example is threat - but - establishment media won't publish big picture of establishment corruption

aljazeera |  Julian Assange: WikiLeaks set an example and the example was the threat. And the example was the threat because the technology, over time, became more available to other people who could then follow the example. But examples really are threats, once they're copied you're not just dealing with one threat any more, you're dealing with normalisation of a particular practice. But we're actually only halfway there. So our technology has been adopted for some of the inputs, a little bit for organisational-to-organisational communication. But unfortunately not much yet on the publishing side. That's still a big problem.

Looking forward as to how I think the Panama Papers will go, it's going to be very hard to get reform without a bulk publishing effort. There's just not the mass, if there are 300 journalists involved that is just not enough mass to deal with the reliance that the establishment of the UK, United States and in fact most countries have in the offshore sector.

Now what you have in practice at the moment is basically a two-tiered tax system where the middle class and the working poor pay income tax and the wealthy essentially don't pay anything. That's a question about the structure of society and that big picture angle is not being engaged with in the journalism that it's done. It is all oh North Korea, oh Russia or sanctions breaking or maybe someone dodging inheritance tax a little bit. But there is a big picture here as well.

Al Jazeera: The stories that we can put a face on. They like to do the stories that they can put a face on ...

Julian Assange: You know, scandals and stories you can put a face on. It can be good for marketing reasons, but what are you marketing in the end? What WikiLeaks does, and what I believe should've been done with this story, is that the scandals are there to market the archive because it's archive that has the scale that can deal with the problem.

how economists rode math to become this era's astrologers...,

aeon |  Since the 2008 financial crisis, colleges and universities have faced increased pressure to identify essential disciplines, and cut the rest. In 2009, Washington State University announced it would eliminate the department of theatre and dance, the department of community and rural sociology, and the German major – the same year that the University of Louisiana at Lafayette ended its philosophy major. In 2012, Emory University in Atlanta did away with the visual arts department and its journalism programme. The cutbacks aren’t restricted to the humanities: in 2011, the state of Texas announced it would eliminate nearly half of its public undergraduate physics programmes. Even when there’s no downsizing, faculty salaries have been frozen and departmental budgets have shrunk.

But despite the funding crunch, it’s a bull market for academic economists. According to a 2015 sociological study in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, the median salary of economics teachers in 2012 increased to $103,000 – nearly $30,000 more than sociologists. For the top 10 per cent of economists, that figure jumps to $160,000, higher than the next most lucrative academic discipline – engineering. These figures, stress the study’s authors, do not include other sources of income such as consulting fees for banks and hedge funds, which, as many learned from the documentary Inside Job (2010), are often substantial. (Ben Bernanke, a former academic economist and ex-chairman of the Federal Reserve, earns $200,000-$400,000 for a single appearance.)

Unlike engineers and chemists, economists cannot point to concrete objects – cell phones, plastic – to justify the high valuation of their discipline. Nor, in the case of financial economics and macroeconomics, can they point to the predictive power of their theories. Hedge funds employ cutting-edge economists who command princely fees, but routinely underperform index funds. Eight years ago, Warren Buffet made a 10-year, $1 million bet that a portfolio of hedge funds would lose to the S&P 500, and it looks like he’s going to collect. In 1998, a fund that boasted two Nobel Laureates as advisors collapsed, nearly causing a global financial crisis.

The failure of the field to predict the 2008 crisis has also been well-documented. In 2003, for example, only five years before the Great Recession, the Nobel Laureate Robert E Lucas Jr told the American Economic Association that ‘macroeconomics […] has succeeded: its central problem of depression prevention has been solved’. Short-term predictions fair little better – in April 2014, for instance, a survey of 67 economists yielded 100 per cent consensus: interest rates would rise over the next six months. Instead, they fell. A lot.

Nonetheless, surveys indicate that economists see their discipline as ‘the most scientific of the social sciences’. What is the basis of this collective faith, shared by universities, presidents and billionaires? Shouldn’t successful and powerful people be the first to spot the exaggerated worth of a discipline, and the least likely to pay for it?

In the hypothetical worlds of rational markets, where much of economic theory is set, perhaps. But real-world history tells a different story, of mathematical models masquerading as science and a public eager to buy them, mistaking elegant equations for empirical accuracy.

competing stories about inequality and why they matter

paecon |  This paper examines several mainstream explanations of the financial crisis and stagnation and the role they attribute to income inequality. Those explanations are contrasted with a structural Keynesian explanation. The role of income inequality differs substantially, giving rise to different policy recommendations. That highlights the critical importance of economic theory. Theory shapes the way we understand the world, thereby shaping how we respond to it. The theoretical narrative we adopt therefore implicitly shapes policy. That observation applies forcefully to the issue of income inequality, the financial crisis and stagnation, making it critical we get the story right.

This paper explores competing stories about the role of income inequality in the financial crisis of 2008 and the ensuing stagnation. At one level, the paper is a purely analytical exercise. At another level, there is a deeper purpose regarding exposing the neoclassical monopoly in economics that has destroyed pluralism and distorted economic debate and policy making.

