Swiss Paliament Accepts Taxation Treaty with the USA (French) ….(English)
Today is 6 March 2012, the morning after a very tragic day for Switzerland, and democracy all over the world. The Swiss parliament has agreed yesterday to cede yet more of our sovereignty to the US, in violation of its duties under Article 2 of the Constitution “The Swiss Confederation shall protect the liberty and rights of the people and safeguard the independence and security of the country.” Alongside the abstentions of some, the only party that adamantly opposed this was the Swiss People’s Party (“UDC”, the largest party) but that wasn’t enough.
Parliament’s excuse is that if they don’t cooperate with the US, the Swiss banking and finance industries would be shunned. They are selling us minnows out along with their sacred principles of popular democracy and sovereignty.
They are throwing away over seven-hundred years of democratic progress!
They are choosing to enhance cooperation with a totalitarian country that ignores its own Sacred Constitution and holds people without trial and tortures them! The same totalitarian country where a federal judge agreed that Obama could sentence a US Citizen to death without any trial and have him assassinated wherever in the world he could be found (even though the victim might not be somebody we would have wanted to shake hands with the assasination was carried out in violation of every notion of due process)! They are kneeling before the same sorry excuse for a fake democracy that recently passed the National Defense Authorization Act allowing indefinite detention without trial, in violation of the 4th, 5th, 6th Amendments of the US Constitution, and Articles 29 through 30 of the Swiss Federal Constitution!
All of this so that the IRS can prosecute its general warrants in violation of the 4th Amendment, compel people to self-incriminate themselves in violation of the 5th Amendment, collect “excessive fines” in violation of the 8th, and continue to double-tax US-persons abroad in violation of international legal principles of jurisdiction and despite having no legal mandate to do so (Congress has no authority over US Citizens abroad because they are not counted in the Census as Article 1 Section 2 of the US Constitution provides).
Shame on every single deputy who voted for this! They are not Swiss! They are enemies of the Sacred Constitution, the Sovereign Swiss people, and our Beloved Helvetia!
I think some of the minnows over here will turn piranha very soon. Personally, I feel my teeth getting very sharp. I would like to find out the name of every deputy who voted for this (I believe there was a roll-call vote) and keep each and every one of them on my permanent black list. They just committed an act of war against their own people; we must throw them all out into the street. They must never hold any public office or any position of responsibility in the private sector ever again. They must be held accountable for their traitorous actions.
The only positive note is that the new treaty will allow dragnet fishing expeditions only in the case of particular banks where bank employees have « contributed to illegal models of behavior ». Otherwise, the US must state the name of the person. « Les autorités américaines enquêtant sur des comportements délictueux pourront obtenir des informations sur des contribuables non identifiés par leur nom ou adresse (demandes groupées) si la banque ou ses collaborateurs ont contribué à des modèles de comportement illégaux. Sinon, l’identification de la personne concernée restera nécessaire. » The other oddity is that the treaty is not yet in effect because the US Senate has not approved it yet.
The UDC has already proposed a popular initiative on banking secrecy; this effort needs to be accelerated. The people must decide on this, we cannot let a bunch of turncoat politicians run the show. I would suspect that there is room for some judicial review of the new treaty, although I have not yet read the text, and I am thus uncertain as to what extent the treaty is “self-executing”. At any rate, as far as I am concerned the vote yesterday was invalid and the treaty null and void because parliament does not have the right to sign a treaty that goes so fundamentally against the directives of the Constitution. I hope our judges have some testicles. They are going to need them.
God preseve Sacred Switzerland! God save us from tyranny!
If you understand French spoken with a Swiss-German accent, hear Christoph Blocher , one of the top leaders in the Swiss People’s Party he agrees with me that this whole business is against our laws and our fundemental principles and he even uses the words “act of war”, although he remains a bit more diplomatic than I was above. Herr Blocher, danke für Ihre Wörter!!
Blocher says, “They want to destroy Swiss banks; that is almost an act of war.” Exactly. I will say it this way: They want to tax Canadian residents and citizens: they want to fine them for their bank accounts. That is an Act of War. It must be the Canadian government that protects us from such actions of a foreign country. Blocher understands. So did Isaac Brock.
