It remains to be seen whether the EU will use its power to try to scupper their plans although all around the world, those who work for greater social justice and human rights fear that the City of London, with the active support of its allies in the UK government, will move hastily to transform itself into an even more pernicious facilitator of abusive international tax practices, thereby accelerating the race to the bottom among nations on tax, secrecy and regulations.

As the world’s economic elite met in Davos recently to discuss the future of the global economy, a gaggle of international journalists was touring the City of London to find out what Brexit might mean for ordinary people. The Brexit Tax Haven Tour was organised by the Tax Justice Network and the Global Alliance for Tax Justice together with Tax Justice UK, Women’s Budget Group and Womankind Worldwide, taking international press on a walking tour of key sites in the City of London where they heard about the real and imminent threat posed to poorer/plundered and industrialised countries alike by the UK government’s ‘Singapore on the Thames’ strategy.

Speaking at the Bank of England, the Tax Justice Network’s John Christensen explained the peculiar history of this curious institution, which acts as both a central bank and also as a banking regulator, but has done little to counter London’s role as a global money-laundering centre, resolutely ignoring the global risks posed by Britain’s global tax haven network. When considered as a whole, Britain’s network of tax havens and financial secrecy jurisdictions represents the largest and most deleterious tax haven in the world, denying poorer/plundered countries billions of dollars in revenue every year and siphoning away resources urgently needed in all nations for climate change adaptation, economic and social progress and the fulfillment of basic human rights.

Following the Bank of England, the walking tour took journalists to the Maternité statue, Aimé-Jules’ 1878 depiction of a French peasant woman breastfeeding, which is nestled discreetly, and without any deliberate irony, behind the rather more imposing Bank and the Royal Exchange. At this stop, Womankind Worldwide’s Roosje Saalbrink explained the disproportionate burden of unpaid care work imposed on women by unjust tax policies, and the danger of this trend being further exacerbated by increased regulatory ‘competition’ among states.

Countries that are unable to raise enough revenue from businesses through corporate income taxes often have to resort to implementing higher taxes on working people through more regressive forms of taxation such as VAT

Feminist economist Susan Himmelweit of the Women’s Budget Group then elucidated the role the City of London plays in pillaging resources from poorer countries, and thereby preventing them from providing the basic social services that are fundamental to confronting inequality for women and girls. As she explained, countries that are unable to raise enough revenue from businesses through corporate income taxes often have to resort to implementing higher taxes on working people through more regressive forms of taxation such as VAT, or through myriad fees and special charges paid only by local residents. Women living in poverty, who generally have lower incomes than men, are doubly disadvantaged by such revenue generation measures.

The City of London, in pursuing its ‘Singapore on the Thames’ ambitions, will become “the capital of financial secrecy”.

The final stop of the Brexit Tax Haven Tour took us to Guildhall Square, site of the City of London Corporation building, which is the administrative hub of this “city within a city”. At this stop Dereje Alemayehu, Executive Coordinator of the Global Alliance for Tax Justice, explained the machinery of international tax abuse that is managed from the site and the serious threat that the City of London poses, in pursuing its ‘Singapore on the Thames’ ambitions, to become “the capital of financial secrecy”.

As things already stand, countries in the Global South lose one trillion dollars every year because of capital flight and tax dodging. In Africa alone, between US$ 30 and 60 billion per year is transferred illicitly which is equivalent to 40 years of the development funding the continent currently receives every year. These figures are likely to rise post-Brexit.

As the afternoon’s activities drew to a close,  a protest illumination bearing the words ‘Tax Haven Britain: A threat to us all,’ appeared first on the City of London Corporation building and then on the Bank of England. It remains to be seen whether the world’s elite will see fit to hear this crucial message. Davos organisers notably opted not to invite economist Rutger Bregman back to this year’s event after he argued, at the previous 2019 meeting, that tax justice was the only way to confront the multiple crises now afflicting the world. Here’s a reminder of his comments which resonated strongly across the world:

truepublica.org.uk

Watching World Vision infomercials educating the west to the want and misery suffered by millions of children in the third world, I wasn’t alone in asking adults “why”? When I enjoyed all the comforts of food security, electricity and running water, why were these other children living in poverty? I know that I was not the only bewildered child to receive the shallow response that I did from family and teachers when I was told that this “simply is the way it is”. At best, we privileged few in the 1^st world could hope that $1/day would alleviate their pain, but really there was no great solution.

