Panama Papers

[seemslikeadream]

Kashoggi is like the Forrest Gump of the deep state world.

viewtopic.php?f=8&t=25094&hilit=Khashoggi&start=105

[conniption]

CrossTalk on Panama Papers: Corruption PSYOPS

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWdqbhl3upE
RT

Published on Apr 8, 2016

The so-called Panama Papers are sold to us as a vast leak chronicling the financial misdeeds of the rich and powerful. But is this really the case? Certainly we are given insight into the secretive world of offshore banking, but is it a complete and balanced story? One interpretation of the Panama Papers is the West targeting its enemies.
CrossTalking with Mitch Feierstein, Alexander Mercouris, and Pepe Escobar.

[smiths]

There are some big problems though with the theory that the leaks are the west targeting their enemies,

For one, the leaks have almost no effect on Putin who was the initial target for so much of the reporting,
perhaps they might end up being more damaging for China but I doubt it

And if it is the West, why target and embarrass David Cameron so much?
Again perhaps it is connected to the Brexit but this seems like a very chaotic and loose strategy

And damaging an insider candidate like Hillary Clinton in the leaking process at the moment when the American establishment seems to need her most seems odd

[divideandconquer]

One interpretation of the Panama Papers is the West targeting its enemies.

Oh please. The hands of the powers in the US, England, Israel, Germany, etc. are clean, clean, clean! I'm sure our noble leaders will rush in with a solution to clean up this horrific corruption. Perhaps a new global tax grid in order to crack down on these dirty tax evaders and money launderers...who only exist in non-Western countries such as China, Russia, Syria, etc. You know, like that tax co-operation agreement...I think it's called The Multilateral Competent Authority Agreement (MCAA). Then, once that's established, they can set up the central international revenue service and launch the global tax system which will solve all the problems of the world.

[82_28]

Very well said, smiths. It does seem very odd. The power of this as I think it was Escobar (who I have loved reading for a long time) who said it in the interview posted above, nobody is ever going to read the entire thing but can be cherry picked from. Actually, come to think of it I think it was the dude in NYC who said that in the top left hand corner. Anyway, do you just thrust the "papers" into an algorithm and name search along with search terms? I know I will never dip my toe into it but will indeed have to read something that someone else found and published something or another for whatever reason or for whatever spin. This world is hopelessly corrupt.

I hate trying to understand shit I am not prepared to understand in the first place. I don't know no names of no one, just the major players. How does one drill down on the figures they've never heard of?

Also that host is super annoying.

[Wombaticus Rex]

And if it is the West, why target and embarrass David Cameron so much?
Again perhaps it is connected to the Brexit but this seems like a very chaotic and loose strategy

"Chaotic and loose" is a pretty good description of US foreign policy since the Cold War ended.

It was also a pretty good description of US foreign policy before the Cold War ended.

Looking over the panoply of Current Events, one could perhaps be forgiven for assuming such a strategy was at work here in the Western World.

These are the same people who were studying how to frack Colorado with nuclear weapons a few decades back.

[zangtang]

There's just no end to the confidence that inspires in my faith in authoritaay.

I had rather hoped someone was running this ship.

[MacCruiskeen]

I just endured the first two minutes of The International Consortium™'s highly-professional report cartoon:



This sterling investigative effort tells us all about the crimes of empire capitalism rampant Evil Noriega Saddam Ghaddaffi Assad and his "barrel bombs".

How long did it take that International Consortium™ of dogged, fearless gumshoes to devise, script and produce this cartoon? (Prioritise, guys, prioritise!) And why did they go out of their way to produce a fucking cartoon, if not because they know full well that they are catering to an infantilised audience that is addicted to the spectacle?

If this isn't a psyop, please tell me what it is.

Meanwhile:

elle ‏@snookersession

Cameron must go, he has lost all legitimacy in the eyes of his people. I hope China begins to arm the moderate rebels in Manchester.

34 Retweets 48 Gefällt mir

[JackRiddler]

But we've all agreed throughout that the top-level branding of the leak disclosures through the non-sequitur use of Putin and Assad is "psyop" insofar as false and intentionally misdirecting. That is the flag opportunistically planted on the iceberg. At the same time, hundreds in dozens of places now have access to the full set of documents, and this circle will tend to grow. Thus the same still-limited disclosures prompted among other things the current round of Cameron protests to which you link (with just incredible timing given what has been happening the last few weeks in Britain) following logically from the disclosures about his family's business. So which is it? "Psyop" (not necessarily the right term, but disinfo in any case) or not? Both, obviously. I don't know why you don't want to look past the flag.

At the same time, it's obvious that this is just one iceberg off a very large glacier. I'd say however it's focused attention on the right issues - concentrated wealth and the ways in which it eludes law and creates hidden centers of independent power. That may or may not have been the intent of the leak. The unknown identity of the leak is more of a key question than what the top level of the "consortium" is doing with it.

[gnosticheresy_2]

Feels like a corporate Snowden - similarly disruptive but with better presentation.

