Jeffrey Robinson's Blog

Mr. President –

Your country is a cesspool of financial crime, and your insistence otherwise, is total BS!

Look at what’s been going on for years.

In mid-2000, the so-called world’s money laundering watchdog, the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) published its “report on Non-Co-operative Countries and Territories,” adding 15 jurisdictions to its blacklist — Russia, Liechtenstein, Israel, Lebanon, the Bahamas, the Cayman Islands, Cook Islands, Dominica, the Marshall Islands, Nauru, Niue (a phony offshore operation set up by sleazebag Panamanian lawyers Mossack and Fonseca), the Philippines, St. Kitts and Nevis, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines — and Panama.

Your country feigned shock and horror.

Several years later, the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) piled on, describing Panama as an “uncooperative” tax haven.

Granted, whenever the FATF and the OECD bare their teeth, their dentures fall out.

But the response from Panama’s head of the financial analysis unit was not, “You’re right” (Because they were.) Or, “We agree, we need to change.” (Because you did then, and still do.)  But rather, “Panama cannot afford to have a bad reputation.”

Clearly he was wrong because that’s exactly what Panama has had ever since.

In the wake of the #PanamaPapers, you merely echo the same baloney, trying to convince the world that you and Panama have “zero tolerance” for financial crimes.

Coming from the country that brought the world General Noriega, the statement is laughable and, categorically, untrue.  You have colossal tolerance. You know, damn well, that modern Panama was built on, and is sustained by, dirty money.

Sure, I understand why you’re so desperate to pull the wool over the world’s eyes. Not only does your economy depend on it, but for the past 40 years, Panama has managed to fool just about everyone, including and especially the FATF and the OECD. That said, considering how easy it is to fool the FATF and the OECD, the fact that Panama was included on any of their lists is down to your nation’s naked venality.

The FATF and the OECD claimed Panama was uncooperative, so Panama did what Panama has always done – pretended to be cooperative. It works for the Swiss, why shouldn’t sleight of hand work for you?

Street corner whore that Panama is, you guys simply bought yourselves a bright new and shiny white wedding dress and, blushing on cue, said, look at us. Foolishly, the FATF and the OECD still believe in Tooth Fairies and Easter Bunnies. They removed your country from the black list. It was beyond their limited imagination that Panama would pass a few new codes that no one ever intended to enforce. That nothing changed. That nothing would change.

Secret banking. Phony shell companies. Lawyers out of control. Company formation agents out of control. And the Colon Free Trade Zone, the world’s largest pawn shop/fence, which is regulated by people who don’t believe in regulation because it would cost too many Panamanians too much money.

Face it, Panama is not a country, it’s a business.

And, in spite of  the bright new and shiny white wedding dress, practiced blushes and a few licks of fresh war paint, Panama is still the local street corner whore.

What could it matter to your law firms, and your financial institutions and your company formation agents that the offshore world has been aiding and abetting the war on drugs for more than 40 years? Or that the offshore world is the bulwark of transnational organized crime? Or that the offshore world is a haven for fraud-money, corporate corruption money, political corruption money and evaded taxes?

For that matter, what could it matter to anyone in Panama that the Free Zone is still a swamp where financial viruses breed ferociously, exactly the way mosquitoes did in the swamps that became the Canal.

The lawyers at the heart of this most recent fiasco, Jurgen Mossack and Ramon Fonseca, have maintained their innocence. In 40 years, they point out, they have never been prosecuted for anything. Your close personal pal, Fonseca, has even likened the firm to kitchen knife makers. He says, as such, they cannot be held responsible if  some woman uses their knife to kill her husband.

What unadulterated crap.

How about the people who built the gas chambers and made the Zyklon B and sold it to the Nazis? Do they have a right to claim, but we weren’t the ones who murdered 6 million people?

Sorry Mr. President, but for the past 40 years, your country has been that financial cesspool. And yet, you shamefully insist that everything is all right, and that will get even better because you have “zero tolerance,” for financial crime.

Amigo, talk is cheap.

Until your judiciary indicts Mossack and Fonseca and everyone else in Panama who has, knowingly, unknowingly or otherwise – it doesn’t matter – aided and abetted financial crimes around the world, your legacy will be that of previous tinpot Panamanian politicians – just another stooge put in office to look the other way.

/ JR

 

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By Jeffrey Robinson

Published: June 8, 1998

LONDON— A two-day Special Session of the General Assembly opens this Monday at the United Nations in New York, intended as a major assault on the global drug problem. By the time dessert and coffee are served Tuesday night, everything will return to business as usual, including the inability of the United Nations to have any effect on the global drug problem.

They have gone this route before. In 1988 the General Assembly adopted the Convention Against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances. Ten years later, a quarter of the member states had still not signed on, and among the rest fewer than 30 bothered passing legislation that even came close to resembling the model in the convention.

The United Nations’ impotence stems directly from individual members’ interests. Too many countries flourish in the narco-economy.

Worldwide, more money is spent on illicit drugs than on food, making illicit drugs the planet’s largest and most lucrative cash crop.

The devastation wreaked by drugs on everything from families to democracies is too often shrouded by glass skyscrapers — witness Miami, now the economic capital of South America. Or by the dividends of international banking groups — bad loans to Latin America in the 1970s were repaid thanks to drug money. Or by the huge invisible earnings of global financial centers — witness Britain selling its sovereignty in the murky world of offshore banking.

Ultimately, rhetoric is easier than turning the war on drugs into a war on the business of drugs.

As in any multinational industry, drug trafficking thrives on cash flow and reinvestment. Cash from the streets gets put into the world’s banking system, moved in and out of shell companies and through secret banking jurisdictions, then repatriated, disguised as legitimate profit.

The United Nations has conceded that as much as $300 billion worth of drug money is currently immersed in this money laundering cycle. Yet more than 50 UN member states openly sell phony shell companies.

It is not just the Caribbean — the Cayman Islands, for example, with one bank for every 57 citizens. It is also Western Europe (Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, the Channel Islands), the Middle East, Latin America, Eastern Europe, Africa (Nigeria in particular) and the Pacific.

Two months ago, preparing a French television film based on my book “The Laundrymen,” I phoned a company-formation agent in London to wonder, blatantly, where I could hide money. The person suggested Niue. Where is that? The person didn’t know.

It turns out to be a British Commonwealth sandbar in the middle of the Pacific, population 2,321. It has been put on the map by Panamanian lawyers acting for Colombian drug barons.

For $135, white-collar professionals operating legally in UN member states will hook anyone into the network of countries, companies and banks used for hiding dirty money.

Company-formation agents are backseat passengers on this bandwagon. Sitting up front are otherwise legitimate bankers, lawyers and accountants who have mined colossal fortunes out of brokering dirty money.

The United States has the world’s strictest regulations against money laundering — perhaps not surprisingly, as it is the largest consumer of illicit drugs. Yet there are no laws in the United States or in any other member state which hold white-collar professionals criminally responsible for not knowing that way down the line the ultimate beneficial owner of the money turns out to be a drug baron.

Relying on “plausible deniability,” these professionals need only look to their immediate client to claim: “I’m not dealing with a trafficker, I’m doing business with a lawyer.”

Requiring them to identify everyone involved at every level back to the ultimate beneficial owner of the money would effectively thwart the traffickers’ ability to launder his profits.

And the community of nations should ruthlessly ostracize governments which countenance trafficking and money laundering. Shutting down businesses in member states, that rely on secret banking and phony shell companies in rogue states would send the correct zero-tolerance message. You beat the traffickers by bankrupting them.

But that means taking on globally influential bankers, lawyers and accountants, and at least a quarter of the member states. Where are the politicians with the stomach for this fight?

 

—–

The writer’s books include an updated edition of “The Laundrymen,” a survey of the world of money laundering. He contributed this comment to the International Herald Tribune.

© 1998 Jeffrey Robinson

​

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With law suits now piling up against his eligibility, Ted Cruz risks becoming a huge liability to the Republicans. Surely, the Democrats are waiting in the wings to pounce, should he get the nomination. In the meantime, there are challenges to his name on the ballot in Illinois, New York and Texas, with more to come.  All he has to do is lose one.

A few weeks ago, on the SkyNews Debate, we broached the subject and, afterwards, I went into great detail on Facebook. Here is the prosecution case against Ted Cruz.

Ted Cruz was born in Canada, which is not disputed. His father is Cuban and his mother is American. But at the moment of his birth, Canadian citizenship was automatically ascribed to him. He is, in the eyes of Canada and the various treaties which recognize such things, including by the US, a natural born Canadian.

His American citizenship was bestowed upon him by US law through his mother. He also, most probably, could have claimed Cuban citizenship through his father. But his parents never asked for Cuban citizenship. They did however petition for US citizenship. Because this is a right granted to the children born abroad of at least one US citizen parent (with some very minor caveats) as soon as his mother requested a birth certificate from a competent US authority (embassy or consulate) it was automatically granted.

In other words, he is a citizen by statute.

Had she not requested it, moved her family back to the States and the day came when he wanted a US Passport, he would not have been given one. He would not have been considered a US citizen by virtue of his natural born Canadian status. That’s what it says on his original birth certificate. So she needed to ask for US citizenship to be granted.

Interestingly enough, he has not, to my knowledge, ever produced any papers confirming his US citizenship. Does he have a passport? How did he get it?. Does he have a certificate of birth of a US citizen born abroad? Did his mother ever bother to get one? Why doesn;t he produce it and let’s see what it says.

I understand the situation because I went through it with my children, both of whom were born in France. Within 12 hours of their birth, they had US Passports based on the issuance, by the US Consulate in Nice, of a certificate of birth of a US citizen born abroad. They are US citizens by statute. However, like Cruz, they are also natural born citizens of the country of their birth. In the case of my children, France.

And the term “natural born” is critical.

Like Cruz, my children hold dual-nationality. But you cannot be a “natural born citizen” of more than one country. You’re only born in one.

The Founding Fathers were well aware of this when they wrote the Constitution and set down, in stone, the requirements for the US Presidency.

Article II, Section 1, Clause 5 unequivocally states: “No person except a natural born citizen, or a citizen of the United States, at the time of the adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the office of President; neither shall any person be eligible to that office who shall not have attained to the age of thirty-five years, and been fourteen years a resident within the United States.”

