Dictionaries are descriptive, not proscriptive, and beyond that, decades of research have shown gender and sexuality are fluid. Clearly you feel very threatened by someone not conforming to your views of sexuality, but that's really too bad. Just like racists half a century ago, you're just going to have to get with the times or become a member of an increasingly marginalized and impotent group of malcontents.
And really, how does any of this harm you? Are you have secret thoughts that are awakened by someone who has a different view of their gender? Do you need to protect your own gender identity by suppressing someone whose identity is different? What are you afraid of?
In general terms they rely on the courts to overturn the laws. Then they can go to the bigots that form their base and say "We tried to help Jesus, but those pinko Liberal activist judges interfered!" There'll be a whole lot of whining about activist courts, how none of the Founding Fathers wore dresses, how "family values" are being destroyed, as the bigots donate money to their re-election campaign.
There is a narrative being spun that the Panama Papers are nothing more than an invasion of privacy, and that it's all part of quest by evil Leftists to damage the poor, long-suffering rich people. For this to work, of course, examples of misconduct have to be rewritten as purely mundane business arrangements. Hence, in the case of the PM of Iceland, what amounts to a scheme to bury the fact that the PM was a direct beneficiary of moneys his own government was going to be funneling has to be transformed into a mere checking account. One can imagine that soon enough Western banks and investment houses helping tyrants and criminal organizations bury their cash, or helping billionaires evade taxes, will merely be very normal business transactions, just some guys writing checks on some British Virgin Islands checking account.
I think we know who is trying to sow these stories. What I can't understand is the useful idiots on forums like Slashdot helping corrupt billionaires spread thick layers of bullshit. Does somebody get paid, or is this just an example of the mindless anti-regulation types trying to bolster their own worthless world view.
If the United States and other major economic powers had not intervened by pumping money into the banks and financial markets, the whole international credit system would have ground to a halt. What was a relatively shortlived recession would have turned into a Depression. Yes, it meant bailing out banks that had been party to malfeasance and incompetence in one degree or another, but the alternative was so horrible that no one was willing to sit around at that point trying to determine who was deserving and who wasn't. This was about saving the global economy, and by extension saving the domestic economies of dozens of nations.
To be more specific, he was funneling money to investors, among which was his wife, part of whose holdings were his, until he sold them to her for a dollar the day before he would have to had to have revealed that he had those holdings.
In sheer number of deaths, Mao is the worst (nobody is certain how many Chinese died in the Great Leap Forward, but it's in the tens of millions). As to whether Stalin or Hitler are worse, I still say Hitler, and not just because of the Holocaust (Stalin's purges, forced relocations and forced famines killed more), but because Hitler's actions not only lead to the Second World War, but so thoroughly altered the world order that in many ways we still live under the shadow the Nazis. Without WWII, it seems likely Stalin's actions would have remained contained to within the borders of the USSR, but the destabilization that occurred during and after WWII created the Cold War and a Soviet regime utterly paranoid of some Western power rising up to invade it, thus creating the series of alliances on both sides of the Cold War.
I'd like to think that in just about any liberal democracy, having the head of government being caught trying to hide a significant conflict of interest and then rejigging a repayment scheme so that a large amount of money was directed at his or her spouse would at the very least raise an eyebrow.
What this document dump reveals is that Putin is a lot smarter than the idiot former PM of Iceland. Putin makes sure no money ever touches his hands. It all ends up be a bizarre set of coincidences in which his close friends and family are all billionaires, but so far as anyone can tell, Putin is as poor as a pauper.
The same, by the way, seems to be the case for Chinese President Xi Jinping, who appears to have no money, but who seems oddly surrounded by friends and family who have vast sums.
Of course he should resign. He had an undeclared conflict of interest and clearly knew he had such a conflict, which is why he went out of his way to try to hide the conflict; including a transfer of the assets to his wife (which wouldn't in almost any jurisdiction clear him of conflict) and in a timely fashion to avoid ever having to report it. He's the head of the government, a government which negotiated to have payments redirected to creditors, of which he (despite his pretty flimsy attempt to hide it) was one. There's no way to look at this that doesn't arrive at one conclusion; that this was political corruption.
I'd say deliberately trying to obscure a conflict of interest at the very least underscores the fact that they were well aware that there was a conflict.