Former Swiss President Micheline Calmy-Rey gets a pie in the face (entartée) Monday night.
Funny. She pansied around with the US when she was president and was also foreign minister during the UBS mess in 2009 if I remember correctly. The current president, Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf, is not doing any better on the issue. She is part of the Bourgois Democratic Party, made up of people who were expelled from the UDC by Christoph Blocher a few years ago. We need a president with big nuts (or boobs) to stand up firmly against the US.
Link: http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/44b21e58-6775-11e1-b6a1-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1oLWfd0Vt
Testing
@Jefferson; re your turn of phrase –
“We need a president with big…”
The equivalent would be ovaries…
@ Badger, yeah ok, you’re right.
The battle will not be over until the Fat Lady Sings, and it is my impression that she hasn’t even started to warm up yet. Meanwhile I can’t believe how many foreign leaders are rolling over rather than stranding tall in the face of US tax law imperialism.
This only incourages the US Congress to even get tougher.
Lots of people in the Swiss Parliament are otherwise very reasonable folks, with professions, families, farms, hobbies, intellectual and cultural activities. ideas, and projects. I think they ignore how nasty Unca Sam can be when blinded and blithely meandering about with his paws. Open your eyes folks, wake up before it is too late.
@All
I don’t know about you, but I’ve lost all hope that FATCA will ever go away or that our politicians here in Europe will grow a backbone at all. We have been betrayed again and again but I don’t see what we can do about it beyond protecting ourselves and renouncing citizenship. Most of our co-nationals don’t care because they view it as an internal US issue. They don’t understand the violation of their own sovereignty.
Anyway, the news only seems to get worse and worse each passing month: the Big 5 EU countries becoming “IRS partners”, FEIE possibly to be nixed, bank accounts being closed in the US and outside on an increasing basis, and so on. I can’t stand it anymore and I’ve lost patience with politicians on both sides of the Atlantic!
Don, when are you going to renounce? As soon as they accept my paperwork here, hopefully next week, I’m going to get a certified copy of my US passport and THEN FINALLY go back to the embassy to tell them to shove this passport. Then…. no more US worries 🙂
Nothing will ever improve if every expat renounces. I won’t rule it out but want to leave it as a last resort. I actually resent the greedy lawyers more than anyone. True, there are still honest ones but fear that far too many are jumping on the gravy train. The system needs to be reformed.
Better to renounce or relinquish citizenship than to tolerate being persecuted just for living outside one’s country of birth.
I wonder what William Tell would have to say about all this.
FATCA may be a watershed event in human history. Even now, it is no longer simply about banks, taxes or a meagre handful of expats caught in its leading edge. Now, with the chimeric promise of reciprocity for all those who sip from its cup, FATCA is transforming into a powerful catalyst for hastening the destruction of the nation-state itself, leading ultimately to a fully integrated and globalized police state. Say goodbye to quaint memories of national sovereignty, privacy and individual freedoms.
Our leaders, unwittingly or not, are now laying the foundations for a dystopian oligarchical society that will leverage the full power of the Internet age to eventually track, profile, enumerate, control, pacify, homogenize and commodify every human being on the planet. We are merely privileged to experience an early taste of what will become the norm for our children and grandchildren. For all those who have contemplated how much better a World Government might be, be careful what you wish for…
@Deckard:
I think your prognosis is probably correct, unless the grand ponzi scheme of western central banking collapses under its own weight– which it may.
There is only so much debt people can take on and the dollar appears to be doomed.
It will be interesting to see how the future unfolds. Will we wind up with a new single currency (like Soros and others advocate) along with a world government of sorts?
Or will the pendulum swing back in the other direction with more competing currencies and a renaissance of national sovereignty?
Only the future will tell.
“These are the times that try men’s souls.”
@ Deckard You are right. So is CATO. Fact is we will have something different then now. And people will look back to our earlier 1950-2012 with nostalgia as the golden era of globalism; the Dark empire is coming or the Dark Ages. I feel it. The US is headed toward 1984 or Mad Max and I don’t know which it is gonna be, but I feel the later is the more likely scenario, as Americans become sick of government control, remove its shackles, and chaos takes its place.
