Cross Post from GD:P : The Panama Papers Are Only the Beginning

[dana_b]

The Panama Papers Are Only the Beginning

Financial crimes and political conspiracies aren’t discrete events but the essence of neoliberalism.
By Greg GrandinTwitterYESTERDAY 4:44 PM

The danger with the Panama Papers is that the massive amount of data—much of it still unreleased—could overwhelm, pushing the public to that place where the covert and the spectacular collapse into each other, creating not action and knowledge but paralysis and amnesia. The trees (that is, the data) will hide the forest (our conceptual understanding of how the data points relate to each other). As Noam Chomsky describes the paradox, “How it is we have so much information, but know so little?”

snip

As of now, there is no known connection between Bloomberg’s right-wing hacker story and the network partially revealed by the Panama Papers. The dots, however, are but two degrees separated. The hacker, Andrés Sepúlveda, worked on behalf of candidates and parties that wanted to reverse Latin America’s leftward drift, to once again open the region’s energy sector to US private capital and pay tribute to bond markets. Among his other achievements, Sepúlveda helped Álvaro Uribe get reelected president of Colombia in 2006, Porfirio Lobo elected president of Honduras in 2009, and Enrique Peña Nieto president of Mexico in 2012. All three of these leaders are implicated in exactly the kind of para-politics and para-economics Lombardi drew about, of the kind that has been championed by the current front-runner in the Democratic primaries, Hillary Clinton, under the banner of “free trade.”

As aecretary of atate (sic), Clinton successfully pushed for the passage of free-trade agreements with Colombia and Panama, which, as Clark Mindock and David Sirota point out, make the kind of offshore tax evasion revealed by the Panama Papers even more pervasive (more than 850 Colombians are named in what is so far released of the Panama Papers, including founders and financiers of death squads). Hillary and Bill Clinton are deeply embedded in Colombia, as Ken Silverstein, along with others, has reported (FYI: Silverstein wrote on Mossack Fonseca for Vice nearly a year and a half ago). Hillary counts Álvaro Uribe (who represented the death-squad wing of Colombian politics) as a close ally, with profits from Colombia’s petroleum industry pouring into the Clinton Foundation. As to Honduras, Clinton’s role in legitimizing the 2009 elections that Lobo won (with an assist from Sepúlveda) is well known, largely as a result of the recent murder of the environmentalist Berta Cáceres. And in Mexico, Peña Nieto has accelerated the privatization of the national oil industry, a project that, e-mails reveal, Clinton’s State Department helped make happen.
When asked why none of the information so far seemed to implicate US-based individuals or businesses, the editor of Süddeutsche Zeitung said, “Just wait for what is coming next.” Let’s see.

http://www.thenation.com/article/the-panama-papers-are-only-the-beginning/

Cross posted as requested.

[grasswire]

1. another article here...

http://www.thenation.com/article/ben-carson-isnt-the-only-us-politician-with-a-hand-in-shady-latin-american-dealings/


Simply FULL of information about the corruption of the Clintons in Latin America.

Just mind boggling and sickening.
............................................

Then there’s Hillary Clinton. As Ken Silverstein reported last week, the Clintons are involved in all sorts of shady dealings in Colombia, all made possible by policies Bill Clinton put into place while in office.

In 2000, just before leaving the White House, Clinton ratcheted up military aid to Colombia. Plan Colombia, as the assistance program was called, provided billions of dollars to what was, and remains, the most repressive government in the hemisphere. The effect was to speed the paramilitarization of the country, with government- and military-allied death squads penetrating the intelligence services, judiciary, municipal government, legislature, and executive branch. Washington money effectively subsidized the narco-right to preside over an enormous land grab. According to the US government’s own figures, “in rural areas, less than 1% of the population owns more than half Colombia’s best land.” “Torture, massacres, ‘disappearances,’ and killing of non-combatants” became routinized, with trade unionists, peasants, and Afro-Colombians the main victims. The CIA’s always-useful World Factbook says that a staggering 6.3 million Colombians have been internally displaced (IDP) since 1985, with “about 300,000 new IDPs each year since 2000”—the year Bill Clinton enacted Plan Colombia. Added up, that’s 2.4 million people during Clinton’s eight-year presidency.

The payoff from all this misery was substantial. Between 2002 and the 2008 financial crisis, foreign direct investment in Colombia increased fivefold, mostly in the petroleum, mining, and finance–that is, those economic sectors unleashed by the global deregulation that started under Reagan and continued by Clinton.

