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Data Leak Shakes Notion of Secret Offshore Havens and, Possibly, Nerves

Prime Minister Bidzina Ivanishvili of Georgia, center,
is listed as an owner of a secret offshore firm, according
to The Guardian.

By ANDREW HIGGINS

Published: April 4, 2013 492 Comments

BRUSSELS — They are a large and diverse group that includes a Spanish heiress; the daughter of the former Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos; and Denise Rich, the former wife of the disgraced trader Marc Rich, who was pardoned by President Bill Clinton. But, according to a trove of secret financial information released Thursday, all have money and share a desire to hide it.  

And, it seems safe to say, they — and thousands of others in Europe and far beyond, in places like Mongolia — are suddenly very anxious after the leak of 2.5 million files detailing the offshore bank accounts and shell companies of wealthy individuals and tax-averse companies.

“There will be people all over the world today who are now scared witless,” said Richard Murphy, research director for Tax Justice Network, a British-based organization that has long campaigned to end the secrecy that surrounds assets held in offshore havens. The leaked files include the names of 4,000 Americans, celebrities as well as more mundane doctors and dentists. 

It is not the first time leaks have dented a thick carapace of confidentiality that usually protects the identities of those who stash money in the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, Liechtenstein and other havens. Nor, in most cases, is keeping money in such places illegal.

But the enormous size of the data dump obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, a Washington-based group that, along with affiliated news media organizations, announced its coup on Thursday, has punched a big hole in the secrecy that surrounds what the Tax Justice Network estimates are assets worth at least $21 trillion held in offshore havens. “This could be a game-changer,” said Mr. Murphy, the author of a book about offshore tax shelters. “Secrecy is the key product these places sell. Whether you are a criminal laundering money or just someone trying to evade or avoid taxes, secrecy is the one thing you want.” Once this is gone, he added, “it creates an enormous fear factor” and has a “massive deterrent effect.”  READ MORE

Everything is Bigger in Texas, Including the Aryan Brotherhood

Texas is experiencing incredible economic success. Texas leads the United States in oil and gas production and job growth.    In February alone Texas employers added over 80,000 jobs. The unemployment rate in Texas hovers aroung 6.3% as compared to the national average of 7.7%. Texas also is proud to have the fastest growing cities in the country. The top three growth cities in the country are Austin #1, Houston #2, and Dallas #3. While Rick Perry would like to take credit for the economic success of the state, it is more likely attributable to the lack of state income tax, which is made possible by the presence of such large oil & gas reserves.

While the country identifies Texas as a leader in economic growth, it is also a leader in the Aryan Brotherhood.

The Life Expectancy for a District Attorney in Texas must be the shortest in the country. Last Saturday District attorney Mike McLelland and his wife were found dead in their home. It was just two months ago that Mr. McLelland had vowed to put away the “scum” who had killed one of his deputies. The county sheriffs have brought in the FBI to help with the investigation. Thank heavens we didn’t secede from the United States, as our Governor had suggested!

Mr. Hasse, the district attorney who was shot on his way to work outside the county court house two months ago, had carried a gun for protection, and even changed the exit he took every day from the Court House, for security reasons.
While no charges have been filed, there is great speculation that the Aryan brotherhood of Texas is involved. The Aryan Brotherhood of Texas is at the center of a large federal case that involves racketeering, murder, kidnapping and other various crimes. The Aryan Brotherhood of Texas is described as a “whites only” prison based gang in operation since the 80’s. They are arguably the most violent white supremacist prison gang in the United States. The group has been credited with more than 100 murders, and at least 10 kidnappings. Their code is ‘blood-in, blood-out‘ meaning that you can only get into ABT by carrying out some kind of attack,” and … you can only leave in a body bag. READ MORE

The Sequester and the Tea Party Plot

ROBERT B. REICH,

Imagine a plot to undermine the government of the United States, to destroy much of its capacity to do the public’s business, and to sow distrust among the population.

Imagine further that the plotters infiltrate Congress and state governments, reshape their districts to give them disproportionate influence in Washington, and use the media to spread big lies about the government.

