Ann Coulter, the Republican version of the Miss America Nazi, was devastated by the November 6 defeat of Mitt Romney.
“People are suffering,” she whined. “The country is in disarray. If Mitt Romney cannot win in this economy, then the tipping point has been reached.
“We have more takers than makers and it’s over. There is no hope.”
Ann Coulter
Actually, Coulter was right–but not in the way she thought she was.
The “takers” are not the “have-nots” who depend on government for assistance. They are the “more-than-haves” who cheat the government of billions in lost tax revenues.
In 2012, Tax Justice Network, which campaigns to abolish tax havens, commissioned a study of their effect on the world’s economy.
The study was entitled, “The Price of Offshore Revisited: New Estimates for ‘Missing’ Global Private Wealth, Income, Inequality and Lost Taxes.”
http://www.taxjustice.net/cms/upload/pdf/Price_of_Offshore_Revisited_120722.pdf
The research was carried out by James Henry, former chief economist at consultants McKinsey & Co. Among its findings:
- By 2010, at least $21 to $32 trillion of the world’s private financial wealth had been invested virtually tax-free through more than 80 offshore secrecy jurisdictions.
- Since the 1970s, with eager (and often aggressive and illegal) assistance from the international private banking industry, private elites in 139 countries had accumulated $7.3 to $9.3 trillion of unrecorded offshore wealth by 2010.
- This happened while many of those countries’ public sectors were borrowing themselves into bankruptcy, suffering painful adjustment and low growth, and holding fire sales of public assets.
- The assets of these countries are held by a small number of wealthy individuals while the debts are shouldered by the ordinary people of these countries through their governments.
- Local elites continue to vote with their financial feet while their public sectors borrow heavily abroad.
- First World countries do most of the borrowing.
- Of the $7.3–$9.3 trillion of offshore wealth belonging to residents of these 139 countries, the top 10 countries account for 61% and the top 20 for 81%.
- The offshore industry has many levels of protection: Private bankers, lawyers and accountants get paid handsomely to hide their clients assets and identities. These groups also maintain influential lobbies.
-
Bank regulators and central banks of most individual countries typically view private banks as key clients. They have long permitted the world’s top tax havens and banks to conceal the ultimate origins and ownership of assets under their supervision, especially those held in off-balance sheet trusts and
fiduciary accounts. - Although multilateral institutions like the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the IMF and the World Bank are supposedly insulated from politics, they have been highly compromised by the collective interests of Wall Street.
- These regulatory bodies have never required financial institutions to fully report their cross-border customer liabilities, deposits, customer assets under management or under custody.
- All conventional measures of inequality sharply understate the levels of income and wealth inequality at both the country and global level.
- Less than 100,000 people, .001% of the world’s population, now control over 30% of the world’s financial wealth.
- The impact on lost tax revenue may be huge–large enough to make a significant difference to the finances of nations.
- Assuming that global offshore financial wealth of $21 trillion earns a total return of just 3% a year, and would have been taxed an average of 30% in the home country, this unrecorded wealth might have generated tax revenues of $189 billion per year.
Summing up this situation, the report notes: “We are up against one of society’s most well-entrenched interest groups. After all, there’s no interest group more rich and powerful than the rich and powerful.”
Yet the study reveals two bright spots for countries fed up with being bled dry by those parasites whose allegiance runs only to their wallets.
- A huge pile at least $21 trillion of untapped financial wealth has been discovered–monies that can be called upon to help solve the most pressing global problems.
- A substantial fraction of this wealth is being managed by the top 50 players in the global private banking industry.
As a result, these findings allow nations’ leaders to:
- Prevent the abuses that have lead to off-the-books wealth accumulation in the future.
- Make use of the huge stock of accumulated, untaxed wealth that is already there, as well as the steady stream of untaxed earnings that it generates.
It was Stephen Decatur, the naval hero of the War of 1812, who famously said: “Our country, right or wrong.”
Stephen Decatur
Billionaire tax-cheats like those uncovered in the above-cited report have coined their own motto: “My wallet–first and always.”
Bureaucracybuster's Blog 
ABC NEWS, CARLOS THE JACKAL, CBS NEWS, CIA, CNN, DEFENSE INTELLIGENCE AGENCY, DIPLOMATIC ASYLUM, EDWARD SNOWDEN, FACEBOOK, JOHN WAYNE, MERCENARIES, NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY, NBC NEWS, NICCOLO MACHIAVELLI, OUTSOURCING CONTRACTORS, PAULA DEEN, SPYING, STAR TREK, SUDAN, THE GREEN BERETS, THE LOS ANGELES TIMES, THE NEW YORK TIMES, THE WASHINGTON POST, TWITTER
MERCS FOR HIRE: PART ONE (OF TWO)
In Bureaucracy, Business, History, Military, Politics, Social commentary on May 14, 2014 at 1:49 amA movie critic, reviewing John Wayne’s 1968 gung-ho film, The Green Berets, said that Wayne had reduced the complex issues behind the Vietnam war to the simplicity of a barroom brawl.
