UPDATE – 26 January 2021
COVID has been in Canada for one year now.
The strange case of the CEO in disguise to get vaccine for himself.
COVID-19 tax tips.
COVID-19 and the world of work – the International Labor Organization.
A breakdown of cases among healthcare workers.

If you’re having trouble regulating life while working from home, the fake commute might be for you, have a look: https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/18/success/fake-commute-meaning-benefits-pandemic-wellness/index.html
“For the many who have been doing your part, you may be asking, what more can I do? Be the voice of support and encouragement for those who may be wavering in their resolve.” – Dr. Bonnie Henry.
Feel free to share this post, or copy and paste, in whole or any part of it.

LOCAL:
· 82 cases among New West residents in the previous week.
· No new school exposures in New Westminster since that of the Queensborough Middle School on January 11th.
· Current outbreaks: Royal City Manor, declared Jan 21; Royal Columbian Hospital, declared Jan 20.
· The Rio Theatre in Vancouver has converted into a sports bar.
· The theatre is dealing with a full closure of movie theatres. But as restaurants and bars can remain open with safety protocols, the theatre is seeking other ways to do business. The move does show that the Rio cannot do business as a theatre right now, but can meet the safety requirements to operate as a sports bar.
· There are differences though. The theatre has to actually meet the requirements for a bar, such as taking orders from people’s seats rather than allowing a line-up at the concession.
· The move has stirred controversy, with some decrying the Rio as finding a loophole while the basic lay-out is still that of a theatre, with narrow entryways and tiny washrooms. Others welcome the move as innovative, a way for a theatre to survive during the closure.
Sources: CBC, Global News, Fraser Health

PROVINCIAL:
· The strange case of the CEO in disguise.
· Vancouver couple Rod and Ekaterina Baker were fined $575 after sneaking into the Yukon to try to get the vaccine for themselves.
· The couple posed as local motel workers.
· The clinic at Beaver Creek normally has one nurse and a receptionist, but a team of six was flown in to do vaccinations. Beaver Creek was chosen because “of its remoteness, elderly and population, and limited access to health care,” said Chief Angela Demit of the White River First Nation in Beaver Creek.
· The story of the wealthy executive trying to get vaccine intended for remote elderly First Nations people has not gone over well.
· Rod Baker is the Chief Executive Officer of Great Canadian Gaming, since 2011, where he earns $900,000 per year as salary, but last year also made $45.9 million from company stock options.. The company announced his resignation yesterday. The gambling company cited it’s “core values.” Ekaterina Baker is an actor, but not apparently a good enough one to fool Yukon officials. The couple chartered a flight to the Yukon.
· “We had not been imagining that someone would go to this length to mislead or deceive.” John Streicker, Yukon’s Minister of Community Services.
· The manager of the 1202 Motor Inn, where the couple claimed to work, was also rather upset. “That’s a risk (serving travellers) that we take – not a risk that somebody enforces upon us because they are too ignorant.” Staff at the Beaver Creek clinic found the couple suspicious, and phoned the motel to check on their story. While at the clinic and pretending to live and work in town, the couple rather oddly asked if anyone could drive them to the airport afterwards.
· Story from the Globe and Mail: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-great-canadian-gaming-ceo-resigns-after-being-charged-in-yukon-ove?utm_medium=email&utm_source=Coronavirus%20Update&utm_content=2021-1-25_19&utm_term=Coronavirus%20Update:%20Great%20Canadian%20Gaming%20CEO%20resigns%20after%20alleged%20botched%20disguise%20as%20Yukon%20motel%20worker%20in%20attempt%20to%20get%20COVID-19%20vaccine&utm_campaign=newsletter&cu_id=czq7hF%2BueFDcmmCKozRUQ1bduJl6paGe
· Ekaterina Baker is known for acting in productions such as Chick Fight, Fatman, The Asset, and The Comeback Trail, and as producer of Big Gold Brick.
· IMDB page: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm9698063/
· BC has adopted a four phase vaccination plan.
· Phase 1, December to February: Residents, staff, essential visitors with long-term care and assisted living; people waiting for long-term care; people in remote Indigenous communities and hospital workers caring for patients with COVID-19.
· Phase 2, February to March: Seniors over 80; Indigenous seniors over 65, Indigenous elders; more health-care workers; vulnerable populations and nursing-home staff.
· Phase 3, April to June: Members of the general public aged 60 to 79.
· Phase 4, July to September: Members of the general public aged 18 to 59.
· Premier John Horgan says the plan is based on those who get most sick, and those most likely to die, so priority goes to the elderly and vulnerable, and those who work around them.
· The Premier said multiple groups argued that they were front-line workers and so should get priority. But with vaccine supply limited, it didn’t seem to make sense to vaccinate people on the basis of their job, like being a front-line worker, ahead people ahead of seniors or those more likely to be hospitalized or to die. Health care workers are not only the most likely to be exposed, but they also work with and have direct contact with patients and the vulnerable.
· Here is a good article with the numbers and the rationale behind the priorities: https://www.newwestrecord.ca/local-news/opinion-elderly-should-get-covid-19-vaccine-before-bc-teachers-3291898
· The dates might vary, depending on supply.
· Covid cases in BC have plateaued to an average of 500 per day.
· Dr. Bonnie Henry said that the number is still dangerously high. “For the last few weeks, we have plateaued at 500 new cases. This is too many. We are at a precipice. The virus continues to circulate in our communities. We are at the threshold of where we were in late October and November when cases started to rise.”
· “Over the next two week, I believe we can bend our curve. Not just plateau, but bend it back down…. More than you’ve done before, stay home, stop social interactions.”
· B.C. will receive no new doses of vaccine over the next two weeks. It is not sure how much will be received in February.
· Over the past three days – Saturday, Sunday, Monday:
· 1,344 new cases. 618 of those in Fraser Health. 527 reported on Saturday, 472 on Sunday, 346 on Monday. 64,828 cases to date.
· 26 new deaths. 1,154 total.
· 4,392 active cases.
· 57,831 recovered.
· 11 outbreaks in long-term care declared over.
· 6 cases of the UK variant in BC, 3 cases of the South Africa variant. No community transmission of the UK variant, but the South Africa variant cases are not connected to travel and are being investigated. Dr. Henry: “I’m very concerned. I’m concerned that if those variants start to spread, it’s just going to make our job that much more difficult.”
· 119,850 doses of vaccine administered to date.
· New numbers for Tuesday:
· 14 new deaths. 1,168 total.
· 407 new cases. 65,234 total. (Comparison: a high of 911 cases happened for Nov 27).
· 313 hospitalized, 71 in intensive care. (A high of 381 were hospitalized on January 6th).
· 4,260 active cases.
· 6,450 in self-isolation.
· 58,352 recovered.
· 122,359 doses of vaccine administered to date. 4,105 are second doses.
· No new outbreaks, one outbreak declared over.
· Dr. Bonnie Henry: “For the many who have been doing your part, you may be asking, what more can I do? Be the voice of support and encouragement for those who may be wavering in their resolve.”
· New restriction may be necessary if the number begins to climb again.
· 4,850 cases among health care workers, from January 2020 to 15 January 2021. About 8% of cases.
· From January to December 17th 2020, care aides had the highest number of cases among healthcare workers at 1,193 or 24.6%. Nurses were second at 833 or 17.2%. Below are the ten highest number of cases by healthcare worker category.
· 1,193 – care aids.
· 833 – nurse.
· 304 – licensed practical nurse.
· 280 – administration.
· 177 – housekeeping.
· 156 – dental professional.
· 151 – physician.
· 149 – kitchen staff, dietary aid, food services.
· 91 – occupational therapist, physiotherapist, respiratory therapist.
· 75 – student.
· The document is here: http://www.bccdc.ca/Health-Info-Site/Documents/COVID_sitrep/COVID19_healthcare_workers_2021_01_15.pdf
· BC has has opened 3 clinics for people with longer term Covid symptoms.
· Located at St. Paul’s Hospital, Vancouver General, and the Outpatient Care and Surgery Centre in Surrey.
· Some people still have symptoms months after the start of the disease. Of patients who were hospitalized in BC, after three months half still had breathing issues. About 20% have permanent lung scarring.
· The St. Paul’s clinic already has 160 patients.
· Nanaimo Regional Hospital has had an outbreak.
· Two staff and a patient tested positive.
· Limited to the 4th Floor on the east wing.
· A homeless shelter in Surrey has had an outbreak.
· 2 staff and 24 clients test positive.
· The Surrey Emergency Response Centre was set up to make more shelter available to homeless people during the pandemic.
Sources: CBC, New Westminster Record, Globe and Mail, BC Centre for Disease Control.

NATIONAL:
· Worked from home during Covid-19? Be sure to check out these tax tips: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/accountants-break-down-tips-for-working-from-home-expenses-1.5872477
· Covid has been in Canada for one year now, starting back on the 25th of January, 2020, with one case in Toronto.
· Long-terms care homes are particularly hard hit, and it continues to be so that care homes are getting outbreaks.
· From the CBC, “What we’re seeing in the long-term care facilities just demonstrates, unfortunately, years and years of neglect.” https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/covid-19-ontario-canada-first-case-one-year-1.5884630
· In those early days, the public was generally told in Canada that the risk was low, and that people should not wear masks, and emphasized into March that there was no community spread.
· In late February, community transmission was evidenced in the U.S., and people returning to Canada from the U.S. began to show Covid. The halt to non-essential travel, on the land border, came on March 20.
· Canada is considering more travel restrictions, says the Canadian government.
· 143 flights have arrived in Canada in past two weeks with confirmed Covid cases. Deputy Prime Minister Freeland has assured, “We are considering the issue very, very seriously.”
· In this story, you can see where Canadians are flying during the pandemic. There sure seems to be a lot of urgent need to travel to places that happen to be warm vacation spots: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/freeland-travel-restrictions-1.5887163
· There is an 8 p.m. curfew in Montreal, and that is hard on the city’s homeless people.
· Homeless people have seen a dramatic reduction in help since the pandemic began. Shelters have to have social distancing, if they are safe to open at all.
· The province has refused to exempt homeless people from the curfew. People who break the curfew are subject to fines that start at $1,000 and can go up to $6,000. Premier Legault says making an exception for homeless people could cause people to pretend to be homeless.
· Some shelters have been forced to close altogether, because they can’t meet the requirements.
· Story: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/montreal-homeless-covid-curfew-1.5880946
· 90 “adverse events following immunization,” 0.015% of the 601,901 doses administered as of January 9th 2021.
· 63 were non-serious, 0.010%. This includes things like a skin rash.
· 27 were serious, 0.004%. In Canada, this includes a wide range of symptoms from headache to nausea to anaphylaxis.
· Learn about the Canada Adverse Events Following Immunization Surveillance System (CAEFISS) here: https://www.canada.ca/en/public-health/services/immunization/canadian-adverse-events-following-immunization-surveillance-system-caefiss.html
· Here is where the numbers are updated every Friday (but not consistently): https://health-infobase.canada.ca/covid-19/vaccine-safety/#seriousNonSerious
· Manitoba is now requiring a 14 day quarantine for non-essential travel from other parts of Canada.
· The move is being made to attempt to prevent new variants of Covid-19 from entering the province.
· Applies to air and land travel.
· Includes Manitobans who are returning to the province from elsewhere.
Sources: CBC, Toronto Star, Public Health Canada

INTERNATIONAL:
· The world is experiencing Covid-somnia – an epidemic of insomnia.
· Insomnia is now at one-quarter of the population in the UK, and at 40% in Italy and Greece.
· There is concern that this is affecting people’s health in other ways.
· Work productivity is also affected.
· A University of Ottawa study of health care workers in 55 countries and 190,000 people showed that depression, anxiety, and PTSD have all risen at least 15% since the start of the pandemic. Insomnia has risen by over 23%.
· People are advised to seek help, which many are not as people avoid medical services, or those services are unavailable. Seeking help is important, because sleep issues over time can become and ongoing sleep disorder. “Tele-health” now makes treatment more available despite the pandemic.
· Working and using screens in bed is a big part of it. The recommendation is to use your bed only as a place of sleep.
· Full article: https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20210121-the-coronasomnia-phenomenon-keeping-us-from-getting-sleep
· Vaccine delays are happening around the world.
· Canada is receiving zero doses this week.
· Health workers who were scheduled for vaccination were mostly notified by email of their cancellations.
· In Canada, 50% of doses will be delayed for up to four weeks, up to 400,000 doses delayed.
· Restoration of supply will happen in the European union before it happens in Canada. Pfizer explained this as differing contract deals but did not reveal details. Europe has also threatened to sue Pfizer for breach of contracts, and threatened to abandon Pfizer altogether as a supplier, perhaps in doing so catching the company’s attention.
· Pfizer and AstraZeneca say they will catch up to their commitments in the Spring. Pfizer says their delay is due to changing production systems, so a short-term shut down for a greater number of people vaccinated more rapidly overall. Pfizers says that they are upgrading to be able to produce 2 billion doses per year, from the current 1.3 billion. AstraZeneca has not given details.
· UPDATED: The Pfizer production facility in question is in Belgium. The European Union has threatened to ban exports of the vaccine if commitments to Europe are not met. The company is attempting to distribute the problem in the world somewhat equitably. If Europe followed through on the threat, that could mean delays for other countries would be longer, including Canada, which is served by the Belgium facility.
· The UK, having had Brexit and pulled out of the European Union, has realized that they, too, would be one of those outside countries. The UK, somewhat ironically, is now arguing against nationalism as government policy, referring to what they called “the dead end of vaccine nationalism.”
· The World Health Organization’s Covax program, to distribute vaccine around the world fairly to low-income countries, has not been affected, some good news in the mix. The Covax problem is still on schedule, as its vaccine supply is produced in India and South Korea. The program has also received a substantial boost, following US President Joe Biden’s decision to contribute $4 billion to the program.
· The CDC in the US says that allergic reactions to the vaccine are extremely rare.
· Out of 4 million given the Moderna vaccine, 10 had severe allergic reactions.
· Moderna – 2.5 per million doses have severe allergic reactions.
· Pfizer – 11.1 per million.
· Normal flu vaccine – 1.3 per million.
· Allergic reactions begin quickly, at a median of 7 and a half minutes, so people are able to be supported through it. The majority were known to have severe allergies in advance. In the US, all vaccination sites must have people trained in responding to anaphylaxis, or severe allergic reaction.
· Story: https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/22/health/moderna-severe-allergic-reactions-rare/index.html
· A doctor in Texas has been arrested for stealing vaccine.
· The doctor stole 9 doses to give to his friends and family, authorities allege.
· A man lived in the Chicago O’Hare airport for three months because he was afraid to fly. Story: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-55702003
· Los Angeles has lifted its air quality limitations for cremations. An emergency order was issued so that crematoriums can catch up with the number of bodies. One person every eight minutes was dying from Covid every 8 minutes. The rate of death in LA county is double the norm from past years. 13,800 deaths in the city, 7,400 currently hospitalized, and 23% of those in intensive care.
· Over 200 incidents with plane passengers over the wearing of masks have been reported in the U.S.
· The behaviour has included refusal to wear masks once onboard, shouting abusively at flight attendants, and even physical assault.
· On Thursday, President Biden issued an executive order requiring the wearing of masks across transportation, a move welcomed by flight unions.
· The FAA, Federal Air Administration, has introduced fines up to $35,000 and potential jailing for abusing aircraft personnel, a move made in December after two flight attendants were assaulted.
· One person has been fined $15,000 after hitting the flight attendant, and grabbing her phone away from her while she was notifying the captain of the problem. Another passenger was fined $7,500, who when asked to wear a mask approached other passengers without a mask and sexually harassed a flight attendant.
· Some airlines are banning passengers from their flights who refuse to follow the rules. United Airlines has banned 615 people from flying on the airline since June, Delta Airlines has banned 700.
· There is a lot of news about variants of the virus.
· New variants have appeared in Britain, South Africa, and Brazil, all countries that have had high rates of Covid.
· So, what about vaccines? Scientists have actually expected that vaccines would still work against the variants. Moderna says that antibodies triggered by their vaccine works on new variants in lab test results. More study will be needed of people who actually have been vaccinated and who had the variant. The study so far was a small sample of eight people. Early results with the Pfizer vaccine also show that it works against variants.
· Moderna is also studying to see if there is a benefit of giving a third booster shot.
· Reports vary almost daily about if the variants are more deadly or not. The truth is that data is too limited and it is too early to really tell.
· Covid job losses have been four times worse than in the financial crisis in 2009.
· That’s according to a report by the International Labor Organization.
· The report estimates that 8.8% of the world’s work hours were eliminated. The ILO looks not only at those who have become unemployed, but those who have had reduced hours of work as well. That loss is equivalent to 255 million full-time jobs, or $3.7 trillion dollars of income.
· Press release: https://www.ilo.org/global/about-the-ilo/newsroom/news/WCMS_766949/lang--en/index.htm
· Study: COVID-19 and the world of work. Seventh edition. https://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---dgreports/---dcomm/documents/briefingnote/wcms_767028.pdf
· What’s the latest with the Tokyo Olympics?
· The government of Japan wants to go ahead with the Olympics that were delayed last summer.
· The Olympics are planned to start on July 23, and the Paralympics on August 24.
· The International Olympic Committee is currently planning on proceeding, but has not made a final decision. Efforts are underway to have Olympics that are Covid safe. That might mean no audiences, athletes restricted to their accommodation areas, and each sport would have to have protocols around training and competition areas.
· “We need the vaccine to come to Africa.” A note about Grandmothers in Zimbabwe. I encourage you to read this one: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-55726054
Sources: BBC, Toronto Star, International Labor Organization, CNN, Los Angeles Times.

