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Monday, October 27, 2008
More than half of all finance fluxes use tax heavens
That is what J. Basterra, using data from the UN, Tax Justice and ATTAC, denounces at Basque daily Gara today. The never collected tax revenue (250 billion euros yearly) could fully finace the UN project to reduce poverty by half globally for 2015 (goal that, of course, will not be achieved, not even approached). European nations and EU itself, among others, are full accomplices of these financial pirate heavens, some of which are either autonomous colonies of EU states (case of Cayman Islands, for example) or tightly associated with EU (Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Andorra, Monaco).
What this highlights anyhow is how Capitalism itself has gone global and beyond the surveyance and regulator activity of sovereign states and international organizations. These tax heavens are certainly unfair competitors of EU states and companies without transnational status and are damaging European (as well as others') economy. This is something I already read about in the mid-80s: that states can hardly anymore regulate global Capitalism and that, in case of crisis like the one we are suffering now, the separate or even coordinated efforts of these states will hardly serve for anything, as a large fraction of capital (the most central, strategic and elusive fraction of it) is well beyond their reach.
The crisis is probably unmanageable in such circumstances.
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2 comments:
It's probably the cause of the crisis.
I would not go so far: it's an important aspect of the financial crisis and a symbol of the power of Transnational Capital above all.
But this crisis is just the typical Marxist structural crisis: too low real salaries and too high living cost make demand collapse. It had already been at limit for some time but the discourse of economists (illusionists of the markets) was that demand was sustained and even growing (it was just the demand generated by speculation itself, nothing else), what just kept the bubble going for some more years.
Would there be justice, many economists, CEOs, bankers, politicians and so-called "investors" would be in jail and even facing death penalty. But most will just slip away with the bounty, as good thieves, and the few that get some penalty (scapegoats rather than the most guilty of all) will just get symbolic penalties.
Meanwhile the people, both in the center and the peripheria ("north" and "south"), will pay for their larceny, with their very lives possibly.
This will end in a real global revolutionary wave, it has no other exit, yet the socio-political conditions are not yet good enough, except maybe in Latin America, where there's much more class consciousness.
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