In the same vein, the American news media displays a genius for ignoring the complexities of a major news story and focusing on just a single, sensationalistic aspect of it.
Take the Paula Deen scandal. The media universally focused on Deen’s admitted use of the “N-word”–and utterly ignored far more important aspects of the story.
According to the complaint filed in the lawsuit, employees at the restaurant were routinely subjected to violent behavior, racial and sexual harassment, assault, bettery and sexual discrimination in pay.
Similarly, in covering the odyssey of Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency (NSA) employee turned mass secret leaker, the media have followed the same path.
Edward Snowden
Following Snowden’s disappearance from the United States, the media focused their attention on charting the almost daily whereabouts of Snowden.
Would Snowden receive amnesty in Hong Kong? In Russia? In Cuba? China? Venezuela? Nicaragua?
For the moment, he has settled on Russia, whose president, Vladimir Putin, is keeping a protective eye on him.
Yet even though he has momentarily obtained asylum, there’s no guarantee it will last.
Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, the international terrorist better known as “Carlos the Jackal,” can attest to that.
By 1994, he had spent almost 20 years on the run from the French Intellilgence agents. They were seeking him for a series of terrorist attacks across France–and for the 1975 murders of two counter-intellilgence agents and their informant.
Carlos “The jackal”
After living in a series of countries that had no extradition treaty with France–such as Syria, Iraq and Jordan–he settled down in the Sudanese city of Khartoum.
He felt utterly safe, since he had been accorded official protection by the Sudanese government. But he had misjudged his protectors.
French and American Intelligence agencies offered a number of deals to the Sudanese authorities. In 1994, Carlos was scheduled to undergo a minor testicular operation in a Sudanese hospital.
Two days after the operation, Sudanese officials warned him of an assassination plot–and moved him to a villa for protection. They also provided him with bodyguards.
One night later, the bodyguards entered his room while he slept, tranquilized and tied him up–and slipped him into the custody of his longtime pursuers.
On August 14, 1994, Sudan transferred him to French Intelligence agents, who flew him to Paris for trial. He is now serving two sentences of life imprisonment.
There is no guarantee that any nation that guarantees the security of Edward Snowden today won’t decide, in the future, to betray him.
And, eventually he will run out of secrets to spill. That’s assuming that Russian and/or Chinese Intelligence agents haven’t already helped themselves to the secrets on his laptop.
As Mr. Spock once famously said during an episode of Star Trek: “Military secrets are the most fleeting of all.”
So where does the significance of the Snowden story lie?
In the fact that Americans have become too lazy or fearful to do most of their own spying.
Yes, that’s right–60 to 70% of America’s Intelligence budget doesn’t go to the CIA or the National Security Agency (NSA) or the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).
Instead, it goes to private contractors who supply secrets or “soldiers of fortune.”
One such contractor is Booz Allen Hamilton–which employed Snowden and gave him access to the super-secret NSA.
The outsourcing of government intelligence work to private contractors took off after 9/11.
This was especially true after the United States invaded Iraq in 2003–and found its Intelligence and armed services stretched to their furtherest limits.
The DIA estimates that, from the mid-1990s to 2005, the number of private contracts awarded by Intelligence agencies rose by 38%.
During that same period, government spending on “spies/guns for hire” doubled, from about $18 billion in 1995 to about $42 billion in 2005.
Many tasks and services once performed only by government employees are being “outsourced” to civilian contractors:
More than 500 years ago, Niccolo Machiavelli, the Florentine statesman, warned of the dangers of relying on mercenaries:
“There are two types of armies that a prince may use to defend his state: armies made up of his own people or mercenaries….
“Mercenaries…are useless and dangerous. And if a prince holds on to his state by means of mercenary armies, he will never be stable or secure; for they are disunited, ambitious, without discipline, disloyal.
“They are brave among friends, among enemies they are cowards.
“They have neither the fear of God nor fidelity to men, and destruction is deferred only so long as the attack is. For in peace one is robbed by them, and in war by the enemy.”
Machiavelli, on meeting Edward Snowden, would no doubt find his judgment confirmed.
Share this: