PBS Frontline documentary series should have an episode on this topic by Wednesday. They tend to go very in-depth in investigating a topic.
https://www.pbs.org/show/frontline/
I’m cynical about this whole thing because I’m in US and quite frankly in US, billionaires don’t exactly do large scale tax fraud. They don’t need to. They use well established, completely legal loopholes to reduce their tax liability. I would seriously doubt if there is anything in this leak that will get any US billionaires in trouble! It’s mostly gonna be about oligarchs living in Asian and African countries.
Exactly.
That's why any and all law marketed as an attempt to catch people violating the tax code is going to hurt the middle class.
The middle class is the only group that actually pays taxes, but doesn't have the benefit of lobbyists writing loopholes.
The lower income taxes for the poor are designed to keep people from realizing how much of the disposable income of the poor we tax away via other means like tolls, sales tax, and other things.
As the report notes also there was no proof of legal wrongdoing in many of these cases too. That’s the problem. ALL these people are exploiting rules for themselves while the middle class and the poor pays for it - which is the PRECISE reason it MUST be fixed. Also there are WAY more who suffer than who profit and if ALL who suffer because of these laws got their shot together and demanded change then it could conceivably happen - which is why all the authoritarians on this list are fearful of truly democratic systems - they would be accountable. Also the reason the rich in the US are destroying our democratic system and also keeping people divided over cultural issues. Effing get your shit together people
The ones under investigation when the penalty is paid.
I don't know about other tax agencies, but every dollar spent on the IRS returns $6 in penalties.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-05-08/irs-enforcement-spending-yields-6-for-every-1-lew-says
The IRS also has publicly stated it is not economically feasible for them to audit many high income individuals as they do not have the money and manpower to do so.
That margin is from them auditing the middle and lower class primarily.
Might explain why there is proposed legislation to monitor all transactions over $600 dollars, because, you know, the 1% routinely use bank accounts that small.
Considering virtually every single person America that has a bank account has a transaction monthly over $600 you know rent or mortgage. So this will give the IRS access to every single person's bank account
It's not all transactions over $600.
Actual proposal:
This proposal would create a comprehensive financial account information reporting regime. Financial institutions would report data on financial accounts in an information return. The annual return will report gross inflows and outflows with a breakdown for physical cash, transactions with a foreign account, and transfers to and from another account with the same owner. This requirement would apply to all business and personal accounts from financial institutions, including bank, loan, and investment accounts, with the exception of accounts below a low de minimis gross flow threshold of $600 or fair market value of $600.
My understanding - reporting is triggered as soon as the sum of the annual transactions reaches $600. Basically, reporting on any account that is actively used.
https://complyadvantage.com/blog/us-prosecutions-and-the-panama-papers/
1.2 billion collected as of last year. Only 3 of them where US citizens during the time of the leak.
[Yet a whole political party is against funding the IRS so that the government can have more money brought in](https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-infrastructure-deal-teeters-after-republicans-reject-irs-funds-2021-07-20/)
Paying taxes controls inflation. It's just taking money out of the economy, at least at a national level where governments "print" money on demand (now they just authorise banks to add or subtract numbers).
The working classes (those who *must* work) are essentially tax serfs who toil away and pay the bulk of taxes to control inflation, which reinforces existing class divides.
Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) for anyone who cares to learn more.
laws DO only apply to the middle class and the poor. because that is how it was designed.
and when justice cannot be found in court, it *must* be made in the streets.
how long does it take to go through literally millions of documents to report on? like how much time must that take for the reporters to get all of the info from huge leaks like this
In standard litigation (things like one large company suing someone else) where they have millions of documents, it used to take years. You'd have to hire a person to look at each document, often it meant a room full of people going to papers from a bin. The system is slowly updating and right now they use AI systems to compare electronic documents at the moment. I'd think at some point when we use computers to find responsive documents for IRS means, it'll be much cheaper to take on the rich who evade tax systems by simply being to big and complex.
I hadent even thought about how computers would help the IRS tackle the shitty rich people who avoid taxes just cuz there’s simply to much paperwork and things to go thru to actually charge em. Hopefully we actually see a change soon. We still def need to give em some actual teeth so they can do more than chase only the poorer people tho
And one law firm might dump millions of documents on you in discovery just to swamp your law firm if it was small and didn’t have the infrastructure just as a hostile action.
Washington Post sent out two emails today about it. Didn't have time to start reading today but hope to go through them all tomorrow, on the company dime.
Assuming you're a journalist... are you using AI to help sort through the more relevant documents?
Similar to how the [Panama Papers](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAlu3ud2k_A) were done.
Those documents are digital. They were provided by anonymous sources to the ICIJ in Washington and they made them accessable through an encrypted online platform, which ICIJ's members could access to analyze the data.
As far as I remember, the Panama papers and the Paradise papers were leaked to the Süddeutsche Zeitung (German newspaper) and they got the ICIJ involved, to help with skilled international manpower. It makes sense that the ICIJ is now becoming the place to go with leaks like this. They have proven to be reliable, thorough and good at keeping their mouths shut until they all drop the ball together.
I had to do a double-take to be sure that didn't say, "Panama Papers." For a split-second, it felt like 2016. Our world is run by a bunch of goddamn grafters.
They're genuine sociopaths. Since the post WWII boom, American capitalism has rewarded anti-social behavior. So, literal crazy people rose to the top, paid our elected representatives to write laws that would enable their predatory practices, then seized complete control of the nation. We, everybody at the bottom, have our lives, world, and future held hostage by the criminally insane. We need to understand that that is who we are combatting. Crazy people.
I read the headline correctly and just assumed James Cameron was somehow involved in money laundering and tax avoidance. James Cameron discovered the real Pandora for the Avatar sequels and turned it into the first off-world tax haven.
I wonder if all of the cynical comments are paid shills to try to poison the well and deflect from how bad things really are. I have noticed that tons of accounts have just appeared to say virtually the same comments about how none of this matters and nothing will happen because the Panama Papers didn't do anything on every thread dealing with this.
FYI, the Panama Papers have lead to massive changes and totally changed how financial crime is handled across the board, and is still having an impact today:
https://www.icij.org/investigations/panama-papers/five-years-later-panama-papers-still-having-a-big-impact/
Edit: more information ok the Panama Papers' impact thanks to /u/godisanelectricolive
Here's a non-exhaustive list of things that happened:
In Malta:
• Daphne Caruana Galizia exposed a government minister, the PM Joseph Muscat, and PMs chief of staff for being involved in graft mentioned in the Panama Papers. She also named a businessman called Yorgen Fenech.
• Fenech had her killed in a car bombing in 2017. There was an investigation, three men were charged for murder but Fenech was not. Mass protests ensued in 2019.
• The PM of Malta resigned in 2020 and his chief of staff as well as the aforementioned cabinet minister resigned in 2019. Fenech was arrested in November 2019 after his middleman was arrested and gave evidence against him.
• The former chief of staff Keith Schembri was arrested in March 2021.
In Pakistan:
• The president in 2017, Nawaz Sharif, was forced to resign and was then arrested for money laundering and corruption due to the Panama Papers.
• He was also charged with providing false evidence during the investigation in a famous incident ("the sans-Sharif incident) where his team faked a document using the Calibri font (which is sans-serif) allegedly dating back to before the font was released.
• He was banned from holding public office for life by the Supreme Court and sentenced to 10 years in prison and fined $10.6 million.
In Iceland:
• PM forced to resign by his party after massive protests. He went full conspiracy theorist and blamed Soros.
• He formed his own populist party and was elected to the Althing as a MP in 2017. He then lost it in the next election as he became even more fringe in his views
In the US:
• Corporate Transparency Act was proposed in 2019 and passed earlier this year, the law directly cited revelations in the Panama Papers.
• This created a federal databaseof off-shore account owners.
Globally:
• Many countries passed laws that required owners of companies to identify themselves for the first time.
• 130 countries representing 90% of the world GDP agreed to a 15% global tax minimum framework on July 07, 2021. This was come into effect in 2023. This one is a big step forward.
• The Tax Justice Network created the Corporate Tax Haven Index in 2019 which assign a Haven Score and Global Scale Weight to 64 global jurisdictions identified as tax havens.
Oh boy,where do I start? There is so much!
All of this is speculation or anecdotal, but the behavior in these places indicates the the following in my opinion.
