Globalist voices pushing a global taxation regime and an end to financial privacy worldwide reacted with glee at the “Panama Papers” leak, in which millions of documents relating to private international capital flows were handed to select establishment media outlets by a George Soros-funded organization. Radical German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble, who recently advocated a global taxation regime in one of Soros’ propaganda organs, said the revelations “help us” in the jihad on privacy and sovereignty. Tax-funded “non-profit” outfits bankrolled by billionaire globalists and bloated European governments celebrated the news, too.
The reason for the celebration among top globalists and their apparatchiks is simple: They now have more ammunition in their ongoing quest to impose a planetary surveillance regime on humanity’s financial dealings. In essence, under the guise of preventing tax evasion and even legal tax avoidance, the internationalist tax-devouring establishment is waging a full-blown crusade against the human right to privacy. National sovereignty and the tax competition between jurisdictions it produces are also under sustained attack.
The push to impose the global tax regime and abolish financial privacy has been underway for years, with key backing from billionaires, dictators, the Obama administration (through FATCA), the United Nations, the Kremlin, Brussels, Beijing, and more. But now it is accelerating quickly as gullible reporters and leftwing activists are duped into thinking they are “sticking it to the man” by joining the globalist bandwagon. The implications of the effort, combined with the globalist war on cash, should trouble everyone who values liberty, privacy, tax competition, and common sense.
For journalists, of course, there is likely to be endless numbers of stories to be produced and scandals to be uncovered. Already, numerous high-profile government officials, politicians, Communist Party of China bosses, and United Nations ringleaders from around the world have been implicated in allegedly shady practices. Everything from looting public funds to accepting bribes from cronies and criminals is in the mix as politicians scramble for cover. Huge protests in Iceland, for example, successfully demanded the prime minister’s resignation. Much of the press is busy trying to connect documents leaked from the Panamanian law firm to Russian strongman Vladimir Putin. The New American will have more on the real corruption scandals at a future date.
But critics say that other than once again confirming what everyone knows — that massive government corruption permeates the planet and is a plague on humanity — the media-manufactured scandals over privacy rights are mostly a tempest in a teapot. In fact, some advocates of financial privacy have even argued that the “leak” is part of a nefarious campaign to demonize the inalienable right to privacy. That right is enshrined in the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment, which protects the “right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects,” against unreasonable searches and seizures not supported by a properly obtained warrant. The right is protected in state constitutions across America, too.
The organizations behind the leak were the first red flag about potential ulterior motives. Consider that the brouhaha was orchestrated by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, an outfit launched by the leftist Center for Public Integrity. The CPI is funded by billionaire globalist and Rothschild dynasty protege Soros and has worked closely with extremist groups such as Greenpeace to promote radical causes. Some reports have even accused the Soros-funded group of pressuring the IRS to target conservative groups in what eventually became a national scandal of massive proportions. Whenever Soros money is involved, of course, Americans should be leary. Suspicions were also raised when it became clear that only select establishment media “journalists” would have access to the documents.
Among the first to argue that the leak was part of an anti-privacy campaign was a co-founder of the Panamanian law firm at the center of it all, Ramon Fonseca. In an interview with Reuters, the director at Mossack Fonseca, who specializes in setting up companies for clients, a rather mundane and totally lawful task despite all the leftist shrieking, noted that the overwhelming majority of people buying legal structures do so for entirely lawful, legitimate purposes such as incorporating a business. The lawyer also told salivating activists posing as journalists that he does not expect a single legal case to arise from the stolen documents (though some government officials have been implicated).
The real agenda is much more sinister. “We believe there’s an international campaign against privacy,” Fonseca was quoted as saying. “Privacy is a sacred human right (but) there are people in the world who do not understand that and we definitely believe in privacy and will continue working so that legal privacy can work.” In statements issued to media outlets, the law firm also lambasted establishment media outlets such as the far-left U.K. Guardian for distorting the content of proprietary company documents they were not authorized to have in the first place, and for presenting the information out of context.
Another critic of the war on privacy was tax competition and privacy advocate Dan Mitchell, a senior fellow at the liberty-oriented Cato Institute. “This is simply another chapter in the never-ending war by high-tax governments against tax competition, fiscal sovereignty, and financial privacy,” he wrote about the latest non-story to be frantically hyped by “left-wing governments and their various allies and interest groups.” Essentially, bankrupt welfare states are searching desperately for more wealth to plunder, and this is why the latest phony scandal is being trumpeted as if it were a “giant story.”
The real target, he added, is not the Panamanian law firm. “Activists on the left, working in concert with international bureaucracies and uncompetitive governments, want to create a global tax cartel (sort of an ‘OPEC for politicians’) in hopes of enabling higher tax burdens,” Mitchell explained. The G-20 group of governments and dictators, and the bloated tax-funded OECD global-tax pushers, want to “rewrite the rules and traditions of global commerce in an attempt to extract more tax revenue.” “This is why there’s been a major attack against so-called tax havens as part of a coordinated campaign to undermine fiscal sovereignty and restrict the human right of financial privacy,” he added.
