Panama Papers

[Section_31]

I posted something on Facebook yesterday along these lines. I'm not surprised or arsed by all this, but it means two things. One is that Cameron can no longer claim to be patriotic or monopolise it at the likes of Corbyn's expense. There is nothing patriotic about depriving your country of the fuel it needs to survive. Second, he has no right to dictate poor people about the benefits of hard work, seeing as hard work played no part in his success. He inherited his wealth, and his kids will inherit his. Money, opportunity, success, it's all predefined for this lot. They inherit it, they keep it for themselves and they blame you when you don't have it.

[Priory Doctor]

I posted something on Facebook yesterday along these lines. I'm not surprised or arsed by all this, but it means two things. One is that Cameron can no longer claim to be patriotic or monopolise it at the likes of Corbyn's expense. There is nothing patriotic about depriving your country of the fuel it needs to survive. Second, he has no right to dictate poor people about the benefits of hard work, seeing as hard work played no part in his success. He inherited his wealth, and his kids will inherit his. Money, opportunity, success, it's all predefined for this lot. They inherit it, they keep it for themselves and they blame you when you don't have it.

All that is spot on. The trouble is that the cap doffing idiots who keep voting these parasites in can't (or won't) stop supporting them. 

[Hades]

@DaftLimmy

 

Look, we'd all do what David Cameron did. We'd all avoid paying tax whilst targeting the poor and disabled and pushing them to suicide.

[cloggypop]

http://www.theguardian.com/news/commentisfree/2016/apr/10/money-offshore-corrupt-democracy-political-influence?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Facebook

[Dr Nowt]

If you cried when Bambi's Mum died, then viewer discretion is advised.

 

[Guest Pistonbroke]

Only a cunt would say something like that. Charles Moore is a cunt. 

[cloggypop]

[Anubis]

If you cried when Bambi's Mum died, then viewer discretion is advised.

 

Oh. My. God.

 

I never realised he had it that bad. It's devastating to know that if I lose my job all I'll have to worry about is the trivial matter of keeping a roof over my head, and finding a way to buy food. But this poor fucker will have to live with knowing that, with a bit of belt tightening, he'll be fine. Who would want that burden?

[Jairzinho]

If you cried when Bambi's Mum died, then viewer discretion is advised.

 

 

Interesting. I'd quite like to see him trapped in a well. With a bear. A hungry, horny, bear. With aids.

[Gnasher]

If Cameron is so "trapped" in wealth I you'd have thought the easiest solution to untrap himself is by giving some away, he could make a start by giving his fair share to the British taxpayer.

[Dr Nowt]

If Cameron is so "trapped" in wealth I you'd have thought the easiest solution to untrap himself is by giving some away, he could make a start by giving his fair share to the British taxpayer.

To the tower with this dangerously subversive, impertinent oik.

[Bobby Hundreds]

Trapped in wealth, sounds terrible kinda like getting your dick trapped between Rachel Khoo's tits.

[thegreatelephant]

clear to see why these pricks constantly use labour party funding as some sort of stick to beat them with. which is, you know, by largely the rank and file that are on PAYE, fairly contributing to their country. often on lower than the national average yearly wage. it's just clear distraction technique.

 

the idea that that they might want a say in the running of the country as the backbone of it? clear to see this is abhorrent to the something for nothing culture tories and something that must be ridiculed. sums them up really and their contempt for the people doing the actual work that actually keeps the country afloat. which is often unglamourous and not particularly financially rewarding.

 

if they want to keep on trotting out that crap- then all MPs must reveal all sources of their incomes so the public can decide whose voice is being represented and why. and Corbyn needs to hammer this point home. might also have the knock on benefit of weeding out Labour MPs who see being elected as a chance to feather their nests, rather than represent the interests of those who elected them.

[Gnasher]

Laura kuenssberg the main bbc political reporter is back on twitter reporting that Jeremy Corbyns lost his tax return and if he doesn't find it by 3.30 in parliament Cameron will make mincemeat of him.

[Guest Pistonbroke]

They should send that cow to some remote Amazon village to interview cannibals. 