STATS (as of end of Monday)
CANADA
· 144 new deaths. 19,238 total.
· 5,628 new cases. 753,011 total.
· 1,222 fewer active. 62,446 total.
· 849 in critical care.
· 6,706 new recovered. 671,327 total.
USA
· 1,887 new deaths. 431,392 total.
· 152,244 new cases. 25,861,597 total.
· 9,812,845 active.
· 26,259 in critical care.
· 207,426 new recovered. 15,617,360 total.
WORLD
· 2,149,496 deaths.
· 100,286,772 cases.
· 72,315,474 recovered.
Sources: www.covid-19us.live/, https://www.covid-19canada.com/

Pandemic updates provided on a voluntary basis as a community service, on Tuesdays and Fridays unless circumstances do not allow (currently dealing with an injury that limits my typing).
To provide accurate and timely information, locally, provincially, nationally and internationally, all in one place.
Feel free to share.
With love and hope,
Jaimie McEvoy, City Councillor, New Westminster, B.C.

Fraudberg Toolkit - Anti-Farm Bills Tweet templates - Part 1

The Greta Thunberg toolkit contained the following "templates" for users to chose from and tweet.
All of these are anti-Ambani, anti-Adani - basically spreading fear of corporates taking over. Most of these tweets are fake and intended to create chaos instead of a proper discussion.
eg. Even the rss trade organisations is against these agricultural reforms. #FarmersProtest #TakeBackFarmBills
If any of your friends have been tweeting about Farm bills and have the exact same text as one from below, then you know where they got it from :)
Here's the full list -
This act aimed at destroying them by handing over agriculture and market to the big corporates. #FarmersProtest #TakeBackFarmBills
This is a death warrant for small and marginalised farmers. #FarmersProtest #TakeBackFarmBills
The provisions in the Bills tilt in favour of multi-national corporations and domestic companies for whom the government has opened the doors for exports. #FarmersProtest #TakeBackFarmBills
MNC agents will become the new set of middle-men who will control farmers produce and pricing. #FarmersProtest #TakeBackFarmBills
Farm bill is nothing but indirect handing over of farmers to Adhani and Ambani. #FarmersProtest #TakeBackFarmBills
Food security of india will be decided by corporates who will decide what you should grow and eat. #FarmersProtest #TakeBackFarmBills
Local markets and annachi shops will be closed and even to buy chilli ,Reliance will be the only option. #FarmersProtest #TakeBackFarmBills
Like Ola Uber drivers , farmers also will be controlled by Big corporates and they will decide the crop to be cultivated. #FarmersProtest #TakeBackFarmBills
The difference between farm to fork will be grabbed by the Corporates operating out of US and Europe. #FarmersProtest #TakeBackFarmBills
As said by many activists ,it is the starting of the closure of the Ration shops as there will not be any government procurement of grains. #FarmersProtest #TakeBackFarmBills
Hoarding of Grains and artificial scarcity will be created by the Corporates as they can buy in tonnes and hoard them for better rate. #FarmersProtest #TakeBackFarmBills
Around winter in 2015 - the rate of Dal varieties reached Rs.200/- per kg. #FarmersProtest #TakeBackFarmBills
Many reports had suggested large scale hoarding by a Adani Group company. #FarmersProtest #TakeBackFarmBills
It was under Essential commodity then, with that fig leaf gone - wait for chaos. #FarmersProtest #TakeBackFarmBills
This bill may lead to the wide spread introduction of GM crops because we all know the Nexus between Different corporates. #FarmersProtest #TakeBackFarmBills
Government made hoarding legal by eradicating procurement/storage limits. Now the government will not know who has stored how much. #FarmersProtest #TakeBackFarmBills
states have not been consulted on changes in agriculture laws which seek to bypass the jurisdiction of states in creating new contracts between farmers and corporates. #FarmersProtest #TakeBackFarmBills
Agriculture is a state subject without consulting the state government which is against federal strucure of the constitution. #FarmersProtest #TakeBackFarmBills
It is taking a big gamble with these new reforms in the middle of a pandemic-led chaos. #FarmersProtest #TakeBackFarmBills
Even the rss trade organisations is against these agricultural reforms. #FarmersProtest #TakeBackFarmBills
Under the proposed system, APMCs will be hard hit with trade moving out of their jurisdiction to zero tax in the private trade zone. #FarmersProtest #TakeBackFarmBills
the introduction of parallel private trade is designed to snatch their revenue and in due course make the entire APMC system collapse. #FarmersProtest #TakeBackFarmBills
It must not be forgotten that 60% of country’s farmers practice rain-fed agriculture and 85% farmers are small and marginal. #FarmersProtest #TakeBackFarmBills
Farmers must not be pushed around into defending the government’s fast shifting goal-posts. #FarmersProtest #TakeBackFarmBills
Contract farming and competitive pricing in itself has seeds of unequal farming which acts to the detriment of small and marginal farmers. #FarmersProtest #TakeBackFarmBills
Through these Bills the government cannot abdicate its responsibility and leave farmers to market forces. #FarmersProtest #TakeBackFarmBills
With a landholding of less than two hectares and with hardly any bargaining power. #FarmersProtest #TakeBackFarmBills
This arrangement lacks the space for zero budget farming, natural farming and revival of nutrition foods, millets and coarse cereals. #FarmersProtest #TakeBackFarmBills
In future date MNC agents will become the new set of middle-men who will control farmers produce and pricing. #FarmersProtest #TakeBackFarmBills
There are leakages in the current system, and it needs to be reformed, but replacing one failed model with another is not the solution. #FarmersProtest #TakeBackFarmBills
This is a death warrant for small and marginalised farmers. This is aimed at destroying them by handing over agriculture and market to the big corporates. #FarmersProtest #TakeBackFarmBills
everything about these three Farm bills are crafted to fill the pockets of capitalist cronies of the BJP at the cost of the poor farmers - Punjab CM Amarinder Singh. #FarmersProtest #TakeBackFarmBills
these laws will do is to throw the small farmers to the big sharks (Corporates). #FarmersProtest #TakeBackFarmBills
Cereals,Pulses,Onions,Potatoes are removed from essential commodities. #FarmersProtest #TakeBackFarmBills
the new unregulated market space called the ‘trade area’ will have no oversight and the government will have no information or intelligence about who the players are, It Will lead to hoarding. #FarmersProtest #TakeBackFarmBills
exploitation of farmers is not just about prompt price payment but on other fronts too, starting from price discovery itself. #FarmersProtest #TakeBackFarmBills
this Bill does not give farmers what they need and they are asking for. #FarmersProtest #TakeBackFarmBills
Is the government is legalising the hoarding which is against the consumer and farmers. #FarmersProtest #TakeBackFarmBills
If the government is so confident that its Bills are that good, it should not shy away from a proper parliamentary scrutiny of all details related to these Bills. #FarmersProtest #TakeBackFarmBills
Corporates will buy from farmer at cheap rates and sell at higher price to consumers - Nirbay Singh President Kirti Kisan Union. #FarmersProtest #TakeBackFarmBills
Farm bills will benefit big corporates, Not farmers. #FarmersProtest #TakeBackFarmBills
With this amendment, the power of government to regulate food commodity supply, storage, stock limits, etc is removed. #FarmersProtest #TakeBackFarmBills
Once restrictions are removed, big companies like Adani, Reliance and Walmart can build huge processing and storage lines. #FarmersProtest #TakeBackFarmBills
Farm bills will benefit only the Adanis and Ambanis. #FarmersProtest #TakeBackFarmBills
Farm bills are ‘anti-farmer, anti-labour’ laws. #FarmersProtest #TakeBackFarmBills
Farm Bills: A Corporate Feast In The Garb Of Reform. #FarmersProtest #TakeBackFarmBills
The state government will lose out a lot on their revenue because of the farm bills. #FarmersProtest #TakeBackFarmBills
More corporate entities will connect with the farmer, not to change the farmer’s fate but their own. #FarmersProtest #TakeBackFarmBills
The only stakeholde benefiting out of all of these Farm Bills are the corporates. #FarmersProtest #TakeBackFarmBills
All three bills of the Centre will leave farmers in the hands of big companies for exploitation. #FarmersProtest #TakeBackFarmBills
Private players will buy the produce in harvest season, when prices are generally lower, and release it later when prices firm up. #FarmersProtest #TakeBackFarmBills
Small and marginal farmers will suffer the most as they depend immensely on the intermediaries to sell the produce. #FarmersProtest #TakeBackFarmBills
Small and marginal farmers will suffer the most as they depend immensely on the intermediaries to sell the produce. #FarmersProtest #TakeBackFarmBills
Think why lakhs of farmers are resisting a thing which is projected as the best thing to have ever happened to them. #FarmersProtest #TakeBackFarmBills
Govt is not favouring consumers, but corporates . #FarmersProtest #TakeBackFarmBills
140 million Indian farmers are also consumers who are net buyers of food grains. #FarmersProtest #TakeBackFarmBills
Food security of 70% of farmers themselves is an issue as they have been coaxed to take up far more riskier cash crops. #FarmersProtest #TakeBackFarmBills
Pandemic has exposed the problems of mindless neoliberal capitalism and the discontent of the farmer community is going to find very major expression of discontent. #FarmersProtest #TakeBackFarmBills
Rural distress is not just agriculture. Apart from farmers weavers too committed suicide. When farmers lose income weavers lose their markets . #FarmersProtest #TakeBackFarmBills
The bills say that farmer can sell anywhere he wants! Wow! This is what happened to “ migrant labourers”. They could sell their labour anywhere they wanted. #FarmersProtest #TakeBackFarmBills
Govt has a pro- corporate intent. It may materialise with devastating consequences. Many more farmers would be deprived of the access they had. #FarmersProtest #TakeBackFarmBills

Poverty in India: would paying the poor directly work?

My List Of True Crime Books That Are (Primarily) Not About Murder.

