Eideard

The chief of India’s federal investigation agency says Indians have illegally deposited an estimated $500bn in overseas tax havens.

Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) director AP Singh said Indians were the largest depositors in foreign banks. Funds were being sent to tax havens such as Mauritius, Switzerland, Lichtenstein and the British Virgin Islands among others, he said…

Mr Singh was speaking at the opening on Monday of the first Interpol global programme on anti-corruption and asset recovery in the Indian capital, Delhi…

Mr Singh said getting information about such illegal transactions was a time-consuming and expensive process as each country where money had been sent had to be approached for help with investigations.

He said there was a lack of political will in the tax havens to part with any information because they were aware of the extent to which their economies had become “geared to this flow of illegal capitals from the poorer countries”…

In a report in November 2010 the US-based group, Global Financial Integrity…India’s underground economy accounted for 50% of the country’s gross domestic product, it said. The report said the illicit outflows of money had increased after economic reforms began in 1991.

I know it ain’t ever easy to get nations to cooperate when a significant portion of their economy is designed to aid criminal activities. But, that is exactly the context which should make penalties easy to establish in the home country.

Gee, all you need is honest politicians in your own government to pass the laws.

Differences? Well, Mueller prefers a .40 calibre Glock

Private information about Google users was demanded by governments or police a total of 14,201 times in 26 developed countries in the last six months of last year, according to figures released for the first time by the internet giant…

In an effort to highlight the amount of online censorship that exists, Google disclosed that it had received more requests from the United States than anywhere else – and that it complied with anywhere from three-quarters to more than 90% of the requests depending on which country they were made in…

Google began releasing its half-yearly Transparency Report in April 2010 as a way to highlight state censorship of the internet. “For the first time, we’re disclosing the reasons behind requests for content removal and the percentages of user data requests we comply with, in whole or in part,” a Google spokesman said…

The figures show that Brazil still leads the way in requesting that Google removes content from its services, with 263 orders, ahead of South Korea, Germany, Libya and India…

Google also, for the first time, revealed that it had received no content removal requests from Chinese authorities in the latter part of 2010. Google began redirecting Chinese users to its uncensored Hong Kong site in June 2010 amid allegations of state spying.

No surprises here for me. Considering it’s been 47 years since the first time I had a couple of FBI agents show up where I worked in an attempt to scare me off from continued opposition to the VietNam War.

Over the years you develop a bit of a callus on the bits of your freedom that stick out and are abraded by hypocrites in and out of government who prattle about this land of liberty. The Patriot Act is only something new and threatening to those who’ve never gotten off their rusty dusty and offered public dissent to American bigotry, foreign policy and snoops in general.

Humans are incredibly cooperative, but why do people cooperate and how is cooperation maintained? A new research study by UCLA anthropology professor Robert Boyd and his colleagues from the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico suggests cooperation in large groups is maintained by punishment…

Previous models of cooperation assumed that punishment of free-riders was uncoordinated and unconditional. One problem with these models was that the costs associated with punishment were often higher than the gains of cooperation. Thus, the cost of one group member’s punishing a free-rider would be substantial and would not overweigh the gains achieved through increased cooperation…

To address the problem, Boyd and his colleagues changed the assumptions built into previous cooperation/punishment models. First, they allowed for punishment to be coordinated among group members. In their model, group members could signal their willingness to punish someone who was not participating in the group, but punishment would only occur if it was coordinated. This meant the cost of punishing a free-rider would be distributed across members and would not be higher than the cost of gains achieved through increased cooperation.

Second, the researchers allowed for the cost of punishing a free-rider to decline as the number of punishers increased. Boyd explained that this new model was “catching up with common sense” because these two assumptions exist in reality.

Their model had three stages in which a large group of unrelated individuals interacted repeatedly. The first stage was a signaling stage where group members could signal their intent to punish. In the second stage, group members could choose to cooperate or not. The final stage was a punishment stage when group members could punish other group members.

The results of their model look a lot like what is seen in most human societies, where individuals meet and decide whether and how to punish group members who are not cooperating. This is coordinated punishment where group members signal their intent to punish, only punish when a threshold has been met and share the costs of punishing.

I’m not too certain about this one. It’s an interesting start, though.