Later in life, as my closest friends found themselves enmeshed in university political science and economic programs, the innocent curiosity that recognized injustice for what it was not only died under the weight of materialist theories of human nature which their parents paid good money to feed them, but upon leaving school, those same friends actually became witting accomplices in that very system which their youthful hearts recognized as wrong so many years earlier. Since humanity was intrinsically selfish and our economic system so immutable, the best we could hope for was success in life and enjoy being on the receiving end of destiny.

Again, I know that I’m not alone in this experience, as tens of millions of citizens took to the streets all around the world on September 27 to march for the earth, repulsed by corrupt consumerism and celebrating the advent of a Green New Deal.

This activation of “people power” driven by such institutions as the Extinction Rebellion, Fridays for the Future and the young Greta Thunberg could never have occurred had not a deep sense of injustice and malaise not already been festering in our collective hearts. That sense of injustice and malaise connects us to our deepest humanity and is a purity which unites each of us in a field of compassion with the whole of which we are but parts, and should be celebrated and protected at all costs.

In spite of that purity something much darker showed its ugly face on September 27 which used that inherent goodness to its dark advantage. It is that dark something that I would like to discuss.

You Know Something Isn’t Right When…

The first clue as to the ugly problem can be found in the simple fact that leading central bankers had already issued a call for the same new green banking system which Greta and the countless masses also demanded long before Extinction Rebellion, Fridays for the Future or There is No Time were ever created.

While officially announced on September 22^nd at the opening of the UN Climate Summit in NY, a Central Banker’s Climate Compact was unveiled under the leadership of Bank of England Governor Mark Carney that had already been in the works for over 18 months representing over 130 of the world’s largest and corrupt banks calling for a radical decarbonisation of the world economy by 2/3 according to commitments laid out in the 2015 Paris Climate accord.

Bank of England head and Chair of the Bank of International Settlement’s Financial Stability Board (2011-2018) Mark Carney announced at this venue that “climate disclosures must become comprehensive, climate risk management must be transformed and sustainable investing must go mainstream”. Carney then took on a more threatening tone by saying “the firms that anticipate these developments will be rewarded handsomely. Those that don’t will cease to exist”.

Now Mark Carney has been hailed by the environmental lobby as the leading “eco-warrior” of central bankers and those doing the hailing seem to rarely take notice of the blatant fact that the person who sits atop the technocratic power structure that has given rise to the world’s greatest economic and environmental injustices for decades is also the person designing how this dysfunctional world is supposed to be restructured.

So how do Carney and his fellow hive of central bankers propose the world transform?

The New Green System Becomes…

For starters, Carney believes that a new global reserve currency must replace the U.S. Dollar.

What should this post-dollar system be based upon? Well, as of August 23, during a central bankers’ summit in Jackson Hole Missouri, Carney stated that it should be modelled on Facebook’s cryptocurrency the Libra, which is scheduled to start issuance by early next year. Unlike the Libra however, Carney’s cryptocurrency will be entirely controlled by private banking institutions and totally removed from sovereign nation states, which are just too influenced by short term political interests rather than an “enlightened technocratic elite” who know how to truly think long term.

Knowing that China’s Belt and Road Initiative is increasingly becoming the foundation for a viable new economic order, and knowing that the financial oligarchy’s monopoly over world finance will come undone if that were so, Carney also warned that a crypto-digital currency is the only way to stop the Renminbi from becoming the US dollar’s replacement. Carney called his digital solution to be a “synthetic hegemonic currency… through a network of central bank digital currencies” which would base their value upon new standards not existent in the 1971-2019 globalized model.

Redefining value

In a 2015 Lloyds of London Speech preceding the Paris COP21 Climate summit, Carney stated “the desirability of restricting climate change to two degrees above pre-industrial levels leads to the notion of a carbon “budget”- an assessment of the amount of emissions the world can “afford”.

This statement essentially defines the parameters which Greta and her minions of green followers are being induced to call for as a new “post-consumerist” world of monetary valuation while actually merely destroying what little remains of a middle class and empowering an already entrenched oligarchy.

Like all good lies, this one hinges upon a truth.

Carney and the green new dealers recognize that pure “market demand” has totally failed as a standard of assessing “value” of money or any other primary asset in our economy. $4.5 trillion of currency speculation grows like a cancer every day without any positive payback to the real economy while $700 trillion of derivatives hover like a Damocles sword over the world waiting to fall at any moment that “market confidence” disappears as it did in 2007.

