HOW THE RICH AVOID PAYING TAXES
Third world island TAX HAVENS
It is a very unreal, fabricated world that we, the unwashed, are living it... they keep us amused and distracted with our petty projects and trivial pursuits...With Song and Dance contests and Reality shows that are not the least bit like reality. Well, there is a book out this month -- Anthony Sutton's book, America's Secret Establishment (one may order it from Amazon in the meantime. OR, this text from Treasure Islands by Nicholas Shaxson tells you what's in Sutton's book. Read text below, you will get the important idea of what it denounces. LEGAL TAX EVASION which strips the state of enormous revenues which these super rich might yield up for public use. Its failure to appear and becounted has the state so broke it must exploit the super poor. ( STATE EXPLOITATION OF THE NEEDY).
For instance, just today, SPRING of 2015, I noted that the City of Los Angeles has posted hundreds of pages of TAX GARNISHMENT FAILURE HOMEOWNERS --a list of houses for sale, -- TAX BILLS UNPAID. Many were Deutsche Bank, One condo owner had a hundred apartments he couldn't sell or rent I guess. Every newspaper in our town has a different set of these UP FOR SALE lists, three houses per column inch! Folks who are losing their homes or investments for tax bills ranging from 240$ to 25,000 on the nicer, middle class homes. They city may let them go for a song and may notl make a neat profit but it shows us what's happening to the JOBLESS and PENSIONLESS! These homeless people will fall onto the taxpayer's backs as recipients of public monies for public aid, food stamps, free med-i-care because when you fall off the world, the public has to catch you. So the moola from the super rich, evaded/ avoided with TAX HAVENS (text below) is meaningful.
Treasure Islands: An Offshore Awakening
Sunday 15 May 2011
by: Nicholas Shaxson, Palgrave MacmillanThis excerpt is the Prologue from Treasure Islands: Uncovering the Damage
of Offshore Banking and Tax Havens by Nicholas Shaxson."One night in September 1997 I returned home to my flat in North London
to find that a man with a French accent had left a message on my
answering machine. Mr. Autogue, as he called himself, had heard from an
editor at the Financial Times (whom I was writing for) that I was to
visit the oil-rich country of Gabon on Africa's western coastline, and
he said he wanted to help me during my visit. He left a number in Paris.
Curious as hell, I rang back the next morning. This was supposed to be a
routine journalist's trip to a small African country: I wasn't expecting
to find too much to write about in this sparsely populated former French
colony, but the fact that English-speaking journalists almost never
ventured there meant I would have the place all to myself. When I
arrived, I discovered to my surprise and alarm that Mr. Autogue had
flown out to the capital of Libreville with an assistant on first-class
Air France tickets and they had booked themselves into the city's most
expensive hotel for a week--and their sole project, he cheerfully
admitted, was to help me. I had spent years watching, living in, and
writing about the curve of oil-soaked African Atlantic coastline that
ranges from Nigeria, in North Africa, through Gabon and down to Angola,
farther south. Today this region supplies almost a sixth of U.S. oil
imports1 and about the same share of China's; and beneath a veneer of
great wealth in each place lies terrible poverty, inequality, and
conflict. Journalists are supposed to start on the trail of a great
story somewhere dramatic and dangerous. I found my story here
unexpectedly, in a series of polite if unsettling meetings in
Libreville. Lunch with the finance minister? No problem: Monsieur
Autogue arranged it with a phone call. I drank a cocktail in a hotel
lobby with the powerful half-Chinese foreign minister Jean Ping, who
later became president of the U.N. General Assembly; the estimable Mr.
Ping gave me as much of his time as I needed for my interview and asked
graciously about my family. Later, the oil minister clasped me by the
shoulder and jokingly offered me an oil field-then withdrew his hand,
saying, "No: these things are only for les grands-the people who
matter." Never more than five hundred yards from foul African poverty on
the streets of Libreville, I spent a week wandering about in a bubble.