An open-minded pluralistic economics demands representation of all economic theories that provide a logically coherent explanation of the economy consistent with the facts as we know them. But that is not how economics is practiced owing to the neoclassical monopoly. 

Pluralism is not just important as an intellectual aspiration. It is also important in practical terms for delivering sound economic policy. Theory shapes how we understand the world, which in turn influences how we respond to events. Theory is a form of story-telling, and the stories we tell shape our understanding of the economy and economic policy. That means the stories we tell are critical.  

Steve Wynn "Nobody Likes Being Around Poor People, Especially Poor People"

zerohedge |  Last September he again made waves when he became one of the first high profile personalities to endorse Donald Trump.

Then, overnight, during a presentation to Wynn Resorts investors, Wynn tossed out another bombshell which, while taken out of context, will further inflame the already class tension within the US. This is what he said: "rich people only like being around rich people, nobody likes being around poor people, especially poor people."

Whether or not what he said is true is secondary because as Robert Frank correctly points out, "this line is sure to go viral as the latest tone-deaf gaffe by a billionaire, akin to the 2014 remarks made by technology venture capitalist Tom Perkins saying that rich people were being persecuted and should get more votes."

That said, in its full context context the phrase was less incendiary:

This company caters to the top end of the gaming world. We're sort of a Chanel, Louis Vuitton to use the comparison and metaphor of the retail business. But unlike Chanel and Louis Vuitton, we are able in our business to cater to all of the market by making our standard so high that everybody wants to be in the building. Or to put it in a more colloquial way, rich people only like being around rich people, nobody likes being around poor people, especially poor people.

So we try and make the place, feel upscale for everyone. That is to say, we cater to people who have discretion and judgment and we give them the choice and we are consistent in that, whether the economy is up or the economy is down. We don't do layoffs, we pay attention to our capital structure, so that we don't bounce around our employee base, and we don't bounce around our service levels.

And while Wynn's point about desiring to create a sense of wealth that draws all kinds of crowds is indeed reasonable for a business plan, it is almost certain that that particular soundbite will promptly make the social media rounds as another indication of the language used by Picasso-collecting, Ferrari-driving billionaires (especially one who endorses Trump).

It will certainly not help the simmering tensions beneath America's great wealth divide which is growing greater with every passing year.

legal secrecy and concealment shield overseers from accountability too!!!

NYTimes |  Days after the video gained national attention, the police commissioner, William J. Bratton, said he had strong concerns about the actions taken by the officers. By then the Police Department had already begun an investigation by its Internal Affairs Bureau and the officers had been removed from their assignment with the Conditions Unit, a neighborhood-based troubleshooting division, and put back on patrol. Later, the supervising officer was stripped of his gun and badge and put on desk duty.

Despite all that, the department did not reveal the names of the men involved or apprise the public of any history of complaints leveled against them. The officers’ names became known because of an accident report Mr. Grays obtained at the 71st Precinct station house, which identified them. After Mr. Grays was taken away by the police officers in an unmarked car, that vehicle had hit another in front of it.

Secrecy is, in essence, protocol. It is required by a controversial law passed 40 years ago, Section 50-a of the state’s civil rights code, which protects officers’ personnel records from public view, enshrining the suppression of information around police misconduct as governance.

Had Mr. Grays, in his 27 years, accumulated a litany of petty offenses and low-level drug possession charges, we would almost surely know about them. One comparatively less glaring dimension of the hypocrisy that surrounds cases in which ordinary people are harmed or killed by those entrusted to protect them is the vast difference in the way that law enforcement handles the biographies of those people. A system that safeguards the names of police officers above all else often too easily accommodates the tainting of victims. The most notorious example occurred 16 years ago, when Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani authorized the release of Patrick Dorismond’s arrest record after Mr. Dorismond had become the third unarmed black man shot and killed by New York City police officers in approximately a year. When asked to respond to criticism that he had been vilifying the dead man, the mayor only delivered his rebuke more emphatically, claiming that Mr. Dorismond was not “an altar boy.”

the rich are just different...., right?

alternet |  Who writes the laws, in a society dominated by finance capital, neoliberal economics and the ideology of free trade and globalization? In a system, to quote the author I alluded to earlier, “under which the market is the regulator of social production,” including the production of culture and thought? (Yes, that would be V.I. Lenin, of October Revolution fame.) Whose interests are those laws meant to protect? Does the world of Mossack Fonseca and its ilk, where morphing, shifting corporate entities shepherd amazingly large sums of money in secret from one jurisdiction to another, sound like the operation of a free and fair market society where everyone who works hard or has talent has an equal chance to become Donald Trump or Kim Kardashian? Or does it sound like a rigged system designed to delude the powerless and make them accomplices in their own impoverishment, while ensuring the indefinite oligarchic rule of the rich and powerful?