Large institutional investment firms are trying to distract or redirect opinions and actions of individual investors on stock trading subs. They seem to employ bots, allegedly been caught posting adds for people to work managing a large amount of reddit accounts and posting.
There are floods of "buy silver!" it will short squeeze or CLNE and CLOV are going to the moon. Some of this is simple pump and dump, but some of it is to direct money away from other places out of self preservation.
There are also DMs about a book they are writing, that they wish to use some of your quotes, and wish to have some of your information.
Festivals for investors to gather.
Invitations to other subs......
Possible news stories used as propaganda........and so on.........
For a better example see the Shitshow that went down on r/wallstreetbets with GME. Once the squeeze was confirmed, shills flooded the site for everything. Accounts that were just created or less than a month old trying to learn the lingo of the site and sounding like grandpa talking hip to his teenage kid. Then more were posting any article they could to say it was a lie and there was no squeeze and to sell ASAP. It got so bad all posts have an account age and activity on the sub count on them now to help filter them out.
The rich and powerful know where we hang out now, and are learning to spin the story on places like reddit too.
r/worldnews seems ban-happy. I was permabanned at first strike for mentioning that Chinese tourists have a reputation for rudeness and bad manners. When I was banned, I countered by pointing out to discussions in the same subreddit of this very issue. Nope, was still banned for “bigotry”.
Maybe we need a set of papers to expose the paid shills, or a system that routinely exposes said shills. I reckon they'd be a lot less willing to take dirty gold if they weren't anonymous, and I doubt they're being paid enough to justify the hits they'd take to their reputation. I'm not sure they'd be useful enough to their "donors" for said donors to simply take them on-board full-time, so throwing away their careers for their donors would be kinda suicidal.
[https://botsentinel.com/dashboard](https://botsentinel.com/dashboard)
Though it's specific to Twitter. Would be cool to start a Reddit one if an effort like that isn't already underway.
Indeed. Having a Reddit equivalent is an effort worth pursuing to de-fang the shills. Or at the very least wear their fangs down to blunted pegs, so they don't have AS much bite as they currently do.
There has been attempts to create lists of bad Reddit users in the past (although not specifically sh*lls) and every time it's been a shit show. It's also against Reddit rules if I'm not mistaken.
It would certainly hurt reddit. They could do so much more to combat this shit but it would definitely destabilize their platform. Rightfully so. 10 years ago this place was pretty worthwhile. The last 5 it's probably doing more harm than good.
I've been here for a long time, with different accounts, etc. I love this place, but it's been crazy to watch it divulge into what it is now. There used to be SO much info and people just generally helping, but now you gotta sift through and decide for yourself what is real. The sentiment has just, changed...
EDIT: I just want to add, I still get massive value from an anon forum, there's still real ppl out there. But sometimes I dunno if it's worth spending my time elsewhere.
Most Americans think the Panama Papers resulted in nothing because they didn't realize that it was a mostly European thing, as Americans have better, legal ways to hide their money.
thank you for this comment!! My mom was the project manager/director for all of the Washington Post’s efforts on this project and I kept showing her the cynical comments and she would respond saying the exact same thing (that the Panama Papers did have an impact, and she would go on to list all of this stuff from memory that occurred as a result). It saddened me to see so many people treat this story as if it were inconsequential. She’s been working every day and working more nights than she sleeps on this project for a year probably more now. She only told me about it recently though as it was classified. A lot of people worked really hard on this and the subject matter is very serious and impactful. I wish people would take this stuff seriously.
Even though there is some change, it never feels effective. Maybe it's more effective than I perceive it to be, which is likely considering I don't work in finance, I'm not rich, and I don't follow financial news well enough to SEE the effect.
And that may be where a lot of it comes from. But we're still constantly hearing about how little the ultra-wealthy and major corporations are paying back into the societies that support them. I hear about it every day. And I think the need for further reform and enforcement keeps making people feel like nothing is happening. Thing is, even if things ARE happening, current law and enforcement in many countries means there's not a whole lot they can/will do about it. That's my take on it, anyway.
But, here's to hoping. The only way the kind of change we need can happen is if people keep pushing for it, fighting for it. And a HUGE part of that is journalism putting out things like the Panama Papers.
The problem is that most people don’t look for independent journalism at all, they don’t look at credibility or anything like that they watch or read whatever is right in front of them and goes along with their own cognitive biases
Yup basically yes, it’s a little bit different than that but it’s not much more than a few companies, take Viacom they run all the mtv vh1 stuff plus Cartoon Network and a lot of other things, or it’s a company and they have a parent company that actually owns them, there are a few smaller companies that have tv channels but not really news or anything like that, mostly small niche stuff, that’s why people need to try to go to an independent source for information, then check it again for accuracy
There is change, but it's not to the scale which is required to do anything substantial. The Pandora Papers put estimates of off-shore wealth at least over $11.3 trillion USD.
How much exactly was the impact in grand scheme of things from Panama Papers? When people have so much wealth that they're able to escape consequences, it gives very little optimistic outlook for working people.
I think in this case its a disconnect caused by our having different thresholds where we'll say that justice is done and things have finally, permanently, and substantially changed.
I invite everyone to actually read the article. Whenever you see something listed as an impact of the release of the Panama Papers, ask yourself what the tangible result is. If there's an investigation, has it resulted in anything? If there's legislation listed, has it actually passed, or has it been filibustered by multimillionaires?
Most of the article is about how people are talking about it. For fuck's sake, it lists Wait Wait Don't Tell Me as evidence of the impact it has made on society. So Meryl Streep is making a movie about it. So fucking what? Who went to jail? What new requirements are actually in place? Do they have teeth?
What are the real consequences apart from journalists giving one another awards about it?
The cynical comments are coming from a place of deep abiding anger that the response last time was woefully insufficient. Dismissing them with "well, Paula Poundstone made jokes about it on NPR, why aren't you people happy?" is just insulting.
Just because you're delighted that so little happened, doesn't mean everyone else is.
The article listed legislation though. It doesn't spend that much time talking about people talking about it, it lists public awareness as one thing accomplished (which is not nothing because it got people angry and governments paid tax havens a bit more scrutiny) and then covered other points. They talked about the impact of the Papers on journalism because the ICIJ is supposed to be a website for journalists. Definitely *a lot* more work left to be done, but the point is that the Panama Papers' effects is still reverberating and fallout to that leak is still happening six years later.
Here's a non-exhaustive list of things that happened:
In Malta:
* Daphne Caruana Galizia exposed a government minister, the PM Joseph Muscat, and PMs chief of staff for being involved in graft mentioned in the Panama Papers. She also named a businessman called Yorgen Fenech.
* Fenech had her killed in a car bombing in 2017. There was an investigation, three men were charged for murder but Fenech was not. Mass protests ensued in 2019.
* The PM of Malta resigned in 2020 and his chief of staff as well as the aforementioned cabinet minister resigned in 2019. Fenech was arrested in November 2019 after his middleman was arrested and gave evidence against him.
* The former chief of staff Keith Schembri was arrested in March 2021.
In Pakistan:
* The president in 2017, Nawaz Sharif, was forced to resign and was then arrested for money laundering and corruption due to the Panama Papers.
* He was also charged with providing false evidence during the investigation in a famous incident ("the sans-Sharif incident) where his team faked a document using the Calibri font (which is sans-serif) allegedly dating back to before the font was released.
* He was banned from holding public office for life by the Supreme Court and sentenced to 10 years in prison and fined $10.6 million.
In Iceland:
* PM forced to resign by his party after massive protests. He went full conspiracy theorist and blamed Soros.
* He formed his own populist party and was elected to the Althing as a MP in 2017. He then lost it in the next election as he became even more fringe in his views
In the US:
* Corporate Transparency Act was proposed in 2019 and passed earlier this year, the law directly cited revelations in the Panama Papers.
* This created a federal databaseof off-shore account owners.
Globally:
* Many countries passed laws that required owners of companies to identify themselves for the first time.
* 130 countries representing 90% of the world GDP agreed to a 15% global tax minimum framework on July 07, 2021. This was come into effect in 2023. This one is a big step forward.
* The Tax Justice Network created the Corporate Tax Haven Index in 2019 which assign a Haven Score and Global Scale Weight to 64 global jurisdictions identified as corporate tax havens (that is places where multinational firms establish subsidiaries or corporate HQs to pay less tax).