The Republican base is already broken, and in reality has been broken since 2008. Trump may be the instrument of GOP Armageddon, but the Horsemen of the Apocalypse have been wreaking havoc for eight years now. Whether Trump wins the nomination or not, the party is in bad shape. If he loses the nomination and walks away with his supporters, the meltdown happens before the election. If Trump manages to get the nomination, then the party melts down after the election. Either way, there's a Democrat in the White House and the Republicans are in disarray.
Tax shelters have probably been around forever. They are more sophisticated these days simply because financial systems are more complex, and reporting requirements far greater than they were in the past. Like any scam, tax dodges have to invoke more and more misdirection as investigators gain better powers.
There is a case to be made, however, that these tax shelters are a symptom of the rule makers working in their own self-interest, and creating taxation rules that benefit them. And that's why leaks like this are so important, because in the case of systemic fraud, about the only way you close the holes is by generating a lot of outrage.
Look at Switzerland, whose banking industry was notorious for decades for helping everyone from despots to drug cartels hide cash. For chrissake, even the Nzis were stowing gold they'd stolen from the Jews they were marching off to the gas chambers in Swiss banks. It was only after sustained pressure from international agencies and governments like the US that Switzerland finally began to close the loopholes. And it wouldn't surprise if that's why these tax shelters have become more popular. As the older means of hiding your cash from the taxman (or in some cases, the police) dried up, more sophisticated rackets were formulated.
For me, as bad as it is that rich and powerful people are doing this, the real target here should be the bankers, lawyers and accountants of dozens of countries who set up these schemes. While it will doubtless please the mob that a few politicians and international types fall over this, I'd like to see murky investment scheme organizations like Mossack Fonseca & Co. torn wide open. Otherwise, the people that create these dodges and shelters will just regroup and build some new schemes.
I can't speak for Iceland, but in many common law jurisdictions you cannot claim that you have divested yourself of an asset if you sell it to a spouse or other close family member, and even transactions between more distantly related people, or people not related by blood at all, can be called into question where the transfer involved a transaction whose amount was only a fraction of the possible value of the asset.
Even beyond that, however, is a critical notion in dealing with conflicts of interest, and that is degree of separation. In many jurisdictions, politicians are required to put any assets that would create a conflict into a blind trust, but I cannot imagine any circumstance under which selling your assets to your wife for a nominal fee would create the necessary degree of separation to be considered a blind trust. The PM was clearly still a beneficiary of any funds handed to creditors of the banks in question, and the whole "sale of assets" looks like nothing more than a self-serving attempt to hide the fact that he still had significant financial interests at stake, even as he was in a position to create policies and make agreements that would materially alter his financial situation.
In other words, this was a conflict of interest, and so far as I can see, considering he was in a position to enlarge his wife's (and really, his) financial holdings, nothing more than a series of corrupt acts. If all that happens out of this is his departure from power, he's probably lucky, because I imagine in many jurisdictions a case could be made for criminal charges.
I still think it's a great idea, and I don't know why some Canadian politicians have been so averse to it. I'm sure Britain would love to pass of the Turks and Caicos, considering the problems the dependency has had over the last ten years, and the people of the dependency would become part of Confederation, gaining access to the Canadian economy and a fairly strong political and economic system. Best of all, they wouldn't even have to change the head of state!
Exactly. I can't think of any jurisdiction, at least in the West, where selling your holdings to your spouse for a dollar somehow means the conflict of interest goes away. This is the kind of idiotic scam someone about to go bankrupt would try, and with the same result. Handing it over to your spouse doesn't make the conflict go away.
Trump won't get the nod. Even if they have to bring in Romney as an attempted at a controlled landing (as opposed to a complete crash), they won't let Trump on the ballot.
The GOP knows it won't win the White House in November. That ship has sailed with Cruz and Trump as the leading contenders. Now it's about preserving the party against the inevitable Trump/anti-Trump wars that will follow Trump's departure.
Russians support strong men because, for centuries, it's all they've ever known. Their brief experiments with democracy; the brief periods of government that approached actual democracy, the four months of the Lvov coalition in 1917 and the Yeltsin years after the collapse of the USSR were such incredible failures that I don't think a lot of Russians actually even want anything but nominal democracy.
Putin seems the brightest of the bunch. His friends and family have zillions of dollars, but somehow Putin, like a great black hole at the center of a galaxy of corruption, can't be seen at all.
