Ever wondered how those with over $30 million maintain and grow their wealth while paying bare minimum taxes? Join us as we unveil the dark underbelly of wealth accumulation and preservation with Chuck Collins, acclaimed author of 'Wealth Hoarders'. In a candid conversation, Collins unravels the complex web of the wealth defense industry, detailing how the wealthy maneuver their fortunes off the balance sheets, and shockingly, position the US as their preferred tax haven. How has the U.S. become the favored country for Russian oligarchs, criminals and drug lords to hide their ill gotten gains?
The revelations don't stop there. We delve deeper into the grim consequences of hidden wealth on our local communities. Examining the Getty family's tax evasion strategies that ran California a loss of $300 million, the manipulation of South Dakota's trust industry to allow wealth to accumulate forever beyond taxation, and the rising ghost neighborhoods as a result of hidden wealth driving up housing prices - it's all here.
And for those seeking solutions, Collins doesn't disappoint. We discuss how the US and UK can spearhead a global transparency system, and highlight revealing films like 'The Laundromat' and 'We're Not Broke'. Get ready for a compelling dialogue that starkly exposes vast wealth disparities and the urgent need for reform.
https://inequality.org
https://www.icij.org
https://www.chuckcollinswrites.com
Watch the trailer for The Laundromat here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuBRcfe4bSo
Watch We're Not Broke here - free: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPHlhzRSEnw
If you enjoyed this show, please leave a positive review and share with your friends. Thank you! Osha
Ever wondered how those with over $30 million maintain and grow their wealth while paying bare minimum taxes? Join us as we unveil the dark underbelly of wealth accumulation and preservation with Chuck Collins, acclaimed author of 'Wealth Hoarders'. In a candid conversation, Collins unravels the complex web of the wealth defense industry, detailing how the wealthy maneuver their fortunes off the balance sheets, and shockingly, position the US as their preferred tax haven. How has the U.S. become the favored country for Russian oligarchs, criminals and drug lords to hide their ill gotten gains?
The revelations don't stop there. We delve deeper into the grim consequences of hidden wealth on our local communities. Examining the Getty family's tax evasion strategies that ran California a loss of $300 million, the manipulation of South Dakota's trust industry to allow wealth to accumulate forever beyond taxation, and the rising ghost neighborhoods as a result of hidden wealth driving up housing prices - it's all here.
And for those seeking solutions, Collins doesn't disappoint. We discuss how the US and UK can spearhead a global transparency system, and highlight revealing films like 'The Laundromat' and 'We're Not Broke'. Get ready for a compelling dialogue that starkly exposes vast wealth disparities and the urgent need for reform.
https://inequality.org
https://www.icij.org
https://www.chuckcollinswrites.com
Watch the trailer for The Laundromat here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuBRcfe4bSo
Watch We're Not Broke here - free: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPHlhzRSEnw
If you enjoyed this show, please leave a positive review and share with your friends. Thank you! Osha
Today's story features the heir to a family fortune who had an insider seat at the table of wealth management. What he learned was alarming. So Chuck Collins bucked the trend, choosing to donate his inheritance and dedicate himself to exposing the corrupting influence of dynastic wealth. On today's show, chuck Collins will reveal what he learned about how the wealth defense industry uses a complex shell game to hide trillions of dollars of inherited wealth so that it is never taxed, and how that changes the game for the rest of us. He will guide you through some solutions to changing the system to promote transparency and empower democracy.
Speaker 1:This is Aspire with OSHA Art, nature, humanity and I'm your host, osha Hayden. My guest today is Chuck Collins. He is the author of the Wealth Hoarders how Billionaires Pay Millions to Hide Trillions. He is the director of the program on inequality and the common good at the Institute for Policy Studies, where he co-edits inequalityorg. He is the co-founder of divestinvestorg, a global movement to divest from fossil fuels and invest in climate solutions, and he's a trustee of the Post-Carbon Institute and resilienceorg. He's the author of several books on wealth inequality the one I just mentioned, and also a novel, alter to an Errupting Sun, which has won high praise. That interview is also available on my podcast. Welcome to the show, chuck Collins.
