The Panama Papers: Oozing Slime
April 8, 2016
The Panama Papers: Oozing Slime
by Robert Hunziker
The Panama Papers, a one-year investigation by over 100 reporters worldwide (The International Consortium of Investigative Journalism) of offshore money hiding/laundering/taxation avoidance, is a cause célèbre of underhandedness seldom, if ever, revealed to the world’s public. It is comparable to lifting a rotting log in the woods and finding an active nest of millipedes, red worms, and cockroaches scampering about to escape the bright sunlight. They can’t stand the sunlight because darkness is their life.
“It’s the biggest leak in history, dwarfing the data released by the Wikileaks organization in 2010. For context, if the amount of data released by Wikileaks was equivalent to the population of San Francisco, the amount of data released in the Panama Papers is the equivalent to that of India,” (BBC News, April 5th).
Remarkably, it may only be the tip of an iceberg, a big one, as the incident references the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca & Co. There are likely many more in the world of behind the scenes finance.
The Panama Papers, containing info on thousands of shell companies set up to avoid taxes and hide assets for over four decades from 1977 to 2015, are all about millionaires and billionaires and the politically connected “sticking it to” average citizens of the world by hiding money from fellow countrymen’s taxation policies and/or theft of state funds and laundering money. It is outrageously heinous and deserving of criminal incrimination and/or tarring and feathering whilst run out of town on a rail. It also begs the question of how many more rich pillagers are out there.
Already, major worldwide figureheads, like the PM of Iceland, have fallen. “As much as $21 trillion in global wealth is hidden behind largely-untraceable shell companies such as those exposed in the Panama Papers, according to watchdog group Financial Accountability and Corporate Transparency Coalition,” (NBC News, April 6, 2016.). Twenty-one trillion is considerably larger than the entire U.S. economy. And, if it were taxed, which it is not, it would relieve many nation-states of big deficit spending for social welfare programs.
Indeed, the Panama Papers is a clarion call for revolt against a neoliberal world economic order that favors (1) privatization of public assets, (2) deregulation of governmental influence, (3) free trade in secret, and (4) austerity measures for public welfare. This nonsense started in earnest in the 1980s with President Reagan and PM Thatcher, called Supply-side economics, which preached tax cuts for the wealthy that purportedly incentivizes job creation, thus trickling wealth down to the masses. Problem is, after more than 30 years, all of the wealth gushed upwards whilst wages trickled down. The exact reverse of how it was sold to the American public. Politicians, mostly Republicans, continue making the same lame claims today. Cut taxes to create jobs is their mantra. Well, what they really mean to say is “cut taxes to cut wages” because that’s how it works in real life.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/04/08/the-panama-papers-oozing-slime/
