LewRockwell » Bob Bauman

Do You Know How To Defend Your Property?

Bob Bauman — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 06:00:00 +0000

Recently by Bob Bauman: A Decade of Secret Tyranny

Few months ago in this space I asked the question: “Is your property safe from seizure?”

I went on to explain the wanton abuse of the civil forfeiture laws by local, state and federal police agencies. In 2010, forfeiture programs confiscated condominium units, homes, cars, boats and cash in more than 15,000 cases, worth a combined $2.5 billion – an amount that has doubled in five years, according to the U.S. Justice Department.

One source of defensive measures against civil forfeiture can be found on the website of Forfeiture Endangers American Rights (FEAR), an excellent anti-forfeiture group founded by California attorney, Brenda Grantland. FEAR also provides a list of forfeiture defense attorneys.

Brenda is a friend of mine and I was honored in the past to serve as member of the FEAR board of directors and to work with her in the U.S. Congress for forfeiture reforms.

Now, with anti-forfeiture activist Judy Osburn, they have just published their first E-book, Asset Forfeiture: What to Do When Police Seize Your Property. This new e-book tells citizens what to do if forfeiture happens to them. It outlines the law with links to statutes, cases, and internet resources.

Asset forfeiture has risen from an obscure concept in the mid-1980s to a whopping profit-making industry for law enforcement agencies. Over 400 federal statues now trigger forfeiture, and every state has its own statutes as well. These statutes allow police to seize property – not just from criminal defendants, but from third parties such as parents, spouses, landlords, and lien-holders.

Because there is no requirement that anyone be charged, much less convicted, large numbers of forfeiture cases are not even connected to a criminal proceeding but property is confiscated by police.

Forfeiture victims have a difficult time defending their property, especially when the government can seize everything they have, including cash, leaving them unable to finance a defense.

This book explains in the detail the federal forfeiture process – civil and criminal. It tells how to qualify for a court-appointed attorney, and what to do if you are forced to represent yourself. The book is outlined in a simple question and answer format.

Like the previous Asset Forfeiture Defense Manual, this small booklet is an invaluable tool for anyone facing asset forfeiture and/or for lawyers attempting to defend people against these unjustly used laws. I recommend it highly.

Reprinted with permission from The Sovereign Investor.

Robert E. Bauman is a former Member of the United States House of Representatives from Maryland, (1973–1981). He is also a former federal official and state legislator; Member, Washington, DC Bar; Graduate of the Georgetown University Law Center (1964) and the School of Foreign Service (1959), Washington, DC. Robert currently serves as legal counsel for the Sovereign Society.

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After a Decade of Secret Tyranny

Bob Bauman — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 05:00:00 +0000

Recently by Bob Bauman: On Hitler's Mountain: ItCanHappenHere

Ten years ago today, on Oct. 26, 2001, President George W. Bush signed into law the odious legislation known as the U.S.A. PATRIOT Act, perhaps the single most unconstitutional enactment by the U.S. Congress since the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1789.

A panicked Congress, eager to be seen as “doing something,” overwhelmingly passed the law only weeks after the Sept. 11, 2011 terror attacks in New York and Washington.

In an atmosphere of palpable fear, with haste and secrecy, in the name of the “war on terrorism,” Congress adopted the Act without hearings, giving the U.S. executive branch and its police agencies sweeping powers that undermine both the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

The Act was passed with little debate by senators and congressmen – most of whom did not, and could not, even read the bill. When the vote was taken no final printed copies were available.

General Ignorance

Other than civil libertarians and those who have suffered under this law, a decade later, like the congressman who voted for the Act, most Americans still know little about how drastically the Act restricts their rights and liberties. (For a copy of my detailed expose of the PATRIOT Act Report, click here.)

One of the principal reasons for this public ignorance is that the Act imposes enforced silence on those it touches with its operations, threatening them with fines and jail if they publicly discuss what happens to them.

Section 215 of the Act violates the Fourth Amendment by allowing government police to conduct searches without a warrant and without showing any probable cause and the FBI has used Section 215 to obtain financial and even medical records. This provision violates First Amendment free speech by prohibiting those who are served with the orders from disclosing that fact to others, even where there is no real need for such secrecy.

This secrecy is only a part of an alarming system of government mass surveillance that has been erected, about which most Americans know very little.

Watching You

The massive Department of Homeland Security (DHS), an unnecessary conglomeration of 22 agencies and nearly 200,000 employees, together with an out of control FBI and CIA, engage in massive surveillance of all of us, not just suspected terrorists or criminals.

Our phone calls, our emails and website visits, our financial records, our travel itineraries, and our digital images captured on powerful surveillance cameras are adding to the mountains of data being mined for suspicious patterns and associations.

In the last decade, civil liberties groups have criticized the PATRIOT Act as going too far by scooping up too much data and violating people’s rights to privacy.

One Man Challenge

Nicholas Merrill from New York may be one of the few people to fight a request for information from the FBI that came in the form of a “national security letter.” As I noted above, the Act made it easier for authorities to demand records from Internet service providers like Merrill’s company. But Merrill’s the only person who’s gone to court asking the right to talk about it.

Merrill says: “It’s time to have an open discussion about the direction that our country’s going in terms of all this secrecy and justifying everything with national security. I find it upsetting that there’s still so much secrecy surrounding these powers and their actual use, even to this day.”

20,000 FBI Violations

The record of the FBI in the last decade is one long list of abused powers and unconstitutional acts, followed by apologies and promises to sin no more – but only when they were caught.

In 2002, I reported that the FBI quietly had been asking offshore banks and other financial institutions to review their records for transactions involving scores of U.S. small businesses, organizations and people, none of whom had been charged with any crime.

In 2007 I wrote about a U.S. Justice Department’s Inspector General Report criticizing the FBI abuse of these national security letters in obtaining thousands of telephone, business and financial records without prior judicial approval.

The DOJ report said the FBI lacked controls to assure the subpoenas were issued properly. Although they citied the PATRIOT Act as their authority, the DOJ found the FBI issued illegally more than 20,000 NSLs.

The FBI’s supposed object was to find terrorists and their cash. The use of these “national security letters” marked a drastic change in the relationship between law enforcement and the financial industry, which used to surrender records to government agents only after official proof of probable cause that a crime had occurred, or was about to occur, and after a search warrant was issued by a federal judge or magistrate.

Sneak and Peek

Another part of the Act, the so-called sneak and peek provision, lets FBI agents search a person’s home or business with a judge’s warrant, but without telling the person they’re doing it.

“We’re now finding from public reports that less than 1% of these sneak and peek searches are happening for terrorism investigations,” says Michelle Richardson, of the ACLU Washington office. “They’re instead being used primarily in drug cases, in immigration cases, and some fraud.”

Obama’s Greater Surveillance Plans

Richardson, at the ACLU, says President Obama has even bigger surveillance plans in the works now. Obama’s cyber security proposal “…makes the PATRIOT Act look quaint,” Richardson says. “And the collection that it would allow would outpace anything that’s being done under the PATRIOT Act.”

Merrill, who wasn’t able to talk to his family for years about the FBI request or his lawsuit, still wonders how many other people have gone through a similar experience. Two Democratic senators, Ron Wyden of Oregon and Mark Udall of Colorado, have demanded that the Justice Department go public with a classified interpretation of the Act that they say would surprise and anger the public.

“It’s time to have an open discussion about the direction that our country’s going in terms of all this secrecy and justifying everything with national security,” Merrill says. He hopes the courts agree with him, as do I.

Reprinted with permission from The Sovereign Investor.

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Could It Happen in America?

Bob Bauman — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 05:00:00 +0000

Recently by Bob Bauman: Obama Repeals the 5th Amendment

Even though writing occupies much of each of my days, I also read a lot – averaging one or two books a week.

Recently I bought a paperback edition of a book entitled: On Hitler’s Mountain: Overcoming the Legacy of a Nazi Childhood by Irmgard A. Hunt.

Ms. Hunt, a self-identified political liberal and pacifist, is a former executive of various U.S. and international environmental organizations, who currently resides in Washington, D.C. Now a U.S. citizen, she was born in 1934 in Berchtesgaden, Bavaria, where Adolf Hitler set up his headquarters and his mountain retreat, the Eagle’s Nest.

In fact, in one of her most compelling stories, at the age of three, Hunt recalls sitting in Hitler’s lap during a 1941 village visit, “suspiciously studying his mustache, his slicked-back, oily hair… while at the same time acutely seeing the importance of the moment.” Her father was one of the first German soldiers drafted and one of the first to die. Hunt was only 11 when the war ended, but her “eyewitness” account does provide much personal insight into life under the Nazis.

