But illegality was never the crux of the scandal triggered by those NSA revelations. Instead, what was most shocking was what had been legalized: the secret construction of the largest system of suspicionless spying in human history. What was scandalous was not that most of this spying was against the law, but rather that the law — at least as applied and interpreted by the Justice Department and secret, one-sided FISA “courts” — now permitted the U.S. government and its partners to engage in mass surveillance of entire populations, including their own. As the ACLU’s Jameel Jaffer put it after the Washington Post’s publication of documents showing NSA analysts engaged in illegal spying: “The ‘non-compliance’ angle is important, but don’t get carried away. The deeper scandal is what’s legal, not what’s not.”
Yesterday, dozens of newspapers around the world reported on what they are calling the Panama Papers: a gargantuan leak of documents from a Panama-based law firm that specializes in creating offshore shell companies. The documents reveal billions of dollars being funneled to offshore tax havens by leading governmental and corporate officials in numerous countries (the U.S. was oddly missing from the initial reporting, though journalists vow that will change shortly).
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If Panama or the Cayman Islands were acting to undermine the integrity of the global pharmaceutical patent system, the United States would stop them. But the political elite of powerful Western nations have not acted to stop relatively puny Caribbean nations from undermining the integrity of the global tax system — largely because Western economic elites don’t want them to. …
… But even though various criminal money-laundering schemes are the sexiest possible use of shell companies, the day-to-day tax dodging is what really pays the bills. As a manager of offshore bank accounts told me years ago, “People think of banking secrecy as all about terrorists and drug smugglers, but the truth is there are a lot of rich people who don’t want to pay taxes.” And the system persists because there are a lot of politicians in the West who don’t particularly want to make them. …
… Incorporating your hedge fund in a country with no corporate income tax even though all your fund’s employees and investors live in the United States is perfectly legal. So is, in most cases, setting up a Panamanian shell company to own and manage most of your family’s fortune.
Now the fear people may experience instantaneously in response to this idea is, “If we promote the idea that ‘sex feels good,’ girls will have MORE of it, which will only increase their risk,” and to this I say: Nope.
Why do girls have sex? According to Orenstein’s reporting (and Deb Tolman’s almost 15 years ago – amazingly little seems to have changed since her Dilemma’s of Desire was published), middle class American girls have sex because they are trying to do what they believe they are supposed to do, obeying the rules of their culture, performing their feminine role, in order to meet their partner’s expectations, or because porn and the rest of their culture has taught them that sex is about WHAT YOU DO, not about how it feels inside your body.
They are NOT having sex because it feels good – pleasure doesn’t enter the conversation.
Of all the unresolved conflicts that erupted as the Soviet Union broke up, the one between Armenians and Azerbaijanis over Nagorno-Karabakh has always been the most menacing.
Now Armenians, Azerbaijanis and the wider world have been reminded that this conflict is a tinderbox that can still ignite to disastrous effect. The 1994 ceasefire has been shattered. The main victims amongst several dozen dead are the young conscripts who serve in the armed forces on either side.
Threats constantly change, yet our political discourse suggests that our vulnerabilities are simply for lack of resources, commitment or competence. Sometimes, that is true. But mostly we are vulnerable because we choose to be; because we've accepted, at least implicitly, that some risk is tolerable. A state that could stop every suicide bomber wouldn't be a free or, let's face it, fun one.
In the video segment, I note how the evolution and erosion of the nuclear winter hypothesis (which two climate scientists, Stephen H. Schneider and Starley Thompson, later concluded would be more like a “nuclear autumn”) fit a cycle often seen in consequential science:
There’s a pattern to how some phenomena and stories play out. The first idea is very stark and then the scientific process is like piranhas that nibble away at the soft stuff and whatever is left is the hard skeleton of the ideas – the enduring part.
The video also explores the relationship of nuclear winter studies to one way to “geoengineer” a cooler climate — lofting sun-blocking sulfate aerosols into the atmosphere.
Still, boil down all the numbers and caveats above and you arrive at a simple fact: In the United States, in 2014, more cash and property transferred hands via civil asset forfeiture than via burglary. The total value of asset forfeitures was more than one-third of the total value of property stolen by criminals in 2014. That represents something of a sea change in the way police do business — and it's prompting plenty of scrutiny of the practice.
By one estimate -- based on data from the World Bank, IMF, UN, and central banks of 139 countries -- between $21 and $32 trillion is hiding in tax havens, more than the United States’ national debt. That study didn’t even attempt to count money from fraud, drug trafficking and other criminal transactions whose perpetrators gravitate toward the same secret hideouts.
...a new trove of secret information is shining unprecedented light on this dark corner of the global economy. Fusion analyzed an archive containing 11.5 million internal documents from Mossack Fonseca’s files, including corporate records, financial filings, emails, and more, extending from the firm's inception in 1977 to December 2015. The documents were obtained by the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and shared with Fusion and over 100 other media outlets by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) as part of the Panama Papersinvestigation. The massive leak is estimated to be 100 times bigger than Wikileaks. It's believed to be the largest global investigation in history.
In recent years, government investigations have centered on how major banks are used to move, hide, and launder money by the wealthy. But the new Panama Papers trove shows the role of often-overlooked lawyers and incorporation agents in the process. The results of the yearlong investigation encompass 214,488 corporate entities – among them companies, trusts, and foundations –controlled by everyone from heads of state, politicians, Forbes-listed billionaires, to drug lords, businesses blacklisted by the US government, scammers, and FIFA officials. There’s a common thread between members of Vladimir Putin’s inner circle, the man who laundered money from a record-setting robbery in the U.K., and a drug trafficker convicted of killing a U.S. DEA agent: They have all used companies created by Mossack Fonseca.
