A tale of £13 trillion in hidden wealth

[Stinky The Clown]

Last edited Sun Jul 22, 2012, 03:54 PM - Edit history (1)

Here's a fairly quick read from The Guardian. The site is safe and the article is short enough that I am not going to excerpt any of it here.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/jul/21/global-elite-tax-offshore-economy

[nc4bo]

1. This is absolutely disgusting....

Profit made off the backs of middle, working classes and the poor and/or magic money created by hedge funds, corporate greed and full blown vulture capitalism, all on a global scale.

And the 1% wonder why we want their hides tarred and feathered?

[Mimosa]

2. Everybody should read the article.

Thanks for posting it, Stinky.

[drm604]

3. K&R

[FreakinDJ]

4. Be sure to share the story on FB

need more people to see this

[Stinky The Clown]

5. Please do. I have no Facebook account.

I have email.

I have DU.

That's it.

[sabrina 1]

32. Tweeted ...

[freshwest]

6. From the link:

Last edited Sun Jul 22, 2012, 12:56 PM - Edit history (1)

"The problem here is that 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," the report says.

Note, it was not the welfare queens, unions, poor, socialized medicine or social safety nets that did it. Instead it was the people who profited from their labor and the planet's resouces That is a proof of FDR's warning:

“The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it comes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism - ownership of government by an individual, by a group...”

In order to work together peacefully in cooperation, we pay taxes through our government; but like a temporary gastric bypass gone wrong, the nutrients are not being returned to the body politic, so it has been reduced to the point of feebleness. Thus they are above our leaders who are bound by their position in this body. Some like Obama and Warren, tried to rein them in by calling to reduce the bypass by going after overseas tax havens, and are called by the ravenous rich 'socialists' and 'anti-business.'

One of Barack's very first actions was to go after tax havens overseas, which began a hailstorm of media criticism in his first months and they then instituted a very dangerous game, since their billions pay for many supporters willing to kill for them. They have not stopped railing against him in vicious terms and have now achieved their goal of convincing both the left and right parts of the population that government's mere existence is the problem and not them.

The belief of the people that government should stand between them and these groups has existed for hundreds of years, as an association that they could have some input. Clearly, the rich minority are secretive about where their money comes from, which is us, in order to not inflame the majority against them. Instead, they pay media to inflame us against each other. They created the Tea Party by media to continue the flow of wealth to them without stopping. The spirits of the people we fought in WW2 now keep Americans busy by media mass hypnosis about God, Guns, Gays and Gynecology, going after each other, to take their minds off of where the money went:

"The really dangerous American fascist... is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way. The American fascist would prefer not to use violence.

His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power...

They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest.

Their final objective, toward which all their deceit is directed, is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection."

-- U.S. Vice President Henry A. Wallace, quoted in the New York Times, April 9, 1944

[scarletwoman]

12. Great post!

Thank you for that wonderful Henry Wallace quote - true words and timeless (unfortunately).

[freshwest]

13. I wish people knew MORE about that and LESS what media tells them. Thanks for your comment on it.

[scarletwoman]

16. The vast majority in this country are utterly clueless. And the plutocrat-controlled corporate media

sees to it very well that they are kept that way.

[malaise]

25. +1,000

Great post indeed

[Tsiyu]

20. Great post n/t

[sabrina 1]

33. Excellent post. And it looks like they have accomplished the goal outlined in the last paragraph of

your quote:

Their final objective, toward which all their deceit is directed, is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection."

-- U.S. Vice President Henry A. Wallace, quoted in the New York Times, April 9, 1944

When Glass Steagal was rescinded, they knocked down the last barrier between them and the money they needed for absolute power.

They created the Tea Party by media to continue the flow of wealth to them without stopping.

And they sent out their 'private armies to Crush OWS because any sign of the people uniting in oppositio to them was viewed as a huge threat that needed to be stomped out quickly and efficiently.

Note, it was not the welfare queens, unions, poor, socialized medicine or social safety nets that did it. Instead it was the people who profited from their labor and the planet's resouces

But yet, even here on DU we had people believing that the Greek Working Class were the responsible for the collapse of the World Economy. And our own politicians, at least until last summer, talking about 'fixing SS in order to fix the deficit'. An outright lie that was again bought by even some on the Left.

This should be an OP.

[freshwest]

34. You're welcome to make one of it. But as far as the Greeks, when I talked to Europeans, they said...

They blamed them for NOT curbing the offshoring of wealth, NOT showing the political courage to rein in their plutocrats. And they had developed a broad, populist, anti-tax culture that blamed their creditors for their problems, when they were closer to home.

