Wash-bays, tax evasion and the death of God and Marx

Feb 05, 2017 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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Every society has its moral codes. Some of these values may be downright obnoxious, but the reality is that power will always favour the upper classes and the rich classes determine the moral codification of society.
The great 20th century, Italian thinker, Antonio Gramsci gave a masterful account of how the prevailing values are written for the entire society by the wealthy classes. According to Gramsci, the dominant classes achieve hegemony not through the bullet, but cultural penetration.
In Guyana, moral and legal violations only become abominations depending on which classes are the practitioners. The City Council (and do not let the leadership of the PNC, AFC, WPA fool you, they are as equally guilty as the City Council for the oppression of the lower classes since May 2015) has ordered the closure of wash-bays in Queenstown, because they have become hideous encumbrances in an area that is zoned against such activities.
One is forced to ask the question; which is uglier – wash-bays in Queenstown that spoil the ambience or humongous tax evasion by the hegemonic classes?
The chairman of the Guyana Revenue Authority, Rawle Lucas discovered one of the most dangerous threats to the well-being of this country. Let’s offer an extract from my November 2, 2016 column on what Lucas found. Here is what I wrote then; “When the APNU-AFC Coalition Government came into being, the new chairman of the GRA board, Rawle Lucas intoned that property tax contributed “virtually nothing to government revenue”. Those were his words (see “Uncollected billions point to major GRA problem – Lucas,” Stabroek News, December 28, 2015). But how could that be? Prior to 2014, citizens were exempted from property tax on the first $7.5 million in assets. For every dollar over $7.5 million, but not exceeding $12.5 million, you paid 0.5 percent in property tax. For every dollar over $12.5 million you paid 0.75 percent.”(end of quote)
To understand the hundreds of billions of dollars this poor country lost over the past decades through the avoidance of property tax, you do not have to do a statistical analysis. You can see the monstrous story with your own eyes if you take a walk around Region Four. There are families and companies whose assets (as against income; I am referring here to the value of fixed assets) are worth in each case, billions of dollars. For example, one Guyanese family recently bought a riverside company for $20 million American, in anticipation of the oil boom. That is equivalent to just under $5Billion Guyanese. That is fixed assets which carry property tax, which before 2014 started at eight million dollars.
Do the calculations after you would have perambulated the greater part of Region Four, particularly greater Georgetown, and would have observed the wealth of dozens and dozens of super-rich families and companies. The figures must show that for the past decades, assets worth from $8 million up from these strata had to bring in a few hundred billions. But Lucas is on record as saying that property tax did not contribute to the State’s revenue.
Something is not right here and that something is horrendously sickening. You have the State losing hundreds of billions of dollars, and to date there is no one before the courts. Well there could be an answer – they eventually paid. That is not the answer, because Lucas wrote that property tax contributed (let’s use his exact words), “virtually nothing to government revenue.” So what is the something that is horrendously sickening?
The State could identify vendors and wash-bay people for closure, but those who robbed the Treasury of hundreds of billions through evasion of property tax have remained untouched. Here is my prediction – 2020 election will be on us, and not one member of the tax-evading families will be brought before the courts before then. The brutal, bestial, sadistic truth about this country is that from colonial times onwards and right up to this day – Sunday, February 5th 2017 – the State has been an oppressor of the lower income classes in both the urban areas and rural parts of Guyana.
In all this, there is a funny side. Walter Rodney’s comrades are in government now. These were the people who fought alongside Rodney and were there when he was killed. At that time, their agenda was to liberate the oppressed classes. I haven’t seen them liberating anyone since 2015.
Poor Walter Rodney! He died trying to free Guyana’s proletariat and peasantry from the oppressive State that his friends are now part of. Remember the saying; “God is dead, Marx is dead…and I don’t feel too well myself.”

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