Then Hillary Clinton became secretary of state under Barack Obama. It’s hard to convey just how stunningly cynical she has been on Colombia: In 2008, running against Obama, she opposed, in unambiguous terms, a free-trade deal with Colombia. “Senator Clinton’s position is clear and unequivocal: She is opposed to the deal,” said a spokesperson. Yet even as she was telling voters she was against the deal, her chief adviser, Mark Penn, was meeting with Colombian officials to tell them otherwise. Then it was revealed that Bill Clinton was paid $800,000 by the Colombia-based Gold Service International to give four speeches in Latin America, in which he advocated for the free-trade agreement. “Estoy a favor,” he said. Once Hillary Clinton was appointed secretary of state by Barack Obama, she changed her position and pushed for the deal (Obama, too, reversed his campaign pledge). Celebrating the pact’s passage, she said that “by opening new markets to American exports and attracting new investments to American communities, our economic statecraft is creating jobs and spurring growth here at home.” Now she is repeating the exact same pirouette with the Trans-Pacific Partnership. As secretary of state, she backed it. As candidate, she opposes it, “as of today.”


Here is Clinton laughing when asked by a reporter if there was a conflict of interest, considering that her husband’s well-compensated advocacy for the deal: “How many angels dance on the head of a pin?” Who knows? But we do know how many trade unionists have been executed since the 2011 congressional ratification of the treaty: 105.

Others, including Silverstein, provide all the baroque details of Bill and Hillary’s involvement in Colombia. They involve Fondo Acesso, a Colombian venture fund, and something called the Clinton Giustra Sustainable Growth Initiative, all tangled up in a larger set of disclosures concerning taxes and contributions to the Clinton Foundation. One of the most sordid aspects of the Clintons’ Colombian connection is their friendship with the country’s former president Álvaro Uribe, a buffoonish sociopath best thought of as a Donald Trump if Donald Trump presided over a paramilitary army financed with billions of dollars provided by Bill Clinton. “Hard-nosed” is how Clinton described Uribe in her memoir, Hard Choices.

A major node in the Clinton-Colombia nexus is the Canadian Frank Giustra. There are wheels within wheels, but Giustra, one of the Clinton Foundation’s biggest donors and a major investor in Colombian oil, mining, ports, and timber, is exactly the kind of resource extractor made rich by the militarization and neoliberalization of Latin America, which Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton have done so much to advance. Soon after Giustra acquired one of his major Colombian holdings, the petroleum company, Pacific Rubiales (founded by a number of anti-Chavista Venezuelans), the firm laid off 4,000 workers and started a campaign of intimidation against their union.

Yet “as Colombian oil money flowed to Clintons, State Department took no action to prevent labor violations,” as the headline of this very good report by Mathew Cunningham-Cook, David Sirota, and Andrew Perez published in the International Business Times notes.

Maybe the Clinton Giustra Sustainable Growth Initiative can find them new work. Or maybe the Clinton Foundation might pay for the funerals of the 300 Colombian peasants killed so far in 2015.

[KoKo]

7. Thing is....there has got to be some "Sane" part of the MIC that doesn't want

the Country to go through more of this, with the Clintons back in charge, along with their expanded Special Interest Groups, International Dealings and Connections, in recent years. Add in, Hillary's Senate and SOS connections with Wall Street, Neocons, Super Pac's and the "Clinton Global Initiative" all with revelations just waiting to explode somewhere down the road.

[grasswire]

8. maybe the MIC is just manipulating it to their own ends.

She certainly is going to give them all the rope they want.

[Doctor_J]

2. Things are starting to get a little sketchy around here.

Seems like the wheels may be coming loose on the whole thing - not just Hillary's campaign. These hackers have gotten us on a path toward anarchy IMO. I'm not even saying that's necessarily bad, but it's a little unsettling. Glad I'll be dead soon.

[dana_b]

3. I won't be far behind you

I'll see a bit of it but I do worry for my kid.

[Duppers]

9. Anarchy is inevitable, hackers aside.

GCC will have wreaked economics around the world by the end of the century.

Exposing crooks is a good thing imo.

[daleanime]

4. K&R.....

[Bernardo de La Paz]

5. Does RimJob have any money hidden offshore?

[KoKo]

6. Recommend...a Very Interesting Read.

[Duppers]

10. Clinton fans are immuned to this info.

It could be put in all-cap news headlines and they'd pass it off as a Bernie smear.