[seemslikeadream]

The Corruption Revealed in the Panama Papers Opened the Door to Isis
PATRICK COCKBURN • APRIL 8, 2016

Who shall doubt ‘the secret hid

Under Cheops‘ pyramid‘

Was that the contractor did

Cheops out of several millions?

The message of Rudyard Kipling’s poem is that corruption is always with us and has not changed much down the ages. There is some truth in this, but degrees of corruption greatly matter, as the Cheops would have found to his cost if he tried to build his pyramid in modern Iraq instead of ancient Egypt. The project would cost him billions rather than millions – and he would be more likely to end up with a hole in the ground than anything resembling a pyramid.

Three years ago I was in Baghdad after it had rained heavily, driving for miles through streets that had disappeared under grey-coloured flood water combined with raw sewage. Later I asked Shirouk Abayachi, an advisor to the Ministry of Water Resources, why this was happening and she said that “since 2003, $7bn has been spent to build a new sewage system for Baghdad, but either the sewers weren’t built or they were built very badly”. She concluded that “corruption is the key to all this”.

Anybody discussing the Panama Papers and the practices of the law firm Mossack Fonseca should think about the ultimate destination of the $7bn not spent on the Baghdad drainage system. There will be many go-betweens and middle men protecting anyone who profited from this huge sum, but the suspicion must be that a proportion of it will have ended up in offshore financial centres where money is hidden and can be turned into legally held assets.

There is no obvious link between the revelations in the Panama Papers, the rise of Islamic State and the wars tearing apart at least nine countries in the Middle East and North Africa. But these three developments are intimately connected as ruling elites, who syphon off wealth into tax havens and foreign property, lose political credibility. No ordinary Afghans, Iraqis and Syrians will fight and die for rulers they detest as swindlers. Crucial to the rise of Isis, al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan is not their own strength and popularity, but the weakness and unpopularity of the governments to which they are opposed.

Kipling was right in believing that there has always been corruption, but since the early 1990s corrupt states have often mutated into kleptocracies. Ruling families and the narrow coteries around them have taken a larger and larger share of the economic cake.

In Syria since the turn of the century, for instance, the rural population and the urban poor no longer enjoyed the limited benefits they had previously received under an equally harsh but more egalitarian regime. By 2011, President Bashar al-Assad’s first cousin Rami Makhlouf was reported to be a dominant player in 60 per cent of the Syrian economy and to have a personal worth of $5 billion.

In Iraq earlier this year, a financial specialist, who wished to remain anonymous, said that the government of prime minister Haider al-Abadi held files on corrupt individuals, including “one politician who has amassed a fortune of $6 billion through corrupt dealings.”

The danger of citing extreme examples of corruption from exotic and war-ravaged countries like Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria is that these may sound like events happening on another planet. But the political and economic systems in Iraq and Afghanistan were devised under the tutelage of the US and allies like Britain. They were proponents of free market economics which in the West may increase inequality and benefit the wealthy, but in Kabul and Baghdad were a license to steal by anybody with power.

Neo-liberal economists have a lot to answer for. A few days after Isis had captured Mosul in June 2014, I was in Baghdad and asked a recently retired four-star Iraqi general why the much larger and better-equipped Iraqi army had been defeated so swiftly and humiliatingly. He replied that the explanation was: “Corruption! Corruption! Corruption!”

He added that this was pervasive and had begun when the US was building a new Iraqi military after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003, when the American commanders had insisted on out-sourcing food and other supplies to private contractors. These businessmen and the army officers soon determined that, if the Iraqi government was paying money to feed and equip a battalion of 600 men, but its real strength was only 150, they could pocket the difference. So profitable was this arrangement that by 2014 all officers’ jobs were for sale and it cost $200,000 to become a colonel and up to $2m a general in charge of a division.

Blatant corruption at the top in Kabul and Baghdad has been frequently reported over the years, though nothing much seems to change. But it is a mistake to imagine that this was simply the outcome of a culture of corruption specific to Afghanistan and Iraq. The most corrupt ministers were appointed and the most crooked contracts signed at a time when US officials were the real decision-makers in Baghdad.

For example, the entire military procurement budget of $1.2 billion was effectively stolen in 2004/5 when the Defence Ministry was substantially under US control, raising questions of the competence, or even collusion, of the US authorities.

The situation has got worse, not better. “I feared seven or eight years ago that Iraq would become like Nigeria,” said one former minister in 2013, “but in fact it is far worse.”

He cited as evidence a $1.3bn contract signed by a minister with one foreign company that had only a nominal existence – and a second company that was bankrupt. This took place in a country in which one third of the labour force is unemployed, and, if the underemployed are taken into account, the figure rises to over half.

The use of offshore financial centres by the moneyed elite in the oil states and much of the rest of the world is not always to avoid taxes which they would not pay if they kept the money at home, but in some cases to conceal what they have stolen and later to legally launder it.

