GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – A coincidence? In the process of researching Barry Callebaut and Magnum ice cream this morning for a business story on the new long-term partnership between the Zurich chocolate company and Unilever I visited the Magnum Facebook page. Wow! 2.5 million people like the page. That is impressive, no matter what they have done to achieve it, but equally impressive is the thought that of that much ice cream being eaten regularly enough to turn them into fans.

I went to my freezer to see if by any chance we had some, but no luck. I fancy trying out one of the new Ghana chocolate ones, mmm. A 10-minute walk up to the local gas station and back probably burns off enough calories to offset half of one of these; I’m willing to check it out tomorrow.

And then a few minutes later I had this spam message, and I wonder if Facebook stats are headed in the same manipulated direction as too many web site stats: “Buy 2,000 guaranteed Facebook fans worldwide. Process completed in 1-2 days. All fans are 100% real Facebook users.

Ah, my friends, I thought I knew ya.

I’m hoping the Magnum fans are really real.

GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – I agree with the Wikipedians, all 1,800 who voted that the English version of the site to which they contribute should be whited out, blank, tomorrow, 18 January. In the name of saving the Internet and its honest users, the US Congress is considering laws that, if passed, could take on a life of their own and might one day well have the opposite result, reducing the freedom of information online.

If the voice of Wikipedia, added to criticism by the White House over the weekend, can stop the legislation in its tracks, that is good news for the rest of us using the Internet right now.

Please read the Wikipedia pages on these laws, as a starting point, the Protect IP Act and the Stop Online Piracy Act, to understand the broad reach such laws would give to the American legal system.

The US is not alone in trying to create legislation that reaches beyond its own borders, but I am concerned about growing American public acceptance of the notion that the tentacles of the American legal system can and should reach beyond US borders. These laws are too often created by politicians keen to please hometown voters who know precious little about the rest of the world.

I’ve covered the new US-Swiss double taxation treaty and watched US pressure on Switzerland build, to obtain bank data, in recent months. It’s done in the name of virtue and protecting honest taxpayers. Most of us are probably on the side of these (not to mention that we’re probably mostly pro-democracy and anti-terrorism, two more US political buzzwords) but there is a more sinister side to this bullying behaviour and I’ve concluded that a rambling American bureaucracy can too easily take advantage of laws made in a different time and for different purposes. The result in this case shows little understanding of and respect for Swiss laws.

Why would Internet laws that are widely viewed with skepticism outside the US as censorship be any more respectful of other nations’ legal systems than tax legislation? Those who write the laws don’t interpret and enforce them.

GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Kirsten Gillibrand is a senator from New York who has been in Geneva this week to raise campaign funds: she is going after part of her constituency, American voters from her state who live in Europe. Democrats from New York who live in neighbouring France and Switzerland are being given an astonishingly rare treat that could provoke envy among other Americans abroad: a member of the US Congress has noticed and is listening to them.

Her trip has drawn the ire of Republicans back home, however, in the conservative press, with the state chairman of the Republican party, Ed Cox, saying “Senator Gillibrand touts her un-passed ‘Upstate Works Act’ while sipping champagne, popping canapés, and filling her campaign coffers in the shadow of the Swiss Alps. She is clinking glasses overseas when she should be cracking heads in Washington to actually get a bill passed.”

The National Journal published an article on the trip. “Mary Boyle, a spokeswoman at the government watchdog group Common Cause, said the trip ‘shows the insane lengths that candidates and members of Congress go to raise money for their reelection campaigns.’”

The criticism of Gillibrand and underlying assumptions that Geneva = overseas Americans = wealthy Americans come shortly after James Fallows, writing  “The Fatca Chronicles” in The Atlantic, has cautioned Americans abroad that when they complain about lack of representation and  unfair tax regulations they are likely to be viewed as “whiners”:

“Something most overseas Americans don’t realize: The home-bound population does not view them as a hardship class. A known risk category for long-term expats is becoming whiners—I speak as someone who’s lived outside the U.S. for several multi-year stretches and has been known to whine,” he wrote 2 January in “The Fatca Menace”.

Americans living overseas, from Canada to Switzerland, have been complaining loudly in recent months about unfair treatment at the hands of the IRS, starting with double taxation and onerous financial reporting requirements, such as the FBAR and the impact of Fatca on their ability to have bank accounts in the countries where they live, pay rent or own homes and try to set aside retirement money.

