By Anthony Wile
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| Anthony Wile |
Is it over? This is an issue I want to address today because it has not been adequately reported by the mainstream media.
Listen closely and you will hear shrieks of silent, psychic pain emanating from luxurious apartments and boardrooms around the world. The wealthy have suddenly woken up after Cyprus and realized their world has irretrievably changed.
Good on them, eh? In a sense, it could not have happened to a more deserving class of people. These lawyers, accountants, doctors and businesspeople are the types that have donated to those who have now purchased the rope to hang them. The regulatory democracy they have helped create is now taking dead aim at their fortunes and lifestyles.
How many parties and dinner events did they go to over the years, raising money for the political machine that is now insisting on repatriating wealth around the world? The game was simple enough, of course. Pretend that your government and its myriad, increasing regulations and taxation were both fair and appropriate.
Each needed to pay his "fair share" and many upstanding and wealthy citizens thoroughly endorsed such concepts – even while squirreling millions away in various offshore venues. The rules, it turns out, were being made for the "little people" who were to pay the taxes and obey the regulations that the wealthy could afford to disregard.
But not anymore. Shockingly, and all over the world, the shadow of the gallows has fallen. People are faced with a choice: Repatriate with all the uncertainty and potential humiliation it entails or ignore the demands and face similar consequences.
In Cyprus, wealthy (mostly Russian) depositors are finding up to 80 percent of their accounts are being frozen. Russia's Vladimir Putin was asked to intercede and his answer came soon enough in the form of a statement reminding Russians to repatriate their offshore holdings while there was still time.
Most recently, it's been widely circulated that investigative journalists are poring over 120,000 names of offshore accountholders with huge unreported holdings. If they are lucky, some of these people may get a chance to repatriate their holdings. If they are unlucky, they will be taxed on these holdings and face civil or even criminal penalties.
Many will not be able to utilize their resources in their own defence, however, as panicked bankers will have frozen them because of sudden questions over "propriety." This is only the tip of the proverbial iceberg, however.
In Switzerland itself – in Zurich, that urban fortress of private banking – accounts are being frozen because bank officers have "questions." As well as in other less well-known European banking havens. The amounts can be quite large and the relationships may be quite extensive but it doesn't matter. Fear has overtaken any mitigating factors.
Again, I want to be sure people understand. All around the world this is going on. It is as if the Cyprus incident merely provided us with the sound of a starter's pistol and now the race is on.
There are those who will maintain this is simply coincidence, a fashion of the times. Officials in one nation see others adopting these stances and then adopt them themselves. Do you think so, too? I don't. In concert, in virtual lockstep, European nations turn out to have repatriation programs and ... amnesties. They are being implemented now. All at once. Now suddenly, there is nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.
There is no middle ground. Germany is paying millions to whistleblowers to encourage people to come forward with lists of those who hold money outside of the country.
No matter ... no one is going to complain. The wholesale revelations may be shocking and even criminal but few if any with offshore accounts are in a position to confront their governments or banks within the context of litigation. There are so many rules and reporting requirements that almost anyone with offshore money has done something "wrong."
Here we see, as well, the diabolical effectiveness of the Occupy Wall Street movement and its war on "the one percent." For several years now, with increasing stridency, it has been pointed out that a tiny, wealthy group of individuals has illegally amassed wealth from various activities that might be considered criminal but has gone unpunished.
Here at The Daily Bell we've done our best to expose this fiction, pointing out that such a focus is the rankest kind of envy and psychic manipulation. The West's problem is not a "wealthy" individual with five or ten million in a bank in Bermuda but a tiny handful of super-rich who control trillions via central banking around the world and foment the worst kind of hyper-aggressive regulatory democracy to ensure their control remains in place.
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