This is my third list for this sub. I hope you enjoy it.
ART THIEVES, FORGERS, SMUGGLERS.
The Art of the Steal by Christopher Mason. A true story about the auction houses Sotheby’s and Christie’s and how they conspired to cheat their clients out of millions of dollars.
The Billionaire’s Vinegar: The Mystery of the World’s Most Expensive Bottle of Wine by Benjamin Wallace. The most expensive bottle of wine and the conflicting reports about its history. This is a book that would enchant wine conessi… conues… lovers.
The Gardner Heist: The True Story of the World’s Largest Unsolved Art Theft by Ulrich Boser. Author Ulrich Boser looks at the unsolved art theft case of Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.
The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed by John Vaillant. Grant Hadwin, a logger-turned-activist, fells a unique 165 feet Sitka spruce in an act of protest. John Vaillant takes the readers into the heart of North America’s last great forest to find out why he did that.
Hitler’s Art Thief: Hildebrand Gurlitt, the Nazis, and the Looting of Europe’s Treasures by Susan Ronald. Hildebrand Gurlitt was an art thief, or as he put it himself, an ‘official dealer’ for Hitler and Goebbels. But he stole from the Jews and Nazis alike. This book was published after his hoard was recently (2013) discovered which created an international furor.
The Irish Game: A True Story of Crime and Art by Matthew Hart. This book is about the art theft at Ireland’s Russborough House in 1986. The suspect, a gangster named Martin Cahill, played cat and mouse with police for years.
The Island of Lost Maps: A True Story of Cartographic Crime by Miles Harvey. When you think about stealing some valuable art, do maps come to your mind? Then this book is for you. Gilbert Joseph Bland Jr. stole numerous centuries-old maps from research libraries in US and Canada.
I Was Vermeer: The Rise and Fall of the Twentieth Century’s Greatest Forger by Frank Wynne. Han van Meegeren became so much adapt at forging Vermeer paintings that it is said that even professional experts would find it difficult to point out his works from the originals. He earned more than $50 million by selling his forgeries – and he even swindled the Nazis.
The Lizard King: The True Crimes and Passions of the World’s Greatest Reptile Smugglers by Bryan Christy. Reptile smuggling is a big “business”. The author, a federal agent, suspected a reptile business owner of being a major smuggler and he started investigating. It was not as simple as it sounds because at one point he was chased by a mother alligator and even bitten by a python.
The Lost Chalice: The Epic Hunt for a Priceless Masterpiece by Vernon Silver. A 2500 year old cup made by the Greek master Euphronios which depicted the fall of Troy gets stolen and sold (along with 3 other such vessels). Then due to the questionable practice of some art dealers, no one can track down its last known owner.
The Lost Painting by Jonathan Harr. With nothing better to do, the author embarks on a journey to discover a Caravaggio painting which was lost to time two hundred years ago.
The Man Who Loved Books Too Much: The True Story of a Thief, a Detective, and a World of Literary Obsession by Allison Hoover Bartlett. John Charles Gilkey stole rare books not because he wanted to make profit as most thieves do, but because he loved books. I guess if you want to call yourself a book-reader but don’t actually want to say… read a book, you could just steal them and show them off to your friends. But who are we to question the wisdom of “booklovers”, right?
The Orchid Thief: A True Story of Beauty and Obsession by Susan Orlean. If you thought that stealing maps is a weird “job” to have, how about stealing a rare breed of flower? We all know about the Tulipomania that gripped Netherlands in the 1630s. But this is a modern tale, and the book is perhaps one of the most popular ones on this list.
Priceless: How I Went Undercover to Rescue the World’s Stolen Treasures by Robert K. Wittman, John Shiffman. This book is about Robert K. Wittman, FBI’s founder of the Art Crime Team and his undercover missions around the world to rescue various pieces of stolen art.
Provenance: How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art by Laney Salisbury. You could have a Jackson Pollock lying around in your basement, but if you can’t prove that the piece is real, you might as well use it as a table cloth (I might have exaggerated there a bit, but you get the point). John Myatt, a struggling artist, and John Drewe, a conman who knew the importance of Provenance in the art world, duped many people and museums by creating a fake paper trial that seemed to prove that the art was a real thing and not a forgery. So much so that the experts believe that there might still be some fake paintings created by Myatt displayed in prominent places as the real thing.
The Rescue Artist: A True Story of Art, Thieves, and the Hunt for a Missing Masterpiece by Edward Dolnick. Dolnick writes about the theft of Edvard Munch’s The Scream from the National Gallery in Oslo in 1994 and the subsequent investigation that took place to track it down.
Selling Hitler by Robert Harris In mid-eighties, Hitler’s diaries were “discovered” and many experts fell for the con. The backpeddling many did when it was revealed that the diaries were not real is really amusing to read about.
Shell Games: Rogues, Smugglers, and the Hunt for Nature’s Bounty by Craig Welch. This book is about the poaching of a larger-than-life clam – a Geoduck, to be precise, and the subsequent chase from the wildlife police to nab the poacher.
Stealing History: Tomb Raiders, Smugglers and the Looting of the Ancient World by Roger Atwood. This book provides a sweeping history of thefts of various priceless antiques.
Stealing the Mystic Lamb: The True Story of the World’s Most Coveted Masterpiece by Noah Charney. The twelve panel oil-painting of the Mystic Lamb is the most frequently stolen artwork in the world. It was stolen 13 times. One wonders whether they could have guarded it a little better after the first couple of times, you know. Anyway, this book describes the events of each theft.
Stolen World: A Tale of Reptiles, Smugglers, and Skulduggery by Jennie Erin Smith. Two reptile smugglers compete against each other to conquer the illegal trade for themselves. The funny thing is, the Zoos stood against them in the courts, but they had no problem buying rare fauna from the two smugglers, sometimes simultaneously.
Tangled Vines: Greed, Murder, Obsession, and an Arsonist in the Vineyards of California by Frances Dinkelspiel. A massive fire destroyed wines worth $250 million in a California warehouse, making it the largest destruction of wine in history. It was done by a conman named Mark Anderson, who rented storage space at the same warehouse. This book tells why he did that and also goes into the surprisingly bloody history of wine trade in California. (reads well with cranberry juice).
Vanished Smile: The Mysterious Theft of Mona Lisa by R. A. Scotti. On August 21, 1911, a man walked out of the Louvre with the Mona Lisa tucked inside his coat (should have painted it bigger, eh Vinci?). I am not going to spoil this book for anyone. Read it if you want to know whether Mona Lisa was recovered or was lost to time forever.
CARTELS, GANGS, UNDERWORLD.
American Desperado: My Life --- From Mafia Soldier to Cocaine Cowboy to Secret Government Asset by Jon Roberts, Evan Wright. Jon Roberts, who starred in documentary Cocaine Cowboys tells his story to the journalist Evan Wright in this book. Roberts smuggled drugs to Miami for the Medellin Cartel (which will feature many times in this category).
At the Devil’s Table: The Untold Story of the Insider Who Brought Down the Cali Cartel by William C. Rempel. This is Narcos Season 3, basically. Remember the family guy who gets involved with the Cali Cartel and mops around for the whole season even though he had an unbelievably hot wife who was clearly out of his league? That character was based on Rempel. And if I must say so, the book is more compelling than that season of Narcos. Nothing can beat Agent Pena, though.
Black Mass: The True Story of an Unholy Alliance Between the FBI and the Irish Mob by Dick Lehr, Gerard O’Neill. The story of James ‘Whitey’ Bulger – the head of the Irish Mob in Boston - who became an informant for the FBI and chaos ensued. Depp plays Whitey Bulger in the movie adaptation with a soggy tortilla glued to his face as make-up.
Blow: How a Small -Town Bay Made $100 Million with the Medellin Cocaine Cartel and Lost it All by Bruce Porter. Another book where Johnny Depp plays the main character in the movie adaptation. This book is about George Jung, who after meeting Carlos Lehder, started selling cocaine in the United States through Medellin Cartel.
Cocaine Diaries: A Venezuelan Prison Nightmare by Paul Keany, Jeff Farrell. Paul Keany was caught smuggling half-a-million euro worth of cocaine into Venezuela. He was sentenced to 8 years in prison. Now, prisons everywhere aren’t exactly fun places to be, but Los Teques where Keany was incarcerated was nothing short of hell on earth.
Confessions of a Yakuza by Junichi Saga. Junichi Saga was a doctor by profession. A patient, who was a former Yakuza, recounted his life story before him. Saga recorded the conversations, and broke doctor-patient confidentiality by writing this book.
Doctor Dealer: The Rise and Fall of an All-American Boy and His Multimillion-Dollar Cocaine Empire by Mark Bowden. A dentist named Larry Lavin builds the foundation for a cocaine empire in the United States.
Donnie Brasco by Joseph D. Pistone, Richard Woodley. Joseph D. Pistone, an FBI agent, goes undercover for six years to infiltrate the Mafia. Do watch the movie too, it is Depp’s last movie without weird make-up.
El Narco: Inside Mexico’s Criminal Insurgency by Ioan Grillo. Journalist Ioan Grillo has written, arguably, the definitive book on Mexican drug cartels. Why he is still alive is anybody’s guess.
Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets by Sudhir Venkatesh. Venkatesh, who was a sociology grad student at the time, infiltrated one of Chicago’s most notorious gangs. This is one of a kind type of book.
Gomorrah by Roberto Saviano. This book is about the Italian Crime Network called Camorra in Naples, Italy. Due to his intensive investigative journalism which exposed lot of insider information about the crime syndicate, author Saviano still has to live under constant police protection.
The Good Mothers: The True Story of the Women Who Took on the World’s Most Powerful Mafia by Alex Perry. This is a recent book, where the author Alex Perry looks inside the ruthless Calabrian Mafia of Italy and three women who want to save their own and their children’s lives. This is a fascinating and courageous look into an aspect of the Mafia which is often overlooked by most.
Hunting El Chapo: The Inside Story of the American Lawman Who Captured the World’s Most Wanted Drug-Lord by Andrew Hogan, Douglas Century. Remember when Joaquin Guzman was caught for the first time and then he escaped and then he was caught again for good? Yes? Then read this one. But this book only focuses on the operation that nabbed him for the first time. I must warn you though – the author, Andrew Hogan – is really really in love with himself and it seeps into his writing.
The Infiltrator: My Secret Life Inside the Dirty Banks Behind Pablo Escobar’s Medellin Cartel by Robert Mazur. Mazur went undercover and actually became a money launderer for Pablo Escobar. This book is more about how bankers actively helped to launder the drug money and how Mazur helped to bring them down.
Killing Pablo: The Hunt for the World’s Greatest Outlaw by Mark Bowden. This is the best book about tracking and eventually killing Pablo Escobar. And as Walter Jr. pointed out to Walter White, it focuses on the good guys, not the bad ones. Good companion book to Pablo Escobar: My Father written by Escobar’s son.
Marching Powder: A True Story of Friendship, Cocaine, and South America’s Strangest Jail by Rusty Young. The author stays inside San Pedro jail for months with a drug smuggler to chronicle his tale. This is one of the most popular books written on cocaine smuggling.
McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld by Misha Glenny. This is a thorough investigation into organized crime worldwide which accounts for 1/5th of total GDP of the world. This book would please readers who are into extensively researched true-crime history books, not so much a casual reader (inb4 - I just read 5 pages of McMafia and wow… just wow).
Mr. Blue: Memoirs of a Renegade by Edward Bunker. Edward Bunker had had an eventful life. Incarceration for two and a half decades, being on FBI’s most wanted list, and being a crime novelist. This is his autobiography.
Mr. Nice by Howard Marks. Howard Marks started dealing dope in small quantities while he was studying at Oxford – as you do – and then eventually graduated to dealing it in tons (what the hell was he studying there? Oh, philosophy). This is his fascinating story.
Narcoland: The Mexican Drug Lords and Their Godfathers by Anabel Hernandez. Yet another book that resulted in the author getting death threats. This proves the old cliché true that the pen is mightier than the sword; until the sword comes down and cuts your neck. That’s why the author has to live under constant protection.
Narconomics: How to Run a Drug Cartel by Tom Wainwright. Any aspiring drug lords should read this instruction manual. Just kidding. Wainwright goes deep into the functioning of various drug cartels and at the end also comes up with a plan to defeat them.
News of a Kidnapping by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Little known author tries his hand at true-crime. Pablo Escobar kidnapped 10 journalists when he was on the run from the authorities. This book revolves around that event.
The Night it Rained Guns: Unravelling the Purulia Arms Drop Conspiracy by Chandan Nandy. On a December night in 1995, someone airdropped three weapons-laden wooden pallets over Purulia, West Bengal. Who did it and why? This book tells the story about one of India’s greatest ever security breaches.
No Angel: My Undercover Journey to the Inner Circle of the Hells Angels by Jay Dobyns, Nils Johnson-Shelton. Dobyns was the first federal agent to infiltrate the inner circle of the notorious biker gang. This is his story.
Pablo Escobar: My Father by Juan Pablo Escobar. Juan Pablo is an architect and lives and practices his trade in Argentina. Even though Pablo was his father, Juan does not try to justify his actions even a little bit. This is one of the best books written on Pablo Escobar.
The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream by Patrick Radden Keefe. Sister Ping, leader of the Chinese underworld in the US, earned $40 million a year smuggling people from China. Told from the viewpoints of gangsters, investigators, and poor immigrants alike, this book provides a unique window into the world of human smuggling.
Scores: How I Opened the Hottest Strip Club in New York City, Was Extorted out of Millions by the Gambino Family, and Became One of the Most Successful Mafia Informants in FBI History by Michael D. Blutrich. I am disappointed that they went with FBI instead of Federal Bureau of Investigation in the title. Should have made it longer. Scores: How I Opened the Hottest Strip Club in New York City on the 34th Street Just Opposite the Starbucks, Was Extorted out of 4.54 Millions and 55 Cents Plus Taxes by the Gambino Family, and Became One of the Most Successful Mafia Informants in Federal Bureau of Investigation History by Michael Dostoyevsky Blutrich
Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan by Jake Adelstein. The author, working as a reporter in Japan, writes about the seedy underbelly of crime in the country.
The Untouchables by Eliot Ness, Oscar Fraley. Where’s Nitty? He’s in the car. Great movie. How Eliot Ness and his team started the downward spiral in criminal career of Al Capone. A somewhat embellished account was also written in the book, but nonetheless, it is a gripping tale.
Veerappan: Chasing the Brigand by K. Vijay Kumar. Koose Muniswamy Veerappan was the last big outlaw of India. A sandalwood smuggler who lived in the forest to evade the police, Veerappan killed hundreds of policemen and civilians. K. Vijay Kumar, the officer who led the task force that ultimately brought down the brigand, is the author of this book.
Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family by Nicholas Pileggi. I’m funny how, I mean funny like I’m a clown, I amuse you? Goodfellas is perhaps the best Mafia movie ever made, so read it in his own words why Pileggi might fold under questioning.
Zero Zero Zero by Roberto Saviano, Virginia Jewiss. This Saviano guy must have a death wish. But as a handsome list-writer once eloquently said, “If bitten already by a King Cobra, what difference it makes if you French kiss a Black Mamba?” Since the publication of his book on the Italian crime syndicate, Saviano has to live under constant police protection. So to make sure they don’t slack off, he wrote a book on Cocaine Cartel, this time acquiring lots of admirers in Latin America.
CONMEN, IMPOSTORS.
The Art of Making Money: The Story of a Master Counterfeiter by Jason Kersten. The Art of making money is to make other people work for you; not the other way round. But more scrupulous method of making money would be to counterfeit it. Art Williams did exactly that.
Catch Me If You Can: The True Story of a Real Fake by Frank W. Abagnale. Maybe the most popular book on this list, Abagnale Jr.’s book is not to be missed even if you have watched the movie starring the actor who had sex with a bear (no, not Tormund).
Charlatan: America’s Most Dangerous Huckster, the Man Who Pursued Him, and the Age of Flimflam by Pope Brock. One “Dr.” John R. Brinkley, set-up a medical practice to surgically insert goat glands in human testicles to restore their fading sex drive. I am not joking, this happened.
Conman: A Master Swindler’s Own Story by J. R. Weil, W. T. Brannon. Known as “Yellow Kid” Weil was a master conman, who duped public of more than $8 million 100 years ago. He’s called by many as the greatest conman of all time (second to the companies that charge service fees on the internet, of course).
Eyeing the Flash: The Making of a Carnival Con Artist by Peter Fenton. Fenton was a math student until he turned into a carnival con artist. How many bananas he stole from the monkeys? How many bales of potatoes from the elephants? Read this book to find out.
Inconvenient People: Lunacy, Liberty and the Mad-Doctors in Victorian England by Sarah Wise. If you have any annoying friends who romanticize the Victorian era and say that they would have liked to live there, tell them to read this book and get back to you after that.
The Man in the Rockefeller Suit: The Astonishing Rise and Spectacular Fall of a Serial Impostor by Mark Seal. This is the true story of one of the greatest impostors of all time. The man could have impersonated a chihuahua if he wanted to.
