In one of the bluntest statements on the topic by any globalist thus far, controversial German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble (shown) openly called for “global standards” and “global governance” in taxation to ensure that governments can continue extracting huge sums in taxes from the wealth-producing class in perpetuity. In an October 30 column, Schäuble, who regularly promotes globalism and domestic police-state measures, also touted the global tax-information regime long pushed by socialists and globalists just signed in Berlin between more than 120 governments and regimes.
The German finance chief, writing for the self-styled “world’s opinion page” known as Project Syndicate, lambasted businesses for seeking to legally reduce their worldwide tax burden by “adapting their structures.” Citizens, too, must pay more taxes, he argued. In essence, Schäuble claimed that because of a globalized economy and business system, humanity must now submit to a globalized taxation regime as well. “Tax legislation has not kept pace with these developments,” he wrote, echoing calls by globalists around the world for more plunder. “They need to be adapted to the economic reality of digital services.”
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Without a global system of what Schäuble called “workable rules,” which of course would require global rulers, governments and dictators worldwide are “losing revenue that they urgently need in order to fulfill their responsibilities.” He never specifies what exactly he believes those “responsibilities” of governments to be. In the United States, the Founding Fathers established a Republic for the express purpose of protecting the God-given rights of individuals. By contrast, countless other governments around the world have been founded largely to enslave and plunder the population. Some, such as the National Socialist (Nazi) regime that once ruled Germany, were created to literally exterminate certain classes of “inferior” people.
However, based on tyrannical proposals Schäuble has pushed in the past — ranging from extrajudicial assassination of people around the world and ending innocent-until-proven-guilty presumptions to deploying the military within Germany to supposedly fight a terror war — it is not difficult to infer some of his views on the “responsibilities” of governments. In fact, the title of his column offers big hints on his agenda, too: “Why Taxation Must Go Global.” Beyond domestic issues, Schäuble also published a book outlining his views on Germany’s role in what he called the “New World Order.”
Unsurprisingly, critics of the radical policies Schäuble has advocated within Germany have brought up the autocratic machinations of Hitler’s National Socialists (Nazis) and the East German Communist regime’s Statsi in arguing against them. Schäuble, however, undeterred by the criticism, continues to advocate for crushing national sovereignty around the world, beefing up the police state under various pretexts, and expanding “global governance” to more and more areas of life.
To bolster his argument for a global taxation regime, Schäuble claims that “the number of taxpayers who make an adequate contribution to financing public goods and services is decreasing.” Neither “adequate contribution” — as in, the amount of wealth he believes subjects must surrender to the state — nor “public goods and services” is defined in the piece. Based on his long career on the taxpayer dole, though, Schäuble believes Germans and others around the world must pay even more tribute for the alleged “goods and services” provided to them by their political rulers.
In a brilliant example of what Orwell called “doublespeak,” the German finance minister goes on to claim that “tensions between national fiscal sovereignty and the borderless scope of today’s business activities can be resolved only through international dialogue and uniform global standards.” In other words, the manufactured “tension” between national sovereignty and the international economy can “only” be solved by abolishing national sovereignty in favor of a global regime — or “uniform global standards,” as Schäuble put it. Almost incredibly, he cites the deeply unpopular, scandal-plagued European Union — currently dealing with multiple economic crises of its own making as citizens try desperately to extricate their nations from Brussels’ claws — as an example of how it could be done.
Beyond taxation, Schäuble insists that the globalist approach he is advocating to wealth extraction “can also serve as a global governance model for resolving international problems.” Everything from financial regulation and the “regulatory framework” for the “digital economy” to planetary taxation can be enforced and imposed via what he referred to as “international frameworks” concocted by coalitions of national governments, which he misleadingly refers to as “countries.” And that is exactly what is happening, as The New American has been reporting for years.
In his column promoting global taxation, Schäuble refers to the “Seventh Meeting of the Global Forum on Transparency and Exchange of Information for Tax Purposes” then taking place in the German capital. Organized under the auspices of the globalist Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) — essentially a cartel for high-tax governments to bully and crush their lower-tax counterparts in other countries — the summit in Berlin this week concluded with an agreement inked on Wednesday in Schäuble’s “cavernous ministry built for Hermann Goering under the Nazis,” as the New York Times put it.