Cruz is over 35 and resident for more than 14 years. But he was not a citizen at the time of the adoption of the Constitution, nor is he a natural born citizen of the United States having been declared at birth a natural born citizen of Canada.

To highlight the fact that the Framers knew exactly what they were doing, saying that the presidency was not open to just any citizen but restricted to those born on US soil (ie, natural born) here’s what they said about requirements for election to the House and Senate.

“Qualifications of (House) Members: No Person shall be a Representative who shall not have attained to the Age of twenty five Years, and been seven Years a Citizen of the United States, and who shall not, when elected, be an Inhabitant of that State in which he shall be chosen.”

“Qualifications of Senators: No Person shall be a Senator who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty Years, and been nine Years a Citizen of the United States, and who shall not, when elected, be an Inhabitant of that State for which he shall be chosen.”

Both clauses use the term “citizen of the United States.” Significantly, neither uses the term “natural born.” Any citizen can run for Congress. But the Framers specifically and purposely restricted the presidency to those citizens born on US soil, to wit “natural born.”

When it comes to the third branch of government, the judiciary, the Constitution does not set out any requirements for a seat on the Supreme Court. There is no mention of age or citizenship. In fact, a Supreme Court Justice doesn’t even need a law degree. It is only the president who must be “natural born.”

They knew exactly what they were doing.

There have been three presidential aspirants in recent times who have been subject to questions under the “natural born” requirement. The first was Barry Goldwater in 1964 who was born in the Arizona Territory before it became a state. No question, he was born on US soil. The second was Mitt Romney’s father George in 1968. He was born in a religious commune in Mexico. That both his parents were American citizens is of no importance. He was not a natural born American. He was a natural born Mexican. The third was John McCain who was born in the Panama Canal Zone. Although it was then technically a leasehold and not at the time officially considered US soil (that has since been amended) McCain was born in a US Naval hospital on a US Naval base which is considered sovereign US territory.

But Cruz is a natural born Canadian. He is not American by natural birth, he is American by virtue of his mother being American.

The issue has been raised several times over the past year or so, prompting Cruz finally, only just eight months ago, to renounce his Canadian citizenship. He is no longer a dual-national. But he is still not a “natural born” American. That cannot be renounced or erased. You are born where you are born.

He claims his eligibility to run for the presidency is settled law. But, his own Constitutional law professor at Harvard, Laurence Tribe, says it is not. Here’s Professor Tribe’s argument in the Boston Globe earlier this month: https://www.bostonglobe.com/…/zvKE6qpF31q2RsvPO9…/story.html

A more complete, scholarly argument against Cruz, is laid out in a wonderful paper by constitutional expert Mary Brigid McManamon, of the Widener University Delaware Law School.

This is the link to her 2015 paper: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2444766

A shortened, more user friendly version is found here, in an Op-Ed a few weeks ago for the Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/…/1484a7d0-b7af-11e5-99f3-18…

It goes without saying that there are people who disagree with her, arguing in favor of Cruz’s eligibility by interpreting “natural born citizen” to mean anyone who is a US citizen at birth. But that doesn’t hold water with McManamon because it is based on what she labels, a radical 18th-century British statute. Originalists, like Cruz and his right wing pals, the late Justice Scalia and Justice Thomas, claim that only the Framers’ words matter.

And the words included, deliberately and solely for the presidential requirements, are “natural born.” If they wanted to say any old citizen, they would have said that. They did for Congress. They did not for the presidency.

As Cruz will likely not be the Republican nominee, the matter will remain unsettled. There are, however, movements in some states… just in case… notably Illinois, to keep Cruz off the ballot on the basis of being ineligible. Other states, probably eventually all 50, prompted by interest groups in both political parties, would likely see similar suits filed. Cruz is, as many in his own party have pointed out, one of the most disliked men in Washington. This is a guy with very few friends.

Interestingly enough, when Donald Trump raised the birther issue during the 2008 campaign, insisting that Barack Obama was not eligible because he was a natural born Kenyan, Ted Cruz agreed. “Obama’s mother’s citizenship is irrelevant since his father wasn’t American and he wasn’t born in America. He can’t be president.”

(The fact that President Obama was born in Hawaii shows the extent to which Cruz ignores uncomfortable truths.)

But then, terminally delusional about himself, here’s what he said about his own eligibility. “All you need to know about my parentage is my mother was a citizen. My father and place of birth are irrelevant.”

To terminally delusional, add the words, blatant hypocrite.

 

 

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Berlin 1980.

An aging Soviet missile scientist named Rosov Pietrov goes missing from his home in Leningrad. The Russians need to find him and assign the spy master Andre Peshky to resolve the matter.

But the British have intercepted Russian signals traffic. Harry Thornton, an owl lover and a functionary in the British spy service takes it upon himself to cap his long career by bringing Pietrov to the West.

Meanwhile, the Americans have intercepted British signals traffic, and send a young special forces Army officer, Paul Bastia, to find Pietrov.

The search for Pietrov focuses on the divided city of Berlin.

Ever fascinated with the divided city, I wrote this novel in the 1980s, and published it then in both the US and the UK. More than 30 years later, I have gone back into it, and tampered slightly.

It’s a rare treat for an author to be able to do that with an earlier work, to bring so many years of story telling experience to make it better. I did it because I’ve always liked this story, and because Berlin in those days is unforgettable.

Today, reunited Berlin is a vibrant, fabulously sophisticated, cultural city. But in those days, when American tanks at Checkpoint Charlie stared down Russian tanks, the Wall that cut the city in half was a stark, daily reminder that the Cold War had frozen over.

This novel is about that.

It’s about the divided city at the very height of the Cold War, about two pawns in a complex chess game that nobody could ever win, and about the foolishly dangerous games that the world’s powers played there.

The wonderfully talented best-selling author Nelson DeMille was generous enough to call this book: “”A fast paced, yet marvelously complex story.”

PIETROV AND OTHER GAMES: http://amzn.to/1EtRaC3

The excerpt below finds Harry Thornton in his room at the Kempinski Hotel on the Kurfurstendamm, trying to recreate his long-gone glory days with the spy service, by sending himself a coded message to avoid paying his Berlin contact (Ursing) for finding Pietrov.

=============================================

(C) JEFFREY ROBINSON 1985, 2015

He thought again about the deal with Ursing.

Payment after the second one. It worked then. Maybe it will work now. Maybe if I send Ursing on a wild goose chase to find someone who doesn’t exist, he’ll turn over Pietrov without asking for money in advance. Then, once I have Pietrov safe in London, with Ursing still looking for this mythical person, the proper payments can be made.

There was a cardboard folder on the desk, with envelopes and hotel stationery stuffed inside. He sat down, took several sheets and a ballpoint pen and started to make a list.

He’ll be a Russian, of course. Name… Ivan? Good name, yes, Ivan.

He tried to remember if he had ever met any Ivans because it was always best to use a real person in a situation like this.

He thought back to his Moscow trip with Bathgate. What was their driver’s name? He couldn’t remember.

What’s an even better Russian name. How about Senyk? Of course. Vladimir Senyk. Why not? He’ll do as well as Ivan anybody else.

Now he had to decide just who Senyk should be.

Occupation… scientist? Double agent? Spy? No, nothing like that. It’s got to be something simple. Something real. Taxidermist? That was certainly real, but would Ursing ever believe that the British government was willing to pay to help a taxidermist defect?

He pondered that for quite a while.

V. Senyk, Taxidermist.

It’s just wild enough that Ursing could well believe it.

He continued writing his notes.

Value to GB? This is the difficult part. Why on earth would Her Majesty’s government be willing to pay to help someone get to the West when all he did was stuff dead animals?

Harry pondered that for a long time.

The obvious answer is, our taxidermist has something the British want. Like what? Secrets. But secrets of what? How about…

No. He changed his mind. Instead of secrets, he decided to use the two Czech girls model.

Ursing will believe that because he’ll remember that it happened before. He won’t question it happening again. We’ll make it a personal matter. We’ll make Senyk related to someone. We’ll use the House of Lords. Or perhaps a minister. Or, how about the PM?

My God… this is getting better all the time. We’ll go all the way with this. Senyk will be related to the PM, on her mother’s side, of course.

He was very pleased with the way this was working out.

Value to GB… family of…

He crossed that out and tried to come up with another way of putting it.

How about, strictly personal? Yes, we’ll classify the matter. strictly personal/strictly secret.

He looked at that.

Even better, strictly personal/strictly secret-CEO.

Cabinet eyes only.

He liked that phrasing best of all. It added a tone of mystery.

And I won’t actually tell Ursing everything about this. I’ll lead him along so that he himself comes up with bits and pieces of the puzzle. Basic O-Level psychology. If Ursing thinks of it himself, he’ll be more inclined to believe it.

Next came, whereabouts?

He settled on, East Germany.

Then, contacts.

This will be delicate. How about if I tell Ursing that Senyk is a dissident. He’ll be part of a dissident movement that has worn thin the patience of the rulers. Not part of the Sakharov group. Maybe the last vestiges of the Pasternak era. Yes, very good. Senyk will have found himself put out to pasture by the current group of dissidents and squeezed by the rulers. Caught in the middle. Considered a revisionist by both. That’s the right kind of stuff. I’ll tell Ursing that as long as Senyk was useful to the movement in the Soviet Union, the PM never wanted to interfere. No, better still, I’ll say that, as long as Senyk felt useful to the movement, he never tried to impose himself on the PM. But now that he’s caught in this bind, he’s contacted her and she feels she cannot let him down.

He reread the list but felt that “Whereabouts – East Germany” was too simple. He crossed out East Germany and wrote Budapest.

Why not? Senyk was there at a convention. Surely taxidermists go to conventions, even behind the Iron Curtain? Yes. And he’s back there now, on his way to East Germany, and the PM wants him out. Very good. Ursing will go for it, I’m sure he will.

Sitting back in his chair, Harry enjoyed the glow of satisfaction that comes from a job well done. He put his pen on top of his notes and looked at himself in the mirror that hung just over the desk.

Like the old days. This is now just like the old days.