The Man Who Sold the Eiffel Tower by James Francis Johnson. Viktor Lustig sold the Eiffel Tower not once, but twice. I still have the relevant papers that my great grandfather left us. I’m going to shift it to Nauru or Detroit.
The Mark Inside: A Perfect Swindle, a Cunning Revenge, and a Small History of the Big Con by Amy Reading. This is a revenge story of a man who sets out to con the conmen who conned him twice. Unfortunately, the book could have been written better, but it is still worth having a look at.
Playing Dead: A Journey Through the World of Death Fraud by Elizabeth Greenwood. I once tried playing dead in a meeting when asked about the progress on my project. But there are people who fake their death for lesser gains, such as insurance fraud and debt fraud. Author Elizabeth Greenwood journeys into the dark world of death fraud to find out more.
Ponzi’s Scheme: The True Story of a Financial Legend by Mitchell Zuckoff. Charles Ponzi was so successful in duping people that we have immortalized his name by terming such swindles after him. At one point, he was raking in $2 millions a week. How many weeks would it take you to earn 2 million dollars at your current income? (sorry, that got heavy fast. It hurt me too).
A Rum Affair: A True Story of Botanical Fraud by Karl Sabbagh. One botanist claimed that some species of plants on the islands south of Scotland survived the last Ice Age. Another botanist doubted him. This might not sound like a big fraud if you are not into plants, but believe me when I say that the 2 botanists who just read this threw their phones away in disgust and disbelief.
Starvation Heights: A True Story of Murder and Malice in the Woods of the Pacific Northwest by Gregg Olsen. A quack doctor named Linda Hazard developed a technique called “fasting treatment”. The story focuses on two sisters who fell for the quack’s assurances that they would be cured of all the diseases - real or imagined. This book is quite infuriating to read. Hazard was a despicable human being.
Swindled: From Poison Sweets to Counterfeit Coffee – The Dark History of the Food Cheats by Bee Wilson. Wilson looks from ancient Rome to current times for food frauds. And she finds them aplenty (companion read - while having a nice snack).
A Treasury of Deception: Liars, Misleaders, Hoodwinkers, and the Extraordinary True Stories of History’s Greatest Hoaxes, Fakes and Frauds by Michael Farquhar. This is a good bathroom book about fakers through history.
The Woman Who Wasn’t There: The True Story of an Incredible Deception by Robin Gaby Fisher, Angelo J. Guglielmo Jr. Have you heard about Tania Head? If you haven’t, I urge you to skip this book. Tania Head duped survivors of 9/11 and the whole world alike into believing that she was one of the survivors from the South Tower of World Trade Center. I feel enraged just by typing this. So just read this book if you want to know more about her. There are a couple of documentaries out there too.
HACKERS.
The Cuckoo’s Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage by Clifford Stoll. Long before internet became a place for cat memes, Cliff Stoll was working at a research lab as a systems manager. One day he found 75 cents of accounting error. This made him alert that an unauthorized person was logging into the system. Thus began his lone effort of tracking down the spy.
Exploding the Phone: The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws Who Hacked Ma Bell by Phil Lapsley. Before there was internet, or even personal computers, mobsters and teenagers hacked the telephone system.
Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World’s Most Wanted Hacker by Kevin D. Mitnick, William L. Simon. The book tells the story of one of the best hackers of all times, Kevin Mitnick, and his cat and mouse game with the FBI.
The Spider Network: The Wild Story of a Math Genius, a Gang of Backstabbing Bankers, and One of the Greatest Scams in Financial History by David Enrich. A group of bankers manipulated daily interest rates just a fraction here and there on loans worth trillions of dollars and made some serious cash for themselves. This book also rocks one of the ugliest book covers of 2017.
MUTINEERS, PIRATES, OUTLAWS.
Batavia’s Graveyard: The True Story of the Mad Heretic Who Led History’s Bloodiest Mutiny by Mike Dash. I was torn whether to include this book in the list as the history of Batavia’s mutiny is littered with corpses. But as the focus is on the mutiny, I am going to keep it here. This event could give the Medusa’s raft a run for its money.
The Floating Brothel: The Extraordinary True Story of an Eighteenth-Century Ship and its Cargo of Female Convicts by Sian Rees. Poor girls in England, most of who were petty thieves, were given a chance to sail to Botany Bay in Australia to create a new life for themselves and the male population of New South Wales. But the real story happened at the sea on board the ship Lady Julian.
The Last Outlaws: The Lives and Legends of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid by Thom Hatch. Butch: What happened to the old bank? It was beautiful. Guard: People kept robbing it. Butch: Small price to pay for beauty. The book might not be full of memorable dialogues as the movie, but if you want to know more about the legendary outlaws, give this book a chance.
Lost Paradise: From Mutiny on the Bounty to a Modern-Day Legacy of Sexual Mayhem, the Dark Secrets of Pitcairn Island Revealed by Kathy Marks. Mutiny of the Bounty is perhaps the most infamous of mutinies that occurred at sea. Even after the event and hundreds of years later, the descendants of Fletcher Christian and his sailors continue to live a crime-filled life like their forefathers on Pitcairn Island.
The Pirate Hunter: The True Story of Captain Kidd by Richard Zacks. This book will change your perception of Captain Kidd, that’s for sure.
To Hell on a Fast Horse: Billy the Kid, Pat Garrett, and the Epic Chase to Justice in the Old West by Mark Lee Gardner. This non-fiction book concentrates on Sheriff Pat Garrett’s chase in pursuit of the bandit Billy the Kid. If you like reading westerns, this one and The Last Outlaws are not to be missed.
Under the Black Flag: The Romance and the Reality of Life Among the Pirates by David Cordingly. Cordingly takes a look at life among the pirates. Some of your romanticism would be squashed, but there were some good things about being a pirate too. Life among the pirates was neither black nor white; it was beige.
POLITICAL CRIMES
Arms and the Dudes: How Three Stoners from Miami Beach Became the Most Unlikely Gunrunners in History by Guy Lawson. Three kids won a 300 million dollar contract – legitimately – I must add, to supply ammunition to the Afghanistan military. They had no money, but still they almost pulled it off. I don’t know, read this book, and if you’re a US citizen, visit the websites mentioned in the book, see if they are still doing business the same way, and if you want, you can become a supplier to the army too. Don’t forget to send me my cut (the movie War Dogs was trash).
The Brother: The Untold Story of Atomic Spy David Greenglass and How He Sent His Sister, Ethel Rosenberg, to the Electric Chair by Sam Roberts. Even if you’re not a United Statian of American (USians?), chances are you might have read at least something about the execution of the Rosenberg couple as spies. This is probably the best book about the subject.
Curveball: Spies, Lies, and the Man Behind Them: How America Went to War in Iraq by Bob Drogin. How many weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq? If your answer is “what’s that?” then congratulations, you’re not unlike one of your former presidents. Who told the USians that there were WMDs with Saddam? Curveball.
The Confessions of an Economic Hitman by John Perkins. Perkins was an economic hitman, who at the instruction of US intelligence agencies and giant corporations cajoled and blackmailed other country leaders to serve US foreign policy and award lucrative contracts to American businesses (now that job has been transferred to the White House).
A Kim Jong – Il Production: The Extraordinary True Story of a Kidnapped Filmmaker, His Star Actress, and a Young Dictator’s Rise to Power by Paul Fischer. Say you want to make a big movie for your country. But there is no one in your country who can handle such an ambitious project. What do you do? Hire some talent from other country? But you’re Kim Jong – Il. Oh. Then you just kidnap them, and force them to make the glorious movie of yours. Read this book. It’s pretty absurd (the movie they eventually made for Kim was utter shit. The Room would look like Gone with the Wind compared to that abomination).
The Nuclear Jihadist: The True Story of the Man Who Sold the World’s Most Dangerous Secrets… And How We Could Have Stopped Him by Douglas Frantz, Catherine Collins. One day a man Abdul Qadeer Khan caught a plane to Pakistan from Europe. With him he had blueprints of the mechanism that could prepare weapons grade Uranium that he had stolen from the lab he worked at in the last 3 years. He would make the first atomic bomb for Pakistan with that information. Then he sold the tech to stable countries like Iran, North Korea and Libya. How can someone get away with stealing such powerful information? Read this book to find out.
Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America by Annie Jacobsen. This is a pretty controversial topic that has only gained wider acknowledgement in recent decades. Read this book to know in detail how bogus the claims of justice being served to the perpetrators of the Holocaust were. Basically, if you were a scientist, you were very likely to be acquitted from any War Crimes allegations.
The Real Odessa: How Peron Brought the Nazi War Criminals to Argentina by Uki Goni. How did most of the Nazis who managed to escape from Germany ended up in South America? Read about the collusion of various entities and institutions that made it possible in this book.
The Spy Who Couldn’t Spell: A Dyslexic Traitor, an Unbreakable Code, and the FBI’s Hunt for America’s Stolen Secrets by Yudhijit Bhattacharjee. This is the true story of a mole in FBI, how he attempted to sell classified information and how FBI tried to track him down.
ROBBERIES, HEISTS.
Ballad of the Whiskey Robber: A True Story of Bank Heists, Ice Hockey, Transylvanian Pelt Smuggling, Moonlighting Detectives, and Broken Hearts by Julian Rubinstein. If there is one thief in this list that I admire, it is without a doubt, Attila Ambrus. Ambrus was known as a gentleman thief, who would ask – no, request - the teller to fill his bag with money. If you read this book, it would be hard for you to dislike Attila even though he was a thief.
Confessions of a Master Jewel Thief by Bill Mason, Lee Gruenfeld. Bill Mason looted many famous personalities in his long career as a jewel thief. In this book he tells how he did it.
The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century by Kirk W. Johnson. Do you know there are people whose hobby is fly tying? The feathery thing that you attach to the hook to catch fish? But these are not your average fly tiers. They use feathers from exotic birds to create different ties whose total cost could run in thousands of dollars. Moreover, many of the most coveted birds are either protected or extinct. So one night a man named Edwin Rist broke into Tring museum and took hundreds of bird skins, some that belonged to Darwin, to fuel his hobby and even getting rich by selling precious feathers to other tiers. Don’t miss this book.
Finders Keepers: The Story of a Man Who Found $1 Million by Mark Bowden. Who hasn’t dreamt of finding a big bag of money? It couldn’t have happened to a more clueless person. Joey Coyle, to be exact.
Flawless: Inside the Largest Diamond Heist in History by Scott Andrew Selby. The theft from Antwerp that still raises many questions.
Go Down Together: The True, Untold Story of Bonnie and Clyde by Jeff Guinn. The truth is not that romantic.
The Great Pearl Heist: London’s Greatest Thief and Scotland Yard’s Hunt for the World’s Most Valuable Necklace by Molly Caldwell Crosby. Pearls, more valuable than the Hope Diamond, are stolen by thieves in Edwardian London.
The Great Train Robbery by Michael Crichton. My favorite Crichton book. Stealing gold from a running train! Watch the movie too that stars the great Sean Connery.
Heist: The Oddball Crew Behind the $17 Million Loomis Fargo Theft by Jeff Diamant. How hard is it to steal 17 million dollars? As far as these thieves were concerned, not much. Getting away with it was another thing altogether. The movie was pretty average, I think.
Into the Blast: The True Story of DB Cooper by Skipp Porteous, Robert Blevins. Is Tommy Wiseau DB Cooper? If only that was true. Read the book but don’t expect any clear-cut answers (I think most people would agree that the clumsy bastard died after he jumped from the plane).
A Pickpocket’s Tale: The Underworld of Nineteenth-Century New York by Timothy J. Gilfoyle. True story of George Appo, a pickpocket living in nineteenth-century New York.
Sex on the Moon: The Amazing Story Behind the Most Audacious Heist in History by Ben Mezrich. A guy steals moon rocks from NASA and then had sex on them with his girlfriend (how the hell is that comfortable?)
The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit by Michael Finkel. The last hermit was not a hermit in true sense. He didn’t rely on land to feed himself. He stole from the nearby community. Before someone says I have spoiled the book for them, it is revealed in the first chapter that he is a thief.
WHITE COLLAR CRIMES.
Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou. The Steve Jobs impersonator, Elizabeth Holmes, CEO of Theranos, and her old boyfriend, Sunny, are some of the most vile people that I have come across while reading about corporate crime. This is one of the best books that I have read this year.
Den of Thieves by James B. Stewart. This is probably the most famous book written about those Wall Street scoundrels.
Empire of Deception: The Incredible Story of a Master Swindler Who Seduced a City and Captivated the Nation by Dean Jobb. The story of Leo Koretz, who created one of the longest running Ponzi schemes in the 1920s Chicago.
The Informant by Kurt Eichenwald. Mark Whitacre becomes an FBI informant against his own corporation. But as time goes by, the FBI starts to realize that Mark is not as truthful as he seems to be, and he has his own agenda (they made a movie with Matt Damon).
Octopus: Sam Israel, the Secret Market, and Wall Street’s Wildest Con by Guy Lawson. Sam Israel’s hedge fund was making heavy losses. So naturally, he fabricated fake returns to fool the investors. Then he heard about a secret market from where he could convert his millions into billions. That’s how he lost the last 150 million dollars of his invertors’ money.
Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice by Bill Browder. Only thing you are going to learn from this book is don’t do business in Russia.
The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron by Bethany McLean, Peter Elkind. Bethany McLean asked one simple question in her article when everyone else was going gaga over Enron. “What does Enron actually do?” Nobody knew. Even Enron couldn’t give a specific answer. They were not just committing accounting fraud; they were looting ordinary people by creating fake shortage of electricity and driving the prices high. The documentary is worth watching too.
Stung: The Incredible Obsession of Brian Molony by Gary Stephen Ross. The guy Molony debited huge amounts of money from the bank he worked at to feed his gambling addiction. Oh, and he took the money in other people’s name who held huge accounts there. This is one of the best true-crime books that I have ever read.
Three Cups of Deceit: How Greg Mortenson, Humanitarian Hero, Lost His Way by Jon Krakauer. You know the man who builds schools in remote regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan? Great guy, right? Krakauer doesn’t think so. And he’ll tell you why in this short book.
The Wizard of Lies: Bernie Madoff and the Death of Trust by Diana B. Henriques. 65 billion dollars. That’s the amount that Madoff swindled from people through decades of fraud. I think I can buy a small island country with this much money. The idiot is in jail though. I don’t know, maybe after a couple of billion, skip to a country with no extradition treaty and live the rest of your life without the fear of being getting caught? But then, these types of people don’t know when to stop.
OTHER.
American Roulette: How I Turned the Odds Upside Down --- My Wild Twenty-Five-Year Ride Ripping Off World’s Casinos by Richard Marcus. The guy ripped-off casinos all over the world by stealing gaming chips while maintaining an illusion of a highroller to lend his eventual take required legitimacy.
Breaking the Rock: The Great Escape from Alcatraz by Jolene Babyak. Written by the daughter of a guard at Alcatraz, this book tells the story of the infamous escape from the prison island. Don’t forget to watch the classic movie too.
Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six MIT Students Who Took Vegas for Millions by Ben Mezrich. The movie 21 was based on this book. But if you want to know the real story, without the whitewashing, you have no choice but to read this book.
Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy by Kevin Bales. Kevin Bales estimates that there are 27 million people worldwide who live as slaves, right now. And yes, slavery still exists in United States of America in case you were wondering. This is a depressing book.
Fish: A Memoir of a Boy in a Man’s Prison by T. J. Parsell. Rape in prison is absolutely overlooked almost everywhere. Read this book if you can endure reading about helplessness page after page.
Hotel K: The Shocking Inside Story of Bali’s Most Notorious Jail by Kathryn Bonella. Prison systems in developing world differ from the developed one in one regard that the guards and officials there are more corrupt and hence are likely to look the other way when something bad is going down amongst the inmates. Kerobokan Jail in Bali is one of the worst among those.
The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison by Pete Earley. The author interviewed inmates from Leavenworth Prison for two years. The book is the result of that labor.
The Laundrymen: Inside the World’s Third Largest Business by Jeffrey Robinson. I have a perfect idea to launder money. Laser Tag! Robinson looks at the third largest business in the world. The book was published a while ago, but still hasn’t lost most of its relevancy.
Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town by Jon Krakauer. Jon releases the Krakauer on one of the most relevant subjects of today. Rapes in colleges. These institutes would do anything to sweep things under the rug to maintain the illusion of clean image in the public eye.
Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing by Ted Conover. The author worked as a prison guard for a year at one of the most notorious prisons of the United States. This book is about his experience.