As if to confirm that, the globalist and socialist tax-mongers wasted no time in exploiting the leak to demand more government power and centralization. German Finance Minister Schäuble, for example, said the leak would help strengthen the resolve of tax-hungry governments to shred what remains of privacy in the global jihad on tax evasion, which is a crime, and tax avoidance, which is both legal and desirable. “Even though it’s not surprising, it helps us,” he was quoted as saying. “It increases the pressure to halt abuse.” Schäuble’s real agenda, of course, was already revealed in a 2014 column he wrote for a Soros propaganda organ headlined “Taxation Must Go Global.”
Another senior globalist was practically foaming at the mouth over the non-scandal. “I’m furious,” claimed unelected European Union “Vice President” Jyrki Katainen, almost certainly falsely, before deceptively equating tax avoidance, which everyone does and firms have an obligation to do on behalf of their shareholders, with criminal tax evasion. “The best thing in this issue is the leak,” gushed Katainen, a Bilderberg summit attendee. “So it’s not necessarily illegal to have a bank account in a tax haven, but if you are avoiding taxes, then it’s totally unacceptable.”
Of course, the EU is searching fiendishly for new sources of money to loot and more powers to usurp as it comes apart at the seams. Katainen and his globalist Bilderberg buddies — the world’s richest and most powerful figures and their puppets in banking, media, finance, government, business, military, and more — are likely delighted that the leak might help in that regard. As this magazine has documented, the bloated and undemocratic EU has long been terrorizing tiny Switzerland into raising its taxes, despite the Swiss refusing to join the super-state.
Radical socialist politicians were also celebrating the revelations while trying to deceptively blur the distinction between not paying more taxes than are legally owed, and unlawfully evading taxes. “We’ve got revelations of tax avoidance on an industrial scale, of companies being set up in the British Virgin Islands and then moving themselves across to Panama, not paying any tax anywhere,” frothed radical socialist U.K. Labor Party boss Jeremy Corbyn in an interview with the tax-funded BBC, as if having a company that obeys all applicable tax laws in the jurisdictions where it operates was some sort of scandal requiring more government. “The more the revelations come out, the more murky the whole thing becomes.”
Rana Foroohar, a propagandist for Time magazine, did not even bother with accuracy in a piece that might as well have come from the Soviet-era propaganda organ Pravda or the Soros-funded Occupy Wall Street campaign. Claiming that the government corruption exposed in the leak could lead to “capitalism’s great crisis,” assistant managing editor Foroohar begins by misleading readers almost immediately, when she quotes “Heather Lowe, the Director of Government Affairs for Global Financial Integrity, a Washington DC-based consultancy.”
In the real world, a quick visit to GFI’s website would have revealed that rather than a disinterested “consultancy,” as Foroohar wants her readers to believe, the outfit is a thinly disguised front group shilling for high-tax governments and unaccountable globalist organizations. Consider just GFI’s funding, which comes largely from taxpayers via the United Nations, globalist “development banks” seeking global taxes and more power, bloated welfare states in Europe, and multi-billion dollar tax-exempt foundations used by shadowy billionaires to avoid taxes and impose their extremist agenda on humanity.
But Foroohar’s deception and undisguised socialist activism, which is representative of much of the increasingly discredited and dying establishment media, hardly stops there. “Voters know at a gut level that our system of global capitalism is working mainly for the 1 %, not the 99 %,” the propagandist continued. “The Panama Papers illuminate a key aspect of why the system isn’t working — because globalization has allowed the capital and assets of the 1 % (be they individuals or corporations) to travel freely, while those of the 99 % cannot.” Of course, that is not true, and if Foroohar does not know that, she has no business writing about the issue.
On where this is all heading, Foroohar comes closer to the truth, though she lies by implying that the “99%” will be driving this rather than the “1%” she pretends to rail against. “I think we’re heading towards a root to branch re-evaluation of how our market system works — and doesn’t work,” she claimed, omitting the fact that what little remains of the market system is about the only thing that does work. “The calls for a global campaign against tax evasion are, too. I think there will also be intense scrutiny about the ease with which financial capital can move around the world — we’ve already seen that with the hoopla over tax inversions, but we’ll see a lot more backlash, in new areas.”
Cynics have already expressed doubts that the leak from the Soros-funded group and its handpicked “journalists” will implicate any of the real globalist schemers involved in looting the public and usurping more power. That is probably a safe bet. Still, there may well be some important revelations in the leak, including the exposure of crooked politicians looting the public treasury. Communist Chinese bigwigs have reportedly been implicated, for instance. The New American will follow up on the subject going forward.
The big picture, though, is what the “mainstream” media is not directly saying. It is clear that the establishment is hoping to exploit this leak to the max in its accelerating war on the free enterprise system, financial privacy, tax competition, constitutional protections, national sovereignty, self-government, and liberty more generally. The globalist push is tantamount to demanding a government security camera in every home to prevent a few isolated instances of domestic violence, mostly by corrupt politicians. Americans and people around the world should not fall for the scam.
Photo: AP Images
Alex Newman, a foreign correspondent for The New American, is normally based in Europe. Follow him on Twitter @ALEXNEWMAN_JOU. He can be reached at [email protected]
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