He poured himself another Scotch.

Now he reasoned, I’ll need a telex. I’ll need something that looks like it’s in code. That way Ursing will think that I’ve just been informed of this. That it’s Whitehall who is refusing to pay him any money until the PM’s relative is delivered. That way Ursing will think this has a very high priority. I must speak to Daleham.

He dialed and it rang, but still there was no answer.

I don’t know what they’re playing at.

Damn.

He thought about eating something, but he didn’t want to leave the phone. He also didn’t want to leave that gun in his room.

Just my luck the maid will look in the case hoping to steal spare change. How could I ever explain such a thing?

He thought about room service and decided that would work perfectly well. Except he wasn’t really sure he had much of an appetite. Maybe later.

He took his address book and looked for Daleham’s home number.

Mrs Daleham answered.

“He’s not home,” she said.

“Where is he?”

“Not home.”

“Can you find him? This is Mr. Thornton.”

“Oh, ‘ullo, luv.”

I am not “luv”, he wanted to say. She always called him “luv”. One of these days he would tell her, “Madame, I am not your luv.” This time he settled for, “You must reach him and have him ring me right away. He’ll know where to find me.”

She said, “Right, luv. All the best.”

God, how I would hate to be married to a woman like that. Luv and guv and ‘e and me.

He took the phone again to call his wife. “Hello, dear, I just thought I would ring to see how you are.”

She sounded half asleep. “Where are you? What time is it? Harry, is that you?”

“Yes, yes, dear, did I wake you?” He checked his watch. It was only 10.30 in London. “Have you gone to bed already?”

“Oh, Harry, dear, you woke me. I’ve gone to bed early this evening.”

It was 10.30 already? “Well, dear, I’ll let you get back so sleep. Pleasant dreams.”

“Good night, Harry. I think I want to go back to sleep.”

He could use some sleep himself but first he had to get in touch with his office.

Where the hell is Daleham? I need that telex if this is going to work. Why aren’t they following set procedures? How many times have I told them, you must always follow set procedures? Well, at least I’ll follow set procedures. I’ll get a message through to someone.

He rang Senyk’s number. The answering machine came on. “This is the automatic answering machine for V. Senyk. I regret that there is no one here at the present to take your message. You see, none of my birds knows how to answer the phone. However, if you will be kind enough to leave your name, your number and a short message when you hear the tone, either I or one of the birds will ring you back very shortly. That they know how to do.”

Beep.

“…ah… ” He knew what he wanted to say but the words wouldn’t come out. He hated to be caught on answering machines. “Ah… ”

He hung up.

Ghastly things. So damned intimidating. And why is it that people who own them always make it so much worse by using them for quips and jokes? Damn.

He reached for the phone again and re-dialed Senyk. This time he forced himself. “Yes, hello, this is Harry Thornton speaking…” He felt flustered. “I need to speak to my office.” He couldn’t think of anything else to say. “Thank you.” He hung up.

That should do it, that should be sufficient, he reassured himself. Yet he couldn’t understand where Daleham was and why Kingsley hadn’t passed the message on to him.

I specifically told Kingsley to pass along the message to Daleham. I specifically told Kingsley to tell Daleham to ring me. If I don’t get that telex, Ursing will never swallow the bait.

It was too late to eat a proper dinner although he decided he was indeed hungry. So he called room service to ask if they had any soup.

“Yes, of course we have soup. We have goulash…”

“No, thank you,” he said, “not at this hour of the night. What about a consommé?”

“Yes, we have consommé.”

“All right, please, one consommé for room 227.”

“Will that be all?”

“That will be all.”

Now he went back to his desk and wrote a draft of a telex.

It’s got to look like it’s in code. How about…

The room service menu was within easy reach.

He took a sheet of Kempinski stationery and drew three columns on the page. In the first column, he listed the words, strictly Personal/strictly secret, and the letters… c, E, O, s, E, N, Y, K.

Then he opened the menu to the English translation and started copying down words from it. Salmon next to the first Strictly. Peas next to Personal. Salad next to the second Strictly, and Soup next to Secret.

For the letters he wrote caviar, eel, onions, strawberries, eggs, noodles… and stopped at Y.

What kind of food starts with the letter Y?

He couldn’t think of a single one.

I’ll come back to it later.

For K he wrote kippers.

Then, in the third column, he wrote the German translations of his chosen English words. Lacks, Erbsen, Salat, Suppe, Kaviar, Aal, Zwiebeln, Ei, Nudeln.

He suddenly remembered Y is for yoghurt. But he didn’t know the German word for yoghurt. That’s when he realized that he didn’t know the German word for kippers either.

He called room service again. “Your consommé is on the way, sir.”

“Tell me something,” he asked in English. “What do you call yoghurt?”

“Yoghurt?” The boy taking the room service order asked. “I call yoghurt, yoghurt.”

“No, in German. What is the German word for yoghurt?”

“Yoghurt is joghurt. The same as in English but with a j.”

“Ah yes.” He wrote down Joghurt. “And kippers? Do you know what kippers are?”

“Like you have in England?”

“Yes, like we have in England.”

“That is… let me think… Raucherhering.”

So it is, he thought and jotted down that word too. “Yoghurt with a j and Raucherhering. Thank you very much.” Now he had it all.

The next step was to add a few miscellaneous words and numbers.

How about… confirmed menu?

Next to that he put the time… 11 pm.

I’ll tell Ursing this has come directly from 10 Downing Street, with the “p.m.” being the PM’s signature.

He had to smile at how well this was going.

The next problem is that I must somehow get Budapest in there and East Germany too. How about if the message ends, “Begin Hungry, Eat Good.” Yes, that’s it. But no more than that. Shan’t overdo it. Stop there. Quit while you’re ahead. It’s perfect just like that.

He copied the exact message down on another piece of paper so that he could read it to Daleham.

Where the hell is Daleham?

He tried the office number and was surprised, this time, when Daleham picked up the phone.

“Where the hell have you been?” Harry demanded. “What in God’s name is going on?”

“Sorry, guv,” Daleham said. “Just a minor misunderstanding. Nothing serious. Everything is back on track.”

“What kind of minor misunderstanding.”

“Not now, guv,” Daleham said. “I’ll explain another time.”

The hell you will, Harry thought. “You’ll tell me right now. Don’t you understand how serious this is?”

Daleham seemed to hesitate. “Well, all right. If you must know, I mean, I’m never one to tell tales out of school, but it’s Kingsley.”

“What about him?”

“Well… I was just coming on shift and he met me at the door and I didn’t have me keys with me, and when he bent down to get the milk, eggs and bacon, the door closed with the two of us on the outside. We got locked out.”

I don’t believe how clumsy they are.

He sighed. “You got locked out? Why didn’t you have your keys? How did you get in? And what are you talking about, eggs and bacon? Since when do we have eggs and bacon delivered?”

“I didn’t have me keys because the wife… ”

“Never mind,” Harry said, “never mind.” He didn’t want to hear another one of Daleham’s lengthy stories. “Just listen to me. Copy this down as I read it to you and then send it to me as a telex care of the hotel.” He read out the message but had to stop after each word so that Daleham could repeat it and spell it. “Yoghurt with a j.”

“Got it,” Daleham said.

“Now read it back to me just to make sure.”

He did. “But what does it all mean?”

“Never mind.” Harry wasn’t going to let anyone in on his secret. “I’ll tell you when I get back. Is there any message traffic on our friend?”

“No sir. But oh, I have arranged for the money to be transferred by wire to you in the morning. You’ll get it at the hotel.”

“All 300,000 marks? How did you…?”

“Sorry, guv, what 300,000 marks? I have written here £6000.”

“Yes, fine, well done. We will be needing some more, but perhaps not right away. I’ll let you know. So… is that all?”

“That’s all, guv. You keeping well?”

“Fine. I’ll speak with the office in the morning.”

Someone knocked on his door.

“I’ve got to go. Goodbye.”

“All the best,” Daleham said.

Harry hung up. It was obvious that Kingsley had failed to pass the message on.

Thank God Daphne and I don’t sound like each other.

It was room service.

A waiter wheeled in a tray and gave him the bill to sign. Harry found a few marks as a tip, signed the bill and locked the door as the waiter left.

He pulled a cover off of a soup bowl and looked at the consommé.

But there was a second cover.

He pulled that off and stared into the plate… two kippers smothered in a mound of yoghurt.

*****

 

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Each week on the SkyNews Debate, the Conservative commentator Armstrong Williams and I go toe-to-toe on issues that the producers back in London choose with audience interest and provocation in mind.

This week, (June 25) I felt we disgracefully gave airtime to Larry Pratt and his irrational and singularly idiotic views on gun control.

As I say in the program, I believe that listening to the drivel and hate he spews forth actually makes him the poster boy FOR gun control.

That said, we also had the wonderful and brilliant Professor Chip Gallagher from LaSalle University talking about facts that the gun control wingnuts don’t want the public to know. And Armstrong had his hands full there.

Before the program began, I wrote an “editorial” showing my disgust at Pratt and his views, and my displeasure with him using our airtime. I asked the producers to let me read it in full, and they agreed.

Shamefully, Niall interrupted before I could finish, and I didn’t hide my anger. So I have reprinted here, word for word, the views I wanted and needed to express, uninterruptedly.

“Putting Mr. Pratt into perspective –

“Over the past eight months or so that we have been doing this show, there have been guests I have disagreed with, at times vehemently.

“We have never had as appalling and repulsive a guest as this man. Gun Owners of America is a radical, right wing, conspiracy-theory loving group he founded because he believed that the radical, right wing, conspiracy-theory loving National Rifle Association was not radical, right wing and conspiracy-theory loving enough.

“Throughout the years he has been associated in various ways with white supremacist groups, anti-Semitic groups, and survivalists and believes that “Second Amendment Rights” is all about owning enough fire power to create South American rebel-style militias… Guatemala-like death squads… capable of over-throwing the government… especially a government run by a black, socialist, communist, anti-gun, abortion loving, gay marriage loving, illegally installed president who was obviously born in Kenya.

“His statements in the wake of the massacres… of the premeditated murders of innocent people are more than just distasteful, they are abhorrent and repugnant.