Speaker 2:Thanks, Thanks for having me OSHA.
Speaker 1:It's a pleasure to have you here today. So, as the heir to a family fortune, you had an inside seat at the table of generational wealth and the wealth defense industry. So can you just tell us the story of what you learned and how that influenced your work on income inequality and the growing wealth divide in our country?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean growing up in a wealthy family, I kind of learned early on that there's a whole circle of advisors that work with families with the goal of helping them, I guess, accumulate and maintain as much wealth as possible and pass it down the generational line, paying as little taxes as possible, and that is kind of their institutional bias, that's their North Star. If you have to pay a lot of taxes and less money goes to the next generation, they haven't succeeded in their job. So there is this whole. Now I describe it as an industry really the wealth defense industry. Tax attorneys, wealth managers, accountants all who serve the ultra wealthy, and I'm really talking about families with $30 million or more. That's when you start to see people hiring these professional wealth defense industry folks. So, yeah, I was sort of privileged in the sense of getting a window into that world and how it's grown in 30, 40 years, because inequality has grown and wealth is concentrated in fewer hands. So has this industry of enablers and helpers to help the ultra rich.
Speaker 1:So you also wrote the wealth hoarders during the pandemic shutdown. How did what you witnessed then influence the writing of this book?
Speaker 2:Well, one of the things that happened not long right around the time that this book came out was there was a huge leak, called the Pandora papers Trillions of dollars of wealth. They discovered, through several wealth management firms, that they were moving all this money to the shadows, and that was part of. One of the trends during the pandemic was that the United States more and more became a destination for hiding wealth. Prior to that, you know, I think people thought oh, there's this offshore tax system and there are these Caribbean islands like the Cayman Islands or Bermuda or the British Virgin Islands. That's where people go. They move their money offshore to hide it. And I think what we learned in the pandemic was actually, people don't need to move it offshore and that the United States has become a tax haven and a destination for wealthy people from around the world who want to hide their money.
Speaker 1:So that really brings up the point of. I know there are a lot of politicians who are very focused on immigration making sure we don't have illegal immigration but when you have all this hidden money and hidden wealth coming into the country behind the scenes without being tracked, how do those things relate in terms of the importance of one thing over the other?
Speaker 2:Well, it's just sort of a I guess it's a juxtaposition really the people who you know the United States has not a very good set of laws overseeing these issues of wealth and hidden wealth. We don't have very good transparency laws. We have states like Delaware where you can incorporate a limited liability company and never have to disclose who the real beneficiaries are. You have states like South Dakota that have morphed their laws, rewritten their laws to allow trusts to live forever and never pay taxes and be anonymous. So part of what's happened is policymakers have turned the US into kind of a weak link in the system of global transparency. That's why the money is moving here. It's attracted to where there's the minimal oversight and regulation, and the United States has become that place.
Speaker 1:It used to be Switzerland.
Speaker 2:Right. I think we all have images of Swiss banks from our movies and from 20 years ago and it's true that after World War II the numbered Swiss bank account was sort of an ironclad way that wealthy people could park money off outside the US and never have to report it, never have to pay taxes on it.
Speaker 1:So that's one thing that really surprised me when I read the book.
Speaker 2:Just to kind of give us a sense of scale, I think we're talking north of 20 trillion dollars. I mean, we're talking about amounts of money that are hard to even imagine, that have moved off the balance sheet. So even when you and I talk about inequality, we're not even factoring in so much of this hidden wealth, which is mostly owned and controlled by the richest people in the world. So the bad news is we're much more unequal than we think we are, which is already kind of shocking levels of inequality.
Speaker 1:Seems to me that the less money that the ultra wealthy pay in their taxes, the more all the rest of us have to pay. So I mean, how did really the infrastructure get so incredibly broken down to the point where it was dangerous? How did the health system become so disastrous compared to every other developed economy in the world? Those things sort of all lead to the same money river, don't they? Yeah?
