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The Real Target of the Panama Papers |
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Wednesday, 11 May 2016 14:06 |
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Escobar writes: "So this is the way the Panama Papers end. Not with a bang, but with a whimper."
A police officer stands outside the headquarters of Mossack Fonseca while prosecutors raid the offices in Panama City on April 12, 2016. (photo: Carlos Jasso/Reuters)
The Real Target of the Panama Papers
By Pepe Escobar, teleSUR
11 May 16
Pepe Escobar connects the dots.
 o this is the way the Panama Papers end. Not with a bang—as in “Putin hiding $2 billion”; you all remember the original headlines. But with a whimper; everyone lining up to duly access a prosaic database and find out the names of nearly 320,000 entities/offshore companies/trusts/foundations engaged in beautifying the finances of the rich and powerful.
The Soros-financed International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) has not exactly fulfilled its mandate of heaping dirt on selected BRICS nations and the odd enemy of imperial interests/values – based on a NSA-style hack of Mossack Fonseca.
So what’s left is for everyone to freely peruse names and addresses of companies in 21 jurisdictions—including Hong Kong and Nevada in the U.S. Yet don't expect to see bank account numbers, phone numbers or compromising emails.
Panama—where no one can flush a toilet without the U.S. government knowing about it—is for suckers; the real elite, connected (or profiting) even indirectly from the real Masters of the Universe and the liquid modernity enablers of top of the line turbo-capitalism use hack-proof Luxembourg, Virgin Islands or Cayman Islands connections – not to mention secure, Empire-based Delaware and Nevada loopholes.
Fictional scenarios, anyway, will continue to prosper, such as the myth the Panama Papers leak came from one John Doe—an “anonymous” whistleblower who allegedly contacted the Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper and the ICIJ with a mini-manifesto titled “The revolution will be digitized”.
John Doe justified his alleged leak by arguing that tax evasion was one of the great issues of our time, and governments must do more to prevent it. Thus his pledge—"I want to make these crimes public" – as he unloaded 11.5 million files (2.6 terabytes of data), which took over a year to be perused by ICIJ hacks, in absolute secrecy, with no leaks whatsoever.
John Doe is no Daniel Ellsberg or Edward Snowden. Apart from the resignation of Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson, Prime Minister of Iceland, and the offshore trust set up by David Cameron’s Dad, the Panama Papers did not yield anything really groundbreaking, as much as the bombastic headlines in the first four days insisted to demonize powerful players in Russia and China, especially Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Everyone familiar with the inner mechanisms of turbo-capitalism knows how wealthy tax-evading players across the spectrum – in this case helped by Mossack Fonseca—go legally offshore. Of course, this carries the possibility of countless open roads for fraud and/or illicit money laundering.
The G-20 has already agreed that the government of each member nation should know who are the real owners of legally registered offshore companies. But implementation, so far, has been negligible. Turbo-finance always trumps parliamentary politics.
Mossack Fonseca insists the whole Panama Papers saga is “based on the theft of confidential information." The ICIJ for its part insists the disclosure is “in the public interest” as “a careful release of basic corporate information”, and not a “data dump”.
Nonsense. It is a data dump. As for the “basic corporate information”, in does not prove anything; the ICIJ itself—in the preface to the latest release—observes that the appearance of particular names and companies on the list does not imply wrongdoing.
ICIJ hacks used Nuix—an Australian computer forensics and IT investigation software—to sift through the data. But, crucially, the decisions by mainstream media organs on what to publish first, and how to edit the information, were purely political.
Public opinion in the global South immediately noted the absence of Americans. Of course; Americans in the know use the Caymans and the Virgin Islands, as well as Delaware and Nevada, not Panama. Still, the ICIJ now has to resort to lame excuses, such as “Mossack Fonseca’s working relationships with dozens of Americans tied to financial misconduct raises questions about how well the firm keeps its commitment to following international standards for preventing money laundering and keeping offshore companies out of the hands of criminal elements.”
