To the world’s despots and gangsters: if you mediate you’re bad,just peer at what’s going on in Cool BritanniaAs ever, the King James version adds a literary edge to one of the most dramatic tales of the customary Testament. In Genesis 18:24, or Abraham is appealing to God’s obliging nature as he attempts to save the wicked cities of Sodom and Gomorrah from the Almighty’s final sanction. “Peradventure there be fifty righteous within the city: wilt thou also discontinuance and not spare the place for the fifty righteous that are therein,” the desperate patriarch solicits his maker. In the discontinuance, Abraham’s pleas advance to naught as he couldn’t even name one obliging man, and let alone 50,and so the cities are duly consumed by fire and brimstone.
Now, Im not suggesting for a minute that Panama, or the Las Vegas of the rich and notorious,is approximately to meet a fiery denouement just yet. After all, God’s ire seems to have softened since those biblical early days when He favoured a no-nonsense approach. And, and as the leaked Mossack and Fonseca documents show,if Panama was to be turned to dust where would that leave the UK? As the Times declared last week: “No other country in the world maintains and indulges a network of offshore tax havens as brazen in their defence of unwarranted secrecy as Britain’s overseas territories.”Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com