO and offer assistance to Israel?

This is the dilemma which the Obama administration today could very well face should the situation in the Middle East continue to deteriorate as it has been doing so gradually, ever since the start of this crisis some 60 years ago.

While the oil spill from a sunken drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico threatens to become an environmental disaster, plans are proceeding for opening up new drilling territories in the iceberg-infested waters off Greenland.

The island, an autonomous territory under Danish sovereignty, this week conducted an auction for 14 blocks in Baffin Bay, off the northwest coast of Greenland near Canadian territorial waters. Results will be announced in August.

In the meantime, Cairn Energy will this summer begin drilling off Disko Island in Baffin Bay on the basis of leases awarded in earlier auctions. Exxon Mobil and Chevron also hold existing leases, while Royal Dutch Shell and Norway's Statoil were among the bidders in this week's auctions.

The U.S. Geological Survey has estimated that some 50 billion barrels of oil may be found offshore Greenland, where ice covers four-fifths of the surface territory for a good part of the year. Some in Greenland, which has a population of only 57,000, hope that oil will be the ticket to independence from Denmark, which has controlled the island since the 18th century.

A great - and still growing - divergence appeared in 2009 between public statements by leaders and their public performance. The politicized, romanticized theater of increasingly populist "democratic" leaders and media seemed to be of a different planet from activities taking place in the real world.

While a large part of the global population appears still transfixed by words, there is a growing perception that great fissures already rend the global strategic architecture.

This is a trend which will compound during 2010.

There is a widespread belief that the world has "ducked the strategic bullet" of global economic collapse, but this is merely the delusionary euphoria of the severely wounded patient. Severe structural damage has occurred to the key driver of global economic stability, the United States. Most major economies of Western Europe and Asia, although in plight, have been protected in their fall by a complex web of structures and the fact that they were not, in many respects, as leveraged as the US. Britain and Japan, however, remain leveraged in their debt-to-asset ratio, to a death-defying degree.

All of this has been long in coming, and brought to a speedy climax by the unprecedented recklessness of inflationary spending by US Pres. Barack Obama, and, in the UK by Prime Minister Gordon Brown. The modern world (East and West, but prompted by the West) is at a junction point in a long process of constantly growing -- but poorly-defined -- obsession with "rights" (entitlements). This had its origins with the halting, but consistent, rise in global prosperity which began with the early stages of the Second Industrial Revolution (1700-1900).

Thus, a butterfly flutters its wings in 18th Century Britain and a tsunami engulfs the world in the early 21st Century.

Managing the now-overwhelming sense of entitlement in what we call modern democracies has become, because of the power of a comprehensive, but ill-informed electorate, an exercise in mob control, and an opportunity for populist demagoguery.

Pres. Obama's statement of January 25, 2010, that he would now curb US Government spending was, like most of the statements of the past year, self-serving and had nothing to do with reality. His plan to push through a State-dominated healthcare system at a reputed cost in excess of $1-trillion (quite apart from other discussions about a new "stimulus package" of spending) makes a mockery of the pre-election posturing of fiscal moderation (that is, his posturing before the 2008 and the 2010 elections). In any event, a review of the statistics of the US shows that his proposed "freeze" on a small part of US Government spending would be, compared with his profligacy and reduction of private sector productivity and capital formation ability, a derisory diversion.

Without dwelling, for the purposes of this estimate, on the cumulative impact of ever-broadening the electoral franchise -- which creates an automatic disposition of an electorate to demand increasing benefits without attendant increases in productivity -- the Western economies are probably at a point where they must attempt to create fairly draconian, centralized power structures to rule more by diktat than by "democracy". That is the only recourse to stem the growing dysfunction of government brought about by the "democratic" necessity to pander to a restive populace.

In a report on March 20, 2009, I noted: "the 'professional politician' will morph into new forms of Cæsarism or Bonapartism. This is already underway, as 'leaders' with no practical experience of the world increasingly fear the uncertainties of markets and the confidence of those who can actually create, manage, and build. Thus, the 'new socialism' is a system built by leaders who demand central control of societies and who genuinely fear freedom."

The new circus includes the pandering to newly-created pseudo-scientific religions, such as "climate change", which have so greatly distracted governments, the media, and populations from their daily work as to have already hampered the chances for economic viability in the near future. Those, however, who live by the sword of populism -- mob rule -- must ultimately answer to that same fickle crowd, which, as Elias Canetti noted in Crowds & Power, has no mind, only wants.

Uruguay bank secrecy hangs delicately poised after conflicting statements of intent from rival candidates ahead of October presidential elections.

Just a week after Frente Amplio candidate Jose Mujica signalled his intent to discuss bank secrecy within the Mercosur group in an interview with an Argentinian newspaper, opposition candidate Luis Alberto Lacalle apologized for his rival's remarks at a lunch given by the Uruguay-Argentina chamber of commerce.

When questioned on the issue of bank secrecy, Lacalle stated categorically that he would not hand over bank secrecy if he won the election. He further backed up his statement with the following reasons (translation from an article in Uruguayan newspaper el pais).

- Uruguay politics should be geared towards maximising the nation's comparative advantages.
- Financial activity generates wealth and employment
- For Uruguay to act like small countries such as Luxemourg and Switzerland is completely legitimate.
- It is hypocritical for large countries to try and impose policy in this way when in places like the US state of Delaware ''they wash, iron, and dry'' money (a reference to the number of secret companies formed in that state).
- In the cases where it is called for bank secrecy can still be lifted.

With just weeks to go until the country decides, Mujica looks better placed to win the election.