One of Lenin’s main points, in the essay “What Is to Be Done?,” was that the market system produces its own rules, its own ideology and its own self-justifying structure of thought. Those things are enforced upon the entire society, and you can’t do anything to fight the system until you get outside that ideological structure. One does not have to agree with Lenin’s concrete solutions (which I am not inclined to defend) to see that the problem is still with us. It may be the secret narrative behind the Democratic primary campaign between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, for instance: While they are nominally not far apart on many issues, Clinton is a member of the Mossack Fonseca-level social stratum, and represents its interests. Whatever his flaws as a candidate may be, Sanders isn’t and doesn’t.

secret companies a problem made in America...,

WaPo |  How can it be that the United States is more of a secrecy haven than Panama, the British Virgin Islands, etc.? Michael Findley, Daniel Nielson, and I decided to get to the bottom of this by shopping for shell companies on an industrial scale in a project called Global Shell Games. We impersonated a rogues’ gallery of 21 would-be money launderers, corrupt officials, and terrorist financiers, and sent over 7,000 emails asking firms like Mossack Fonseca to set up prohibited untraceable shell companies to shell in 180 countries.

We wanted to know whether these firms would require us to prove our identity in accord with international rules. This would help us to answer three important questions. First: how well do the global rules banning the formation of untraceable shell companies that hide the identity of the real owner work? Second: do incorporation firms respond differently to more or less risky customers? Third: which countries do a good, bad, or indifferent job of enforcing these Know Your Customer rules? The answers were counter-intuitive – and very worrying.

First, only about half of those firms that replied followed international rules by asking for the proper suite of ID documents from our fictitious ne’er-do-wells. Almost a quarter didn’t ask for any ID at all. Second, incorporation firms were generally just as willing to do business with high-risk customers as those with low-risk profiles, with the partial exception of customers who presented terrorism financing risks. Third –  getting back to Panama, we found that once again, firms in tax havens were actually much more likely to follow international Know Your Customer rules than those in the U.S. and other OECD countries.

Does this mean that Mossack Fonseca and other offshore firms are blameless? Hardly; if they facilitated real misdeeds, they deserve to be punished. But if this leak shows the damage that can be done with 200,000 offshore companies, remember that there are more than 15 million companies incorporated in the U.S. Then consider the advertising pitch of one U.S. incorporation firm: “A corporation is a legal person created by state statute that can be used as a fall guy, a servant, a good friend or a decoy. A person you control… yet cannot be held accountable for its actions. Imagine the possibilities!”

how Granny Goodness bought and paid for many of her superdelegates...,

counterpunch |  In August 2015, at the Democratic Party convention in Minneapolis, 33 democratic state parties made deals with the Hillary Clinton campaign and a joint fundraising entity called The Hillary Victory Fund. The deal allowed many of her core billionaire and inner circle individual donors to run the maximum amounts of money allowed through those state parties to the Hillary Victory Fund in New York and the DNC in Washington.

The idea was to increase how much one could personally donate to Hillary by taking advantage of the Supreme Court ruling 2014, McCutcheon v FEC, that knocked down a cap on aggregate limits as to how much a donor could give to a federal campaign in a year. It thus eliminated the ceiling on amounts spent by a single donor to a presidential candidate.

In other words, a single donor, by giving 10,000 dollars a year to each signatory state could legally give an extra $330,000 a year for two years to the Hillary Victory Fund.  For each donor, this raised their individual legal cap on the Presidential campaign to $660,000 if given in both 2015 and 2016. And to one million, three hundred and 20 thousand dollars if an equal amount were also donated in their spouse’s name.

From these large amounts of money being transferred from state coffers to the Hillary Victory Fund in Washington, the Clinton campaign got the first $2,700, the DNC was to get the next $33,400, and the remainder was to be split among the 33 signatory states. With this scheme, the Hillary Victory Fund raised over $26 million for the Clinton Campaign by the end of 2015.

The money was either transferred to the Hillary for America or Forward Hillary PACs and spent directly on the Hillary Clinton Campaign, often paying the salaries and expenses within those groups, or it was moved into the DNC or another Clinton PAC.  Some of it was spent towards managing the Hillary merchandise store, where you can buy Hillary T shirts and hats and buttons.

The fund is administered by treasurer Elizabeth Jones, the Clinton Campaign’s chief operating officer. Ms. Jones has the exclusive right to decide when transfers of money to and from the Hillary Victory Fund would be made to the state parties.

One could reasonably infer that the tacit agreement between the signatories was that the state parties and the Hillary Clinton Campaign would act in unity and mutual support. And that the Super Delegates of these various partner states would either pledge loyalty to Clinton, or, at the least, not endorse Senator Sanders. Not only did Hillary’s multi-millionaire and billionaire supporters get to bypass individual campaign donation limits to state parties by using several state parties apparatus, but the Clinton campaign got the added bonus of buying that state’s Super Delegates with the promise of contributions to that Democratic organization’s re-election fund.

If a presidential campaign from either party can convince various state parties to partner with it in such a way as to route around any existing rules on personal donor limits and at the same time promise money to that state’s potential candidates, then the deal can be sold as a way of making large monetary promises to candidates and Super Delegates respectable.

the consensus reality of plutocrats, politics, and the media didn't include the Left Behind...

Move over Rat Pack and Brat Pack Here comes the Snap Pack

counterpunch |  It is probably a truism that you do not know people you do not hang out with very well. Maybe you read about them but if you happen to be the person who is hired to write about them, they probably do not get written about. You know why. Because they are not the people, you know very well or at all.