But even if someone finds a way to directly implicate him, it will be irrelevant, because much of the Russian press is in Putin's pocket, so most Russians will hear little more than whispers, and what they do hear will be countered with "Evil Yankee pig-dogs trying to make our beloved leader look bad..."
This largely appears to be a defense being invoked by some of those caught up in this. "Why haven't the Americans been outed?" First of all, I do believe at least a couple of American names have already shown up, but as the release is being staged (much as other major leaks have been staged), the Americans on the list are coming.
Frankly, I'm more interested in any more revelations that show how regimes like North Korea and organized crime rings used tax shelters to hide and launder money, to breach sanctions and export bans and the like. I have a feeling that as bad as a naughty Icelandic Prime Minister may seem, we have yet to see the full extent of the out and out large-scale corruption that these tax shelters have been facilitating.
In the long run I expect that shelters like the British Virgin Islands are going to end up having to adopt many of the measures Switzerland did if they want these financial havens to survive, and in some cases I expect the governments (cough... UK... cough) that have allowed their dependencies to behave in this fashion will probably kill much of what makes these tax shelters shelters at all.
The notion of confidence is the chief reason Walter Bagehot, 150 years ago, observed the superiority of the Westminster system to the Presidential system. Short of a trial and conviction for impeachment, there's precious little Congress can do about an errant president.
He sold the asset in question to his wife for one dollar, and the mere fact that his wife still held that asset as he was assuring that funds intended to shore up Icelandic banks was instead redirected to creditors pretty much makes this a case of out and out corruption. You can't just get rid of a conflict of interest by selling your assets to your spouse, particularly when the actual sale was for such a nominal fee that it raises the question as to whether it was even a legitimate transfer.
Stop listening to yourself then. The notion that this is targeted is beyond bizarre, considering one of the targets has ended up being David Cameron, whose old man was hiding cash in a tax shelter.
Besides, many of the American names haven't been released yet, and that's expected to be rather juicy.
Fuck that! Turks and Caicos are going to become the eleventh Canadian province! Time for Canada to actually have a nice little domestic tax shelter to counter the six or seven that Britain runs!
Slashdot Mirror
Dictionaries are descriptive, not proscriptive, and beyond that, decades of research have shown gender and sexuality are fluid. Clearly you feel very threatened by someone not conforming to your views of sexuality, but that's really too bad. Just like racists half a century ago, you're just going to have to get with the times or become a member of an increasingly marginalized and impotent group of malcontents.
And really, how does any of this harm you? Are you have secret thoughts that are awakened by someone who has a different view of their gender? Do you need to protect your own gender identity by suppressing someone whose identity is different? What are you afraid of?
In general terms they rely on the courts to overturn the laws. Then they can go to the bigots that form their base and say "We tried to help Jesus, but those pinko Liberal activist judges interfered!" There'll be a whole lot of whining about activist courts, how none of the Founding Fathers wore dresses, how "family values" are being destroyed, as the bigots donate money to their re-election campaign.
There is a narrative being spun that the Panama Papers are nothing more than an invasion of privacy, and that it's all part of quest by evil Leftists to damage the poor, long-suffering rich people. For this to work, of course, examples of misconduct have to be rewritten as purely mundane business arrangements. Hence, in the case of the PM of Iceland, what amounts to a scheme to bury the fact that the PM was a direct beneficiary of moneys his own government was going to be funneling has to be transformed into a mere checking account. One can imagine that soon enough Western banks and investment houses helping tyrants and criminal organizations bury their cash, or helping billionaires evade taxes, will merely be very normal business transactions, just some guys writing checks on some British Virgin Islands checking account.
I think we know who is trying to sow these stories. What I can't understand is the useful idiots on forums like Slashdot helping corrupt billionaires spread thick layers of bullshit. Does somebody get paid, or is this just an example of the mindless anti-regulation types trying to bolster their own worthless world view.
If the United States and other major economic powers had not intervened by pumping money into the banks and financial markets, the whole international credit system would have ground to a halt. What was a relatively shortlived recession would have turned into a Depression. Yes, it meant bailing out banks that had been party to malfeasance and incompetence in one degree or another, but the alternative was so horrible that no one was willing to sit around at that point trying to determine who was deserving and who wasn't. This was about saving the global economy, and by extension saving the domestic economies of dozens of nations.
To be more specific, he was funneling money to investors, among which was his wife, part of whose holdings were his, until he sold them to her for a dollar the day before he would have to had to have revealed that he had those holdings.
