I warned that New Zealand would be used as a tax haven on October 26th, 2011, if the National government was reelected.
I wasn’t the first.
Never did I expect we would be proven right in such a spectacular fashion as via the Panama Papers leak.
A leak that has shone light on an agenda to use New Zealand as a port of safe harbor for vast swathes of foreign cash. An agenda that does not stem solely from the ruling party. It comes from on high.
In a healthy society governed by democratic principles and the rule of law, news media would be analogous to a powerful telescope, a roving, scrutinizing eye from which little or nothing can hide. Corrupt societies — ones that require the vast majority of the population to be passive, obedient, misinformed, ignorant, distracted and consumptive — require instead a media that acts as a kind of prism, a distorting lens that presents a perversion of reality.
The scale of this distortion varies greatly around the world, with some — mostly independent — media (sometimes lone journalists) laudably aiming to shine a torch as best they can on state and corporate power. At the other extreme, dictatorships like North Korea use state media to portray a false reality to help control their people, who nonetheless are surely aware that their freedoms are strictly limited.
Western corporate-owned media, however, is unique and quite remarkable in that while it depicts a reality as laughably false as that shown to the North Koreans, its readers/viewers — more accurately its consumers — are overwhelmingly unaware that they are being fed a pack of lies, that the picture given to them is — in key areas that concern corporate power and Western control of world resources — diametrically opposite to reality. With a corporate media monopoly over the information that enters people’s brains, information that is crucial to the formation of their worldview, reality is skewed with ease to serve the interests of capital and control. Not only are consumers of such information not aware of this cynical manipulation, they are not even aware that they are not aware.
On hearing the term ‘tax haven,’ many will picture idyllic locales with long beaches, palm trees and yachts belonging to multi-millionaires like the Cayman Islands, a British Overseas Territory in the Caribbean Sea. The more mundane reality, however, is laid out in the ‘financial secrecy index’ compiled by the Tax Justice Network in 2013.
Unimaginably vast sums of financial wealth sit in the 82 jurisdictions listed. European countries like Greece, Italy and Portugal have been brought to their knees by decades of secrecy and tax evasion.
A global industry has developed involving the world’s biggest banks, law practices and accounting firms which not only provide secretive offshore structures to their tax- and law-dodging clients, but aggressively market them. ‘Competition’ between jurisdictions to provide secrecy facilities has, particularly since the era of financial globalisation took off in the 1980s, become a central feature of global financial markets.