“This is a man who, after the sandy hook elementary school shootings, put the blame entirely on gun control advocates saying that they “have the blood of little children on their hands.”

“He denies reality. In so doing, I actually think he is THE poster boy for gun control.

“And while he has every right to express his views, I have every right to be nauseated by them.

“And by him.

“Because, I believe, it is impossible to have an intelligent, meaningful discussion with just any old psychotic fool, I refuse to engage him. I refuse to dignify his appearance here. I refuse to justify his existence.

“I will say no more, except to add that his last name would be spelled with one t.”

*****

(c) Jeffrey Robinson 2015

Here is the link to the show:

http://news.sky.com/video/1507905/gun...

The post SkyNews Debate and Gun Control appeared first on .

As Seen in The Daily Beast – 5/20/2015

(c) Jeffrey Robinson

At first glance, it looks like it’s been a pretty good spring for the folk who would have the world believe that the virtual currency bitcoin is finally happening, especially where it matters most, on Wall Street.

In March, a New York-based start up called Noble Markets did a deal with NASDAQ to help create a bitcoin trading platform. The hope is that this will reinforce bitcoin’s legitimacy.

Next, the NASDAQ announced a full blown experiment using bitcoin (there’s bitcoin and there’s Bitcoin, but we’ll get to that in a moment) to run a tiny market for initial public offerings (IPOs). The hope is that it is more efficient and less costly than the backroom work currently done on paper by hand.

Finally, earlier this week, the NYSE announced the launch of a bitcoin price index. It intends publish the daily U.S. dollar value of bitcoin in its—usually paid for by subscription—Global Index Feed (GIF).

However, as with all things bitcoin, what you see is not necessarily what you get.

***

In 2008, someone, or some people, calling himself/themselves Nakamoto Satoshi published a white paper on an obscure cryptography mailing list describing a decentralized, trustless system for transferring value. Seven years later, there is Bitcoin the blockchain (capital B, essentially a new kind of software database) and bitcoin (small b, a volatile virtual currency, essentially backed by thin air).

That database is a real-time, permanent, indelible ledger of assets being bought and sold, much like a bank or credit card statement, except that it’s set in stone. Once an entry is made, it cannot be edited or erased. It is there, and visible, forever.

To avoid any possibility of manipulation, before a transaction is recorded, it is broadcast on a worldwide peer-to-peer network of independently operated computers.

John is sending money from his bitcoin wallet (account) to Mary’s bitcoin wallet.

To prove the transaction has been completed—known as “Proof of Work”—the computer owners on the peer-to-peer network, who are known as “miners,” must compete with each other to bundle a group of similar transactions into a chain and then add them as a block, which is an entry on the ledger. The first miner to do it—he manages it by solving an enormously difficult mathematical problem—is rewarded with a prize of newly “mined” bitcoins. Currently it is 25 bitcoins, worth $232 each, for a total of $5,800.

If it sounds complicated, it is. Made all the more confusing by the hype, misinformation, spin, outright lies and snake oil salesmen that populate the eco-system.

Granted, Bitcoin, the technology, has been exciting some serious folk in finance for the past few years. But bitcoin, the virtual currency, is traded in a paper thin market that is easily manipulated, not to mention having quickly become the coin of the realm for illegal activities in the dark web. It is also the money of Internet gambling sites, but not much else.

The bitcoin faithful claim there are now more than 100,000 businesses around the world “accepting” bitcoin. But, Coinometrics in the UK, a think-tank that looks at these figures unemotionally, notes that only around 1,000 bitcoin transactions a day involve the buying and selling of goods and services, meaning that virtually none of those businesses regularly sees bitcoins.

The faithful also boast of eight million bitcoin wallets, without explaining that wallets does not equate to people, and most of those wallets are empty. Coinometrics, again, reports that the actual number of wallets holding more than one bitcoin is around 250,000, which translates to less than 250,000 people. That means there are fewer people around the world holding bitcoins than there are members of the Kuwait Airways frequent flier club.

As a currency, bitcoin can’t stand toe to toe with the non-convertible Cuban peso. Weighted against real currencies, bitcoin barely comes in a distant second to the Uzbekitan som.

With that in mind, a closer look at the three recently announced bitcoin deals puts them into a different perspective.

Noble Markets CEO John Betts has announced that his company’s involvement with NASDAQ should nullify doubters’ concerns that trading in the virtual currency is risky. His exact quote was, “They can say, ‘These are sophisticated organizations; they have done their due diligence, and if it’s good enough for them, it’s good enough for us.”

It mirrors the same marketing ploy that makes teenagers believe that if they buy Air Jordans, they will be able to jump like Michael.

Reached by phone in New York, Betts is slightly more circumspect. “The last five years were about the proof of concept,” he told The Daily Beast. “The next five years are about rolling out adoption. And the next five years are about building the killer apps. If you look at the timeline of the Internet, it’s the same thing.”

It worked with the Internet, ergo it will work with bitcoin. That’s a frequently heard argument justifying bitcoin.

Meantime, at the NYSE, while other price indices listed on its Global Index Feed are compiled from multiple sources, at least for the time being, the GIF is publishing what the San Francisco-based bitcoin exchange Coinbase decides the price is.

Not by coincidence, earlier this year, Intercontinental Exchange—parent company of the NYSE—invested in Coinbase. Is the GIF listing bitcoin’s price really any different than Whole Foods postering their windows with the price of chicken? It certainly has never done much for chickens.

The one to watch is the NASDAQ experiment.

One news story heralded the announcement with, “Bitcoin is inching closer to legitimacy.” Except, it’s the blockchain that’s inching closer to legitimacy at the expense of the currency.

Each bitcoin is broken down into minute pieces known as “satoshis.” (For the record, there are 100 million satoshis in a single bitcoin, which makes each one of them effectively worthless.) But, by attaching a piece of data to it, saying, this represents one share of stock in a company, the sale of the share can be verified by the miners and successfully recorded on the blockchain.

Ideally, not having anything to do with the currency or the miners would be a better still. Consider the fact that most of the bitcoin mining is done in China. Which is why other companies, such as Eris, have come up with a variation on the theme, called “smart contracts.” This allows banks and finance companies to stay in dollars, sterling, euros, etc, and also eliminates the risk of anonymous miners or other bad actors, possibly interfering.

As Tim Swanson, one of the most respected observers and bloggers (OfNumbers) on bitcoin, has observed, “No bank’s going to want to put a billion dollars of value (on a ledger) if it can be destroyed by anonymous validators (miners).”

There are also projects in the works to create closed, or centralized, blockchains, which are based on the premise that banks moving money between themselves can trust each other and, therefore, no proof of work is required. In this case, the blockchain eliminates backroom costs without any exposure to bitcoins and miners.

If the NASDAQ experiment succeeds, a worthless bitcoin world might be the future.

If the NASDAQ experiment fails, smart contracts and no proof of work blockchains will undoubtedly fill the void.

In either case, as far as Wall Street will be concerned, the currency comes off second best.

 

The post Bitcoin’s Overblown Wall Street Debut appeared first on .

THE FINANCIAL SERVICES CLUB BLOG

By Chris Skinner

Jeffrey Robinson is a native New Yorker and an international bestselling author of 30 books.  He is a recognised expert on organised crime, fraud and money laundering, and has been labelled by the British Bankers’ Association as “the world’s most important financial crime journalist”.  After my recent coverage of bitcoin, the blockchain and cryptocurrencies, he got in touch to provide the other view of this world.  As his most recent book is a year long investigation into the other side of bitcoin – “Bitcon: The Naked Truth About Bitcoin” – the conversation proved fascinating.

— What is your background with bitcoin and how did you find some of the activities with bitcoin rather suspicious?

A few years ago, someone told me that bitcoins were good for money laundering. And after books like The Laundrymen, The Merger, The Sink and The Takedown, serious books about the serious business of dirty money, I was interested. So, I looked into it and eventually came to the conclusion, as I say in BitCon – The Naked Truth About Bitcoin, that it is, in fact, not good for money laundering. The system moves it but doesn’t inherently disguise the origins of illegal funds or help them reappear as legally obtained funds. However, bitcoin is great for capital flight, terror finance, tax evasion, extortion and criminal finance. But, for money laundering, it basically sucks.

Still, I wanted to know more so I went to one of these Bitcoin meetings.  One of these big convention type things that they hold all the time. I was awestruck at the general level of naïve stupidity. These were pre-pubescent kids. It felt like a bad high school reunion. Everyone was keenly intent on convincing me that the dollar is dead; that Bitcoin was about to take over the world; that all the central bankers should be thrown in jail.

I said to myself: “If this is what the Bitcoin movement is all about, it has no chance whatsoever.” But, over lunch at that meeting, I spoke with one of the few grown-ups in the room about the technology. It dawned on me that maybe there is something here when it comes to the transferring of assets.

The way I see it, and the way he saw it, too, with greater development of asset transfer there will be greater emphasis on valuing those assets in dollars and pounds and euros. That means the pretend currency will become increasingly useless and eventually disappear.

By the way, I call it a pretend currency because it doesn’t satisfy any of the three main criteria for modern currency. Furthermore, it is traded like a pretend commodity on what I have come to believe is a pump and a dump market; where very few people control the market and the gullible lose money.  Only the few people who control the market make money.

The more I got into this the more evident it became to me that, if you could separate out the lunatics, the delusionals, the pump and dump schemes, the pretend currency and all of that, and get to the core blockchain, you might actually have something interesting. It was with that in mind that I went and spent a year running around Planet Bitcoin, talking to a lot of people and asking the kinds of questions that I didn’t see anybody else asking.

— I find it intriguing, in your book ‘BitCon’ that you quite clearly lay out the idea that the currency has no future. And yet, when you talk to the fundamentalists in the community of the Bitcoin world, they believe you can’t have a blockchain without bitcoin.  The two are integrally tied together. Do you agree with that view?