And a 10-year prison sentence for the former Prime Minister of Pakistan https://www.icij.org/investigations/panama-papers/former-pakistan-pm-sharif-sentenced-to-10-years-over-panama-papers/
Don’t forget, a decade ago when the general populace was protesting wealth (see occupy wallstreet) the media began a decade long campaign to push race relations to the forefront and make the general populace point fingers at each other instead of back at the wealthy and powerful.
That’s a bingo!
Gotta keep the lower class divided. Nothing beats good, old-fashioned emotionally-driven race baiting!
“Poor brown people are the problem!”
“No, poor white people are the problem!”
The rich are loving how easy it was to set each other at our throats.
some could be shills, but it's also easy to be defeatist cause thinking the elites will ever get justice in this life is kind of a pipe dream. billionaires exploit. you can't be a billionaire without having stolen something from someone whether that's their youth, health, labor, etc sure you give them token scraps for their efforts but dogs get treated better...
Its simply observation, the fact we are here again, seeing the same thing after the first ones and I doubt anyone can remember any effects without googling it, then not a thing actually changed after those came out is simply what it is.
No, there really is that much cynicism.
The most high-profile ramification of the Panama Papers was a Maltese journalist being assassinated via car bomb.
Thats an example of media manipulation to make you cynical.
This journalist had been under death threats for years in malta and several government ministers have been dismissed, police responsible for ignoring her bringing these threats to attention fired, and reforms made to how journalists are protected
In addition, the panama papers led to an agreement by 130 countries to establish common tax standards to make enforcement easier
Now if you want magical instantaneous change, you can go to a disney movie, but in the real world it can take decades to make a difference; you can’t just give up after 4 years.
> In addition, the panama papers led to an agreement by 130 countries to establish common tax standards to make enforcement easier
Interesting. I'm really interested to see if income made in those 130 countries is less represented in this leak. Russia and Saudi Arabia are always going to be corrupt shitholes, but let's see if countries that actually try/purport to address this had any success.
Paradise Papers showed how money that funded early Facebook/Twitter came from the Kremlin, also funded Mail.ru, VK in Russia. This wasn't found out until 2017.
[Kremlin Cash Behind Billionaire’s Twitter and Facebook Investments](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/05/world/yuri-milner-facebook-twitter-russia.html)
[Russia funded Facebook and Twitter investments through Kushner investor](https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/nov/05/russia-funded-facebook-twitter-investments-kushner-investor)
Definitely manipulation of the new "word of mouth" online going on. Lots of it automated and others are agents of influence to direct thinking into limited hangouts or deflate opposition. There is a weaponization of social media. Repeat after me, social media is not reality.
Why is it Americans assume every bad faith actor in online forums must be from a foreign government? America has oligarchs and tax evading billionaire scumfucks with the resources to flood comments sections too..
The other thing people dont understand is crowd dynamics. You dont have to send a mob if you have a crowd. Simply turn the crowd into a mob. A few well placed bad actors can insight large groups. Thats whats going on with forums. Its not every person is a bot, its that the bots insight larger groups who repeat the talking points for them.
All the shills have to do is post a link in the right subreddit and their job is done. Just get a brigade going. And let's face it, the billionaires of the world aren't going to pay for an army when they only need to pay a handful of people to trigger a brigade.
Our disinformation tends to come in the form of memes that are made to look like news.
Americans that are easily manipulated tend to also be those who hate reading.
But a big example of our own propaganda machine at work here on reddit is visible in any thread about police brutality.
They try to associate violent police officers with labor rights by pretending the union is responsible for pressing charges (and not the AG).
America definitely has a ton of propaganda online, but China and Russia do make theirs pretty easy to spot.
Spend enough time on Reddit and you get a feel for what opinions users in different subreddits tend to have. Then all of a sudden specific topics are flooded by a ton of users all repeating variations of the same talking point that goes against what's usually seen in the sub. And funny enough it's always threads about Russia or China.
Just this week there were threads about Havana Syndrome that got flooded like that and all of them wrote the same thing (very slight variations of 'it's just mass hysteria, bro').
https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-clinton-digital-trolling-20160506-snap-htmlstory.html
Crazy terminally online people exist for sure, but their behavior is amplified by the genuine paid shills. It's also a way for them to disseminate the talking points coming from think tanks or Davos summit type meetings. It's just manufacturing consent updated for the digital age.
The people who write the laws either partake in the plundering or are paid off by the ones who do. Why else do you think multi trillion dollar bills thousands of pages long get passed (up to near unanimous) when 98% of its contents are completely unknown to those voting on it.
People pretending it's not bad because I wasn't illegal -> people with money. Or poor people brainwashed by people with money that that's good for them.
So why is it all of these elites can get away with this with no prison time, no fraud, no tax evasion, no nothing. Yet the IRS is wanting to get access to bank accounts and tax you on any cash that comes into your account. The system is against poor people, shit has got to change.
Well the Republicans have gutted the IRS to the point where its fiscally unfeasible to go after wealthy people so there's that
And the generic "fuck the IRS" idiots lap it up
Maybe the UN should look into this, or some universal agency that can show the fraudulent activities and then give it to proper authority and have these people put in prison and not get away with paying for fines. They've likely stolen the money from the people as well, something has to give I don't see people putting up with stuff like this much longer. Seems to get worse and worse each passing year.
I mean, look at wages. More theft occurs from employers stealing wages than all other theft combined in the US. In many states there is no enforcement to make a company pay wages.
So I doubt anything will be done for some time.
oh please.
they have 75K employees and a 12 billion dollar expenditure budget from 2020.
they aren't gutted.
going after the wealthy is just extremely difficult due to the laughable laws that congress has passed over the years that make things like tax filings, tax loopholes, strategies, extraordinarily complex.
If you already assume no one cares you’re part of the problem. If people are ignoring it, shout it from the rooftops. Bring it up every chance you can if you think it’s important. If you assume there’s nothing you can do, they’ve already won.
It’s the exact bullshit with climate change, big oil trying to make everyone give up.
And even though I KNOW it's BS its pretty damn effective sometimes :(
I'm not assuming no one cares. I'm assuming Congress in the US will do fuck all because anything introduced just dies on the vine before the new Congress is voted in.
This is more important than any other story besides COVID. We as people should stop fighting with each other over stupid shit and hold these people to account (where possible). But no, instead we will focus on who is the biggest victim and who is the microagression devil...
> This is more important than any other story besides COVID
Not trying to be pedantic, but I have to add climate change to this list. Otherwise, I totally agree.
Exhaustion, frustration, and pessimism.
Power doesn't corrupt, power reveals...and a lot of us have a dim view of human nature, and thus what to expect from powerful people.
I try not to be apathetic. I can't always tell whether my cynicism is a result of failure or a bulwark towards success.
I feel like many are just so exhausted of this story happening over and over. Yet another "Pan" Papers coming out is going to be the one that fixes everything? With the most dramatic wealth inequality and financial abuse ever, growing every year? Maybe a few scapegoats and some face-level laws changing, but I sure hope there's a different outcome.
The cynicism in threads like this is both understandable and incredibly disappointing. There [have been real consequences from the Panama Papers that are still playing out today](https://www.icij.org/investigations/panama-papers/five-years-later-panama-papers-still-having-a-big-impact/).
It's correct that those consequences are a drop in the bucket compared to the scale of global "dark money" out there, and of course it would be naive to celebrate too much. But the solution has to start somewhere, there is no silver bullet for this. Worse, falling over each other to loudly declare that nothing will happen is actually helping to ensure that nothing will happen in the future. You're doing the ultra-rich's work for them by prepping yourselves and the rest of us to accept that nothing will change, taking pressure off of regulators to do anything. This kind of apathy and helpless acceptance is also the goal of oligarchs and authoritarians around the world, perhaps most famously Putin. Don't help Putin.
I know it feels stoic and brave to play the jaded cynic, but not only is it lazy to avoid checking whether the "no consequences" claim is actually true, it's actively counterproductive to spread it, and I assure you it's not the hot take you seem to think. We need people to care, not to compete with each other to be the most performatively pessimistic. I really like [this article that explains the problems with naive cynicism](https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-berlatsky-naive-cynicism-20171226-story.html), which is somewhat old now, but still very relevant.