[Strontium]

Speaking of the BBC, it turns out that they have £84m invested in a Bermuda-based scheme.

[Stu Monty]

It's systemic. As many people have been saying for years. 

 

The narrative of everyone needing to tighten their belts as we are in hard times sort of falls apart when someone points out that there's actually plenty of cash knocking about; it's just all been siphoned off into a box office on a tropical island.

[Gnasher]

Laura Kunty now tweeting Corbyn has shown his tax receipt but got fined £100 for filling it out late. I bet she couldn't wait to report that.

 

The bigger issues disclosed in the Panama papers seem to have flown over her head.

[stringvest]

We're kind of missing the point here.  It's the money that doesn't make it on to the tax return that is where the criminality lies.  

[Section_31]

It's systemic. As many people have been saying for years.

 

The narrative of everyone needing to tighten their belts as we are in hard times sort of falls apart when someone points out that there's actually plenty of cash knocking about; it's just all been siphoned off into a box office on a tropical island.

It's a peculiarity of the British and US forms of capitalism that nobody really cares about the country as such, only what they can siphon off and get away with. Everyone in Stuttgart is obsessed with Mercedes, absolutely obsessed with it, the company builds infrastructure like sports fields and stuff for kids. We sold Rolls Royce to Germany and Jaguar Land Rover to India, we demonise our own working class and offshore jobs to south Africa and manufacturing to China.

 

This country is one giant pussy and everyone's trying to fuck it, the trouble is, some people's cocks are bigger than others.

 

[thegreatelephant]

We're kind of missing the point here.  It's the money that doesn't make it on to the tax return that is where the criminality lies.  

well, let's just go with all MP's tax returns and run with that for the time being. i think that'll do for openers. see what we can establish currently with that. the expenses issue revealed episodes that have stuck in the public mind about these people, so I am sure out of 600+ of them, there will be some interesting reading. notice the PM doesn't want to do that.

[AngryOfTuebrook]

A lot of people on Facebook getting all excited about Denis Skinner's showboating, but I'm not impressed.  Anyone can do the name-calling.  (The Tories are the masters of it; it's their game.)  People who think governing the country is a serious business should, y'know, take it seriously.  Corbyn nailed Cameron with some difficult questions about his breaching of regulations and his conflicts of interest.  A pound to a pinch of shit says that will get less coverage than Skinner saying "Dodgy Dave".

 

Sir Alan Duncan's contribution was telling and very instructive of why it is absolutely right to hate and despise Tories.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-36017175

 

 

Aah, yes - Alan Duncan, the "High Achiever".

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/mps-expenses/5304976/Alan-Duncan-claimed-thousands-for-gardening-MPs-expenses.html

[Jairzinho]

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/apr/11/smash-uk-mafia-elite-treat-offshore-wealth-terrorist-finance-perugia

 

Smash the mafia elite: we should treat offshore wealth as terrorist finance

Paul Mason

 

Amid the cobbled passageways and tumbling tenements of the Italian city of Perugia, it’s possible to daydream you are in the middle ages. You are surrounded by medieval art and architecture. And then you think: hold on, what happened to the Renaissance?

 

Sure, there are some imposing private palaces from the period 1300-1500, and sure Raphael left half a fresco in a tiny chapel. But it’s not Florence. The money was clearly here at some point but, some time after 1300, the artistic, cultural and scientific riches moved somewhere else. By 1500, the city was “smaller, poorer and politically narrower” than 200 years before, writes historian Sarah Rubin Blanshei.

 

Why? Because the rich did not pay their taxes. The Perugian elite became a closed stratum of mafiosi, earning their money from mercenary work abroad, jealously guarding their family inheritance, stifling social mobility. Sound familiar?

 

As David Cameron’s fiasco over the Panama Papers collides with George Osborne’s over the budget, the danger is that we frame these merely as political scandals.

 

In fact, the Panama Papers point to a deeper sickness. Globalised capitalism has become an organised and legalised form of corruption, in which the work of the manager, the inventor and the entrepreneur come second to that of people whose wealth “works for them” – preferably in a jurisdiction nobody can see.

