Author Archives: Petros

Why does the United States claim the right to protect Americans abroad and therefore to tax them, when there is no entity or mechanism by which American citizens abroad may receive protection FROM the United States government? A Federal court has just decided that US citizens have no rights outside of the United States. Therefore US citizens abroad have no right to habeas corpus or from illegal detention of indefinite duration.

Constiutional rights don’t apply overseas

Patricia Moon mentions a potential $455,000 FBAR fine on her financial accounts in the recent article in the Wall Street Journal. Now it doesn’t take very much FBAR math to figure out what her financial assets are. She lives in Toronto, so on paper she is likely what I would call a middle-class millionaire; but she is house rich but not cash rich. A million dollars doesn’t make a person rich, since most houses in major Canadian cities are now worth over a million. But the alarming thing is that in the United States the average wage earner makes less than $27,000 and 46 million people are on food stamps. These are indications that the majority of people in the United States have dropped out of the middle class. On this, Charles Hugh Smith has written a definitive essay, “What does it take to be Middle Class?” His conclusion is that one needs a minimum of 100K income per year to even be considered middle class, and that greatly exceeds the median household income. In this light, even a large number of the so-called “one percent” are not rich but only middle class. Still the majority of American homelanders have little sympathy for the Patricia Moons of the world who renounce their US citizenship in order to save themselves from financial ruin. Obama also won the last election by over 50% of participating voters. Is that a coincidence?  Hardly.

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Michael Maloney makes a distinction between “currency” and “money”. Currency is issued by government. Money has always been gold or silver. He outlines in the following video how various currencies dominate world trade only for a short time before they collapse and something else takes over. At the end of World War II, the US dollar became the dominant currency, and for the first time ever in history, the world had one reserve currency. Today, in Maloney’s view, there are various events which are bringing the greenback’s status as the world’s reserve currency to an end–nails in its coffin.  One of those nails is FATCA.  See at 18:00 minutes in:

After subjecting us to multiple articles by Barrie McKenna on FATCA, the Globe and Mail comes out with this:  Treat all Canadian citizens equally under the law:

Stripping a citizen of citizenship is characteristic of a totalitarian regime such as the Soviet Union, which banished dissidents, including the writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn in 1974. It’s not a model for Canada to emulate.

Sending the banking information of Canadians of US origin to the IRS is an effective stripping of their protection under Canadian law as citizens. Hence it is another way that the Harper government wants to strip people of their Canadian citizenship.  Prime Minister Stephen Harper is a tyrant and does not deserve to lead Canada.

I have sad news to impart: On June 2, 2014, Don Whiteley passed away. See his obituary in the Vancouver Sun.  He was a great ally from the journalistic community, and he will be greatly missed.

See also some of his articles:

The accidental Kenyan: What would happen if the African nation copied U.S. tax policy?

@BCBusiness Gets the Canadian #FATCA Capitulation story right! By Don Whiteley

Will Canada’s hard line on Eritrea’s ‘diaspora’ tax apply to the U.S.?

IRS wants Canada to nab U.S. tax cheats: Why we should care

We used to call the USA the land of opportunity. But with FATCA, the USA has become the land of importunity.

The US is forcing all the banks in the world to give them banking information. To say this is an importunate demand is a bit of an understatement.

77,000 foreign banks to share tax information with IRS

Bloomberg reports that the US plans to fine a French bank US $10 billion:

U.S. authorities are seeking to impose the fine to settle allegations that BNP transferred funds for clients in violation of sanctions against Sudan, Iran, and Cuba, according to people familiar with the investigation. The fine could be the largest criminal penalty in the U.S., eclipsing BP Plc’s $4 billion accord with the Justice Department last year.

I have little sympathy for banksters and politicians who are essentially arguing over how they going to divide the spoils of the middle class. But this $10 billion fine of France is a particular arrogant treatment of an “ally” and has the potential of helping the anti-FATCA movement. It is an especially egregious example of how the US determines that its laws have international jurisdiction and has set about confiscating the world’s wealth through its banking hegemony. If the US keeps this up, expect the rest of the world to join Russia and China economic coalition against the US.

Hat tip, Zerohedge: France Furious At US $10 Billion BNP “Masterful Slap”, “Racketeering” Fine

Well, I hope that our technical problems have finally come to an end. Problems Wednesday were about changing our domain registration to a new ISP (internet service provider), which required time for “prorogation”.  I myself didn’t have access until Thursday morning. Then the normal Brock traffic simply overwhelmed our shared server service which was promoted by the ISP but turned out to be thoroughly inadequate for our needs. That’s when we started getting the account suspended message–and no, that wasn’t because you put some bad language in a comment. So we had to change to a new platform which is more robust and will hopefully carry us into the next year.

For those naysayers of Isaac Brock–and boy do we ever have them, I have a message. Take for example Kim Moody, who wrote:

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Now that we’ve arrived at 10,000,000 hits, it is time to move to a more robust platform. My personal thanks to our software developer who has worked hard as a volunteer to make this happen.

At around 11:00 am this morning, I will turn off the ability to make comments at isaacbrocksociety.ca. Then, thanks to a website developer who has graciously volunteered his time, we will be upgrading the website to a more robust platform. This will enable us to handle more easily the traffic that we have been experiencing.

Please note that if you are absolutely in need of comment fix, that our Facebook page is also available.  If you haven’t liked that page, today is a good day.