But after that truth is acknowledged, what does the “carbon budget” entail which professes to somehow lower the world temperature to within two degrees of pre-industrial temperatures which we must assume to be a solution to an under-defined problem?

According to the Green New Deal proposed by Carney and his allies, in order to bring world carbon dioxide production down to net zero emissions by 2050 as demanded by COP21, several things must happen.

• Green bonds must be expanded en masse, in the similar fashion that victory bonds were created in WW2 to pay for the growth of industry needed to battle Hitler. In this 21^st century version of course, it is the Bank of International Settlements which financed Nazism which today wishes to define how the new victory bonds will behave. Rather than finance industrial and scientific growth as occurred in the 1940s, these new bonds promise to shrink it. The associated constraints upon humanity’s ability to support its 7 billion lives is not lost to some cold hearted technocrats and their aristocratic managers at the top.
• In reducing industrial growth through the transition from a carbon-based society towards a “green” energy- fueled society of windmills and solar panels, carbon footprints must be diminished. The degree to which humanity diminishes its carbon footprints is the degree to which Carney and his masters promise to reward economic players with monetary profit. Again this is the very opposite process when compared to the 1938-1971 system of industrial growth which tied dollar values to the growth of the REAL economy (agriculture, industry, science and technology) which tied money to the betterment of human life.
• Carbon Taxes and Cap and Trade mechanisms must become hegemonic which then creates measurable values for the reduction of humanity’s carbon footprint.

Embarrassingly Bad Science

By acting on a purely emotional state of fear and panic as Greta demands we do, Carney-ite technocrats hope that no one bothers to shine light upon the blatant scientific fallacies underlying the entire “green new deal” which the Bank of England is proposing the world adopt.

We must ignore the fact that the “99% of scientists who all agree that global warming is caused by human activity” is really only based upon a survey of 79 anonymous scientists (77 of whom believed in the claim).

We must believe that it has been proven that CO2 is a cause of climate variation, even though all long term measurements of climate and temperature indicate that CO2 follows rather than precedes temperature changes.

We must also believe that this reduction in humanity’s contribution of CO2 to the entire greenhouse effect (which accounts for less than 0.1% of the total) would have any impact whatsoever upon a 2 degree reduction of the global mean temperature from pre-industrial levels (which we have no ability to assess anyway).

We must ultimately assume that perpetual economic growth is a delusion which only fools believe in and that population growth is a problem which must be corrected by a technocratic elite who have the “stomachs to handle the bloodletting”.

Breaking out of our Carrying Capacity

The fact is that there has always been a carrying capacity to humanity and no one should try to deny that reality.

What green technocrats hate to admit is that humanity’s carrying capacity is very different from that found among all other species of life in the biosphere.

While other species find their population potential limited by genetic traits, and environmental constraints, humanity alone can transcend those material limits by leaping into the creative realm of discovery both in the sciences as well as in the arts. The fruits of humanity’s discoveries as outlined in Abraham Lincoln’s brilliant speech On Discoveries and Inventions (1860) is entirely connected to our unbounded capacity for scientific and technological progress.

The reality of the coherence between mankind’s creative powers and the creative power shaping the universe as a whole has been a powerful concept identified millennia ago by Plato, St. Augustine, Nicholas of Cusa and his followers Johannes Kepler, Gottfried Leibniz, Benjamin Franklin and Friedrich Schiller (1). Its expression (though not always fully understood by those acting upon it) has been the object of hate and fear by an entrenched oligarchy which has launched innumerable wars, assassinations and regime changes to prevent its awakening.

The New Silk Road… Not the Green New Deal

Today, Russia and China have recognized this necessity of unbounded human progress and are fully committed to integrating their economies into an “alternative” financial system centered on the Belt and Road Initiative. While 135 other nations have increasingly joined in this new system, the oligarchy which signs Carney’s paycheques is well aware that a USA under the control of a president who says “the future belongs to patriots, not globalists” creates an intolerable risk that may re-orient America towards this new system and that cannot be tolerated.

Most importantly, when one truly inspects the Belt and Road Initiative’s accomplishments both in Asia as well as Africa and the Middle East, it becomes apparent that the only system which truly has the means to not only replace our bankrupt order while also eliminating war, environmental destruction and squalor is tied directly to what China has built and which has already pulled over 800 million souls out of poverty. NASA even recently confirmed that earth’s biomass grew by 10% entirely because of India and China’s commitment to industrial progress- overturning the foolish notion that economic growth and environmental health must always be at odds.

