Corruption is not just a practice, but a mood, and it reaches heavens, when it’s made legal. Examples, especially global examples, set global moods.
An idiotic president spent his presidency visiting with plutocrats, begging them for money. A consequence of this highest example of triumphant corruption? The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) is now delving further into corruption and doping in the world of international athletics.
Who is leading the charge against corruption? The usual suspect. The French Republic. In Munich, Germany, Thursday january 14 “the criminal investigations into the IAAF (International Association of Athletics Federations) and its independent commissioner turned over information to the French prosecutor’s office” the Canadian reporting to WADA, McLaren, revealed.
It’s the second set of findings by the commission established by WADA. The first report released in November stunned the world of athletics by daring to reveal widespread, systematic doping in Russia, including the involvement of some employees of the Russian government. (Left unsaid was that, just looking at their results, countries such as the UK, USA, and Jamaica are just as drugged out as Russia is.)
Olympus gave its name to Olympia, where the Olympic games were held every four years, starting in 776 BCE. Olympia is actually in the Western Penepolese, a gigantic mountainous peninsula, far from Olympus in Northern Greece. So what’s the connection? Elevation of the human character, the will to come closer to the gods. Ancient athletes got no reward, but only symbolic ones, such as a crown of laurel.
Today’s Olympic athletes are only Olympic in name. Just like prostitutes they are led by greed to do what is too shameful, or even too illegal, to talk about. Including destroying their own lives through drug addiction, just to roll in dough.
In this hell, the elected politicians stand even lower. They have no shame, and have rendered legal all they do. [Although I make an exception for those who really fight for ideals, like politicians who campaign for socialized, or single payer medicine in the USA, such as Bernie Sanders, or against plutocrats, Sanders again. (And also the one whose name shall not be said.); or Catalan independentists, etc.]
IAAF suspended Russian athletes from international track and field competition. The question of whether they will be authorized to take part in the Rio Olympics is in the air.
The report brought a series of resignations of IAAF officials, including anti-doping director Gabriel Dolle and IAAF president Lamine Diack. Diack was jailed and is facing corruption and money laundering charges in France. Diack is accused of taking more than $1.55 million in bribes and taking money from athletes to cover up positive doping tests.
Diack’s sons were also paid by IAAF. One was convoked by French justice, but fled to Africa. France issued an Interpol warrant of arrest against him on Tuesday.
This is the sort of things, ladies and gentlemen, why global plutocracy hates France: France considers herself as the holder, beholder and defender of world justice.
What’s next? France issuing warrant of arrest against ALL international criminals? Will plutocrats be immune no more? Is France going to arrest all what makes London worthy, or, more exactly, expensive?
In the Swiss Canton of Ticino, Tessin, 24 global textile firms established themselves in the last two decades. Including North Face, Boss, Armani, Gucci, Versaci, countless Italian fashion houses, etc. The textile sector has become the main contributor to Ticino/Tessin taxes.
However their rate of imposition are kept secret. This sort of corruption is legal. However, it’s high time to put this sort of politicians and civil servants in jail. They often have, like El Chapo, the Mexican drug lord, the support of the local population. They are not any better.
Why not any better? Because by undermining the global tax base, they weaken global law enforcement, thus civilization, driving people crazy, and they turn to drugs to forget the whole mess. At some point, one will have to use force.
In Ticino, or Tessin, in the year 2012, the company formerly known as Pinault-Printemps-Redoute, headed by Pinault, one of the world’s top plutocrats, maybe the richest person in Europe, and who, showing up at the Elysee Palace could ask all present, including the so-called “President” to sit and stand-up, at will. Again and again. Of course, it won’t happen. It would break the Orwellian spell the Commons have been plunged into.
So Pinault the would-be Satanic changed the name of its tool: invisibility is one of Pluto’s assets. Changing names confuse critics. Instead of calling it as it was known, he called it “Kering”. Sounds seriously German, as serious as Volkswagen. Kering owns Gucci, Alexander McQueen, Volcom, Stella McCartney, Puma, etc.
An NGO got its hand on Kering’s accounting, and just revealed it. Kering has 600 employees in Switzerland. They make 70% of Kering’s profits (as least so Satan Pinault claims). In the rest of the world, Kering has 30,400 employees: they make only 30% of Kering’s profits. Making the computation, a Swiss employee makes 1.6 million Swiss Francs (roughly 1.6 million US dollars), and the average employee in the rest of the world, the thirty thousands, makes less than 14,000 dollars of profits. So a Swiss Kering worker makes more than a thousand times more profit than a Non-Swiss employee. They claim. And remember: we don’t know how small the taxes are on Pinault’s supposedly Swiss property. So instead of the French Pinault being taxed in France, or the rest of the world, he is “taxed” where there are no taxes. And the criminal ambles the world of the powerful, more powerful than them all, showing up at Davos, to plot with the other criminals. Hey, it was good to destroy completely the primary forest of Ivory Coast (thus spawning civil war there, when the economy tanked, as a result).
