Recent Attac comments on Jersey on their website

There is a lot of good stuff on the employment law, the minimum wage, and the high cost of housing. However, I would make the following points:

Corrupt governments, companies and individuals in rich and poor countries stealing money from their own people and investing it for their own gain in tax havens like Jersey.

Details, details please. If there is information, it should be stated - in the same way that Private Eye does not hesitate to do, otherwise this is just so much mud-slinging. Private Eye always gets facts, which is why it is so widely read. Otherwise there is just rhetoric, which may or may not be true.

There are few outlets for public opinion in Jersey, but we see ourselves as an important voice for democracy and the rights of global citizens.

Indeed! I am surprised "false consciousness" or the idea that the masses are led by the nose has not surfaced. If people were so concerned about the States, they would readily attend any organisation, and it would generate its own newsletter, which would get wide distribution outside official circles; after all, that is what happened in the Occupation under much more extreme circumstances (and that was not a pseudo-dictatorship, it was the real thing when possession of news sent you to concentration camps!)! The early days of the JADA shows that there is certainly some concern there, but the evaporation of support at the Polls shows that just because an organisation claims to speak for the people, it doesn't mean the people want that voice!

The States of Jersey's political assembly consists of 53 independently elected members, of which 12 are Senators with an island wide mandate, 29 Deputies who are elected on a parochial mandate and 12 Constables who take their place in the assembly as a right of being elected leader of their respective parish. The assembly also has three ex-officio members appointed by the Queen of England who are the Attorney General, Solicitor General and the Dean of Jersey, who is the head of the Church of England in Jersey. They have the right to address the assembly, but not the right to vote. The assembly is lead by the Bailiff and Deputy
Bailiff, who are unelected to the assembly but can vote in favour of the status quo. The Queen also appoints a Lieutenant Governor to oversee her interests in the Island. In our opinion, the States of Jersey Assembly is nothing more than a pseudo-dictatorship, especially as any criticism is not tolerated and rubbished by the local partisan news media.

The jump from "elected" to "pseudo-dictatorship" takes my breath away. At least Chesterton knew how to put together a sensible argument about the deficiencies of "representation" in democracy, but then his excellent arguments apply equally to most so-called democratic governments. I would say the UK had even more of a pseudo-dictatorship than Jersey. As for the EU, with the EU Commissioners not directly elected in any fashion like MEPs, this is even less of a democracy.

Jersey had a gross national income for 2004 of just over £3 billion (€4.47 billion) giving Jersey a gross national income of £29,000 (€43,900) per capita, which is the second highest in the world after Luxembourg.

Interesting, especially as Luxembourg always features in lists of offshore centres too! And at the heart of the EU as well. That could have been mentioned!

Jersey's fiscal policy is going through a period of change. Over the next four years,it will maintain a 20% personal income tax for individuals, and combined employer/employee social security contributions at 12.5%, reduce corporate income tax to 0% and implement a goods and services tax at 3% with no exemptions. Attac&TJN believe that Jersey's fiscal policy impacts unfairly on
citizens from the lower socio-economic classes and is unsustainable in the long term. We have recommended increasing social security contributions to meet the demands of social protection and repealing the goods and services tax and implementing a textbook progressive income tax system.

1. The impact of 20 means 20 will in fact work as a progressive system.

2. Increasing social security contribitions also impacts on the lowest people, and if it becomes two high, it becomes a tax twice, as the monies deducted from income for social security are also subject to taxation, which is surely an iniquitous sitation, and one which would have to be addressed. To use social security as a form of taxation, without limits, is simply to introduce a stealth tax.

3. Lastly, any critique of GST at 3% impacting on the lower income groups is also logically a critique of the entire system of VAT across the EU, because that is precisely what VAT does. Are Attac groups in the UK and France taking the same united stance? It would be nice to know!

Utilising the internationally recognised benchmark of assessing relative poverty at 60% of median income, Jersey currently has 46% of single pensioners, 64% of single mothers and their children living in relative poverty. In addition, 25% of all Jersey homes need support from the States to make ends meet.

I'd like to know where they get their median income figures from! My persistent gripe with the States Statistic unit is that they tend to only give arithmetic means, not medians.

As we have seen from the above narrative Jersey is being run by a pseudodictatorship who are totally committed to formulating and implementing social and economic policies that benefit the rich and cripple the poor from a local to global perspective. Jersey is following the neo-liberal models of the United States of America and the United Kingdom in reducing direct taxation on individuals and companies, whilst raising indirect taxation in the form of a goods and services tax, which will have a detrimental effect on the lower socio-economic classes. Several years ago, Jacques Harel of Attac Saint Malo warned us that the first casualties of tax havens were the indigenous people and especially the poor, and his advice has certainly proved correct.

Maybe I missed something important in this argument. I believe Jersey is looking at GST of 3%, the UK has 17.5%, and France has 19.6 %. Has Jacques Harel something to comment on that? Why is France missing from this list when its indirect taxation is greater than that of the UK? And on the subject of cripplying policies, has France does anything about the corruption endemic in the Common Agricultural Policy, which sucks EU funds into a black hole which the auditors refuse to sign off, so bad is the accounting.

---

http://www.ptclub.com/eurobanking.html

Luxembourg

The RTL media empire which developed out of Radio Luxembourg has made entertainment the second largest industry in this rather staid but extremely beautiful principality. Its other claim to fame is that statistically it is the richest country in the world. Although they have taxes, nobody seems to work too hard on collecting them. The largest industry, of course, is finance. Luxembourg's history as a tax haven goes back to its 1929 holding company legislation, but as a founder member of the European Union it is under great pressure on bank secrecy issues and is having to readjust its role to compete with the likes of London and Frankfurt rather than Nassau and Road Town. Nonetheless, for non-EU residents Luxembourg gets our highest recommendation. Everything is super efficient, less snobbish than Switzerland, and personal accounts with internet banking can be opened by ptCLUB through the mail for just $500. In this country banking secrecy is part of the national culture more than anywhere else we know. As a small, rich country it has avoided the socialist problems of Switzerland where some politicians want to abolish bank secrecy. And while the Swiss apply a 35% withholding tax, investments in Luxembourg are tax free for non residents. And where else but in our beloved Luxembourg can you find the biggest banks disguising their plastic cards as guides to global time zones, or providing paper shredders for client use in branches? We recommend you to order a Luxembourg account today by contacting ptCLUB.