Let us say we have the sort of generous plutocracy where about 20% of the population, most of them the professional/gentrified class and a few at the very top, the Equestrian/Patrician class. First, let me say, that one fifth of a population of over 300 million is enough to keep the Dow Jones doing its ups and downs. Also, members of this top 20% keep the 80% informed, not about the 20 people who have wealth equal to 50% of the population or about the consequences of this. Now the 80% who do not know fuck all about Wall Street’s dark dealings have suddenly, in the eyes of the 20%, emerged to push the presidential candidacies of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.

For the gentry, whether Democrat or Republican, this is like your hired Nanny telling you to shut up, or a bunch of hooligans busting through the gates of your “community” and wanting to do something other than clean your pool. Somebody has shown up at the electoral dinner party who wasn’t invited and whose name is unknown. This is not exactly like Nat Turner showing up in a bloody rebellion but the sheer unexpectedness of it is something like what 20% of the country is now facing with the populist explosion in both parties.

So how come almost no one who represents what is going on knew this would happen? Simple answer: they did not know these people were there because they were not reporting anything about them and they were not reporting anything about them because they were invisible to them. Look at it this way: no one had been campaigning the bottom 40% hard since…never. We have thrown into that group blue collar workers, the once unionized manufacturing working class, the “salaried” class, and now all, The Underclass. The classless, ungentrified. They have less shopping power than the top 20%, they do not usually vote, they have no one lobbying for them, they are not needed as laborers except for jobs that cannot be sent out of the country, and they have almost no leverage in a plutocracy. Right now, we have a burgeoning plutocracy still tied to an electoral, representative democracy and so “one person one vote” remains the solo bargaining chip of plutocracy’s “negative assets,” how The National Review refers to Trump’s followers.

this rigged election's outcome pales by comparison to the establishment's loss of control...,

cassandralegacy |  For a good number of years, I have been studying the reasons for the collapse of societies. And, at the beginning, I tended to explain it as mainly the result of the depletion of crucial resources; crude oil, in our case. But, the more I think about that, the more I understand that the relation between depletion and collapse is far from being straightforward. A society can very well collapse without running out of anything; think of the case of the Soviet Union. When it collapsed, the Union had still plenty of mineral resources, but it couldn't find a way to exploit them in a convenient manner. In the case of the Roman Empire, also, there is no evidence that it run out of food or of any basic resource. Rather, it ran out of the resource it used for paying its troops, gold and silver for its currency. In both cases, it was a question of the collapse of control. As we all know, power without control is nothing.

Note that the loss of control is related to resource depletion, but the relation is not direct. It works like this: any complex society can exist only in certain conditions: it is not enough to have access to natural resources. It is necessary to be able to distribute these resources in such a way to keep all the sections of society supplied; this is a question of control. You can also use the term "governance" if you like to avoid a term that has a military ring to it. The point is that if a society is unable to allocate the resources in such a way to make most people accept the way they are allocated, it will break down, or collapse, or both things.

In our world, resource allocation is controlled by the entity we call "the market", with some correction on the part of another entity that we call "the government". Generally speaking, the government is supposed to correct for the fact that the market is not supposed to provide a fair distribution of wealth. For instance, the government is supposed to provide health care services even to people who can't afford it. This is why taxes are progressive (or used to be, before president Trump took office). This is what we normally call democracy: it works on the shared belief that society is kept together by a certain degree of fair sharing of the available resources.

It works, but only in some conditions. In particular, it works under the assumption that the available resources are relatively abundant. If that's the case, it is more convenient to create new wealth by exploiting some untapped resource than to steal wealth from others who already have it. But that's not always the case. Lets'imagine that you are out of your job. In normal conditions, you look for another job. But if there are no jobs available, or you are too old to get a new job, your only possible survival strategy is theft or robbery (it is happening). Then, if those Arabs are sitting on our oil, then it makes sense to bomb them to smithereens and get it. And why should the poor get our money fortheir health problems?

Note that you don't need to run out of anything to cross the critical point. Within some limits, you may assume that the cost of exploiting a natural resource goes up with the inverse of the resource abundance while the cost of stealing it from someone who has it may be taken as approximately constant. So, there has got to be a point where stealing becomes a better strategy than finding new resources. It is a phase transition in society (see the model, below). At this point, society goes to a crisis that leads it either by some form of breakdown, including "ethnic cleansing," or to some kind of centralized military control. The second outcome can be said to be better than the first. That's what the Romans did when it moved from a republic to an Imperial system. That's the path in front of us.

another let them eat cake .000001% squeals like a fat piglet caught under a gate....,

NYTimes |  Gee, G.E.

After Bernie Sanders singled out General Electric’s tax avoidance and extensive overseas operations as an example of corporate “greed” and “selfishness,” Jeff Immelt, G.E.’s chief executive, penned a long, snarky op-ed for The Washington Post that went beyond defending the company, and appeared to take sides in the Democratic nominating contest. His comments were particularly unseemly on the eve of hotly-contested primaries in New York and Connecticut, G.E.’s corporate home bases.