Some of this can be done by buying property in places like Baghdad, which explains why property prices in that dangerous city are as high as London. But it is safer and better to buy property in London itself, something that will ultimately require the services of a company like Mossack Fonseca – though these services will be far removed from the original toxic source of the investment.

The Panama Papers give insight into the names and mechanisms through which globalised elites hide their wealth and avoid paying tax on it. Commentators now predict that popular disgust with political establishments will benefit radical leaders like Bernie Sanders in the US and Jeremy Corbyn in the UK.

What they do not see is that the way in which the detachment of interests of elites from the countries they rule has already produced states that have failed or are failing, or are wracked by conflict and war.

[divideandconquer]

Assad, Putin, Iceland and…David Cameron???

Since I’m too lazy to recap, this post will make much more sense if you read my last post, “Assad, Putin and…Iceland???”

Having concluded that this Panama Papers spectacle could not be more contrived, I can’t help trying to figure out what the point is. There’s no careful study required when the person at the center of the scandal is Russian, Syrian or South American, but when an ostensible pal gets a drubbing, the point is less obvious. For the second time, identifying the target‘s connections to China reveals interesting possibilities, like this Vox post from a year ago, excerpted below:

How a Chinese infrastructure bank turned into a diplomatic fiasco for America

Last fall, China rolled out a new regional economic initiative — the Asian Infrastructure and Investment Bank — on which it was partnering with India and a range of smaller Asian countries. The United States swiftly announced its opposition to the plan, which it said would undermine the existing global financial architecture, and began leaning on allies around the world to give the bank the cold shoulder.

This March, America’s AIIB diplomacy suddenly and dramatically collapsed, as the United Kingdom — over the objections of the UK’s own Foreign Office — said it would join the bank. And that opened the floodgates. Germany, France, Italy, Australia, New Zealand, Spain, Korea, and Brazil are now all on board. The US is isolated, America is sniping at its closest foreign allies, and the Obama administration has been dealt a humiliating diplomatic defeat.

–snip–
So is this all David Cameron’s fault?

That’s more or less how it looks from Washington. The Obama administration’s pique is re-enforced by the fact that, as Jamil Anderlini and Kiran Stacey reported for the Financial Times, the United Kingdom’s decision to join the bank was made over the objections of the UK Foreign Office. As Thomas Wright of the Brookings Institution writes, “It appears as if David Cameron’s government took this decision because it wanted to be the first to join and to get the credit from China for doing so.”

This haste to obtain nonspecific commercial advantages at the expense of following America’s lead on grand strategy is seen by many in DC as crass and opportunistic.

You may recall, as my pal @lstwheel did, that a pig-fucking scandal, courtesy of this dude, afflicted Cameron half a year later. Admittedly, Lord Ashcroft had possible reasons of his own — or so we’re told — but surely pissing off Washington and the Foreign Office gave the story the strongest of legs.

Perhaps it wasn’t punishment enough.

UPDATE

Of course we’ve all been instructed by the leaknoscenti to never roll our eyes and say, “old news” but since posting this I’ve learned that there really is no way to credibly deny it this time. Here from 2012: Cameron family fortune made in tax havens. The lede:

David Cameron’s father ran a network of offshore investment funds to help build the family fortune that paid for the prime minister’s inheritance, the Guardian can reveal.

Cameron said as much in his early remarks to the Press, but it slipped by me.

That this scandal has come and gone before makes a useful point. The idiots that love these dramas are in thrall to the childish idea that it’s the leaks themselves that incite protests, investigations, resignations and reforms. But no, dipshits, like everything else in the spectacle, a leak lives or dies in accordance with its utility to people with power. You know, the people that own the story and all the means of telling it and stirring shit around it. The people without whom you wouldn’t even know what Mossack Fonseca is.

There
are
no
exceptions.

Clearly, the story of Cameron’s Dad didn’t make the cut of Really Important People Priorities the last time around. That seems to have changed and resources have been mobilized accordingly. Rubes are jumping through hoops predictably, starting with the “This Four-Year-Old Story is REALLY Important” hoop.

It’s amazing to me that there are actual adults wondering if this scandal is going to create a crisis for capitalism. This is just hilarious. The way playing practical jokes on yourself is hilarious. Seriously, even if this show isn’t entirely contrived, who the fuck do you think is in charge here?

You preening tools that sneer at people who are rightfully skeptical about what looks unmistakably like weaponized scandal, I would love to know what theories about power, information and media you’re operating under. What history of spying, propaganda, blackmail and coups is your reference point? Put another way, do you know anything?

[smiths]

Really? So we are supposed to accept the idea that Britain has made decisions the US doesn't like,

And therefore, Britain becomes a legitimate target for destabilisation, even though it is arguably the most consistent and loyal ally of the US for the last half century

That is ridiculous and insane. The US has plenty of hostile elements in the world currently, not least Putin and the Chinese gang.

The suggestion that they have turned on the UK in such a public way is bullshit in my opinion

[tapitsbo]

Related to looming Brexit one way or another conceivably though right?

[smiths]

Brexit definitely could be in play,

Bred it really is one of the most significant events in the current economic landscape