Toms Blog on Life and Livingness
The lack of peace in certain regions is proof positive that these principles are actually valid and needed, more than ever. Please promote the Youth for Human Rights videos so more people are aware of and insist upon their rights so that we can live in a peaceful society.
Watch the video and if you think so too, please share it!
A corporate collapse in Germany that may be little known to most Australians is being compared to the 2001 bankruptcy of infamous US energy trading giant Enron. Dominant cashless payments processor Wirecard collapsed on 25 June owing US$4 billion, with billions missing from bank accounts pointing to fraud on a massive scale. At the centre of the scandal is auditor EY (Ernst and Young), one of the Big Four global auditing oligopoly, which didn’t do its most basic job of checking Wirecard’s money even existed.
The scandal is a timely reminder of the danger of bank bail-ins: while most of us assume the major banks are profitable and strong and our deposits are safe, that assumption depends on the reliability of bank audits. Unfortunately, the global Big Four auditing firms which monopolise bank auditing worldwide have proven again and again they cannot be trusted. To protect the public from the possibility of similar financial collapses occurring here, including of the banks, which may trigger bail-ins, Australians must demand politicians pass two bills drafted by the Citizens Party that are currently before Parliament:
the Australian Banks (Government Audit) Bill 2019 introduced in the House of Representatives by Bob Katter MP in December, directing the Commonwealth Auditor-General to conduct a deep audit of the Australian banks in place of the Big Four global firms; and
the Banking Amendment (Deposits) Bill 2020 introduced by Senator Malcolm Roberts in February and currently the subject of a Senate inquiry, which clarifies the 2018 bail-in law rushed through Parliament so that its very broad language cannot be used to bail in bank deposits.EY’s Enron
A 30 June London Telegraph article, “Why Wirecard could become EY’s Enron”, compares the role of the auditor in Wirecard’s downfall to that of Arthur Andersen, the then-Big Five accounting firm brought down by the 2001 Enron scandal. Arthur Andersen’s demise reduced the Big Five to the Big Four, but since then, despite countless scandals, the remaining Big Four have been considered too big to fail.
Wirecard started in 1999, and came to dominate cashless payments processing in Europe. Essentially the company is a middle man in the electronic payments system, processing money-flows between paying and receiving banks and taking its cut. Two years ago Wirecard became a member of Germany’s prestigious DAX 30 Index, valued at US$28 billion, but questions were already being asked about its accounting; now it’s the first DAX 30 company to go bust, losing 98 per cent of its value in just days.
Wirecard collapsed seven days after EY refused to sign off on its accounts over US$2.1 billion in missing cash. According to the 25 June Financial Post, a source reported the company had faked two-thirds of its sales. While EY eventually forced the issue, for three years it had signed off on Wirecard’s books without confirming the company’s claim that the missing billions were in bank accounts in the Philippines. Instead of confirming the existence of the cash with the banks directly, EY accepted screenshots and other documents. Fraud is possibly not the only crime EY facilitated: according to the 1 July London Times, “Senior Wirecard employees were linked to an opaque network of British companies associated with alleged money laundering.”
(This involvement of a cashless economy leader with fraud and money laundering destroys one of the central arguments of the Australian Treasury’s Black Economy Taskforce that recommended a ban on cash transactions above $10,000 to ostensibly combat crimes like money laundering and fraud. The truth is criminals will find a way to commit crime in any medium, and all cash bans will do is trap people in banks so they cannot escape bad policies like bail-in.)
Wirecard collapsed owing US$4 billion to creditors who are unlikely to see any of their money—US$3.25 billion to 15 banks and US$750 million in corporate bonds. The scandal has led to calls in Germany to break up the big auditors between their auditing and consulting businesses, which combined have led to massive conflicts of interests. Auditing firms are supposed to blow the whistle on bad practices in a company, but as they are often paid more by the same company in consulting fees, there are now many cases of audits ignoring bank scandals. In the UK in 2018, the Labour Party commissioned a report by accounting professor Prem Sikka, “Reforming the auditing industry”, which recommended breaking up the auditing firms and establishing a government auditor for the banks. These recommendations are included in the bill Bob Katter introduced in Australia’s Parliament.
Bail-in
The biggest immediate concern raised by the repeated scandals of the Big Four auditing firms is the true health of the world’s banks, 98 per cent of which are audited by the Big Four. In Australia EY has already been exposed for its corrupt collusion with NAB to hide that the bank was knowingly selling bad products to customers. Their audits simply cannot be trusted, not only due to their conflict of interests, but because they do not properly examine the assumptions underlying the banks’ trading in high-risk derivatives, which have the potential to spark unexpected bank failures that could force the regulator to order bail-ins of deposits in an attempt to sacrifice bank customers to save the system. Australian politicians assure concerned constituents that Australia’s banks are “unquestionably strong” and bank failures are highly unlikely, but they are relying on the word of the auditors, which is worthless. Even the regulator APRA outsources much of its detailed examination of the banks to the Big Four auditors, making it as blind as the politicians and public.