In an interview with the editorial board of The New York Daily News, Mr. Sanders said:

General Electric was created in this country by American workers and American consumers. What we have seen over the many years is shutting down of many major plants in this country. Sending jobs to low-wage countries. And General Electric, doing a very good job avoiding the taxes. In fact, in a given year, they pay nothing in taxes. That’s greed. That is greed and that’s selfishness. That is lack of respect for the people of this country.

Asked “how does that destroy the fabric of America?”  Mr. Sanders issued a broader condemnation:

I’ll tell you how it does. If you are a corporation and the only damn thing you are concerned about is your profits. Let’s just give an example of a corporation that’s making money in America, today, but desiring to move to China or to Mexico to make even more money. That is destroying the moral fabric of this country. That is saying that I don’t care that the workers, here have worked for decades. It doesn’t matter to me. The only thing that matters is that I can make a little bit more money. That the dollar is all that is almighty. And I think that is the moral fabric.

G.E.’s controversial tax avoidance strategies, its shedding of domestic jobs and its heavy reliance on political lobbying to get what it wants have been well-documented. That, and Mr. Sanders, clearly got Mr. Immelt’s goat.

100 CEO's have more saved up for retirement than 41% of U.S. families combined...,

theatlantic |  And now, courtesy of the Center for Effective Government, a nonprofit, and the Institute for Policy Studies, a think tank, here is another: Together, 100 American CEOs have more saved up for retirement than 41 percent of American families combined.

The CEO with the largest nest egg on the report’s list was David C. Novak, the former chief of Yum Brands (which owns KFC, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell), and now its executive chairman. At last count, Novak had nearly $250 million in his retirement account, according to the report, which got its data on CEOs from companies’ SEC filings.

For the purposes of comparison, the average Yum employee had about $70,000 in his or her 401(k). That means the Novak’s retirement savings are more than 3,330 times the size of the typical Yum employee’s, which makes the ratio of average CEO pay to average worker pay—300:1—look relatively small.

The report, in a way, obscures the crisis at hand. The comparison it’s making—between 100 exceedingly well-paid executives and tens of millions of Americans—suggests intolerable corporate excess. As the report makes clear, on the CEO side of the equation, there are beefy retirement accounts flush with more than $4.5 billion. But on the typical-American side of the equation, there are a huge number of people who have practically nothing saved up—for all American households nearing retirement age, the median retirement-account balance is about $12,000. So, it’s not so much that these CEOs have a lot (they do) but that everyone else has next to nothing.

With that in mind, the fact that 100 CEOs have saved up more than 41 percent of Americans is stunning but not surprising. Over the last few decades, companies have moved away from providing their workers with pensions, which used to offer a degree of security in retirement. But during that transition, pensions weren’t reliably replaced with retirement-savings accounts, such that now only about 40 percent of private-sector American workers have any kind of employer-provided or subsidized retirement plan, such as a pension or a 401(k). Everyone else is on their own.

the end of ordinary politics...,

thearchdruidreport |  In the same way, the word “racist” in the mouths of the pundits and politicians who have been applying it so liberally to the Trump campaign is a dog whistle for something they don’t want to talk about in so many words. What they mean by it, of course, is “wage class American.”

That’s extremely common. Consider the recent standoff in Oregon between militia members and federal officials. While that was ongoing, wags in the blogosphere and the hip end of the media started referring to the militia members as “Y’all-Qaeda.” Attentive readers may have noted that none of the militia members came from the South—the only part of the United States where “y’all” is the usual second person plural pronoun. To the best of my knowledge, all of them came from the dryland West, where “y’all” is no more common than it is on the streets of Manhattan or Vancouver. Why, then, did the label catch on so quickly and get the predictable sneering laughter of the salary class?

It spread so quickly and got that laugh because most members of the salary class in the United States love to apply a specific stereotype to the entire American wage class. You know that stereotype as well as I do, dear reader. It’s a fat, pink-faced, gap-toothed Southern good ol’ boy in jeans and a greasy T-shirt, watching a NASCAR race on television from a broken-down sofa, with one hand stuffed elbow deep into a bag of Cheez Doodles, the other fondling a shotgun, a Confederate flag patch on his baseball cap and a Klan outfit in the bedroom closet. As a description of wage-earning Americans in general, that stereotype is as crass, as bigoted, and as politically motivated as any of the racial and sexual stereotypes that so many people these days are ready to denounce—but if you mention this, the kind of affluent white liberals who would sooner impale themselves on their own designer corkscrews than mention African-Americans and watermelons in the same paragraph will insist at the top of their lungs that it’s not a stereotype, it’s the way “those people” really are.

Those of my readers who don’t happen to know any people from the salary class, and so haven’t had the opportunity to hear the kind of hate speech they like to use for the wage class, might want to pick up the latest edition of the National Review, and read a really remarkable diatribe by Kevin Williamson—it’s behind a paywall, but here’s a sample.  The motive force behind this tantrum was the fact that many people in the Republican party’s grassroots base are voting in their own best interests, and thus for Trump, rather than falling into line and doing what they’re told by their soi-disant betters. The very idea!  It’s a fine display of over-the-top classist bigotry, as well as a first-rate example of the way that so many people in the salary class like to insist that poverty is always and only the fault of the poor.