No, not at all. This is the old argument of: “The Catholic Church is the only church, and everything else is heresy.” It simply isn’t true. Preston Byrne in Eris is working on a blockchain that has nothing at all to do with bitcoin. Ripple has nothing to do with bitcoin. People don’t want to know about bitcoin because it is surrounded by so much hype, spin, misinformation and outright fantasy, and it’s too clumsy.  On the other hand, if you have a bank or a group of banks that could operate a centralized or closed blockchain just among themselves, for the transfer of assets back and forth, that could work.  This bank or group of banks could, say, send money from the US to London and back and forth, and if it was just these banks working on these settlements, you wouldn’t need bitcoin. You wouldn’t need the miners as you don’t need any mining. It’s a closed ledger that the banks control, and the banks essentially are inventing their own blockchain.

Of course, that’s seen as heresy by the bitcoin faithful. But look at the concept of decentralization. It’s a political ideology. “I don’t want the government involved”.  That makes it non-commercial. How about if the banks don’t want to turn over their money for the ten minutes that it takes the miners to verify each transaction, which means they temporarily lose control of the money. A couple of months ago, transactions were taking an hour and a half or almost two hours. No bank is going to give up control of $100 million for two hours, especially when you consider that much of it will be verified by miners in China. It’s not going to happen. The decentralisation political ideology does not conform with what the banks want. They want a commercial solution. What they’re looking for is a centralized, or closed, blockchain.

Now, the faithful will say, “You can’t have a centralised blockchain, it’s just a database”. Well, decentralized blockchains are just a database. There are efficiencies and inefficiencies in that database, so you take the great efficiency of the decentralised blockchain, you centralize it, close it, and you can say bye-bye bitcoin because no one needs it.

— I can see both sides of the argument in some ways and right now we are seeing a lot of the banks on Wall Street starting to play. For example, UBS recently announced that they’re incorporating laboratories to develop blockchain technologies to reduce cost.

That’s right, but they don’t say they’re getting into bitcoin, the pretend currency.

— No.

You see this is part of a hype and spin and why we need to separate the pretend currency from the blockchain.  Every time someone speaks of the technological advancements, the bitcoin faithful immediately equate it to a success for the pretend currency. But it’s not. As a matter of fact, there are no bitcoin pretend-currency successes. I can’t find even one of them. You talk about the VCs in Silicon Valley and London and Canada, especially the big ones who have invested upwards of a half a billion dollars. The investment is not in bitcoin the pretend currency; it’s in the concept of blockchain technology.

I think Marc Andreessen gave the game away when I contacted him for BitCon. He said, “My only interest is in finding practical solutions to real problems”. When you think about that, he’s developing businesses that will ride off the back of the blockchain. What he needs to do is sell it to somebody. So, if it’s a financial thing, he’s going to have to sell it to a bank or a finance house. If that bank or finance house says, “We have no interest in this pretend currency, we want it in dollars and pounds”, he’ll abandon bitcoin in a heartbeat. He has no loyalty to the pretend currency, none whatsoever. No one does. Except speculators and the guys trying to flog it to greater fools. In fact, Andreessen told me how he hardly has any of it. He doesn’t own a lot of it.

— Yes. If you look at Marc Andreessen, in particular, you can see his VC fund Andreessen Horowitz investing heavily in the technology developments, such as Ripple, rather than the currency.

That’s right. That is their only interest. You’ve got $500 million approximately invested in this technology. None of them have seen real returns yet. How sustainable is that if it goes on for another two or three years? It’s not. These guys are only interested in seeing two, three, five or ten times their return on money and, if they’re not making it, they’re going to pull out and put their money into someplace else. That’s how venture capitalists stay alive.

I really blame the media for a lot of this. I don’t blame the bitcoin media, because there is no bitcoin media. They are simply regurgitating PR releases. CoinDesk is not journalism. I’m sorry, but it isn’t. However, the mainstream media – CNN, BBC, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Forbes and the like – aren’t asking the right questions. They are blinded and enamored by the idea of bitcoin. They keep rehashing this “bitcoin is the currency of the future” crap and never look beyond it to say: “Hold on a minute, this stuff can’t stand a close scrute”.

For example, Dish Network, Dell, Expedia and others supposedly “accept” bitcoin, at least according to the press reports. The truth is that they don’t “accept” it. They simply allow you to pay in bitcoin. And those payments go through Coinbase or BitPay.  This is because Dish and Dell and Expedia and the others don’t want anything to do with bitcoin. Allowing a customer to pay with bitcoins is not an endorsement of bitcoin, it’s a marketing ploy.

Microsoft is not endorsing bitcoin. Bill Gates said recently something about how crypto-currency may be the future of finance. Right. So, immediately the media screams, Bill Gates endorses bitcoin. No, he doesn’t. Apparently Bill Gates doesn’t even have any bitcoins. That’s the kind of hype and spin and misinformation that really drives me nuts. It’s a failure of journalism to do its job. As an old school journalist, I find that really extremely worrying.

— In your book you’ve dug through a lot of the headlines, in terms of where claims are being made about bitcoin that actually aren’t true.

They’re categorically untrue. I’ll give you a really good example. Take my pal Patrick Byrne, the CEO and Chairman of Overstock.  About a year ago, he was saying he has no interest in cryptocurrencies or in bitcoin. Well, somebody convinced him that there were pockets of bitcoin all over the place that couldn’t be spent anywhere. So he said, let’s go after those pockets of bitcoin and sell them garden furniture. This was a marketing ploy.  He announced, “Overstock will accept bitcoins.” The press loved it. But Overstock wasn’t “accepting” bitcoins because every sale had to through Coinbase. What’s more, Patrick was smart enough to have negotiated with Coinbase that he wouldn’t have to pay a commission on the currency conversion. So “accepting” bitcoin didn’t cost him anything. The very first day he racked up $133,000 worth of bitcoin driven sales. It looked like he was supporting the bitcoin community, so the bitcoin community supported him. Within three months, however, his bitcoin-driven sales were down to $7,000 a day. Why? Because the people who had these pockets of bitcoin and no place to spend them, had spent them. And they didn’t buy back in. They saw no reason to buy any more bitcoins simply to use them to buy for pillow cases and garden furniture priced in dollars at Overstock. That’s significant. Think about it. How is there any logical reason for anybody to take dollars to buy bitcoins to pay for things priced in dollars? It adds no value and, in fact, creates extra expense. So, his sales dropped down to $7,000 a day. He then announced that he would accept bitcoin worldwide and his sales went up to $8,000 a day. But they have since fallen again. He has even said publicly, there is no international interest in bitcoin. None.

Shortly after admitting world wide disinterest, he filed a report with the SEC which received no media reporting whatsoever.  He’d decided to hold on to 10% of all his bitcoin sales. It means that Coinbase now converts 90% and sends him the remaining 10%. So he’s holding onto $700 a day worth of bitcoin business which he says he is giving to his staff as bonuses. By the way, the staff apparently insisted they put a bitcoin ATM in the lobby of the building in Utah so they could cash out right away. Now, on $7000 a day of bitcoin-driven sales, he’s saving his 3% Visa and Mastercard fees.  That’s $210. Okay, $210 a day times 365 adds up.  Except, he told the SEC that, in order to integrate the 10% he holds,  he must integrate $700 a day into his bookkeeping for tax purposes. That’s not so easy because bitcoin is considered property by the tax people, which means there are both capital gains and capital loss calculations on each bitcoin. So far for the privilege of keeping a few bitcoins on his books, he told the SEC, it has cost him $400,000.  Next, Patrick said in that SEC filing, he would probably have to spend another $400,000 to make his bookkeeping fully compatible. So, he’s spending $800,000 to save $210 a day. It will take him almost ten years to get his money back. Explain to me how this is a good idea, how this is sustainable, how this makes any sense at all.

— The Bitcoin community claim they have created money without government if they live within the Bitcoin system. What’s your reaction to this claim?

But you cannot live within the Bitcoin system. It’s impossible. Sure, you can buy bitcoins with your dollars and fool some people into thinking you’re living on bitcoins. But you’re not. To manage it, you need a circular flow of income, and with bitcoins, there is none. Every time you purchase something with bitcoins, as soon as the sellers of the goods and services turn it over to Coinbase or Bitpay to convert it back to dollars or pounds, each purchase becomes a sale of bitcoins. That way, no one’s holding this stuff.

Equally, when you look at the real statistics, you find that a lot of the numbers the Bitcion faithful claim as usage, are outright phony.  The faithful say there are 110,000 transactions a day, but only about a thousand of those transactions are for the buying and selling of goods and services. The rest are miners moving bitcoins between different wallets and address, and gambling. On top of that, there is what’s called “the change factor” which means each transaction gets counted twice. Next, the faithful say, there are eight million wallets. What they don’t tell you is that almost all of them are either empty or near-empty. In truth, Coinometrics at Cambridge says that fewer than 250,000 wallets hold one bitcoin or more. That’s not 250,000 people, that’s wallets, and most people have multiple wallets. Based on that, I am correct when I say, there are more people who are members of the Kuwait Airways frequent flier club than there are people on the planet holding bitcoins.

The faithful also say there are 80,000 to 100,000 businesses around the world that “accept” Bitcoin. But they don’t “accept” it.  Most of them never see any bitcoins and the few that do, mostly, don’t hold any. I called some of these businesses and asked, “Since you put a bitcoin button on your site, what’s  happened?” They said, “It’s a pain in the ass.  We’d much rather have somebody just give us cash, because what we have to do as soon as we get the bitcoins is sell them.  We don’t want them.”

Of the very few businesses I found that actually keep bitcoins, the one I liked the best is a guy who sells rodeo tickets in Texas. He said to me, “I put the bitcoin button on my site hoping that I’d get one or two, which I would save so that when I hit a million dollars of coins, I could retire. But I also play the lottery and that never comes in.” I asked, “How many purchases have you actually had with bitcoins?” He said, “None”.

The facts are the facts. No one is using this stuff. To that I add this undeniable fact: As a global economic phenomenon, bitcoin is a non-event.

The pretend currency is not working. Where people are saying bitcoin has a future, ask them to point to a bitcoin success. Nobody is saying, “Look at this, here is a huge success,” because there aren’t any. Instead, they point to the future. They say: “Just wait and see how bitcoin will end poverty by becoming a bank for the great unbanked.”

