'Exposing financial corruption' !!!

We still haven't looked in depth at the financial crisis/recession/depression/crunch etc really yet, but actually there's a section of what's going on somewhat connected to all of it or actually even blamed for it as well to some degree, that's such a ridiculous cruel joke I guess we may as well talk about it. It's exemplified by an article in today's Times.

I should point out all the conservative press is guilty of this and probably most of the left press as well. So here's the story from the Times:

"THE financier who has been appointed to protect taxpayers’ money in Britain’s bailed-out banks is a former trustee of a secretive Liechtenstein bank accused of facilitating massive tax evasion.

Glen Moreno, who chairs the powerful body that oversees the government’s £37 billion shareholding in the banks, was paid hundreds of thousands of pounds during a nine-year association with Liechtenstein Global Trust (LGT), a private bank based in the tax haven.

The disclosures are an embarrassment for Gordon Brown, who last week criticised offshore tax havens and called for international action to stamp out tax evasion.

“Advising the rich to exploit tax loopholes is unpatriotic,” the prime minister has said in the past. The bank was strongly criticised by name by President Barack Obama when he was a senator"

You can read the rest of it if you want I wouldn't bother. But this idea, that somehow the press is 'exposing financial corruption' and this is presumably supposed to find a resonance with a lot of people struggling to make ends meet and so on is a very common one that is repeated constantly.

Just unfortunate then that's not what's happening at all when you see this stuff.

First off it's the height of irony that The Times, along with the Daily Mail and so on which essentially should be pro-business, pro-corporation, anti-tax, small government etc gives such a lot of space to what they purport are white collar financial intrigues (note tax loopholes are a not exactly an intrigue). But that's the clue.

Anyway in this specific example in the Times we get the usual general implicit message beamed out that taxation is an immutable destiny of the state, that tax is a perpetual duty of everybody and that there is something so utterly despicable about people who think otherwise.

The idea is that perpetually closing loop holes, and more and more draconian tax legislation is a wonderful thing and an ongoing noble quest of government and so on.

And yeah, all of the above is not aimed at any fat cats with really ridiculous money that's squarely aimed at you.

We also, in this case, get the implicit message that individuals avoiding taxes could somehow be to blame for the financial situation, along with the idea that some yet even more sinister 'reforms' of world banking are the only answer.

But enough of me writing on this.

Superb analysis of this kind of thing has been done by academic, writer and activist Noam Chomsky, and I can't recommend enough these 3 videos on YouTube where he is interviewed by Andrew Marr of the BBC on the subject of the media. (these clips are over 10 years old)

So as far as this article in The Times goes let's just quote Chomsky on this (YouTube 3:16+):

"Big business is not in favour of corruption. And if the press focuses on corruption Fortune Magazine will be quite happy with it...

They don't want the society to be corrupt, they want it to be run in their interests.

...Corruption interferes with that."

Chomsky goes on:

"So for example when I came back from India, the Bank of India released an estimate, economists there tell me it's low, that a third of the economy is black, meaning mostly rich businessmen not paying their taxes. Well that makes the press because in fact certainly transnationals don't like it.

They want the system to be run without corruption...just pouring money into their pockets. So yes that's a fine topic for the press"

And as well that brings up the whole point about big government, and big government spending and the mix of big government and big business that for the so-called 'conservative' press usually mysteriously vanishes when discussing some financial intrigue or another.