Finally, imagine they not only paralyze the government but are on the verge of dismantling pieces of it.

Far-fetched?  Perhaps. But take a look at what’s been happening in Washington and many state capitals since Tea Party fanatics gained effective control of the Republican Party, and you’d be forgiven if you see parallels.

Tea Party Republicans are crowing about the “sequestration” cuts beginning today (Friday). “This will be the first significant tea party victory in that we got what we set out to do in changing Washington,” says Rep. Tim Huelskamp (Kan.), a Tea Partier who was first elected in 2010.

Sequestration is only the start. What they set out to do was not simply change Washington but eviscerate the U.S. government — “drown it in the bathtub,” in the words of their guru Grover Norquist – slashing Social Security and Medicare, ending worker protections we’ve had since the 1930s, eroding civil rights and voting rights, terminating programs that have helped the poor for generations, and making it impossible for the government to invest in our future. READ MORE

Does Irrationality Doom America?

How rational problem-solving has ceased to be "serious" among US elites.

March 22, 2013  |  

 

The United States is on the verge of committing suicide. Slow suicide, perhaps, which may take decades to fully play out, but suicide nonetheless. The proximate event is the sequester - deep across-the-board cuts to military and discretionary domestic spending, originally conceived as a Sword of Damocles, but which Tea Party-dominated Republicans now see as just the perfect budget axe. And that's just one of several successive and mostly recurring crisis points at which Republicans are obstinantly demanding deep budget cuts that will inevitably slow, if not cripple the already weak economy - as well as debilitating or destroying vital government functions in the long run.

This comes at a time when there's actually a staggering need to vastly expand the scope of government action to deal with multiple looming threats of environmental catastrophe - not to mention previously intolerable levels of unemployment, and a crumbling infrastructure. Climate change is just the most prominent of such environmental threats - not just to the United States, but to the continued existence of advanced industrial civilisation as a whole - which the US can't even begin to rationally grapple with as long as anti-government ideology blocks even the most common sense actions on well-understood problems. A super-power whose highways are cracking and bridges are falling down, and which then responds by slashing spending cannot be long for this world. If it staggers on for a few more decades, that's nothing compared to the centuries that the Roman Empire endured, much less the millenia of dynastic Egypt's glory.
 READ MORE

Op-Ed: We Need More Aaron Swartz-Style Hacktivism

March 11, 2013 1:00 PM

 

 

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TRANSCRIPT

NEAL CONAN, HOST:
This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Neal Conan.
And now the Opinion Page. The release of millions of academic papers by Internet activist Aaron Swartz raised many questions about how much access the public should have to scholarship, questions that took on new dimensions after his suicide. At the time of his death, Swartz faced federal charges of wire fraud and violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

In The Chronicle of Higher Education, Peter Ludlow argues Aaron Swartz was right, not only justified in his act of civil disobedience, but morally impelled to act. We want to hear from those of you in academic publishing, what's the legacy of Aaron Swartz? 800-989-8255. Email: talk@npr.org. You can also join the conversation on our website. That's at npr.org, click on TALK OF THE NATION.
Peter Ludlow is a professor of philosophy in Northwestern University. His commentary "Aaron Swartz Was Right" ran in The Chronicle of Higher Ed on February 25. He joins us now from member station WBEZ in Chicago. Good to have you with us today.

PETER LUDLOW: Hi. Good afternoon.

CONAN: And you write that the consensus, so far, is that Swartz did something wrong. And, well, he himself called it an act of civil disobedience. Don't people who commit act of civil disobedience expect some - well, there are some risks associated with that.

LUDLOW: There certainly are. When you commit an act of civil disobedience, you're doing something that is technically against the law, but you believe it's the right thing to do. For example, Rosa Parks knew that it was against the law to sit in the front of the bus, but she did so anyway. And that's basically the structure of acts of civil disobedience.

CONAN: Yet, you accept that there's a possibility you could end up facing charges for this.

LUDLOW: You certainly do.

CONAN: And the civil act that he committed, you say, was justified by the, well, peculiar structure of academic publishing.