Mr. Autogue's attempts to keep my diary full made me determined to find
out what it was that he might be wanting to hide. My new best friend had
opened for me a zone of air-conditioned splendor: I was ushered to the
front of queues to meet with powerful people, who were always delighted
to see me. This parallel, charmed world, underpinned by the unspoken
threat of force against anyone inside or outside the bubble who would
disrupt it, is easy to miss in the affluent and easy West. In Africa the
jolt was enough to begin to shake me from my sleep. I had stumbled into
what later became more widely known through a scandal in Paris and the
so-called Elf affair. The scandal began in 1994 when U.S.-based
Fairchild Corp. opened a commercial dispute with a French industrialist,
triggering a stock exchange inquiry. Unlike in more adversarial
Anglo-Saxon legal systems, where the prosecution jousts with the defense
to produce a resolution, the investigating magistrate in France is more
like an impartial detective inserted between the two sides. He or she is
supposed to investigate the matter until the end, when the truth is
uncovered. In this case Eva Joly, the Norwegian-born investigating
magistrate, found that every time she investigated something new leads
would emerge. Her probes just kept going deeper. She began receiving
death threats: A miniature coffin was sent to her in the post, and on a
raid of one business she found a Smith & Wesson revolver, fully loaded
and pointed at the entrance. But she persisted: Other magistrates became
involved, and as the extraordinary revelations began to accumulate, they
began to discern the outlines of a gigantic system of corruption that
connected the French state-owned oil company Elf Aquitaine with the
French political, commercial, and intelligence establishments, via
Gabon's deeply corrupt ruler Omar Bongo. Bongo's story is a miniature
tale of what happened when France formally relinquished its colonies. As
countries in Africa and elsewhere gained independence, the old
beneficiaries of the French empire set up new ways to stay in control
behind the scenes. Gabon became independent in 1960, just as it was
starting to emerge as a promising new African oil frontier, and France
paid it particular attention. France needed to install the right
president: an authentic African leader who would be charismatic, strong,
cunning, and, when it mattered, utterly pro-French. In Omar Bongo they
found the perfect candidate: He was from a tiny minority ethnic group
and had no natural domestic support base, so he would have to rely on
France to protect him. In 1967, aged just 32, Bongo became the world's
youngest president, and for good measure France placed several hundred
paratroopers in a barracks in Libreville, connected to one of his
palaces by underground tunnels. This intimidating deterrent against coup
plots proved so effective that by the time Bongo died in 2009, he was
the world's longest-serving leader. In exchange for France's backing
Bongo gave two things. First, he gave French companies almost exclusive
access to his country's minerals, on highly preferential terms that were
deeply unfair to the people of Gabon. The country became known as French
companies' chasse gardée-their private hunting ground. But the second
thing Bongo provided was more interesting. He allowed his country,
through its oil industry, to become the African linchpin of the
gigantic, secret Elf system-a vast, spooky web of global corruption
secretly connecting the oil industries of former French African colonies
with mainstream politics in metropolitan France, via Switzerland,
Luxembourg, and other tax havens. Parts of Gabon's oil industry, Joly
discovered as she dug deeper and deeper in Paris, had been serving as a
giant slush fund: a pot of secret money outside the reach of French
judicial authorities in which hundreds of millions of dollars were made
available for the use of French elites. An African oil cargo would be
sold, and the proceeds would split up into a range of bewildering
accounts in tax havens, where they could be used to supply bribes and
baubles for whatever the unaccountable elites who controlled the system
deemed fit.
