In light of news reports revealing the massive, worldwide extent to which wealthy elites including politicians use offshore tax havens to hide their wealth and tax liability, www.salon.com/... here's a sad fact about American culture and values. Given the following two scenarios, which one *should* matter more in the great scheme of things?
1. An elite public figure, perhaps a politician, whose credit card or phone records show some pattern of paying for sex -- call girls, prostitutes, the works.
2. An elite public figure, especially a politician, whose suddenly revealed financial records indicate that he has hidden millions or billions of dollars in secret, off-shore tax havens, free from public or government scrutiny.
Not to belittle the plight of sex workers, who are too often abused, underpaid, exploited and shunned (not for the most part including pimp-less, high-priced madames who serve wealthy clientele). On the other hand, fundamentally, sex-for-hire encounters are by and large deals that involve consenting adults -- sleazy or morally dubious, perhaps, yet a business transaction that's quite legal in some places.
The quick answer is that both kinds of behavior should matter, whenever you vet a public figure, especially someone running for public office. Whatever views you have regarding sexual pecados (and if you regard some or all guys who make use of sex-for-hire services as creepy, I won't argue), I ask again: relative to what? A financial pecado mas grande?
Setting up a secret lock box here or abroad to launder and hide your wealth, avoiding your fair share of taxes, and in some cases masking your criminal financial behavior? Now that's a huge betrayal of the public and the public's treasury. It's not just ripping off one person or a small group of them, it's ripping off the entire society.
It's also a big clue as to the integrity and social views of such individuals, boiling down to: greed is good. That's a kind of scandal worth talking about -- often, far, and wide.
But beyond individual greed and miscreance, the whistleblowing revelation that this is happening all over the planet, involving many banks and other financial institutions, shows just how corrupt some of our "too big to fail" financial institutions have become. They are the planet's biggest whores, willing to cut any corner or get their lawyers to craft any loophole in order to make a bit more profit and curry favor with the politically and economically influential. Frak 'em!
And by the way, to the extent American politicians are fingered in the lists of names revealed in this scandal, consider how this use of secret tax havens parallels recent developments in domestic campaign financing -- where "dark money" now floods the system, contributed and spent in essentially anonymous, hands-off ways to mislead and fool the public. It's all part of an increasingly corrupt financial system that benefits those in power, hides their activities, and sends the bills to the rest of us.
