Re: Date: Sun, 28 Apr 2013 17:36:17 -0700 (PDT) From: Mervyn Lobo <mervynal...@yahoo.ca> To: "goanet@lists.goanet.org" <goanet@lists.goanet.org> Subject: [Goanet] Off topic: The joys of offshore banking
Folks, Strangely?enough, tiny Cyprus seems to be sending the correct message to all those who send their money abroad so as to escape taxes. The message is: "Pay your taxes at home and let the local economy benefit from your deposits or let the tax haven banks decide what to do with your money." Mervyn1650 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- There is quite a lot to say about the 'correctness' of the message, but it should be clear that hi-spirited Mervyn is (at least) 30 years behind schedule. "Pay your taxes at home and let the local economy benefit" might have had some validity then, but now paying taxes mainly means shoring up failing - 'but too big to fail' - banks, and the financial system in general - a bottomless pit with all of us simply waiting for the day of reckoning. What 'Cyprus' inaugurated, and what Jeroen Dijsselbloem, our (NL) genial finance minister and chair of the Euro-group, emphasized - before hastily retracting his words once the intended damage had been done - is the generalized dispossession of the ordinary citizenry in favor of big corporate entities en fat corporate individuals. This will be done in three stages: (i) relentless 'hunt' of tax dodgers squirreling funds offshore - but leaving corporates, both companies and individuals, shielded, or even more favored as before, like the Netherlands do - a conspicuous tax paradise for multinationals; (ii) dispossession of individual assets (especially real estate) through punitive wealth taxation (with monies so collected going towards 'saving' 'the system'), again, with leaving corporates unaffected; and (iii) last but not least, 'bail-in' of failing banks by seizing individual deposits (again, - etc.), even within the 'sacrosanct' 100K Euro guarantee - that was what Dijsselbloem termed 'a workable scenario for the future'. All this will result in the ultimate victory of 'disaster capitalism', i.e. the definitive shift of resources and incomes from households to firms, which is, ad fundum, what the whole 'modern' economy is about. No cheers from patrizio & Diiiinooos!
