WTF Headline Of The Day: Tax-Cheating IRS Staff Got Bonuses | Zero Hedge

WTF Headline Of The Day: Tax-Cheating IRS Staff Got Bonuses | Zero Hedge



if you are a non-government-employee who doesn't pay your taxes, you get
jail and accounts frozen... but if you're an IRS employee... you get a
fucking bonus!!!

Jana Pittman - poster child of the age of entitlement

It seems the offensive Jana Pittman has no other plan for the rest of her life than to have the Australian taxpayer bankroll her olympic twaffling.

If she wants to spend the next ten years trying to paper over her charisma-less media presence and parlay her "Australian personal best" performances into a career with, let's say hypothetically, Channel 7... Let her.

But why does public money support her and the legion of other sports failures?

Coming 14th is only winning in the Charlie Sheen sense.

Olympic crap is fine for the obsessive compulsive people who do it or crush their children into it, and I guess for the sad fuckers who watch it, but why should any part of it receive public money? THAT is a disgrace.

ASIC gives up on Offset Alpine mystery | The Australian

ASIC gives up on Offset Alpine mystery | The Australian



THE corporate regulator has given up
the fight to uncover the mystery of who owned a secret parcel of Offset
Alpine shares that soared in value after a fire at the company's
printing plant in 1993 - one of the biggest corporate scandals in recent
history. 






The Australian Securities & Investments Commission has decided
to end overseas court cases and its wider investigation into deceased
stockbroker Rene Rivkin, businessman Trevor Kennedy and former Labor
politician Graham Richardson.



After the death of Rivkin in 2005,
Mr Kennedy, a former Qantas director, and Mr Richardson, an ALP
powerbroker, became the focus of the legal pursuit.



In recent years, ASIC had tried, unsuccessfully, to obtain documents which may have linked offshore companies to Mr Kennedy.



ASIC's
decision to end its legal actions leaves Mr Richardson and Mr Kennedy
in the clear. Both have always denied ownership of the parcel of shares.



ASIC will not recommend any criminal charges be laid and no fines will be imposed.






The backdown comes after ASIC spent millions of dollars on a global
hunt in countries such as England, Switzerland, the Bahamas and the Isle
of Man in a bid to determine whether it could gather enough evidence to
lay charges of perjury or other civil charges relating to the
shareholding. But in a recent court judgment obtained by The Weekend
Australian, ASIC was criticised in one legal action for changing its
position, which was described as "at best, highly confused, inconsistent
and deeply unsatisfactory on the papers".



***





The opening scene – be it fact or fiction – is Christmas Eve 1993; an
old printing plant in Silverwater goes up in smoke. It’s one of those
rare nights in the year the presses aren’t running, so there’s no one at
work to put out the fire. The thermal alarm is triggered at 11.04 pm,
and five minutes later, by the time the first engine arrives, the blaze
is so fierce it’s too late to stop it. With wooden pallets, rolls of
paper and gallons of flammable solvents to fuel the conflagration,
orange flames light up the sky for miles around. By daybreak, the roof
has collapsed and $3 million worthf of printing plant has been
destroyed.



In the aftermath, anyone who is lucky enough to hold
Offset Alpine shares gets a lovely Christmas present, because the
antiquated presses are insured for more than ten times their actual
value. Two months before the fire, the company has upgraded its
insurance policy and taken out new-for-old cover that indemnifies it for
loss of profits. The eventual payout from the disaster will come to $53
million, or more than three times what a small company controlled by
Rene Rivkin has just paid Kerry Packer for the whole shebang.



Thus
the scene is set for 16 years of action in which police and journalists
in Sydney try to solve two big mysteries. The first: Was the fire
deliberately lit and if so who was responsible? And the second: Who has
made money out of the rocketing share price and, in particular, who owns
a secret parcel of stock worth $26 million that is held by a couple of
Swiss banks.

*

In the first few days after
the fire it became clear that arson would be impossible to prove,
because the damage was so great that any potential evidence had been
destroyed. The police informed the NSW State Coroner that the factory’s
intruder alarm had not been working, but also reported no sign of forced
entry and no trace of accelerants. As far as could be divined, the fire
had started in a metal bin containing chicken bones and solvent-soaked
rags. In the afternoon before the fire, there had been a barbecue on the
factory floor; it was possible that smouldering ashes had been tipped
into the bin and that these had started the blaze.



Intriguingly,
the official police report revealed that an anonymous note had been sent
to the insurance company’s fire investigator. Typewritten on one sheet
of paper, it pointed a finger at “the owner’s father” at Offset Alpine
and claimed a similar blaze had destroyed his El Telegraph
Lebanese newspaper in Marrickville a decade earlier. This person was
identified as the ALP powerbroker Eddie Obeid, who had been offered the
company by Packer before the sale to Rivkin and whose son Paul was a
director, but who did not in fact own any shares.



 http://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2010/june/1278297076/paul-barry/fire-walk-me



***



Graham "Operation Wallah" Richardson has form. And so it is little surprise that he is still gilding the lily for Thomson and the rest of the ALP / unionist scum.

Hating the Abbott government II | Catallaxy Files

Hating the Abbott government II | Catallaxy Files

As I’ve argued before many bureaucrats and government agencies seem to have taken the view that it is their job to take on the government.

No doubt, next week some other government agency will step up and belt the Abbott government for good measure.