Another German Lady Remembers

Last month I met an 83-year-old American lady and her husband, a veteran of World War II, both from Nevada. Because she spoke English with a German accent, we got to talking and I soon learned that at an early age she had been sent to the Sudetenland to a Hitler Youth Camp for girls.

When the war ended, in the mass confusion she had literally been turned loose from the camp, and with other girls, she became a refugee walking hundreds of miles in an effort to find her family. She recalled sleeping in the woods, starvation and scavenging garbage from the trash of American GIs, one of whom hit her in the back with a rifle butt, an injury from which she still suffers today. She eventually found her mother.

With all this in her past, this elderly lady is a proud American who loves her adopted country. When we discussed Hunt’s book about her childhood in Nazi German, I asked whether she thought that something akin to the Nazis and Hitler could happen in America. Without any hesitation she replied: “Of course it could; it is what I fear most about America today.”

Could It Happen in America?

Imgard Hunt also addressed this very question in her book when she was asked: “Could a Hitler happen here in America? If you think so what would be the circumstances? Are there aspects of life in the United States that would prevent a Hitler from rising here?”

Here is her disturbing response, and something to consider in the context of American politics:

“I thought a great deal about that while I wrote my book.

“Yes, an American version of a Hitler dictatorship is possible – but not the Holocaust. A dictatorship in America would arrive largely unnoticed and insidiously, with the pretense of a free democracy intact. The prerequisites would be that the executive, legislative, and judicial functions would be in the hands of one party, headed by a man on a mission who surrounds himself only with the like-minded.

“The media would be largely controlled by that party or by sympathetic owners. The military would be obedient and heed the leader’s orders against their better judgment, while the moneyed interests would be well protected. A powerful, shrewd, and sophisticated propaganda machine ready to lie to people and manipulate their minds – a propaganda machine like that of Dr. Goebbels – would quickly increase the danger of voices of reason, diverse opinions, and criticism.

Suspending the Constitution

“The trigger that could tip the scale dangerously in such a direction might be a monstrous economic disaster or more fear-inspiring terrorist attacks providing the excuse to suspend or ignore the Constitution and to declare emergency powers like Hitler did in 1933 after the fire in the Reichstag. There might be a group or groups that would be demonized and become an excuse for extreme measures. In Germany it was the Jews. Here it might be terrorists or Muslims.

“And yes, I believe we are seeing danger signs all around us, from the Homeland Security Act that diminishes civil rights and increased surveillance to scare tactics that increase fear, acceptance of torture of prisoners, and acceptance of a war based on lies. Add to that litany the increasing political power of an intolerant, ideology-driven, fundamentalist right wing and we have a scenario that could spell the end of democracy as we know it.

“There are of course enormous differences between the United States now and Germany then. For one, the ultra-fascist, violent Storm Troopers (S.A.) who staged the Kristallnacht and spread violence before and after Hitler’s power grab do not now have an American equivalent. In addition, the extreme fear of an imminent Communist revolution that haunted the Germans in the twenties does not exist.

“Most importantly, the American people, unless they become completely brainwashed by their government and their fundamentalist religious leaders, are used to living in a democracy, to questioning, speaking up, protesting, marching, blowing the whistle, and pointing the finger.

“If we want to keep America free we must continue to do just that.”

Something to ponder seriously, dear readers.

Reprinted with permission from The Sovereign Investor.

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Obama Repeals the 5th Amendment

Bob Bauman — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 05:00:00 +0000

Recently by Bob Bauman: Ten Years Later… We're Still Paying the Price

Rarely in my long life’s experience have two news items been published on the same day that demonstrated such palpable irony.

The two stories that appeared in The New York Times last Friday (Sept. 30) and when read together, they present a sharp incongruity and discordance that far exceeds the simple and evident intention of the words and actions recounted.

Due Process: 1945

Item #1: In a column entitled “The Nuremberg Scripts” Joe Nocera told how, in November 1945, six months after Nazi Germany’s surrender to the victorious Allies, a 24-year-old Army combat engineer named Harold Burson was handed a new assignment: daily reports on the Nuremberg trial of the top Nazis leaders for the American Armed Forces Radio Network. For the next five months, Burson was one of two soldiers who reported on the trial and produced a daily “script,” read over the air by the AFRN announcers.

Mr. Burson, who is 90 now, is the co-founder of Burson-Marsteller, one of the world’s largest public relations firms, says that every five years or so, he goes back and re-reads those old scripts, marveling at the remarkable experience he’d been afforded at such a young age.

Nocera says there was an aspect to Burson’s scripts he “…found quite endearing. They have an earnest, idealistic quality that reminds you just how full of hope America was after World War II.

“Though we had fought a brutal war, we were determined to act generously to the vanquished. That even applied to the Nazi brass who had committed reprehensible crimes against humanity. “G.I.’s have one stock question,” reads Burson’s very first 1945 script. “Why can’t we just take them out and shoot ’em? We know they’re guilty.”

Due Process: 2011

Item #2: In a “news analysis” in the same Times edition, Scott Shane reported: “The killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen struck on Friday by a missile fired from a drone aircraft operated by his own government, instantly reignited a difficult debate over terrorism, civil liberties and the law.”

In a statement my former U.S. House of Representatives colleague, Rep. Ron Paul, said President Obama was “appointing himself judge, jury and executioner by presidential decree” and was acting outside “the Constitution or the rule of law” He added: “Awlaki was a U.S. citizen. Under our Constitution, American citizens, even those living abroad, must be charged with a crime before being sentenced.” He suggested the president could be impeached for the killing.

“In any way destroyed…”

The Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, one of the most important protections in our Bill of Rights says in part: “No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury…nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law…”

The United States Supreme Court has held: ”It is now the settled doctrine of this Court that the Due Process Clause embodies a system of rights based on moral principles so deeply imbedded in the traditions and feelings of our people as to be deemed fundamental to a civilized society as conceived by our whole history. Due Process is that which comports with the deepest notions of what is fair and right and just.” Solesbee v. Balkcom, 339 U.S. 9, 16 (1950);’ Snyder v. Massachusetts, 291 U.S. 97, 105 (1934).

The concept of due process goes all the way back to Magna Carta, (1215) in which King John promised that ”[n]o free man shall be taken or imprisoned or disseized or exiled or in any way destroyed…except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.”

Evidence

Pressed to justify the constitutional law professor/president’s open defiance of the Fifth Amendment in ordering the murder of a U.S. citizen without trial, the White House press secretary refused to respond. As the Washington Post put it, “The administration officials refused to disclose the exact legal analysis used to authorize targeting Aulaqi, or how they considered any Fifth Amendment right to due process.”

Glen Greenwald said it: “That is the mindset of the U.S. Government and its followers expressed as vividly as can be: we can spy on, imprison, or even kill anyone we want – including citizens – without any due process or any evidence shown, simply because we will tell you they are Bad People, and you will trust us and believe us.”

Deeply Embedded Hypocrisy

A writer from Bangor, Maine commented: “…we target and kill an American citizen without trial. I’m not saying this man’s actions didn’t deserve punishment. But why even bother to pretend anymore? Why bother? Maybe with Obama’s latest drone kill we can let the hypocrisy go. But remember, Americans. Remotely-controlled drones can fly and kill over American cities just as easily as they can fly and kill over Yemen.”

Ask yourself this question: In the 66 years from the Nuremberg Trial 1945 to the White House 2011, what has happened to America’s belief in what the Supreme Court described as those “moral principles so deeply imbedded in the traditions and feelings of our people as to be deemed fundamental to a civilized society…”

The next time you hear what sounds like a small plane flying overhead, look up. If the president decides you are one of those Bad People, it might be the last thing you ever see.

Reprinted with permission from The Sovereign Investor.

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We’re Still Paying the Price 10 Years Later

Bob Bauman — Sat, 10 Sep 2011 05:00:00 +0000

Recently by Bob Bauman: Government Takes Away Gold and Our Rights

What to say, on this tenth anniversary, about the horrible events that occurred on that beautiful, sunny autumn morning of September 11, 2001 – “9/11? as it is now universally known?

Listen to Edmund Burke, speaking in 1715: “No passion so effectively robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.”

Our second President, John Adams, warned: “Fear is the foundation of governments.”