Speaker 2:I mean, you're pointing to the important point, which is why does this matter really, or who is harmed by it? And the answer is we're kind of all harmed by it. You know, I tell the story early in the book about Angola and the wealthiest family in Angola taking money from the people of Angola that could have been invested in building health clinics or infrastructure in that country and siphoning it out of the country to Portugal and to European banks and into this global offshore system. This is the mechanism. This hidden wealth system is the mechanism by which the wealth of the commons is sort of looted or siphoned away and where tax dollars that should be spent to make a good society vanish. So simple equation if the wealthy aren't paying their fair share and are hiding their money and avoiding tax, either the rest of us are paying more or there's just a gap and we're not making the kind of public investments that we need to have healthy and good societies. It really matters and it really harms the lives of everybody who's not wealthy in the world.
Speaker 1:And you talked also about on this same subject. Can you talk more about that? I mean, how much of the world imagines a problem for developing countries to be poverty? We think of it as, oh, those countries are very poor, but it's actually plundering that is causing that poverty.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I mean, let's just take the continent of Africa. For every dollar of global aid that goes to Africa, several dollars of wealth kind of leave through this system, siphoned away, plundered. This is the tool for the plundering of the wealth of the commons for most of the world and people think, oh yeah, you know we need to send aid to these countries, but if, in fact, if we allowed them to Tax their own wealthy and invest in their own societies, they would be so much better off. But we're kind of like the getaway car driver when I say we meaning the United States, because we're enabling global oligarchs, not just Russian oligarchs, but African oligarchs and Asian oligarchs. They love the United States. They're bringing money here, parking it in trusts and in our shell companies and and sometimes in our real estate, and that's where the hidden wealth is hidden. It's hidden here in some cases.
Speaker 1:We talked a little bit about Delaware. It's mind-boggling really when you think about it that we have a state and isn't that like kind of their primary industry is the LLCs and wealth defense.
Speaker 2:It's a huge industry in the state of Delaware and they've had this kind of corporate friendly culture for decades. They have very low standards and they have a very corporate friendly judiciary and so a lot of you know a lot of the Fortune 500 companies are Incorporated in Delaware for good reason on their end that there's less accountability. And then the limited liability company is the premier sort of anonymous ownership model and even when law enforcement is trying to figure out who stole the money and they track it and they hit a limited liability company, it's almost like they hit the wall. The search is over, they can't go past it because they'll never be able to find the real owner and Occasionally there's some cracks and the light shines in. We've learned that, for instance, back pages one of the premier Child trafficking, sex trafficking websites is incorporated, formed in the state of Delaware.
Speaker 2:When Donald Trump wanted to launder funds to stormy Daniels, he got his attorney, michael Cohen, to run it through Delaware limited liability companies. So sometimes we learn about the role of Delaware LLCs and it's really even frustrating for law enforcement who are just trying to obey the rules. We actually are doing a report right now about private jets and private jet ownership and the owners of private jets can mask the ownership of their jets through Delaware limited liability companies, so we don't even know who's flying that jet over our house Thanks to this opaque ownership system, and what you see is the wealth-hiding industry will kind of layer. They'll have a Delaware LLC that owns property in a city or owns a bank account in in Bermuda, and what the wealth defense industry does well is make things complicated and layer upon layer of anonymous ownership, and that's how they hide. The treasure of the world really is using these tools in their toolbox.
Speaker 1:So it's a complicated shell game. I know that here in Northern California there's an Air Force base and they began started hearing stories about Alarm as all of this thousands of acres of land was being bought up by an anonymous buyer and no one could figure out who it was. No one knew and finally it just came to light it's a group of investors from Silicon Valley trying to create a whole new city.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm sure they use Delaware corporations etc to mask that. That's a great example like who is buying up our neighborhood, who owns our community, who owns our city. You would think that we would have laws that would say that has to be transparent, you have to say who the beneficial owner is. We should know that and we've created the system of secrecy. I have another interesting story from a California perspective that came out since I wrote the wealth hoarders, which is the Getty family, which is the heirs to J Paul Getty, the oil baron, the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, etc. Well, turns out many of them live in California but they Fictionally pretend to live in Nevada for tax purposes so they avoid taxes.