To be fair, it has taken more than a week – but, I suppose, we can’t
expect too much over the summer break. Nonetheless it has happened as
Nick Cater explained in the Australian:

In December, at a forum of health ministers from
Australia and New Zealand, assistant Health Minister Fiona Nash made it
clear that she was sceptical about a plan to place a health star rating
on the front of food packets.

She was concerned that the Regulatory Impact Statement, requested by
the Office of Best Practice and Regulation in the middle of last year,
had not been produced. Nash ordered the department to calculate both
costs and benefits and to report back to the forum in June.

The Blob was having none of it. Kathy Dennis, the assistant secretary
in charge of the Healthy Living and Food Policy branch, decided to
press ahead anyway.

Two weeks ago, the department launched a website,
www.healthstarrating.com.au, explaining the forthcoming health star
rating system that the minister had yet to approve.


A ministerial adviser contacted Dennis expressing the minister’s
concern, but the website remained in place. Nash’s chief of staff,
Alastair Furnival, called Dennis to reinforce the message. Dennis stuck
to her guns.

The minister was obliged to take the matter to the acting head of the
department, Mark Booth. On Booth’s instructions, the website was taken
down and Dennis was moved to other duties.

That is bad enough – but get the next part of the story:

The excuse for the outbreak of insubordination, if you
believe The Guardian, was that bureaucrats believed they answered to a
ministerial forum (which includes, incidentally, New Zealand’s Health
Minister Tony Ryall) not Nash, the minister accountable to the
Commonwealth Parliament.

The fact that Australian public servants could even imagine that they
are not accountable to the Australian government, or the minister, is
astonishing. That is a huge governance failure. Now maybe the previous
government led them to that view – although I seriously doubt that.




Now Kathy Dennis should be sacked – and several of her mates too for
good measure. At present the Abbott government does not have control
over the bureaucracy. As Nick tells us:

The mutiny at Sirius House is not an isolated case. The progressive establishment clearly has it in for the Abbott government.

Across the board, from the Climate Change Commission to the ABC, the
Human Rights Commission and even Infrastructure Australia, all are
openly hostile to the popularly elected government.

Unfortunately the Liberals have a history of weakness in this area.
Failing to sack Ken Henry in 2007 was a huge mistake – that we all came
to regret, and pay for, through his advice during the GFC, his mining
tax proposal etc.

Black Magic: when Magic Negro thinking leads to white death (ie all the time)

Censored News: Black woman kills 12 y.o. white boy with blow torch | Fellowship of the Minds

Censored News: Black woman kills 12 y.o. white boy with blow torch

Posted on August 16, 2013 by Dr. Eowyn | 23 Comments

Jonathan Foster (l); Mona Nelson (r). Would the media report this if Foster wore a hoodie?

We couldn’t escape the media’s 24-7 coverage of the death of
17-year-old 5′ 11″ black teen Trayvon Martin and the trial of his
shooter,



half-Hispanic George Zimmerman.





 But have you heard or seen news
about a 44-year-old black woman
named Mona Nelson who is on trial for the murder-by-blow-torch of a
12-year-old white Texas boy, Jonathan Foster?




Even worse, Nelson committed the murder more than 2½ years ago, on Christmas Eve 2010 — but we’d heard/seen NOTHING about this.




That’s because in Obama’s
America, blacks now enjoy “black skin privilege” and Big Media simply
turn a blind eye to black crimes, especially black-on-white crimes.

What are the ACCC and police doing? | Catallaxy Files

What are the ACCC and police doing? | Catallaxy Files



Grace Collier has
an important piece in the Australian today where she blows the whistle
on some of the practices in the Australian construction industry.  She
focuses particularly the egregious (surely illegal?) behaviour of head
contractors forcing subcontractors into damaging (often bankrupting)
arrangements with their workers because the CFMEU has insisted this
happen (so-called ‘jump up’ clauses).




She also raises the issues of why the ACCC does not intervene or the
police act to remove picketers from blocking access to businesses.




You will all be pleased to know that the ACCC’s highest priority at the moment is on-line restaurant reviews.  In
the meantime, the rights of honest business people are being crushed,
businesses are destroyed, lawlessness is encouraged and construction
costs are significantly inflated.  Good one, Rod.



***



ACCC needs to be abolished. Commonwealth Solicitor General should be handling trade practice and false and misleading advertising, investigation should be by department or federal police. I know, it's insane to suggest the AFP actually DO something... But hey.

Spirit of Mawson Expedition: the food situation – Shub Niggurath Climate

Spirit of Mawson Expedition: the food situation – Shub Niggurath Climate

The food situation highlights an important conflict. If this were a hardy science team, they could have waited out the freeze. Instead these were tourists under scientists’ care. By every conservative estimate, the tourists funded the bulk of the expedition. (If one hypothetically assumes $16,500 paid by each of the 52 evacuees, it comes to $858,000). The spectre of feeding their patrons mince beef rations for an indefinite length of time, which the Shokalskiy crew was happy to receive, must have weighed on the science team’s minds.

As predicted, the vessel freed itself when the winds changed. As the precautionary evacuation got underway, fate withdrew its hands. It instead followed the boarding party on the Aurora Australis, sending another storm her way.

From the the hasty diversion of the Aurora Australis to the dangerous helicopter missions, the moves made have been a reactionary mess. As Plazaeme notes, ‘fear and precipitation seldom come cheap’.