In sheer number of deaths, Mao is the worst (nobody is certain how many Chinese died in the Great Leap Forward, but it's in the tens of millions). As to whether Stalin or Hitler are worse, I still say Hitler, and not just because of the Holocaust (Stalin's purges, forced relocations and forced famines killed more), but because Hitler's actions not only lead to the Second World War, but so thoroughly altered the world order that in many ways we still live under the shadow the Nazis. Without WWII, it seems likely Stalin's actions would have remained contained to within the borders of the USSR, but the destabilization that occurred during and after WWII created the Cold War and a Soviet regime utterly paranoid of some Western power rising up to invade it, thus creating the series of alliances on both sides of the Cold War.
I'd like to think that in just about any liberal democracy, having the head of government being caught trying to hide a significant conflict of interest and then rejigging a repayment scheme so that a large amount of money was directed at his or her spouse would at the very least raise an eyebrow.
What this document dump reveals is that Putin is a lot smarter than the idiot former PM of Iceland. Putin makes sure no money ever touches his hands. It all ends up be a bizarre set of coincidences in which his close friends and family are all billionaires, but so far as anyone can tell, Putin is as poor as a pauper.
The same, by the way, seems to be the case for Chinese President Xi Jinping, who appears to have no money, but who seems oddly surrounded by friends and family who have vast sums.
Of course he should resign. He had an undeclared conflict of interest and clearly knew he had such a conflict, which is why he went out of his way to try to hide the conflict; including a transfer of the assets to his wife (which wouldn't in almost any jurisdiction clear him of conflict) and in a timely fashion to avoid ever having to report it. He's the head of the government, a government which negotiated to have payments redirected to creditors, of which he (despite his pretty flimsy attempt to hide it) was one. There's no way to look at this that doesn't arrive at one conclusion; that this was political corruption.
I'd say deliberately trying to obscure a conflict of interest at the very least underscores the fact that they were well aware that there was a conflict.
The Republican base is already broken, and in reality has been broken since 2008. Trump may be the instrument of GOP Armageddon, but the Horsemen of the Apocalypse have been wreaking havoc for eight years now. Whether Trump wins the nomination or not, the party is in bad shape. If he loses the nomination and walks away with his supporters, the meltdown happens before the election. If Trump manages to get the nomination, then the party melts down after the election. Either way, there's a Democrat in the White House and the Republicans are in disarray.
Tax shelters have probably been around forever. They are more sophisticated these days simply because financial systems are more complex, and reporting requirements far greater than they were in the past. Like any scam, tax dodges have to invoke more and more misdirection as investigators gain better powers.
There is a case to be made, however, that these tax shelters are a symptom of the rule makers working in their own self-interest, and creating taxation rules that benefit them. And that's why leaks like this are so important, because in the case of systemic fraud, about the only way you close the holes is by generating a lot of outrage.
Look at Switzerland, whose banking industry was notorious for decades for helping everyone from despots to drug cartels hide cash. For chrissake, even the Nzis were stowing gold they'd stolen from the Jews they were marching off to the gas chambers in Swiss banks. It was only after sustained pressure from international agencies and governments like the US that Switzerland finally began to close the loopholes. And it wouldn't surprise if that's why these tax shelters have become more popular. As the older means of hiding your cash from the taxman (or in some cases, the police) dried up, more sophisticated rackets were formulated.
For me, as bad as it is that rich and powerful people are doing this, the real target here should be the bankers, lawyers and accountants of dozens of countries who set up these schemes. While it will doubtless please the mob that a few politicians and international types fall over this, I'd like to see murky investment scheme organizations like Mossack Fonseca & Co. torn wide open. Otherwise, the people that create these dodges and shelters will just regroup and build some new schemes.
I can't speak for Iceland, but in many common law jurisdictions you cannot claim that you have divested yourself of an asset if you sell it to a spouse or other close family member, and even transactions between more distantly related people, or people not related by blood at all, can be called into question where the transfer involved a transaction whose amount was only a fraction of the possible value of the asset.