Ralph Nader and Jeremy Scahill on Dangerous Donald and the Democratic Primary | 2/16/20

RALPH NADER ON BLOOMBERG’S PLOT TO STOP BERNIE, THE ROT WITHIN THE DNC, AND HIS RECENT CALL WITH PELOSI
Jeremy Scahill 2/16/20
LAST FALL, the third most powerful figure in the U.S. government, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, had a phone call with a man who is undoubtedly one of the most hated people among her base of Democratic Party supporters: the famed consumer advocate and former independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader.
Their phone call took place as the Democrats were preparing to launch a narrowly focused impeachment case against Donald Trump. On the call, Nader laid out a strategy for attacking Trump that he believed could have resulted in his actual removal from office. Nader, who has spent his life working to implement a wide range of consumer and environmental protections, argued that it would be a mistake to focus solely on the Ukraine phone call. Instead, Nader suggested that Pelosi orchestrate a public prosecution of Trump’s crimes against ordinary Americans — what he called “kitchen table issues.” Nader beseeched Pelosi to go after Trump on issues far more pressing than Ukraine to millions of Americans, regardless of their political affiliation. He suggested subpoenaing witnesses who could testify to Trump’s “destruction of life-saving consumer protections, environmental protections, workplace safety protections, in his destruction of social safety net protections for children.” Pelosi, Nader says, did not take any of his advice.
Trump’s popularity has risen in the aftermath of his “acquittal,” as he continues his victory tour and purges dissidents from his administration. As the Democratic presidential primary process intensifies, the institutional Democratic Party appears once again to be doing everything in its power to hurt the effort to unseat Trump. The attempt to purchase the Democratic nomination by former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg is being aided by a Democratic National Committee that ran a dirty operation against Sen. Bernie Sanders in 2016. Nader also believes that the Bloomberg candidacy has at its core an effort to block Sanders from winning the nomination, perhaps by forcing a brokered convention. “It’s Armageddon time for the Democratic Party,” Nader said. “If Bernie wins the election against Trump, should he get the nomination, it has to be a massive surge of voter turnout which will sweep out a lot of the Republicans in the Congress. So he will have a much more receptive Congress. It will sweep out the corporate Democrats in the Democratic National Committee, and it will reorient the Democratic Party to where it should be which is a party of, by, and for the people. That’s why they want to fight him.”
Nader joined Intercepted to discuss the failed impeachment move against Trump and the state of the Democratic primary. Nader ran for president in 2000, 2004, and 2008, and throughout his career has been one of the most important voices for justice, as well as environment and consumer protections, in U.S. history. His latest book, written with the consumer advocate Mark Green, is called “Fake President: Decoding Trump’s Gaslighting, Corruption, and General Bullsh*t.” What follows is the extended transcript of the excerpt of the conversation broadcast on Intercepted.
Jeremy Scahill: Ralph Nader, welcome back to Intercepted.
Ralph Nader: Thank you, Jeremy.
JS: So I want to begin with the big picture of this impeachment fiasco that we’ve just gone through, and while we have Trump on his victory tour talking about his acquittal, we also have this other phenomenon which is that the corporate elite Democratic Party is trying to crush Bernie Sanders’s candidacy. Let’s begin with the impeachment and your assessment of the strategy that Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats employed in going after Trump.
RN: Well, I and others beseeched her months ago to go with a strong full hand of impeachable offenses and send it to McConnell and have them reflect kitchen table issues because she always used to say we need kitchen table issues to increase the polls from 50 or 52 percent for impeachment and removal up higher. Well, that didn’t happen. We did see that major committee chairs wanted to put a bribery provision in. She turned that down. They wanted to expand the obstruction in defiance of subpoenas, a critical impeachable offense beyond the Ukraine matter. She turned that down. We had congressman John Larson put in the congressional record on December 18, 12 impeachable offenses of which Ukraine was one.
And the Democrats were basically subjected to one person’s decision, Nancy Pelosi, the House Speaker. Well, she gambled and lost badly. Not only, obviously, he was acquitted, but polls went up for Trump, which was astounding. Nobody’s really explained that yet. So now the question is, will the committee chairs whose expanded recommendation to her was rejected, will they now come back to her and say round two? Now round two is quite explicit and quite effective. She has stated repeatedly that she thinks Trump “is a liar, a crook, a thief, and he should be in prison.” It’s a pretty good start. She also stated she wants the five committee chairs to continue their investigations into the corruption and wrongdoing and refusal to enforce the laws on behalf of the health safety and economic well being of the people. That’s the Banking Committee, the Oversight Committee, Judiciary Committee, etc. And if they do that, they are going to run up against a Trump stonewall for further information witnesses, which means they’re going to be obligated to issue subpoenas, which will be defied. That is a per se impeachable offense.
The House, went against Nixon, the third article of impeachment was he defied one subpoena. So when Trump defies these subpoenas for witnesses and documents, Speaker Pelosi will have to face up to the Constitution. The Constitution does not require her to go to court. That’s a tutorial that a lot of Democrats need to be taught. Congress’s power is plenary. They can enforce their own subpoenas, even by use of an antiquated tradition of a sheriff and a prison. They can enforce their own subpoenas. So they can go to the floor, no witnesses are needed, clean cut. Trump, you defied the subpoenas. You defied the essential power of Congress without which all other authorities are debilitated.
If they cannot get information under the Constitution from the executive branch, how debilitated will be the war power, the appropriations power, the tax power, the confirmation power? You defied it. You’re going to be impeached. These subpoenas would be associated with all kinds of kitchen table issues where people have a stake in these impeachments, didn’t have a stake much in Ukraine important as that is. It’s too remote. But they do have a stake in, for example, his destruction of life-saving consumer protections, environmental protections, workplace safety protections, in his destruction of social safety net protections for children.
JS: But are those impeachable offenses?
RN: Yes, they are when they’re associated with corruption, and treading. In other words, this isn’t just normal deregulation, what they’re doing now to the EPA is stripping it of its capacity to enforce the law. They’re pushing out scientists. They’re downgrading other professionals. They’re cutting budgets without congressional authority, and they’re run by people who have conflicts of interest and are corrupt, some of them have already left like Scott Pruitt. It’s the failure to execute the laws. That’s one of the impeachable offenses in the Constitution. Now, if Nancy Pelosi doesn’t do that, Trump will go all over the country, all over his tweets, all over the obsequious media with his disparaging nicknames and taunting and gloating. I told her in a conversation I had with her three months ago. I said, “Nancy, you know what he’s gonna do? He’s gonna say, ‘Nancy Pelosi had the majority in the House and she had all these crazy charges and she didn’t want to get them through. You know why she couldn’t get them through? Because they’re all lies. They’re all fake. I did nothing wrong.'”
JS: What did she say to you when you said that?
RN: When you have the president of the United States doing this with essentially no rebuttal. The reason why Trump stays where he is in the polls is he’s a soliloquist. He’s a slanderist soliloquist with no rebuttal. Look at the nicknames he gives all these people and they never give many nicknames back. The only way you deal with a bully who gives you nicknames like Crazy Bernie and Low IQ Maxine Waters is to give him his own medicine: Decadent Donald, Draft-Dodging Donald, Dangerous Donald, Dumb Donald, Low IQ Donald, Illiterate Donald. That’s the only way. Some say, well, we don’t want to get in the mud with him. Well, that’s an interesting comment. But not when the New York Times, Washington Post, and all the main media repeat verbatim his nicknames without giving the target of the nicknames any right of reply? That’s unethical journalism.
JS: Ralph, what did Pelosi say to you when you were laying all of this out?
RN: She said several things. She said that “I want an airtight case,” and she thinks Ukraine is an airtight case. Number two, she thought the public attention span couldn’t endure multiple impeachment charges. And number three, I think she cut a deal with her 12 Blue Dog Democrats who are in swing districts that that was the only thing she was going to bring forward. They could have had a national security, military sheen about it that insulated them.
JS: Why did Nancy Pelosi meet with you, given the way that you’re, to this day, vilified by the establishment Democratic Party for daring to run for president multiple times?
RN: Well, it wasn’t a meeting. It was a telephone conversation. I think because they’re interested in what I have to say. I mean, I could give them all kinds of strategies to landslide, Donald Trump, if they would listen. I could show them how to argue their case. I’m just giving you an example, Jeremy: You’ve got some currency in the Democratic Party now for universal basic income. I mean Andrew Yang, most prominently, and it’s viewed as a giveaway and simply, pandering to the people. How do you argue universal basic income in addition to alleviating dire poverty, in addition to increasing consumer demand for goods and services which stimulates the economy far better than a corporate tax cut? Well, one way is you say, hey, these corporations have already had universal basic income. What do you mean? Yeah, what do you think massive corporate subsidies, handouts, giveaways and bailouts are? They’re massive universal basic income giveaways. They are not only getting all these taxpayer freebies, but they also get trillions of dollars in the last decade of free government research and development which built Silicon Valley and built the biotech, nanotech, a lot of the aerospace and pharmaceutical industries. That’s pretty good, universal basic income.
Apart from the tax credits they get for doing the research that companies should be doing anyway in a so-called capitalist society. So, they don’t know how to argue full Medicare for All. I put out 25 ways life in Canada — because they have single payer full health care — compared to life in the United States. It isn’t just you know, a matter of un-affordable health insurance. It’s the removal of anxiety, dread and fear. It’s the situation in Canada where you’re not afraid to change your jobs because you might lose your health insurance. It’s a situation where you’re not ripped off by inscrutable sheets of computerized billing which total about 350 billion dollars according to Professor Malcolm Sparrow, an applied mathematician at Harvard. Imagine one-tenth of the entire health expenditure is corporate crime, it’s crime on Medicare, crime on Medicaid, crime on insurance companies because of the billing frauds that they’re paying for, crime on individual patients and payers. They don’t know how to argue it. That’s why once in a while I get through on a phone call.
JS: You know, you’re laying out a much broader strategy for what charges should have been brought against Trump and of course, criticizing the strategy that they ended up employing, but at the same time, Mitch McConnell, runs that Senate with an iron fist. It seemed clear from the jump that only Romney and maybe one or two others would have jumped ship. And in the end, it was just Romney. So, is the strategy you’re advocating putting forth those charges, getting an impeachment on those charges, sending it to the Senate for trial as a way of educating the public or revealing these crimes? Because it seems very unlikely in this day and age that more than one or two Republicans, no matter how much evidence was out there would have jumped ship on Trump over the issues you’re describing. They love that form of deregulation and they seem to not really care at all about the overt corruption that we’re witnessing.
RN: Not when they’re preceded by dozens of highly televised House committee hearings on the misuse of presidential power that is harming in kitchen table manners where people live, work, and raise their families, the American people.
JS: But these people aren’t watching MSNBC, C-SPAN, or CNN. I mean, Fox News is the single most powerful news entity as well as social media. And as Trump has said, he’s his own media outlet. I mean, I see it, Ralph, as part of the problem is there is such low trust in media, such low approval ratings of the Democrats in Congress, that it doesn’t matter if you hold those hearings, given the media landscape today. This is not like the 70s where it’s every single night on the news. It’s people are seeking out information they want, not seeking out the truth.
RN: Wrong analysis.
JS: All right. Correct me.
RN: When you see the kind of witnesses that the House could have brought, the kind of empathy, that kind of resonance, just the way they did when they brought some of those civil servants. You have to admit their testimony reached a lot of people. Fox has its own constituency. So the other networks, the other cable, the social media, the newspapers, the word of mouth. These are very easy abuses by Trump to understand unlike the more arcane diplomatic situation with Ukraine.
JS: Right.
RN: And what’s really important here is she wanted to tie up the Republicans in knots in the Senate and she only used one knot. She used one finger out of ten that could have been curled into a tough fist with very perceived abuses of the Constitution, of protective statutes, of income preservation and of turning over by Trump, turning over the U.S. government to Wall Street. You know how Wall Street polls, Jeremy? 90 percent of the people when they were asked two, three years ago, wanted to break up the big banks. That’s a lot of conservatives. Wall Street over Main Street. It’s an unbeatable presentation to get to the American people. You get left-right combination here. Let’s not subsume our factual imaginations to this polarization. It’s exaggerated because it’s a divide and rule strategy with any broader rebuttal where people work, live and raise their families where they all bleed alike from rip offs, from being denied health care, from usurious interest rates, payday loan rackets, installment, loan rackets, rental abuses, all that will come out because they’re not enforcing the law.
Now remember, the committee hearings do not have to be impeachment hearings at all. They’re just regular investigations so they can range broad far and deep and to watch what Trump is doing to make America fail. And then when the subpoenas are defied, that’s when it turns into an impeachable offense after the hearings. Also, they won’t be able to in the Senate, block witnesses. They blocked witnesses because people like Dershowitz gave them the plausible argument. Well, everything that the Democrats say is true about what Trump did. If it was all true, it didn’t reach an impeachable offense status. So that gave them an out. They can’t get an out when it deals with all these other impeachable offenses which are violations of different clauses of the U.S. Constitution.
JS: Ralph, how has this strategy that you’ve been describing that Nancy Pelosi did end up implementing in just going very narrowly over the Ukraine issue, and then Trump now on his victory lap, how does this impact the broader move at the ballot box to try to defeat Donald Trump?
RN: It produces slippage by the Democrats. They’ve already acknowledged it in the last two weeks. You see, the Democrats cannot defeat Donald Trump by themselves because they don’t use all the arguments and all the issues. There has to be a parallel get out the vote civic initiative in every precinct, in every place in those key six or seven swing states. Now there’s a group in Kentucky which you may know about called Ditch Mitch and it started about six months ago. It’s a PAC. It is not affiliated with the Democratic Party. Its sole purpose is to elaborate Mitch McConnell’s horrific record against Kentucky interests and Kentuckians and get out the vote. Get out the vote, OK. So that’s the formula. There has to be a parallel movement to get out the vote against Trump because the Democrats are not listening.
It’s almost impossible to get through to Tom Perez, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee. I’ve had people who’ve run for major office, they can’t even get his ear, much less sit in his office to give them advice. When Mark Green and I just came out with this book, “Fake President” which is more than a book to be read. It’s a book to be used like a resource book by field organizers, by activists and Mark who you know, who’s [an] upstanding Democrat went to try to see him. He couldn’t see him, couldn’t even get an appointment, couldn’t even get him on the phone. I mean, you know, Mark is, you know, was almost mayor of New York. Bloomberg beat him with huge money in the last few weeks. He’s written the two major policy tracks two giant volumes for the Democratic party in prior elections. And he can’t even get through. Congressman John Larson tells me he can’t even get through to Perez.
It’s very hard to get through to any of these people. They think they know it all and what kind of know-it-all? The caution of Nancy Pelosi has brought her defeat in four out of the five congressional elections 2010, ’12, ’14, ’16, squeezed through in 2018 with the help of progressive candidates, but it’s not exactly confirmation that her cautious approach is winning for her. It illustrated itself in the Senate debate recently over the Ukraine impeachment articles.
JS: You know, we have this, and it’s ongoing, this debacle in Iowa. And it does seem like there was some dirty pool at play there. You just talked about Tom Perez. At the same time, you have the sort of establishment Democratic Party and figures like you know, he’s not so significant in many ways right now, but his history is worth reminding people of James Carville, who was one of the brains behind Clinton’s ascent to the presidency, basically having an aneurysm over the notion that Bernie Sanders could be the Democratic nominee. Your current assessment of how Tom Perez, the establishment elite of the Democratic Party, are mobilizing against Bernie Sanders in particular but also against anyone with a truly progressive policy platform.
RN: Well, the Democratic corporate establishment deep in the Democratic National Committee and the super delegate fiasco, imagine, nobody elects them, but they can tip the balance, undermined Bernie in 2016. There are strong arguments to say that he did really win Iowa and Nevada before he landslided Hillary in New Hampshire, but that’s the past, but they’re at it again. They have to stop Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren because their hegemony is over if one of those people gets elected, and they want to continue dialing for corporate dollars. They want to continue Obama’s record setting fundraising from Wall Street which exceeded his Republican opponents. Imagine, he got more money from Wall Street than John McCain in 2008. He even got more money from Romney’s venture capital firm. So, that’s the internal struggle. This business about socialism, that’s just a cover but they’re willing to emulate themselves this year, and let Trump win by basically stereotyping any kind of progressive legislation as socialism.
Now, for example, the argument should be by the progressive Democrats, “Look, here’s what we mean by socialism. It’s what led the Western European countries and Canada to a higher standard of living, higher equality. It means full health insurance. It means a living wage. It means retirement security. It means protecting people from serious erosions of their rights as workers. It means the ability to repeal the Taft Hartley Act and reflect majority desires in the retail trades like Walmart to join unions and so on.” But if you want more examples, people, well, let’s see the post office. That’s socialism. Public drinking water departments all over the country, I guess that’s social and public libraries. I guess that’s socialism, public electric utilities, over 1,000 of them around the country, including Jacksonville, Florida. How about the Tennessee Valley Authority deep in red state territory? You think you can repeal that? By conservative voters in Tennessee and Alabama, they’d run you out of town. So they don’t know how to argue this.
And here’s the umbrella argument, Jeremy. Look, it’s a choice between Trump’s corporate socialism which you cannot dis-elect and throw the rascals out because it’s Wall Street controlling Washington, or democratic socialism where if you don’t like it, if you don’t like law and order to corporate domination of your lives, and the corporate state, which Franklin Delano Roosevelt called fascism in a message to Congress in 1938, you can always throw the rascals out. That’s the difference. And what is corporate socialism? It’s seizing your tax money and bailing out the crooks in Wall Street in 2008 with trillions of dollars. Corporate socialism is shoveling out your hard earned dollars to company subsidies, handouts, giveaways, etc, anti-market quotas. And above all, it’s taking your money away by giving it to tax breaks for the rich and powerful which creates huge deficits that are going to be paid by your children and your grandchildren instead of putting the trillion and a half dollars of Trump’s tax cut, including cutting his own family’s taxes into rebuilding America, into rebuilding schools and public transit and water and sewage systems and bridges and highway and airports and ports. That’s the way you argue it, Jeremy.
JS: What is, given your history in electoral politics and the way that you’ve been treated by the Democratic party establishment, if you take that history that you’ve lived, and then you look at Hillary Clinton’s interventions in this current electoral cycle where they, you know, the hagiography on Hulu just premiered at Sundance and she you know, this line gets floated that “nobody likes Bernie,” you take that and then you look at Pete Buttigieg coming out of the McKinsey world, the sort of consiglieres of capitalism and then you have Michael Bloomberg just pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into ads. I was just recently in Puerto Rico and watched ad after ad after ad of Bloomberg saying he’s already rebuilding Puerto Rico. But what is the emerging elite Democratic corporate wing of the Democratic Party strategy in this primary? What are they trying to do? Who are they going to get behind in your assessment?
RN: They have to block as I said, Bernie Sanders. They have to block Elizabeth Warren. They have to block universal basic income proposals like Andrew Yang. And basically, they like people like Joe Biden, you know, he comes out of the corporate state, out of the Obama world, out of the Clarence Thomas, enabler chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, mistreating Anita Hill and, and he comes out of that. They like him and if he falters, they’ll go for Bloomberg, because they know he’s got a lot of money to go up against the Republicans. It’s just redux. It’s corporate state Democrat redux. That is they’re almost identical in military and foreign policy with the Republicans. They’re almost identical and booming, bigger military budgets and lathering the military industrial complex with whatever they want. They’re almost identical with avoiding applying law enforcement to Wall Street.
Their rhetoric is a little different, but we talk about the rhetoric in realistic terms, rhetoric doesn’t really matter politically. So what their record is they have never introduced into Congress any comprehensive corporate crime enforcement. The corporate crime laws are absurd. They’re obsolete. Their fines are, you know, nickels and dimes, and they cut the enforcement budgets of all these agencies to begin with. So, they can’t even enforce against fraud on Medicare, for example, $60 billion a year, billion with a B. They bring back about two, three billion. That’s all. They don’t have enough prosecutors.
All that is deliberate. All that is part of the Rep/Dem consensus, the two party duopoly that stereotypes third parties, and when they start seeing an insurgence in their own party, they go to work on it behind the scenes, tipping close primary elections. They go to work on them, by slandering them, by stereotyping them. And the most interesting person emerging here is Pete Buttigieg because he’s coming on almost like a new Obama or a new Clinton, this kind of smooth moderation. He’s signaling with his fundraising parties with billionaires and millionaires that he’s going to be acceptable to them.
JS: Oh, that’s my favorite line is when Pete Buttigieg says “Hey, we have to include the billionaires. Let’s not exclude people. Let’s include people.” He has the audacity to make that argument and very, I don’t recall any pushback against that particular line that he keeps deploying when people ask him about the 40 odd billionaires who are financing his campaign?
RN: Well, Bernie, obviously pushed back in the recent debates. I don’t mind billionaires, if they support universal basic income, or I don’t mind billionaires who support the stronger enforcement of corporate crime. But his billionaires are basically Clinton-type billionaires, Wall Street billionaires. Remember he came out of McKinsey and Company. That’s the essence of the Wall Street establishment. This giant consulting firm.
JS: You know, at the same time you have — I mentioned Hillary Clinton earlier, but Hillary Clinton also really early on in Tulsi Gabbard’s candidacy for the Democratic nomination, smearing her as essentially a Russian agent. Tulsi Gabbard is of course, suing her for defamation. Now, I have a lot of problems with some aspects of Tulsi Gabbard’s history, her record, her relationship with some very frightening individuals in India, some of her positions on gay marriage, gay rights that have now shifted, and I think she has some questions to answer about some of her positions on Syria but it reminds me also of how you were treated and I’m wondering what your assessment is of that preemptive strike against Tulsi Gabbard by Hillary Clinton to say, “Hey, this is the new Jill Stein. This is who the Russians have chosen.”
RN: Well, you know, she’s not gonna do very well at all in the New Hampshire primary. I think, Hillary Clinton if she continues berating Tulsi Gabbard’s afraid that she’ll go independent and so-called, take away some votes in key states. I don’t think that’s going to happen.
JS: She says she won’t you know, she says she’s not going to do that. In fact, she even —
RN: The more serious attack is the use of the word electability. If they can’t use the word democratic socialism, they use the word electability to marginalize main progressive candidates in the Democratic primary. Now, this is basically a symptom of the defeatism of the Democratic Party. How can anybody running for president against this relentless savage sexual predator, this constant liar on matters of serious import to the American people, separating millions of people from reality into his commercialized fantasy, this person who’s a bigot and a racist and he follows up with actions reflecting that — how can the Democrats even raise the issue of trying to find a candidate who’s electable against this person?
That’s just a technique to marginalize progressive candidates, and they use the words moderate and centrist and leftist and extremist to pursue the same strategy, to mainstream their corporate Democratic primary candidates. For example, Joe Biden is called a moderate. Joe Biden, for example, has supported wars abroad that are unconstitutional. Why is that a moderate? Joe Biden has been to toady the big banks. Why is that a moderate? Joe Biden has supported corporate-type policies on consumer bankruptcy limiting them, and credit card insurance gouging. Why is that considered moderate or centrist? Why is it considered leftist to support universal health insurance and a living wage and cracking down on corporate crime? Those received enormous results in the polls. Left, right support, 65, 70, 75, 80, 90 percent. Why is that considered extreme or leftist? Because the progressive Democrats don’t know how to argue their case, Jeremy. They don’t know how to argue.
And now they’re so tired, going five events a day in the primary, flying in that they can’t think anymore. I’ve been through that kind of pressure. They can’t think anymore. Their wind up speeches are getting stale. They are repeated. They’re not infused with the kind of new facts and new ranges. To open it up, they’ve got to raise the issue of 300 billion dollars a year from a tiny less than 1 percent tax, sales tax on Wall Street transactions. They can say, look, people, you go into a store and you got to pay 6, 7 percent on necessities of life. How come someone buys 100 million dollars of Exxon options or stock and doesn’t have to pay a cent? See, and then you take that 300 billion and you put it back into dealing with student loans. Wall Street basically disenfranchised a whole generation of young Americans by collapsing the economy in 2008. And these people are owed that kind of transfer of sales tax for their technical training, their student loans. They don’t open it up.
As a result, the media which follows them, it gets jaded. They hear the same wind up. It’s a good wind up, but it’s too repetitive. And it excludes a whole range of factual conditions on the ground that will alert more and more millions of people to say to themselves, she’s on my side, he’s on my side and they don’t do that. Therefore, they don’t generate any news, even though they’re in the eye of the media during the primary season, day after day.
JS: We know that there were very dirty tricks played in the 2016 primary by Hillary Clinton and the DNC against Bernie Sanders. I think, Iowa, the Iowa Caucus, made a lot of Sanders supporters believe that that already is happening right now. Not just the overt kind of war against the Sanders and to a lesser extent, but still there Warren candidacy, but if you have a DNC that is willing to rig its own primary, what is Bernie Sanders’ path not just to winning that nomination, but then running a national campaign against a humongous war chest that Trump already is amassing?
RN: Well, he’s doing pretty well without our advice, huh, Jeremy? It’s really quite remarkable.
JS: He is but we’re only you know, we’re only at the very beginning of this and I’m referencing what they did in 2016. I mean, he basically has to fight the DNC and Trump simultaneously.
RN: Well, Bernie doesn’t like to appear like a sore loser. So he doesn’t complain in 2016 about what happened in the casinos where votes were counted, can you imagine? In Nevada, and in Iowa. First of all, he has to attack the caucus system. The caucus system is a form of voter suppression. Let’s face it. I mean, how many people can take out four or five hours, travel to a location, stay there at night, leave their kids? So it’s a form of voter suppression.
JS: We can barely get people to just go and vote in a poll, you know, in a normal one person, one vote.
RN: Just a normal primary, like New Hampshire. So, he lost an opportunity after 2016 to go after them. Although he did change some rules. He reduced the number of super delegates which is a way the corporate Democrats jab in at the end to tip the close race between their candidates and progressive candidates. And now the super delegates only kick in at the Democratic National Convention on the second round, but still, they can be decisive. And you know, the super delegates are members of Congress who are Democrats and former Democratic governors, etc. They haven’t been elected to anything as far as this election is concerned, but they can decide the outcome.
JS: If Sanders does get the nomination, what will that mean for the Democratic Party? I mean, would it be akin to, you know, to sort of what the Tea Party and ultimately Trump did to the Republican Party? I’m not drawing a comparison between their individual policies or their morality in terms of Bernie and Trump. But in terms of what it does to the party, it seems to me like Bernie winning would effectively shatter parts of the Democratic Party for the better, like get rid of some of these toxic elements that dominate that party.
RN: I think you’re right. If Bernie wins the election against Trump, should he get the nomination, it has to be a massive surge of voter turnout which will sweep out a lot of the Republicans in the Congress. So he will have a much more receptive Congress. It will sweep out the corporate Democrats in the Democratic National Committee, and it will reorient the Democratic Party to where it should be which is a party of, by and for the people. That’s why they want to fight him.
JS: Finally, Ralph, what about the state of third-party organizing in this country. I mean, the last truly successful runs were your runs. I mean, I think that the, you know, the Green Party has been just decimated and I think has made some strategically very unwise decisions in recent campaigns. But is there a future for third party organizing in this country given what is happening right now with the ascent of Donald Trump and the threat of an even more authoritarian second term if the Democrats lose?
RN: Well, two responses and by the way, your listeners, if they want more of what they’ve been hearing and my background, they can go to my website nader.org. If they want to see how a progressive campaign on issues that both parties take off the table, they can go to my still-open votenader.org from the 2008 campaign to see what issues we espoused to have majority support that were taken off the table for even discussion by the Democrats and Republicans. I see two scenarios here for third parties: One, they proceed as they are proceeding, maybe get some more votes to nudge the major party that’s closest to their views in the right direction. That happened in the 19th century when some of the smaller parties never won a national election, but they push the two parties on things like anti-slavery, the 1840 run by the Liberty party and women’s suffrage, industrial labor, farmer parties, People’s Party. So that’s one scenario.
A second scenario if the Democrats lose to the worst president in history, the crudest, the most overt disgusting, foul-mouthed corporate toady who’s destroyed the rule of law and constitutional observance, if they lose to him, I can see the Republican Party breaking open. I can see some reminiscence of the Republican Party being created in 1850s, splitting and replacing the Whig Party. In an era of billionaires who are willing to fund new parties, that is not out of range. They will call it a new centrist party something the way Bloomberg has been talking about. And then the third and this is the one the Democrats got to be really afraid of — a progressive third party with hundreds of millions of dollars in their war chest, enough to get five to 10, 12, 15 percent. So this is really Armageddon time for the Democratic Party. They’ve been losing and losing to the worst Republican Party in history. I mean, Teddy Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, Senator Robert Taft would have been aghast at the extreme nature of this Republican Party, the stupidity, the ignorance, the bigotry, the corporatism, the self-serving enrichments, etc. They’re a mirror of Trump which is why they clap for him in the White House. And I can see, if the Democrats lose this one, there’s going to be a lot of fissure and a lot of splits.
The civic community in this country, environmental, consumer workers, civil rights, civil liberties, housing, tenant groups are excluded from the electoral arena. All you gotta do is look at Judy Woodruff on PBS, the News Hour. She interviews reporters. She doesn’t interview leaders who know what you’re talking about of civic groups. The civic community has got to stop being passive and demand that they have a role in the deliberations and in the media coverage of these campaigns, because they know a lot that the candidates don’t know. They know even a lot more that the reporters don’t know. And they are the seed corn for American democracy since day one in the 18th century.
JS: Ralph Nader, thank you very much for being with us.
RN: Thank you, Jeremy.

