Rich Hide Money in Secret Accounts, Throw Us Crumbs

[marmar]

from the Working Life blog:




Rich Hide Money in Secret Accounts, Throw Us Crumbs

by Jonathan Tasini
Thursday 24 of February, 2011


Let me be quite clear again about one fact that gets lost: we have plenty of money in the country. There is no debt or deficit "crisis" even if people across the political spectrum, including former labor leaders, are regurgitating complete nonsense about the "crisis". This is simple: it's class warfare and the rich don't want to pay their fair share. Indeed, here's some more evidence of what they are doing: stashing it away in secret foreign bank accounts.

From a variety of outlets, this from the Wall Street Journal:

A federal grand jury in Virginia indicted four Swiss bankers who worked for Zurich-based Credit Suisse, as U.S. authorities widened their campaign against foreign banks that help U.S. customers evade taxes.

The four are accused of engaging in "illegal cross-border banking that was designed to assist U.S. customers evade their income taxes by operating and maintaining secret bank accounts at the bank and other Swiss banks," according to the indictment announced by the U.S. Department of Justice Wednesday.

And...

As of the fall of 2008, the Department of Justice alleged the unnamed international bank maintained "thousands of secret accounts" for customers in the U.S. with as much as $3 billion in total assets under management in those accounts. The conspiracy dates back to 1953, the Department of Justice said, and involved two generations of U.S. tax evaders including U.S. customers who inherited secret accounts at the bank.

The Credit Suisse scandal follows on the scandal involving thousands of accounts stashed with cash at UBS, which cut a deal with the U.S. government to release names on the accounts. ...........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.workinglife.org/blogs/view_post.php?content_id=15113

[aquart]

1. You bet they do.

Used to work for a guy at Donaldson, Lufkin, and Jenrette who was busy hiding money for a pal at Brown Brothers Harriman. And his family. And anyone else with over $8 million who asked for his help.

[RKP5637]

2. I always work my taxes down to the penny, all receipted, the whole bit, but always

wandering in the back of my mind is the thought while we as tiny wage earners are counting pennies to be honest many are salting away zillions uncollected in taxes and huge corporations pay no taxes. It's so unfair that some of us work with the system and others cheat the system big time defrauding the rest of us, the entire country.

[truedelphi]

3. But all of this tax evasion results in non payments of comparative

Peanuts. The bigger factor in our huge "deficit crisis" is that the Ultra Rich Banking Families and Financial Firms were handed anywhere from eleven to thirty trillion dollars through the back door digitized window that Bernanke(Paulson) created over at the Federal Reserve.

(Though please don't take this to mean that I don't want the rich to be taxed. I do.)