As the French magazine L’Express noted in 1986, “Bernard-Henri Lévy went all-out for his father. Did he intervene with presidential counselors to use the presidency’s African contacts to bump up the Ivory Coast’s debts to Bécob to top priority? BHL denies this intervention. However, he admits having contacted [then-PS Economy Minister] Pierre Bérégovoy to help his father.” Lévy also looked for help with the conservatives around Jacques Chirac, then mayor of Paris, and ultimately got an advantageous state loan after the personal intervention of President François Mitterrand.
Lévy’s firm also obtained an advantageous loan from François Pinault, a Gaullist politician, luxury firm executive, and today the 67th richest man in the world with a fortune of $11.5 billion.
Given Pinault’s bad reputation in business circles and his ties to far-right figures like Jean-Marie Le Chevallier and neo-fascist National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, L’Express notes, “Helping Bernard-Henri Lévy, a star of the intellectual left and leader of an already substantial network in publishing and media circles, was perhaps not such a stupid move. … The theory of a gesture by Pinault to win over BHL matches well, in any case, with subsequent developments: the turn of the [Pinault] group towards cultural industries and the birth of a ‘great friendship’ with Bernard.”
That was then. Now Pinault is much wealthier. Much powerful. By next year, he can ask Obama to lick his toes. In private.
Fiscal “optimization” has absolutely to stop. If nothing else, it’s weakening the West top military powers in their military capability. This is clear in Britain and France. (In the USA, the corruption affects military procurement: see the F35 scandalous catastrophe.)
But I am sure many officials in Ticino live very well, and, just as Nancy Pelosi only ever earned at most 160,000 dollars a year, her great leftism and democratism insures that Pelosi has now a personal fortune “between $42.4 million and $199.5 million in assets in 2013, which was enough for Bloomberg Business to deem her the richest member of House leadership from either party. By 2014, she and her husband, investment banker Paul Pelosi, were doing even better: She reported between $43.4 million and $202 million in assets”.
A report from Associated Press indicated that six years ago the IAAF knew of the widespread doping. Two internal IAAF papers before the London Olympics proposed not publishing doping sanctions for lesser-known Russians. Other officials claimed the IAAF was “one of the largest criminal organizations ever revealed”. Although some insisted that FIFA was still in the lead in that horse race.
In these matters, as in many others, the self-declared leading country leads. Obama just explained in his SOTU that the world wanted the USA to lead. Maybe it’s the world of the corrupted, corrupting global plutocrats which wants the USA to lead. In the USA many completely unethical practices, such as mass concussions for the youth, to serve “bread and circuses”, and make the youth unthinking, are perfectly legal.
Many so-called universities, “prestigious”, “excellent” and all that, get most of the profits from…concussion sports, with thoroughly drugged out young athletes (as shown by their dismally short lifespans). Is not that a new sort of slavery?
If the French prosecute, and jail them all, no doubt, after a while that the dreadful examples coming from the other side of the Atlantic will have to be put to the question.
Want to put a stop to the preceding? Campaign and vote for Senator Bernie Sanders, Clinton’s opponent. Although not the far left “populist” plutocratic media claims he is (him and Donald Trump!) Sanders, differently from the Obama, I helped so much eight years ago, is a known quantity in politics with an extremely long track record (yes Bernie likes guns and the F35… But he has to, as the Senior Senator from Vermont, a state heavily in guns and the F35). On the record both “populists” are very much against the tax advantages given to world’s richest people. Sanders is no doubt sincere. And Trump changes the mood, by condemning vigorously the practice (which Klingonic Clinton condones).
Clinton got $600,000 in speaking fees from Goldman Sachs is one year. G-S is an investment bank who got $60 billion from Obama in 2009… Goldman Sachs paid 5 billion dollars in fine for breaking the law. Not one G-S executives was prosecuted while kids who smoke pot go to jail. I have long condemned such facts. Now B. Sanders talk about them. They have to be carefully considered.
Clinton’s reply? Clinton accused Sanders of wanting to “start a contentious debate on healthcare, repel Obamacare”. All lies. Sanders wants MEDICARE FOR ALL.
Changing moods is the most fundamental step to take towards a necessary re-evolution. Yes, some of the world’s wealthiest, most powerful men, are the most corrupt. They are like the stem cells of a metastatic cancer of worldwide corruption. What happens in sports is just symptomatic. The stem cells of worldwide corruption have to be extirpated. Time to tax them, with more than taxes. Contempt should be high on the list, and the awareness than their behavior entails major capital crimes, not just ecological devastation.
Patrice Ayme’