LUDLOW: Yeah. There are actually two things going on here. One is the issue of academic publishing, the structure of it and how knowledge is locked up by academic publishers. And then there's another thing which you're somewhat alluding to earlier when you talk about, you know, he should have expected some sort of punishment for what he did. And that other thing goes to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which lays out these draconian penalties for unauthorized access of a computer system. And so there are really two things going on in all of this. One has to do with the story about academic publishing, and the other thing has to do with this Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and both are incredibly serious issues.

CONAN: Well, let us start with the academic publishing issue then, first. And...

LUDLOW: Sounds fair.

CONAN: All right. And your argument, essentially, that this has been stood on its head, a system that was designed to disseminate information instead bottles it up.

LUDLOW: That's exactly right. If you think about what academic publishers used to do is that they could provide a service that nobody else could provide. That is, they could produce information. They could typeset papers, scientific papers, mathematical papers, and so forth, in a way that nobody else really could do because, you know, a century ago, we're writing these things, you know, with pencil or pen. And they could not only typeset them, but they could publish the - and they could distribute them. And so it played this really invaluable service of taking information that otherwise might just be circulated among a very small group, and distribute it worldwide.
But now, it's performing exactly the opposite function. Instead of helping us to distribute information, it's using a certain kind of rights that it's acquired. And it's using that to bottle up information and demand for fees for that information when there are much more efficient ways to distribute information and academic publishing - academic ideas these days.

CONAN: Well, one of the problems you cite is that very few papers actually do get published, five percent you estimate.

LUDLOW: Well, that's - if you would take a particular top-level philosophy journal, their acceptance rate is around five percent. So presumably, those papers get published elsewhere, but perhaps not a journal that's as prestigious.
And the problem is that if you're a junior professor somewhere, let's say you're a junior professor in philosophy, you need to publish or perish. That means you don't have tenure yet. You're going to need to show up with, you know, six, seven, eight, maybe 10 solid publications in order to get tenure, or you're out the door. And you submit your papers to these journals.
They have a 5 percent acceptance rate and they are not - they are going to, basically, have you sign over the right to that publication. That is, a junior professor is going to be at a very unfair bargaining position, where they're going to give up the rights to their own intellectual product to this publishing company simply because, you know, they're in an impossible situation. They have to publish. They don't have many opportunities, and the publishing company holds all the power.

CONAN: So they've got 'em over a barrel and, of course, they're going to, given those stakes, sign away their right.

LUDLOW: Sure. I mean, I did it when I was young.
(LAUGHTER)

LUDLOW: I needed, I needed tenure. I signed away my rights. And I think for most publications and most fields in academia, the scholars do end up signing away their rights.
CONAN: And then you have the situation then to get access to those papers, subsequently, those publishers demand fees, and this is often for research that's been funded by, well, federal money.

LUDLOW: It could be funded by the NEH or the NSF. It might be funded by your tuition dollars or by state - money that a state contributes to the state university. And often, the research is the product of public funding. But the public doesn't have access to that information unless it finds some route to it by being a student in a university or professor in the university or via some other, not necessarily so obvious, route of access to the information.

CONAN: Now, there are various regulations, laws, written to protect, effectively, monopoly of these publishers.  READ MORE

NOAA: Stop Georgia Aquarium from importing wild beluga whales for captivity

The Georgia Aquarium has applied for a permit to import 18 beluga whales into the U.S. where they will be in captivity at various aquariums and zoological parks throughout the country.

These whales taken from the Sea of Okhotsk in eastern Russia, have been removed from their pod and their natural habitat. Beluga whales are highly social animals who live in large pods and form strong bonds especially between mothers and calves.

The Georgia Aquarium claims this is a "conservation" effort, however, these whales will likely never be released back into the ocean. Many may die at an early age due to the stress of captivity, and
Georgia Aquarium's infant beluga whale died just days after being born in May.

Please help stop plans to send more beluga whales far from their ocean home to barren, concrete tanks in aquariums and zoological parks. These belugas should be released back into their ocean home, please give them back their freedom!

Click here to sign Jennifer's petition, "NOAA: Stop Georgia Aquarium from importing wild beluga whales for captivity".