http://www.truth-out.org/treasure-islands-offshore-awakening/1305476430
From Treasure Islands by Nicholas Shaxson. Copyright © 2011 by the
author and reprinted by permission of Palgrave Macmillan, a division of
Macmillan Publishers LimitedFrom: http://treasureislands.org/ Nov 19 2010 The Book: "Millions of
people have a queasy feeling that something is not right in the global
economy - but they struggle to put their fingers on what exactly the
problem is. Treasure Islands at last tells the real story of where it
all went wrong. This is the great untold story of globalisation. Tax
havens are not exotic, murky sideshows at the fringes of the world
economy: they lie at its centre. Half of world trade flows, at least on
paper, through tax havens. Every multinational corporation uses them
routinely. The biggest users of tax havens by far are not terrorists,
spivs, celebrities or Mafiosi - but banks. Tax havens are the ultimate
source of strength for our global elites. Just as European nobles once
consolidated their unaccountable powers in fortified castles, to better
subjugate and extract tribute from the surrounding peasantry, so
financial capital has coalesced in their modern equivalent today: the
tax havens. In these fortified nodes of secret, unaccountable political
and economic power, financial and criminal interests have come together
to capture local political systems and turn the havens into their own
private law-making factories, protected against outside interference by
the world's most powerful countries - most especially Britain. Treasure
Islands will, for the first time, show the blood and guts of just how
they do it. Tax havens aren't just about tax. They are about escape -
escape from criminal laws, escape from creditors, escape from tax,
escape from prudent financial regulation - above all, escape from
democratic scrutiny and accountability. Tax havens get rich by taking
fees for providing these escape routes. This is their core line of
business. It is what they do. These escape routes transform the merely
powerful into the untouchable. "Don't tax or regulate us or we will flee
offshore!" the financiers cry, and elected politicians around the world
crawl on their bellies and capitulate. And so tax havens lead a global
race to the bottom to offer deeper secrecy, ever laxer financial
regulations, and ever more sophisticated tax loopholes. They have become
the silent battering rams of financial deregulation, forcing countries
to remove financial regulations, to cut taxes and restraints on the
wealthy, and to shift all the risks, costs and taxes onto the backs of
the rest of us. In the process democracy unravels and the offshore
system pushes ever further onshore. The world's two most important tax
havens today are United States and Britain. Without understanding
offshore, we will never understand the history of the modern world.
Poverty in Africa? Offshore is at the heart of the matter.
Industrial-scale corruption and the wholesale subversion of governments
by criminalised interests, across the developing world? Offshore is
central to the story, every time. The systematic looting of the former
Soviet Union and the merging of the nuclear-armed country's intelligence
apparatus with organized crime, is a story that unfolds substantially in
London and its offshore satellites. Saddam Hussein used tax havens to
buttress his power, as does North Korea's Kim Jong-Il today. Prime
Minister Silvio Berlusconi's strange hold over Italian politics is very
much an offshore tale. The Elf Affair, Europe's biggest ever corruption
scandal, had secrecy jurisdictions at its core. Arms smuggling to
terrorist organisations? The growth of mafia empires? Offshore. You can
only fit about $1 million into a briefcase: without offshore, the
illegal drugs trade would be a fraction of its size. Private equity and
hedge funds? Goldman Sachs? Citigroup? These are all creatures of
offshore. The scandals of Enron, Parmalat, Long Term Capital Management,
Lehman Brothers, AIG - and many more? Tax havens lay behind them all.
The rise of multinationals, the explosion of debt in advanced economies
since the 1970s is substantially an offshore tale. Complex monopolies,
frauds, insider trading rings - these corruptions of free markets always
have tax havens at their heart. As Treasure Islands explains in vivid,
thrilling, horrifying detail, every big financial crisis since the 1970s
- including the great global crisis that erupted in 2007 - has been a
creature of the tax havens. These problems all have other explanations
too. Tax havens are never the only story, because offshore exists only
in relation to elsewhere. That is why it is called offshore. Without
understanding the tax havens, or the secrecy jurisdictions as I often
prefer to call them, we cannot understand the world. Treasure Islands at
last starts to fill this gigantic hole in modern history. In short, it
is the most important exposé of tax havens ever published.(from Amazon.ca) - book released April 2011
"In this riveting, well-written expose, Shaxson goes deep into the
largely unexamined realm of offshore money. In the process, he reveals
that this shadow world is no mere sideshow, but is troublingly central
to modern finance, with the US and the UK as leaders. The resulting
abuses are widespread, ranging from tax revenue stripping from African
nations to individuals and corporations escaping enforcement and
accountability. A must read for anyone who wants to understand the
hidden reasons why financial services firms have become so powerful and