This has absolutely nothing to do with “international standards for preventing money laundering." If you know how to it—ask HSBC—or if you have the right connections, you get away with it.
What this is all about is one more chapter in an intra-system hardcore financial war. To have the ICIJ remote-controlled by Soros, the Ford Foundation, the CIA itself, is a beauty. And obfuscation—as in informative selectiveness—works wonders; remember the initial emphasis on “axis of evil” characters, old—as in connected to former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad—and new (Putin, relatives of Xi Jinping).
The heart of the matter is that the Panama Papers disclosure didn’t disturb the global financial casino one bit, because the (transnational) system badly needs fiscal paradises to evade national laws. What the Panama Papers may succeed in is to eliminate competition. From now on, your fiscal paradise of choice must be in US, UK and Dutch jurisdictions. We control every global financial flow—legal or otherwise. Defy us—or else.
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FOCUS: Bernie Sanders Has Already Won |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=63"><span class="small">Marc Ash, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Wednesday, 11 May 2016 11:04 |
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Ash writes: "The progressive political battle was never
for the White House. It was, is, and always has been for mobilization."
Bernie Sanders greets supporters at the University of Washington’s Hec Edmundson Pavilion. (photo: SeattlePi)
Bernie Sanders Has Already Won
By Marc Ash, Reader Supported News
11 May 16
A British general once said to Gandhi, “You don’t think we’re just going to walk out of India!”
Gandhi replied, “Yes. In the end, you will walk out. Because 100,000 Englishmen simply cannot control 350 million Indians, if those Indians refuse to cooperate.”
 he progressive political battle was never for the White House. It was, is, and always has been for mobilization. The battle against plutocracy and fascism has always, in reality, been a battle against apathy.
Bernie Sanders, with this remarkable campaign, has taken the issue of American political corruption out of the shadows and placed it center stage.
While that sounds like a simple thing, it is a thing that all progressive leaders have tried and failed to do for as long as there has been an American political process. The movement is mobilized, and not a moment too soon.
Winning the Presidency
The Oval Office would more aptly at this point be called The Office of the Empire Manager. The notion that any work of social good can be achieved from the Oval Office is, at this juncture, sadly far-fetched at best.
From that perspective, Hillary Clinton is actually well suited for the office, if you want your empire managed efficiently. If you want the logic of empire challenged at its core, then you’ll appreciate the scope of Bernie Sanders’ achievement.
So will Bernie win the “battle” to be the democratic nominee for president? In truth, it seems like a long shot. Will he win the “war” against apathy? He already has, in extraordinary fashion.
What makes defeating apathy so important? Apathy is where corruption grows. Apathy is so valuable to the corrupt that they manufacture it and control the production of it. This is where infotainment and mass broadcasting play such an important role. The trick is to keep the population huddled beneath their security blankets, rather than pounding on doors and demanding justice.
The people who understand the magnitude of the transgressions and who want change have always been there. But they have always been relegated to three percent of the popular vote in presidential campaigning. Brave new world. We are united, we have numbers, and we are on the march. It’s not about the Oval Office, it’s about the country, our country. Let’s win there.
Marc Ash is the founder and former Executive Director of Truthout, and is now founder and Editor of Reader Supported News.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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How the Electoral College Could Make Paul Ryan President in 2016 |
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Wednesday, 11 May 2016 08:22 |
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Excerpt: "Just when you thought you'd heard everything about this year's chaotic race for the presidency, you might want to go back and look at the 12th Amendment. It could, among other things, make Paul Ryan president."
Paul Ryan. (photo: AP)
How the Electoral College Could Make Paul Ryan President in 2016
By Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman, Reader Supported News
11 May 16
 ust when you thought you’d heard everything about this year’s chaotic race for the presidency, you might want to go back and look at the 12th Amendment. It could, among other things, make Paul Ryan president.
Here’s how:
Except in 1876, which was initially a tie, we’ve never had an election where no candidate received a majority of the Electoral College.