No doubt others will have different opinions – and wonder if different methods of analysis and sampling might offer different results?

The arrogance of the Bush-Cheney White House continues unabated – at least the Cheney half – even though they were kicked out the door months ago.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney said he might refuse to speak with a prosecutor investigating suspected CIA prisoner abuses, a probe he branded as political and bad for national security…

Asked whether he would talk to prosecutor John Durham if eventually sought out, Cheney told “Fox News Sunday”: “It will depend on the circumstances and what I think their activities are really involved in…”

Cheney said he did not know at the time which methods were used in specific cases but defended the interrogators, saying “the enhanced interrogation techniques were absolutely essential in saving thousands of American lives…”

On Sunday, Republican lawmakers renewed their concerns about the investigation while one of Obama’s key allies sought to distance the president from Holder’s decision…

Prominent Republicans including Senator John McCain, a former presidential candidate and torture survivor during the Vietnam War, said they were concerned about the investigation’s impact on morale at the CIA.

A Washington Post report on Sunday cited former intelligence officials saying CIA morale was sagging.

I’ve said it before. I’ll say it, again. If Christians hadn’t beaten them to it – the Republican Party would have invented hypocrisy for them.

All these creeps who maunder about Law and Order at election time are confident that the Law part doesn’t apply to them. They needn’t obey or answer questions or even consider cooperating with lawful investigations because they are above the law.

Personally, I don’t mind this view at all

With the aim of ending a regulatory turf war, U.S. government agencies have said they would work together to cut redtape and spur development of offshore renewable energy projects.

Under the agreement, the Interior Department will have jurisdiction over offshore wind and solar energy projects, while the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission will oversee offshore projects that generate electricity from wave and tidal currents.

“This agreement will help sweep aside red tape…our renewable energy is too important for bureaucratic turf battles to slow down our progress,” said Interior Secretary Ken Salazar.

President Barrack Obama has made developing alternative energy sources a centerpiece of his new administration but needs cooperation among a host of agencies to spur development and reach the goal of doubling renewable energy production over the next three years…

Staff at both agencies have been directed to develop a memorandum of understanding that formally spells out the process for issuing permits and licenses for offshore renewable energy projects.

Now, the fun can begin – dealing with vested interests that have neither understanding of modern priorities nor any willingness to step ahead of parochial boundaries.

Daylife/Reuters Pictures

Declaring that “we hope you won’t make the same mistakes we made,” Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton invited China to join the United States in an ambitious effort to curb greenhouse gases, as she toured an energy-efficient power plant in Beijing.

“When we were industrializing and growing, we didn’t know any better; neither did Europe,” Clinton said. “Now we’re smart enough to figure out how to have the right kind of growth.”

The gas-fired power plant, which uses sophisticated turbines made by General Electric, is nearly twice as efficient as the coal-fired plants that supply much of China’s electricity and that helped vault China past the United States as the world’s leading emitter of carbon dioxide. [I have more to offer on that last sentence. Remind me.]

The Obama administration hopes to make climate change the centerpiece of a broader, more vigorous engagement with China. For Clinton, the two-day stop in Beijing at the end of a weeklong Asian tour, represents an effort to put her own stamp on a relationship that was dominated by the Treasury Department in the latter years of the Bush administration.

“The opportunities for us to work together are unmatched anywhere in the world,” Clinton declared, on a hectic day filled with meetings with President Hu Jintao and other top Chinese officials…

On the global economic crisis, the two governments said they would work together to chart a recovery. Clinton said she expected to see changes in the economic relationship between China, with its high savings rate, and the United States, with its heavy borrowing.

Still, some China experts say they believe that climate change can give relations between the countries fresh energy. The White House has paid close attention to a report by the Asia Society and the Pew Center for Global Climate Change, which offers a road map for cooperation.

Perish the thought we finally have people in our government who may have read Leontiev. I doubt if they’ve read much of Deng Xiaoping. But, then, the Russians – especially Gorbachev – never even read Kruschev.

Commerce and competition can be treated as commerce and cooperation when nations and government reach maturity. Maturity doesn’t mean they stop learning – as the Chinese have demonstrated. I don’t know what to say about the United States because we’re not anywhere near maturity, yet.