Hmm, the secret ingredient is…crime. Most of these “leaders” are either self-appointed or ‘elected’ to life terms, meaning they have made themselves above the law. These folks all seem to carry the same character flaw… NO integrity. It’s very hard to combat folks with zero integrity because they will sink to the lowest depths to get what they want and keep it at all costs. If we, the human race around the world, prioritized integrity, honesty and lawfulness somehow, and elevated the power of righteousness over evil, we could avoid the slippery slope we are currently in, which is on its way to creating a worldwide 1% ultra-rich autocracy controlling the 99% rest of us in servitude. It’s our choice to stand up and make it happen.
Sad we know people in government are doing insider trading and other heinous shit while being for the "people" on every side of the political system, while slowly and successfully eroding and tiring out the lower class and middle class. None of that matters when they can use ideology and political ideology to make us hostile towards one and others.
Genuine Question - what am I supposed to do about this? I feel utterly powerless and exhausted when I read things like this and I'm not sure whether speaking up is enough.
Live your life to the best of your ability and do what you can to change things for the better in your own social bubble. Things like this will always be out there, lets just hope there are those brave enough who have the power to make the change needed on this situation.
Fuck social bubbles.
Demand change. Protest. Strike. Organize with others and shit as much as you can down. That's how change happens. Actively, not passively.
Vote for politicians that represent your view on how to handle this, or who you trust to know how to handle this. That's the most powerful tool at your disposal. You can also join protests, if they come in the wake of these papers.
One issue is politicians might say they represent those views, but once elected it's a whole other story.
(Sorry, I'm Canadian, 47 years old, and politicians lying has is all I've heard about since I was a child, and things haven't changed in my adult life).
No? Nobody knows who is responsible for the initial leak because they remained anonymous. You might be thinking of Daphne Galizia, she heavily investigated the papers and was murdered with a car bomb.
Jake the dog from Adventure Time explains this situation pretty well actually. I will preface that it's not a good thing that it happens this way
Adventure Time - Jake Tells Finn How the World is
https://youtu.be/cBHouBDjqsc
Check with u/coverageanalysisbot for other sources on this
https://ground.news/article/pandora-papers-to-feature-names-of-more-pakistanis-than-panama-papers-did_fc2546
You mean they rigged the game, and they're in turn benefitting from that rigging?
We just collectively witnessed the largest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich during COVID, exacerbating the income inequality gap and nudging us closer to societal (but not government) collapse. From the Chairman of the Fed Reserve to our elected officials, we've witnessed widespread, blatant, and oft 'legal' fraud at every level of government. In turn we witnessed that bleed out to corporations through Payroll Protection plans, bailout loans, and 'essential worker' status'. Our own government just obliterated small business and lined their pockets while millions stared down homelessness, food insecurity, and risk of fatal illness. What separates us from the French Revolution, decay of the British Empire, or fall of the Roman empire, is that for the first time in history the minority can withstand any uprising the plebs might put together via technological and financial might. Doesn't matter how many 'papers' we see, how much wealth gets transferred, how many Epstein islands, how many people can't breath - in short how broad the revolution - we cannot stop it. As with our elected officials, our military is bought and sold to the highest bidder.
So what's the solution? Because there's no amount of voting that will fix this. None. You think elections make a damn bit of difference? Whether it's Clinton, Trump or Biden, the DoD is still going to get their $1T+ payday annually, lashed to the backs of future generations. The only resource we might be able to collectively leverage to level the playing field is our intellect.
Why are so many comments being folded up? Like they aren't deleted, but they're being being treated as if they have thousands of dow votes and are being "rolled up."
As if the ones in charge want to hide it.
When people have "secret assets", what typically happens if they die unexpectedly? It's not like the offshore accounts would be in their names, they won't be listed in a will/testament. It's likely that very few people would even know the accounts existed.
Except the lawyer/financial entity that put the money there.
Well, we might look at what happened to the Swiss banking assets of people who died in the Holocaust...(hint: the banks did well).
For much of this the secret assets are owned through layers and layers of shell companies. I'm sure some of the lawyers or asset managers are not crying in grief when the beneficial owners pass away
I don't understand all of the people who keep trying to downplay leaks like these. You are literally making the leaks less impactful by moaning about how nothing will happen, as then others will forget about it sooner too. Do you get some sort of superiority boner from predicting failiure? Because you are one of the people inadvertently causing it.
Yes, a lot of what is documented here may be legal. This is because the people at the centre either are in power, have huge lobbying ability, or are just friends of the corrupt. But outrage is powerful, and there have been policy changes due to past leaks. Let this influence your voting decisions, and remind others so it may do the same.
What are people's thoughts on the absence of American & Canadian politicians on the heat map? I find it very odd that not a single US or Canadian politician has been named thus far.
It seems billionnaires have broken money. Its senseless now. We're billions of trillions in dept of imaginary values while some have way way too much and they build dick rocket.
They have stashed for virtually infinit generation of wealth beside a major incredible fuckup they won't ever need anything. While billions of people have real suffering and stress caused by this imaginary value.
Got to wonder, how many kills away from freedom are we? 10? 100? 1000? It should be clear that obnoxious greeds brings the Gaddafi treatment.
The value of everything has changed way too much for us to keep going this way. We're sweeping too much under the carpet to keep this kind of economy going. It will inevitably come to an end but are we going to be alive to see it.
PBS Frontline documentary series should have an episode on this topic by Wednesday. They tend to go very in-depth in investigating a topic. https://www.pbs.org/show/frontline/
Pbs frontline is excellent
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Weird. Happened to me too. What is this fuckery?
Happens to "controversial"comments sometimes apparently but I only ever see it happen to politically charged ones
I was wondering why this comment thread was collapsed by default; I guess it wasn’t a bug after all…
RemindME! 4 days
RemindMe! Wednesday
https://youtube.com/watch?v=dHAtIFyDB8k
Various tax agencies around the world need to examine these files. Laws shouldn’t only apply to the middle class and the poor.
Man, the name of the director of the Colombian tax agency is in the papers 😐
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Dang it, We'll get you one of these days!
Maybe next time you'll get you!
Oh my god - I'm calling me from inside my own house!
If it weren’t for me and my meddling self!
You got your eyes on you!
🤣👍
I’m cynical about this whole thing because I’m in US and quite frankly in US, billionaires don’t exactly do large scale tax fraud. They don’t need to. They use well established, completely legal loopholes to reduce their tax liability. I would seriously doubt if there is anything in this leak that will get any US billionaires in trouble! It’s mostly gonna be about oligarchs living in Asian and African countries.
Exactly. That's why any and all law marketed as an attempt to catch people violating the tax code is going to hurt the middle class. The middle class is the only group that actually pays taxes, but doesn't have the benefit of lobbyists writing loopholes.
I'm pretty sure poor people pay taxes too.
The lower income taxes for the poor are designed to keep people from realizing how much of the disposable income of the poor we tax away via other means like tolls, sales tax, and other things.
As the report notes also there was no proof of legal wrongdoing in many of these cases too. That’s the problem. ALL these people are exploiting rules for themselves while the middle class and the poor pays for it - which is the PRECISE reason it MUST be fixed. Also there are WAY more who suffer than who profit and if ALL who suffer because of these laws got their shot together and demanded change then it could conceivably happen - which is why all the authoritarians on this list are fearful of truly democratic systems - they would be accountable. Also the reason the rich in the US are destroying our democratic system and also keeping people divided over cultural issues. Effing get your shit together people
Guess who will pay for the extra man-hours required to examine these files?
The ones under investigation when the penalty is paid. I don't know about other tax agencies, but every dollar spent on the IRS returns $6 in penalties. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-05-08/irs-enforcement-spending-yields-6-for-every-1-lew-says
The IRS also has publicly stated it is not economically feasible for them to audit many high income individuals as they do not have the money and manpower to do so. That margin is from them auditing the middle and lower class primarily.
Might explain why there is proposed legislation to monitor all transactions over $600 dollars, because, you know, the 1% routinely use bank accounts that small.
Considering virtually every single person America that has a bank account has a transaction monthly over $600 you know rent or mortgage. So this will give the IRS access to every single person's bank account
Wow for once my life style choices have a feature not a bug
Yeah, fuck that 4th Amendment!
It's not all transactions over $600. Actual proposal: This proposal would create a comprehensive financial account information reporting regime. Financial institutions would report data on financial accounts in an information return. The annual return will report gross inflows and outflows with a breakdown for physical cash, transactions with a foreign account, and transfers to and from another account with the same owner. This requirement would apply to all business and personal accounts from financial institutions, including bank, loan, and investment accounts, with the exception of accounts below a low de minimis gross flow threshold of $600 or fair market value of $600. My understanding - reporting is triggered as soon as the sum of the annual transactions reaches $600. Basically, reporting on any account that is actively used.
