{"id":19592,"date":"2016-04-06T11:25:28","date_gmt":"2016-04-06T16:25:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=19592"},"modified":"2016-04-06T11:25:28","modified_gmt":"2016-04-06T16:25:28","slug":"the-panama-papers-problem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=19592","title":{"rendered":"The Panama Papers Problem"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Panama Papers Problem<\/a><\/h3>\n

The Panama tax haven leaks reveal a lot about the lawlessness of the rich, as well as the ideological bias of the western press. \u201cVladimir Putin\u2019s\u00a0name appears nowhere, but the corporate media used his image repeatedly to drum up interest in what is an otherwise newsworthy story.\u201d\u00a0Americans are conspicuous by their absence from the story. That\u2019s because rich people in the U.S. can avoid taxes \u201clegally in Wyoming, Delaware\u00a0or Nevada.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

The worst criminals on earth are not the poor who sit behind bars in jails and prisons. The biggest thieves are found among the rich. The 1% can\u00a0buy legislation, politicians and the media to carry out and hide their dirty work. If they can\u2019t change the laws to benefit themselves in their\u00a0homelands they simply send their money elsewhere through shell holding companies. This transfer of wealth, much of it diverted from what ought\u00a0to be tax payments, is an open secret. Panama, the Cayman Islands, British Virgin Islands, Luxembourg and Switzerland are known for securing the\u00a0money and secrets of the rich and the well connected.<\/p>\n

The leak of 11.5 million documents from the Panama based Mossack Fonseca law firm brings into the light of day what was long known but\u00a0passively accepted. Now the facts are in the open but the way in which the revelations are reported is questionable and taints an important story.<\/p>\n

The documents now known as the Panama Papers were leaked to the German newspaper\u00a0Suddeutsche Zeitung\u00a0(SZ) who then shared them with the\u00a0International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). ICIJ is a non-profit but with its own problematic origins. It is funded in part by the Ford\u00a0Foundation, Open Society Foundation, Kellogg Foundation and the Rockefeller Family Fund. ICIJ then worked with journalists around the world\u00a0including from the\u00a0Guardian\u00a0and the McClatchy newspaper chain.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Panama Papers Problem The Panama tax haven leaks reveal a lot about the lawlessness of the rich, as well as the ideological bias of the western press. \u201cVladimir Putin\u2019s\u00a0name appears nowhere, but the corporate media used his image repeatedly to drum up interest in what is an otherwise newsworthy story.\u201d\u00a0Americans are conspicuous by their […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[5493,13316,13292,13259,13294,13314,783],"class_list":["post-19592","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-counterpunch","tag-margaret-kimberley","tag-mossack-fonseca","tag-panama-papers","tag-suddeutsche-zeitung","tag-tax-haven","tag-taxes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19592","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19592"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19592\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19593,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19592\/revisions\/19593"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19592"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19592"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19592"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}