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Havens of the one percent: a video interview with Harold Crooks

Harold Crooks’ film The Price We Pay (2014) explores how tax havens are changing the nature of the modern state. From the Open City Documentary Festival. Archive: July 7, 2015.

With 10 to 15 percent of the world’s financial wealth being invested offshore, and therefore beyond the reach of national taxation systems, the redistributive nature of the state-corporation relationship is destined to end.

Growing inequality is in fact becoming an outright expulsion from livelihoods.

Investing offshore, companies insert vast amounts of wealth in a cloud that moves in perpetuity, excluding citizens from the redistributive mechanism that came to exist in the inter-world war period.

The middle classes – existing within the framework of a structured welfare state – are destined for extinction.

Crooks is an acclaimed director, with a background in economics and journalism. His previous film credits include co-writer, The Corporation (2003) and co-director, Surviving Progress (2011).

openDemocracy Author

Donato Paolo Mancini

Donato is a London-based journalist with a background in social anthropology and economics. His work has appeared in The Times, The Guardian, The New York Times, Al Jazeera, VICE, and other publications. He tweets @donatopmancini.

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openDemocracy Author

Dea Gjinovci

Dea Gjinovci is a SOAS alumna and recently graduated from UCL with a Master Ethnographic and Documentary film. She is now based in Paris and pursuing a research master in social anthropology at l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS). She tweets @dea_gj.

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