@Petros
Bravo! Well said. I’ve had enough of 1984 and not much looking forward to Animal Farm.
So if Mad Max shows, I actually hope he sticks around for a while.
“Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of liberty.”
– Thomas Jefferson
@Petros
I think in some ways we heading towards a more populist nationalistic time period and I don’t think that is at all bad thing. In fact Canada has been on the leading for forefront of both democratizing/populising our politics and getting our fiscal situation under control back in the 1990s. Think about everything that is happened in Canadian politics since 1984. First in 1984 the Liberals go down to one of the worst defeats in Canadian history to Brian Mulroney’s Conservatives. Then by 1993 Canadians tire of Mulroney including many conservatives themselves who breakoff and form the Reform Party. The Mulroney Campbell PC’s go from a 169 seats to two seats in a single night. (There is no party in the history of democracy that has ever suffered as bad of a defeat as the Kim Campbell Progressive Conservatives). The splinter Reform party(Which eventually become today’s Conservative Party of Canada) goes from one to 57 seats. In Ontario voters get sick of David Peterson(who himself brought down the Bill Davis Big Blue Machine) and out of nowhere elect Bob Rae’s NDP. Then they get sick of Rae and the NDP and blast into office Mike “Chainsaw” Harris. Then closer to the present day you have to whole coalition crisis and then last spring’s election with Liberals who bad been Canada’s dominant party for most of 20th century go down to humiliating third finish with their leader losing his own seat. I suspect your typicall US Democratic and US Republican member of Congress would have nightmares thinking about what could happen if the US went the way of Canada for the last 27 years. In the US there are still members of Congress that have been in office since the 1970s. In Canada there are few MP’s that go back even before 1993.
I think Canada is in fact the country who is best placed and whose calling to mankind is standup to all this crap such as FATCA and endless IMF bailouts as we have purged ourselves of the old elitist establishment parties such as the PC’s and Liberals and replaced them with more democratic/populist institutions such as Reform/Conservative and the NDP.
@Tim et al,
If you haven’t seen this yet, look what the global elite has in mind for our future:
“Building a North American Community”
http://www.cfr.org/canada/building-north-american-community/p8102
http://i.cfr.org/content/publications/attachments/NorthAmerica_TF_final.pdf
@CATO & Canadians on the thread
I always wondered when some sort of “North American Community” would be formed – I think that its just a a matter of time until the US finds a way to monopolise power in such a grouping and dictate its policy. Oh, and expect the US dollar as the currency I imagine! The only way that such a grouping could be fair is if each individual state or province of the three countries formed the building blocks of the organisation’s membership, otherwise US dominance in such a grouping would make German hegemony in the EU look laughable by comparison.
As a side note, I noticed that half of the authors on that article write their middle names with a single letter, for example “John P. Smith”. I’ve never understood this practice and never encountered it when I lived in the UK, where most people also have middle names (they are less common in continental Europe). Why do Americans write their names like this? I would just write out my whole name or legally use my middle name if I preferred that. Do Canadians write their names like this too or is it exclusively an American phenomenon?
Don Pomodoro re side note on forms of personal name – Decades ago I recall reading that British practice was either two initials and surname, like DH Lawrence, or forename and surname, like Thomas Hardy. In contrast, the U.S. really has a thing for forename and initial and surname … like Steven J Mopsick! Of course, the other two options are OK too — just think how BO does not use his middle H. So unlike ol’ Dubya before him.
Where is Mopsick anyway? Did we frighten him off? He is welcome to discuss with us.
@ Don,
The goal seems to be for a North American Union, like the EU. The currency is supposedly to be called the “Amero.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Union
Scary stuff indeed.
I found this Financial Times article about the Swiss parliamentary vote, you will have to register for free at Financial times to retreive it (8 articles per day for free or something like that).
Financial Times : Swiss parliament backs tax amendment The article seems to twist the whole affair around and as far as I am concerned it is negative press for us.
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