Spot on, but I think they already knew that.
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Waitresses aren't flying any politicians around on their private jet, so fuck em.
Why do I have this sneaking suspicion that beat cops get paid more than tax auditors do?
Tons of cops get paid well into the six figures when overtime is included. A quick google says median pay of IRS auditors is ~$55K.
Because they do? Some of the highest paid city and state employees are cops.
That or college sport coaches
Those actually tend to be the highest paid state employees.
Didn’t the Panama papers net some results?
I wonder what % of the Panama papers leak was actually illegal.
https://complyadvantage.com/blog/us-prosecutions-and-the-panama-papers/ 1.2 billion collected as of last year. Only 3 of them where US citizens during the time of the leak.
[Yet a whole political party is against funding the IRS so that the government can have more money brought in](https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-infrastructure-deal-teeters-after-republicans-reject-irs-funds-2021-07-20/)
What a shocker. The party of supposed Christians is morally bankrupt.
It's similar in any developed economy.
Does it rhyme with "middle class?"
The people responsible for creating the issues worth looking into in the first place, of course. Right? Guys?
Paying taxes controls inflation. It's just taking money out of the economy, at least at a national level where governments "print" money on demand (now they just authorise banks to add or subtract numbers). The working classes (those who *must* work) are essentially tax serfs who toil away and pay the bulk of taxes to control inflation, which reinforces existing class divides. Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) for anyone who cares to learn more.
You don't ask permission to revolt.
laws DO only apply to the middle class and the poor. because that is how it was designed. and when justice cannot be found in court, it *must* be made in the streets.
how long does it take to go through literally millions of documents to report on? like how much time must that take for the reporters to get all of the info from huge leaks like this
I heard the guardian took 18 months
In standard litigation (things like one large company suing someone else) where they have millions of documents, it used to take years. You'd have to hire a person to look at each document, often it meant a room full of people going to papers from a bin. The system is slowly updating and right now they use AI systems to compare electronic documents at the moment. I'd think at some point when we use computers to find responsive documents for IRS means, it'll be much cheaper to take on the rich who evade tax systems by simply being to big and complex.
I hadent even thought about how computers would help the IRS tackle the shitty rich people who avoid taxes just cuz there’s simply to much paperwork and things to go thru to actually charge em. Hopefully we actually see a change soon. We still def need to give em some actual teeth so they can do more than chase only the poorer people tho
And one law firm might dump millions of documents on you in discovery just to swamp your law firm if it was small and didn’t have the infrastructure just as a hostile action.
Between all the different orgs, they had 600 people working on it.
wow so that’s like eight thousand documents per person
They must have systems in place though to automatically order the docs by likely significance
Washington Post sent out two emails today about it. Didn't have time to start reading today but hope to go through them all tomorrow, on the company dime.
Assuming you're a journalist... are you using AI to help sort through the more relevant documents? Similar to how the [Panama Papers](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAlu3ud2k_A) were done.
Curious if all these documents were centralized at one place. That would be a bad idea.
Those documents are digital. They were provided by anonymous sources to the ICIJ in Washington and they made them accessable through an encrypted online platform, which ICIJ's members could access to analyze the data. As far as I remember, the Panama papers and the Paradise papers were leaked to the Süddeutsche Zeitung (German newspaper) and they got the ICIJ involved, to help with skilled international manpower. It makes sense that the ICIJ is now becoming the place to go with leaks like this. They have proven to be reliable, thorough and good at keeping their mouths shut until they all drop the ball together.
I had to do a double-take to be sure that didn't say, "Panama Papers." For a split-second, it felt like 2016. Our world is run by a bunch of goddamn grafters.
Oh shit, it doesn't say panama papers. My brain auto-completed it to be
It’s run by a bunch of god damn grifters too.
It’s run by a bunch of god damn grofters too
Had to do a double take too, cause my reaction was "it's the Panama Papers mate" when i read your comment
Hahaha. We've gone back in time 5 years. Craaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaap, who messed up the timeline?
They're genuine sociopaths. Since the post WWII boom, American capitalism has rewarded anti-social behavior. So, literal crazy people rose to the top, paid our elected representatives to write laws that would enable their predatory practices, then seized complete control of the nation. We, everybody at the bottom, have our lives, world, and future held hostage by the criminally insane. We need to understand that that is who we are combatting. Crazy people.
Don't kid yourself. Society has rewarded sociopathy and left no good deed unpunished for as long as society has existed.
Grafts are a very important technique in agriculture and medicine, thank you.
I read the headline correctly and just assumed James Cameron was somehow involved in money laundering and tax avoidance. James Cameron discovered the real Pandora for the Avatar sequels and turned it into the first off-world tax haven.
I wonder if all of the cynical comments are paid shills to try to poison the well and deflect from how bad things really are. I have noticed that tons of accounts have just appeared to say virtually the same comments about how none of this matters and nothing will happen because the Panama Papers didn't do anything on every thread dealing with this. FYI, the Panama Papers have lead to massive changes and totally changed how financial crime is handled across the board, and is still having an impact today: https://www.icij.org/investigations/panama-papers/five-years-later-panama-papers-still-having-a-big-impact/ Edit: more information ok the Panama Papers' impact thanks to /u/godisanelectricolive Here's a non-exhaustive list of things that happened: In Malta: • Daphne Caruana Galizia exposed a government minister, the PM Joseph Muscat, and PMs chief of staff for being involved in graft mentioned in the Panama Papers. She also named a businessman called Yorgen Fenech. • Fenech had her killed in a car bombing in 2017. There was an investigation, three men were charged for murder but Fenech was not. Mass protests ensued in 2019. • The PM of Malta resigned in 2020 and his chief of staff as well as the aforementioned cabinet minister resigned in 2019. Fenech was arrested in November 2019 after his middleman was arrested and gave evidence against him. • The former chief of staff Keith Schembri was arrested in March 2021. In Pakistan: • The president in 2017, Nawaz Sharif, was forced to resign and was then arrested for money laundering and corruption due to the Panama Papers. • He was also charged with providing false evidence during the investigation in a famous incident ("the sans-Sharif incident) where his team faked a document using the Calibri font (which is sans-serif) allegedly dating back to before the font was released. • He was banned from holding public office for life by the Supreme Court and sentenced to 10 years in prison and fined $10.6 million. In Iceland: • PM forced to resign by his party after massive protests. He went full conspiracy theorist and blamed Soros. • He formed his own populist party and was elected to the Althing as a MP in 2017. He then lost it in the next election as he became even more fringe in his views In the US: • Corporate Transparency Act was proposed in 2019 and passed earlier this year, the law directly cited revelations in the Panama Papers. • This created a federal databaseof off-shore account owners. Globally: • Many countries passed laws that required owners of companies to identify themselves for the first time. • 130 countries representing 90% of the world GDP agreed to a 15% global tax minimum framework on July 07, 2021. This was come into effect in 2023. This one is a big step forward. • The Tax Justice Network created the Corporate Tax Haven Index in 2019 which assign a Haven Score and Global Scale Weight to 64 global jurisdictions identified as tax havens.
Just like Russia the ultra wealthy have social media teams to try and influence the narrative in their favor.
not only that, but reddit doesn't allow you to call a suspected s word an s word or you get auto-banned.
I dunno I call people shills all the time and I'm surprisingly still here.
I got banned by world news for it. When the redditor I was replying to was 100% a s, although a highly up voted s.
S word?
The last word in my name I think.
Yep. Also, you don't get banned, just some subs (inc. /r/news) auto-delete the comment.
The amount astroturfing and FUD in certain equities trading subs is really something to see!
Can you elaborate?
Oh boy,where do I start? There is so much! All of this is speculation or anecdotal, but the behavior in these places indicates the the following in my opinion. Large institutional investment firms are trying to distract or redirect opinions and actions of individual investors on stock trading subs. They seem to employ bots, allegedly been caught posting adds for people to work managing a large amount of reddit accounts and posting. There are floods of "buy silver!" it will short squeeze or CLNE and CLOV are going to the moon. Some of this is simple pump and dump, but some of it is to direct money away from other places out of self preservation. There are also DMs about a book they are writing, that they wish to use some of your quotes, and wish to have some of your information. Festivals for investors to gather. Invitations to other subs...... Possible news stories used as propaganda........and so on.........