Even beyond that, however, is a critical notion in dealing with conflicts of interest, and that is degree of separation. In many jurisdictions, politicians are required to put any assets that would create a conflict into a blind trust, but I cannot imagine any circumstance under which selling your assets to your wife for a nominal fee would create the necessary degree of separation to be considered a blind trust. The PM was clearly still a beneficiary of any funds handed to creditors of the banks in question, and the whole "sale of assets" looks like nothing more than a self-serving attempt to hide the fact that he still had significant financial interests at stake, even as he was in a position to create policies and make agreements that would materially alter his financial situation.
In other words, this was a conflict of interest, and so far as I can see, considering he was in a position to enlarge his wife's (and really, his) financial holdings, nothing more than a series of corrupt acts. If all that happens out of this is his departure from power, he's probably lucky, because I imagine in many jurisdictions a case could be made for criminal charges.
I still think it's a great idea, and I don't know why some Canadian politicians have been so averse to it. I'm sure Britain would love to pass of the Turks and Caicos, considering the problems the dependency has had over the last ten years, and the people of the dependency would become part of Confederation, gaining access to the Canadian economy and a fairly strong political and economic system. Best of all, they wouldn't even have to change the head of state!
Exactly. I can't think of any jurisdiction, at least in the West, where selling your holdings to your spouse for a dollar somehow means the conflict of interest goes away. This is the kind of idiotic scam someone about to go bankrupt would try, and with the same result. Handing it over to your spouse doesn't make the conflict go away.
Trump won't get the nod. Even if they have to bring in Romney as an attempted at a controlled landing (as opposed to a complete crash), they won't let Trump on the ballot.
The GOP knows it won't win the White House in November. That ship has sailed with Cruz and Trump as the leading contenders. Now it's about preserving the party against the inevitable Trump/anti-Trump wars that will follow Trump's departure.
For fuck's sake, even Sanders would beat Trump.
Russians support strong men because, for centuries, it's all they've ever known. Their brief experiments with democracy; the brief periods of government that approached actual democracy, the four months of the Lvov coalition in 1917 and the Yeltsin years after the collapse of the USSR were such incredible failures that I don't think a lot of Russians actually even want anything but nominal democracy.
Putin seems the brightest of the bunch. His friends and family have zillions of dollars, but somehow Putin, like a great black hole at the center of a galaxy of corruption, can't be seen at all.
But even if someone finds a way to directly implicate him, it will be irrelevant, because much of the Russian press is in Putin's pocket, so most Russians will hear little more than whispers, and what they do hear will be countered with "Evil Yankee pig-dogs trying to make our beloved leader look bad..."
This largely appears to be a defense being invoked by some of those caught up in this. "Why haven't the Americans been outed?" First of all, I do believe at least a couple of American names have already shown up, but as the release is being staged (much as other major leaks have been staged), the Americans on the list are coming.
Frankly, I'm more interested in any more revelations that show how regimes like North Korea and organized crime rings used tax shelters to hide and launder money, to breach sanctions and export bans and the like. I have a feeling that as bad as a naughty Icelandic Prime Minister may seem, we have yet to see the full extent of the out and out large-scale corruption that these tax shelters have been facilitating.
In the long run I expect that shelters like the British Virgin Islands are going to end up having to adopt many of the measures Switzerland did if they want these financial havens to survive, and in some cases I expect the governments (cough... UK... cough) that have allowed their dependencies to behave in this fashion will probably kill much of what makes these tax shelters shelters at all.
The notion of confidence is the chief reason Walter Bagehot, 150 years ago, observed the superiority of the Westminster system to the Presidential system. Short of a trial and conviction for impeachment, there's precious little Congress can do about an errant president.
He sold the asset in question to his wife for one dollar, and the mere fact that his wife still held that asset as he was assuring that funds intended to shore up Icelandic banks was instead redirected to creditors pretty much makes this a case of out and out corruption. You can't just get rid of a conflict of interest by selling your assets to your spouse, particularly when the actual sale was for such a nominal fee that it raises the question as to whether it was even a legitimate transfer.
The American part of the list hasn't been released yet.
Stop listening to yourself then. The notion that this is targeted is beyond bizarre, considering one of the targets has ended up being David Cameron, whose old man was hiding cash in a tax shelter.
Besides, many of the American names haven't been released yet, and that's expected to be rather juicy.
Fuck that! Turks and Caicos are going to become the eleventh Canadian province! Time for Canada to actually have a nice little domestic tax shelter to counter the six or seven that Britain runs!
Describing an off shore account in a tax shelter as a "checking account" is like describing an industrial electromagnet as a "fridge magnet".