Editor,
The Panama Papers leak has brought the world’s attention to tax dodgers among the rich and the powerful, reminding us that a large percentage of the world’s tax “havens” are on British-ruled islands.
As a result, if you are British, you would see no need for the rigors of a higher, formal education as a way to get ahead, at least monetarily. You would simply join the millions upon millions of Brits who are innocuously called “shareholders,” benefiting directly or indirectly from revenues accruing to their exchequer from banksters in all these islands still ruled by Britain applying taxation without a whole lot of democratic representation locally, even though they are thousands of miles from Westminster Palace – like the Cayman Islands, Bermuda and their Virgin Islands – places where you go and live like royalty on one of the swank, tourist resorts and enjoy the fantastic weather and beaches and oh-so-lush foliage while you as a Lilly white person are waited upon hand to mouth by colored subjects of the Crown (as depicted ad nauseum in photos in all those tourist brochures) who are conveniently also British subjects – all while business wars conducted by you carrying yet another mother lode of secreted cash over to one of the many banks guaranteed by the Crown.
But the British Prime Minister Cameron, when recently defending the ethics of what Britain’s obvious shadiness in this regard, has euphemistically and patronizingly referred to these residual colonies as “Crown dependencies” and “overseas territories.” That’s like when Britain called Hong Kong (getting huge payoffs for being a duty-free port) one of their “protectorates.” (How convenient to have invented the modern language of global power; you can cast a benign spell upon others of your nationality to not feel guilty when using such modern means of enriching yourself through tax loopholes for multinationals, while your fellow Tories effectively chant, even in their House of Commons: “The empire is dead. Long live empire.”)
And Cameron whitewashed all this capitalism-driven moneymaking by splitting hairs, given the complexity of not just the British tax code, between tax evasion (“illegal”) and tax avoidance (“legal”), and how he is only going to “warn” those who he says are committing “aggressive tax avoidance.”
This has attracted money into Britain from corrupt leaders of third world countries Britain once colonized, making Britain even richer. So, for example, British college students can take all that inherited money from “unit trusts” and spend their year abroad with no need to work, just party.
Arun Ahuja
UNM student