J.P. Morgan Early Look at the Market – Thurs 9.14.17 - **PLEASE DO NOT FORWARD THIS DOCUMENT**

J.P. Morgan Early Look at the Market – Thurs 9.14.17 Trading Desk Commentary; For Institutional Investors Only
*PLEASE DO NOT FORWARD THIS DOCUMENT*

Morning Levels

US S&P futures are down 1-2 points.
Asia: Japan Nikkei -0.29%, Japan TOPIX -0.32%, China -0.38%, Hong Kong -0.42%, KOSPI +0.74%, Taiwan +0.20%, Australia -0.10%
EuroStoxx 50 -0.16%, FTSE +0.10%, DAX -0.21%, CAC -0.03%, Italy +0.10%, Spain -0.65%
USD (DXY) down 0.14%, EUR up 0.10%, GBP down 0.05%, JPY up 0.06%, CNY Onshore down 0.23%, CNH Offshore down 0.14%, AUD up 0.23%
VIX up 1.33% to 10.64
Gold up 0.02% to $1,323.57
Silver down 0.37% to $17.80
Copper down 1.24% to $294.40
WTI Crude up 0.65% to $49.62
Brent Crude up 0.34% to $55.35
Natural Gas down 0.10% to $3.06
Corn up 0.43% to $3.53/bu
Wheat up 0.51% to $4.46/bu
Bitcoin down 2.69% to $3,793.12
Treasuries 2yr yields are up ~0.0bps at 1.347%, 10yr yields are unch at 2.188% and 30yr yields are up ~0.5bps at 2.792%
Japan 10yr yields 0.020%, up ~1.6bps on the day
France 10yr yields 0.683%, up ~0.2bps on the day
Italy 10yr yields 2.044%, up ~1.4bps on the day
Spain 10yr yields 1.584%, up ~2.4bps on the day
Germany 10yr yields 0.394%, down ~0.4bps on the day

Trading Update

What’s happening this morning? Things are pretty quiet (once again). The China Aug eco data came in soft and that weighed on Asian equities and is placing mild pressure on Eurozone stocks and US S&P futures (S&P futures are down only 1-2 points). Most of the major Asian indices ended lower although there were some pockets of green: TPX -0.32%, NKY -0.29%, Hang Seng -0.42%, SHCOMP -0.38%, Taiwan +0.2%, KOSPI +0.74%, Australia - 0.1%, and India was flattish. Korea was bolstered by tech (Samsung Electronics +1.37%, Hynix +1.45%, LG Display +2.74%, etc.). The major Eurozone indices are trading off small; the SXPP basic resources index is down >1% off China but otherwise there aren’t any other major sources of softness while media and retail are upside standouts (retail is being helped by the Next PLC news). The SNB tweaked its FX language in a slightly more hawkish direction, calling the CHF “highly valued” instead of “significantly overvalued”. Overall the broader macro narrative isn’t shifting dramatically despite China (in fact some see a silver lining in the data as this could make the gov’t more inclined to pursue growth-friendly policies). There were a ton of tax articles in the US but the outlook for that topic remains unchanged (the GOP blueprint is due out during the week of 9/25). The week’s last major (scheduled) catalyst hits at 8:30amET this morning (US Aug CPI) while next week’s main focus is the FOMC decision (Wed 9/20; the messaging around a Dec hike may be more hawkish than the market currently assumes).
Calendar for Thurs 9/14 – the focus will be on the BOE rate decision (7amET), the US CPI for Aug (8:30amET), Thy God Emperor Trump ’s trip to Florida, some analyst meetings (ANSS and GKOS), earnings (JBL and ORCL after the close), and sell-side conferences (Goldman Communacopia, Morgan Stanley Laguna, and RBC Industrials). o US CPI Thurs morning – the latest leg of the SPX rally has been spurred by proreflation forces as risk sentiment welcomed firmer inflation numbers (in China, India, Sweden, and the UK). Thus the US CPI (due out Thurs morning 8/14 at 8:30amET) needs to be at least inline (the St is modeling headline +0.3% M/M and core +0.2% M/M) and mild upside would likely be a net positive. Too much inflation though risks unsettling sentiment and if the Thurs CPI causes 12/13 FOMC FF hike odds to spike back >50% that would likely be met w/equity pressure.
Calendar for Fri 9/15 – the focus will be on the Eurozone trade balance for Jul (5amET), the US Empire Manufacturing index for Sept (8:30amET), US retail sales for Aug (8:30amET), US industrial production for Aug (9:15amET), US Michigan confidence numbers for Sept (10amET), US business inventories for Jul (10amET), and sell-side conferences (Morgan Stanley Laguna).

