Cohen. It is a well funded organisation to promote Western geopolitical interests. A mix of naive stooges, professional dissidents and people who want to live in America. If you want a clear human rights issue take a look at the Bradley Manning case. Whedonworship makes some good points. Also, many of these tax havens are in overseas dependencies, island micro-states and landlocked continental countries. Many of these territories function as tax havens, as it is one of the few routes to prosperity for tiny resource-poor countries that are dependent on expensive imports. If we really wanted to put pressure on them, we would not need to invade, we could use less favourable trade tariffs or other less drastic measures. Also, some of them are dependent on foreign powers such as the US or Britain for defence, so you could say we have already invaded them. Respect for democratic EU countries had gone down and admiration for authoritarian China gone up. The post-2008 lesson appears to be that repression works. It makes money. It is good for business. Who are liberals from declining countries to lecture others? I think liberalism lost its hegemony (or whatever you call it when an ideology is so dominant that its dominance isn't even noticed) well before 2008. In the last decade, leading liberal democracies have made a determined attempt to return to the late nineteenth century---to return to the permanent, lawless imperial war of the period. One consequence of this excitingly bloody dash for empire