The Panama Papers Are Only the Beginning
Financial crimes and political conspiracies aren’t discrete events but the essence of neoliberalism.
By Greg GrandinTwitterYESTERDAY 4:44 PM
The danger with the Panama Papers is that the massive amount of data—much of it still unreleased—could overwhelm, pushing the public to that place where the covert and the spectacular collapse into each other, creating not action and knowledge but paralysis and amnesia. The trees (that is, the data) will hide the forest (our conceptual understanding of how the data points relate to each other). As Noam Chomsky describes the paradox, “How it is we have so much information, but know so little?”
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As of now, there is no known connection between Bloomberg’s right-wing hacker story and the network partially revealed by the Panama Papers. The dots, however, are but two degrees separated. The hacker, Andrés Sepúlveda, worked on behalf of candidates and parties that wanted to reverse Latin America’s leftward drift, to once again open the region’s energy sector to US private capital and pay tribute to bond markets. Among his other achievements, Sepúlveda helped Álvaro Uribe get reelected president of Colombia in 2006, Porfirio Lobo elected president of Honduras in 2009, and Enrique Peña Nieto president of Mexico in 2012. All three of these leaders are implicated in exactly the kind of para-politics and para-economics Lombardi drew about, of the kind that has been championed by the current front-runner in the Democratic primaries, Hillary Clinton, under the banner of “free trade.”
As aecretary of atate (sic), Clinton successfully pushed for the passage of free-trade agreements with Colombia and Panama, which, as Clark Mindock and David Sirota point out, make the kind of offshore tax evasion revealed by the Panama Papers even more pervasive (more than 850 Colombians are named in what is so far released of the Panama Papers, including founders and financiers of death squads). Hillary and Bill Clinton are deeply embedded in Colombia, as Ken Silverstein, along with others, has reported (FYI: Silverstein wrote on Mossack Fonseca for Vice nearly a year and a half ago). Hillary counts Álvaro Uribe (who represented the death-squad wing of Colombian politics) as a close ally, with profits from Colombia’s petroleum industry pouring into the Clinton Foundation. As to Honduras, Clinton’s role in legitimizing the 2009 elections that Lobo won (with an assist from Sepúlveda) is well known, largely as a result of the recent murder of the environmentalist Berta Cáceres. And in Mexico, Peña Nieto has accelerated the privatization of the national oil industry, a project that, e-mails reveal, Clinton’s State Department helped make happen.
When asked why none of the information so far seemed to implicate US-based individuals or businesses, the editor of Süddeutsche Zeitung said, “Just wait for what is coming next.” Let’s see.
http://www.thenation.com/article/the-panama-papers-are-only-the-beginning/
Uh oh... It's a pretty ugly situation and this is not just going to go away or get any better.
= new reply since forum marked as read
I knew about the Clinton/Honduras connection. But I had not a hint of this--and it explains so much!
Hillary and Bill Clinton are deeply embedded in Colombia, as Ken Silverstein, along with others, has reported (FYI: Silverstein wrote on Mossack Fonseca for Vice nearly a year and a half ago). Hillary counts Álvaro Uribe (who represented the death-squad wing of Colombian politics) as a close ally, with profits from Colombia’s petroleum industry pouring into the Clinton Foundation.
It may explain how the head of "the death-squad wing of Colombian politics," Alvaro Uribe, got cushy academic sinecures at Georgetown and Harvard, and U.S. appointment to a prestigious international legal commission. (I figured it was CIA Director Panetta protecting Bush Jr. Could as well have been Sec of State Clinton protecting herself!)
It certainly explains why Clinton intervened in the Drummond Coal death squad case, to save Uribe from having to give a deposition (and used her position as Sec of State to imply to the judge that it was a matter of "national security"
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It likely has some connection to why Clinton gave Blackwater a pass for "unauthorized trainings of foreign persons IN COLOMBIA for use in Iraq and Afghanistan." (--a little item I picked up in the news a while ago).
And it main explain how Maria Hurtado--Uribe intelligence chief --got instant asylum in Panama when she fled Colombian prosecutors who wanted to question her about Uribe's pervasive, illegal, domestic spying (--spying on judges, prosecutors and politicians, and on potential death squad victims such as trade unionists). I thought it was Panetta and the CIA who arranged the flight to Panama. But it is just as likely that it was Clinton's State Department who extracted this asylum (to protect her $$crony Uribe) from the RW government of Panama, with whom she was negotiating "free trade for the rich" (which led to this current massive scandal of billionaire tax scofflaws using Panama).
Uribe, my God! Clinton and Uribe!
Could you cross-post this over in DU "Good Reads" Forum? 
I don't see it over there yet! 
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