Demonizing the Rich

Demonizing the Rich

Not the cronies, says Taki: the non-oligarchical, non-neocon good guys.

Follow the Money

My, my, the rich are under attack everywhere, and I thank God the Panama Papers didn’t include the name of the poor little Greek boy. Legality being my middle name, I took legal advice and stayed away from offshore trusts and shell companies as soon as my daddy died. No Mossack Fonseca, they advised, everything’s gotta be on the up-and-up. Mind you, it beats being on a Panama list with all the hacks poring over my not-so-hard-earned moola.

What bothers me is how the word rich has now become a pejorative term, and people use it as an insult, like “that rich fat bastard over there,” as an ex-friend recently described a very nice businessman who was minding his own business. Sure, there are plenty of rich men and women around who behave horribly, and their children can be even worse, but they are in the minority, among the Hiltons and Kardashians and Aby Rosens of this world. Go out in the great Midwest, Southwest, and Northwest, not to mention the Northeast of America, and you will find thousands of rich, patriotic, God-fearing citizens who would run a mile to get away from a mention in a gossip column. Ditto in Europe, in la France profonde or in the shires of the English countryside. Like scum, the rich one reads about in the columns surface in places like New York, Los Angeles, Paris, and London.

“Let’s face it, taxation is a form of state theft, so the smart ones will always find ways to ensure the state steals the minimum from them.”

Where wealth is concerned, we’re now back in the early ’70s, before Maggie Thatcher came into the picture and handbagged the envious class warriors to oblivion. Corbyn and his motley crew—this Tom Watson character should be tarred and feathered for attacking people who cannot defend themselves, always under the protection of parliamentary immunity—hate anybody who’s got a hint of wealth, forgetting the fact that no matter how hard we try, we can’t all sink to Watson’s and Corbyn’s level. That some can rig the system to hide their wealth is unjust, but so is the fact that journalists at The Guardian can spout about unfairness and the rich while the trust that feeds them hides its wealth down in the sunny Caribbean. Let’s face it, taxation is a form of state theft, so the smart ones will always find ways to ensure the state steals the minimum from them. But linking Dave Cameron with tax cheats is Orwellian, the truth being a lie and vice versa. This is how desperate the class warriors are; the next thing they might do is audit Jeremy Clarke’s tax returns for associating with yours truly and having spent a night in Tim Hoare’s house.
               
Needless to say, the unelected and incompetent crooks who run the EU are wading into the fight against international tax dodging. But not to worry; if they handle it as competently as they did the migrant crisis, Amazon and Google will probably get a rebate for the taxes they’ve avoided until now. The double standards reek of hypocrisy. Here you have Facebook hosting sprawling online bazaars offering antiaircraft weapons and even guided missiles, and the hacks are going on about Uncle Vlad Putin, whose name didn’t even appear on the Panama list. The FBI was frantically trying to gain access to the iPhone of those murderers in the San Bernardino massacre, and Apple head Tim Cook refused to play ball in case those the killers had been talking to had their names revealed. It might look bad for the company name. It makes you wish that someone would shoot Cook up the ass, but such just things never happen, do they?

But I shouldn’t complain. Life is good and there are a lot worse cases of injustice. Such as my good friend Wafic Saïd having been treated appallingly by the ridiculous Barclays bank. Here is Britain’s premier philanthropist, a man who has never been able to say no to demands for help, and the most ridiculous of people, the bankers at Barclays, refuse to offer their services because Wafic is a Syrian citizen. What the hell is this world coming to?And there are some good reasons why people use offshore structures. Did you by any chance know that if an American dies with property worth, say, $5 million, the heirs pay no federal estate tax? But if a foreigner dies with $5 million in American property, the heirs will pay 40%? So the foreigner sticks his 5 million in a shell company and registers it with Fonseca and everything’s hunky-dory. Uncle Sam is not playing fair and square, not that there’s a lot of fairness going on nowadays. Take the example of the poor little Greek boy. Donald Trump’s son-in-law, married to Ivanka, is one Jared Kushner, the son of a real estate shark who has done hard time in the pokey for fraud. He owns a New York weekly that regularly attacks the mother of my children, a woman who has never put a foot wrong or been unjust to anyone. Her crime, I suppose, is that she’s married to me, but if I were the son of a fraudster and regularly evicted women and orphans, I’d pick on others and leave Alexandra Schoenburg alone. Not only that, I was the first one to come out for The Donald nine months ago. Kushner should be waterboarded.

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By Taki Theodoracopulos