May I please be frank? The reason that millions of Americans have had their standard of living hammered for forty years, while the most affluent twenty per cent have become even more affluent, is no mystery. What happened was that corporate interests in this country, aided and abetted by a bipartisan consensus in government and cheered on by the great majority of the salary class, stripped the US economy of living wage jobs by offshoring most of America’s industrial economy, on the one hand, and flooding the domestic job market with millions of legal and illegal immigrants on the other.

That’s why a family living on one average full-time wage in 1966 could afford a home, a car, three square meals a day, and the other necessities and comforts of an ordinary American lifestyle, while a family with one average full time wage in most US cities today is living on the street. None of that happened by accident; no acts of God were responsible; no inexplicable moral collapse swept over the American wage class and made them incapable of embracing all those imaginary opportunities that salary class pundits like to babble about. That change was brought about, rather, by specific, easily identifiable policies. As a result, all things considered, blaming the American poor for the poverty that has been imposed on them by policies promoted by the affluent is the precise economic equivalent of blaming rape victims for the actions of rapists.

In both cases, please note, blaming the victim makes a convenient substitute for talking about who’s actually responsible, who benefits from the current state of affairs, and what the real issues are. When that conversation is one that people who have a privileged role in shaping public discourse desperately don’t want to have, blaming the victim is an effective diversionary tactic, and accordingly it gets much use in the US media these days. There are, after all, plenty of things that the people who shape public discourse in today’s America don’t want to talk about. The fact that the policies pushed by those same shapers of opinion have driven millions of American families into poverty and misery isn’t the most unmentionable of these things, as it happens. The most unmentionable of the things that don’t get discussed is the fact that those policies have failed.

It really is as simple as that. The policies we’re talking about—lavish handouts for corporations and the rich, punitive austerity schemes for the poor, endless wars in the Middle East and elsewhere, malign neglect of domestic infrastructure, and deer-in-the-headlights blank looks or vacuous sound bites in response to climate change and the other consequences of our frankly moronic maltreatment of the biosphere that keeps us all alive—were supposed to bring prosperity to the United States and its allies and stability to the world. They haven’t done that, they won’t do that, and with whatever respect is due to the supporters of Hillary Clinton, four more years of those same policies won’t change that fact. The difficulty here is simply that no one in the political establishment, and precious few in the salary class in general, are willing to recognize that failure, much less learn its obvious lessons or notice the ghastly burdens that those policies have imposed on the majorities who have been forced to carry the costs.

warren beatty got blacklisted from hollywood for just pretending Trump...,

zerohedge |  Some people think that truth is relative. At least my relatives do. Try telling your friends and family that all truth passes through Three Stages, from ridicule to violent opposition to eventual acceptance, according to that guy Schopenhauer again, who must have been a lot of fun at parties. My friends and family remain at stage one.

In an essay called Bulworth In 2013, artist Jim Kirwan remarked: “Warren Beatty made Bulworth in 1998 to warn America about what this country had become . . . The film is about a disillusioned Senator who tires of the lies and begins to tell it like it is.  No other major filmmaker has dared to produce, much less chosen to put these topics before the public.” 

Bulworth quickly insults or provokes everyone he meets, from Black civic leaders to Jewish movie moguls to a roomful of the Senator’s corrupt corporate donors.  While on a fundraiser, Senator Bulworth visits the home of some Hollywood heavyweights and is asked bluntly by one of them: “Senator, do you think those of us in the entertainment business need government help in determining limits on sex and violence in today’s films and television programs?” 

Bulworth replies: “You know the funny thing is, how lousy most of your stuff is. You make violent films, you make dirty films, you make family films, but just most of them are not very good, are they? Funny that so many smart people could work so hard on them and spend so much money on them and, I mean, what do you think it is? It must be the money, huh. It must be the money, it turns everything to crap you know. Jesus Christ how much money do you guys really need?” 

And that is how you get black-listed from Hollywood, despite all the Oscars you have won in the past. Talk truth to power and damn if they don’t try to ruin you. 

Bulworth continues on in his suicidal mission. Warren Beatty is masterful and marvelous, like Trump on truth serum or steroids. Intoxicated with his candor, Senator Bulworth begins to rhyme, to a roomful of stunned corporate backers. “And over here, we got our friends from oil/ They don’t give a shit how much wilderness they spoil/ They tell us they are careful, we know that it’s a lie/ As long as we keep driving cars, they’ll let the planet die/ Exxon, Mobil, the Saudis and Kuwait, if we still got the Middle East, the atmosphere can wait/ The Arabs got the oil, we buy everything they sell/ But if the brothers raise the price, we’ll blow them all to hell.” 

Imagine Trump saying something like THAT? 

So ask yourself this, dear reader: When has ONE candidate managed to provoke and then UNITE the hysterical Left liberals and the entrenched, super rich & powerful oligarchs of the Extreme Right against him? Not to mention uniting the puppets and pundits of the mainstream media? Has that ever happened in American history? Before Bulworth? Before Trump? 

