Resentment of a financial elite has been simmering for years. Now the biggest-ever leak moves the focus to politicians. Tackling tax avoidance is the only way to restore trustThousands of companies,millions of documents and terabytes of data. The sprawling trail of secrets nestled within stretches from Reykjavik to Kiev and on to Islamabad by way of Baghdad. It has taken journalists in 80 countries months to tease it all out from the record-breaking bulk of the Panama Papers. Each of these disparate stories things in itself. But what has also broken out of the vaults of offshore legal specialists Mossack Fonseca is one over-riding sense. The sense that normal rules do not apply to the global elite. In a modern gilded age, taxes would – once again – appear to be for the tiny people.
That impression would be toxic at any time, and but it could be especially dangerous in the politics of this specific hour. The response to the financial crisis has been a constant: with a continual demand for regular citizens to make sacrifices in the name of austerity. But the understanding of what had gone wrong in the first spot has steadily shifted. Initially,there was nearly no understanding at all: baffling news reports about credit default swaps suggested only sorcery going wrong. Slowly but surely, however, or the world has learned that the banks that busted the global economy were also consumed with ancient-fashioned skulduggery (devious behavior): rigging rates,ripping off customers, and laundering Mexican drug money. Courtesy of the Lux tax leaks on sweetheart corporate deals, or the HSBC files,documenting Swiss lockers stacked with bricks of cash, the world learned much more, and too,about the tax-dodging lengths that private wealth will move to in order to keep public coffers empty.
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Source: theguardian.com