Kit, Off-Guardian, April 4, 2016

http://tinyurl.com/jccs8fv

Certain species of lizard – when threatened, cornered or in danger of being eaten – have the ability to “drop” their tail. This process, “Autotomy” (from the Greek, auto=self, tome=severing), enables the lizard to flee whilst the predator gets a brief distraction and small meal. The lizard survives. Tails grow back.

A simple, efficient survival method. The body ejects a replaceable part in protection of the vital whole. Easily adapted for the “Grand Chess Board.” Pinochet, the Shah of Iran, Saddam Hussein. All have played their part, only to be dropped when it became convenient. Despots and puppets grow back, too.

The Panama Papers broke, yesterday. Dozens of MSM outlets joined together in echoing this startling piece of investigative journalism: Rich people avoid paying their taxes. I know, I was shocked too.

Most of the BIG HEADLINES and threatening looking diagrams were reserved for Vladimir Putin (The Guardian) and Bashar al-Assad (The Independent), despite the fact that (as we covered last night) neither are named in any of the leaked documents.

The names that ARE mentioned? A who’s who of disposable despots, monsters of the week and inconveniently uncooperative politicians…with a few minor British political figures to add some verisimilutude.

• Petro Poroshenko, a slow, stupid, politically inept post-Soviet fossil thrown into the least appealing Presidency on the planet.
• Pavlo Lazarenko – convicted criminal and former Ukrainian PM.
• Bidzina Ivanishvili – former PM of Georgia under the bufoon Saakashvili.
• Sheikh Khalifa, President of the UAE and Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber bin Mohammed bin Thani Al Thani former PM of Qatar, both magnets for acceptable criticism.
• The King of Saudi Arbia, the perrenial boogeyman of “alternative” thinkers, and reposit of all mainstream criticism of any Western foreign policy – a sock puppet with a scary face, that we’re all encouraged to boo and hiss at so we can feel we have made a stand.

Ten-a-penny climbers, idiots and monsters. Lizard tails all. Cut them off and grow a new one.

No American citizens were named. No American companies were implicated. In espionage terms this is what they call a “limited hangout”: a vaguely-worded and dishonestly-presented partial truth, used to add credence to a backstory and increase the believability of the source.

In more colloquial, and honest, terminology: It is agenda-driven bull****.

The cooperative of intelligence-backed hacks who “broke” this “story” all hail from The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) a “special project” (their website tells us) of the not-at-all-Orwellian-sounding “Center for Public Integrity”.

Now, we’ve been here before – see our work on The New East Network – let’s just take a stroll down the About page of the Center for Public Integrity, and find out where they get their money from:

• The Goldman-Sonnenfeldt Foundation – they don’t have a website, but their President does. He’s a “philanthropist and entrepeneur”. In case you’re wondering…yes, that is “Goldman” as in “Goldman Sachs”.
• The Ford Foundation – yes, as in Henry Ford. Business magnate and Nazi collaborator.
• Open Society Foundation – we’ve tangled with these fine folks before. The OSF are an NGO set up by billionaire George Soros. Because billionaires love justice and freedom.
• The Rockefeller Brothers Fund and Rockefeller Family Fund – how exactly these two things differ I’m not sure, however they do both exist, and they both give money to the CfPI, because the Rockefellers are all about that integrity.
• The Carnegie Corporation of New York – As in Andrew Carnegie, the billionaire. As in the Carnegie Endowment for American Hegemony…sorry, I mean International Peace.

So – to sum up:

George Soros, David Rockefeller, the Carnegie Corporation, the Ford Foundation, Goldman-Sachs et al. – who are all rabidly anti-corruption and always pay their taxes – all pooled their resources to fund the “International Consortium of Investigative Journalists” and tasked them with investigating shady international financial practices.

The result is this “leak,” a list of geo-political nobodies, has-beens, easy targets and dead ancestors. The tenuous and absurd connections to “enemies” of the West are exaggerated and plastered all over the headlines, whilst the names of allies and relatives are sidelined and barely mentioned – the majority of the information will “never be made public,” according to the Guardian.

Credit: www.commondreams.org

Jabeen Bhatti, USA Today, April 4, 2016

http://tinyurl.com/gr6c2bj

BERLIN — It started with an email in early 2015: “Hello, this is John Doe. Interested in data?”

“We are very interested,” replied a journalist in Munich.

The exchange resulted in internal documents from Mossack Fonseca — a Panama law firm that creates anonymous offshore companies around the world — being sent to staff at the Süddeutsche Zeitung, a large German daily. The newspaper had been involved in tax-haven investigations before.

The newspaper received about 2.6 terabytes (2,600 gigabytes) worth of information detailing how leaders, celebrities and athletes from around the globe acquired shell companies that can enable owners to cover up their dealings, and hide money.

