By Dave Lindorff
Hold everything!
I
mean it. Stop talking about cutting school budgets, Social Security
benefits, Medicare, Veteran’s pensions. Stop cutting subsidies to
transit systems, to foreign aid. Stop cutting unemployment benefits.
Stop it all.
There
can not be any justification for budget cutting while wealthy
criminals, corrupt politicians and business executives are hiding what
reportedly totals between $29 trillion and $32 trillion in offshore tax
havens.
A massive data dump by the Washington-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), working in conjunction with dozens of news organizations around the globe,
has exposed the secret files of over 120,000 dummy offshore companies
that have been used for years to hide the wealth -- much of it
ill-gotten, all of it tax-dodged -- of the world’s rich and mega-rich.
Before we go further, let’s think about those numbers, which are really mind-boggling.
The
US annual federal budget for 2012 was $3.7 trillion. The total US
economy, largest in the world by far, was $15.8 trillion in 2012. That
federal budget deficit that we hear so much about, which is growing by
$1 trillion a year, totals about $16 trillion.
Now
by comparison, the Philadelphia school system -- fifth-largest in the
country -- is in crisis, with 27 schools being closed down because of a
budget shortfall of $304 million. That shortfall (the direct result of tax breaks given to wealthy corporations in the city), is approximately one ten-millionth of a percent of
the amount of money criminal politicians and business leaders -- many
and probably the vast majority of them, Americans -- are reportedly
squirreling away abroad in hidden accounts each year!
The
total shortfall in the US Social Security system, that is leading a
huge number of politicians in Washington, Republican and Democrat, to
claim that the sky is falling and that the system will go “bankrupt” in
2036, is $8.6 trillion. Even that huge deficit, caused by the large
number of Baby Boomers born between 1946 and 1964 reaching retirement
age over the next two decades, could be totally erased by simply taking
back a quarter of the money illegally shipped abroad by our and other
countries’ ruling elites.
Given
that the US economy is roughly one quarter of the global economy, we
can assume that at least a quarter of the hidden offshore money, or
about $8 trillion, belongs to Americans, but in truth...
For
the rest of this article by DAVE LINDORFF in ThisCantBeHappening!, the
new independent 3-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative
newspaper, please go to: www.thiscantbehappening.net/
No comments:
Post a Comment