http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/04/uks-osborne-exempts-members-of-parliament-other-politically-exposed-persons-from-money-laundering-oversight.html

You cannot make this up. So much for that rule of law thingie. Hat tip Guido Fakwes via Richard Smith:



This was the argument used to justify giving Members of Parliament and their families a free pass from money laundering. Note that the Daily Mail clearly signals its skepticism in this story from January:

Britain’s banks have been accused of hounding MPs’ children, parents, grandparents and even in-laws in a crackdown aimed at curbing fraud by corrupt African dictators.

They have threatened to shut the bank accounts of MPs and their relatives – on suspicion of being linked to terrorism and international money laundering.

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http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/04/robert-reich-why-is-one-of-sanders-most-important-proposals-being-ignored.html

Yves here. I want to clarify one key issue about a transaction tax. Its purpose is not to raise revenue. Its purpose is to discourage excessive trading, which is socially unproductive. Recently, many studies have found that an outsized financial sector is as drag on growth. The finer-grained ones have identified too many resources devoted to secondary market trading as the cause. “Secondary market trading” is all the buying and selling that happens after a company raises money, as in among investors, not sales of newly-issued securities from a company to investors to raise money. A certain level of secondary market trading is necessary and desirable so that an investor can sell if he wants to (as in he needs liquidity). But overly cheap liquidity makes it attractive to trade for purely speculative purposes, as the collapse in average holding times of NYSE stocks attests.

Now a transaction tax may indeed raise a lot of revenue. But the intent is to discourage undesirable activity, and it’s hard to estimate in advance how much trading volumes would fall with a well-designed transaction tax.

By Robert Reich. Originally published at his website

Why is there so little discussion about one of Bernie Sanders’s most important proposals – to tax financial speculation?

Buying and selling stocks and bonds in order to beat others who are buying and selling stocks and bonds is a giant zero-sum game that wastes countless resources, uses up the talents of some of the nation’s best and brightest, and subjects financial market to unnecessary risk.

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Always seek to find how the Authortarians are F-ing you over.

Can we teach this to all school students?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/how-wealthy-americans-divided-and-conquered-the-poor-to-create-the-concept-of-race/2016/04/19/2cab6e38-0643-11e6-b283-e79d81c63c1b_story.html?tid=sm_tw

...
So, using some specialized lessons, Hipkins helped the students explore the invention of race and the reasons for it, as laid out in colonial law. Especially the Virginia slave codes enacted between 1640 and 1705.

Question: How did wealthy landowners thwart the efforts of enslaved Africans and European indentured servants to join forces in a common struggle for economic justice?

Answer: Divide and conquer through the invention of race. Make the white servants feel superior to black slaves by virtue of skin color; manipulate poor whites into believing that any perceived gains by blacks had come at their expense.

“I started by having students get together in groups and think up laws that could be used to separate one group of people from another and laws that would make one group of people feel superior to another,” said Hipkins, who taught 11th-graders at the Capital City Public Charter School in Northwest Washington.

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