Keynote Address By Bill Moyers
Environmental Grantmakers Association
Brainerd, MN 
October 16, 2001 


As TIME Magazine
reports, thirty industrial nations were ready to tighten the screws on
offshore financial centers whose banks have the potential to hide and often
help launder billions of dollars for drug cartels, global crime
syndicates--and groups like Osama bin Laden's Al-Quaeda organization. Not
all off-shore money is linked to crime or terrorism; much of it comes from
wealthy people who are hiding money to avoid taxation. And right-wingers
believe in nothing if not in avoiding taxation. So they and the bankers'
lobbyists went to work to stop the American government from participating in
the crackdown on dirty money, arguing that closing down tax havens in effect
leads to higher taxes on the poor people trying to hide their money. I am
not kidding; it's all on the record. The president of the Heritage
Foundation spent an hour, according to the New York Times, with Treasury
Secretary O'Neill, and Texas bankers pulled their strings at the White
House, and presto, the Bush administration folded and pulled out of the
international campaign against tax havens.