Treasure Islands: Uncovering The Damage Of Offshore Banking And Tax Havens (2011) - Plot & Excerpts
This is an important and profound book that exposes what is really going on around the world. Rich elites with utterly depraved lack of morality are cheating, lying and thieving against the rest of the world's population in places such as that vile cesspool of depravity the Isle of Jersey, in the Cayman Islands--a vile place that has enabled criminality of the worst sort, of foolish places like the state of Delaware that allowed themselves to enable the destruction of their fellow Americans through the elimination on limits on interest payments and most of all through the actions of a little-known knothole within the London, England known as the City of London. These various places and the bankers who have used their immoral devices to rob, cheat and steal from the community of the world, are the worst sort of filth on earth. If there were a God, the people whose actions are described in this monumental book would burn in a seething miasma of oil. While pretending to be honorable professionals, the bankers and hedge fund managers and accountants and attorneys who enable the practices described in detail in this book are the worst sort of scum, stealing from the poor, forcing others to pay the taxes they shirk, all while these same people benefit from the stable societies in the countries where they live and whose taxes they don't pay.Even more infamous, these same super wealthy and corporations complain about income taxes they claim are high while they in fact evade, lie and slime their way out of paying any of them. The super wealthy in America but all over the world now evade taxes almost 100% while whining and complaining about those same taxes, in the most astounding and shocking and angering display of venality you can imagine. In truth, no matter how bad you thought it was--these people who do business in Bermuda, in the Cayman Islands, in the Bahamas, in Manhattan, in Delaware, in the Isle of Jersey, Gurnsey, the Isle of Man, in the financial center of London called the "City of London" and in a thousand other places across the world--are 1,000,000 times worse than in your worst horror imaginings. These people are not only responsible for the finacial crisis--and for the destruction of economies going back to the mid 1980s. These self-justifying slime are the reason that our world is in trouble. They don't care and if this world is to be saved from destruction from within, each one of us owes it to humanity to say, I personally am not going to put up with this. In the United States, it is the super wealthy that screw everybody and their enables are of course the Republicans but, I am horrified to realize, the Democrats are in the tank too.Read this book and see if you don't join my outrage. It's time for us to take action. Action--yes--you know what I mean. Not indignation but real action, the kind that comes out of a pitchfork. You, reading this in the Isle of Jersey, in the Cayman Islands. We are looking right at you. You have enabled these crimes. We know. The book's premise is that to understand how there has been a significant transfer of wealth from the 99% to the 1% we need to study the central role played by tax havens. The author, Nicholas Shaxson, defines a tax haven as a 'place that seeks to attract business by offering politically stable facilities to help people or entities get around the rules, laws and regulations of jurisdictions elsewhere.'Through the avoidance of tax wealthy individuals and multinationals have abrogated their responsibilities to society. They don't just use tax havens to avoid paying taxes but to escape the rule of law. They are havens for corruption and fraud; used by drug barons, sex traffickers, gun smugglers, dictators, Royalty and wealthy politicians alike. The book details how money has been stolen from the world's poorest countries to fill the coffers of the 1% who treat the world and its resources as one giant slush fund. An enormous industry has grown to service these super wealthy – not just the large banks, but the big accountancy firms, tax advisers, and the so-called regulators – all working to hide assets in secrecy jurisdictions. It is estimated that half of all banking assets are routed offshore. The IMF estimated that in 2010 that the balance sheets of small island financial centres alone added up to $18 trillion. Small islands, though, are just the tip of the iceberg. This book examines the development and spread of tax havens in Switzerland, Luxembourg, and America (especially Delaware). However, the world centre for this trade is none other than the City of London. The British Empire, and the Bank of England, sits at the heart of a massive web of corruption and fraud – spinning out to Jersey, Guernsey, the Isle of Mann, the Caribbean islands and Hong Kong. These capture foreign trade and channel it to London, they act as a money-laundering filter allowing the City to be involved in the dirty business whilst providing enough distance to maintain plausible deniability. A focus on Jersey reveals the terrible corrupting influence on the island at every level. Offshore tax havens are all about placing your money 'elsewhere' – somewhere where no questions are asked, where you will be guaranteed secrecy, where democracy is not going to get in your way. The book is informed by a number of whistle blowers who eventually felt sickened by the corruption and fraud perpetrated, and now live in fear of reprisals for speaking out.Shaxson describes offshore as not just a place but a process – a race to the bottom where regulations, laws and the trappings of democracy are steadily degraded – the battering ram of deregulation. He shows the part that offshore tax havens have played in poverty in Africa, deregulation, globalisation, rise of debt, towering inequalities, the drugs industry, gun smuggling to terrorists and financial fraud. This book shines a torch into the shadowy world of offshore banking to reveal a world that the super wealthy would rather we weren't aware.
What do You think about Treasure Islands: Uncovering The Damage Of Offshore Banking And Tax Havens (2011)?
Had to go back on my blood pressure medication to finish this book...
—machume
Five stars. Very enlightening. This needs more attention.
—marlen12
Brilliant, very interesting and factual book.
—applemit
