The Grand Duchy of Luxembourg is a founding member of the EU, but it's also a rogue state, enabling massive corruption throughout the trading bloc; while Cyprus and Malta will sell any corrupt robber-baron EU citizenship, it's Luxembourg that leads in laundering their money.
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As the @TaxJusticeNet's @nickshaxson memorably put it, Luxembourg is "a criminal enterprise with a country attached" - a country where corporations are guaranteed "an easy ride on taxes, disclosure, financial regulations, and criminal enforcement."
2014's #Luxleaks exposed some of the worst corruption, whereby @PwC worked with Luxembourg officials to secure illegal tax benefits for major corporations and the world's richest people.
Luxleaks lead to a 2018 EU directive that required member states to publish registers of the true owners of the companies they registered.
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Luxembourg published theirs in 2019, and @lemondefr partnered with ten media orgs for a year-long analysis of the register, which was published this week: #Openlux. The findings reveal that Luxleaks was just the tip of the iceberg.
Luxembourg claims that it primarily registers companies to serve Luxembourgers, but 90% of the country's companies are controlled by foreigners, lead by the French, who control 17,000 Lux companies.
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All told, Luxembourg is home to 55,000 offsore companies with more than €6t in assets. Much of this wealth belongs to Russian oligarchs, Italian mafiosi, corrupt latinamerican leaders, and far-right EU parties like Italy's Lega.
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Whole neighborhoods in large cities like London and Berlin are owned by Lux companies, empty safe-deposit boxes ultimately controlled by the wealthiest, most corrupt plutes of 157 countries.
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279 of the world's ~2,000 billionaires park their money in Luxembourg through shell companies. But the country only employs 59 enforcers charged with monitoring compliance with corporate transparency laws. All told, the country's finance regulator has a mere 900 employees.
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Thus, the secrets unearthed through Openlux only represent a fraction of the country's corruption - those companies that complied with the registration laws rather than risking enforcement by the minuscule cohort of vastly outnumbered legal enforcers.
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Personnel are policy: when Trump appointed the ex-Verizon lawyer @AjitPai to run the @FCC, he set in motion a series of maneuvers that would compromise broadband access for all Americans, but especially the poorest people in the country.
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From the start, Pai's misconduct was breathtaking. His blockbuster manoeuvre was killing #NetNeutrality on the basis of obviously fraudulent, bulk-submitted comments from stolen identities and fake email addresses.
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Pai's act of neutracide has far-reaching consequences for everyone who depends on the internet, but other Pai policies were more narrowly targeted, raining down especially grave harms on the poorest, most vulnerable people in the country.
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Last week, Aaron Epstein, a 90-year-old legendary Angeleno, took out ads in the WSJ shaming AT&T for the abysmal quality of the broadband service he gets in North Hollywood.
Epstein pointed out that his neighbors are locked-down film industry professionals, totally dependent on fast internet for their livelihoods - but they are stuck with 3mpbs DSL.
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It worked: a week later, after national media attention, Epstein has 300mbps symmetrical fiber. AT&T figured that in this one instance, doing its job was more important than protecting its shareholders.
Republican North Dakota legislators have introduced #SB2333, a bill that prohibits large tech companies from locking their users into a single app store or payment processor.
While his has implications for Android and other large tech platforms, its most immediate and far-reaching effects with be on Apple, whose Ios platform uses lock-in to monopolize both apps and payments (and another domain, not mentioned in the bill: repairs).
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Predictably, this has thrown Apple into a fury, with Apple's privacy chief @erikn telling the SD legislature that Apple uses its monopoly over the app store to protect its users' privacy and security.
Back in the early 2010s, people started falling into open sewer entrances in New York City and other large metros - because a China-driven spike in the price of scrap metal, combined with post-2008 unemployment, gave rise to an army of metal-thieves.
A decade later, there's a new precarity- and bubble-fuelled metal-theft epidemic: stealing catalytic converters out of parked cars to harvest their palladium and rhodium for re-use in the global auto-sector, which is facing strict emissions controls.
Palladium and rhodium prices are soaring: palladium is up from $500/oz in 2016 to $2000-$2500/oz; rhodium rose from $640/oz to $21,900/oz (!). This puts a serious dent in auto profits - in 2019, the industry spent an extra $18b on metals (it was higher in 2020).
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Adam Curtis is a brilliant documentarian, and films like Hypernormalization and series like All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace had a profound effect on my thinking about politics, technology and human thriving.
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In this interview with The @idler's @TWHodgkinson, Curtis lays out a compact, incisive and important critique of the big social media platforms - and of their critics, who give these companies far too much credit.
Curtis puts Big Tech's self-serving boasts about how good it is at manipulating public opinion in the same bucket as other outlandish claims of secret, astounding accomplishments, such as those made by British spy agencies.
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