Yes, of course – most rational human beings want to feel safe and be secure. But with bipartisan agreement among the politicians, our fears have been exploited, dumping hundreds of billions of tax dollars into the bureaucratic maw under the banner of “homeland security.”

What has 9/11 wrought?

Over the past decade a new and alarming system of government mass surveillance has been erected, and we know very little about it.

Osama Bin Laden Is Dead… But in Too Many Ways He Died Victorious

When Osama bin Laden caused those airplanes to kill civilians 10 years ago, he took a lot more from the United States of America than the lives of more than 3,000 of our fellow citizens and residents.

Within a matter of days, if not hours, eager American politicians adopted fear as their continuing motif, justifying the sacrifice of our constitutional rights and liberties as the price of alleged safety.

The centerpiece of their opportunistic politics is the grotesquely named PATRIOT Act that has destroyed personal and financial privacy in America, rendering meaningless much of the hard won Bill of Rights we had honored for the last 220 years.

Yet most Americans have been all too willing to purchase that illusive security without regard for its cost in terms of lost personal freedom and liberties.

In an interview on the National Geographic Channel last week, George W. Bush says his most painful memory of that day was seeing the horror of people falling or jumping to their deaths from the Twin Towers and knowing there was nothing he could do to help them.

It would be useless for an interviewer to ask Mr. Bush what he thinks about what he and his successor in the White House, the constitutional law professor, Barack Obama, have done to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. In pursuit of both terrorists and common criminals, Obama has perpetuated so many of the Bush administration’s wrongful policies that their policies are indistinguishable in the destruction of civil liberties.

The inimitable Oscar Wilde wrote:

“Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.”

As we observe the 10th anniversary of 9/11 this Sunday, the people of the United States have every reason to question whether their “leaders” really have learned anything from those thousands of needless deaths and the events of ensuing years.

Yet our leaders have sacrificed the very principles that they claimed to be defending.

I was one of the millions of horrified Americans watching television when United Airlines flight 175 crashed into the South Tower of the World Trade Center at 9:02:59 a.m., on 9/11/2001.

After my sensations of horror, disbelief, anger, sorrow for the victims, my friend and former House colleague, U.S. Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, spoke for me in expressing my troubled thoughts:

“Times of tragedy and war naturally bring out strong emotions… Sometimes people are only too anxious to sacrifice their constitutional liberties during a crisis, hoping to gain some measure of security. Yet nothing would please terrorists more than if we willingly gave up our cherished liberties because of their actions.”

Sad to say, Ron Paul’s prediction has come to pass in too many ways. A short six weeks after the 9/11 attacks, a panicked U.S. Congress adopted the so-called “USA PATRIOT Act.”

In my view, that “law” is the single most egregious example of an unconstitutional law ever enacted by Congress. I have spent 10 years chronicling the offenses that have been committed by U.S. government agents in its name.

So Who Is Winning – Freedom or Terrorism?

This raises the question… just how far are Americans willing to go in surrendering their liberty and their privacy? How much are we willing to pay for this promised, illusory defense? Are we willing to become Fortress America with Big Brother watching and listening to all that we say and do?

Americans had better put aside politically inspired fears, and start asking and answering that question – before we enjoy neither safety nor liberty.

More than one million Americans have died in all our wars. To observe that so many have sacrificed down through the centuries only accentuates the meaning and importance of the greater cause for which they died.

They died before their time, their promise unrealized, in the service of the country.

Ten years removed from 9/11, while thinking of the thousands of souls who died, we should consider President Abraham Lincoln’s advice in closing his Gettysburg Address: “… that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain – that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

9/11 truly was, and continues to be, America’s moment of truth. Whether we pass or fail this crucial test is yet to be determined.

Failure is what we should truly fear.

This 10th anniversary of 9/11 is a good time to ask questions and demand answers. We need concrete proof that those in power, and those who aspire to power, realize what America has lost and whether they are willing to restore our constitutional rights and liberties.

Reprinted with permission from The Sovereign Investor.

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Government Takes Away our Gold and Our Rights

Bob Bauman — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 05:00:00 +0000

Recently by Bob Bauman: Tomorrow the World

It is a sad indictment of the dictatorial policies of the U.S. government when an honest citizen has to fear confiscation of his or her private property, but that is today’s reality in Police State America.

An official policy continues of wanton confiscation of gold and gold coins by U.S. government agents, not only from innocent travelers, but in lawsuits against legitimate gold coin owners.

With the gold price nearing $1900 an ounce today (Aug. 22) it appears that the feds will go right on grabbing all they can.

In spite of the fact that ownership and possession of gold is fully legal for Americans government agents are seizing gold from innocent people, offering no justification and with no complaints from Obama administration officials. The bureaucrats even refuse to explain what Americans must do to avoid their attacks on private property.

Case in point: in May 2010, an individual asked the U.S. Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) whether or not he was required to file one of FinCEN’s own forms, U.S. Treasury Form 105, when and if he transported an unspecified quantity of Canadian Maple Leaf silver coins across the U.S. border. A year later when the bureaucrats at FinCEN finally got around to replying they said they wouldn’t tell him because they did not give individual case opinions!

ICE Airport Seizures

Also in May 2010 I reported to you that U.S. Immigration and Customs (ICE) agents and Border Protection officers at the Houston, Texas at Bush airport seized almost $160,000 in gold and silver in 14 separate seizures from individual travelers during that month, none of which was involved in any criminal activity. Reason given: failure to file an obscure form called a “Shipper’s Export Declaration Form.”

My colleague, Mark Nestmann has written about Mexican airport police and customs officers also seizing gold coins from innocent travelers.

All of which serves as a background for my response to an email from a Sovereign Society member that stated: “I have gold and silver coins that I want to take with me to another country by air. What is the best way to carry them out; declaring the current value at the airport; not declaring them, because the amount on the coins doesn’t show the true value, and therefore doesn’t go over the $10,000 limit. If I want to take as many as a hundred coins out, what would be the best way?”

Here is my reply which I hope may save your gold should you travel across U.S. borders:

I don’t wish to alarm you or overload you with information about this topic, but you need to understand the problems that can arise when gold and silver coins (or any precious metals) are transported from the U.S. to other countries, or the reverse.

Know the Law

My strong advice is for you to contact the nearest office of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Agency and explain what you propose to do and ask them what you should do to conform to the law. You should ask for and receive a written response from them so that you can use it when you actually depart. Also ask Customs if you need to notify them of your date and departure flight as a precaution against the very real possibility a local customs agent at the airport may not know the rules that cover this situation.

At a minimum you will need to complete Census Bureau Form 7525-V, “Shipper’s Export Declaration.” Form 7525-V is required for exported commodities with a value exceeding $2,500. At current silver and gold prices the coins would exceed this reporting threshold. Failure to file a shipper’s export declaration can result in the commodity’s seizure. The consequences for stating incorrect information on the Shippers Export Declaration form are severe and may result in a fine up to $10,000 and/or imprisonment.

When you actually do travel at your place of departure you will need to fill out and file a U.S. Treasury Form 105, required when transporting currency or negotiable instruments worth $10,000 or more.

Call Your Congressman

If you have difficulty dealing with the U.S. Customs office, call the office of your local Member of the U.S. House of Representatives or one of your U.S. Senators and ask their assistance. They should be pleased to help you.

There may also be reporting formalities, and possibly customs duties payable, when you enter another country. You should contact your destination country’s customs authorities or their embassy or consulate here in the U.S. to determine how they deal with silver and gold imports. Don’t give them any definitive identification information against the possibility that government might put you on a travelers watch list.

To import gold and silver coins it might be advisable to hire a U.S. customs broker in advance of your trip. The customs broker would then appraise the value of the coins and arrange for payment of the foreign country’s customs or other goods and services taxes. Your local FedEx or UPS office probably can advise you about how to contact customs brokers.

Of course, you should also bring with you proof of your ownership of the specific coins in your possession.

What the totalitarian U.S. government is doing to our privately held gold mirrors what it is doing to our constitutional rights and liberties – destroying them one at a time until we will find ourselves defenseless. Protect yourself by knowing the law and if need be, seek help from an attorney.

Reprinted with permission from The Sovereign Investor.

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Tomorrow the World

Bob Bauman — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 05:00:00 +0000

Recently by Bob Bauman: Superman Ends His U.S. Citizenship

There is a line from a marching anthem in an old Hitler Youth songbook that goes as follows: Denn heute gëhort uns Deutschland; Und morgen die ganze Welt. A rough translation: For today Germany belongs to us; And tomorrow the whole world.

