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You're Under Arrest.
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| Tuesday, November 29, 2005 - Vol. 7 No. 239 |
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In Today's Letter:
WEALTH: Tax Advantaged Offshore Vehicles.
OFFSHORE: Is the OECD Really Necessary?
COMMENT: You're Under Arrest.
PRIVACY & RIGHTS: Pentagon Wants to Spy on U.S.
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HOW YOU CAN RIDE THE COMING FINANCIAL SHOCK WAVE
The global derivatives market has soared from just over $1 trillion to a staggering $272 trillion, according to the Bank of International Settlements. What's more disturbing, is that nearly 1/3 of these derivatives are concentrated in the hands of just 3 American banks.
One bad move...one unexpected crisis...could blow these banks' delicately balanced derivatives portfolios off their axis and spin world markets into an unprecedented collapse. But you can protect your portfolio - and potentially reap huge gains - by accessing "secret" financial opportunities that are set to soar when the derivatives bubble bursts...click right here:
LINK: http://www.isecureonline.com/reports/SVS/E190FB14/
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Tax Advantaged Offshore Vehicles
Buying an annuity or life insurance policy from an offshore insurance company achieves financial diversification. Even better, the tax implications are favorable and far less complex than those involving foreign trusts or international business corporations (IBCs).
Many of the best companies specializing in annuities and life insurance for foreign investors are in Switzerland. Some are centuries old and world renown, providing excellent service with a wide variety of investment products. The Swiss insurance industry has a long and enviable history of sound financial activity. It's been more than 150 years since a Swiss company failed, a claim the US and most nations can't make. Switzerland offers special tax incentives to foreign annuity investors by exempting nonresident annuity purchasers from all Swiss income, capital gains,and inheritance taxes on the annuity. Added inducement: annuities and other insurance contracts are exempt from the Swiss withholding tax on interest payments.
There's another good reason to invest in offshore insurance; strong asset protection. It's very difficult to collect a claim against an annuity purchased and administered outside the US. Swiss law says ownership of a Swiss annuity or bank account, absent other evidence of business activity there, is not a sufficient basis for a Swiss court to honor a foreign legal judgment against the annuitant or account holder. Swiss courts repeatedly and strictly have upheld this rule. The law also protects annuities naming spouses and children as beneficiaries.
Rates of returns vary on various insurance products. Carefully compare several before you decide. Many companies offer rates tied to market interest rates, but be aware of currency risk. You can also lower this risk by buying your annuity in a country with a particularly strong currency. Again, Switzerland and the Swiss franc come to mind. Life insurance remains one of few remaining opportunities for offshore estate tax planning combined with asset protection and tax deferral. And barring major changes in US tax, these advantages will remain for the foreseeable future.
The Sovereign Society can put you in touch with reliable life insurance and annuity professionals. Just ask us.
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Is the OECD Really Necessary?
Our friend Dan Mitchell of the Heritage Foundation in Washington, DC, under the headline, "Paris based bureaucracy seeks to undermine America" describes the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) as "an international bureaucracy controlled by high tax European welfare states." He notes, as we have many times, that the OECD pursues left-wing initiatives such as a phony campaign against "harmful tax competition." According to the Paris based bureaucracy, it's unfair for jobs and capital to escape fiscal hell-holes like France and Germany and migrate to less oppressive, lower tax jurisdictions such as Hong Kong, Switzerland, Ireland, and the US. But this is hardly news. As John Berlau notes in Human Events, the OECD routinely proposes big government policies that would hurt America. What is news is that American taxpayers are paying one fourth of the OECD's bloated budget. Why should American taxpayers pay bureaucrats in France (who pay no tax, by the way) to advocate higher taxes in the United States?
Maybe it's time the US got out of the OECD, or at least stops paying most of its bills.
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You're Under Arrest.
Dear A-Letter Reader:
Have you ever had a run in with the law? A traffic ticket? A mistaken arrest? An alleged violation of IRS tax or SEC or other regulatory laws?
Suppose, instead of a system of known laws, where you went to court, you discovered the law was whatever the judge or the prosecutors wanted it to be -- always interpreted to their advantage, and to your disadvantage. Suppose after you were arrested you were not allowed to have a lawyer and were held in "solitary confinement" for a long period of time -- without knowing why, without being allowed to contact your family or friends -- without even being given a newspaper, a book or a magazine.
That's what has been happening to countless persons here in America, many of them US citizens, many foreigners in the US legally, until now.