John Quincy Adams did initially fail in 1824, but he cut a deal with Henry Clay of Kentucky and took the White House. The real victor in the popular vote (by about 150,000 to 100,000) was Andrew Jackson. The infuriated Tennessee slaveholder then built a new Democratic Party in large part on slavery, race, and the slaughter of Indians. He took the White House in 1828.
When the Democrats split in 1860, Abraham Lincoln won the Electoral College while carrying less than 40% of the popular vote.
Rutherford B. Hayes, Benjamin Harrison, and George W. Bush all lost the popular vote but won the White House through the Electoral College.
Through various means of corruption, the Republican Hayes actually tied the Democrat Samuel Tilden in 1876. (Yes, there are an even number of votes in the Electoral College, and yes we could have another tie; it almost happened in 2004.) Hayes agreed to end Reconstruction in the South, the Democrats threw him their votes, and after a five-month standoff, Hayes became president in 1877.
Grover Cleveland defeated Benjamin Harrison in the popular vote in 1884, 1888, and 1892. But Harrison won the Electoral College in 1888, making Cleveland our only president to serve non-consecutive terms.
In 2000, the Republicans (among other things) stripped more than 90,000 mostly black and Hispanic citizens from the voter rolls, and flipped about 20,000 electronic ballots in Volusia County. The flip was later corrected, but served the purpose of getting all four major media networks to declare Bush the winner. George W. Bush’s official margin of victory was 537 votes, though later recounts showed he actually lost. He lost the official popular vote nationwide by more than five hundred thousand votes. Nonetheless, Florida’s votes in the Electoral College made him president.
In 2004, voter rolls were stripped in Ohio, and the electronic vote count was flipped between 12:20 and 2:00 a.m. election night. A very dubious official count showed Bush the popular vote winner nationwide. But for the first time in US history, an entire Electoral College delegation was challenged in Congress. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Cleveland Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs-Jones (since deceased) formally argued that the Ohio delegation was not legitimate. Had they won their challenge, John Kerry would’ve become president.
In the chaotic case of 2016, many things are possible. One of them has to do with the 12th Amendment, ratified June 15, 1804, whose relevant section reads:
The person having the greatest number of votes for President, shall be the President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of Electors appointed; and if no person have such majority, then from the persons having the highest numbers not exceeding three on the list of those voted for as President, the House of Representatives shall choose immediately, by ballot, the President. But in choosing the President, the votes shall be taken by states, the representation from each state having one vote; a quorum for this purpose shall consist of a member or members from two-thirds of the states, and a majority of all the states shall be necessary to a choice.... The person having the greatest number of votes as Vice-President, shall be the Vice-President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of Electors appointed, and if no person have a majority, then from the two highest numbers on the list, the Senate shall choose the Vice-President; a quorum for the purpose shall consist of two-thirds of the whole number of Senators, and a majority of the whole number shall be necessary to a choice.
In plainer English, it means this: if there are three or more candidates for president, and none of them gets a clear majority in the Electoral College, the House of Representatives will make one of the top three Electoral Vote-getters the new president. But the tally is scored with each state delegation getting a single, unified vote.
The vice president is chosen in the Senate among the top two candidates, with each Senator getting an individual vote.
At this point, the state delegations in the House shake out with just 14 controlled by Democrats: Washington, Oregon, California, New Mexico, Minnesota, Illinois, New York, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Maryland, Delaware and Hawaii.
Maine, New Hampshire and New Jersey are evenly split.
The rest are controlled by the Republicans.
SO ... in the long-shot but legally possible world of 2016, should Hillary Clinton get the Democratic nomination, and Bernie Sanders run as an Independent (or vice-versa), and should no candidate get a clear majority of electoral votes, the practical question might be whether enough of the GOP Congressional delegations would throw their votes to Hillary Clinton rather than Donald Trump.