In order to continue not paying in, they sustained their safety net by borrowing from countries who were biting the bullet, insisting on taxes being paid, to keep their SOL high. As those countries began to struggle, they resented discounting the loans, which they had done previously.

Sounds familiar, doesn't it?

We have 'patriots,' libertarians, corporatists and teabaggers singing 'the IRS is illegal' tuneand claiming the entire financial sector is at fault, poor people or Obama. But it is the propaganda funded by the plutocrats and the people that have been voted into office who are burning down the house here.

[ananda]

7. That is pretty amazing and appalling..

.. that that much money can be hoarded without being taxed. Ugh.

[muriel_volestrangler]

8. 13 trillion pounds; 21 trillion dollars

just to emphasise the size of the fortune this is about.

[aint_no_life_nowhere]

21. Could be up to $31 trillion - the article says 13 to 20 trillion pounds

[Stinky The Clown]

28. I saw that error right after posting. I was in a hurry and chose to leave it.

Fixed now.

[Berlum]

9. This is soooooo Republican

sheesh

[lunatica]

10. They're planning to use it anytime now to create jobs

Just as soon as they save up enough.

stop picking on them dammitt!

[freshwest]

23. They've already created jobs. They've reduced people to hiring on to kill other people.

That'll keep the commoners too busy to go after them. It always has, since we seem to hate each other so easily. So, I'll go along with not picking on them, for just a little while...



Although I know you were being saracastic.

[scarletwoman]

11. Your headline is innaccurate - it's 13 trillion in British POUNDS, 21 trillion in U.S. DOLLARS.

A global super-rich elite has exploited gaps in cross-border tax rules to hide an extraordinary £13 trillion ($21tn) of wealth offshore – as much as the American and Japanese GDPs put together – according to research commissioned by the campaign group Tax Justice Network.

£=Pounds, $=Dollars.

I'm not saying this just to be nit-picky, I simply think that the impact of 21 TRILLION DOLLARS makes the true amount of these offshore hoards that much more compelling to the U.S. reader.

[Stinky The Clown]

27. I knew that right after I posted. I chose to leave it.

I was in a hurry to get someplace.

[scarletwoman]

29. No problem, part of why I posted the correction was for the other readers of the thread, so they'd

know that the actual dollar amount was much higher than 13 trillion.

[grasswire]

14. the comments section is definitely worth reading n/t

[otohara]

15. They Give New Meaning to Hoarding

TLC, the darling of cable TV needs to ask why these people feel the need to hoard more money than they can possibly spend.

[Octafish]

17. Lucy Komisar has done an excellent job of covering offshoring wealth.

For those interested:

http://www.thekomisarscoop.com/category/offshore/

[aint_no_life_nowhere]

18. The greatest enemies of civilization are no longer countries or nations

"...0.001% of the world's population – a tiny class of the mega-rich who have more in common with each other than those at the bottom of the income scale in their own societies. ..."

[freshwest]

22. This is the reality we are faced with today.

[Tsiyu]

19. Thanks for this eye-opener

We can all feel it, we have seen our power and our $$$ just drain away into the hands of the select few, yet we are like the frog slowly boiling in the water.

I keep hoping more Americans will get fed up with this fascism but they are perhaps too busy surviving, and being convinced it's all their fault, to rise up as we all should. And of course the media keep them distracted and unfocused so they can't really see what's happening to their livelihoods and their nation.

What will it take? Don't know, but I hope this nation's good people of all races and creeds will someday soon say "Enough!"

[lunatica]

24. This needs to be posted often

Just as a reminder.

[malaise]

26. Was on local news here

Frightening is the word

[freshwest]

36. Do you mind telling me where? Big city, national or local franchise? How did they introuduce it?

[malaise]

38. I'm in Kingston

Jamaica - carried it in the international section of the mid-day news. I was pleasantly surprised.

[freshwest]

40. Thanks. So they didn't make a big deal of it, huh?

[HiPointDem]

30. kr

[agent46]

31. The human race is living on scraps

and they're charging us for it. Time to overturn the tables of finance.

[Egalitarian Thug]

35. K&R for an important thread that actually matters to all our lives. n/t

[Zalatix]

37. Blockade the Cayman Islands and their like, to send a warning to Switzerland.

Create tax firewalls that make it hard to send money out of the country.

[ljm2002]

39. Very informative...

...deserves to be read widely.

We need to expose the self-serving bastards and all of their methods and havens. Otherwise we have no hope of stemming the tide.

We here in the US are so used to reading about other countries, and their plutocrats stealing money and hoarding it offshore. Well guess what folks, it's happening to us too.

[freshwest]

41. +1

[dragonlady]

42. John Nichols mentioned this at his speech in Milwaukee tonight

He said he would write about it tomorrow. I'm sure his comments will be worth reading.