When I was in China a few weeks ago, you may recall how I described my TV viewing of the BBC and my Internet access in my hotel room both being blocked and censored. This abridgment of my freedoms was not aimed at me particularly, but at anyone who happened to be in China, citizen or not, who sought information the Communist dictatorship did not like.
There is no real freedom in China (and places such as Cuba, and increasingly, in Russia again), because individuals are allowed to do only what the government orders them to do. And if they don't like it, there is no appeal, no rule of law, no due process or equal protection of the law -- all concepts that were once paramount in American law -- but are now under attack by our own government.
A long article in the NY Times yesterday recounted how a young lady judge in China was being reprimanded because she dared to hand down a fair and equitable ruling that angered local Communist government officials. She was trying to uphold the law as written -- but she discovered "the law" was what the Communist government said it was.
In the same vane, as Americans, what are we to make of the news reports concerning the sudden shift of Jose Padilla, a US citizen, from military to US judicial control?
He has been held by the US government without charges for over three years as an "enemy combatant." When US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales announced last week that Padilla would be transferred to the federal justice system from military detention, he said almost nothing about the standards the administration used in deciding whether to charge terrorism suspects like Mr. Padilla with crimes or to hold them in military facilities as enemy combatants. "We take each individual, each case, case by case," Mr. Gonzales said.
The upshot of that approach, underscored by the decision in Mr. Padilla's case, is that no one outside the Bush administration knows just how this determination is made - whether to handle a terror suspect as an enemy combatant or as a common criminal, whether to hold him indefinitely without charges in a military facility or to charge him in court. Indeed, citing the need to combat terrorism, the administration has argued, with varying degrees of success, that judges should have essentially no role in reviewing its decisions.
Before you go ballistic and send me an e-mail saying all alleged terrorists should be taken out and shot without trial, substitute yourself at that time when you may have had a brush with the law (or been the subject of a civil lawsuit) and ask yourself whether, in that situation, you wanted the rule of law?
Because, dear reader, when the rule of law is suspended in one area of offenses to make it easy for police and prosecutors to arrest, detain, isolate, punish and convict -- it can be suspended for you too.
Small wonder that an increasing number of US persons are looking offshore or places where the rule of law still applies.
That's the way that it looks from here.
BOB BAUMAN, Editor
* In Terror Cases, Administration Sets Own Rules.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/27/national/nationalspecial3/27enemy.html
* Rule by Law: A Judge Tests China's Courts, Making History
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/28/international/asia/28judge.html
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Pentagon Wants to Spy on US
The Pentagon is expanding its domestic surveillance activity with proposals in the works to allow military agencies to spy on law abiding Americans and to build secret dossiers on citizens. The demand for police state powers is said to be necessary in order to fight the "war on terror."
The US Defense Department wants more programs for gathering and analyzing intelligence within the US, more personnel and additional legal authority for domestic security activities. The White House is considering expanding the power of a little known Pentagon agency called the Counterintelligence Field Activity, or CIFA that would transform CIFA from an office that coordinates Pentagon security efforts to one that has authority to investigate domestic crimes within the US such as treason, foreign or terrorist sabotage or even economic espionage. The Pentagon is also pushing legislation that would create an intelligence exception to the Privacy Act, allowing the FBI and others to share information gathered about US citizens with the Pentagon, CIA and other intelligence agencies. Backers say the measure is needed to strengthen investigations into terrorism or weapons of mass destruction (such as the ones found in Iraq?).
A former official of the Reagan administration, Paul Craig Roberts, offers the opinion that the "Bush administration's hype about terrorism serves no purpose other than to build a police state that is far more dangerous to Americans than terrorists." Doesn't anybody in Washington read and understand the US Constitution?
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6 Forces Driving Gold to $600 in 2006...and 10 Ways to Protect Yourself from Economic Mayhem and Profit as Gold Gets Ready to Rocket
The "conventional wisdom" crowd on Wall Street will tell you now's the time to sell gold-while at the same time they're trying to sell you shares of some helium-huffing tech stocks with no earnings and no real value. But, every fundamental and technical factor we are watching right now says...
* It is not too late to profit from rising gold prices
* You will want to have gold in your portfolio over the next year
* Gold could move farther and faster than many people believe possible.
Full, detailed report at:
http://www.isecureonline.com/reports/190SSFDG/E190FB58/
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THE SOVEREIGN SOCIETY OFFSHORE A-LETTER .
* Bob Bauman, Editor * Daniel Aponte, Jr., Managing Editor,
* Matthew Barrett , E-Commerce Mgr. * Erika Nolan, Publisher.
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