| Story Views | |
| Now: | |
| Last Hour: | |
| Last 24 Hours: | |
| Total: | |
What to make of the Panama Papers?
http://real-agenda.com/feed
Contrary to what it seems, the “Panama Papers” will not diminish financial misappropriations nor favor freedoms. Rather the opposite will happen. The system will shrink further around the UK, Holland, the United States and Israel, so that only those countries can control it. By violating the principle of equality before the law and their own professional ethics, members of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists are at the service of the enemies of freedom and defenders of big capital and the fact that this organization revealed the names of some few cheaters absolutely does not change anything. The US Economic Strategy At the beginning of his term, President Barack Obama appointed historian Christina Romer to chair the Council of Economic Advisers. As a professor at the University of Berkeley, Christina Romer is a specialist in the study of the crisis of 1929. According to her, that which brought the United States out of recession was not Roosevelt’s New Deal and World War II but the influx -around 1936- of European capital fleeing the “increased danger”. Romer’s explanation is what Barack Obama has based his economic policy on. First, he acted to close all tax havens that are not under the control of Washington and London. Then he organized the destabilization of Greece and Cyprus so European capital would take refuge in tax havens controlled by Anglos. It all started in Greece in December 2008 with a series of demonstrations provoked by the death of a teenager by a police officer. The CIA brought from Kosovo busloads of individuals responsible for causing disorder during a demonstration and to establish a beginning of chaos [1]. The US Treasury Department could then see the Greek capital fleeing Greece. The experiment was conclusive and the White House decided to engulf that fragile state in a financial and economic crisis that came to threaten the very existence of the eurozone. As expected, whenever questions arise about the possible expulsion of Greece from the euro or a disolution of the eurozone, European capital runs to the mainly British, American and Dutch tax havens that are available. In 2012, there was another operation against the Cypriot tax haven. All accounts of more than 100,000 euros were confiscated. It was the first and only time that such kind of nationalization was observed in a capitalist economy [2]. Over the past 8 years, we have seen how numerous meetings of the G8 and G20 have imposed all kinds of international rules, supposedly in order to prevent tax evasion [3]. However, after the imposition of those supposedly valid-for-all-rules, the United States and, to a lesser extent, Israel, the Netherlands and the UK have the luxury of not respecting them. Tax havens Each tax haven has a generally absurd special legal status. Currently, the major tax havens are the independent State of the City of London (member of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland North), the State of Delaware (part of the United States) and Israel. But there are still many more tax havens, especially British, starting with the islands of Jersey and Guernsey (member of the Duchy of Normandy and therefore subject to the authority of the Queen of England, although not a member of the United Kingdom or of the European Union), Gibraltar (Spanish territory illegally occupied by the United Kingdom) and the islands of Anguilla, Bermuda, the Caymans, Turks and Caicos, the Virgin islands and the island of Montserrat. There are also some who belong to the Netherlands, as the islands of Aruba, Curacao and St. Maarten. A tax haven is a “free zone” covering an entire country. But in the collective imagination, a free zone is indispensable for the economy, while a “tax haven” is a bad thing. Actually, both are exactly the same. Of course, some companies make improper use of free zones to avoid paying taxes while others make bad use of tax havens, which does not justify questioning the existence of these structures, as they are essential for international trade. In their war against non-Anglo tax havens, the US railed against Switzerland [4]. This small country had developed a strict banking secrecy that allowed smaller operators to succeed in mounting and developing transactions behind the big operators. By forcing Switzerland to give up their bank secrecy, the United States extended its own mass surveillance in the field of economic transactions, which has allowed it to easily manipulate competition and sabotage the activity of small operators. For more than 10 years, Forbes said Fidel Castro was the head of the wealthiest state in the world. It is now widely demonstrated that it was pure propaganda … but Forbes never apologized. The “Panama Papers” It is in the midst of all this context that Washington delivered to the Süddeutsche Zeitung 11.5 million pirated computer files from the firm ranked as the fourth largest in the world in terms of creating offshore companies. Theft of those files constitutes a crime and, for that reason, the alleged “whistleblowers” remain anonymous. Of course, previous to the revelations being made public, Washington made a careful selection of documents and excluded, first, all the ones that incriminated American citizens and businesses and, secondly, probably also ruled out involving its good allies. The fact that some of its supposed allies, which currently have some sort of conflict with the Obama administration, such as Ukrainian President Petro Porochenko, appear in the disclosed […]
The post What to make of the Panama Papers? appeared first on The Real Agenda News.
More news from The Real Agenda: http://www.real-agenda.com
Source: http://real-agenda.com/make-panama-papers/