BUT ... if Donald Trump gets the Republican nomination, and Paul Ryan or some other “establishment Republican” runs as an Independent, and carries enough states to throw the outcome into the House, the smart money might well be on that Independent candidate.
It’s all a long shot. And there are plenty of other scenarios to consider.
But this is the law of the land. And in 2016 ...
Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman’s The Strip & Flip Selection of 2016: Five Jim Crows & Electronic Election Theft is now available at www.freepress.org and www.solartopia.org. Bob’s Fitrakis Files are at www.freepress.org; Harvey’s America at the Brink of Rebirth: The Organic Spiral of US History is coming soon at www.solartopia.org
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National Mindlessness, Police to POTUS, Threatens Nation |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=20877"><span class="small">William Boardman, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Tuesday, 10 May 2016 13:53 |
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Boardman writes: "Donald Trump is the greatest threat to America today, or so the conventional wisdom left and right would have you believe. More realistically, the greatest threat to America today is actually believing that Trump is the greatest threat to America today."
Kiara Jacobs, 8, hugs her brother Quentin Stamen, 13, at a memorial in the Cleveland park where Tamir Rice was fatally shot by police officers. (photo: Ty Wright/NYT)
National Mindlessness, Police to POTUS, Threatens Nation
By William Boardman, Reader Supported News
10 May 16
“We are in serious times, and this is a really serious job. This is not entertainment; this is not a reality show. This is a contest for the presidency of the United States.” – President Obama, May 6, 2016
 onald Trump is the greatest threat to America today, or so the conventional wisdom left and right would have you believe. More realistically, the greatest threat to America today is actually believing that Trump is the greatest threat to America today.
To believe that Donald Trump is the greatest threat to America today, one needs to be a little hysterical or dishonest (or both). Actually believing in the mortal Trump threat requires believing that the Congress, the Supreme Court, the military, the security state, and all the other the other agencies of government, as well as all the states and most of the populace will suddenly become helpless to oppose the White House. That is an imaginary helplessness with no basis in reality, as viciously demonstrated by the Republican Congress of the past six years. For better or worse, the Constitution is designed to enable gridlock.
Advanced Trump-phobia is mostly political posturing, as in the president’s quote above. The country is drowning in bad faith like this and worse, because the country isn’t ready to look itself honestly in the mirror. When your political system produces bad results, it’s all too easy, cynical, and dishonest to blame the results. That’s just politics. Intellectual integrity is quite a different orientation, one that is in short supply in a country in the near death-grip of decades of national mindlessness. Examples are plentiful.
“We’ll pay $6 million, but we don’t admit doing anything wrong”
On November 22, 2014, Cleveland police officers drove into a playground and executed a 12-year-old boy less than one second after they arrived. The cop who did the killing had had violence problems when he was with another police department. The prosecutor, who failed to get an indictment from a grand jury, later lost a bid for re-election. The family of the boy, Tamir Rice, sued the city in federal court under the civil rights statute. In April 2016, Cleveland agreed to pay Tamir Rice’s estate $6 million, perhaps the largest Cleveland settlement in a police-shooting case. Under the settlement, the Rice family will drop its complaint against officers Frank Garmback and Timothy Loehmann, the shooter, who are both still city employees. While paying $6 million, the city admits no wrongdoing, even though the event was rife with wrongdoing.
Failure to admit wrongdoing despite committing wrongdoing has long been an acceptable corrupt practice in the American legal system. Instead of accountability for killing or maiming people, the perpetrators are allowed to lie legally as one means of limiting their damages in a fair trial. Corporations that create Love Canal or Gulf Coast oil spills are the most common beneficiaries of this class-based double jeopardy against the victims. So common is this blatant injustice that it is rarely challenged politically, or denounced, or more than mentioned. But it is a soul-destroying practice embedded in American culture that enriches the rich and protects the guilty. Voters know this viscerally, so when Trump says the system is rigged, they know he’s right, and they know almost no one else is telling them that truth.