Now I hasten to add that I am not comparing agents of the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS) with the Nazis, but their policies, tactics and attitude too often provide grim reminders of a superior cult that believes they are unstoppable – even by the clear words of the U.S. Constitution or the laws of other sovereign nations.

A few years ago in one of my books I wondered if the day would come when armed IRS agents would be wading ashore on the beaches of Caribbean tax havens, ready to enforce demands for bank records and other information about American with offshore business and bank accounts.

Invasion of the Agents

Two years ago I read a news story stating that IRS agents would be stationed in the U.S. Embassy in Panama. When I asked our veteran Panama attorney and member of the Sovereign Society Council of Experts, Rainelda Mata-Kelly, about this her response mirrored my thinking: “I don’t know why IRS agents would be stationed here. Panama’s territorial tax law applies here, not U.S. tax laws.”

Well, we were both wrong.

We could hardly have guessed that the U.S. Congress. momentarily dominated by Obama and his radical left Democrats, would enacted the pending FATCA law, the basic premise of which is that U.S. tax laws apply to every bank and financial institution in the entire world.

That the country in which an offshore bank may be located, such as Switzerland, Austria or Panama has existing laws against revealing such financial information is not even considered by the IRS – “They are only nations. We are the IRS!”

We’re Here to Help You!

Recently PricewaterhouseCoopers warned U.S. taxpayers with offshore financial operations that the IRS may send agents into foreign jurisdictions. It appears that the IRS historically has sent agents to a foreign country for interviews and to review books, ledgers and other documents, but only with the foreign jurisdiction’s permission and under its rules.

As we all know only too well, U.S. law holds citizens resident elsewhere liable for paying U.S. taxes in addition to those they file and pay to another country, one of the only countries in the world to impose this extra-territorial tax reach on non-resident citizens.

If you are a U.S. person with an offshore business your records and U.S. tax and other reporting had better be in very good order.

The major problem as I see it is that the IRS has an ingrained prejudice against U.S. persons with offshore bank accounts and business interests. Add to the arbitrary application of a complex U.S. tax code two major factors: 1) an obvious IRS prejudice against taxpayers – the attitude that the taxpayer is always wrong, that taxpayers are guilty until they can prove themselves innocent; 2) a well known IRS opinion, shared by most U.S. government bureaucrats, that any American who dares to engage in offshore financial activity is probably a tax evader or worse.

Soak the Rich Again

The President, whose salary is about $400,000 a year, has been consistent and clear in his demagogic attacks against “millionaires, billionaires and corporate jet owners paying their ‘fair share“– tax them more, he says.

He knows but ignores the fact that the wealthiest top 10% of households, earning an average of $366,400 in 2006, paid 73% of the income taxes collected. The bottoms 45% of Americans, on average, make a profit from the federal income tax; they get more money in tax credits than they would otherwise owe in taxes. Those people get government payments subsidized by the taxes others must pay.

That’s what the late, assassinated U.S. Senator Huey Long (D-LA) cheerfully called for; “redistributing the wealth.”

As the Republican Leader of the U.S. House of Representatives, Eric Cantor (R-VA) has said, Obama calls for others to ”stop playing politics” but he repeatedly engages in “the politics of division…fueled by efforts to incite class warfare.”

Meanwhile, Obama the Hypocrite aggressively is courting Wall Street donors to support his shaky re-election campaign, trying to fool them that, despite his repeated attacks on corporate jet owners, his policies remain favorable to the “investor class.” No doubt a number of bailed out banks that got billions would agree.

Legions of GHWIGs

Implementing the Obama philosophy of “spreading the wealth around,” U.S. IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman has adopted IRS policies aimed right at what he described as “high wealth individuals and their related entities.”

Especially targeting the wealthy and offshore American financial activity, Shulman launched what he calls the IRS “Global High Wealth Industry Group,” (GHWIG) described as a “game-changing strategy” to centralize and focus IRS compliance expertise involving rich folks who supposedly don’t pay enough taxes.

IRS Imaginary Numbers

This IRS assumption of more taxes collected offshore runs counter to a 1998 U.S. Senate Committee on Finance report that stated: “Nearly 50% of the returns filed by overseas citizens or resident aliens report no tax liability, primarily as a result of sections 911 and 901 of the Code [the foreign earned income exclusion, which I have explained before].

The new IRS and onerous FACTA programs make no distinction between hidden, unreported fraudulent offshore accounts and the accounts of U.S. citizens or green card holders who are residents of other countries and who regularly declare their financial assets and pay taxes to these governments.

The late Will Rogers once observed: “The crime of taxation is not in the taking it, it’s in the way that it’s spent.”

I think Will was only half right on that one.

Reprinted with permission from The Sovereign Investor.

The Best of Bob Bauman

Superman Renounces His US Citizenship

Bob Bauman — Mon, 02 May 2011 05:00:00 +0000

Recently by Bob Bauman: Cheer Up! It Could Be Worse!

The latest reports reconfirm a continuing trend we at the Sovereign Society have observed since our founding in 1997; the most recent U.S. State Department figures for 2010 show the total number of U.S. citizens formally ending their citizenship rising at double previous rates.

Indeed, the growing trend of Americans voluntarily ending their status as U.S. citizens – the only legal way by which they can escape U.S. taxes and government controls – has reached a new peak and shows no signs of abating.

Those leaving the U.S. are mostly the wealthy and the talented, many of them young persons – those who have had enough, thank you.

World Wide Shock

I’ve observed this exodus for years but never in my wildest imagination could I have predicted that Superman (aka Clark Kent) would decide to end his many years as a respected U.S. citizen living in the city of Metropolis.

Now in the latest issue of DC Action Comics No. 900, released on Wednesday, the iconic super hero renounces his U.S citizenship following a clash with the federal government. The youthful 73-year-old Man of Steel joins thousands of other Americans in announcing that he is ending his U.S. citizenship, as reported in the New York Times.

Kansas Farm Boy

The readers of DC Comics know of Superman’s alien origin, but with his base of operation primarily being the American city of Metropolis, we always have thought of the hero as one of our own. (The true citizen, of course, is mild-mannered reporter Clark Kent, who was raised on a farm near Smallville, Kansas.)

Given that he was rocked to Earth from the dying planet of Krypton, Superman’s official papers – his super-birth certificate – have never been fully analyzed.

The Man of Steel, created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster in 1938, has always been recognized as a devoted American warrior who constantly fought evil, but as of now, he is no longer America’s own to claim.

Truth, Justice & the American Way

“I intend to speak before the United Nations tomorrow and inform them that I am renouncing my U.S. citizenship,” Superman says in Action Commics. “I’m tired of having my actions construed as instruments of U.S. policy.”

Superman even questions his longtime motto: “Truth, justice and the American way.”

“Truth, justice and the American way – it’s not enough anymore,” Superman tells the U.S. president’s national security adviser. “The world’s too small; too connected.”

A Sign of the Times

As I have explained in my most popular book, The Passport Book, the U.S. Supreme Court has affirmed the right of Americans to end their citizenship and to enjoy dual citizenship.

Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr., a leading libertarian, has placed such personal decisions in the proper perspective:

“A person who decides to give up his U.S. citizenship is not guilty of disloyalty to America; quite the opposite. He could very well be more loyal to American principles than the regime is willing to tolerate. It also does not mean that he is giving up hope for liberty; he may have great hope for liberty, in a different way and in a different place.”

Certainly Lew has described perfectly Superman’s surprising but understandable decision.

It is indeed sad that freedom under the government of the United States has so declined as to compel this act by a respected world hero.

Reprinted with permission from the Sovereign Society.

The State’s Ferocious War Against Us

Bob Bauman — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 05:00:00 +0000

Recently by Bob Bauman: Small Fish Fry, Big Ones Wiggle Off theHook

That headline is an old saying, to which the traditional reply is: "Sure enough. I cheered up and it did get worse."

But these days, I am not sure how much worse it can get.

In the last 14 years here at the Sovereign Society I have had the sad duty to chronicle and warn about the Leviathan state's ferocious war against free market economics, and especially against your freedom to bank, invest and do business offshore.

This unrelenting war has been led by the leftist Democratic Party in the U.S., including President Barack Obama, the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the European Union, the Organization for Community and Economic Development (OECD) and its Financial Action Task Force (FATF), as well as the United Nations.

Each of these big spending, high taxers, for their own, and for common tax hungry reasons, has joined in a coordinated attempt to crush offshore financial havens which they see as nothing more than centers for massive tax evasion.