Consider the growing list of powerful, special interests arrayed against Donald Trump. Billionaire corporate heads oppose Trump. Dozens of them flew down to Sea Island, Georgia to devise ways to remove Trump from the Republican ticket. “”What we see at Sea Island is that, despite all their babble about bringing the blessings of democracy to the world’s benighted, AEI, Neocon Central, believe less in democracy than in perpetual control of the American nation by the ruling Beltway elites,” wrote Patrick Buchanan. “If an outsider like Trump imperils that control . . . the elites will come together to bring him down, because behind party lines, they’re soul brothers in pursuit of power.” 

Speaking of soul brothers, another billionaire, and self-confessed Nazi collaborator, George Soros backs BlackLivesMatters.  Soros provided in excess of $30 million in “seed” money to BLM.  Tweeted top BLM activist and rapper Tef Poe: “ If Trump wins, young niggas such as myself are fully hell bent on inciting riots everywhere we go.”

Billionaires bankrolling ghetto brothers to burn and riot? And NO outcry from the American media, naturally.  Fist tap Don.

no this let them eat cake type bish did not say this isht right'chere!?!?!?!?

bloomberg |  The global economy is beset by an array of political risks, from terrorism to the U.K.’s potential departure from the European Union, at a time when growth is at best mediocre, IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde said.

The world outlook is clouded by “weak growth, no new jobs, no high inflation, still high debt -- all those things that should be low and that are high,” Lagarde said in an interview in Frankfurt on Tuesday with Bloomberg Television’s Francine Lacqua. The downside risks have increased and “we don’t see much by way of upside,” she said.

The International Monetary Fund’s view of the world economy has dimmed over the last six months, exacerbated by China’s slowdown, lower commodity prices and the risk of financial tightening in many countries. The Washington-based fund, which will hold its spring meetings starting April 15, is warning that political populism now also poses a growing risk to the economic order, fueled by income inequality and the ongoing fallout from last decade’s financial crisis.

“What we fear is this sort of very new mediocre,” Lagarde said in the interview after delivering a speech at Frankfurt’s Goethe University. In the talk, she urged governments to front-load structural reforms that can boost growth potential and warned that monetary policy can’t bear the burden for supporting output alone.

Lagarde, 60, a former French finance minister, used a quotation from Goethe’s “Faust,” in German, to chastise governments for not doing enough on the reform or fiscal-spending front to prevent economies from slipping into torpor.

“The message well I hear, my faith alone is weak,” she said. “There is always a good reason not to act. But that would be precisely the wrong move. The growth momentum is weak, risks are probably on the rise, and confidence is sorely lacking.”

wikilieaks calls for panama papeles to be released in full

belfasttelegraph |  Mr Hrafnsson, who worked on the ‘Cablegate’ leak of diplomatic documents in 2010, suggested the withholding of documents is understandable to maximise the impact, but said that in the end the papers should be published in full for the public to access.

He told RT's Afshin Rattansi on Going Underground: "When they are saying this is responsible journalism, I totally disagree with the overall tone of that.

"I do have a sympathy to stalled releases, we certainly did that in WikiLeaks in 2010 and 2011 with the Diplomatic Cables… but in the end the entire cache was put online in a searchable database.

"That is what I’d want to see with these Panama Papers, they should be available to the general public in such a manner so everybody, not just the group of journalists working on the data, can search it."

The reports are from a global group of news organisations working with the Washington-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ).

The consortium have been processing the legal records from the Mossack Fonseca law firm that were first leaked to the German Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper.

Shell companies are not necessarily illegal. People or companies might use them to reduce their tax bill legally, by benefiting from low tax rates in countries like Panama, the Cayman Islands and Bermuda.

But the practice is frowned upon, particularly when used by politicians, who then face criticism for not contributing to their own countries' economies.

Because offshore accounts and companies also hide the names of the ultimate owners of investments, they are often used to illegally evade taxes or launder money.

Presenter Rattansi mentions that the ICIJ is funded by the Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Endowment think tank, the Rockefellers and George Soros.

panama papeles clip chilean head of Transparency International

reuters |  While Delaveau is not accused of illegal activity, the leaks called into question his post at Transparency International, a German-based organization that seeks to monitor and root out corporate and political corruption worldwide.

According to CIPER, Delaveau, a lawyer, acts as a representative for Turnbrook Corporation, DK Corporation, Heatlhey International Inc, Turnbrook Mining Ltd and Vizcachitas Ltd, all of which are domiciled in the Bahamas.

Delaveau also serves as a director for Turnbrook Mining, which owns 51.6 percent of Los Andes Copper, a Canadian exploration and development company currently focused on a mine project north of Chile's capital, Santiago.

Delaveau could not be reached for comment.

In response to questions from CIPER, he said he was a director only at Turnbrook Mining and that his relations with the other companies were consistent with his role as a lawyer and legal clerk.

He added in an interview with a local radio station that he was "extremely surprised" by the "gray, dark area" of Mossack Fonseca.