Speaker 2:And a whistleblower came forward. A wealth manager who sort of worked with several heirs of the Getty family Came forward and said she recommended that these family members, look, declare your California citizenship. They would literally fly in a private jet from their homes in California to the airport in Nevada and Transact business for their trusts, kind of maintaining this fiction. She said you know, why don't you pay your California taxes? It's not that much money compared to what you have. And they fired her. So she sued them for a wrongful termination, but she also blew the cover on them and there's a great New Yorker piece About her. She's named Marlena son. Turns out they're stiffening California 300 million dollars of taxes. So California is being harmed by the system and that means the other California taxpayers have to pick up the slack when the Getty family is avoiding their taxes. And here's this whole industry that's helping them do that and it should be simply outlawed.
Speaker 1:It wouldn't be hard to just make it so that these things are transparent. And if you buy property, it's transparent because we could talk about what's happened to the property prices. And I could just say from here, locally in Sonoma County, the city of Sonoma has been Under siege, being one thing after another bought out by this ultra rich guy, matt's, and who Nobody really knows what all is behind him, and he's trying to buy the whole town and own it, basically, and put people on the board of the school boards and then change the curriculum. Wow, it's pretty intense stuff and the people have been trying to fight it. But you know, somebody wants to buy property and someone wants to sell it and they offer more than it's worth. They can pretty much have free reign to do what they want to do.
Speaker 2:I think this is a really important harm of this hidden wealth system is you have ultra-wealthy people, not just from our community but coming from all over the world, who are bidding up the cost of land and housing, pushing it out of the reach of local people, and they're able to do it anonymously. So it's almost like our communities are battling these almost invisible forces of harm and we don't know who's behind it. As you said, osha, you can have laws that say look, you want to own property in Sonoma County. You need to record who the real beneficial owner is. You can't have a shell company be the owner and you're giving political donations to influence local policymaker or your backing local candidates. We should know who you are and that's just a simple transparency provision, but it would make a difference.
Speaker 1:Because all that hidden wealth also translates into political power. Right.
Speaker 2:That's the problem. It's wealth and power together. If we're going to have any kind of functioning, healthy democratic society, we need to know who holds the power and how they're wielding it.
Speaker 1:And isn't that what happened in South Dakota, that they changed the laws in order to benefit themselves? They just went to the mayor. You want to say a little bit about that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, south Dakota is an interesting example where the state basically the trust industry representing the most dynastically wealthy families in the country went to South Dakota. There was a sympathetic governor. They said listen, if you change your state laws, we'll bring all this business to South Dakota. And it's true. South Dakota has a substantial trust industry. They're managing somewhere between $600 billion and a trillion dollars of trust wealth. It's probably much more, we don't know and they even have a commission at the state level to just update the laws every year based on what the trust industry needs.
Speaker 2:It's an unfortunate example of how states have a lot of independence. In this country we have federalism and states have a lot of autonomy, so you have these small states where a powerful industry can make, can kind of have their way with their state legislature. They basically write the laws that they want. In this case of South Dakota, in the 1980s they abolished something called the rule against perpetuities, which is basically a limit on the lifespan of a trust. Trusts used to only be able to exist for a hundred years. Now they can exist forever.
Speaker 2:So people are creating what they call dynasty trusts. Wealth will be deposited in these trusts and will just grow and grow and grow and the great great grandchildren of these folks will have these huge fortunes outside the reach of accountability, oversight, transparency and taxes. So South Dakota is kind of like leading the race to the bottom in terms of setting standards and that's their competitive position. And I was just on a radio interview in South Dakota talking about their oversight of these trusts and a really good reporter basically found out that there's Russian oligarchs are hiding money in South Dakota and these trusts are engaged in illegal activities. And so they went to the state and said well, how often are you overseeing this? When did it was the last time you oversaw this? And they said sorry, we don't have to answer that question. We have a law that says we don't have to answer that question.