“Honoring slavers is our way of showing that slavery was wrong”
On April 28, 2016, Yale University president Peter Salovey tried to explain the Yale Corporation’s decision to retain the name of the residential hall Calhoun College, named for South Carolinian John C. Calhoun, Yale 1804. A lawyer, Calhoun owned dozens of slaves and defended slavery as “a positive good.” He fought for the expansion of slavery into new territories. He argued that the federal government should defend minority rights, meaning the minority comprising southern slave owners. He defended states’ rights in general and in particular the right of the South to secede, either peacefully or by force:
If you who represent the stronger portion [the North], cannot agree to settle them on the broad principle of justice and duty, say so; and let the States we both represent agree to separate and part in peace. If you are unwilling we should part in peace, tell us so; and we shall know what to do, when you reduce the question to submission or resistance.
In other words, Calhoun was a significant historical figure who was also a slave-owning bigot and traitor, lacking only the opportunity to betray his country because he died in 1850. Yale named Calhoun College after him in 1931, largely on the basis of his achievements – serving as vice president, congressman, and senator (as almost no other Yalies had) – not on the basis of his character. After months of public dialogue within the Yale community and private consideration within the Yale Corporation, Salovey explained the decision to continue honoring Calhoun this way:
We are a university whose motto is “light and truth.” Our core mission is to educate and discover. These ideals guided our decisions. Through teaching and learning about the most troubling aspects of our past, our community will be better prepared to challenge their legacies. More than a decision about a name, we must focus on understanding the past and present, and preparing our students for the future.
This explains nothing, and students were unhappy. What in this somewhat lofty rhetoric makes it an educational necessity to honor a slave-owning secessionist? Nothing. These are experiences that are not illuminated by having students live in a place named for a horrible exemplar of a horrific past. Calhoun and the legacy he represents will not be hidden if the place is called by any other, benign name, Salovey’s rationalizing notwithstanding:
Ours is a nation that often refuses to face its own history of slavery and racism. Yale is part of that history. We cannot erase American history but we can confront it, teach it, and learn from it. The decision to retain Calhoun College’s name reflects the importance of this vital educational imperative.
The decision to retain Calhoun College’s name demonstrates a muddy-mindedness that can’t or won’t distinguish between changing a name and erasing history. By Yale’s form of reasoning, Calhoun may as well fly the Confederate flag. Surely people as smart as those at Yale can figure out how to confront the history of slavery and racism without honoring slavers and racists.
Making the Calhoun decision even more indefensible, Yale has also announced the names of two new colleges it plans to build. One will be Benjamin Franklin College, in honor of the recipient of a Yale honorary degree in 1753. While the choice is ambiguous (and was greeted by laughter from students at a town hall meeting), Franklin’s brilliance and contributions to learning are undeniable. And the fact that he was a slave owner has real, potential educational value in tracing how Franklin came to be an abolitionist. Calhoun died unreconstructed and apparently unreflective.
Yale’s other new college will be named for Anna Pauline (Pauli) Murray, a 1965 Yale Law School graduate and 1979 recipient of an honorary Doctor of Divinity. Born into a poor black family in 1910, Pauli Murray grew up to spend most of her 75 years fighting for positive social change that should make Calhoun roll over in his grave. As Salovey put it, without subterfuge this time:
Pauli Murray represents the best of Yale: a pre-eminent intellectual inspired to lead and prepared to serve her community and her country. She was at the intellectual forefront of the battles that defined 20th-century America and continue to be part of our discourse today: civil rights, women’s rights, and the role of spirituality in modern society.
Yale, like most of America, is having trouble dealing fairly with minority students and faculty. Yale, like most of America, is still part of the national mindlessness about race and ethnicity. Of that, at least, Calhoun would be proud. Trump, on the other hand, might note that at Yale’s going rate, $250 million could create a Trump College at Yale.
“Hey, be grateful, drones kill fewer civilians than carpet bombing!”