Huh? You and I both live in countries where there are unbanked, but they’re unbanked for various reasons. In some cases it’s cultural. There are ethnic communities that don’t want banks, that operate only in cash. There are also people who cannot afford banking and have to use payday lenders and cheque cashiers or things like that. But I cannot find a single case where bitcoin has actually saved any of those people, and this is in the developed world.  Not a one. In the United States, where there are 70 or 80 million unbanked, there is now a move by Bank of America and Walmart to go after these people and to get them credit, to bring them into the banking system. How do you expect three delusionals teenagers on bicycles, wearing t-shirts that say, “In thin air we trust”, to compete with Bank of America and Walmart? It’s not going to happen.

Also, in the States and in Britain and throughout the developed world, WiFi is cheap and readily available, and smartphones are readily available and cheap.  But the unbanked are still unbanked. Now look at the developing world where WiFi is expensive, where smartphones are not plentiful and where people have traditional, cultural, religious and political distrust of all sorts of things coming from the West. How are you going to sell these people on an invisible currency they can’t possibly use? They’re simply not going to buy into this.

On the other hand, a bank in Kenya and Vodafone, whom they know, are saying to them: “Look at M-PESA.  You can put that on your phone and move money.” They have sales and marketing forces. They understand the traditional, culture, religious and political mindset. Those three guys on their bicycle with the t-shirts are never ever going to compete with that.

— I still haven’t worked out your view between the idea that there’s a good technology here, which is going to play something useful for banks such as Ripple, which has centralized capabilities.

Or Eris. It’s the blockchain that is useful, and the blockchain needn’t have anything to do with bitcoin.

— Versus the Bitcoin guys who keep coming back at me and saying, “But it’s out there, it’s in the wild. We’ve got it, we don’t care about you.”

Except no one’s using it. Preston Byrne in Eris had a great quote the other day that I re-tweeted, because I think it’s the best quote ever about bitcoin: “A paradigm shift is not a paradigm shift if no one is using it.” That sums it up. The faithful always talk about bitcoin being disruptive. What they ignore, at their peril, is the fact that the disrupted will always be heard from.

— So you see this as a pretend currency, but it actually has a real technology, and your outlook for the future would be: this is a really useful thing?

No, no, no. Bitcoin is a pretend currency traded like a pretend commodity and pushed and pumped by a snake oil salesmen who have a self-interest in finding greater fools to buy it from them. Look at the Winklevoss twins and their Bitcoin ETF. These guys are grasping at straws to find greater fools to buy their bitcoins from them.  And they’re not alone. The problem with bitcoin the technology is that it is surrounded by the need to recruit the gullible in order to keep the game alive.

— What about the way in which bitcoin is used as a community currency, for crowdfunding for example?

Like the Elmer Gantrys of the old south, some of these evangelists are preaching: “Look at crowdsourcing and crowdfunding, and this will save you all.“ Andreas Antonopoulos testified before the Canadian Senate last fall, telling the committee on banking how wonderful Bitcoin was. I testified in January and spent most of my time debunking everything he said, explaining to the senators: “This guy is pulling the wool over your eyes.”  One of his misleading contentions was how bitcoin crowdsourcing was changing things for small businesses. The idea that you could have people from around the world collectively giving you two bitcoins so that you could do whatever business you needed to do with two borrowed bitcoins.  Again, the media just accepts this stuff, and they accepted his explanation. So I spoke to people who are borrowing crowd-sourced bitcoins, and spoke to people who are lending this stuff, and asked: “How does it work?” One guy in South America said to me: “It works great. I borrowed 1.1 bitcoin and I only paid 2% interest.” I said: “Gee, that isn’t bad. What was the term of the loan?” He said: “15 days.” I said: “Hold on a minute. You paid 2% interest for 15 days? Tony Soprano charges 2% for 15 days. That’s 48% a year. If you put it on your credit card, you can get it for 19% a year. You’re paying extortionate usury.” I then looked closely at the leading bitcoin crowdsourcing site, and they’re listing loans at 204% interest, and 305% interest and I even found one at 2,037% interest.

Short and simple, this is loan sharking. And there are laws against this. It is even possibly criminal for sites to aide and abet these loans. And it is definitely bad for business. What’s more, if you’re sitting in Britain and you crowdsource a guy in South America and he doesn’t pay you back, how do you collect on your loan? But, Antonopoulos sat in front of those Canadian senators and, with a straight face, told them: “It’s a wonderful thing.” It took me to say: “Look at the numbers, they don’t lie. He’s full of crap”. That’s what gets me about this. All of the spin and the misinformation and the hype, and the mainstream media is not doing its job debunking this.  They should be saying: “Let’s look closely”, because bitcoin cannot stand a close scrute. Because, frankly, when it comes to bitcoin, what you see is never what you get.

— In BitCon, you write about Mt.Gox and the guy who ran it, Mark Kerpeles, being such a geek that he wasn’t actually sustainable in his own world, let alone running billions of dollars of other people’s money.

Karpeles was a train wreck waiting to happen. And he was in Japan, which meant if you wanted to get your money back, you had to go there. Now, here’s Coinbase in the United States, run by a bunch of Americans. If something goes wrong, they’re easier to get to get. But how will you know until it happens because they don’t publish their books? They’ve just gotten a $75 million fill-up. Why? Because, I would suggest, they were in trouble and needed more money. There is a processor in Slovenia, run by two geeks. Are you telling me that you’re going to trust your money to anyone in Slovenia? This is crazy. There are no consumer protections.  There’s absolutely no guarantees in any of this.  And people say it’s wonderful. But it isn’t wonderful. It’s a minefield that’s fraught with problems, and it will come unglued because it simply cannot continue.

It’s not helped by the criminality that surrounds bitcoin. Not just Mt. Gox, but Ross Ulbricht – aka Dread Pirate Roberts – and his Silk Road conviction. Or Charlie Shrem, one of the original bitcoin stars, now doing time in federal prison for illegal activities with bitcoin. Or any of the other so-called “stars” who have previous criminal convictions. Or the fact that the champion of bitcoin, the Bitcoin Foundation, was near-bankrupt through alleged mismanagement and sheer stupidity.

As soon as the guys at Eris or Etherium or Ripple or any of the many other labs working on bitcoin-less blockchains get it right – by which I mean that they create a blockchain that deals in dollars and pounds and other currencies – that’s the end of bitcoin. It’s dead. That is when all the bitcoin processors in the United States or Slovenia will find themselves in an economic death-spiral because there won’t be enough action to sustain them. I’m not even convinced there’s enough action to sustain them for much longer, now. As soon as one of the VCs announces: “I just figured out a way we don’t need bitcoin”, it’s over. We’ve seen it before. Fads always disappear. Pet Rocks. Goo-Goo Dolls. The guy who invented pogs died the other day. His legacy is pogs. Satoshi’s legacy will be the concept of the blockchain, but the legacy of the pretend currency will be pogs.

— But what about the whole idea that it will become a centralised technology.  In fact, I don’t know if you saw it, but the Fed and IBM announced the other day that they’re working together on creating a dollar-based cryptocurrency that will be authorised and regulated and centralized.  Is that the way it’s going to go?

That’s right. That’s the future. Centralized. Closed. As soon as they work out payment systems in dollars, sterling and euros, bitcoin goes down in history like 8-track, semi-automatic transmissions and Pet.Com. The idea that everyone is going to use this pretend currency because it’s an alternative way of beating the central banks, is ludicrous. The faithful say: “Why would you believe in a central banker when you can believe in mathematics?” The answer is because mathematics alone and the algorithm alone, can’t run an economy. You need the central banker to run the economy. But, they say, central bankers inflate everything so that the value of your money is miniscule. They argue, if you’d put $100 under your mattress in 1913, today it would be worth $3. So what? I don’t know anybody who’s got 1913 dollars under their mattress.  And anybody who puts money under their mattress is a fool, because money invested can keep up, and often, beats inflation.

Inflation is built into the system specifically to avoid deflation. If you have a closed commodity economy, like bitcoin or like gold, the deflation you end up with is ten times worse than inflation. The bitcoin faithful want all the benefits of the gold standard without any of the problems attached to the gold standard. Look around. There isn’t a single country left on Earth that’s on the gold standard. And for good reason. The bitcoin faithful simply don’t understand the world economy. They don’t understand money. All they understand is their own self-interest. As one kid said to me: “When bitcoins hit $1 million dollars a coin, I’m going to be a multi-millionaire. I’m going to get rich.” Yeah, good luck.

— You seem rather anti-bitcoin.

I’m passionate about this stuff because it’s easy to see through it, and because nobody is asking the right questions. I see people come on CNBC and Fox Business, talking about the joys of bitcoin, and none of the journalists are doing their jobs by saying: “You’re full of crap”. They’re buying into this stuff and, when it all goes wrong, trust me, they will be the first to say: “We knew. We told you so.” There was a guy on CNBC that I openly challenged, who has a bitcoin credit card. He said: “You put bitcoins on your credit card and you can pay for anything with bitcoins. You go to Selfridges, John Lewis, a petrol station, and you pay in bitcoin. Isn’t that terrific?” No. It’s a con. It requires you to buy bitcoins with pounds or euros or dollars first, which is not only completely illogical but a really stupid thing to do. Why bother? Where’s the benefit? Just pay in pounds, euros or dollars. Why put bitcoins in the middle? Why add the cost when you’re getting no added value? Same thing with the bitcoin ATMs which, by the way, are mostly going broke. Bitcoin ATMs are proving to be non-profitable because (a) nobody’s using them, (b) the rent is too high and (c) the charges are too high.  They set their own exchange rate and they add a fee on top of it. There’s no reason to use them. The whole concept of bitcoin the pretend currency, is illogical. Yes, you can fool some of the people some of the time but you can’t fool all of the people all the time. Bitcoin the pretend currency will die on that.

— So it’s like The Emperor’s New Clothes? Eventually you see there’s nothing there?

That’s right. It’s become a cult. It’s become a religion. And I’m the heretic because I stand up and say: “This is crazy.” So they come after me. There are whole Reddit forums talking about the fact that I don’t understand anything. Vehemence, vengeance and juvenile temper tantrums show you the kinds of people who are involved in this, and you quickly understand that they can’t possibly sustain this because they truly are delusional. The rational ones are the VCs who are putting real money onto the blockchain to find practical business solutions to real problems. And none of those practical business solutions will involve bitcoin the currency.  None of them. Because bitcoin is a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist.