Their attacks have reached the frenzy level in the last year or two as the worldwide recession has reduced tax revenues and in America the deficit and national debt have become hot political issues.

Looking for more tax monies President Obama (he of the trillion dollar deficits) and his radical left allies in the U.S. Congress, led by U.S. Senator Carl Levin (D-Mich), and aided and abetted by the IRS, are constantly devising new ways to curb offshore financial activity and abolish financial privacy.

To wit:

1) IRS Pre-Crime Plans

In remarks to the National Press Club on April 6th, our old friend, IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman, revealed a startling “look forward” plan in which all of the information you use in preparing your annual IRS Form 1040 (W2, 1099, mortgage and bank interest) would be submitted automatically to the IRS every day in real time throughout the year.

IRS bureaucrats with this expanded snooping power and new sc-fi technology want to audit your financial activity on a daily basis. After a massive upgrade in technology, Shulman insisted the IRS would be able to "pre-calculate" what the IRS expects it should receive from you in taxes and reject any return that doesn’t comply with its pre-determination.

This claim from a bloated agency that over 20 years has spent hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on its multiple inconsistent computer systems that still don't work!

If you wish to know how this nutty idea might be applied, check out the alarming movie Minority Report, based on a short story by Philip K. Dick.

In the movie, set in the year 2054, a specialized U.S. government "pre-crime" police force sees into the future and stops criminals in their tracks, arresting them before they commit a crime; sometimes before they even think about committing a crime.

When I saw the movie I hopefully thought: "It can't happen here."

Wrong again, Bob! It already has.

2) Your Friendly Local Informant

Under one lucrative IRS program you can make big money snitching on your friends and family who might be engaged in tax cheating by filing an IRS Form 211.

IRS cash for snoops started in the 1960s, but the rules were changed to give whistleblowers get up to 30% if the IRS collects $2 million or more. The average payout is reportedly about $24,000. The record year was 2000, when $10.8 million went to those who ratted out tax cheating friends, family and coworkers. About 10,000 informants claim IRS rewards each year.

In the past the IRS claimed to have 1,000 “controlled informants,” people who regularly inform on others for pay. Some of them are accountants. (Doesn’t that give you a warm fuzzy feeling?) Michael Levine, a retired U.S. Customs and DEA officer, said that in 2005 there were 15,000 informants on the federal payroll. No doubt that number has been upped since 9-11, 2001.

Now the IRS is stepping up its use of paid informants. Last week a Pennsylvania in-house accountant who tipped off the IRS that his employer was tax cheating received a $4.5 million IRS whistleblower award. The IRS made certain the case got plenty of media coverage.

George Orwell's 1984 Big Brother would have understood and applauded.

3) Your Papers Please

You thought those groping TSA bullies were difficult to deal with at airports?

Or you thought it was not bad enough that the U.S. Congress, following the historic example of Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia and apartheid South Africa, has imposed an exit tax on those who wish to end their U.S. citizenship.

A new government report released last Monday claims that the IRS could collect billions in owed taxes by blocking delinquent Americans from getting or using U.S. passports until they settle their alleged IRS debts.The Government Accountability Office, at the request of Congress, released a study examining how the government could leverage the U.S. passport process to recover unpaid taxes. The GAO found that in fiscal 2008, Americans who received passports owed a collective $5.8 billion to the IRS and could owe much more, since that estimate only factored in one year’s worth of passport recipients.

The GAO said that if Congress wants to collects taxes with the help of the State Department, it would have to authorize denial of passports and authorize the IRS to share tax data.

Have you ever received an IRS notice of intent to levy on all your bank accounts based on $2.50 they claim you owe, or on late filing of a Form 941, self employment tax?

No doubt many travelers might owe a small amount of back taxes without even realizing it. The GAO report showed that only a small percentage of those who received passports in 2008 were delinquent.

Add to the "not bad enough" list the fact that the previous Democrat controlled Congress imposed a near impossible reporting system in the so-called HIRE Act, which contained an onerous and illogical section billed as the "Foreign Account Taxpayer Compliance Act," (FATCA). My colleague, Mark Nestmann, explained this legislative monstrosity. You can read it here to refresh your memory and rekindled your anger.

4) Stretching the Tax Laws

Just as the all-powerful President Obama has decided what laws he will or will not enforce the IRS is considering stretching the meaning and intent of an existing law to suit their voracious appetite for more taxes.

To augment the widening IRS investigation into banks suspected of helping offshore tax evasion by Americans, the U.S. Justice Department (DOJ) is considering a novel punishment: imposing a severe monetary penalty on banks the law heretofore reserved for individual Americans.

The penalty is for a violation of failing to file annually by June 30 with the U.S. Treasury a "Foreign Bank and Financial Accounts" (FBAR) report. The top failing to file penalty is 50% of the account balance for each year of violation, a level that can leave tax evaders owing more than what their unreported accounts held.

Now the DOJ, hoping to add the scalps of Credit Suisse and HSBC to their previous UBS trophy, according to court papers and statements by the banks, is exploring how and whether it could apply the 50% penalty to the offshore banks, if it can be proven that they helped to or themselves violated American tax laws.

FACTA (see above) already has driven many offshore banks to drop existing American clients and refuse new ones, but that only imposes a 30% tax on uncooperative offshore banks.

If this latest law stretching 50% tax idea is adopted it should push most other offshore banks into the anti-American column. Query: Does this mean the U.S. will demand a combined 80% tax on offshore banks? Just asking, folks.

Reprinted with permission from the Sovereign Society.

Small Fish Fry, Big Ones Wiggle Off the Hook

Bob Bauman — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 05:00:00 +0000

Recently by Bob Bauman: Escape From America Continues

A few weeks ago, when the U.S. Justice Department decided not to prosecute Angelo Mozilo, the former chief executive of Countrywide mortgage company, New York Times columnist Joe Nocera wrote a column very properly lamenting the fact that none of the big fish were likely to go to prison for their roles in the financial and home mortgage crisis.

Mozilo and Countrywide made billions in profit, some of it on “liar loans “that he acknowledged were likely fraudulent, action that did major damage to the national economy. He personally was paid hundreds of millions of dollars. Though he agreed last year to a $67.5 million fine to settle fraud charges brought by the SEC, it was a small fraction of what he earned. Otherwise, he walked.

Your Government at Work

With that background it was even more painful to read Nocera’s Sunday (March 27) column about one Charlie Engle, 48, (left) who was recently convicted, sentenced, and incarcerated in a federal prison for committing mortgage fraud – as a borrower!

I invite you to read that column if you want to rekindle your justified antipathy towards government in general and the IRS in particular. (You might also want to write to Mr. Engle and let him know that many Americans are with him in his time of persecution).

Unlike Angelo Mozilo, who made millions for himself participating in billions of mortgage frauds, Charlie Engle wasn’t a seller of bad mortgages. He was a borrower. And the “mortgage fraud” for which he was prosecuted was something that millions of Americans did during the subprime bubble. Supposedly, he lied on two “liar loans,” exaggerating his net worth and assets in order to qualify.

The IRS went all out find something, anything, on Charlie. The government’s star witness, a shady mortgage broker who himself had been convicted of fraud, claimed Engle provided false information and overstated his income on a “stated income” liar loan application.

The jury acquitted Engle on the charge of providing false information. But they somehow managed to find him guilty for mortgage fraud!

Our IRS Policy

Now we always have advised our Sovereign Society members never to meet or talk directly with IRS agents about anything. Having your attorney handle such contacts provides a screen for you and also gives you attorney-client privilege rights should anything develop later.

We also advise filing of any and all required reports with the IRS when engaged in offshore financial dealings if any kind.Therefore it is more than of passing interest for you and I to learn the tactics the IRS used in deciding to prosecute (persecute?) Mr. Engle. It could be you or I.

Dumpsters and Ferraris

Mr. Engle was the subject of a 2008 documentary film, “Running the Sahara.” Robert W. Nordlander, a special IRS agent, saw the film and wondered: “How does a guy train for this because most people have to work from nine to five and it’s very difficult to train for this part-time.” Agent Nordlinger also said that sometimes, when he sees somebody driving a Ferrari, he’ll check license plates to see if they make enough money to afford it.

Engle’s tax records showed that while his actual income was substantial, his taxable income was quite small, in part because he had a large tax-loss carry forward, due to a past business deal. Still convinced that Engle must be hiding income, Nordlander did undercover surveillance and took “Dumpster dives” into Mr. Engle’s garbage.