In a nutshell, more than 50 national governments and unsavory regimes agreed to put the final nails in the coffin of financial privacy — all of it under the guise of extracting more wealth from humanity and gradually dismantling tax competition. Tax collectors and politicians worldwide celebrated, with Italian Finance Minister Pier Carlo Padoan calling the scheme “a positive response on a global level to the global crisis.” The “global crisis” is apparently not enough tax revenue for bloated and increasingly out-of-control governments, which in Europe already consume about half of GDP.
The Obama administration did not formally join the new OECD plot — yet — but the White House has been crucial to every step in the process. “The United States has been a very strong supporter of everything that we are doing,” OECD boss Ángel Gurría, a former Mexican official with the Socialist International-aligned Revolutionary Institutional Party (PRI). Socialist International, of course, which recently had its own summit hosted by a regime implicated in preparations for genocide, has been among the loudest and most powerful proponents of the emerging global tax regime going back many years.
While the prominent German politician never mentioned it in his column, the foundation for the emerging new world tax regime he was promoting and celebrating was actually laid by the Obama administration and congressional Democrats in 2010. In a little-noticed provision of a totally unrelated “jobs” bill, Congress included a White House-backed scheme dubbed the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA).
Under the transparently fraudulent guise of extracting less than $1 billion per year from U.S. taxpayers with assets abroad (enough to run the federal government for less than two hours, and less than the half-baked system will cost), the legislation essentially created a de facto planetary tax regime that turns banks around the world into unpaid agents of the state. In addition to devastating middle-class Americans abroad, the FACTA scheme — blatantly unconstitutional from multiple angles — was used as the model for the emerging OECD-G20 global tax regime.
“Under the CRS [Common Reporting Standard], tax authorities receive information from banks and other financial service providers and automatically share it with tax authorities in other countries,” Schäuble gushed, without mentioning the collection of gangster regimes and imploding socialist autocracies that will soon be receiving sensitive private data on all of their subjects from around the world. “In the future, virtually all of the information connected to a bank account will be reported to the tax authorities of the account holder’s country, including the account holder’s name, balance, interest and dividend income, and capital gains.” In simpler terms: Privacy rights, as protected in the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, are a thing of the past.
The new global tax scheme will establish what Schäuble called “a regulatory framework for the age of globalization.” Automatically violating the privacy of every person on Earth without even suspicion of wrongdoing, he continued, is “a pragmatic and effective response to the perceived lack of global governance regarding international tax issues.” It will also help governments to promote “people’s acceptance of their tax regimes,” he added, calling it a “great success.” However, there is much more to come, as Schäuble and his globalist comrades in global taxation made clear.
Ultimately, he concluded, the goal is to essentially abolish tax competition between jurisdictions as well — eliminating perhaps the single most important check on bad government and wild taxation that has ever existed. “A ‘beggar-thy-neighbor’ taxation policy” by which “one country pursues tax policies at the expense of others,” he claimed, is “dangerous.” Ironically, perhaps, prosperous low-tax Switzerland, which has long been in the crosshairs of the global-tax cabal, was recently blasted for its “dangerous” self-government by the president of Germany.
Supporters of tax competition highlighted multiple problems with the move toward the planetary tax regime. “The trend toward global taxation is designed to benefit politicians at the expense of taxpayers,” observed Andrew Quinlan, president of the free market-oriented Center for Freedom & Prosperity. “Their goal has long been the elimination of tax competition and its many benefits for taxpayers and the economy.” Brian Garst, director of government affairs for the center, added: “If the IRS scandals have proven anything, it’s that excessive taxpayer and financial surveillance are incompatible with liberty. Lacking any sort of electoral or political accountability, it’s a safe bet the OECD’s scheme will lead to widespread abuses.”
Indeed, if humanity hopes to remain (or become) free and prosperous, people had better start paying attention to the behind-the-scenes scheming of their would-be planetary rulers. An autocratic and truly global taxation regime is being imposed on the peoples of the world right under their noses. And without action, the globalists have no intention of stopping there.
Photo of Wolfgang Schäuble: AP Images
Alex Newman, a foreign correspondent for The New American, is normally based in Europe. Follow him on Twitter @ALEXNEWMAN_JOU. He can be reached at [email protected]
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