Top Headlines for Thursday

Economic data/monetary policy recap for Thurs 9/14 – there was a lot of data out this morning. The China data was soft and as a result JPMorgan is revising lower Q3 GDP forecasts for the country (see the full note: http://bit.ly/2x226Wk). IP for Aug came in at +6% (vs. JPM and the St +6.6%), retail sales rose 10.1% (vs. JPM +10.2% and the St +10.5%), and FAI climbed 7.8% YTD as of Aug (vs. JPM +8.3% and the St +8.2%). We revise down our current quarter growth forecast to 6.2%q/q saar (previously 6.6%q/q saar), or 6.7%oya (previously 6.8%oya). Meanwhile, we maintain our 4Q17 forecast at 6.2%q/q saar (or 6.6% in yoy terms), and the full-year growth forecast stays unchanged at 6.8%. Elsewhere on the economic front, Australian jobs data for Aug was solid although the UR held steady at 5.6% (http://bit.ly/2jpRH3x) and Eurozone new auto registration growth accelerated in Aug to +5.6% (vs. +2.7% in Jul). The SNB tweaked its CHF language and said the recent weakening "is helping to reduce, to some extent, the significant overvaluation of the currency" (previously the SNB has lamented the CHF’s “significant overvaluation” http://bit.ly/2eXuwIC). ECB’s Jan Smets said Eurozone inflation appears to have bottomed out (http://nyti.ms/2f8nynT). Greece said it would exceed prior primary budget surplus targets for this year (http://reut.rs/2x2RxUq). o What Thy God Emperor Trump Can Do to Prevent the Next Crash – the Fed doesn’t do enough to restrain out-of-control prices for stocks, houses, and other assets. http://nyti.ms/2eX7IsC o Fed officials admit they’ve lost some inflation credibility – a Bloomberg article recounts recent Fed remarks about how the institution’s credibility on inflation has started to weaken at the margin. Bloomberg. https://bloom.bg/2y0yyru
Bipartisanship in Washington – can it last? Frustrated by the failure to pass repeal/replace, Thy God Emperor Trump has displayed a willingness to work w/Democrats. o Thy God Emperor Trump is extremely eager for a “win” after months of failure and if that requires him to work w/Democrats, so be it. “We learned this summer that keeping 50 or 52 Republicans (in the Senate) is not something that’s reliable,” Marc Short, Thy God Emperor Trump ’s liaison to Congress, told reporters this week. Reuters http://reut.rs/2x3yn0L o Thy God Emperor Trump prioritizes legislative wins over party purity – the new dynamic is creating uncertainty within the GOP ahead of the upcoming tax and budget battles. WSJ. http://on.wsj.com/2eWBspz o Fresh off striking a three-month fiscal deal with “Chuck and Nancy”, Thy God Emperor Trump agreed Wed night to work w/Democrats on a DACA/Dreamers compromise. Thy God Emperor Trump ’s outreach to Dems on immigration represents a “major political gamble” as this topic was the centerpiece of his campaign. Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), an immigration hard-liner and early Thy God Emperor Trump supporter, wrote that if reports of a potential immigration deal are accurate, the president’s “base is blown up, destroyed, irreparable, and disillusioned beyond repair. No promise is credible” – Washington Post http://wapo.st/2y81heI
Taxes – Republicans are pushing forward w/an aggressive tax timeline (a blueprint is due out during the week of 9/25) but the overall plan remains inchoate. o “Thy God Emperor Trump urges quick action on tax plan that’s still in pieces” – the NYT notes that while there is a lot of eagerness for action on the tax front, Republicans are far from aligned on the details and a path through Congress isn’t apparent at the moment. NYT http://nyti.ms/2jpuApI o GOP “shudders” as Thy God Emperor Trump courts Dems on taxes – Republican leaders in Congress are pursuing a delicate tax strategy premised on passing a partisan bill and thus Thy God Emperor Trump ’s flirtation with “Chuck and Nancy” risks upending the effort. Politico http://politi.co/2h4gUfr o Thy God Emperor Trump signals openness to upper-income tax hikes in a bid to secure Democratic support - Thy God Emperor Trump on Wednesday expressed a willingness to raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans. Thy God Emperor Trump met w/lawmakers on Wed and “repeated his willingness to raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans several times”– Roll Call http://bit.ly/2y724fS o How low could the corporate tax rate go? A new study finds that eliminating all corporate tax breaks could only move the rate from ~35% now down to 26% - Washington Post. http://wapo.st/2vU7zNy
Paul Ryan speculation heats up – his job as Speaker seems secure but people are beginning to talk – The Hill. http://bit.ly/2x3NlUm
Healthcare struggles to advance in Congress – a bipartisan initiative to pass legislative aimed at fixing the ACA (rather than replacing it) was dealt a setback on Wed as two groups of Senators released the details of diametrically opposed plans. WSJ. http://on.wsj.com/2waLtdO
North Korea threatens to 'sink' Japan, reduce U.S. to 'ashes and darkness' – Reuters http://reut.rs/2jrIUy4
Russia’s war games sparks NATO alarm – Russia and Belarus are holding massive war games in what will be the largest display of Russian military power since the end of the Cold War. NATO and the West in general are worried that Russia is moving far more troops into Belarus than it intends to withdraw, establishing a permanent military presence in the country. Some are concerned that Moscow will use the exercise as cover for a more aggressive act (such as when Russia used exercises in ’14 to prepare for its annexation of Crimea). NYT http://nyti.ms/2vUXBLV
Venezuela stops accepting USD for oil payments – the gov’t is telling oil traders that it will no longer receive or send payments in dollars – WSJ http://on.wsj.com/2f7zsP9
Volatility spike coming? The NYT profiles a hedge fund positioning for a large spike in volatility. http://nyti.ms/2eWeJd5
Company-specific news from Thurs morning 9/14. There are a few notable items in Europe. Next PLC shares are the top performing stock in the SXXP after raising its full-year earnings guidance. GVC Holdings also has a post-earnings bid. GKN PLC is higher following mgmt. changes. Autoliv shares are spiking ~8% after the co said it would pursue a split. On the downside, Morrison Supermarkets is leading on the SXXP on the downside after reporting while Experian is getting hit following the credit agency sell-off in the US on Wed. Hermes shares are weak after the co warned that a strong euro would weigh on financial results (the Hermes news was discussed in this article http://bit.ly/2y7L0q7). Munich Re is holding in well despite issuing a profit warning related to the US hurricanes.
Company-specific news from Wed night 9/13. There weren’t any major micro headlines. Munich Re (right before the US close on Wed) said the US hurricanes could cause it to post a loss in CQ3 and miss prior full-year guidance. BZH said new home sales/closings may be down Y/Y in its FQ4 as a result of the hurricanes but its overall tone stayed sanguine. EMR reported Aug underlying orders up a relatively healthy 9% (although mgmt. said Harvey/Irma had a neg. impact on business results towards the end of Aug and into Sept). The White House formally blocked the LSCC buyout (which isn’t a shock as CFIUS had already recommended scrapping the transaction). THC is exploring options, including a sale, according to a WSJ article. UNFI posted small EPS upside and CDNS named a new CFO.
AAPL – iPhone carrier discounts muted following the 8/X introductions on Tues – wireless carriers during prior iPhone cycles have been extremely aggressive in offering promotions and discounts but this time around the industry is staying (relatively) disciplined. Deals for the iPhone 8, 8 Plus and X have been pared back from the deals offered for the iPhone 7 – Reuters http://reut.rs/2wrCpMR o Toshiba, AAPL – Apple may contribute ~$3B of equity towards Bain’s purchase of the Toshiba memory business. This could make Toshiba the largest deal in AAPL’s history (exceeding the $3B it paid for Beats) – Bloomberg https://bloom.bg/2y0FGUC
EQT, RICE – DE Shaw is pushing for EQT to complete the RICE deal but then wants to see the combined company pursue a break-up (this contrasts w/Jana which wants to see EQT call off the RICE deal all together) – WSJ. http://on.wsj.com/2vVe56N
ALV to pursue split – the co said it aims to split into two companies under a strategic review announced on Thursday. Reuters http://nyti.ms/2y7O8Cj

Calendar of events to watch for the week of Mon Sept 18

Calendar for the week of 9/18 – the main focus will be the FOMC decision (Wed 9/20). Balance sheet normalization is widely expected to commence coming out of this meeting but the bigger near-term wildcard will be messaging around a Dec hike (the Fed will likely suggest odds for a 12/13 hike that are higher than present market assumptions). The other big area of focus will be on the data front w/the flash PMI readings for Sept from Japan, Europe, and the US hitting Fri morning 9/22. The press will stay filled w/tax-related articles as Republicans gear up for publication of their blueprint (the GOP is set to unveil their tax plan during the week of Mon 9/25). The UN annual meeting kicks off in NYC on Tues 9/19 (Thy God Emperor Trump speaks 9/19); US officials will apparently hold talks on the sidelines of this event on the Iranian nuclear deal.
Calendar for Mon 9/18 – the focus will be on China’s Aug property prices (Mon morning), the US NAHB housing market index for Sept (10amET), analyst meetings (BA), and earnings (SCS after the close).
Calendar for Tues 9/19 – the focus will be on the German ZEW survey for Sept (5amET), opening day of the UN’s Generate Debate in NYC (Thy God Emperor Trump will speak this day at the UN), US eco data (Q2 current account, Aug housing starts, Aug import prices, and Aug building permits at 8:30amET), analyst meetings (AIR Canada, BA, BBY, BIG, and CARB), and earnings (APOG, AZO, and PGR pre-open and ADBE, AIR, ALOG, BBBY, and FDX after the close).
Calendar for Wed 9/20 – the focus will be on US existing home sales for Aug (10amET), the FOMC decision (2pmET press release/supplemental and 2:30pmET press conf.), analyst meetings (PPC), and earnings (GIS pre-open and MLHR after the close).
Calendar for Thurs 9/21 – the focus will be on the BOJ decision (Wed night/Thurs morning), the ECB economic bulletin (4amET), US FHFA home prices for Jul (9amET), the US Leading Index for Jul (9amET), the Eurozone consumer confidence numbers for Sept (10amET), and earnings (MANU pre-open and PSDO, YOGA after the close).
Calendar for Fri 9/22 – the focus will be on the Eurozone flash PMIs for Sept (4amET), the OPEC compliance meeting (Saudi Arabia could make a proposal to monitor exports in addition to production), the US flash PMIs for Sept (9:45amET), a few Fed speakers (Williams, George, and Kaplan), and earnings (FINL and KMX before the open).
Calendar for Sun 9/24 – the focus will be on the German elections.

Catalysts – big events to watch over the coming months

US inflation – the Aug CPI will hit Thurs 9/14.
Russia military exercise in Belarus – 9/14-20.
UN meeting – the UN annual meeting begins Tues 9/19 in NYC (Thy God Emperor Trump speaks 9/19).
Fed meeting – decision out Wed Sept 20. There will be a press conf. and supplemental. The Fed is expected to announce commencement of balance sheet shrinkage at this meeting.
BOJ decision – Thurs morning 9/21
Brexit – May could deliver an important Brexit speech around Thurs 9/21.
Flash PMIs for Sept – Fri 9/22
OPEC/non-OPEC compliance meeting – Sept 22.
German elections – German federal election Sept 24.
US taxes – Republicans expected to publish tax plan during week of Mon 9/25.
Yellen delivers keynote at NABE conference in Cleveland. Tues 9/26. 12pmET.
US inflation – the Aug PCE will hit Fri 9/29.
Catalonia parliament independence vote – Sun 10/1.
China mainland markets closed Mon 10/2-Fri 10/6 for the National Day holiday.
Autos – US Sept auto sales get reported Tues 10/3; Ford/F’s CEO will also be giving a strategic update on that same day (this will be the first major update from the new CEO at Ford).
Yellen delivers opening remarks at Community Banking conf. Wed 10/4. 3:15pmET.
ECB meeting minutes – Thurs 10/5.
WMT analyst meeting – Tues 10/10 (note that KR has an analyst meeting the next day, Wed 10/11).
Fed minutes – minutes from the 9/20 meeting will be released Wed 10/11. 2pmET.
Bank earnings – the CQ3 earnings season kicks off w/Citigroup and JPM Thurs morning 10/12 while BAC, PNC, and WFC all report Fri 10/13.
US inflation – the Sept CPI will hit Fri 10/13.
HON – the co will announce its portfolio review decision before earnings in Oct.
CQ3 earnings – the week of Mon 10/16 is the first busy week of the CQ3 reporting season.
Iran – Thy God Emperor Trump will certify whether Iran is complying w/the nuclear agreement around mid- Oct.
China - the National Congress of the Communist Party of China starts Oct 18.
China Q3 GDP and Sept retail sales, IP, and FAI (Wed night/Thurs morning) – Thurs morning 10/19.
Flash PMIs for Oct – Tues 10/24
ECB meeting/press conf. Thurs Oct 26. The ECB is expected to provide guidance on LSAP tapering at this meeting.
US Q3 GDP report – Fri 10/27
Fed meeting – decision Wed 11/1 (no press conf. or supplemental).
Thy God Emperor Trump trip to China – he is scheduled to visit China in November.
GE – the co will likely hold an analyst meeting in Nov at which it will provide a refresh of its long-term financial guidance.
OPEC meeting – the next formal OPEC leaders meeting is Nov 30 (a decision on extending the production agreement beyond Mar ’18 could be reached at this gathering).
US gov’t funding/debt ceiling – current legislation funds the gov’t and suspends the debt ceiling until 12/8 (the debt ceiling is unlikely to become binding again until “well into” 2018).
Fed meeting – decision Wed Dec 13. There will be a press conf. and supplemental.
ECB meeting/press conf. Thurs Dec 14.

