If the auspiciously named ICIJ and their partner journalists were actually interested in excising this offshore cancer for want of a better world, they would be demanding that all corporations and officials in positions of significant influence publish their tax affairs for ICIJ or public examination. It would be releasing all the Panama Papers: at the very least to independent journalists for them to report on or at best in a public database.
I stress, I am suggesting nothing illegal happened. But to say that Ian Cameron did not gain from tax avoidance when running such a structure is absurd and Robert Peston has a duty to do better than that if he is to be taken seriously.
Did the corporate media vilify David Cameron for some serious high-ranking connections to this mother of all leaks? No, it did not. Did the same media publish any damning report that featured Cameron airbrushed alongside global ‘baddies,’ like former Iranian leader Ahmadinejad? No. But it seems as far as Putin and Russia is concerned, anything the media dishes out is regarded by the elites as fair game.
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation shamed the BBC by putting out a Four Corners documentary on the Panama leak that had real balls. In stark contrast to the BBC, the Australians named and shamed Australia’s biggest company and Australia’s biggest foreign investor. BBC Panorama by contrast found a guy who sold one house in Islington. The Australians also, unlike the BBC […]
Did you know that 85 percent of Americans say that it’s harder to maintain a middle class standard of living today than it was 10 years ago? (Pew Research Center) Or that “77 percent of all Americans live paycheck to paycheck at least some of the time”, or that “one of every four workers in the US brings home wages that are at or below the federal poverty level”, or that “47 million Americans are on food stamps, or that “40.4% of the U.S. workforce is now made up of contingent workers,” mainly temps, contract workers and part-time labor?
Is a mother who has just given birth and is sitting in her hospital bed, by definition, work-shy? Is a father who raises three young kids full time while his partner works by definition work-shy? If you answered no to those questions, congratulations! You have managed to understand employment statistics in a more nuanced way than Dr Adam Perkins, the new […]
The American “New Economy” is the American Third World economy in which the only jobs created are low productivity, low paid nontradable domestic service jobs incapable of producing export earnings with which to pay for the goods and services produced offshore for US consumption.
In 2008 the Federal Reserve had a choice: It could save the economy, or it could save the banks. It might have used a fraction of what became the vast QE credit – for example $1 trillion – to pay off the bad mortgages and write them down. That would have helped save the economy from debt deflation. Instead, the Fed simply wanted to re-inflate the bubble, to save banks from having to suffer losses on their junk mortgages and other bad loans.
The fight that the government has picked with junior doctors is just part of the present attack on the NHS and its staff. Cameron and Hunt are using the vague promise of ‘a truly 7 day NHS’ to impose a contract on junior doctors, in the hope and expectation that if they win they will roll out these changes to other NHS staff. They think the public’s interest and support will wane but we must not let this happen.
You Can’t Earn a Living on the Minimum Wage When presidential candidate Bernie Sanders talks about income inequality, and when other candidates speak about the minimum wage and food stamps, what are they really talking about? Whether they know it or not, it’s something like this. My Working Life Then A few years ago, I wrote about my experience enmeshed in the […]
Even as some insist that the global economy is in “secular stagnation,” the facts suggest that we may be entering the “worst” depression in history. The global markets have been on a slippery slope since the summer of 2007, and things have only been getting worse in 2016. The picture looks dismal, no matter which theoretical lens one uses. (This […]
What if you really want to quit your job and go independent, but you’re worried about paying your bills? Today I’m able to enjoy the best of both worlds. My bills are easily paid from my passive income streams, and I get to do work I love and enjoy tremendous freedom. But when I was first starting out, it was […]