This is the system which existed only as a dream unknown to most in the west as I watched World Vision programs encouraging me to beg my mother to give $1/day to a kid in Guatemala whose life had been destroyed by that same system which today threatens to destroy what little is left of the third world through a Green New Deal.

(1) In the 20^th century it found a unique expression in the figure of the late American economist Lyndon LaRouche.

The government of Venezuela is seeking to eventually repatriate at least 14 tons of gold held at the Bank of England (BOE). It has recently asked to release the gold bars worth about £420 million or $550 million. This is the right and timely move as the new round of punitive measures recently imposed on Caracas by Washington showed. The Bank has refused to do so!

UK officials have reportedly insisted that Venezuela clarify its intentions for the gold. Venezuelan President Maduro is suspected by London of harboring plans to sell the national treasure for personal gains. There is also a subterfuge used to explain why the Venezuelan property has not been returned to the owner. The UK says it’s very hard to obtain insurance for the shipment to move the large cargo. Even if Venezuela gets the gold back, it’ll be a large order to use it for raising hard currency because of the new round of US sanctions announced on Nov.1. With the penalties in place, it’s impossible to sell the gold straight from the Bank of England.

The UK knows better who should be suspected of what and who can be trusted to have one’s own property returned. If it’s not theft, then what is? The rules of civilized behavior, you say? Forget about it, it’s up to London, faithfully complying with the instructions coming from Washington, to decide what’s civilized and what’s not.

According to US National Security Adviser (NSA) John Bolton, “The new sanctions will target networks operating within corrupt Venezuelan economic sectors and deny them access to stolen wealth.” The NSA explained that “Most immediately, the new sanctions will prevent US persons from engaging with actors and networks complicit in corrupt or deceptive transactions in the Venezuelan gold.” So, the US administration is the supreme judge to decide what exactly transactions are “corrupt” or “deceptive”. London snaps to attention, salutes and rushes to do what it is told by “superiors”.

Today it’s Venezuela; tomorrow it could be any other holder on the list of more than 30 nations keeping gold reserves in BOE vaults.

Venezuela, a member of the “troika of tyranny”, is trying to become a major gold exporter. It is engaged in certifying some 32 gold fields, and building 54 processing plants.

The flagrant encroachment on the rights of the sovereign state affects other nations, which also have their interests damaged. Russia is among them. Moscow prefers the precious metal to greenbacks, so it has become a major world gold importer. Last year, it purchased a record 92, 2 tons to make the reserves exceed 2 thousand tons. It may soon catch up with Italy (2451, 8 tons) and France (2436 tons) – the third and fourth world gold holders. The illegal British activities are a direct threat to Russia’s national interests.

Germany, the second biggest holders of gold in the world after the US with 3,378 tons, finished repatriating 300 tons from the US last year. It had taken the United States several years to do it! It was reported that the gold bars received by Bundesbank had different labels to make one think that US might have replaced the German bullion with different gold bars bought from the market. It means the gold was not in place when the Germany’s request for return was made. Perhaps, the UK is not able to comply with Venezuela’s request for the same reason – the gold is not in vaults and London needs time to purchase it.

Koos Jansen, a contributor to BullionStar, has questioned whether Fort Knox’s gold is still there. Former Representative Ron Paul tried to figure out some of the mysteries around the Federal Reserve by questioning the organization and interrogating representatives of the Fed. He never received a clear answer. The US government does not audit the gold.

There is another reason why Russia is affected – Venezuela is its big economic partner. Caracas pays its bills. Moscow wants it to be solvent.

The very fact that Great Britain asked Venezuela “what do you need your gold for?” is preposterous. This kind of behavior is unacceptable and outrageous. Will London refuse to pay for Russia’s gas deliveries asking Moscow “what do you need your money for?” This time Great Britain has gone too far. This precedent is important enough to justify ringing alarm bells across the international community. It’s either we have commonly accepted norms of behavior respected or live in a jungle. Instead of attacking Russia and other nations without any proof to substantiate the claims, the UK government would have done better by looking at itself in the mirror. Now everyone can see that the UK is an unreliable partner to deal with. It’ll take a long and hard effort to restore London’s reputation.