Monaco harbour. Flickr/nanand81
, CC BY-NC 2.0
On a wall of my office in Chesham hangs a cartoon of Don Quixote that I bought from a street vendor in Moscow in the dying days of the Soviet Union. It serves as a reminder of the pitfalls of tilting against windmills like the OECD or the IMF. Through Tax Justice Network’s (TJN) early years there was a shared feeling that we were engaged in a valiant but hopeless struggle against the most powerful people on the planet and the all-pervading ideology of financialised liberalism that backed their interests. But the banking crisis that emerged in 2007 marked a turning point, beyond which TJN’s mission seemed less quixotic – though more urgent.
