by Sinan Ak
The "curse of globalization" seems to be tax evasion by transnational capital and corporations, among others, which is very bad in the U. S. and Great Britain, but it is devastating for ordinary people in developing countries. Millions of people go without basic services - running water and other utilities, health care, education, police, because their governments have the money to pay for it.
The decision of the Supreme Court in the income taxes cases deprived the National Government of a power which, by reasons of previous decisions of the court, it was generally supposed that Government had. It is undoubtedly a power the National Government ought to have.... I therefore recommend to the Congress that both Houses, by a two-thirds vote, shall propose an amendment to the Constitution conferring the power to levy an income tax upon the National Government without apportionment among the States in proportion to population ... and second, the enactment, as part of the pending revenue measure, either as a substitute for, or in addition to, the inheritance tax, an excise tax upon all corporations, measured by 2 percent of their net income.
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)
In Zambia, the government is wrong or corrupt to collect taxes on dividends made at least $2,500,000,000 profit by now, thanks to intense pressure from the IMF and World Bank privatized in the 1990s and foreign-owned mines. Most of the wars in Africa occur so that Western companies do not include tax or profit sharing on $1,000,000,000,000 in raw materials that were stolen from the continent to pay.
That being the case, you would see the conflicts in Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria, disappear etc.. It would also explode the living standards of people. So this is the right way. A former Swiss banker hands over documents to Wikileaks, claims that he tried detail by wealthy entrepreneurs and legislators to evade tax payments.
It seems to me that there must be an ecological limit to the number of paper pushers the earth can sustain, and that human civilization will collapse when the number of, say, tax lawyers exceeds the world’s total population of farmers, weavers, fisherpersons, and pediatric nurses.
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)
"Data theft remains a serious crime in Switzerland. But the fact that money is now being offered by the authorities adds a novel element," says Konrad Hummler, chairman of the Swiss Private Bankers Association and boss of Wegelin, an established private bank.
WikiLeaks has come out with another episode now. Its founder Julian Assange claimed that Swiss Bank executive Rudolf Elmer provided him 2 CDs of data of more than 2,000 accounts in the prestigious bank. In his response, the ex-bank chief said the CDs contained data about 40 companies and MNCs guilty of tax evasion.tax evasion cases tax evasion income