Opinion Sur
Large oligopolistic corporations extract value from the markets they control, and several then evade or elude paying taxes set by law. A large part of this ill-gotten capital is leaked to tax havens and other jurisdictions, which constitutes an enormous criminal drain of resources with devastating consequences for countries, punishing the middle and popular sectors of their population.
A critical aspect of the contemporary economic system is that large oligopolistic corporations control major markets, such as food, energy, medicines, agro-exports, mining, banking, and insurance.
They are leading companies that impose their power on suppliers and consumers through prices and commercial conditions, appropriating income that does not belong to them. They extract them by paying low wages to workers, by acknowledging low compensation to their suppliers, and by setting high prices for consumers. To this income they add what they withhold from the treasury for the tax evasion and elusion they carry out and then flee abroad. The consequences of this appropriation are devastating for countries, especially for middle and popular sectors of the population.
The impact of these direct effects of oligopolistic appropriation is multiplied through a cascade of other derivative effects. On the one hand, workers, suppliers, and consumers who fail to retain value that belongs to them reduce their ability to purchase goods and services and, in doing so, harm those who produce them, their workers, and suppliers. There is a chain contraction of domestic demand while appropriated incomes reinforce the concentration of wealth of large corporations and wealthy families.
On the other hand, the criminal defunding of the State due to evasion, elusion, and flight of ill-gotten capital compromises public accounts by severely restricting the genuine revenues of the public sector, contributing to the generation of serious fiscal deficits. To make matters worse, instead of correcting the deficit by eliminating the crimes of tax evasion and elusion, those who profit from it impose other solutions so as not to affect their interests. They do so by imposing strong adjustments to the State’s social investment, reducing salaries and pensions, maintaining the prevailing unfair tax regressivity unchanged, granting subsidies or setting excessive rates for services they control. With these measures that they impose at the expense of the majority, they generate a tremendous social and productive disaster.
To sustain this process of concentration of wealth and stagnation or setback in the living conditions of the vast majority, they need to ensure political support and control of those affected. They achieve this by financing complicit segments of politics, hegemonic media that manipulate public opinion, and a judiciary system biased in favor of the powerful.
Without dismantling the concentrating process, oppression reproduces itself cycle after cycle. It is true that modalities and the people who lead the subjugation can change, but the accumulation of the value that is appropriated is renewed and enlarged.
Every country and humanity as a whole face the tremendous challenge of cutting the robbery that suffocates socially and environmentally. Something complex, difficult to carry out and, nevertheless, imperative to address. It is an effort of an essentially political nature that requires the establishment of enlightened agreements between diverse social forces that have rarely managed to converge.
The new directions and criteria for aligning the interests and energies of the middle and popular sectors are known. There is no lack of strategic knowledge, measures to sustain transformations, and even programs and projects that open new paths to peace, equity, and collective security. However, its implementation does not involve any voluntarism. On the one hand, the rulers have never graciously ceded their power and privileges, they can only do so by confronting them in order to dismantle the engines that generate concentration.
On the other hand, the victims of concentration make up a huge and heterogeneous universe of beings with important cultural differences and life perspectives. A social and territorial dispersion that hinders the necessary clarification and organization. Hence, building a sustainable transformative power requires achieving the convergence of a diversity of interests of multiple groups while respecting their singularities of histories and needs.
Even more so when the rulers always try to fragment the forces that resist them by manipulating the understanding of what is happening and placing infiltrators in the very heart of the transformative movements, a risk of great danger. As denounced by the famous Adagio en mi pais (Adagio in my country)when it warns that a single traitor can defeat a thousand brave people. It is worth listening to him because he also sings “my people say that they can read, in their worker’s hand, their destiny, and that there is no fortune-teller or king, who can show them the way, that they are going to travel”. And he points out hopefully, “another time will come, from the depths of time.”
A long-standing march, which today takes the form of the unbridled concentration of wealth and decision-making power that compromises humanity and threatens the very planet that shelters us. How much madness and cruelty, how the alienated in greed and opulence punish the rest!
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