Speaker 1:So they just keep writing the laws to defend this industry. Well, let's talk a little more about the housing market I think that's really important and about how these ghost neighborhoods get formed with all of this money coming in, just how people park their money and then price the rest of us out of housing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, one of the things we've seen in the last 10 years, and particularly on the coasts. So the West Coast, the California, oregon and Washington state and the East Coast cities are very attractive for this hidden, oligarchic wealth and you kind of have to get into your inner billionaire mindset. Here You've got all this wealth. You don't really want it all. In the financial markets that's volatile. You want to spread the wealth around and diversify it and have it in many, many places, and so what better way to do that than own real estate in multiple jurisdictions and countries? And what we found was like cities like Vancouver and British Columbia were just overrun with global wealth coming in and buying up and bidding up the cost of real estate and hollowing out communities. You know they're literally buying up whole neighborhoods in Vancouver, mostly money coming from Asia, to the point where the local neighborhood stores were like there's no one actually really living here.
Speaker 2:This is a wealth parking lot. It's a safe deposit where you see. If you go to New York, you see these skinny little residential towers rising all over the city around Central Park. They are housing owned by the ultra wealthy, often anonymously, and in many cases no one is living there. The whole purpose of this is like a safe deposit box in the sky. So, yeah, it's kind of disrupting all this hidden wealth flowing into our communities is disrupting our housing markets, bidding up the cost of land and housing, hollowing out communities and kind of making our communities less livable for the people who live there, as opposed to want to just park their money there.
Speaker 1:Right. Well, if you own a store, the shops that serve those places, and then suddenly there's no one there to buy anything, then you're out of business, right? How do you survive?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and even in Boston, where I live, for many they built this huge residential tower one Dalton Place. They advertised it as a internal vertical neighborhood. Like you don't really need to even leave your building here, we have everything you need, and including huge security systems. So the surrounding neighborhood is like a ghost town. There's no one there, there's no street life, there's no people in the parks, the parks are all privatized, so it creates this sort of privatized neighborhood, which is really not healthy for any community.
Speaker 1:We haven't even really talked about the global corporations and how they hide their wealth, but that's another huge loss of tax revenue where they have their own shell schemes to yes, there's a whole sort of parallel global corporation part of the story.
Speaker 2:So we're mostly talking about individuals and individual wealth. You have big companies like Apple and Google who have subsidiaries in other countries and they play a little global shell game with their taxes. They'll go to places Google and Apple or take Nike and the Swoosh logo they will incorporate the logo in a low tax or no tax haven where they don't pay taxes on royalties Within their company. They'll pay their subsidiary in Ireland all these royalties as a way to reduce their taxes in the US. So, yes, sort of the same system. Some of the same lawyers and sort of experts that help the ultra wealthy hide their money also help corporations minimize their tax and move it around and play these shell games.
Speaker 1:So I'd like to take a short break and we'll be right back with more and we'll talk about some of the measures that can be put in place to actually fix the system and make a difference. So we'll be right back. Stay tuned. In case you're just joining us, this is Aspire, with OSHA Art, Nature, Humanity, and I'm your host, OSHA Hayden, and I am here with Chuck Collins. We are talking about the wealth hoarders. We've been laying out basically the problem and what is happening and how that is harming us, and now we're going to talk a little bit about some of the solutions that are available to us. Some of the steps forward you say have already been taken, such as the passage late last year of the Corporate Transparency Act. What changes will that make?