For almost pure psychic numbing, let’s turn to the White House, where it’s needed most (except possibly at the Pentagon). What the Germans did to London and Coventry in World War II constituted war crimes, unlike what our side did to Dresden and Hiroshima. Killing civilians (at least deliberately) violates the law of war, or at least it used to. Having done a lot of saturation bombing in Afghanistan and Iraq, to little military or political avail, the US decided to use the cheaper, more “precise” drone attack tactic, also to little military or political avail. The more meaningful accomplishment of drone warfare has been to turn the president (first Bush, and now Obama, more so) from the chief executive into the chief executioner.
There was a time when having the president of the United States start his day by picking the names of people to kill from a list would have been repugnant. Drone killing is, on the face of it, a war crime. And drone warfare is waged largely in secret (except from the victims). No wonder it goes unchallenged by Congress and presidential candidates alike.
Even Bernie Sanders as president would continue to send drones to kill people on a list, people with no due process rights, no rights of appeal, nothing but the right to be imperial sacrifices in the name of imperial security. In March, Sanders defended his non-pacifist cred, citing the wars he’s supported and defending the party line on drone warfare:
Drones are a big issue, and drones have done some good things. They've been selective; they've taken out people who should be taken out…. [Drones have also done] some terrible things, which have been counterproductive to the United States. But would I rule them out completely? No, I would not. But I am aware that they have in some cases, you know, you use a drone and you end up killing 40 people in a wedding in Afghanistan; that is not a terribly humane thing to do or productive thing to do.
In the past, Sanders said he would continue to wage drone warfare, but would use drones “very, very selectively and effectively.” This is American politics today. The good guys want to do as little evil as possible, the bad guys are ok with as much evil as seems necessary. In April, “Obama put the lesser-evil argument this way:
There’s no doubt that some innocent people have been killed by drone strikes. It is not true that it has been this sort of willy-nilly, you know, “Let’s bomb a village.” That is not how it’s—folks have operated. And what I can say with great certainty is that the rate of civilian casualties in any drone operation are far lower than the rate of civilian casualties that occur in conventional war.
Never mind that the rate of civilian casualties in conventional war was driven to new highs with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So the president is using an obscene level of carnage to make his personal assassination program seem reasonable. Presidential assassination by autocratic fiat was new in American life when President Bush first crossed that line. Presidential assassination, aka executive action, used to be against even American law. A decade after the first drone strike, the country in its muddled mindlessness pretends we’re not all proxy assassins. That’s too hard to swallow, to admit, to address, to stop, to prosecute. That’s reality. It’s much easier, and less dangerous, to pit illusion against illusion, to pretend that Donald Trump is a freak-out lethal threat to an America that hasn’t existed for a long time. That’s a reality show for real. The president and the people collude in the same unconscionable charade: he doesn’t want to tell the truth and the people don’t want to hear it.
The possibility of healing America continues to recede in the rearview mirror. A nation that creates a torture concentration camp like Guantanamo is not a healthy nation. A nation that maintains a torture concentration camp like Guantanamo is not a healthy nation. A nation that cannot come to terms with a torture concentration camp like Guantanamo and close it down and hold those responsible to account is not a healthy nation. Guantanamo has nothing to do with Donald Trump beyond being another visible symptom of the same metastasizing spiritual cancer.
William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV, print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a
link back to Reader Supported News.
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n Monday, U.S. Atty. Gen. Loretta Lynch stood before the American public and delivered the most powerful rejection of North Carolina’s anti-transgender bathroom bill, HB 2, of any public official to date. Comparing HB 2 to Jim Crow, Lynch argued that the North Carolina fight is about more than where trans people go to the restroom, it’s a battle over basic human rights. “This is about the dignity and respect we accord our fellow citizens and the laws that we, as a people and as a country, have enacted to protect them—indeed, to protect all of us,” she said. “And it’s about the founding ideals that have led this country—haltingly but inexorably—in the direction of fairness, inclusion and equality for all Americans.”