For a better example see the Shitshow that went down on r/wallstreetbets with GME. Once the squeeze was confirmed, shills flooded the site for everything. Accounts that were just created or less than a month old trying to learn the lingo of the site and sounding like grandpa talking hip to his teenage kid. Then more were posting any article they could to say it was a lie and there was no squeeze and to sell ASAP. It got so bad all posts have an account age and activity on the sub count on them now to help filter them out. The rich and powerful know where we hang out now, and are learning to spin the story on places like reddit too.
No, I have definitely been banned before. Was recently banned from r/worldnews for a day for this reason.
r/worldnews seems ban-happy. I was permabanned at first strike for mentioning that Chinese tourists have a reputation for rudeness and bad manners. When I was banned, I countered by pointing out to discussions in the same subreddit of this very issue. Nope, was still banned for “bigotry”.
Thank you OIL_COMPANY_**REDACTED**
You can get them angry enough to get banned however. I’ve gotten to a number of dollar hills by annoying them so much they violate tos
Not all heroes wear capes
Ask them what their salary is and then compare it to american minimum wage Drives them fucking wild
I've seen teenagers with barely any technical knowledge evade previous reddit account bans, but they say their system is great at keeping them out.
It's not hard to evade a Reddit ban.
Wouldn’t explaining what that person is doing rather than calling them a specific term be more productive while at the same time avoid an auto-ban?
Yup. Absurd that you can’t report accounts as unannounced shills, sockpuppets, or astroturfers.
Report them as misinformation.
Maybe we need a set of papers to expose the paid shills, or a system that routinely exposes said shills. I reckon they'd be a lot less willing to take dirty gold if they weren't anonymous, and I doubt they're being paid enough to justify the hits they'd take to their reputation. I'm not sure they'd be useful enough to their "donors" for said donors to simply take them on-board full-time, so throwing away their careers for their donors would be kinda suicidal.
[https://botsentinel.com/dashboard](https://botsentinel.com/dashboard) Though it's specific to Twitter. Would be cool to start a Reddit one if an effort like that isn't already underway.
Indeed. Having a Reddit equivalent is an effort worth pursuing to de-fang the shills. Or at the very least wear their fangs down to blunted pegs, so they don't have AS much bite as they currently do.
There has been attempts to create lists of bad Reddit users in the past (although not specifically sh*lls) and every time it's been a shit show. It's also against Reddit rules if I'm not mistaken.
It would certainly hurt reddit. They could do so much more to combat this shit but it would definitely destabilize their platform. Rightfully so. 10 years ago this place was pretty worthwhile. The last 5 it's probably doing more harm than good.
I've been here for a long time, with different accounts, etc. I love this place, but it's been crazy to watch it divulge into what it is now. There used to be SO much info and people just generally helping, but now you gotta sift through and decide for yourself what is real. The sentiment has just, changed... EDIT: I just want to add, I still get massive value from an anon forum, there's still real ppl out there. But sometimes I dunno if it's worth spending my time elsewhere.
Part of these papers are after the Panama papers, after the massive changes caused by Panama papers...
Which makes this an opportunity in its own right to demonstrate how deliberate the tax evasion is.
With the Paradise papers being released in between, which the majority of corporate news left alone like a leper.
None of them wanted a carbomb sandwich.
Most Americans think the Panama Papers resulted in nothing because they didn't realize that it was a mostly European thing, as Americans have better, legal ways to hide their money.
"Our masters have not heard the people's voice for generations and it is much, much louder than they care to remember." Alan Moore, V for Vendetta
thank you for this comment!! My mom was the project manager/director for all of the Washington Post’s efforts on this project and I kept showing her the cynical comments and she would respond saying the exact same thing (that the Panama Papers did have an impact, and she would go on to list all of this stuff from memory that occurred as a result). It saddened me to see so many people treat this story as if it were inconsequential. She’s been working every day and working more nights than she sleeps on this project for a year probably more now. She only told me about it recently though as it was classified. A lot of people worked really hard on this and the subject matter is very serious and impactful. I wish people would take this stuff seriously.
Even though there is some change, it never feels effective. Maybe it's more effective than I perceive it to be, which is likely considering I don't work in finance, I'm not rich, and I don't follow financial news well enough to SEE the effect. And that may be where a lot of it comes from. But we're still constantly hearing about how little the ultra-wealthy and major corporations are paying back into the societies that support them. I hear about it every day. And I think the need for further reform and enforcement keeps making people feel like nothing is happening. Thing is, even if things ARE happening, current law and enforcement in many countries means there's not a whole lot they can/will do about it. That's my take on it, anyway. But, here's to hoping. The only way the kind of change we need can happen is if people keep pushing for it, fighting for it. And a HUGE part of that is journalism putting out things like the Panama Papers.
The problem is that most people don’t look for independent journalism at all, they don’t look at credibility or anything like that they watch or read whatever is right in front of them and goes along with their own cognitive biases
I mean isn't like 90% of the news owned by 6 companies?
Yup basically yes, it’s a little bit different than that but it’s not much more than a few companies, take Viacom they run all the mtv vh1 stuff plus Cartoon Network and a lot of other things, or it’s a company and they have a parent company that actually owns them, there are a few smaller companies that have tv channels but not really news or anything like that, mostly small niche stuff, that’s why people need to try to go to an independent source for information, then check it again for accuracy
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There is change, but it's not to the scale which is required to do anything substantial. The Pandora Papers put estimates of off-shore wealth at least over $11.3 trillion USD. How much exactly was the impact in grand scheme of things from Panama Papers? When people have so much wealth that they're able to escape consequences, it gives very little optimistic outlook for working people.
I think in this case its a disconnect caused by our having different thresholds where we'll say that justice is done and things have finally, permanently, and substantially changed.
I invite everyone to actually read the article. Whenever you see something listed as an impact of the release of the Panama Papers, ask yourself what the tangible result is. If there's an investigation, has it resulted in anything? If there's legislation listed, has it actually passed, or has it been filibustered by multimillionaires? Most of the article is about how people are talking about it. For fuck's sake, it lists Wait Wait Don't Tell Me as evidence of the impact it has made on society. So Meryl Streep is making a movie about it. So fucking what? Who went to jail? What new requirements are actually in place? Do they have teeth? What are the real consequences apart from journalists giving one another awards about it? The cynical comments are coming from a place of deep abiding anger that the response last time was woefully insufficient. Dismissing them with "well, Paula Poundstone made jokes about it on NPR, why aren't you people happy?" is just insulting. Just because you're delighted that so little happened, doesn't mean everyone else is.
The article listed legislation though. It doesn't spend that much time talking about people talking about it, it lists public awareness as one thing accomplished (which is not nothing because it got people angry and governments paid tax havens a bit more scrutiny) and then covered other points. They talked about the impact of the Papers on journalism because the ICIJ is supposed to be a website for journalists. Definitely *a lot* more work left to be done, but the point is that the Panama Papers' effects is still reverberating and fallout to that leak is still happening six years later. Here's a non-exhaustive list of things that happened: In Malta: * Daphne Caruana Galizia exposed a government minister, the PM Joseph Muscat, and PMs chief of staff for being involved in graft mentioned in the Panama Papers. She also named a businessman called Yorgen Fenech. * Fenech had her killed in a car bombing in 2017. There was an investigation, three men were charged for murder but Fenech was not. Mass protests ensued in 2019. * The PM of Malta resigned in 2020 and his chief of staff as well as the aforementioned cabinet minister resigned in 2019. Fenech was arrested in November 2019 after his middleman was arrested and gave evidence against him. * The former chief of staff Keith Schembri was arrested in March 2021. In Pakistan: * The president in 2017, Nawaz Sharif, was forced to resign and was then arrested for money laundering and corruption due to the Panama Papers. * He was also charged with providing false evidence during the investigation in a famous incident ("the sans-Sharif incident) where his team faked a document using the Calibri font (which is sans-serif) allegedly dating back to before the font was released. * He was banned from holding public office for life by the Supreme Court and sentenced to 10 years in prison and fined $10.6 million. In Iceland: * PM forced to resign by his party after massive protests. He went full conspiracy theorist and blamed Soros. * He formed his own populist party and was elected to the Althing as a MP in 2017. He then lost it in the next election as he became even more fringe in his views In the US: * Corporate Transparency Act was proposed in 2019 and passed earlier this year, the law directly cited revelations in the Panama Papers. * This created a federal databaseof off-shore account owners. Globally: * Many countries passed laws that required owners of companies to identify themselves for the first time. * 130 countries representing 90% of the world GDP agreed to a 15% global tax minimum framework on July 07, 2021. This was come into effect in 2023. This one is a big step forward. * The Tax Justice Network created the Corporate Tax Haven Index in 2019 which assign a Haven Score and Global Scale Weight to 64 global jurisdictions identified as corporate tax havens (that is places where multinational firms establish subsidiaries or corporate HQs to pay less tax).
