Economics is largely based upon and influenced by indices, data used as indicators for growth, expansion, stress and recession. The world has not established an index for frustration or discontent levels, nor is it likely to do so. Yet discontent remains a real issue across the wide spectrum of society, affecting both politics and economics, and whenever it reaches its natural boiling point, it leads to revolution.
People the world over have been disgruntled because of the wide array of austerity measures, a euphemistic term coined to refer to policies that erode wages, pensions, even bank savings in the case of Cyprus, and the general coin in the average man’s pocket.
Disgruntlement moved up one serious notch when the people’s representatives in some parts of the world implemented a policy of bailouts for large companies suddenly crowned as ‘too big to fail’, to justify subsidising their business at taxpayers’ expense rather than allowing them to be taken over as a result of bankruptcy.
The warped philosophy here is that if you are small, the bank would throw you out on the street and take your home or business if you fell behind in payments; but if you are big, with powerful lobbies in Brussels and Washington, then the people’s taxes would bail you out while the people tightened their belts under austerity measures, like those coulees of old carrying their overlords on baskets, straining under the weight of their lard in the sweltering and unforgiving heat.
So how close to the disgruntlement boiling point would we be when those same taxpaying citizens suddenly find out that, for example, the top 50 US corporations, which have lobbied for and received enormous bailouts in their left hand, and given massive bonuses to their executives, have stashed away hundreds of billions of dollars with their right hand in tax havens?
In its explosive report ‘Broken at the Top’, Oxfam has revealed that US corporate giants like Apple, Microsoft, Walmart, Monsanto, Exxon Mobil, Dow Chemicals and General Electric, have hidden away a staggering $1.4 trillion in tax havens (which is larger than the entire economic output of Russia), allowing them to avoid contributing billions to nations’ budgets.
Tax dodging laws are grossly immoral and threaten the pillar of the International Rule of Law
It makes one wonder who the real enemy at the gate is, who is actually threatening world economic stability with such a huge global financial haemorrhage. Meanwhile the man in the street trades in his wage and pension to subsidise enormous bonuses, jets and yachts of those animals who have somehow engineered their way up to become more equal than others in an Orwellian dystopia that would have old Georgie himself horrified by the extent to which our ailing world has overshot 1984 in 2016.
Oxfam’s trusty old spades have dug up interesting figures. General Electric has amassed $28 billion in taxpayer bailouts, yet has a whopping $119 billion hidden away in 118 tax haven subsidiaries. But you will not hear this on NBC, which is owned by GE.
Other media giants Fox and ABC’s Disney together hold $3 billion in tax havens. Dow, who co-produced Agent Orange, got $1.8 billion in tax breaks and have $18 billion hidden away in havens. Apple has a staggering $181 billion in three offshore subsidiaries, safely ensconced and far from the prying eyes of the tax collector, who subsequently comes knocking ever louder at our own door, in a desperate bid to pay the banks their pound of financial flesh in order to service national debts and stave off that most dreaded word ‘default’ – to pay also those same banks that get bailed out and hide their fortunes in tax havens, such as Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo, Bank of America,and City Group, just to complete the circle of insanity.
In seven years the top 50 US corporations spent $2.6 billion ‘lobbying’ the US government, which is currently negotiating a trade agreement with the EU called TTIP. They are very much part of those negotiations, which however have been kept behind closed doors for the rest of us who are less equal than others.
Now who would splash $2.6 billion on lobbying, you would ask, and on what exactly? Well, I guess anyone who could pull $11.2 trillion out of the hat in government loans and bailouts, courtesy of the not-so-obliging taxpaying citizen. Not a bad return on investment in lobbying the people’s representatives, I would say.
Laws permitting slavery or flogging people in the street if, shuffling along in their shackles, they happen to annoyingly get in your way, are not laws in a civilised society. Likewise tax-dodging laws are grossly immoral and threaten the pillar of the International Rule of Law.
Furthermore, especially in the wake of austerity living and enormous disparity in wealth, with one per cent of the population owning over 50 per cent of the world’s assets, it is lighting a fuse for an enormously explosive backlash that historically has always ended in revolution.
The time to act is now. We are at the crossroads. If tax havens and their beneficiaries remain protected, while so many people cling desperately by their fingertips to the edge of a financial precipice, the world economy, which is fuelled by consumption, may very well collapse. If that happens, as in the streets of Paris in 1789, there will certainly be no cake to replace bread, and no haven left to hide.