Off shore illicit funds needed for global security

 

Dear Editor, (10-4-21):  NOT printed in the post.  Not even acknowledged.  

Finally!  The “billions” (and more likely trillions of dollars) stashed in offshore accounts made the Post’s front page!   I write trillions because that was printed in the Post’s “Five myths about Kleptocracy, By Natalie Duffy and Nate Sibley (both researchers at Hudson Institute’s Kleptocracy Initiative) 1-8-2017.   They referred to a 2012 report asserting that at least $32 trillion may be stashed in these anonymous havens by kleptocrats, oligarchs, international crime cartels, violent extremist groups, and rich capitalists avoiding taxes.   https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/five-myths-about-kleptocracy/2017/01/04/42b30d72-c78f-11e6-8bee-54e800ef2a63_story.html . 

A later Post news article alleged that US authorities don’t know who owns approximately half of all the US homes valued at over $5 million in our nation’s wealthiest cities.  This anonymity is compliments of the greed of the US real estate industry lobby. 

And if that isn’t enough corruption corroding our nation’s financial system - that corruption also inflames our greatest national security threats (the forces of poverty that fuel hunger, pandemics, wars, environmental destruction, populism, refugee flows, species extinctions, indebtedness, and terrorism. Another news source April 5, 2017 (MARTIN KENNEY: PUT YOUR OWN TAX HAVENS IN ORDER, AMERICA, by Martin Kenney asserted that the U.S. holds 20 percent of the global market for financial services for non-residents with foreign assets of $16.75 trillion (2013), and foreign direct investment of $3 trillion (2014). http://www.fcpablog.com/blog/2017/4/5/martin-kenney-put-your-own-tax-havens-in-order-america.html#sthash.IiaU0HjG.dpufhttp://www.fcpablog.com/blog/2017/4/5/martin-kenney-put-your-own-tax-havens-in-order-america.html

In 2015 the United Nations offered the world a set of 17 Sustainable Development Goals to achieve by the year 2030, and most nations have agreed to meet them.  These remain a comprehensive and holistic approach intended to address the root causes now driving most of our accelerating threats.  A lack of financial resources is not the problem.  Just the lack of political will and wise foresight to grasp that a “whole of government” approach cannot work against hyper corrupt globalization.   We need a whole of government's effort.  First to freeze these illicit funds. Then seize them and devote what is needed to actually achieve these wise goals.  Is there anything else that could bring our nation or our world together during this increasingly tense and chaotic time?    It is increasingly a self-evident truth that time is not on our side.  The momentum of change around us cannot be stopped with the glacial speed at which our democratic political systems change.  Why do we continue to ignore the warnings?

Freezing and seizing some of the $32 trillion stashed in offshore accounts could go a long way toward meeting the 17 Sustainable Development Goals.. 

 "The accomplice to the crime of corruption is frequently our own indifference" Bess Myerson