Know Your Customer

Endangered Liberties Commentary

By J. Bradley Jansen
February 9, 2001

President Bush should end the global anti-privacy, high tax campaign of the
Clinton Administration.

He should act immediately to protect privacy, trade, economic growth and

sovereignty by quickly and unequivocally announcing a reversal of the Clinton
Administration’s pursuit of Know Your Customer through the OECD’s Financial Action
Task Force.

The Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development is an organization of

unelected bureaucrats who are not directly accountable to the people of the
countries that they purport to represent. The OECD, with the support of the
Clinton Administration, launched a campaign against what it called “harmful tax
competition.”

The OECD considers low taxes to be “harmful.” Any country having lower taxes and
more efficient government spending is considered a threat to the high tax welfare
states.

Unfortunately, Treasury bureaucrats are claiming that the US position hasn’t

changed with the election of a president who campaigned for lower taxes.
President Bush needs to clarify the new Treasury position before more damage is
done.

Know Your Customer proponents see the internet and new technological developments
which have added so much productivity to the economy as threats. Having failed
to stop the use of drugs by effectively deputizing bank tellers as law enforcement
agents, Know Your Customer proponents are trying to bully other countries into
being tax collectors and law enforcement agents for us and are trying to regulate
the Internet and our emails to pursue their agenda of higher taxes and less
privacy.

Concerned citizens need to make sure their Congressmen and Senators oppose the
global Know Your Customer bill. We also need to remind President Bush that we
elected him to cut our taxes—not pursue an agenda that considers low taxes
“harmful.”