— And if I’m talking to you in about ten years, it’s hard to forecast these things, but do you think we’ll be looking back and saying, “Look at all these bitcoin fraudsters who have now disappeared, but didn’t they give us a great technology?”

But they’re not giving us a great technology. They’re pumping bitcoin, the pretend currency, which has nothing to do with the technology. Again, they’re self-interested. One of these clowns went on the record as saying: “Bitcoin has gone so viral, it is viral cubed.” The man needs to keep taking his meds because he’s just not in touch with reality. More recently, he’s claimed that bitcoin’s future is assured because the average life of a fiat currency is 27 years. In the next breath he recalled that Sterling has been around since the 17th century. Only people who want to believe the earth is flat buy into his absurdities. But then, without those flat-earthers, the pretend currency would become worthless. The point is that the blockchain will revolutionise things, but it won’t be the bitcoin blockchain. And it won’t take ten years. Five years from now, you and I will talk about bitcoin the way we talk about Edsel.

 

The post The Finanser Interviews: Jeffrey Robinson, Author of “BitCon – The Naked Truth About Bitcoin” appeared first on .

by Izabella Kaminska

September 29, 2014

Part of the BitcoinMania series

(c) The Financial Times (Alphaville)

 

Jeffrey Robinson is an American author best known in media circles for his work on international financial crime via his 1995 book The Laundrymen.

Suffice to say, when one of the world’s best known financial-crime authors turns his attention to the world of cryptocurrencies, and in particular Bitcoin, it probably makes sense to pay attention. Especially when the book he publishes is called, BitCon: The Naked Truth About Bitcoin.

Sadly, for the Bitcoin faithful — as well as all the other reasonable institutions that seem to have been taken in — the verdict is not good. Robinson reduces the entire phenomenon to a classic swindle. A small cohort of ruthless predators taking advantage, as usual, of the naive and gullible via a carefully constructed and asymmetrical myth, which happens to appeal to those of a certain persuasion, encouraging them to take leave of their senses entirely.

Part of the fervour is driven by classic get-rich-quick sentiment, but the other and the more sinister part is based on the art of indoctrination, no different to that employed by cults focused on getting people to hand over their hard-earned cash for the the sake of reserving themselves a prime slot in heaven and/or the supposed system that comes after this one.

Most heinous, in Robinson’s assessment, is the fact that the predatory and cultic marketing spiel focuses on the message that “This time is different”, when an objective analysis of the evidence suggests nothing more than a common swindle that only really benefits shadowy non-contributors to the global economy.

Robinson quotes an array of respected authors, investors and academics who argue convincingly that Bitcoin “the currency” is Ponzi-esque to the Madoff level.

In fact, Robinson says, even the Austrian school academics, who Bitcoiners love to idolise, assess the phenomenon that way. Take the prognosis of Dr Gary North, economic historian and associated scholar of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, who has predicted “Bitcoins will go down in history as the most spectacular private Ponzi scheme in history. It will dwarf anything dreamed of by Bernard Madoff”.

Of course, the Bitcoin faithful don’t seem to view the Ponzi issue as a problem because they mistakenly believe the fiat currency they are displacing is no better and/or no worse. Worse than that they assume their Ponzi is transparent, and thus immune to the information asymmetry problem that plagues all other Ponzi schemes.

But, as Robinson notes, in the opinion of Mark Williams, former Federal Reserve Bank examiner — one of bitcoin’s most articulate skeptics and one of the top 10 most reviled men on the Bitcoin Foundation’s published “Most Reviled” list — the scheme is anything but transparent. It suffers not only from misinformation, but concentrated market power, hoarding, opaque and unregulated exchanges, insufficient trade reporting, elevated marketing hype and greater opportunities for market manipulation.

As Robinson observes, this is the domain of those suffering from apophenia, i.e. those who legitimise their belief by seeing meaningful patterns in random or meaningless data.

It can’t go on, Robinson argues, because the world eventually runs out of fools.

Unsurprisingly the Bitcoin faithful don’t like what Robinson has to say. In fact, most telling about the cultic nature of the whole phenomenon is that anyone making reasonable objections is set upon with ad hominem attacks full of hubristic “you’ll see when we take over the world” flavour.

The book, in any case, provides a good overview of why the economic thinking that drives the movement is toxic, as well as the twisted and malevolent forces at play.

As ever, Robinson begs us to consider, cui bono? Who does it all benefit? Guess what, it’s not the little guy. Those in prime beneficiary position are the dark and mysterious miners, anyone with illicit earnings to launder through the network, the intermediaries, the scammers, the PR industry propagating the brainwashing, the cottage industry of exchanges and even the big tech geniuses who have put their reputations on the line.

A key focus of the book is unravelling much of the misinformation that has come to dominate bitcoin coverage in the media — in large part due to the ferociously persistent nature of the PRs appointed by the movement. His biggest beef is with the notion that retail adoption is growing and that retailers are benefiting from the inclusion of bitcoin.

Robinson’s research suggests this is anything but the case. As he notes:

“In a totally unscientific, ad hoc study, I randomly phoned a couple of dozen small businesses in North America and Europe who were listed as “accepting” bitcoins.

They all had pretty much the same story. They put up their “Bitcoins Accepted Here” sign because it struck them as being a good marketing tool and, sure enough, several of them had very positive responses for a few days. If wasn’t necessarily a lot of money, but it was more than they had before they put up the sign. Then, their bitcoin takings all evaporated.”

Another interesting example of the distortion at play comes via his analysis of the Bitcoin Wikipedia page, which Robinson was directed to when one of The Faithful told him to “wise up to the truth” by reading up the Wikipedia entry, since it had been compiled by “thousands of people”.

From Robinson:

So I checked. Instead of thousands, it turned out to be a few dozen and, doubting them, Wikipedia had stopped publishing outside entries to the bitcoin listing. Why? Unsubstantiated entries and unreliable information.

All that said, all through the book Robinson separates bitcoin “the pretend currency” — which he sees as totally unnecessary and in no way revolutionary — from Bitcoin, the technology. Bitcoin the currency he notes is backed by the full faith and credit of wasted computer time. The technology, when not connected to currency, does possibly have potential.

He even refers to an exchange with tech billionaire Marc Andreessen, of “Bitcoin matters” editorial fame, in which Andreessen confirms he’s actually more interested in the power of the technology. (Though why then the $25m investment in Coinbase, the most notable of the payment processors currently bearing most of the bitcoin float risk, eh?)

But even on the technological side, there are issues due to the general complexity and cost associated with introducing digital asset systems. One of the book’s most interesting chapter, for example, discusses the lessons learned from the rise and fall of Canada’s MintChip initiative.

As Robinson explains the problem with MintChip — which was supposed to introduce the equivalent of a real digital state currency — was that it was simply too expensive for the public purse and MPs didn’t understand why the Mint was getting into the business of creating payment services, which to date had been successfully handled by the private sector. The private sector, meanwhile, had no interest in creating or supporting a system which competed with their own digital products directly.

Robinson interviews David Everett, the developer of the first electronic purse — a system called Mondex — who was brought in to the MintChip project. As he tells Robinson, had the Mint been prepared to bear the cost, the whole thing would worked really efficiently due to the simplicity. It all went wrong, he believes, because in the end people got confused about the difference between a real currency and a virtual one. This he notes, is down to the fact that not everyone understands cash or how the cash mechanism works. He suspects people got confused with MintChip and bitcoin, and started seeing the former as a virtual currency when that’s not what it was.

But as Everett notes, the reason why Mondex and MintChip had the potential to work while bitcoin will not is because they really were the equivalent to real currency. As Robinson quotes him saying:

“I think there are a lot of nice things in the bitcoin technology, but I don’t think it’s very good for cash. It doesn’t really lend itself to immediate payments. I’m surprised bitcoin has gone as far as it is.”

In other words, Bitcoin’s potential, if any, is as a publicly distributed and self-funded ledger of existing assets (but preferably not currency).

And really, this is only point with which we disagree with Robinson on. Yes, we agree, the idea of smart contracts is nifty, but we’re not sure the smartness of contracts is in any shape or form dependent on blockchain technology.

To the contrary, we suspect a lot of the “genius” of the blockchain lies in the way the system transfers the cost of clearing to users directly. It encourages people to police themselves rather than to rely on the services of a particular public or private authority of repute. The reason, consequently, why technologists and entrepreneurs love the “technology” (which is really a protocol) is because it allows them to build pyramids on the back of voluntary (instead of costly) slave labour.

To call this “technology” is consequently disingenuous. What it really amounts to is a persuasion technique focused on the roll out and adoption of a protocol on voluntary as opposed to compulsory terms, which — if constructed wisely — is supposed to help society order itself more prosperously.

This is no different to Moses persuading his followers that a world of self-discipline, as per the Ten Commandments, is better than a world without it. We don’t need Egyptian whips to build pyramids, we can discipline ourselves to achieve the same scale of growth.

Naturally, if society can be trusted to accept such commandments and live by them, the need for a supervisory agent (of the ancient Egyptian variety) can be eliminated.

But the question remains how can you be sure the public will comply with the rules that need to be followed by all if the system is to flourish?

The truth is, this usually depends on an innate payoff and penalty being built into the system. In religion, the reward for compliance is access to the kingdom of heaven while the penalty is eternity in hell. And not dissimilarly, with the Satoshi system, the reward for compliance is a step up on the social hierarchy of the system, while the penalty is the collapse of the system itself.

Remove such payoffs and penalties, and the incentive to cheat or ignore the protocol becomes too great.

What you end up with instead is a system that depends on constant public scrutiny to deter non-compliance. But this introduces not only an incentive to dodge the inspection of the crowd — opaqueness via off blockchain transactions –but also the corruption of the scrutinising crowd.

Which is why, for us, there is little sense in going from a system in which a single trusted intermediary of known repute (and which knows you) can verify what you are or are not entitled to, to a system in which you can’t partake even in a coffee transaction without the public at large judging that you have the right to the transaction.

