Tuesday, December 6, 2005

INCORPORATED THEFT Guardian: "Five trillion dollars has been corruptly removed from the world's poorest countries and lodged permanently in the world's richest countries. That is the 'conservative estimate' not of a leftwing anti-globalisation activist but of a leading American businessman and enthusiast for capitalism who has just completed a major study of how multinational corporations, wealthy individuals and unscrupulous governments are using the world's banking systems in ways that spread poverty. Raymond Baker is a committed capitalist whose new book, Capitalism's Achilles Heel, has already made waves in the US. In Britain he has been working with the Tax Justice Network, a London-based organisation that seeks to expose the abuse of tax havens and loopholes. Baker describes capitalism as 'the greatest economic arrangement ever devised', but he believes that western governments and banks are failing catastrophically in their duty to police the system. 'Falsified pricing, haven and secrecy structures and the illicit movement of trillions of dollars out of developing and transitional economies break the social contract ... that Adam Smith incorporated into the core of the free-market system,' he writes." 12:34:47 PM

© Copyright 2006 Hetty Litjens.