[pullquote]The relatively unknown investment fund where Theresa May’s husband Philip works as a senior executive is one of the world’s largest and most powerful financial institutions, controlling $1.4 trillion in assets.Its portfolio also includes $20 billion of shares in Amazon and Starbucks, both of which were cited by the Prime Minister-designate in her pledge to crack down on tax avoidance yesterday. Tap Blog.[/pullquote]Governments depend on taxes to govern, the amount of tax they can raise depends on there being enough people at work to pay it. The alternative is to tax the rich. Britain already does that. 300,000 people pay a quarter of the nation’s income tax. Never the less the latter do very well out of it. Thanks to automation and immigration, the wages of the workers they employ have fallen, a fact concealed by the government using its printing presses to inflate the currency. Inflation and deflation have however roughly kept pace with the other, so the decline in wealth is concealed. To make any interest on capital huge amounts of money have to be traded in games of electronic poker played on the world’s money exchanges by computers.The result is that money has become so cheap the banks don’t want it, and charge savers to deposit it.
Britain is the first European nation to announce it is about to step outside the magic circle called the EU within which, with permission of Brussels, vast amounts of untaxed capital circulate. Capital belonging not to governments or peoples but to corporates such as Apple, Google and Facebook. Google paid £6m to the Treasury in 2011 on a UK turnover of £395m. Apple made £1.9bn of profit in the UK in the year ended September 2014 and paid £11.8m in tax – a rate of 0.6 percent. Facebook paid HMRC £4,327 in 2014-15 on a cash pile of £1.9 billion in the Cayman Islands.
It is why the pound is falling like stone and politics has become the advertising arm of big business. Nothing in the last Tory conference suggests that anything will be done (apart from warm words) to change this or the physical manifestations of corporate greed. Hinkley Point, HS2, the third runway at Heathrow are the corporates and their lackeys in Whitehall spitting in our faces. Within a decade the countries of the west will be corporate entities run by machines spouting comforting advertising slogans. Human happiness has become a business plan.
All so very true, and the closing sentence, “Human happiness has become a business plan” is a real gem!
The EU plutocracy and its gold will face at some point non-plutocrats acting on Machiavelli’s observation that those who have iron can get gold. Business likes to preen that it is the only practical reality, but without just politics business does not survive.