Here’s Looking at You Babe

In March 2009, still unsatisfied, Nordlander persuaded his IRS superiors to send an attractive female undercover agent, Ellen Burrows, to meet Mr. Engle and see if she could get him to say something incriminating. In the course of several flirtatious encounters, she asked him about his investments.

After acknowledging that he had been speculating in real estate during the bubble to help support his running, he said, according to Mr. Nordlander’s grand jury testimony, “I had a couple of good liar loans out there, you know, which my mortgage broker didn’t mind writing down, you know, that I was making four hundred thousand grand a year when he knew I wasn’t.”

Mr. Engle added, “Everybody was doing it because it was simply the way it was done. That doesn’t make me proud of the fact that I am at least a small part of the problem.”

Unbeknownst to Mr. Engle, Ms. Burrows was wearing a wire.

I invite you to read Joe Nocera’s full column to review all the facts that in totality raise the question whether any crime was ever committed by Engle.

Final Irony

Even when he emerges from prison, though, his ordeal will not be over. As part of his sentence, Engle was ordered to pay $262,500 in restitution to the owner of his mortgages. And what institution might that be? You guessed it: Countrywide, now owned by Bank of America.

Nocera says: “Angelo Mozilo ought to get a good chuckle out of that one.”

And we all should learn something about the tactics of the IRS, an agency that habitually presumes Americans guilty instead of innocent – as the Constitution requires – and as this sad case shows, they’ll do almost anything to manufacture that guilt.

Reprinted with permission from the Sovereign Society.

The Escape from America Continues

Bob Bauman — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 05:00:00 +0000

Recently by Bob Bauman: China in Talks to Build Panama Canal Rival

The latest news reports reconfirm a continuing trend we at the Sovereign Society have observed since our founding in 1997; the most recent U.S. State Department figures for 2010 show the total number of U.S. citizens formally ending their citizenship is rising at double previous rates.

According to one web site, the 2010 figure was 1,485, but Bloomberg News lists 1,534. In both cases, the 2010 figure appears to be about double that for any year since 2003.

We at the Sovereign Society have noted sadly that each year hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens and resident aliens have left America to make a new home in other nations, even though most of them do not renounced U.S citizenship. Admittedly, that number pales against the millions clamoring to get into the U.S., legally and otherwise.

But there’s a huge difference in the economic status of these two groups.

Although the current recession has slowed the pace, those seeking admission (or just illegally crossing our borders) are, by and large, poverty stricken persons desperately trying to better their lot with a new life in the Promised Land. They’ll settle for low-paying jobs, welfare, free education for their kids, and U.S. taxpayer subsidized housing and health care.

Those leaving are the wealthy and the talented – those who have had enough, thank you.

Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr., a leading libertarian, speaks for me when he says: “Let’s be clear about something. A person who decides to give up his U.S. citizenship is not guilty of disloyalty to America; quite the opposite. He could very well be more loyal to American principles than the regime is willing to tolerate. It also does not mean that he is giving up hope for liberty; he may have great hope for liberty, in a different way and in a different place.”

Historic Exodus

My friend, whom I have often quoted, John Gaver, who edits the conservative web site Action America looks at this from a different angle: “What these lists fail to show is the vast and increasing numbers of wealthy U.S. citizens who are just ‘dropping out’ – taking all of their wealth and leaving the U.S. without renouncing. They just disappear off the U.S. tax rolls and appear on some other country’s tax rolls.”

Based on data in polls conducted between 2005 and 2007 suggest perhaps 3 million U.S. citizens each year go abroad to live. That number, if true, is a big increase over previous years. Of special interest, the largest number of relocating households is not those with people approaching retirement, but rather those with young adults ranging from 25 to 34 years old.

Renunciationguide.com, a site maintained by and for people considering giving up U.S. citizenship, points out a number of errors in the State Department figures. They say it safe to assume the figures are higher based on discrepancies.

In 1996 the U.S. State Department began publishing in The Federal Register the names of those who renounce. The figures reflect only completed requests, not pending demands. There are long waiting periods at many U.S. embassies in places such as Paris and London.

For example, currently at the U.S. embassy in Bern, Switzerland, no appointments are available for 18 months until August 2012. These numbers have skyrocketed despite a State Department administrative fee of $450 imposed in July 2010. Renouncing citizenship had previously been free of charge.

Joint IRS-State Department Demands

I have previously explained the onerous 2008 “exit tax” the U.S. Congress and George Bush imposed on those who exercise their constitutional right to end citizenship. The only other countries that imposed a tax on those citizens who sought to expatriate were Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia and apartheid South Africa.

Now the ever-vigilant U.S. Internal Revenue Service has joined with the State Department for the first time, linking new and renewable passport applications to the IRS. New forms for renewing a U.S. passport state that as part of the Privacy Act information that data will be provided to the U.S. Treasury and the IRS.

“Your Social Security Number will be provided to Treasury, used in connection with debt collection and checked against lists of persons ineligible or potentially ineligible to receive a US passport, among other unauthorized uses.”

It appears that IRS tax compliance demands are also a major factor in slowing down what the State Department calls the “renunciation” process. For those who want to join the line to “renounce” citizenship, an added complication is a demand for proof that a person is “compliant” with all U.S. taxes concerned.

Reprinted with permission from the Sovereign Society.

China To Finance Rival to the Panama Canal

Bob Bauman — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 06:00:00 +0000

Recently by Bob Bauman: Another Swiss IRS Target

Why, you ask, would the Beijing Communist Chinese government want to finance a US$7.6 billion alternate route that geographically parallels and could economically rival the Panama Canal?

Because they can; and they are.

Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos has announced that Bogotá and Beijing are negotiating a deal to build a multi-billion-dollar railway connecting Colombia’s Caribbean and Pacific coasts. In an obvious swipe at the U.S. Santos said: “Asia is the new motor of the world economy.”

Chinese officials confirm they have agreed to invest in the $7.6 billion project, which would run about 140 miles (220 km) from Colombia’s northern Caribbean region, on the Atlantic side near Cartagena, to an as-yet undecided site on its western Pacific Ocean coast, mainly as a route to transport Colombia’s abundant coal to energy hungry China.

Yes, Panama is a leading world tax haven, but at the heart of the nation’s economy is the famous Panama Canal, now undergoing a US$6 billion expansion. It doesn’t need any rivals stealing its transcontinental shipping business.

Bad Treatment for Allies

But both Panama and its southern neighbor, Colombia, despite their past willing support for U.S. policies, have been pushed around by President Obama and Democrats beholden to U.S. labor unions.

Both friendly countries have been waiting none too patiently for the U.S. Senate to ratify free trade agreements (FTAs) signed with the United States – way back in 2006.

Panama has been so desperate for FTA approval that recently it surrendered to U.S. demands that it end its historic strict bank secrecy by signing a tax information exchange agreement with the U.S.

The two FTAs have languished ever since 2006 in the Harry Reid’s Democrat-controlled Senate because of questionable objections from American labor unions who claim both countries treat their unions and workers unfairly. Union opponents also mutter about “environmental concerns” and Panama’s alleged harboring of U.S. tax cheats.

In the meantime American businesses, especially farmers, have lost market share in Colombia to competitors from Brazil and Argentina. Other countries, including Canada, are increasing business there, too. Their trade advantages would be removed if U.S. tariffs on products like wheat and beef were erased under the pending FTAs.

America’s Backyard No More

South America has long been seen as “America’s backyard” – but not anymore.

With the U.S. mired in Iraq and Afghanistan, nations in Latin America have felt neglected by Washington. Not surprisingly, Venezuela’s far left elected dictator, Hugo Chavez, has unstintingly supported Beijing’s Latin overtures.

Last year Chinese foreign investment in Latin America exceeded US$15 billion. In addition China has become a new export market for Latin America. Well over $50 billion of Latin American products, chiefly iron and copper ores, soya, and crude oil, will go to China this year as well.

Same Old Song

An Obama administration official expects that the FTAs will be sent to the Senate for ratification by June – but they have been promising that without action for two years.

Suddenly this week Obama’s boys seem to have been shaken out of their FTA union-induced torpor.

A U.S. interagency delegation is in Colombia this week supposedly to assess labor progress. Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-MT) also is in Colombia, in part to push the FTA. His committee has jurisdiction over international trade and he hails from a farm state. All that activity coincides this week with a trip led by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to drum up support for the deal.