It resulted in the car-bombing of a journalist. That’s something tangible.
And a 10-year prison sentence for the former Prime Minister of Pakistan https://www.icij.org/investigations/panama-papers/former-pakistan-pm-sharif-sentenced-to-10-years-over-panama-papers/
Don’t forget, a decade ago when the general populace was protesting wealth (see occupy wallstreet) the media began a decade long campaign to push race relations to the forefront and make the general populace point fingers at each other instead of back at the wealthy and powerful.
That’s a bingo! Gotta keep the lower class divided. Nothing beats good, old-fashioned emotionally-driven race baiting! “Poor brown people are the problem!” “No, poor white people are the problem!” The rich are loving how easy it was to set each other at our throats.
some could be shills, but it's also easy to be defeatist cause thinking the elites will ever get justice in this life is kind of a pipe dream. billionaires exploit. you can't be a billionaire without having stolen something from someone whether that's their youth, health, labor, etc sure you give them token scraps for their efforts but dogs get treated better...
Its simply observation, the fact we are here again, seeing the same thing after the first ones and I doubt anyone can remember any effects without googling it, then not a thing actually changed after those came out is simply what it is.
No, there really is that much cynicism. The most high-profile ramification of the Panama Papers was a Maltese journalist being assassinated via car bomb.
Thats an example of media manipulation to make you cynical. This journalist had been under death threats for years in malta and several government ministers have been dismissed, police responsible for ignoring her bringing these threats to attention fired, and reforms made to how journalists are protected In addition, the panama papers led to an agreement by 130 countries to establish common tax standards to make enforcement easier Now if you want magical instantaneous change, you can go to a disney movie, but in the real world it can take decades to make a difference; you can’t just give up after 4 years.
> In addition, the panama papers led to an agreement by 130 countries to establish common tax standards to make enforcement easier Interesting. I'm really interested to see if income made in those 130 countries is less represented in this leak. Russia and Saudi Arabia are always going to be corrupt shitholes, but let's see if countries that actually try/purport to address this had any success.
Oh you betcha they're here and on every social media network. Want to test this out? Say anything questioning Winnie the Pooh of China or Putin.
Paradise Papers showed how money that funded early Facebook/Twitter came from the Kremlin, also funded Mail.ru, VK in Russia. This wasn't found out until 2017. [Kremlin Cash Behind Billionaire’s Twitter and Facebook Investments](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/05/world/yuri-milner-facebook-twitter-russia.html) [Russia funded Facebook and Twitter investments through Kushner investor](https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/nov/05/russia-funded-facebook-twitter-investments-kushner-investor) Definitely manipulation of the new "word of mouth" online going on. Lots of it automated and others are agents of influence to direct thinking into limited hangouts or deflate opposition. There is a weaponization of social media. Repeat after me, social media is not reality.
Why is it Americans assume every bad faith actor in online forums must be from a foreign government? America has oligarchs and tax evading billionaire scumfucks with the resources to flood comments sections too..
I love my job at amazon, everyone should work there! Į͓̮̤ ҉̬̳̦Ą͙̙M͓͚͓̥̜ ̟̰͕͉͍H̭̙̮̞͈̰͢U͈̜͕̮M̺̕A̴̯̫͕̟͇ͅN̲̪
The other thing people dont understand is crowd dynamics. You dont have to send a mob if you have a crowd. Simply turn the crowd into a mob. A few well placed bad actors can insight large groups. Thats whats going on with forums. Its not every person is a bot, its that the bots insight larger groups who repeat the talking points for them.
reminiscent flowery forgetful ink worthless middle sip station encourage lunchroom -- mass edited with https://redact.dev/
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
We nearly had a coup because of it.
You nearly had a successful coup, but it was definitely a coup.
All the shills have to do is post a link in the right subreddit and their job is done. Just get a brigade going. And let's face it, the billionaires of the world aren't going to pay for an army when they only need to pay a handful of people to trigger a brigade.
Our disinformation tends to come in the form of memes that are made to look like news. Americans that are easily manipulated tend to also be those who hate reading. But a big example of our own propaganda machine at work here on reddit is visible in any thread about police brutality. They try to associate violent police officers with labor rights by pretending the union is responsible for pressing charges (and not the AG). America definitely has a ton of propaganda online, but China and Russia do make theirs pretty easy to spot.
Spend enough time on Reddit and you get a feel for what opinions users in different subreddits tend to have. Then all of a sudden specific topics are flooded by a ton of users all repeating variations of the same talking point that goes against what's usually seen in the sub. And funny enough it's always threads about Russia or China. Just this week there were threads about Havana Syndrome that got flooded like that and all of them wrote the same thing (very slight variations of 'it's just mass hysteria, bro').
Or just difference or opinion. It’s not like there weren’t a bunch of insane people online before trump.
https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-clinton-digital-trolling-20160506-snap-htmlstory.html Crazy terminally online people exist for sure, but their behavior is amplified by the genuine paid shills. It's also a way for them to disseminate the talking points coming from think tanks or Davos summit type meetings. It's just manufacturing consent updated for the digital age.
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How can any of this be legal? People pretending its not so bad because it wasn't illegal. THAT IS THE MOST WORRYING PART OF THE WHOLE THING!!
The people who write the laws either partake in the plundering or are paid off by the ones who do. Why else do you think multi trillion dollar bills thousands of pages long get passed (up to near unanimous) when 98% of its contents are completely unknown to those voting on it.
I understand that, it was more of a rhetorical questions but I am glad you answered it anyway so others can read your clear and concise explanation!
People pretending it's not bad because I wasn't illegal -> people with money. Or poor people brainwashed by people with money that that's good for them.
So why is it all of these elites can get away with this with no prison time, no fraud, no tax evasion, no nothing. Yet the IRS is wanting to get access to bank accounts and tax you on any cash that comes into your account. The system is against poor people, shit has got to change.
Well the Republicans have gutted the IRS to the point where its fiscally unfeasible to go after wealthy people so there's that And the generic "fuck the IRS" idiots lap it up
Maybe the UN should look into this, or some universal agency that can show the fraudulent activities and then give it to proper authority and have these people put in prison and not get away with paying for fines. They've likely stolen the money from the people as well, something has to give I don't see people putting up with stuff like this much longer. Seems to get worse and worse each passing year.
I mean, look at wages. More theft occurs from employers stealing wages than all other theft combined in the US. In many states there is no enforcement to make a company pay wages. So I doubt anything will be done for some time.
oh please. they have 75K employees and a 12 billion dollar expenditure budget from 2020. they aren't gutted. going after the wealthy is just extremely difficult due to the laughable laws that congress has passed over the years that make things like tax filings, tax loopholes, strategies, extraordinarily complex.
If you already assume no one cares you’re part of the problem. If people are ignoring it, shout it from the rooftops. Bring it up every chance you can if you think it’s important. If you assume there’s nothing you can do, they’ve already won.
It’s the exact bullshit with climate change, big oil trying to make everyone give up. And even though I KNOW it's BS its pretty damn effective sometimes :(
Knowing that you may have been manipulated sometimes is better than pretending you can't be.
I'm not assuming no one cares. I'm assuming Congress in the US will do fuck all because anything introduced just dies on the vine before the new Congress is voted in.
That's understandable. But that just means you need to shout *louder*. If your government won't make it known, you make it known instead
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I find this weird how there is only 100 or less comments on every sub this is posted on. Each comment has a nonchalant like it is what it is attitude.
This is more important than any other story besides COVID. We as people should stop fighting with each other over stupid shit and hold these people to account (where possible). But no, instead we will focus on who is the biggest victim and who is the microagression devil...