Town hall meetings in Geneva and protests in Canada have made it clear that the complaints are coming, not from a handful of wealthy diletante expats, but from a large group of middle income Americans who happen to live outside the country and who ultimately help the rest of the world better understand the US through personal contact.

Many fall below the $92,000 earned income exclusion, the bar set by the IRS for double taxation, and they have been vocal in their complaints about how the system has nevertheless cost them unfairly and grossly.

A significant part of their complaint but one that has so far fallen on deaf ears in the US is that they are taxed without representation. True, an American abroad technically should have Congressional representatives to whom complaints and pleas for help can be sent, and these overseas citizens are supposed to be able to vote and can, in theory, help elect people who understand their concerns.

The system sounds fine on paper, but the reality is very different. For a start, many Americans who live overseas, especially long-term residents or children born abroad to US citizens, no longer or have never had addresses they can use in a US state, and your US address is the starting point for all congressional relations.

Offspring are told by some states, in order to vote and to have a congressional rep, to use a parent’s last address in a state, but this can make voter registration an onerous process. They are simply not eligible to vote in some states.

The Overseas Vote Foundation has been working hard to improve the situation, but few Americans in the US appear to be aware that for a large number of Americans overseas the basic representation and taxation rights that are so stridently defended during electoral campaigns sadly do not apply to all citizens.

Groups like Geneva-based ACA (American Citizens Abroad) have been working hard to draw attention to the issues.

But even if all US citizens abroad managed to find a senator or representative willing to listen to  them, this group is dispersed, so its voice remains weak. Their common concerns appear through a prism of all the states, so few politicians see them as having enough weight to be important.

Gillibrand isn’t just raising money for a campaign. She’s opened a conversation with a group of Americans who are often ill-treated by their own government because its elected leaders too often focus on larger vested interests. She should be given some credit by Democrats and Republicans alike for doing her homework and taking her responsibilities seriously.

A Canadian and a Swiss: getting the work life balance right

ZURICH, SWITZERLAND – Switzerland comes in sixth, behind three Nordic countries, The Netherlands and Belgium (not having a leader doesn’t count against you, it appears), for work life balance, according to the Paris-based OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development).

The report was published in October 2011 but unlike quality of life rankings for countries and cities, designed by for-profit groups, it received relatively little publicity.

The OECD report uses three key indicators to compare countries for work-life balance, but the ratings are based on this plus 10 other criteria, which together make up its better life initiative. Here, Switzerland ranks 7th. Canada, which suffers on the work life balance ratings, holds 4th place overall.

Two interesting tidbits of information form part of the Swiss report page: there are more visitors, 8.6 million a year, than the resident population of 7.6m, and renewable energy now accounts for 20.42 percent of energy used.

What we do right: income, jobs, education, health and life satisfaction

What we do wrong: governance (OECD’s lowest turnout for voters)

One statistic will surprise many readers, given the paucity of child-care facilities in Switzerland and the fact that women earn 20 percent less than men, according to the federal government: “In Switzerland, 79 percent of mothers are employed after their children begin school; this figure is higher than the OECD average of 66 percent and suggests that mothers are able to successfully balance family and career.”

Germany comes in for a tough review despite 8th place in the work life balance ratings, notes the Atlantic, which carries a nice set of slides on the top 23 countries. The odd cutoff number of 23 is due to the US coming in at 23.

I have a niggling complaint with the Atlantic article, for a sentence that could leave you thinking Europe’s oldest country is 30 years old: “The average first-time mother is as old as any country in the OECD (30), and the career costs of having a child are sky-high.”

Rain in St Prex 14 December: the flowers love it

LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND – Get your Christmas shopping in this week, before the weather turns a little chillier and weekend snow flurries arrive, for the Lake Geneva region’s weather this week doesn’t qualify as wintry yet.

Temperatures of 8-10C along the lake and thunderstorms have been followed by sunshine and more thunderstorms.

The safest bet for clothing today is a scarf around your neck.

Poor Santa, at a bit of a loss in his sunny warm window

St Prex, like other villages in the region has had unseasonable and unstable weather 14 December, with rainstorms and five minutes later sunshine; the neighbour’s flowers love it, Santa at another neighbour’s looks lost.

The good news, for skiers, is that it is snowing in the mountains (Crans-Montana’s webcams at 16:oo are grayed out from the snow).

GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Am I the only one who wonders why someone would park their car next to a penitentiary and leave the keys in the ignition? It’s Saturday, so I can’t easily check on details for press releases that come in the door. And will Valais police even have the answer? People in Valais do sometimes leave their keys in their cars, rural-fashion, but next to a prison?