While President Barack Obama has given priority to a trade deal with South Korea and plans to submit it for congressional approval within weeks, Republicans and business groups are demanding that the FTAs with Colombia and Panama be sent up at the same time.

I Pick Panama

The vision of that potential Chinese-Colombian transcontinental railroad seems to have worked wonders in Washington.

And as one who knows Panama, I advise no worries about the future of its famous Canal or its booming economy. By the way, Panama has had its own successful transcontinental railway since 1855 – and it’s still in very good operating condition. Plan to ride it when you visit the isthmus.

Reprinted with permission from the Sovereign Society.

Want an Offshore Account?

Bob Bauman — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 06:00:00 +0000

Recently by Bob Bauman: Doctor No Comes Into His Own

For sound asset protection and ease of investment you need an offshore bank account. But as I pointed out last week, Americans must be very careful about which bank they choose – and what advice they accept.

For those interested in offshore financial activity there is no need to re-run the sad details of the UBS tax evasion scandal that ended decades of absolute statutory Swiss bank secrecy – and tarnished that country’s good reputation in the process.

But as I told you some months ago, UBS is not the only target of the U.S. Internal Revenue Service. I explained then that the second largest Swiss bank, Credit Suisse, was also in the IRS cross hairs, along with Swiss cantonal banks.

Since 2008 when the IRS cracked down on the two largest Swiss banks, UBS and Credit Suisse, both have suffered huge cash outflows. UBS paid a $780 million fine in 2009 and agreed to turn over 4,450 names of American clients. Much of the U.S. and European client money was assumed to have gone to banks in the Far East but tens of billions of dollars may have ended up in Swiss cantonal banks.

Next

Today the New York Times reports that “a senior private banker at Credit Suisse has been arrested in the United States in connection with a federal investigation into the Swiss bank’s work with questionable offshore accounts.”

The banker, Christos Bagios, a Greek citizen, was arrested in New York and transferred to Fort Lauderdale, Fla., where he has been charged with conspiracy and fraud. Bagiso heads an SEC registered private banking unit that is part of Credit Suisse Private Advisors based in Zurich.

DOJ Pressure Tactic

An arrest such as this is a highly unusual move and seen as proof that the U.S. Justice Department is zeroing in on Credit Suisse and the possibility that the bank may have helped wealthy American clients to evade taxes.

It was not clear whether Mr. Bagios was cooperating with the DOJ investigation, a move that would increase pressure on the bank.

In 2008, a former top UBS executive, Martin Liechti, was arrested and detained in Miami in connection with the major federal investigation of UBS. Mr. Liechti, a Swiss citizen who was UBS’s top private banker for the Americas, was allowed to return to Switzerland after several months and cooperated with the IRS in its investigation of the UBS tax evasion scandal.

Names

In a possible repeat of the UBS mess, the U.S. Department of Justice probably will demand names of Credit Suisse American clients under the terms of the Swiss-U.S. tax treaty.

This latest chapter in the U.S.-Swiss tax evasion story comes just days after the Swiss government announced plans to relax still further the conditions for the release to the U.S. and other governments of tax and other information on foreign bank account holders.

I repeat: the Swiss government has come a long way in a short time; from defending absolute financial privacy under the 1934 Bank Secrecy Act, (still the law a year ago) to who knows what today?

Americans with Credit Swiss accounts are about to discover the answer to that question. Rumors have it that the Swiss division of HSBC is also high on the current IRS hit list.

Reprinted with permission from the Sovereign Society.

Ron Paul Comes into His Own

Bob Bauman — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 06:00:00 +0000

Recently
by Bob Bauman: The
War on Your Financial Privacy Continues

“And when
man faces destiny, destiny ends and man comes into his own.”

Those words
were uttered by the late André Malraux, French adventurer,
award-winning author, and statesman, but they certainly apply now
to my friend and former congressional colleague, U.S. Rep. Ron Paul
of Texas.

If proof were
needed of that truth, one need only glance at today’s New
York Times front
page.

There, under
the cynical headline “Rep. Ron Paul, G.O.P. Loner, Comes In
From Cold” is a lengthy article that chronicles Ron’s
ascension in the new Congress to the chairmanship of the House Subcommittee
on Domestic Monetary Policy which oversees the Federal Reserve as
well as the currency and the valuation of the dollar.

After years
of blocking him from a leadership position, Rep. Paul’s fellow
Republicans have elevated him to what could become a highly visible
platform for exposing Ben Bernanke and the Fed’s squandering
of trillions of declining paper dollars. They did so, despite the
reported opposition of a number of Wall Street bankers who apparently
fear Paul – as well they should.

End the
Fed

Ron Paul has
strong views on the issues. He has written a book called End
the Fed; he embraces the Austrian school of economic thought,
which holds that the government has no role in regulating the economy;
and he advocates a return to the gold standard.

Sounds damn
good to me!

That The
Times, the declining mouthpiece of the American Left, would
give such prominence to one whose presidential candidacy they routinely
have vilified, is at least an acknowledgement of the power of Paul’s
influence – as well as the national groundswell that is the
Tea Party Revolution.

Many of the
new Republicans in the next Congress campaigned on precisely the
issues that Ron Paul has been talking about for 40 years: forbidding
Congress from any action not explicitly authorized in the U.S. Constitution,
eliminating entire federal departments as unconstitutional and checking
the power of the Fed.

A Positive
No

In 1973, when
I was first elected to the U.S. House, my late colleague and good
friend, John Ashbrook of Ohio told me: “Bob, 99% of the time
in the House you can’t go wrong by voting no.u201D

During his
20 years in Congress, Ron has staked out the lonely end of 434-to-1
votes against legislation that he considers unconstitutional, even
on issues as ceremonial as granting Mother Teresa a Congressional
Gold Medal. His colleagues have dubbed
him “Dr. No,” but his wife insists that they have
the spelling wrong: he is really Dr. Know.

Rep. Paul wasted
no time in assuming his new role in the House. In a statement on
his web site he made plain his future plans:

“Since
the announcement that I will chair the congressional subcommittee
that oversees the Federal
Reserve, the media response has been overwhelming. The groundswell
of opposition to Fed actions among ordinary citizens is…in
the tremendous interest shown by the financial press. The demand
for transparency is growing whether the political and financial
establishment likes it or not. The Fed is losing its vaunted status
as an institution that is somehow above politics and public scrutiny.
Fed transparency will be the cornerstone of my efforts as Subcommittee
Chairman.”

Freedom
Alliance

By the way,
if you had been a member of the Freedom
Alliance, which I chair, you would have had full audio access
to an interview I did last month with Ron Paul. Ron had many interesting
things to say about numerous topics and was very candid in revealing
he may well run for president again in 2012.

The Times
notes: “Aides, supporters and television interviewers now use
words like ‘vindicated’ to describe him – a term
Mr. Paul, a 75-year-old obstetrician with the manner of a country
doctor, brushes off.

“I don’t
think it’s very personal,” he said in an interview in
his office on the Hill, where he has represented the 14th District
of Texas on and off since 1976. “People are really worried
about what’s happening, so they’re searching, and I think
they see that we’ve been offering answers.”

The right answers,
I might add.

Reprinted
with permission from the Sovereign
Society.

Robert
E. Bauman is a former Member of the United States House of Representatives
from Maryland, (1973–1981). He is also a former federal official
and state legislator; Member, Washington, DC Bar; Graduate of the
Georgetown University Law Center (1964) and the School of Foreign
Service (1959), Washington, DC. Robert currently serves as legal
counsel for the Sovereign
Society.

The War on Your Financial Privacy Continues

Bob Bauman — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 05:00:00 +0000

Recently
by Bob Bauman: The
(Tax) Return of the Tiger

President Obama
in a current
Rolling Stone interview actually had
the audacity to say this: “The idea that we’ve got
a lack of enthusiasm in the Democratic base, that people are sitting
on their hands complaining, is just irresponsible. . . . .If we
want the kind of country that respects civil rights and civil
liberties, we’d better fight in this election.”

Glen Greenwald
of Salon put
it best: “…for Barack Obama to cite ‘civil liberties’
as a reason why Democratic apathy is ‘just irresponsible,’
and to claim with a straight face that this election will determine
whether we’re ‘the kind of country that respects’
them, is…detached from basic reality…”

This from a
phony 2008 presidential candidate who attacked the PATRIOT Act,
then as president expanded that law and has suspended due process,
allowed continued preventive detentions, authorized secret assassinations
of U.S. citizens, vastly expanded government surveillance of the
Internet, protected Executive branch crimes through the use of radical
secrecy doctrines, escalated punishment for government whistleblowers,
granted legal immunity for war crimes, and massively escalated drone
war in Pakistan.

