Tom Secker and I recently sat down to talk with Ed Opperman all about Matt Alford’s new book The Writer With No Hands. The book deals with the bizarre “death” of Hollywood screenwriter Gary Devore and his mysterious links to the CIA. We also talk about the second season of The CIA and Hollywood, and some recent Jeffrey Epstein developments.
Show Notes:
The very first time I heard about the Mossack Fonseca scandal in Panama, my immediate reaction was, that there with this many elite criminals there are bound to be plenty of Clinton connections.
What we may be witnessing here is the 1% going after the 10% of people who, according to German researcher Margrit Kennedy, do not need to borrow but are “net savers.” Today the remaining 90% are “all borrowed up.” Either they are unwilling to borrow more or the banks are unwilling to lend to them, since they are poor credit risks. Who, then, is left to feed the machine that feeds the 1%, and more specifically the 0.001%?
Establishing a globally agreed tax body under the auspices of the United Nations and putting an end to dubious tax avoidance activities would bolster government revenues and help finance the provision of essential public services, especially in the Global South.
I know, I know... what happened to my refusal to write about the Panama Papers and Mossack Fonseca ?? It just so happens I came upon a couple of interesting articles that made me realize the way the Panama Papers news was presented was the means to obfuscate some pretty interesting facts- Not absurdity. Facts. Facts like Mossack Fonseca was a little fish swimming in a sea of sharks.A very small player compared to the too big to fail/jail bank/bankers.Mossack Fonseca it turns out was a bad weed needing eradication.
If the auspiciously named ICIJ and their partner journalists were actually interested in excising this offshore cancer for want of a better world, they would be demanding that all corporations and officials in positions of significant influence publish their tax affairs for ICIJ or public examination. It would be releasing all the Panama Papers: at the very least to independent journalists for them to report on or at best in a public database.
When I was spending a lot of time in London on business for a few years, a friend of a friend was a Member of Parliament-- a gay Tory-- and he offered to take me to lunch in the Members dining room one day with the option of sitting in the visitors' gallery and hearing a debate. I gladly accepted .The day we picked just happened to turn out to be the day Margaret Thatcher decided to go join George H.W. Bush and go to war against Iraq. It wasn't a very lively debate and there was a sense of unrealness about what was-- in retrospect at least, being launched.
Hillary was a big booster of the catastrophic Bush-Cheney decision to invade Iraq and disrupt the stability of the Middle East. Bernie was adamantly opposed. It turned out it be the worst American foreign policy decision in at least a century. And it is far from the only example of Hillary's instinctually bad, Republican-oriented decision-making in terms of foreign policy. Take a look at the video up top that shows her shilling for the terrible Panama Free Trade Agreement, juxtaposed with Bernie carefully laying out why that agreement was a terrible idea.
I bet everyone inside Fortress Hillary in Brooklyn breathed a sign of relief when the Panama Papers of money launderers and assorted financial criminals started leaking and didn't show any Clintons, Mezvinskys or any of the other shady characters they've surrounded themselves with. I'm told, though, there's plenty more to come.
“Privacy is a fundamental human right that is being eroded more and more in the modern world. Each person has a right to privacy, whether they are a king or a beggar.” Few could disagree with the essence of this statement by Panamanian lawyer Ramon Fonseca, one of the founders of Mossack Fonseca, which has made the news in the last few days.
