“Global finance has expanded without accountability. However, the good news is that the attempts to take down journalism as an agent of facts are failing. Instead, a network is lining up like dots across a landscape of searches for truth. It is sustained with anger, vengeance, honor, and integrity, and it looks to me like two things. First, the attacks are a “tell” that makes the managers of extreme wealth very unsafe and conservative (to a fault) poker players, and second, the enormous flow of capital is producing a logic similar to that of a cancer cell. I predict Pandora for “all gifts” including the world evils.”
Rex L. Curry
The Financial Accountability and Corporate Transparency Coalition (FACT) pointed its tweet readers to the work of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) on the problem of #AnonymousCompanies that hinder inquiries into political corruption and a long list of criminal enterprises (read testimony May 2019). To wonder why the FBI is under attack is not to understand the facts. See why we need more financial accountability people (here).
Face it. We have a terrible case of the jitters. After all, Wilbur Ross became the U.S. Secretary of Commerce in 2017, right after his name was in releasing 13.4 million documents known as the Paradise Papers in 2016. That leak came from an off-shore finance management legal firm Appleby containing the names of more than 120,000 people and companies that hide capital. I don’t know why Mr. Ross wants that particular position of power, but it gives me the jitters.
Before Paradise, we had the Panama Papers. Remember? It became “news” following the “leak” of 11.5 million documents from another managing law firm – Mossack Fonseca, a team of journalists, gathered to finish the work of John Doe, whose identity remains unknown. During the data analysis, journalists (not government officials) have gathered worldwide to develop a plan. Their work covered many months of traditional journalistic practice before releasing newspaper stories designed to expose how billions of dollars were hidden killed from governments. A film summarizing their experience became available in March 2019.
Pandora (Frontline PBS)
The work to expose the cancerous practices of extreme wealth management continues. Given global conditions, even the honestly gained wealth is managed without an interest in investment to improve global conditions. Following the release of findings focused on public figures, the known investigators have been harassed, killed, and others attacked with “alternative facts” and lawsuits. When it takes ‘whistleblowers” to produce the momentum for reform, be worried. The tale of two worlds requires the distasteful cleaning of the world’s corporate laundry. Forcing it out of these poorly managed financial machines may not occur until wealth becomes meaningless.
The wealthiest Americans have so much more money in 2020 that even Bernie Sanders has difficulty explaining it. That wealth is thanks to the 2017 tax overhaul by Republican Party. As recently as 2018, the estate tax was $20 billion for the treasury from nearly 5,500 families. In 2020, $9.3 billion in estate taxes were paid by 1,275 wealthy families. In the last five years, U.S. billionaires have doubled net worth. According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, it is more than $5 trillion.
To Act Go (here), it leads to an old list of billionaires, pressing for trillion, and to what end? Again, action writers in the tradition of “the papers” are sought.