That’s without pointing out the obvious: for a publicly distributed ledger to be a fair system you need the participation of the entire population at every transaction level. Yet the public is unlikely to have the time, the resources or the inclination to be bothered to participate to that scale. This leaves the judgment process open to the bias of participating judging agents.

We guess it all comes down to whether you prefer a system that uses a common entity that everyone knows and trusts to judge what you are entitled to, or a faceless crowd of unknown repute, with an unclear agenda.

The post BitCon – The Book appeared first on .

NPR ran a story recently about a report coming out of Harvard suggesting that the United States kill off the $100 bill.

Here’s the NPR story, and my response.

============================================

NPR:

Of all the U.S. currency in the world, nearly 80 percent is in $100 bills. That’s about a trillion dollars.

Some people want to get rid of the bill altogether. Ken Rogoff, an economist at Harvard University, says the $100 bill :

“Think about countries like Mexico, Colombia, where they’re really at war with the drug money, where the United States is not only buying the drugs but it’s providing this resource that very much helps the drug dealers.”

Richard Stratton is a former drug smuggler who benefited from the $100 bill. In one deal, Stratton brought 15,000 pounds of hashish into the U.S. But the $50 million deal left Stratton with a problem: He had to get all that cash out of the country and into his bank accounts in the Cayman Islands. Hundreds made the job easier.

And drug dealers aren’t the only ones that use $100s. Human traffickers, weapons dealers and all kinds of criminals love the bill.

But there’s also a good side to the popularity of $100s. The note is popular with ordinary people around the world who can’t trust their government or banks. About 20 years ago, the Federal Reserve saw vast sums of currency, especially in the form of $100 bills, leaving the country.

“At some point, Alan Greenspan said, ‘So, you know, how much is it?’ ” says Ruth Judson, an economist at the Fed. “And people didn’t know the answer. And we just thought that we should know the answer to a question like that.”

Judson spent years traveling around the world with a team of Secret Service agents and Treasury officials. They tried to map where all the $100s were. She says they found that as much as two-thirds of the currency was overseas.

 Today, more than half a trillion dollars’ worth of $100 bills are overseas.

But Judson is not convinced that the U.S. needs to kill the $100 bill. After all her traveling and sleuthing, she says, the Fed still doesn’t know how much of the money is being used for good and how much is being used for bad.

JR:

The idea of taking notes out of circulation is not new. After all, there once were $500, $1,000, $5,000 and $10,000 bills, but the US stopped circulating them in 1969. The Mint last printed a $2 bill in 2003.

 If you did away with the $100, you would have to up production of the $50 and also, drastically, the $20 because I recently heard that $20 bill production is currently at a 30-year low.

 There would be further complications in that something like 2/3rds of all US currency circulates outside the US, creating a huge problem when it comes to recall.

 That said, if you did away with the $100, you would hurt the drug traffickers who have stuffed tons of them under their mattresses.

 But then, a similar scheme was contemplated back in the 1980s, with the $20.

 Here is an excerpt about that from my money laundering book, THE LAUNDRYMEN (© Jeffrey Robinson)

 Because the underground economy functions almost exclusively with dollars, the Reagan administration radically proposed a way to render the traffickers’ dollar mountains useless. They were going to change the color of money. In those days, the United States was the only country in the world whose currency was both the same size and the same color in all denominations. Reagan’s idea was to announce on a Monday morning that within seven days green $20, $50 and $100 bills would no longer be considered legal tender. Instead the government would be issuing newly designed banknotes, perhaps bigger, perhaps smaller, perhaps yellow, red or blue. All anyone would have had to do was walk into a bank and exchange the old notes for the new notes. But any cash transaction over $1000 would be recorded and the information would be passed on to the IRS and the DEA. For the average person it wouldn’t have been anything more than a nuisance. Even if someone always carried a few thousand dollars in his pocket, making the switch would take only a few minutes. But it could cripple a drug dealer with several million in cash hidden under his mattress. Swapping thousands of old $20s, $50s and $100s for the new money in such a short period of time, even using an army of smurfs, would be out of the question. And once the week was up, his cash mountain would be worthless.

 The DEA even suggested that government might print two types of currency. One would be legal tender exclusively inside the country, the other would be legal tender exclusively outside the country. The only place the two would be interchangeable would be at specially controlled financial institutions. At least in theory, that should put an end to dollar smuggling.

For what it’s worth, this is where you’ll find the Kindle version of THE LAUNDRYMEN: amzn.to/1m3fZGr

 Obviously, recalling the $20 bill didn’t happen. Recalling the $100 probably won’t.

 However, the $100 bill is the least offensive of all the big denominations in the world. Number one reprobate is the €500 note.

 For my take on that, I hope this amuses you, from a speech in Berlin.

Jeffrey Robinson – Money Laundering and the 500 Euro Note

Jeffrey Robinson – Money Laundering and the 500 Eu…
Financial Crime expert Jeffrey Robinson explains why, if he was a money launderer with a magic wand, he’d wish for the 500 Euro note.







View on bit.ly


Preview by Yahoo

  

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The actress and entertainer Elaine Stritch passed away on July 17, at home in Detroit, at the age of 89. I met her in London in 1981 and wrote this backpage feature on her in the International Herald Tribune. She was a hoot.

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August 18, 1981

Elaine Stritch: The Discipline of Comedy

By Jeffrey Robinson

International Herald Tribune

LONDON — She came home to The Savoy Hotel, where she’s been living for the past 11 years, after having lunch with Prince Charles. It was the first time they’d met. “I love the way he walks. God, he moves so well. If he had a different face he could be a gangster.”

And while she came away from a meal with the future king of Britain talking about him, it’s not too outlandish to imagine that the prince came away from that meal talking about her. Elaine Stritch might be many Britons’ favorite American.

Detroit-born and Broadway trained, she’s been wooing British audiences since Noel Coward insisted that she come to the West End in the 1960s. “He really had to talk me into coming here. He bought me a red-leather, gold-tooled passport case, then took me to lunch and had three violinists play ‘A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square’ in my ear until my mind blew. Now London is home.”

Since moving to Britain she has not only stayed on the boards but has also starred in a pair of BBC television comedies. “Two’s Company” ran for five years. “Nobody’s Perfect” is currently on the tube – the English version of the U.S. hit show “Maude.”

“Very frankly,” she said, in the voice that has been described as corncake wading through bourbon on the rocks, “I hate sit-coms. They’re so hard to make real. The clock is always against you. There are only 26 minutes and you have to spend them fighting for your life.”

She started in the theater, and despite roles in films such as “A

Farewell To Arms” and in television series, her reputation, primarily as a comedian, is based on stage performances in hits the likes of “The Little Foxes,” “Pal Joey,” “Bus Stop,” “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” “The King and I,” “Any Wednesday,” “Private Lives” and “Mame.”

‘Such Make-Believe’

“My first love is the theater. A live audience. It’s all such make-believe. You do a play eight times a week and when you get up in the morning you have that wonderful feeling, because you can play in it again that night. Really great actiong is effortless, but comedy is so hard because it requires a much more disciplined life. I love to make people laugh. Lots of people can stand on a stage and scream or holler. But I want to make the whole world laugh. That’s some goal, isn’t it?”

At 55, she knows how the theater can also take its toll. “When you’re doing a play, your whole life is geared to that evening’s curtain call. There’s no time or energy for anything else. When you’re young, that’s terribly exciting. When you get older it turns your life upside down. You sleep at the wrong times. You eat at the wrong times. It’s all ass-backwards. Yet I do it every chance I get.”

But she added: “I won’t let it control me. Sure, I love to stand up on a stage and think to myself, ‘Hah, I’m fooling ‘em.’ That’s what acting is. An actress should fool people. But if you take it too seriously and if you start fooling yourself, it’s a killer. Look what it’s done to Marlon Brando. What I love to see is an actress like Katy Hepburn who’s got it all figured out. She’s got a lifestyle apart from being an actress.”

After a convent school education, Stritch went to New York in the 1940s, wanting to be a star. “One nun at school once told my mother that I was a born leader, except that I was leading all the other girls in the wrong direction. I had my first whiskey sour when I was 14, and thought, ‘God, I’ve found a friend.’ It was only a few years ago, when I thought our friendship was getting too steady, that I gave it up.

“In spite of that, when I went to New York I was a very innocent girl. At drama school I fell in love with Marlon Brando. Who didn’t? He went through the class like a dose of salts and left me for last.”

She said Brando poured on his charm by taking her to a library, a church and a strip show, “in that order,” then to his room. “I was so naive that he eventually said, ‘Go home,’ and I did.”

‘Poetic Justice’

Married late in life (to the American actor John Bay, who has been doing a one-man revue based on Groucho Marx), Stritch said she is still something of a little girl from convent school. “I pray sometimes, and the thing I pray about most is faith. Sometimes I go to bed at night and think, maybe this is it. Maybe there is nothing else.

“So I pray because I really want to see poetic justice have its day. I don’t pray that I’ll win the pools or that my shows will be good. Nope, I pray that someday everybody will get there due. Everyone should get the reward. And the bastards of this world should get kicked in the ass.”

Stretch has just finished a book that will be published in Britain later this year by Granada. “Two Shots a Day” has to do with diabetes.

“I’ve been a diabetic for the past 3½ years and I feel that as long as I have a forum, I must try to explain some things about diabetes to a lot of people who might not otherwise understand.

“Things could be worse. A lot of people are afraid of diabetes. I look at it as a challenge. I want people to understand the diabetes is not the end of the world, that diabetes can be treated. I mention diabetes once in an interview and started getting so many letters, you’d think I was Liz Taylor. So now I written a book to answer all those questions.”

She added: “My insulin comes with me wherever I go and I don’t give a damn where I am or whom I’m with. When it comes time for my shot, nothing stops me. Like the night I was at a club and it was time for my shot, so I offed to the ladies room. My slacks were down, my needle was out and I was already to jab myself when a woman walked in and stop dead in her tracks.

“She stared at me. I stared at her. God only knows what she was thinking. I might have explained, except that she blurted out, ‘Can I have your autograph?’ Well, what the hell are you supposed to doing a case like that? I dropped the needle and right there, with my slacks still down, I signed my name.”

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