"The Spider's Web: Britain's Second Empire" is a documentary on the dominant role of "the City of London" in global Banking Secrecy.
Bank Secrecy is probably the greatest, but scarcely mentioned, threat to global society and in fact the planet itself. It is the gateway to corruption on the highest level, which then allows other forms of organized crime, maffias and illegal trafficking that destabalize global society:
- Trafficking of Weapons
generally known as the biggest business in the world, it pobably maintains all the wars around the world, either declared or non-declared, the cause of the endless flow of immigrants to Europa amongst other. - Trafficking of Drugs
maintains the world's drug-cartels like those in Mexico destabilzing all of south-America and ruining millions of lives of young people in Europa and all over the world. - Trafficking of People
Done by international mafias which covers from, again, trafficking of immigrants by the thousands to trafficking of women for prostitution and trafficking of children or even organs. - Trafficking of animals
Specially the exotic animals that generally are already on the edge of extinction. In this sense, Bank Secrecy and (political) corruption are in fact the greatest threat to bio-diversity and survival of nature. This extends to illegal deforestation and polution.
The so-called global financial 'crisis'
According to the documentary:
"We can end taxhaven and financial secrecy jurisdictions. Here are 5 steps to put and end to them:"
- Stop public councils from issuing public contracts to companies operating out of tax havens.
- Create public registries of beneficial owners of companies, trusts and foundations.
- Introduce full transparency of deals and secret agreements between companies and governments.
- Introduce public country by country reporting by multinational companies.
- Introduce automatic information exchange between all countries.
The question is who these "we" are. It seems it refers to politicians and political legislation. But since Bank Secrecy and corruption involve politicians in the first place, this route gives little hope, although Europa should be at least a bit better off than other regions of the world. However, simply observing how fearcefully the Netherlands, Luxembourg or Ireland defend their internationally recognized, and by some very appreciated, positions as tax havens, makes it clear there is a long way to go before politics and politicians take true actions against more serious Bank Secrecy.
Possibly only we, the people, are willing to truly fight this disease and we should find creative and intelligent ways do so ourselves, bottom-up, as in fact should be European politics anyway. How to break this priority European and Global problem also needs common sense and creativity.