The Guardian:
The leak of 2m emails and other documents…has the potential to cause a seismic shock worldwide to the booming offshore trade, with a former chief economist at McKinsey estimating that wealthy individuals may have as much as $32tn (£21tn) stashed in overseas havens.
The naming project may be extremely damaging for confidence among the world’s wealthiest people, no longer certain that the size of their fortunes remains hidden from governments and from their neighbours.
What is a “Double Irish with a Dutch Sandwich”?
And why is it that poor and middle-class families in Western countries are accountable for paying taxes while the very richest families and corporations aren’t? And what’s the deal with that empty, fenced off “development project” outside of Nairobi, the one being built for the world’s biggest tech firms?
Tax-Free Tour is a sweeping and infuriating look into the world of offshore tax havens and corporate tax-dodging, including how it all works and how it exacerbates global inequality and economic suffering. Made by Dutch journalists, the film competently dissects an underreported and crucial financial issue and is a real eye-opener. If you find it educational, please share.
The expression plastered on the face of the Starbucks financial officer as he’s being expertly grilled by the British MP—like a naughty boy being taken to task—is unlikely to be forgotten anytime soon.
After watching, there’s a chance you may decide to join the international tax justice movement. Fixing the tax haven issue could potentially ease the pain of millions of families.
Produced by Dutch public television broadcaster, VPRO.
Bloomberg:
[Goldman shareholder] John Harrington said the bank should explore running for office, using a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that corporations have similar political rights to individuals.
“It’s too bad we didn’t get it on the ballot, it would have been a good discussion piece,” Harrington said today in a phone interview. “You begin to see a pattern of how much influence corporations have on our political balance, and now it’s so skewed that you figure, ‘Why don’t we have Goldman run for president and JPMorgan Chase run for vice president.’ And that way, they can run the system for real.”
Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone:
The secrets are out there and everyone from hackers to journalists to U.S. senators are digging in search of them. Sooner or later, there’s going to be a pitched battle, one where the state won’t be able to peel off one lone Julian Assange or Bradley Manning and batter him into nothingness. Next time around, it’ll be a Pentagon Papers-style constitutional crisis, where the public’s legitimate right to know will be pitted head-to-head with presidents, generals and CEOs….What if it we’re forced to look at all of this for real next time, and what if it turns out we can’t accept it? What if murder and corruption is what’s holding it all together?
From Democracy Now:
On Tuesday, Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Democratic Rep. Ted Deutch of Florida introduced a constitutional amendment to overturn the Supreme Court’s 2010 landmark Citizens United ruling that cleared the way for corporations and other special interest groups to spend unlimited amounts of money on elections. The bill is part of a growing movement to overturn the ruling. Today we host a debate on whether the push for a constitutional amendment is the best path to overturning Citizens United. We speak to Mark Schmitt, a senior fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, and John Bonifaz, co-founder and director of Free Speech for People.
Here’s a treat from My Dinner with Andre (1981) with Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory, directed by Louis Malle. Prepare to take a mindful 5 minute break from the reality of your day…
Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone:
A great many people around the country were rightfully shocked and horrified by the recent excellent and hard-hitting PBS documentary, The Untouchables, which looked at the problem of high-ranking Wall Street crooks going unpunished in the wake of the financial crisis. The PBS piece certainly rattled some cages, particularly in Washington, in a way that few media efforts succeed in doing.
Thirty-Eight Decisions
In an attempt to emphasize some of the areas of general agreement and silence between the two candidates in this election—issues that will require citizens taking democratic action outside the electoral system—Tomáš Zeman and I put together this graphic. The interactive version can be downloaded here.
Kickstarter:
The Yes Men Are Revolting is a funny, action-packed adventure. With the environment on the brink of collapse, we ask a pressing question: at a time when corporate forces have bought and sold democracy, how can we effect real change? Our answer: get every viewer involved in the struggle.
For the last four years we’ve worked with dozens of groups on infiltrations, impersonations, and mass actions to try to make a difference. Check out the video on this page for a little taste! After the part where we ask for your support, you’ll see a scene where we hold a press conference pretending to be from the US Chamber of Commerce (big-money lobbyists who spend hundreds of millions blocking and dismantling environment, labor, housing, and health laws). The press conference goes well, and the Chamber’s real PR guy even shows up—comedic vigilante justice at its best. Stay tuned to this page for more videos in coming weeks.
But as we continued pulling off actions like the one against the Chamber, the Obama years rolled by, and as money’s chokehold on democracy got tighter, we got more frantic. We even took it out on each other, and our “band” almost split up. But then, a sequence of unbelievable global uprisings, from Tahrir Square to Occupy Wall Street, got us excited about the idea of a global revolution–and we began to realize that we can do it too.
Then, energized by our involvement with the Occupy movement, we came to realize our true role in social change. Now, we’re hatching our most ambitious plan ever.
An extraordinary investigative piece in the NYTimes this weekend (see link above) detailed the recently burst bubble of the natural gas market in the U.S., including who it damaged irreparably (ordinary people, the environment) and who benefited big time (members of the top .1%). The article includes revelatory detail on how two billionnaire fraternity brothers, one an investment banker and the other an energy corporation CEO, fueled the country’s natural gas bubble using ownership of land on gas-rich shales, global connections to elite investors, creative financial instruments, and a significant amount of bluster and bullshit.
National Catholic Reporter:
Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict by Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan uses graphs, charts, sociological research and statistical analysis to show how in the last century, nonviolent movements were far better at mobilizing supporters, resisting regime crackdowns, creating new initiatives, defeating repressive regimes and establishing lasting democracies.
Chrystia Freeland, NYTimes Op-Ed:
The irony of the political rise of the plutocrats is that, like Venice’s oligarchs, they threaten the system that created them.
‘Censored 2013’ celebrates the importance of independent journalism for democratic self-government, and it holds to account the corporate media for their failure to provide the public with complete, relevant news coverage.
Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone:
The mere fact that Mitt Romney is even within striking distance of winning this election is an incredible testament to two things: a) the rank incompetence of the Democratic Party, which would have this and every other election for the next half century sewn up if they were a little less money-hungry and tried just a little harder to represent their ostensible constituents, and b) the power of our propaganda machine, which has conditioned all of us to accept the idea that the American population, ideologically speaking, is naturally split down the middle, whereas the real fault lines are a lot closer to the 99-1 ratio the Occupy movement has been talking about since last year.
Francis Fox Piven, professor of political science and sociology at the Graduate Centre of the City University of New York:
The great protest movements of history lasted not for a moment but for decades. And they did not expand in the shape of a simple rising arc of popular defiance. Rather, they began in a particular place, sputtered and subsided, only to re-emerge elsewhere in perhaps a different form, influenced by local particularities of circumstance and culture.
Movements that may appear to us in retrospect as a unified set of events are, in fact, irregular and scattered. Only afterwards do we see the underlying common institutional causes and movement passions that mark these events so we can name them, as the abolitionist movement, for example, or the labor movement or the civil rights movement. I think Occupy is likely to unfold in a similar way.