Speaker 2:One of the things that the Corporate Transparency Act does is it gives the federal government the ability to know who the real owners are of companies, at least law enforcement. You and I won't be able to look up and find out who lives, but at least the people trying to enforce global and national laws. But it's a good example of and, by the way, the wealth defense industry has fought the implementation of that law, whereas we've been pushing it to not just cover corporations but also cover trusts, which is another ownership system different than a company or corporation that people use to hide money. And one of the challenges in this is the wealth defense industry is always two steps ahead when it comes to creating new ownership entities and morphing existing laws. So you really need to have an enforcement and oversight capacity at the national level and at the global level.
Speaker 2:But partly the interest in Russian oligarchs. So around the invasion of Ukraine, there were a lot of sanctions being put on Russian oligarchs. They realized how much Russian oligarch wealth was here in the United States, maybe in the land up the road from you. So there was more desire to kind of expose and pass transparency reforms.
Speaker 1:It seems really important, not just for the oligarchs, but also for criminal activity. If we don't know where that money is and who's the owner, there's no way that we can really deal with that in any effective fashion. Tell me about the patriotic millionaires.
Speaker 2:There's a network of wealthy, high net worth individuals who are pretty outspoken on issues around tax fairness and the need to raise the floor in terms of wages and reduce the influence of money in politics.
Speaker 2:So it's 300 individuals and many, many more who are sympathetic, and so, yeah, they're an example of wealthy people organizing for good, fair public policies, and some of them have been very outspoken on what you and I are talking about here, and including going to wealth advisors and saying things like hey, I don't want you to use every loophole, I don't want you to aggressively hide money on my account. The wealth defense industry their sort of default position is tax avoidance, but there are a lot of people going to their wealth advisor saying I should pay my fair share of taxes. This is what good societies do, so they're an important voice in this conversation, and you're starting to see wealth advisor firms that advertise that we're pro-social. We support our responsibility to pay taxes. Maybe it isn't the best thing to pass on unlimited inheritances to the next generation. That's not necessarily a good thing for people's development. They're starting to sort of change and shake up the norms around wealth management, which is a good thing.
Speaker 1:So one of the things you talk about, too, is the common good and how in a democracy, if there's no investment in the common good, then how does that democracy survive? Do you want to talk a little bit about the effect on democracy of all this hidden wealth?
Speaker 2:Yeah, again, I think this is kind of an interesting trend is that the levels of inequality have become so enormous in the last couple of decades that even the beneficiaries of that system, meaning the people in the top 1% or the top 1 tenth of 1%, are seeing how distorted and harmful it is to have so much wealth and power in so few hands and they're starting to speak out in that way. And some of that's pushing back against this wealth defense industry and their norms and creating a sort of different demand, if you will, for services. And part of it's saying yeah, we can't have a healthy democracy if the billionaires and the oligarchs have so much power and say and sway in our democratic system. It's one of the reasons we can't get anything meaningful to happen, particularly at the federal level where the big wealth seems to dominate. So I think from a democracy, from a healthy economy perspective, you're starting to see more wealthy people saying well, not in my name, I don't really want you to rewrite the tax code just to benefit me. We need to have a system that works for everybody.
Speaker 2:20 years ago I was part of an effort to keep the inheritance tax what we call the estate tax in the US from being abolished. We organized to get wealthy people to step forward. Bill Gates's dad and Warren Buffett and hundreds of multimillionaires and billionaires said don't abolish the estate tax, it's a good tax. So the people who wanted to get rid of it essentially just weakened it and created work arounds to the point where it's a joke. The ultra-wealthy don't pay an inheritance tax. In this country, let's say, estimated trillion dollars of wealth passed from one generation to the next. Last year, in the upper canopy of the wealth forest, the estate tax only captured about 18 billion. I mean, it's a joke. And it's because the wealth industry, wealth defense industry, has created these work arounds where rich people can bypass laws and accountability.
Speaker 1:So some of the things that you're proposing and that are kind of in the works to try to get past, do you want to talk about those a little bit?