impossible to reform."--Yves Smith, creator of Naked Capitalism and
author of Econned "Treasure Islands shines the light on some very dark
places. It reads like a thriller. The shocking thing is its all
true."--Richard Murphy, co-author of Tax Havens: How Globalization
Really Works "At last, a readable - indeed gripping - book which
explains the nuts and bolts of tax havens. More importantly, it lays
bare the mechanism that financial capital has been using to stay in
charge: capturing government policy-making around the world, shaking off
such irritants as democracy and the rule of law, and making sure that
suckers like you and me pay for its operators' opulent
lifestyles."--Misha Glenny, author of McMafia: A Journey through the
Global Criminal Underworld "Trade and investments can play a profoundly
productive role on the world economy. But so much of the capital flows
that we see are associated with money laundering, tax evasion, and the
wholesale larsony (sic) of assets often of very poor countries. These
thefts are greatly facilitated by special tax and accounting rules or
designed to "attract capital" and embodying obscure and opaque
mechanisms. Shaxson does an outstanding and socially valuable job in
penetrating the impenetrable and finds a deeply shocking
world."-Nicholas Stern, former Chief Economist for The World Bank "The
real challenge to America's economy comes not from China - but from the
Caymans, the Bahamas, and a whole hot-money archipelago loosely under
the control of the City of London. If only as a civics lesson, read this
astonishing book to find out the true political constitution of the
world."-- Thomas Geoghegan, author of Were You Born on the Wrong
Continent? "Far more than an exposé, Treasure Islands is a brilliantly
illuminating, forensic analysis of where economic power really lies, and
the shockingly corrupt way in which it behaves. If you're wondering how
ordinary people ended up paying for a crisis caused by the reckless
greed of the banking industry, this compellingly readable book provides
the answers."--David Wearing, School of Public Policy, UCL, London's
Global University "An absolute gem that deserves to be read by anyone
interested in the way contemporary globalization is undermining social
justice. Give it to your sons, daughters, families, favourite
legislators and anyone else needing stimulation of their thought buds.
This masterpiece illuminates the dark places and shows the visible hand
of governments, corporations, banks, accountants, lawyers and other
pirates in creating fictitious offshore transactions and structures and
picking our pockets. This financial engineering has enabled companies
and the wealthy elites to dodge taxes. The result is poverty, erosion of
social infrastructure and hard won welfare rights and higher taxes for
ordinary people. Tax will be the decisive battleground of the
twenty-first century as no democracy can function without it, or provide
people with adequate educations, healthcare, security, housing,
transport or pensions. Nicholas Shaxson has done a wonderful job in
lifting the lid off the inbuilt corruption that has become so
naturalized in the western world."--Prem Sikka, Professor of Accounting,
University of Essex, UK Product Description A thrilling ride inside the
world of tax havens and corporate masterminds While the United States
experiences recession and economic stagnation and European countries
face bankruptcy, experts struggle to make sense of the crisis. Nicholas
Shaxson, a former correspondent for the Financial Times and The
Economist, argues that tax havens are a central cause of all these
disasters. In this hard hitting investigation he uncovers how offshore
tax evasion, which has cost the U.S. 100 billion dollars in lost revenue
each year, is just one item on a long rap sheet outlining the damage
that offshoring wreaks on our societies. In a riveting journey from
Moscow to London to Switzerland to Delaware, Shaxson dives deep into a
vast and secret playground where bankers and multinational corporations
operate side by side with nefarious tax evaders, organized criminals and
the world's wealthiest citizens. Tax havens are where all these players
get to maximize their own rewards and leave the middle class to pick up
the bill. With eye opening revelations, Treasure Islands exposes the
culprits and its victims, and shows how: *Over half of world trade is
routed through tax havens *The rampant practices that precipitated the
latest financial crisis can be traced back to Wall Street's offshoring
practices *For every dollar of aid we send to developing countries, ten
dollars leave again by the backdoor The offshore system sits much closer
to home than the pristine tropical islands of the popular imagination.
In fact, it all starts on a tiny island called Manhattan. In this fast
paced narrative, Treasure Islands at last explains how the system works
and how it's contributing to our ever deepening economic divide.About the Author: Nicholas Shaxson is a journalist who has written for
the Financial Times, The Economist Group, African Energy, and the
insider newsletter Africa Confidential. He is the author of the highly
acclaimed Poisoned Wells: The Dirty Politics of African Oil and an
associate fellow with the Royal Institute of International Affairs in
London.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *<=== BACK TO THE FRUGAL TIPS and CHEAPO LIFESTYLE WEBPAGETAX HAVENS BANNED FOR THE SUPER RICH! OLIGARCHS ARE FINISHED!
