I think that the ICIJ may be doing a bit of self-promotion by exaggerating the impacts of their investigations on the use of tax havens by the One Percent to avoid paying taxes. As they state in another article,
...reports of the demise of offshore tax havens have often been greatly exaggerated. Highly touted clampdowns in 2000 and 2009 yielded few results. In the last five years, two French presidents have vowed to wipe tax havens off the map entirely, but so far no one has come close to dealing a coup de grâce.Still, they have a mother lode of information regarding tax havens, their lobbyists, and naming some of the names benefiting from tax havens located only in Luxembourg (there are hundreds of others). For example, one link in the article takes you to many corporations that are using these Luxembourg havens. Another link provides us with information about who are doing the lobbying for the corporations. From what I saw perusing their articles this morning is that their focus is limited to corporations using these havens in Luxembourg, not individual rich people.
Such schemes are possible for the rich because their concentrated wealth easily translates into power, and they use this power for their own benefit. Remember the fundamental asocial principle of capitalism so well articulated by former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher?
...there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first. It's our duty to look after ourselves and then, also to look after our neighbour.Thus the former British head of state does not recognize the moral principles expressed in our American Declaration of Independence:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.No wonder that we declared our independence and fought a war for it. But it looks like we, the people, were duped once again. It seems that this British moral principle was secretly adopted by our native capitalists who didn't want to pay taxes to the British Crown, and to avoid restrictions which interfered with their exploitation of the new American lands, poor immigrants, and slaves. Since the War of Independence our new ruling class have been engaging in subverting the very principles our ancestors fought for.
Since this war our history has been a history of the concentration of wealth by a small, amoral and asocial class of exploiters. As a result they are now so powerful that they are not only destroying our society but many other societies throughout the world in an effort to capture the remaining energy and other resources vital to capitalist expansion. Hence tax avoidance schemes by the rich are merely another means to enrich this class at the expense of the rest of us. Other logical outcomes are managed elections in which the rich choose who we can vote for, media owned by the rich who report only items and opinions that favor their interests, austerity policies for the people and the military-industrial complex for the rich to profit off of wars.
The self-serving and class-serving moral principle of capitalists pits individuals and families against all other individuals and families. Those who by "hook or by crook" can acquire "ownership" of economic property will always win in these contests. So, it is no wonder that our type of society produces so many sociopaths in general, and so many sociopaths in our ruling capitalist class who think nothing of destroying whole nations in their quest for more wealth and power. Because they tend nowadays to be globalists, they don't even mind the slow destruction of US society.