Speaker 2:The first thing to say is those of us who are in the United States should take a look at our own house. I mean, we can talk about the global systems and offshore, but we really need to A get our own house in order and then be part of a global effort to create a system of transparency. Europe is a little farther ahead of us. England, the United Kingdom, is probably the other most important part of the wealth hiding system, not so much both in terms of London as a sort of destination for money, but within the Commonwealth nations under the sort of oversight of British law. Those are some of the biggest tax havens in wealth-hiding jurisdictions. So if the United States and the United Kingdom cleaned up our own act and then used our global position to kind of leverage, we could close down this hidden wealth system. But it starts here in the US, I think, federal laws overruling states that have morphed their laws to help wealth-hiding.
Speaker 2:So the Delaware Limited Liability Company just require federalized corporations above a certain size and require them to have a federal charter that requires disclosure. You're a Fortune 500 company. You shouldn't just get to incorporate in a little fiefdom of Delaware with its own little laws. You should be subject to federal laws. That would make a big difference. What you and I talked about with real estate why shouldn't real estate be transparent? Why shouldn't every jurisdiction require the disclosure of who the real owners are of real property? And that could be implemented. We don't have to wait for the federal government to do that. Local jurisdictions could do that. New York State and New York City have begun to move in that direction. So those are some real pressure points that would make a difference.
Speaker 1:So I think that really I just want to recommend that people read your book the Wealth Hoarders, because there's so much information in there and it's very compelling, so it's really an important I think I open it for people to understand. And one of the things you mentioned in there is the movie that was filled Meryl Streep and Antonio Banderas, the Laundromat, which really talks about the Panama Papers and the real people that were harmed by that, and there's another movie, we're Not Broke.
Speaker 2:Which is free on YouTube, which is a great introduction to the offshore tax system and really showing people trying to organize around that. And yeah, there's a great global network called the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. You can go to their website, ICIJorg. They are the ones that are receiving all this leaked data and sort of helping make sense of it. And the Panama Papers you mentioned, the Pandora Papers. What we've learned about this system has largely come about because of whistleblowers and defectors within the system helping tell the story of this kind of mostly secretive system, and that's really really helpful to getting the picture that we're starting to get here.
Speaker 1:So if we really want to make changes in the world and in this country, we kind of have to start with figuring out what's happening to all those tax dollars that are being withheld from the common good, from building the roads, from the infrastructure, from every single system that would help to elevate life for everyone.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we're really not going to be able to solve some of our big societal problems, whether it's climate disruption or inequality, if the richest people on the planet are hiding huge amounts of treasure away from the rest of us.
Speaker 2:It's like we're creating a parallel universe of the ultra-wealthy who can stash their cash and never have to pay taxes, or can engage in criminal activity and never be held to account. So, yeah, we're not going to be able to solve a lot of our problems unless we fix this global trans system, and the reality is we in the United States have more leverage to fix it than probably anyone else in the world right now. To the extent we still have a remaining democracy, to the extent some of us live in states like California or New York, where we're harmed by this system, where other states can rewrite the rules and undermine our own states. So that should be organizing the states that are harmed by the system as a good starting point and fixing it at the federal level, because South Dakota and Delaware are not going to take the lead in fixing this. They benefit from the system, so those of us who are harmed by the system need to push back.
Speaker 1:So people can look up more information at inequalityorg. They can look you up at ChuckCollinsRightscom, so those are some places where you can go to get more information. You can look at the films. We talked about the laundromat or we're Not Broke. I'm sure there are others out there, but there are a lot of resources to really learn about how this hidden scheme to kind of rip us all off is happening and what we can do about it. So thank you so much for being on the show today, Chuck. As always, you're an amazing encyclopedia of information and activism and kind of proponent for the common good.
Speaker 2:Well, thanks for having me back, and it wouldn't mean anything if there weren't people like you just having these conversations. That's so much of what's needed right now.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you so much and, to my listeners, I hope this has inspired you to learn more and to perhaps make some changes or get in touch with your senators or your government officials. And until next time, have an inspired week and live your joy.
Speaker 2:See you next time.