Delaveau's resignation came hours after Chile's tax authority announced the beginning of an "intense follow-up" of the Chileans mentioned in the Panama Papers, who range from ex-soccer stars to newspaper magnates.

The disclosures also come as Chile deals with political and corporate corruption scandals that have left Chileans angry with the entire professional class and eroded the government's popularity.

panama papeles reveal that like fish, world soccer still rots from the head...,

theguardian |  The new head of world football has been caught up in the sport’s corruption scandal because of documents that have been revealed by the Panama Papers leak.

Files seen by the Guardian will raise questions about the role Fifa’s president, Gianni Infantino, played in deals that were concluded when he was director of legal services at Uefa, European football’s governing body.

According to records, Uefa concluded offshore deals with one of the indicted figures at the heart of an alleged “World Cup of fraud” despite previously insisting it had no dealings with any of them.

The emergence of the contracts from 2003 and 2006, which were co-signed by Infantino, link Uefa for the first time to one of the companies involved in the huge unfolding scandal that has brought down former Fifa president Sepp Blatter.

Uefa has denied any wrongdoing by any of its officials or any other marketing partner.

It said the contracts were all above board. Fifa has previously insisted Infantino had no dealings with any of the officials currently under investigation – or their companies. Infantino said he was “dismayed” by the reports and “will not accept that my integrity is being doubted”.

The disclosures are based on the leak of 11m documents from the files of the offshore financial law firm Mossack Fonseca, which were obtained by Süddeutsche Zeitung and shared by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists with the Guardian and other news organisations.

capitalism will devour democracy unless...,

libertyblitzkrieg |  The IMF’s austerity package is inhuman because it will destroy hundreds of thousands of small businesses, defund society’s weakest, and turbocharge the humanitarian crisis. And it is unnecessary because meaningful growth is much more likely to return to Greece under our policy proposals to end austerity, target the oligarchy, and reform public administration (rather than attacking, again, the weak).

To give a monstrously exaggerated but terribly instructive parallel of the IMF’s logic, if Greece is nuked tomorrow the economic crisis ends and its macroeconomic numbers are “fixed” as long as creditors accept a 100 percent haircut. But, if I am right that our numbers added up just as well, while allowing Greece to recover without further social decline, why did the IMF join Berlin to crush us in 2015?

For decades, whenever the IMF “visited” a struggling country, it promoted “reforms” that led to the demolition of small businesses and the proletarisation of middle-class professionals. Abandoning the template in Greece would be to confess to the possibility that decades of anti-social programs imposed globally might have been inhuman and unnecessary. 

To recap, the Wikileaks revelations unveil an attrition war between a reasonably numerate villain (the IMF) and a chronic procrastinator (Berlin). We also know that the IMF is seriously considering bringing things to a head next July by dangling Greece once more over the abyss, exactly as in July 2015. Except that this time the purpose is to force the hand not of Alexis Tsipras, whose fresh acquiescence the IMF considers in the bag, but of the German Chancellor. 

Will Christine Lagarde (the IMF’s Managing Director with ambitions of a European political comeback) toe the line of her underlings? How will Chancellor Merkel react to the publication of these conversations? Might the protagonists’ strategies change now that we have had a glimpse of them? 

While pondering these questions, I cannot stem the torrent of sadness from the thought that last year, during our Athens Spring, Greece had weapons against the troika’s organised incompetence that I was, alas, not allowed to use. The result is a Europe more deeply immersed in disrepute and a Greek people watching from the sidelines an ugly brawl darkening their already bleak future.

capitalism's peak crisis?

Time |  Voters know at a gut level that our system of global capitalism is working mainly for the 1 %, not the 99 %. That’s a large part of why both Sanders and Trump have done well, because they tap into that truth, albeit in different ways. The Panama Papers illuminate a key aspect of why the system isn’t working–because globalization has allowed the capital and assets of the 1 % (be they individuals or corporations) to travel freely, while those of the 99 % cannot. Globalization is supposed to be about the free movement of people, goods, and capital. But in fact, the system is set up to enable that mobility mainly for the rich (or for large corporations). The result is global tax evasion, the offshoring of labor, and an elite that flies 35,000 feet over the problems of nation states and the tax payers within them.

Where do we go from here? I think we’re heading towards a root to branch re-evaluation of how our market system works–and doesn’t work. The debate over free trade is part of that re-evaluation. The calls for a global campaign against tax evasion are, too. I think there will also be intense scrutiny about the ease with which financial capital can move around the world – we’ve already seen that with the hoopla over tax inversions, but we’ll see a lot more backlash, in new areas.

“I expect that the populist backlash will be intense and will impact everything from high-end real estate to PACs (effectively political shell companies),” says one of my favorite sources, Peter Atwater, a behavioral economist. “Voters are increasingly angry at the seeming transience of the financial/corporate/political elite. The 1% can move anywhere they want—and profit handsomely from the relocation, but the 99% can’t. Worse, the 99% are left with the aftermath—the empty buildings of a deserted Detroit, the toxic waste from chemical plants in West Virginia or the unsustainable tax liabilities of Puerto Rico.”