Tax pays for Governments. Governments use tax to pay for international development and aid. There is of course a place for charitable endeavours and arguably tax will never be enough but the rank hypocrisy of would-be-saints ‘Bono’ and ‘Geldof’ with their warped views on taxation and fairness isn’t ‘bollocks’. It is at the heart of what is right and what is wrong with the super-rich believing they can say one thing and do another. When it comes to the world’s poorest and most vulnerable there is a direct cause between the West’s approach to tax havens and the worlds poorest being short changed. Ebola has been made all the worst by poor sanitation and crumbling healthcare. International tax fairness can resolve that.
Read these links and then you decide.
http://www.finfacts.ie/irishfinancenews/article_1026589.shtml
http://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2012/05/16/whys-bob-geldof-so-tetchy-about-his-tax-affairs/
And then perhaps make a direct donation to
DEC as an alternative to massaging the egos of past-their sell-by-date rock capitalists.
'The truth behind the War on Terror is that it is part of Western powers' imperialistic quest to secure natural resource reserves for their corporations. We should all fear for the peoples of energy-rich regions as the global resource grab plummets new depths' writes Patrick Kane of War on Want in an excellent analysis of the link between Western commercial interests (corporations) and militarism in Africa:
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/patrick-kane/mali-algeria-libya-energy-diplomacy_b_2687432.html