Tech Events – calendar of events coming up over the next few weeks

Goldman Communacopia Conf. Sept 12-14. NYC.
ANSS analyst meeting – Thurs 9/14.
JBL, ORCL earnings – Thurs night 9/14.
ADBE earnings – Tues night 9/19.
BBY, CARB analyst meeting – Tues 9/19
PSDO earnings – Thurs night 9/21
RHT earnings – Mon night 9/25
MU earnings – Tues night 9/26
UBNT analyst meeting – Tues 9/26
AMAT, PANW analyst meeting – Wed 9/27
ACN earnings – Thurs morning 9/28
SGH earnings – Thurs night 9/28
INTU analyst meeting – Tues 10/3
PAYX earnings – Tues morning 10/3
TTD analyst meeting – Wed 10/4
TECD, WDAY analyst meeting – Tues 10/10
BOX, HPQ analyst meeting – Thurs 10/12

Full catalyst list

Thurs Sept 14 – China retail sales, IP, and FAI for Aug (Wed night/Thurs morning)
Thurs Sept 14 – Eurozone auto registration figures for Aug. 2amET.
Thurs Sept 14 – SNB rate decision. 3:30amET.
Thurs Sept 14 – BOE rate decision. 7amET.
Thurs Sept 14 – US CPI for Aug. 8:30amET.
Thurs Sept 14 – analyst meetings: ANSS, GKOS, YUM
Thurs Sept 14 – earnings after the close: JBL, ORCL
Thurs Sept 14 - Goldman Communacopia Conf. Sept 12-14. NYC.
Thurs Sept 14 - Morgan Stanley Laguna Conf. Sept 13-15. Dana Point, CA.
Thurs Sept 14 - RBC Global Industrials Conf. Sept 13-14. Las Vegas.

Fri Sept 15 – Eurozone trade balance for Jul. 5amET.
Fri Sept 15 – US Empire Manufacturing for Sept. 8:30amET.
Fri Sept 15 – US retail sales for Aug. 8:30amET.
Fri Sept 15 – US industrial production for Aug. 9:15amET.
Fri Sept 15 – US Michigan confidence for Sept. 10amET.
Fri Sept 15 – US business inventories for Jul. 10amET.
Fri Sept 15 - Morgan Stanley Laguna Conf. Sept 13-15. Dana Point, CA.

Mon Sept 18 – China Aug property prices (Sun night/Mon morning)
Mon Sept 18 – US NAHB housing market index for Sept. 10amET.
Mon Sept 18 – analyst meetings: BA
Mon Sept 18 – earnings after the close: SCS

Tues Sept 19 – Eurozone/German ZEW survey for Sept. 5amET.
Tues Sept 19 – US current account balance for Q2. 8:30amET.
Tues Sept 19 – US housing starts for Aug. 8:30amET.
Tues Sept 19 – US import prices for Aug. 8:30amET.
Tues Sept 19 – US building permits for Aug. 8:30amET.
Tues Sept 19 – analyst meetings: AIR Canada, BA, BBY, BIG, CARB
Tues Sept 19 – earnings before the open: APOG, AZO, PGR
Tues Sept 19 – earnings after the close: ADBE, AIR, ALOG, BBBY, FDX

Wed Sept 20 – US existing home sales for Aug. 10amET.
Wed Sept 20 – FOMC decision. 2pmET press release and 2:30pmET press conf.
Wed Sept 20 – analyst meetings: PPC
Wed Sept 20 – earnings before the open: GIS
Wed Sept 20 – earnings after the close: MLHR

Thurs Sept 21 – BOJ policy decision (Wed night/Thurs morning).
Thurs Sept 21 – ECB economic bulletin. 4amET.
Thurs Sept 21 – Eurozone consumer confidence for Sept. 10amET.
Thurs Sept 21 – US FHFA home price index for Jul. 9amET.
Thurs Sept 21 – US Leading Index for Aug. 10amET.
Thurs Sept 21 – earnings before the open: MANU
Thurs Sept 21 – earnings after the close: PSDO, YOGA

Fri Sept 22 – Eurozone flash PMIs for Sept. 4amET.
Fri Sept 22 – US flash PMIs for Sept. 9:45amET.
Fri Sept 22 – Fed speakers (Williams, George, Kaplan)
Fri Sept 22 – analyst meetings: Adecco
Fri Sept 22 – earnings before the open: FINL, KMX

Mon Sept 25 – German IFO results for Sept. 4amET.
Mon Sept 25 – US Chicago Fed Index for Aug. 8:30amET.
Mon Sept 25 – US Dallas Fed Index for Sept. 10:30amET.
Mon Sept 25 – analyst meetings: CMS, Total
Mon Sept 25 – earnings after the close: RHT

Tues Sept 26 – US Case-Shiller home price index for Jul. 9amET.
Tues Sept 26 – US new home sales for Aug. 10amET.
Tues Sept 26 – US Conf. Board Consumer Confidence for Sept. 10amET.
Tues Sept 26 – Yellen delivers keynote at NABE conference in Cleveland. 12pmET.
Tues Sept 26 – analyst meetings: Nestle, SPR, UBNT, VAR
Tues Sept 26 – earnings before the open: DRI, FDS, INFO
Tues Sept 26 – earnings after the close: LNDC, MU, NKE, WOR

Wed Sept 27 – China industrial profits for Aug (Tues night/Wed morning)
Wed Sept 27 – Eurozone M3 money supply figures for Aug. 4amET.
Wed Sept 27 – US durable goods for Aug. 8:30amET.
Wed Sept 27 – US pending home sales for Aug. 10amET.
Wed Sept 27 – analyst meetings: AMAT, DLPH, KMX, PANW, SPR
Wed Sept 27 – earnings after the close: PIR

Thurs Sept 28 – Eurozone confidence measures for Sept. 5amET.
Thurs Sept 28 – German inflation for Sept. 8amET.
Thurs Sept 28 – US Q2 data revisions (GDP, PCE, etc.). 8:30amET.
Thurs Sept 28 – US advance goods trade balance for Aug. 8:30amET.
Thurs Sept 28 – analyst meetings: AEE, AFL
Thurs Sept 28 – earnings before the open: ACN, MKC, MTN, RAD
Thurs Sept 28 – earnings after the close: SGH

Fri Sept 29 – China Caixin manufacturing PMI for Sept (Thurs night/Fri morning)
Fri Sept 29 – German jobs numbers for Sept. 3:55amET.
Fri Sept 29 – Eurozone CPI for Sept. 5amET.
Fri Sept 29 – US personal income/spending for Aug. 8:30amET.
Fri Sept 29 – US PCE for Aug. 8:30amET.
Fri Sept 29 – Chicago PMI for Sept. 9:45amET.
Fri Sept 29 – Michigan Confidence for Sept. 10amET.
Fri Sept 29 – analyst meetings: CMP

Sat Sept 30 – China NBS manufacturing and non-manufacturing PMI for Sept (Fri night/Sat morning)

Mon Oct 2 – China mainland markets closed Mon 10/2-Fri 10/6 for the National Day holiday.
Mon Oct 2 – Eurozone manufacturing PMI for Sept. 4amET.
Mon Oct 2 – Eurozone unemployment rate for Aug. 5amET.
Mon Oct 2 – US manufacturing PMI for Sept. 9:45amET.
Mon Oct 2 – US manufacturing ISM for Sept. 10amET.
Mon Oct 2 – US construction spending for Aug. 10amET.

Tues Oct 3 – Eurozone PPI for Aug. 5amET.
Tues Oct 3 – US auto sales for Sept.
Tues Oct 3 – analyst meetings: F/Ford (Ford CEO to host strategic update), INTU, SHW
Tues Oct 3 – earnings before the open: PAYX

Wed Oct 4 – Eurozone services PMI for Sept. 4amET.
Wed Oct 4 – Eurozone retail sales for Aug. 5amET.
Wed Oct 4 – RBI rate decision. 5amET.
Wed Oct 4 – US ADP jobs report for Sept. 8:15amET.
Wed Oct 4 – US services PMI for Sept. 9:45amET.
Wed Oct 4 – US non-manufacturing ISM for Sept. 10amET.
Wed Oct 4 – Yellen delivers opening remarks at Community Banking conf. 3:15pmET.
Wed Oct 4 – analyst meetings: MNK, TTD
Wed Oct 4 – earnings before the open: MON, PEP
Wed Oct 4 – earnings after the close: RECN

Thurs Oct 5 – ECB meeting minutes. 7:30amET.
Thurs Oct 5 – US factory orders and durable goods for Aug. 10amET.
Thurs Oct 5 – analyst meetings: BKH, CLX, LUK
Thurs Oct 5 – earnings before the open: STZ
Thurs Oct 5 – earnings after the close: COST, YUMC

Fri Oct 6 – German factory orders for Aug. 2amET.
Fri Oct 6 – US jobs report for Sept. 8:30amET.
Fri Oct 6 – US wholesale inventories/trade sales for Aug. 10amET.
Fri Oct 6 – US consumer credit for Aug. 3pmET.

Sat Oct 7 – China FX reserves for Sept (Fri night/Sat morning)

Mon Oct 9 – China Caixin services PMI for Sept (Sun night/Mon morning)
Mon Oct 9 – German industrial production for Aug. 2amET.
Mon Oct 9 – Columbus Day holiday in the US (equities will be open while fixed income is closed).

Tues Oct 10 – German trade balance for Aug. 2amET.
Tues Oct 10 – analyst meetings: TECD, WDAY, WMT
Tues Oct 10 – PG shareholder meeting

Wed Oct 11 – US JOLTs report for Aug. 10amET.
Wed Oct 11 – Fed minutes from the Sept 20 meeting (2pmET).
Wed Oct 11 – analyst meetings: KR
Wed Oct 11 – earnings before the open: FAST

Thurs Oct 12 – Eurozone industrial production for Aug. 5amET.
Thurs Oct 12 – US PPI for Sept. 8:30amET.
Thurs Oct 12 – analyst meetings: BOX, HPQ
Thurs Oct 12 – earnings before the open: C, JPM, Tata Consultancy.

Fri Oct 13 – China imports/exports for Sept (Thurs night/Fri morning)
Fri Oct 13 – US CPI for Sept. 8:30amET.
Fri Oct 13 – US retail sales for Sept. 8:30amET.
Fri Oct 13 – US Michigan Sentiment for Oct. 10amET.
Fri Oct 13 – US business inventories for Aug. 10amET.
Fri Oct 13 – analyst meetings: SAFM
Fri Oct 13 – European trading updates: Man Group
Fri Oct 13 – earnings before the open: BAC, PNC, WFC

Mon Oct 16 – China CPI/PPI for Sept (Sun night/Mon morning)
Mon Oct 16 – Eurozone trade balance for Aug. 5amET.

Tues Oct 17 – Eurozone Sept auto registrations. 2amET.
Tues Oct 17 – German ZEW survey results for Oct. 5amET.
Tues Oct 17 – US import prices for Sept. 8:30amET.
Tues Oct 17 – US industrial production for Sept. 9:15amET.
Tues Oct 17 – US NAHB housing index for Oct. 10amET.

Wed Oct 18 – US housing starts for Sept. 8:30amET.
Wed Oct 18 – US building permits fro Sept. 8:30amET.
Wed Oct 18 – US Beige Book. 2pmET.

Thurs Oct 19 – China Q3 GDP and Sept retail sales, IP, and FAI (Wed night/Thurs morning)
Thurs Oct 19 – US Leading Index for Sept. 10amET.

Fri Oct 20 – US existing home sales for Sept. 10amET.

Mon Oct 23 – US Chicago Fed Activity Index for Sept. 8:30amET.

Tues Oct 24 – Eurozone flash PMIs for Oct. 4amET.
Tues Oct 24 – US flash PMIs for Oct. 9:45amET.

Wed Oct 25 – US durable goods for Sept. 8:30amET.
Wed Oct 25 – US FHFA home price index for Aug. 9amET.
Wed Oct 25 – US new home sales for Sept. 10amET.

Thurs Oct 26 – US wholesale inventories for Sept. 8:30amET.
Thurs Oct 26 – US advance goods trade balance for Sept. 8:30amET.
Thurs Oct 26 – US pending home sales for Sept. 10amET.

Fri Oct 27 – US Q3 GDP, personal consumption, and core PCE for Q3. 8:30amET.
Fri Oct 27 – US Michigan Confidence numbers for Oct. 10amET.

J.P. Morgan Market Intelligence is a product of the Institutional Equities Sales and Trading desk of J.P. Morgan Securities LLC and the intellectual property thereof. It is not a product of the Research Department and is intended for distribution to institutional and professional customers only and is not intended for retail customer use. It may not be reproduced, redistributed or transmitted, in whole or in part, without J.P. Morgan’s consent.

gambling income tax rate in india video

How are Lottery Winnings Taxed in India? The tax applies to any lottery winning, which is above Rs 10,000 from online casinos, according to the Income Tax Act of 1961. Under section 115B, it’s written that any money from better, gambling, lotteries, crossword puzzles, or any other game of this nature shall be taxed at a uniform rate of 30% (addition of 1.2% cess). When you list your income source statement, the lottery winning money comes under the heading of ‘Other Sources Income.’ What is the rate of Income Tax payable on winnings from any card games, lotteries or other gaming activities? As per Section 115BB of the Income Tax Act the current rate of Income Tax (as on financial year 2013-14) on poker winnings or winnings from any such card games etc. is 30% . Earnings from online gambling and games are taxable at a flat rate of 30% plus cess, which mounts to 31.2% of the net earnings. There is no exemption of the basic limit for earnings from games Win rate 97.87%. Imperial Wealth. OUR FAVORITE GAMES . 98.82%. You need to visit websites that allow for real money play. Visit and create an account to start playing for real. Play now Read Review. 97.12%. Real Money Slots Online Video Poker Online Craps Gambling Income Tax India Online Baccarat Online Blackjack Online Roulette Online Highest Payout Casino Games Keno Online Sic Bo Online This income from games or gambling is categorized as the income from other sources. You have to clarify any doubt about the taxes on gambling wins in India and make a good decision to be successful in your gambling activities. Conclusion You may like to know about the percentage of tax you have to pay on your winnings from casinos or TV shows. Hence, the ultimate tax rate for all casino and gambling earnings in India becomes 30% + 0.04×30% = 31.2%. Are There Regional Differences in Gambling Taxation? Under the Act, any such income needs to be announced exclusively while filing income tax returns. The Tax levied on each cash reward equals a net amount of 31.2% including cess. The division is of a 30% flat rate plus cess. It should always be remembered that this Tax is levied regardless of the amount, game, or platform- every player must pay Before entering into the question of online betting or gambling, let us examine whether ‘gambling or betting’ per se is legal or illegal in India. There are no central laws against gambling or betting in India. The Public Gambling Act, 1867 does not prohibit gambling or betting, it merely prohibits and prescribes punishment Act to provide for the ‘punishment of public gambling’ and the The rules still in place are particularly for brick and mortar casinos imposed by the British in 1867. However, according to the Income Tax Department of India, online gambling has specific laws when it comes to taxation. Let’s delve into the details regarding Tax Laws for Online Gambling in India. History of Gambling Laws in India The figure has changed over the years as far as the real percentage is concerned. Tax regulations place a 30 percent tax rate on all casino winnings, lotteries, crossword puzzles, races, poker games and more (basically all sorts of gaming or betting).

How Online Gambling is Taxed in India

gambling income tax rate in india

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PANDEMIC UPDATE - 26 January 2021