OBAMA FINALLY DOES SOMETHING SMART for the country!Until the 4th of MAY, 2009, any tax breaks out there under OBAMA have not been for the common man but MAY 4th, along comes a new law that beats all.The PRESIDENT said that the USA WILL NOW go after taxes that the BIG corps owe and these big guys will pay the full 35% of all corporative income with no more saying
sorry we invested the money offshore so it's a write off when it's really in some phony subsidiary that hides in that infamous tax dodge country theCAYMAN ISLANDS in that building that has 18,000 different corporations in it! Parking lot there holds ten cars, so go figure! G'bye Cayman Islands!This new tax dredge will bring in billions, no? The figures that the Gov gave for what corps
paid 'til now was 2.5% of their corp profits, using offshore subsidiaries.I'm wondering how come Clinton or somebody didn't do this earlier? Or CARTER?
Guess you could say they were part of the NEW WORLD ORDER, after all
Or, maybe the USA simply wasn't broke enuf! Now we are. So it's an ill
wind that blows NO GOOD! This should provide a gusher of money for the USA
Or be the straw that CLOSES down every CORPORATION AROUND!
The cash cows are being butchered!The pharms will close, we have to learn to make our own willow bark instead of using
aspirin. The Cereal corps will close, we'll have to grind our own wheat into wheatena,
actually very tasty. I used to make it myself. Toast wheat kernels a tad, cool, then grind.
But when the car companies all die, can we make our own car? In a way, yes. Most boys can
fix the old cars that don't have computers in them. After a tidal wave of boys do that for
their families, I'm betting some boys invent better smog filters than what's currently used. And
become the new HENRY FORDS.Throw your mind into the corps that will fail. DRESS MANUFACTURERS. SO we have
old sewing machines in the garage, don't we? Blue jeans don't need replacing, the older the
better. What else? Get back to me with your thoughts.NEW TAX LAW Written up in HOUSTON CHRONICLE
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/headline/biz/6407981.html~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~
SEE HOW a typical company hides its money, this one being the famous tech giant,
ORACLE, socking it away in CALIF and CAYMANS BOTH!
~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~
THE NEXT TAX FIX needed is to reverse Reagan's tax break to those earning
over $3.2 million. That is the root of the whole AMERICA POVERTY problem.
Before that REAGAN BREAK, the tax on the UBERWEALTHY was 70% higher.
What this will do is, profits for all CORPORATIONS will actually be saved and
re-invested in the company --not given to those thieving CEO bums. WHY?
The cause and effect factor is that astringent money conditions provoke
realism. IT will not be worth giving executives money over 3.2 million at that tax
rate. So the money saved on massive pay rates, golden parachutes, will be reinvested
in the company. And that's a good thing.~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~
LAST THOUGHT: there's a big danger that this new OBAMA law making big corps pull their moola out of Caymans. They wll serve up the taxes owed on that cash but this will CRASH those Carioca banks down to the white sand beneath and that fractional lending they were doing means the corps all must stand in line to get their bucks back. The first guys get payback, the rest can't get their money out & NO FDIC in Bermuda, Jersey islands or any of those carioca islands. "We ain't got no steenking FDIC!" ERGO a lotta corps gonna hit the wall and implode! Also the banks but who cares? Do we care?
APRIL 2008, MC CAIN came out with 'let's lower taxes on corps."
see: http://wonkroom.thinkprogress.org/2008/08/12/no-corporate-taxes/
Our POSTER is ANITA SANDS HERNANDEZ, Los Angeles Writer,mother of 4 and career Astrologer for 63 years. Catch up with her websites TRUTHS GOV WILL HIDE & NEVER TELL YOU, also The FUTURE, WHAT'S COMIN' AT YA! FRUGAL LIFE STYLE TIPS, HOW TO SURVIVE the COMING GREAT DEPRESSION, and Secrets of Nature, HOLISTIC, AFFORDABLE HEALING. Also ARTISANRY FOR EXPORT, EARN EUROS....* Anita is at astrology@earthlink.net ). Get a free natal horoscope "my money/future life" reading now + copy horoscope as a Gif file graphic! No smarter, more accurate Destiny reading out there!
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