Patrick's Notebook

By Niv Elis

The top 1 percent of households in terms of income fail to report an astonishing 21 percent of their income to the IRS, according to a new paper co-authored by IRS researchers and prominent academics in the National Bureau of Economic Research.

In comparison, the paper found that the bottom half of earners fail to report about 7 percent of their income.

The IRS captures data on most wage income from employers, who report the wages they pay through W-2 forms. Other income, however, earned from freelance work, collecting rent, self-employment and other avenues, must be reported directly.

Of the 21 percent of income unreported from the top tier of earners, 6 percent reportedly comes from avoidance methods that even audits would have trouble finding, such as undeclared foreign accounts and the use of pass-through businesses to hide income.

In comparison to previous estimates, the study finds that unreported income is larger by a factor of 1.1, a figure that rises to 1.3 for the top 1 percent and 1.8 for the top 0.1 percent. » Read the rest of this entry «

by Naomi Wolf

In 2008, I wrote a book, The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot. I warned, based on my study of closing democracies in 20th century history, that America needed to beware of a slide toward totalitarianism.

I warned that would-be tyrants, whether they are on the left or the right, always use a map to close down democracies, and that they always take the same ten steps. Whether it’s “Invoke a Terrifying Internal and External Threat,” “Create a Thug Caste,” “Target the Press,” or the final step, “Suspend the Rule of Law,” these steps are always recognizable; and they always work to crush democracies and establish tyrannies. At that time, the “global threat” of terrorism was the specter that powers invoked in order to attack our freedoms.

The book was widely read and discussed, both at the time of its publication and for the last 12 years. Periodically over the last decade, people would ask me when and if we had reached “Step Ten.”

We – my brave publisher, Chelsea Green, and I — are releasing the first and last chapters of The End of America now, in 2021, for free, and I am calling the sequel to this book, which I am now writing, Step Ten – because as of March of last year, we have indeed, I am so sad to say, arrived at and begun to inhabit Step Ten of the ten steps to fascism. » Read the rest of this entry «

by AlMasdarNews.com

The Syrian Minister of Oil and Mineral Resources, Bassam Tohme, said on Thursday, that the total losses in the direct and indirect oil sector in Syria have exceeded $92 billion (USD)

The Syrian minister said, in statements to the state-owned Al-Ikhbariya TV channel, that the areas under the control of the U.S. and their allied forces contain more than 90% of the oil reserves of Syria, stating that “the Americans and their followers act as pirates in targeting the Syrian oil wealth and the ships of supplies to it.”

Tohme said that the U.S. was deliberately preventing the Syrian government from benefitting from the oil reserves inside the country.

Tohme added that the Syrian waters are “qualified in terms of oil reserves, but what distinguishes exploration contracts is that they are expensive and are long term,” pointing out that “there is a promising oil future in those waters, and the matter needs calm and stable logistical conditions.”

The U.S. military and their allies from the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) currently control the Al-Umar Oil Fields, the largest oil fields in Syria, which they captured from the Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL/IS/Daesh) during the eastern Euphrates campaign.

Making matters worse, Syria is currently witnessing a gas crisis, following a new spike in prices for Octane 90 and Octane 95.

by John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead

“Americans deserve the freedom to choose a life without surveillance and the government regulation that would make that possible. While we continue to believe the sentiment, we fear it may soon be obsolete or irrelevant. We deserve that freedom, but the window to achieve it narrows a little more each day. If we don’t act now, with great urgency, it may very well close for good.”
—Charlie Warzel and Stuart A. Thompson, New York Times

Databit by databit, we are building our own electronic concentration camps.

With every new smart piece of smart technology we acquire, every new app we download, every new photo or post we share online, we are making it that much easier for the government and its corporate partners to identify, track and eventually round us up.

Saint or sinner, it doesn’t matter because we’re all being swept up into a massive digital data dragnet that does not distinguish between those who are innocent of wrongdoing, suspects, or criminals.

This is what it means to live in a suspect society.

The government’s efforts to round up those who took part in the Capitol riots shows exactly how vulnerable we all are to the menace of a surveillance state that aspires to a God-like awareness of our lives. » Read the rest of this entry «

by TheBlogMire.com

Many have been shocked by the scenes in Clapham on Saturday night, where the Metropolitan Police used extremely heavy-handed tactics to break up what appears to have been a peaceful protest and vigil, held in memory of Sarah Everard, who was brutally murdered just days earlier. The reason they did this was because the protest contravened the rules on public gatherings, introduced by the Government and supported by almost all Parliamentarians, as part of apparent efforts to keep us all “safe”.

I confess I am not especially shocked by these scenes. It was clear to me that we gave up on being a free country in March last year when millions of people supinely accepted the apparent need for the curtailment of liberties, ostensibly (but absurdly) aimed at “controlling a virus”. Together with a very few other voices, I warned many times that Lockdowns, and their wide acceptance as an appropriate policy, marked another nail in the coffin of the free Britain we knew, and would likely herald the start of a slide into a far more despotic society and police state.

The Metropolitan Police’s actions were indeed disgraceful, but they were entirely consistent with the powers granted to the authorities under the Coronavirus Act, and entirely in keeping with the treatment meted out to those who peacefully protested against that very legislation in numerous demonstrations last year. In short, they are inseparable from Lockdown laws, which millions accepted with supine acquiescence last year. » Read the rest of this entry «

By Tsvetana Paraskova

Despite the U.S. sanctions on Iranian oil exports, some Chinese refiners are buying so much Iranian crude that the ports in the Shandong province, where most independent refiners are based, are experiencing tanker traffic congestions, analysts and traders have told Bloomberg.

China has never actually stopped buying crude oil from the Islamic Republic, even after the Trump Administration slapped sanctions on Iran’s oil sales in 2018, warning buyers to stay away from Iranian crude and risk being sanctioned and cut off from the U.S. banking system.

Various reports, media investigations, and tanker-tracking firms suggest that China has been receiving much more oil from Iran than the official figures report, when they report imports from Iran.

The Islamic Republic has been using ship-to-ship transfers with transponders turned off to avoid detection, skirting U.S. sanctions. » Read the rest of this entry «

by TheMostImportantNews.com

If you thought that authorities all over the planet could print, borrow and spend money like there was no tomorrow without any consequences, you were being delusional. Since the beginning of the COVID pandemic, we have witnessed the greatest monetary binge in world history. Of course that was going to cause enormous problems. Of course that was going to cause nightmarish inflation. Anyone with an ounce of common sense should have been able to see that. When the value of money is tied to nothing, “more money” is always such a tempting solution for those in power. But as history has demonstrated over and over again, going down that path almost always leads to tragedy.

In our case, it will be the poorest people on the planet that suffer the most. According to Bloomberg, basic food staples are dramatically spiking in price all over the globe…

Global food prices are going up, and the timing couldn’t be worse.

In Indonesia, tofu is 30% more expensive than it was in December. In Brazil, the price of local mainstay turtle beans is up 54% compared to last January. In Russia, consumers are paying 61% more for sugar than a year ago.

And as Albert Edwards has pointed out, annual inflation in cereals has hit 20 percent, which represents “the highest annual rise since mid-2011 when the Arab Spring was in full flow!” » Read the rest of this entry «