Offshore Banking / Tax Havens: Didn’t You Know, You Knew?

Hollywood movies, Belgian comic strips, and thrillers of all origins have depicted tax havens for decades, focusing on this issue long before it was taken up by activists, intellectuals, or journalists. A highly eclectic set of works, including movies such as Blood Diamond, Wall Street or The Godfather, made tax havens part of their plots in order to ensure their own credibility: corrupt politicians, financial schemers and drug lords would not be taken seriously if they failed to use numbered accounts, initially in Switzerland, or today in Panama or Andorra. These narratives are significant in that they reveal the audience’s intuitive awareness of tax havens. Mass culture tells us that this awareness exists; the goal now is to bring it to a political level. Based on the book Offshore by Alain Deneault (2011, The New Press) This is a political video remix, all rights reserved to the original artists.