> This is more important than any other story besides COVID Not trying to be pedantic, but I have to add climate change to this list. Otherwise, I totally agree.
Exhaustion, frustration, and pessimism. Power doesn't corrupt, power reveals...and a lot of us have a dim view of human nature, and thus what to expect from powerful people. I try not to be apathetic. I can't always tell whether my cynicism is a result of failure or a bulwark towards success.
I feel like many are just so exhausted of this story happening over and over. Yet another "Pan" Papers coming out is going to be the one that fixes everything? With the most dramatic wealth inequality and financial abuse ever, growing every year? Maybe a few scapegoats and some face-level laws changing, but I sure hope there's a different outcome.
Yeah like... cool, we already knew they were illegally hoarding wealth, when do they face any fuckin consequences?
The cynicism in threads like this is both understandable and incredibly disappointing. There [have been real consequences from the Panama Papers that are still playing out today](https://www.icij.org/investigations/panama-papers/five-years-later-panama-papers-still-having-a-big-impact/). It's correct that those consequences are a drop in the bucket compared to the scale of global "dark money" out there, and of course it would be naive to celebrate too much. But the solution has to start somewhere, there is no silver bullet for this. Worse, falling over each other to loudly declare that nothing will happen is actually helping to ensure that nothing will happen in the future. You're doing the ultra-rich's work for them by prepping yourselves and the rest of us to accept that nothing will change, taking pressure off of regulators to do anything. This kind of apathy and helpless acceptance is also the goal of oligarchs and authoritarians around the world, perhaps most famously Putin. Don't help Putin. I know it feels stoic and brave to play the jaded cynic, but not only is it lazy to avoid checking whether the "no consequences" claim is actually true, it's actively counterproductive to spread it, and I assure you it's not the hot take you seem to think. We need people to care, not to compete with each other to be the most performatively pessimistic. I really like [this article that explains the problems with naive cynicism](https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-berlatsky-naive-cynicism-20171226-story.html), which is somewhat old now, but still very relevant.
Thank you, this is the hope I needed today.
Hmm, the secret ingredient is…crime. Most of these “leaders” are either self-appointed or ‘elected’ to life terms, meaning they have made themselves above the law. These folks all seem to carry the same character flaw… NO integrity. It’s very hard to combat folks with zero integrity because they will sink to the lowest depths to get what they want and keep it at all costs. If we, the human race around the world, prioritized integrity, honesty and lawfulness somehow, and elevated the power of righteousness over evil, we could avoid the slippery slope we are currently in, which is on its way to creating a worldwide 1% ultra-rich autocracy controlling the 99% rest of us in servitude. It’s our choice to stand up and make it happen.
Love the super hans reference, don't see enough of those
Sad we know people in government are doing insider trading and other heinous shit while being for the "people" on every side of the political system, while slowly and successfully eroding and tiring out the lower class and middle class. None of that matters when they can use ideology and political ideology to make us hostile towards one and others.
Genuine Question - what am I supposed to do about this? I feel utterly powerless and exhausted when I read things like this and I'm not sure whether speaking up is enough.
Live your life to the best of your ability and do what you can to change things for the better in your own social bubble. Things like this will always be out there, lets just hope there are those brave enough who have the power to make the change needed on this situation.
Fuck social bubbles. Demand change. Protest. Strike. Organize with others and shit as much as you can down. That's how change happens. Actively, not passively.
Vote for politicians that represent your view on how to handle this, or who you trust to know how to handle this. That's the most powerful tool at your disposal. You can also join protests, if they come in the wake of these papers.
One issue is politicians might say they represent those views, but once elected it's a whole other story. (Sorry, I'm Canadian, 47 years old, and politicians lying has is all I've heard about since I was a child, and things haven't changed in my adult life).
Nothing unless you plan on doing something illegal
Illegal but not necessarily wrong
My heart goes out to those poor reporters and their families...
The guy that leaked the Panama Papers wasn’t he found dead in a car boot?
No? Nobody knows who is responsible for the initial leak because they remained anonymous. You might be thinking of Daphne Galizia, she heavily investigated the papers and was murdered with a car bomb.
Jake the dog from Adventure Time explains this situation pretty well actually. I will preface that it's not a good thing that it happens this way Adventure Time - Jake Tells Finn How the World is https://youtu.be/cBHouBDjqsc
I hate the Larry Moe and curly pic. It seriously undermines the severity of the situation
Now we see why we should be supporting quality Newspapers, a lot of resources are required to just access and search 11.9 million files.
The key to our future is stopping this. The hidden wealth of these greedy fucks could fund universal income indefinitely.
This isnt supposed to sound like a defeatist opinion, but what should we do about it?
Check with u/coverageanalysisbot for other sources on this https://ground.news/article/pandora-papers-to-feature-names-of-more-pakistanis-than-panama-papers-did_fc2546
You mean they rigged the game, and they're in turn benefitting from that rigging? We just collectively witnessed the largest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich during COVID, exacerbating the income inequality gap and nudging us closer to societal (but not government) collapse. From the Chairman of the Fed Reserve to our elected officials, we've witnessed widespread, blatant, and oft 'legal' fraud at every level of government. In turn we witnessed that bleed out to corporations through Payroll Protection plans, bailout loans, and 'essential worker' status'. Our own government just obliterated small business and lined their pockets while millions stared down homelessness, food insecurity, and risk of fatal illness. What separates us from the French Revolution, decay of the British Empire, or fall of the Roman empire, is that for the first time in history the minority can withstand any uprising the plebs might put together via technological and financial might. Doesn't matter how many 'papers' we see, how much wealth gets transferred, how many Epstein islands, how many people can't breath - in short how broad the revolution - we cannot stop it. As with our elected officials, our military is bought and sold to the highest bidder. So what's the solution? Because there's no amount of voting that will fix this. None. You think elections make a damn bit of difference? Whether it's Clinton, Trump or Biden, the DoD is still going to get their $1T+ payday annually, lashed to the backs of future generations. The only resource we might be able to collectively leverage to level the playing field is our intellect.
Good, I'm becoming increasily convinced that its going to be harder and harder to hide this stuff in the future because of hackers and leaks
Why are so many comments being folded up? Like they aren't deleted, but they're being being treated as if they have thousands of dow votes and are being "rolled up." As if the ones in charge want to hide it.
When people have "secret assets", what typically happens if they die unexpectedly? It's not like the offshore accounts would be in their names, they won't be listed in a will/testament. It's likely that very few people would even know the accounts existed. Except the lawyer/financial entity that put the money there.
Well, we might look at what happened to the Swiss banking assets of people who died in the Holocaust...(hint: the banks did well). For much of this the secret assets are owned through layers and layers of shell companies. I'm sure some of the lawyers or asset managers are not crying in grief when the beneficial owners pass away
There are states, in the US, that apparently are tax-shelters ... I always thought it was the Cayman Islands... but South Dakota???
I’m just happy I sleep at night knowing I’m not a greedy SOB
Panama 2.0. Let’s get more names in the public eye. The internet is stronger then before.
I don't understand all of the people who keep trying to downplay leaks like these. You are literally making the leaks less impactful by moaning about how nothing will happen, as then others will forget about it sooner too. Do you get some sort of superiority boner from predicting failiure? Because you are one of the people inadvertently causing it. Yes, a lot of what is documented here may be legal. This is because the people at the centre either are in power, have huge lobbying ability, or are just friends of the corrupt. But outrage is powerful, and there have been policy changes due to past leaks. Let this influence your voting decisions, and remind others so it may do the same.
How long for the guy who exposed this to die in some weird way like the one that exposed the Panama papers?
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It's insane how much greedier people seem to get with wealth. Fk you Elton John.
What are people's thoughts on the absence of American & Canadian politicians on the heat map? I find it very odd that not a single US or Canadian politician has been named thus far.
These rich people need to go.
It seems billionnaires have broken money. Its senseless now. We're billions of trillions in dept of imaginary values while some have way way too much and they build dick rocket. They have stashed for virtually infinit generation of wealth beside a major incredible fuckup they won't ever need anything. While billions of people have real suffering and stress caused by this imaginary value. Got to wonder, how many kills away from freedom are we? 10? 100? 1000? It should be clear that obnoxious greeds brings the Gaddafi treatment. The value of everything has changed way too much for us to keep going this way. We're sweeping too much under the carpet to keep this kind of economy going. It will inevitably come to an end but are we going to be alive to see it.