Instead of relying on the empty assurance of blind politicians and regulators, Australians must demand Parliament pass the Citizens Party’s suite of legislation to overhaul the financial system, beginning with the bail-in amendment bill to protect deposits from confiscation in a banking crisis, and the government audit bill to conduct a thorough examination of the banks’ books, especially their combined $53.2 trillion in derivatives.
Make a submission against bail-in now!
Australians have three days to make a submission to the Senate Economics Legislation Committee’s inquiry into Senator Roberts’ Banking Amendment (Deposits) Bill 2020. Every submission that urges the Committee to pass the bill counts—make yours straight away. Click here for instructions on making a submission.
The Victorian Premier is doing the exact opposite of what the facts determine should be done. This means he is completely ignorant of the truth or a corrupt, suppressive tyrant. Being told what to do by the medical mafia who are not allowed to cure people but are educated and trained to keep them on permanent medication to support the drug companies is not a democracy, it is tyranny!
Don’t take my word for it, here is a brilliant presentation from a health care professional whose job is to prep people for this sort of crisis.
Thank goodness!
Just to put things in perspective, the normal influenza is far more dangerous to under 60 year olds than SARS-CoV-2. For people under 60 the SARS-CoV-2 death rate is equal to or less than the normal flu.
Cemeteries are full of unfulfilled dreams… countless echoes of ‘could have’ and ‘should have’… countless books unwritten… countless songs unsung… I want to live my life in such a way that when my body is laid to rest, it will be a well needed rest from a life well lived, a song well sung, a book well written, opportunities well explored, and a love well expressed. – Steve Maraboli
(Tom: Are you working on your book/poem/opportunity?)
The political donations aspect of this applies equally in Australia.
I would go further and ban all dontaions from corporations to political campaigns and limit the amount individuals can donate.
Trouble is, good guys don’t need rules and bad guys can’t/don’t follow them. They are bad because they can’t follow rules. So they will find a new way to be bad or just break the rules.
What will solve the problem is more ethical candidates and a more aware populace. That is not a quick fix. It takes time and effort.
To this I would add Vitamin D3.
I was thinking about all the conflicting advice and claims through which we have to navigate to find out how to best survive and improve our health and finances. For instance the recent conflicting results between the trials of the anti-SARS-COV-2 drug, Hydroxychloroquine, where patients died, compared to the doctors who were curing 99% of their parients with it.
Or the fact that 90% of people put on respirators died.
And it hit me. I realised a really, really basic simplicity. The person who gets results is more right than the person who does not. (And since rightness equates to survival and wrongness equates to death, you’re better off being right than you are being wrong!)
The person who gets results is more knowledgeable, more in communication or more competent with the subject or tools.
The doctors curing patients with Hydroxychloroquine know the recommended dose is 600 whereas in one trial the doctors killing their patients with it were administering 3-4 times that amount. Over the lethal dose. And the doctors curing patients were administering it with an antibiotic and Zinc. The doctors on the trial who were killing their patients were not administering the anitbiotic and zinc. https://canoe.com/news/world/who-halts-hydroxychloroquine-hiv-drugs-in-covid-trials-after-failure-to-reduce-death
Now I won’t go into the possibility that the trials were set up to fail so that they could discredit the $20 solution in favor of the $3,000 alternative, that’s a whole ‘nother issue.
Or why those who formulated the trial did not just copy what was well and widely known from doctors in China and France to be the working trilogy of factors.
The point I realised is that the doctors who cured their patients knew more and were therefore more right than the doctors who killed theirs.
Another case in point. A very few doctors know that intravenous vitamin C will cure sepsis. Most doctors do not know that. In fact in NZ some time ago a family had to hire a lawyer to legally force the medicos to administer IV C to restore to health a comatose man they wanted to take off life support. He fully recovered with the IV C. https://www.sunlive.co.nz/news/13121-vitamin-c-man-speaks.html
There is an old Chinese Proverb that goes, “The person who says it cannot be done should not interrupt the person doing it.”
For the man who thinks he can and the man who thinks he can’t are both right.
So my recommendation to you is to look for people who are getting results as they are more right than the people not getting results.
Another rock-bottom simplicity I realised some time ago, there is so much information that it is impossible for one person to know it all. If the person you are consulting for your health issue(s) has not seen it and fixed it before, shop for someone who has!