Stephan: It is not just the banks, and other financial institutions. It is also private individuals, the new aristrocracy of a world dominated not by nations, but by virtual corporate states, sometimes owned and run by one individual or family. At its top this is wealth at a literally unimaginable level. It's not just the biggest toys, as media portrays it. It is a different way of looking at the world, of looking at the world... as a world. A bigger neighborhood.
I have found hubub over Romney's many homes, each with its own staff to be very revealing, but not for the reasons usually discussed.
Romney is actually a small version of the form. Two hundred and fifty million, to someone with say 17 billion controlling corporations all over the world, is not that impressive. In the game, but not on the varsity.
People who are contained within national boundaries, which is to say the 99 per cent of us, live in a different sphere. The elite hide their money away from contributing to the health of their country because nation states, and national wellness are not the priorities they were 50 years ago. This doesn't seem to have dawned on many people yet, but it will become more obvious with time. Who can go to the moon will soon define it.
Nations’ problems of debt and deficit could be easily solved by applying taxes to profits held in offshore tax havens, where the global business elite have hidden up to $32 trillion to skirt their responsibilities to tax agencies all over the world, the liberal-leaning Tax Justice Network reported this week.
The Tax Justice Network said that its estimates of wealth held in offshore havens ranged from $21 trillion to $32 trillion – the lowest of which is still massively larger than the roughly $11.5 trillion held in those same havens in 2005. The latest report refers to the practice of hiding wealth as ‘the dark side of globalization