The car in question was used in a high speed chase after an escaped prisoner stole the car (he must have thought it was put there just for him), and it can’t be in good shape after flipping over, although the prisoner is all right.

Wonder what the insurance company will have to say about this one.

GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – A friend, Mary, in New York shared this with me and all I can say is that no matter what you think of animal testing, if you love dogs you’ll love watching these beagles take their first steps outside their lives in a lab. They’re in Santa Monica or I’d consider adopting one in a flash!

A couple people with slow Internet connections, one in Cambodia and another on an island in Scotland, have had trouble loading the BSCC video about me and GenevaLunch, so I’m posting a smaller file version here, which should help. Enjoy it and let us know you like it, please!

20 years later, have we learned anything from that other famous crook, Maxwell?

Robert Maxwell, media mogul, British MP, self-made man and notable crook, died in 1991

GENEVA, SWITZERLAND - Plus ça change . . . Why is my first reaction skepticism, I wonder, when I see the headline that Irving Picard has done a deal with the IRS and is expected to get back $326 million for Bernard Madoff’s former clients? Picard is the lawyer assigned to get back some of the money stolen by Bernard Madoff. He has asked a court in the US to approve the deal whereby the IRS will pay back 98 percent of the money it collected from Madoff as 30 percent withholding tax on fictional transactions, part of the airy-fairy deals and probably, says Picard, designed to make him look legitimate.

I hope the day some of these people get some of their money back they stand up and let the rest of us know because I, for one, have trouble believing they will ever see a penny, based on personal experience with another crook, this one in his grave. Robert Maxwell published The European, a newspaper I wrote for regularly as a freelance journalist in 1990. Europe’s first national newspaper, Maxwell liked to boast of his baby.

Maxwell died 20 years ago, in November 1991, presumably by falling overboard his luxury yacht in the Atlantic, but rumours have swirled since then about suicide and murder. The rumours are unlikely to die down because of the number of people who never saw a penny he owed them, as his various scams caught up with him and he took his secrets to a soggy grave.

Maxwell also owned the Daily Mirror and he had illegally borrowed the staff’s pension fund. I was only owed £1,000, so perhaps I shouldn’t complain; others fared far worse. I was broke at the time, had a baby, a new mortgage and interest rates had skyrocketed. I really, really was counting on that money.

In fact, most of my anger over the 10 years of correspondence that followed his death was aimed at Arthur Anderson’s accountants, who sent me letters once a month, detailing over several pages, the work they were doing to extract some cash from the Maxwell mess to let little guys like me be paid at least a portion of what we were owed. At one point it looked like I might receive £200. Then that dropped to £120, a fact explained somewhere in the hundreds of pages I received; it was clear that Arthur Anderson was working hard on the case. And getting paid to do so.

The letters suddenly came less often, like the boyfriend who’s gone to see and found someone more interesting in another port.

It seems that was indeed the case, for in 2002 Arthur Anderson, the accounting and not consulting part of the business, was busy with Enron’s problems. Enron, an energy company, went famously bust in 2001 and in 2002 AA was found guilty by a US court of not auditing Enron correctly. That verdict was later overturned, but AA had meanwhile handed in its license to operate, and it shut down.

If it ever came close to finding some money to pay me a fraction of what Maxwell owed me I’m pretty sure it disappeared in the AA budget for writing, copying and mailing thousands upon thousands of useless pages to small creditors.

Good luck, Madoff clients.

GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – American Citizens Abroad are hosting a fourth Town Hall meeting in Geneva Wednesday evening 16 November to talk about US tax obligations. Among the odd questions likely to come up is this one: does the US Justice Department really expect people to inform the Justice Dept. that they are appealing a Swiss federal government decision, if their bank accounts are slated to be turned over to the IRS by Credit Suisse at the behest of the Swiss government?

Swiss law allows the account owners to appeal before any data is turned over, so their privacy is respected until the day the Swiss court rules that the client’s case meets the criteria for “administrative assistance” under the terms of the the bilateral double taxation treaty.

In other words, the day the Swiss tax office says they do indeed appear to be committing fraud or tax evasion involving a substantial amount of money.

Nasdaq, which published a Dow-Jones article Sunday 13 November about Credit Suisse turning names over, ends with this startling sentence: “Taxpayers who challenge the release of the information are supposed to report their challenge to the US Justice Department.”

It takes a bureaucratic mind to come up with that one.