American civil
liberties indeed!

Stupid Reporting
Tricks

What set me
off today on this rant was a New York Times article
this morning announcing that the U.S. Treasury has proposed
an inane requirement that all banks make weekly reports of all
electronic money transfers into and out of the United
States – we’re talking millions if not billions of transfers!

Why? Because,
as usual government shills claimed, this bureaucratic measure is
needed to combat the dread scourge of terrorism!

This latest
Treasury proposal adds another layer to existing “anti-money
laundering” laws, one of the major governmental frauds of all
time, as
I have explained before.

These Draconian
laws have been on the books in the United States and other countries
for nearly 30 years, promoted originally as being aimed at drug
kingpins and their illicit cash. Later the politicians started a
new myth — claiming that AML laws were needed to stop terrorist
cash.

In fact, these
laws have been mainly used as prosecutorial bargaining chips, since
they impose heavy fines and prison sentences. Add ML charges to
any threatened indictment and a putative defendant is likely plea
to a lesser charge.

They have also
been used by the IRS as a backdoor means to search for tax evasion,
especially when offshore financial activity is involved. The IRS
presumes any American engaged in offshore finance probably is a
crook.

Anti-Freedom
Plan

This is yet
another part of the anti-freedom plan in which the U.S. government,
and especially the IRS, have done all they can to keep you and your
money at home — where, under the privacy destroying PATRIOT
Act, they can confiscate cash at will and in secret.

Paris-based
Financial
Action Task Force (FATF), is a subdivision of the stridently
anti-tax haven, pro tax Organization for Economic and Community
Development (OECD). Mainly a front group for the high tax, welfare
state G-20 countries, both the OECD and FATF have skillfully advocated
AML laws for their tax hungry sponsors as a pious means to destroy
financial privacy — and to track down what they claim is massive
offshore tax evasion.

Earlier this
year FATF
proposed making tax evasion a co-crime with money laundering
and two
U.S. senators agreed.

The 9-11
Offshore Myth

Is this latest
Treasury proposal needed to combat terrorism, as they claimed yesterday,
hinting that it could have thwarted the 9-11 attacks? Pure political
bologna!

The official
9/11 Commission estimated that $400,000 to $500,000 was used to
finance the 2001 attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, most
of American bank accounts. Only about $130,000 was sent from overseas.
Some of those transactions were wires above the $3,000 threshold
that requires bank record-keeping, but this 9-11 offshore money
myth was used by Congress to justify hundreds of pages restrictions
in the PATRIOT Act on offshore financial and banking activity. (See
my special PATRIOT
Report for the full story).

SWIFT Again

There is another
audacious angle to this Treasury proposal.

Under the new
Treasury proposal, the bank reports on cross-border wire transfers
would come through the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial
Telecommunication (SWIFT), a global banking cooperative based in
Brussels that actually wires all these funds, allowing financial
institutions to automate and standardize transactions.

In 2006 it
was exposed that SWIFT, under pressure from the Bush administration
secretly had been supplied the IRS with millions of private financial
records. In secret cooperation with the U.S. government, SWIFT violated
the privacy of an untold number of persons by allowing the U.S.
access to Swift cash transfer records. I
wrote about this at the time.

This secret
partnership with Washington, reported in The New York Times
in June 2006, gave U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and the U.S.
Treasury Department access to millions of records on international
banking transactions by private individuals and others. Once exposed,
the European Union and several governments put an end to this secret
snooping deal.

In my opinion
you better believe that the U.S. money snoops who say they are looking
for terrorist cash are also looking for tax evasion, money laundering
of all kinds and any other indictable offenses.

And they are
doing this in violation of the Fourth Amendment guarantees against
illegal searches without a warrant.

Reprinted
with permission from the Sovereign
Society.

Robert
E. Bauman is a former Member of the United States House of Representatives
from Maryland, (1973–1981). He is also a former federal official
and state legislator; Member, Washington, DC Bar; Graduate of the
Georgetown University Law Center (1964) and the School of Foreign
Service (1959), Washington, DC. Robert currently serves as legal
counsel for the Sovereign
Society.

Greedy Tax Grabbers Scare Off the Stars

Bob Bauman — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 05:00:00 +0000

Tax competition
among nations really does matter – for good or for ill, as
I noted in yesterday’s blog
entry.

Example: until
1998, citizens of the United Kingdom who lived and worked outside
the U.K. for more than a year were exempt from taxes on their earnings
if they physically were not in the U.K. longer than 62 days during
each year.

Then the unlamented
former Labor government, elected in 1997, abolished this “foreign
earnings deduction” in what it called “fairness.”
After that, a U.K. citizen who earned any amount of U.K.
source income, however small, while physically in the U.K. was forced
to pay taxes on their entire year’s earnings, regardless of
where in the world that income was earned; no more offshore tax
exemption.

The results
were predictable and swift. In particular, high-earning nonresident
U.K. athletes and entertainers were forced to modify their travel
schedules to avoid earning even a single shilling of U.K. source
income.

Stoned

Case in
point: The Rolling Stones canceled the U.K. leg of their
1998 world tour as a direct result of this tax law. Arguably the
world’s leading rock and roll band, The Stones would have had
to pay over £12 million (US$18.8 million) in taxes on their
worldwide incomes if they played the four U.K. scheduled concerts.
And the U.K. tax collectors were ready to grab the gate proceeds
to pay the taxes.

Labor government
spokespersons were quick to respond to the announcement of the Stones
cancellation as being driven by their greed. But when the Stones
offered to play the concerts and give the earnings to charities
in return for a tax exemption, the government turned down the offer.

The bottom
line: Great Britain may be a great place to live, but a very
bad place to be tax domiciled. Just ask Mick Jagger and his
Stones colleagues.

Fast Forward…

…a dozen
years and U.K. tax history repeats itself.

Except that
after 13 years of Labour’s misrule, the United Kingdom is billions
of pounds in the hole and verging on national bankruptcy –
and tax rates for upper income persons now exceed 50%.

But as luck
would have it, the Ryder Cup Matches, the major golf competition
between teams from Europe and the United States, is scheduled to
be held in the U.K. on October 1st.

Avoiding
Millions in Taxes

One of the
regulars on Ryder Team USA has been Tiger Woods, about whom
I’ve had some things
to say before.

Reports are
that Woods is reluctance to accept a Ryder Cup wild card in part
because of a potential £1 million (US$1.56 million) U.K. tax
bill he could face for playing in the event, which pays no prize
money.

Aside from
any sporting price his team-mates might suffer because of his recent
wretched golfing form, the tax issue highlights a problem that is
causing concern for many British sporting events.

Still the world’s
number one golfer, Woods is going through an expensive divorce and
now, more than ever, probably is being very careful about his finances.

If Woods stays
away from the Ryder Cup it would not be the first athlete stay away
because of Britain’s punitive income tax rules. The sprinter
Usain Bolt has pulled out of a high-profile race in London
this weekend. And prospective members of Europe’s Ryder Cup
team whose main residence and tax domicile, like Woods, are in the
tax haven State of Florida, could also be hit.

One Way
Out

So tax competition
does make a difference – a difference in where you live, in
what you can do, in how much of your hard-earned income you can
keep away from the greedy hands of tax collectors and big spending
politicians.

As Sovereign
Society members know, the only legal way by which Americans can
avoid U.S. taxes is to end
U.S. citizenship by expatriation. (You may want to read The
Expatriation Report which I authored.)

If you think
expatriation could be for you, the first step is to choose a new
jurisdiction and apply for citizenship. There are a number of ways
one can gain citizenship. You can contact the embassy of your country
of choice, and check out my Passport
Book, a complete guide to each citizenship option for 90
desirable countries.

But the U.K.
income tax situation emphasizes another important point – the
vital need to know all about any foreign country you may be considering
as your future home.

You must make
certain that your chosen country imposes no taxes on foreigners
who move there. I explain where these countries are in my best-selling
Where
to Stash Your Cash Legally.

Reprinted
with permission from the Sovereign
Society.

Robert
E. Bauman is a former Member of the United States House of Representatives
from Maryland, (1973–1981). He is also a former federal official
and state legislator; Member, Washington, DC Bar; Graduate of the
Georgetown University Law Center (1964) and the School of Foreign
Service (1959), Washington, DC. Robert currently serves as legal
counsel for the Sovereign
Society.