Corruption

Patrick Liu Chunning, the head of Alibaba Digital Entertainment Group, has been arrested over bribery allegations during his tenure as vice president of digital entertainment at Tencent Holdings.  Five other former employees of Tencent are being held by authorities as part of the investigation.

Greece has already collapsed, and the only real question is whether the ECB will give Greek depositors time to withdraw some of the €120 billion in deposits it holds hostage with the frozen ELA, or if the ECB will admit the truth about the Greek insolvent banking system risking Eurozone contagion. A better question is just what is the purpose of the IMF whose intervention in Greece can be described in one word: disaster. It can also be described in eleven, as the creator of the Taylor Rule, John Taylor, has done in a blog post which can be summarized as follows: IMF Loans To Greece Bailed Out Banks And Worsened The Situation.

Follows the full text of a letter Greek PM Tsipras send to the Troika: Commission President Juncker, ECB's Draghi, and the IMF's Lagarde regarding the latest Greek deal proposal. What is left unsaid: any debt haircut requests (recall just on Sunday night Tsipras requested a 30% debt haircut in line with the IMF's debt sustainability proposal), and any mention of the Greek referendum which Tsipras personally called two weeks ago to the day to reject precisely the proposal he is now presenting.

There is nothing incrementally new or different to what we revealed earlier in the leaked Greek proposal (i.e., no actionable pension cuts, no debt "reprofiling") and as Bloomberg makes it all too clear in flashing red headlines:

GREEK GOVT PROPOSAL SIMILAR TO EU COMMISSION'S JUNE 26 PROPOSAL

... or the one which 61% of the Greek people said no to.

The time of deflationary confiscation is coming closer for the remaining Greek bank depositors. Those who kept their cash in safe deposit boxes at banks are out of luck too: the government has decreed they may not take it out. This is something one needs to keep in mind – if one wants to keep cash outside the banking system, one cannot leave it in a bank safe deposit box either. The government will confiscate it when push comes to shove and the banks need to be rescued.

Facing a new “deadline” to submit a viable proposal to EU creditors and keep Greece in the eurozone, Greek PM Alexis Tsipras faced friends and enemies at the European Parliament in Strasbourg on Wednesday, where there was no shortage of fireworks from both sides of the Grexit debate. 

Greece formally requested a three-year bailout from the eurozone’s rescue fund Wednesday and pledged to start implementing some of the overhauls demanded by creditors by early next week. Crucially for Greece’s creditors, the letter says the government would start implementing some measures, including on taxation and pensions, by the beginning of next week, though it doesn’t go into details. The letter is a first step toward fulfilling a demand by international creditors, who have given Athens until Sunday to come up with tougher measures they would impose in return for desperately needed financing that could keep the country from bankruptcy and even worse economic turmoil. 

Corruption has been the coveted jewel in everybody’s crown since antiquity. Aristotelian philosophy believed that everybody who had power could become corrupt.

"Greece is being 'hit', there's no doubt about it," exclaims John Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, noting that "[Indebted countries] become servants to what I call the corporatocracy ... today we have a global empire, and it's not an American empire. It's not a national empire... It's a corporate empire, and the big corporations rule."

What has really been going on in Europe over the past 5 years, if the debt load kept creeping higher, and yet little money was actually making its way to the broader population? The answer is simple: abuse of taxpayer funding, also known as fraud and corruption. As Italy's TheLocal reports, the EU anti-fraud office, Italy currently has 61 open investigations into fraud involving EU funds. This means Italy has the second highest number of investigations in the EU, ranking just below Greece's neighbor to the north, Bulgaria.

"On a more personal level, how can public service be promoted as an ideal to young people when this sewer corrupts our Republic? At this point in early twenty-first-century America, the greatest service our nation’s young people could provide is to lead an army of outraged young Americans armed with brooms on a crusade to sweep out the rascals and rid our capital of the money changers, rent seekers, revolving door dancers, and special interest deal makers and power brokers and send them back home to make an honest living, that is, if they still remember how to do so."

Four months after the UK opened the membership floodgates and dealt Washington a humiliating political blow, China has officially launched the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.

Regardless of what the Greek people choose, at least the choice will be theirs, along with the consequences.

The only answer to the War on Drugs is the same as that to the equally stupid and destructive War on Demon Rum fought during the ’20s - a repeal of prohibition. The question is really whether you have a right to control your own body and what you ingest. There’s little question that caffeine, cocaine, nicotine, heroin, alcohol, marijuana, sugar, and a thousand other things aren’t good for you, at least not in quantity. But we can’t see how that’s anybody’s business but your own. Once it becomes a matter of state concern, then everything becomes an equally legitimate subject of state attention. Which is pretty much where we are today - well on the way to a police state.

An extensive look at what would happen if Greece were to leave the Eurozone, through a legal fudge.