Loss of liberty and The Patriot Act

Date:   10/18/2005 9:44:01 PM ( 19 y ago)

COMMENT: You Are Naked Before the World.

Dear A-Letter Reader:
Some years ago I was a guest at a reception held in Donald Trump's
ornate Palm Beach mansion, Mar-a-Lago, formerly the winter home of the
late Marjorie Merriweather Post, heiress to the Post cereal fortune.

Trump rents out this ornate 1920's palace for those who can afford it,
and that evening my host was Bank Julius Baer who were having their annual 'thank
you' bash for the leading Swiss private bank's US clients - folks who
have a net worth of millions in order to qualify. (I was there as editor of
The A-Letter, not as a bank client!)

At the event a comment was made by one of my hosts, Raymond Baer of
Bank Julius Baer in Zurich. Speaking of the EU's attempt to coerce
Switzerland into ending its centuries old tradition of banking secrecy,
Mr. Baer said:: "As a human being, I believe financial privacy is a
fundamental right. I don't have to sacrifice my financial privacy on the
altar of transparency."

Well, Switzerland still maintains its financial secrecy but there's no
longer any privacy in America. The PATRIOT Act requires banks, financial
institutions and every business to disclose account information demanded
in any money laundering investigation within 120 hours. And if a banker
informs a client that he is under investigation, the banker risks going
to jail.

There was a time in the US and other major nations when financial
privacy was a given. In those long gone days your banker was a person
of discretion who would never discuss your financial affairs with
anyone, certainly not government agents, without a court order.

Today your US banker is a government spy, obliged to report daily
on any "suspicious activities" to the federal money police. Under the
PATRIOT Act, government agents can secretly nose through your
finances and even freeze your assets without even charging you with
a crime.

Not content to abolish financial privacy, the US and the UK have both
decided that your personal privacy must also end, that government will
force you to become a number with an ID card that the bureaucracy
will use to track you from birth to death.

In the US this idiocy has been imposed by Congress in the "REAL ID
Act" that turns state motor vehicle agencies into issuers of individual
identity cards that will have all sorts of biometric and other very
personal data about you.

In the UK the Labour Party wants everyone to have similar cards for
the first time since they were temporarily introduced when the German
Army was massing on the French coast in 1940. They were abandoned
after the Second World War because, as the government said, they
interfered with civil liberties. But now the UK police want to be able
to trace every move so that every Brit is easy to monitor.

An A-Letter reader wrote to describe the difficult time he has had
after repeatedly refusing to give out his US Social Security number,
even being denied medical treatment. Says he: "We're coming to the
point where it'll be impossible to live normally without ubiquitous
unprotected disclosure to anyone handling your money, to get medical
treatment, to travel and to be able to drive a car, to be able to buy
things." At every turn Americans will be forced to be bar coded
with our SS number or show our government-issued 'REAL ID card.'
Meanwhile, government, big business and banks have entered into
unholy deals to compile personal dossiers on each of us, selling and
trading our personal data for whatever reason they choose.

The saddest aspect of all this is that most people don't seem to give a
damn that they are being stripped naked, graded, and categorized
without even knowing it -- until the try to get a mortgage, rent a car
or open a bank account and are rejected.

Dear friends, good sense dictates that you reorder your wealth and
assets so that a reasonable portion is located in a jurisdiction where
privacy is guaranteed by law. That's why you should have an offshore
bank account, possibly an asset protection trust, and consider making
that nation a base for your business or profession. You may even want
to consider moving to such a blessed country. There still are such
places -- and we can tell you where they are and how to get there.

Until then, you're at the mercy of government and private snoops,
standing naked before the world. Feel that chill draft yet? You will.

That's the way it looks from here.
BOB BAUMAN, Editor



 

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