Socialist luminaries and international bureaucrats at various outfits funded primarily by U.S. taxpayers are seizing on a “devastating” new American taxation scheme, known as the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, or FATCA, to help foist a radical tax information-sharing regime on the world. The repercussions for Americans and people around the globe — especially when it comes to financial privacy and economic freedom — will be crushing, experts argue. Analysts say the end goal, meanwhile, is the creation of a planetary taxation authority.
Leading the charge to create the new global tax regime is the Group of 20 (G-20), a coalition of governments and brutal dictatorships that are in the process of building what virtually every major media outlet recently described as a “New World Order.” Top officials in the outfit, which includes the ruthless Communist regime ruling mainland China, among other barbaric autocracies, publicly announced a plot in recent years to share financial data and more on all citizens with each other. The goal, for now: extract as much wealth as possible.
To implement what critics call their nightmarish vision of a “World Tax Organization” — supposedly aimed at stopping tax evasion — the G-20 asked the United Nations-linked Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) to take the lead. The widely criticized “cartel” of tax-hungry politicians, infamous primarily for fanatical efforts to crush national sovereignty and for bullying jurisdictions with relatively low taxes into surrendering their competitive advantage, is now working to develop the taxation regime and prod its member governments into adopting it.
Meanwhile, the inspiration and model for the global information-sharing scheme, OECD bosses admit, is FATCA. “A key catalyst for automatic exchange of information and the on-going OECD work has been the FATCA legislation enacted by the United States in 2010,” the international outfit said last year in a brief, adding that the plot also has the ardent support of central bankers and G-20 regimes. In fact, the brief explains, FATCA pseudo-treaties between the Obama administration and foreign governments — unconstitutional under the U.S. Constitution, critics say — will even serve as the “model” and “template” for the global regime.
The deeply controversial U.S. tax scheme, adopted in 2010 as part of an Obama administration “stimulus” ploy, is working to turn foreign governments and financial institutions into unpaid agents of the IRS. It is also causing havoc for middle-class Americans abroad. Despite mounting outrage and growing efforts to repeal FATCA or challenge it on constitutional grounds, it is set to go into effect in mid-2014. Critics are already warning of economic and human devastation. At the OECD and the G-20, though, top officials are hoping to spread the misery worldwide in the scramble to extract more wealth from the public.
A key component will be the information sharing among governments and dictators. “The reality will be that for the automatic exchange of information rules should cover what kind of information is to be exchanged, how often, who should collect the information, to whom it should be sent, and in what format,” claimed Pascal Saint-Amans, director of the OECD Centre for Tax Policy and Administration, speaking as if the plot were already a done deal. “It will be a sort of multilateral form of the American FATCA agreement.”
Critics and analysts say that, among other concerns, financial privacy will soon be a relic of the past — at least if the global-tax schemers get their way and governments worldwide put citizens’ private data out in the open for any government or regime to access. OECD and its cohorts hope to have the controversial international tax-information regime in place by September of 2014. Already, planetary bureaucrats are terrorizing national authorities into changing their laws, warning governments from Hong Kong to Switzerland that they will have to alter their successful systems to “comply” with the draconian schemes.
In an interview with SwissInfo.ch, OECD tax czar Saint-Amans portrayed the outfit — funded in large part by $100 million annually from U.S. taxpayers — as some sort of global taxman. “The beauty of international organizations is that we oversee relations between nations and the differences between states,” he boasted, though it was not clear where the OECD had any sort of mandate to “oversee” relations between governments. “We will try to ensure that this initiative to make FATCA multilateral is concluded on the basis of reciprocity so that each country’s interests are taken into account.” By countries, of course, he means governments.
According to a brief by the OECD, among the data that governments would share with each other as part of the “automatic exchange of information” (AEOI) regime are various categories of income, changes of address, purchase or sale of property, and more. Of course, the scheme turns American traditions and constitutional protections upside down. Instead of being secure in one’s house, papers, and effects without a warrant and probable cause, governments and autocrats around the world will be free to rifle through citizens’ most sensitive information at will. Hackers, criminals, and identity thieves, among others, might also be able to access the data, opponents warn.
