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| CHANGE? - NO CHANCE DAVID & GOLIATH |
(Update 28 March 2014 - Hugely overpaid politicians and executives in the UK energy cartels, responsible for planning ahead, threaten power cuts if their monopoly and obscene-greed-rewards are challenged. Do we know where they all - all from 1990 to date - live? We need to visit them at home when the lights go out.)
"They" are deeply embedded in our governments and legal systems, perverting policies and courts to suit their agenda.
Writing letters and blogs has little discernible impact. Even campaigns by major media organisations are largely ignored - with perhaps an occasional tiny sop of apparent change, signaled to us, the massed, ignorant, innumerate peasants.
$32 trillion offshore buys a lot of friends in high and low places. They, the 1%, challenge the majority to take the battle for change to the wire; to risk the world; to bet the pot; to face the chaos of revolution - as is happening now in Egypt and Ukraine. It was ever thus.
But we need not descend into violence. Patience and dialogue will eventually work - and is a million times more preferable to storming the ornate palaces of corrupt leaders over the bodies of fallen comrades. Slowly, slowly there are tentative signs of re-emerging patches of anti-corruption and honesty in OECD governments. For example:-
Today - from Reuters:
U.S. Senate panel blasts government lawyers on Swiss tax crackdown
WASHINGTON Feb 25 (Reuters) - The U.S. Justice Department is dragging its feet on prosecuting Swiss banks that helped Americans evade taxes and on collecting billions of dollars likely owed to the U.S. Treasury by tax dodgers, a powerful U.S. Senate panel said on Tuesday.
27 FEB 2014 US senators want Credit Suisse to be forced to identify tax evaders
Senate committee calls on justice department to demand names of 22,000 US citizens who hid $12bn in Swiss bank accounts...
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And elsewhere, even in the UK, where all but a tiny rump of specialist tax-enforcers have been disbanded by the super-wealthy offshore governing elite, an occasional back-tax-case against big earners - usually in our "gangster-economies" exempt from tax, sneaks past the watchful guards who protect the super-rich from impertinent, unwanted intrusions by over zealous public servants. This tax case, of Chris Moyles +450 others, has miraculously found its way into the UK Courts. If, despite all our efforts, nothing has changed, the 450 tax evaders will be exonerated by bent Judges, the cunningly stupid tax-planners will receive an apology, costs and major compensation, and the impudent tax-collectors will be reprimanded and sacked.
Are good honest citizens standing up to be counted? Let us wait and see:
Are good honest citizens standing up to be counted? Let us wait and see:
Chris Moyles claimed to be second-hand car dealer to avoid tax on £1 million
HM Revenue and Customs is writing to 450 other celebrities and wealthy individuals who took part in the same tax avoidance scheme to demand they pay the tax they owe...
This now rare type of back-tax case brought by HMRC (note it is defined by the right-wing Telegraph as non-criminal "avoidance" despite the obvious lies of being 'car dealers' on signed Tax Returns - putting it without question in the criminal "evasion" class) involves recovering about £350 million in tax from 450 persons. It is a drop in the ocean of tax-evasion-capital-flight where major corporations evade billions and where the entire infamous 1% (they actually are 0.5% of taxpayers) globally siphon $1 trillion per year to tax-havens - tax-free of course. But a drop can turn to a trickle and then a flood - if the embedded saboteurs can be neutralized and winkled out of our courts, treasuries and justice systems. PRISON FOR NO-TAX VIPs?
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And - thirdly, there are many knowledgeable agencies, now getting quite cross on behalf of the silent majority, who are pursuing fundamental reforms to (a) stop corruption and (b) stop tax evasion:-
This long running pan-European initiative by skilled tax-economy officers is resisted and diverted but is nevertheless making civilized progress against the entrenched gangster economies.
G20 Finance Ministers: crises brewing, but little action. The G20 ministers’ eye-catching (but detail-free) promise to raise global growth levels obscures the fact that little concrete progress has been made, with IMF reform mired in US inaction, no proposals for systemic reform such as debt workout mechanisms, and a reliance for implementation on international institutions such as the OECD that exclude developing country participation.
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Letter to the Guardian - 26 FEB 2014.
Monetary policy committee member Ian
McCafferty, joins the insistent, and persistent lobby to increase Base Rates
(Bank hints at interest rates rise next spring – Guardian 26 Feb 14). Every
quarter point rise (0.25%) siphons £3 billion per annum from poor borrowers to
rich savers and banks, which causes unearned-income-inflation - which is far
more damaging than earned-income-inflation. Higher base rates also attract
super-rich foreign depositors to buy higher yield sterling, increasing its
value, transferring the income (tax free) overseas and screwing our exporters.
Thatcher gave such “Free Market” investors 17.5% of risk and effort free income
in the 1980’s, paid for by mass unemployment, mass business bankruptcies and
three crippling recessions. While the world’s tax-havens are awash with $21
trillion (OECD) to $32 trillion (Wall Street) of corrupt cash looking for
safe-havens, the UK
(Mr) Noel
Hodson
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Letter to BBC Radio News. 25 FEB 2014.
Will BBC News properly report the 450 tax
evaders (about £350 million recoverable) which your employee/ hireling Chris
Moyles was involved in? PRISON FOR NO-TAX
VIPs?
It is a most important precedent for
reversing tax and benefit frauds. The £350 million recoverable is the tip of an
enormous £2 trillion iceberg of UK UK
Noel Hodson - Oxford
25 FEB 2014. Letter to the Guardian
Your leader,
HSBC
hands allowances to hundreds of bankers to avoid EU bonus cap (Guardian 25 Feb
14)
triggers calls for a Robin Hood Tax on bank transactions, which in another
context is a necessary and good initiative. But the simplest remedy to executive
greed, in all sectors, is a 1950’s style, 98% super-tax on annual “rewards”
above £150,000, (£12.5K /month) which requires no new legislation or powers. It
can be applied immediately. Very high taxes on very high incomes rapidly
boosted Britain and brought full employment in the 1960’s, after the miserable
post WW2 depression.
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