A breed apart
[back]
-
”Real rich people figure out how to dodge taxes.”
George W. Bush, 2004
-
”We don’t pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes”
Leona Helmsley, property heiress
-
”I'm not prepared to re-enact the French revolutionary renunciation of the rights of the nobility."
Lord Conrad Black,disgraced publishing tycoon
- (News Corp's) profits, declared in Australian dollars, were A$364,364,000 in 1987, A$464,464,000 in 1988, A$496,496,000 in 1989 and A$282,282,000 in 1990. The odds that such figures were a happy coincidence are 1,000,000,000,000 to one. That little grace note in the sums is accountant-speak for ‘Fuck you.’ Faced with this level of financial wizardry, all the ordinary taxpayer can do is cry ‘Bravo l’artiste!’
John Lanchester, London Review of Books, February 2004
- We are not the successor of, we are not a continuation of, Western civilisation. We are a unique and different civilisation.
Grover Norquist, anti-tax president of Americans for Tax Reform, cited in Perfectly Legal by David Cay Johnston, p3
- Flat Tax: An effort by the well-to-do to shift the burden of taxes to the middle and lower classes, where it doubtlessly belongs because they don't have enough sense to become rich so they can afford their own accountants.
The Devil's Dictionary of Taxation: Taxanalysts, October 13, 2008
- However hard it is for them to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, the super-rich have no difficulty entering the United Kingdom of Tax Haven.
UK Labour MP Michael Meacher, writing about Britain's domicile rule, 2007.
- How do I possess that power, that sovereignty? Through privacy. Through the fact that nobody knows. Through the fact that I have to account to no-one.
Ian Fleming, Dr No
- We now live in a separate economy, we live on a separate level to the vast majority of people in the country. We don't send our kids to the same schools, we have more choice over schools, we have more choice over health, we have more choice over where we live, we have more choice over where we go on holiday and what we do for our jobs. And we live in a completely different world to the people we live next door to.
Wealthy lawyer quoted in Unjust Rewards, a book about inequality and wealth, 2008, by Polly Toynbee and David Walker
- These élites "have little need for national loyalty, view national boundaries as obstacles that thankfully are vanishing, and see national governments as residues from the past whose only useful function is to facilitate the elite's global operations."
Samuel Huntingdon , inventor of the term "Davos Man," on Davos Man
- Setting aside both the fanciful and the insidious theories of puppet masters and their cabals, we must recognise that there is something new afoot, a huge imbalance in the global distribution of power that concentrates great influence in among informal clusters of elites. These elites often transcend or supplant the insititutions of the past: national governments, systems of law that could not keep pace with global relaities, and even the earnest but incomplete efforts of the past half century at creating effective multinational organisations.
David Rothkopf, in his book "Superclass"
- What this boils down to – and this is one of the most Postmodern things about Murdoch – is that he is in a sense not located anywhere.
John Lanchester, London Review of Books, February 2004, on Rupert Murdoch, whose tax bill stayed below ten cents in the dollar for the entire decade from 1989.