The newspaper, which described in an article how it acquired the trove of documents, said the source of the material wanted no financial compensation. The source asked only for encryption and other security measures: “There are a couple of conditions. My life is in danger. We will only chat over encrypted files. No meetings, ever. The choice of stories is up to you.”

Asked why the source was leaking the documents, the reply was: “I want to make these crimes public.”

“He said that they must be stopped,” the newspaper’s Bastian Obermayer, who was involved in the project, said in a video. “It’s rotten business they are doing.”

After receiving the data, the newspaper’s staff — realizing the 11. 5 million documents would be too much to take on for one newspaper, brought it to the Washington, D.C.-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ).

The ICIJ had helped coordinate on other projects on tax havens and tax evasion involving the newspaper known as Offshore Leaks, Lux Leaks and Swiss Leaks.

In one case two years ago, a whistle-blower sold internal Mossack Fonseca data to German authorities. That data was much older and smaller in scope, the newspaper said. It addressed a few hundred offshore companies and led investigators to search the homes and offices of about 100 people.

In the end, major German banks including Commerzbank and Hypovereinsbank paid millions of euros in fines. Since then, other countries have also acquired data from the initial smaller leak, among them the United States, the United Kingdom and Iceland.

Still, the Panama Papers is the largest project by far for the newspaper. It involved around 400 journalists from more than 100 media organizations in over 80 countries, some of whom worked on the earlier tax haven stories, according to the newspaper.

The documents are primarily comprised of emails, pdf files, photo files and excerpts of an internal Mossack Fonseca database. It covers a period spanning from the 1970s to December 2015, according to the ICIJ.

“The sheer number of people we found in the data is becoming clear to us — dictators, Japanese mafia, Sicilian mafia, Russia mafia, weapons dealers, drug dealers, pedophiles,” the newspaper’s Frederik Obermaier, who also worked on the project, said in the video.

April 3, 2016

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2016/04/corporate-media-gatekeepers-protect-western-1-from-panama-leak/

Whoever leaked the Mossack Fonseca papers appears motivated by a genuine desire to expose the system that enables the ultra wealthy to hide their massive stashes, often corruptly obtained and all involved in tax avoidance. These Panamanian lawyers hide the wealth of a significant proportion of the 1%, and the massive leak of their documents ought to be a wonderful thing.

Unfortunately the leaker has made the dreadful mistake of turning to the western corporate media to publicise the results. In consequence the first major story, published today by the Guardian, is all about Vladimir Putin and a cellist on the fiddle. As it happens I believe the story and have no doubt Putin is bent.

But why focus on Russia? Russian wealth is only a tiny minority of the money hidden away with the aid of Mossack Fonseca. In fact, it soon becomes obvious that the selective reporting is going to stink.

The Suddeutsche Zeitung, which received the leak, gives a detailed explanation of the methodology the corporate media used to search the files. The main search they have done is for names associated with breaking UN sanctions regimes. The Guardianreports this too and helpfully lists those countries as Zimbabwe, North Korea, Russia and Syria. The filtering of this Mossack Fonseca information by the corporate media follows a direct western governmental agenda. There is no mention at all of use of Mossack Fonseca by massive western corporations or western billionaires – the main customers. And the Guardian is quick to reassure that “much of the leaked material will remain private.”

What do you expect? The leak is being managed by the grandly but laughably named “International Consortium of Investigative Journalists”, which is funded and organised entirely by the USA’s Center for Public Integrity. Their funders include

Ford Foundation
Carnegie Endowment
Rockefeller Family Fund
W K Kellogg Foundation
Open Society Foundation (Soros)

among many others. Do not expect a genuine expose of western capitalism. The dirty secrets of western corporations will remain unpublished.

Expect hits at Russia, Iran and Syria and some tiny “balancing” western country like Iceland. A superannuated UK peer or two will be sacrificed – someone already with dementia.

The corporate media – the Guardian and BBC in the UK – have exclusive access to the database which you and I cannot see. They are protecting themselves from even seeing western corporations’ sensitive information by only looking at those documents which are brought up by specific searches such as UN sanctions busters. Never forget the Guardian smashed its copies of the Snowden files on the instruction of MI6.

What if they did Mossack Fonseca database searches on the owners of all the corporate media and their companies, and all the editors and senior corporate media journalists? What if they did Mossack Fonseca searches on all the most senior people at the BBC? What if they did Mossack Fonseca searches on every donor to the Center for Public Integrity and their companies?

What if they did Mossack Fonseca searches on every listed company in the western stock exchanges, and on every western millionaire they could trace?

That would be much more interesting. I know Russia and China are corrupt, you don’t have to tell me that. What if you look at things that we might, here in the west, be able to rise up and do something about?

And what if you corporate lapdogs let the people see the actual data?

UPDATE

Hundreds of thousands of people have read this post in the 11 hours since it was published – despite it being overnight here in the UK. There are 235,918 “impressions” on twitter (as twitter calls them) and over 3,700 people have “shared” so far on Facebook, bringing scores of new readers each.