The plot to abolish financial privacy and national independence in tax policy will also be expensive, although the taxpayer-funded bureaucrats at the OECD — whose salaries are not taxed — do not seem to care. “What we are doing is to develop a single standard that will be compatible with national and regional systems — there will be only one way of collecting and exchanging information,” continued Saint-Amans. “That will cost something, but it is the price to pay to be free from suspicion of complicity in fiscal fraud.”
In other words, national governments must obey the global tax schemers — and taxpayers and consumers must pay for the schemes — or face consequences. If authorities do not bow down to the OECD demands, they can be blacklisted as “uncooperative,” or worse, with economic sanctions being the implicit threat, according to experts. The tactic is especially effective when bullying smaller nations, especially with Obama and bloated governments ruling major Western economies already fully on-board with the agenda.
Hong Kong was among the most recent victims, and Switzerland is in the crosshairs, too. “The global tax bureaucracy is determined to implement policies that benefit the global political class at the expense of taxpayers and domestic economies, and are further prepared to punish jurisdictions that choose not to comply with their demands,” observed Center for Freedom and Prosperity President Andrew Quinlan. “The OECD has relied upon the coerced cooperation of targeted jurisdictions to achieve their goals, but this appeasement has so far produced nothing but new demands and continued threats of punishment…. Perhaps it is time for a new approach, and for Hong Kong and similarly targeted jurisdictions to band together to tell the OECD that the interests of a select group of statist tax collectors will no longer be allowed to override those of taxpayers throughout the world.”
Even top OECD leaders admit that benefiting rulers, not those they rule, is the goal of the machinations. “We are happy to redouble our efforts in this area, working closely with interested countries [governments] and stakeholders to design global solutions to global problems to the benefit of governments and business around the world,” declared OECD boss Angel Gurría, though it was not clear how having massive compliance costs and mandates foisted on companies would benefit them. The OECD boss, a former Mexican official with the Socialist International-aligned Revolutionary Institutional Party (PRI), was celebrating the exploitation of FATCA to create the global tax regime.
Unsurprisingly, also pushing the scheme is Socialist International, the premier alliance of socialist and communist political parties around the world. The powerful coalition, which met last year in South Africa, called for global taxes, a planetary currency, and a global tax information-sharing regime in one of its most recent resolutions. “There is a pressing need to dismantle tax havens, close loopholes and create automatic tax record exchange systems,” claimed one of the resolutions adopted last year by the socialist outfit’s oftentimes brutal members. “Only under the auspices of a new Global Financial Architecture can this take place, one that significantly increases transparency and strengthens enforcement of the regulations.”
In fact, the OECD even boasts of its collaboration with such regimes. “Working with partner countries (including Argentina, Brazil, China, India, the Russian Federation and South Africa), the OECD is advancing rapidly in the development of a common model for reporting and automatic exchange of certain account information held by financial institutions, including due diligence rules, reporting formats and secure transmission methods,” the outfit explained, noting that automatic information sharing between governments and even ruthless tyrannies was becoming “the new standard.”
Of course, the information sharing is eventually expected to come back to the United States. Already, owing largely to FATCA, machinations are underway to force U.S. financial institutions to gather data on their foreign clients to share with foreign regimes. The effects of such a scheme could prove devastating to American banks as foreign capital flees the United States, analysts say, savaging the U.S. economy in the process. Multiple experts have warned about the prospect, but Congress has largely refused to provide oversight as the Obama Treasury Department runs wild.
The U.S. government had historically resisted the OECD’s fiendish efforts to “harmonize” global taxation policy — at least tepidly. Under the Obama administration, however, the global plot has received among its biggest boosts thus far with the adoption of FATCA. The threats to financial privacy, economic performance, competition among jurisdictions, economic freedom, and more, are very real, experts told The New American. The compliance costs are also expected to be massive.
Because the OECD, the G-20, and other forces seeking to foist the global FATCA regime on the world are largely unaccountable to the public, stopping the scheme will be tough at this point. Critics of the machinations say the best methods of fighting back, for now at least, include raising awareness of what policymakers are doing and urging lawmakers to put an end to the lawless schemes. With firm resistance, though, the emerging planetary taxation regime can still be stopped — along with everything such a scheme would entail.
Alex Newman, a foreign correspondent for The New American, is normally based in Europe. This article first appeared at The New American.