 

If you listen to Cameron’s defenders, their logic follows three contours: he did nothing illegal, nothing unparliamentary and nothing wrong.

 

I do not doubt his decision to invest in an offshore fund was legal.

 

That he failed to register his shares in Blairmore on becoming an MP, and lobbied for the protection of offshore trusts while being an undeclared beneficiary of one, does merit investigation by Parliament.

 

But it’s the insistence by the apopleptic right that he should not be criticised over tax avoidance – that “everybody does it” – that we should register as a kind of collective Marie Antoinette moment for the UK’s social elite.

 

If someone walked into a pub and announced they had found a way to scam the benefit system, they would face opprobrium or a swift, anonymous call to the benefit cheats hotline.

 

But a large part of the UK financial industry is dedicated to scamming the rules whereby both individuals and companies pay tax on income. London is home to literally hundreds of advisory companies – many of them registered professionals in finance, accountancy and the law – whose purpose is to do only this.

 

The size of the missing tax take is disputed. If, as the Tax Justice Network estimates, the global wealth held offshore is $21tn, it might generate $188bn a year for cash-strapped governments.

 

Why don’t they act? Because, as with the government of Perugia in the mid 1400s, they are stuffed full of people who benefit.

 

Why doesn’t the populace revolt? Well, the problem with a globalised economy composed of nation states is that you can revolt all you like, beef up national tax systems, even expose the doings of the rich in newspapers ... but as long as the concept of “offshore” exists, so will the legalised corruption.

 

To the mature democracies of the world, the Panama Papers – as with the Lux Leaks, Swiss Leaks and numerous other data dumps before them – are a warning. If wealth equals power, then the doubling of ratio of wealth to income in the advanced economies since the 70s (see Piketty and Zucman 2014) could tilt power so far in the direction of a new hereditary elite that there is no return.

 

Last week, Costas Efimeros, the editor of a Greek investigative website, warned that the Panama revelations might be the “last chance” for leak-journalism. If a revelation does not provoke outrage, and the wrongdoers go unpunished, he wrote, “then the continuous revelation of scandals has the exact opposite result: defeatism, the feeling of weakness, the fatalistic acceptance of the rule of the powerful”.

 

If he is right, there are implications for all of us locked into this scrum around documents, reputations, professional codes and disputed facts.

 

First, this has to result in action. I am less concerned with taking down an already hapless British prime minister than with empowering him, or his successor, with the will to act unilaterally.

 

Britain could and should take direct rule of its tax-opaque dependencies. It should abolish non-domicile status. And it should create a taskforce within HMRC specifically designed to prosecute evaders and collect money from the aggressive avoiders.

 

Second, it has to result in words. I would settle for a prime-ministerial statement to be read out at Oxbridge colleges, public schools and in every bank, law firm and adviser registered with the FSA. It should say: “It’s over. There are no more respectable forms of tax avoidance and from now on offshore wealth will be treated the same way we treat terrorist finance.”

 

Third, it should be unilateral. The great lesson of the Italian city states in the high Renaissance was that if you will it, it can happen. You can will an economy where science, innovation, art and banking coincide: talented people get rich, inherited wealth soon evaporates; rulers listen to demands for social justice – and if they don’t, they burn.

 

Acting unilaterally goes against the DNA of the globalised elite. Their “nation” is the global system, and it’s seen as heresy for one country to act without others. “If we do, money will simply move offshore,” is the mantra. “Let it go,” should be the response.

 

Unilateral action by the UK would be powerful. It would disrupt the system of organised corruption and it would send a signal. We want to enjoy the best of what the next 20 years can offer our population – not the second best after a 1% elite has skimmed off the cream.

 

We don’t want to be a neo-feudal backwater, where inherited wealth and an unofficial mafia rules. We want to be the Florence, Bruges or Amsterdam of the coming century, not the Perugia.

[setreal]

Laura kuenssberg the main bbc political reporter is back on twitter reporting that Jeremy Corbyns lost his tax return and if he doesn't find it by 3.30 in parliament Cameron will make pulled pork of him.

 

.

[Stickman]

A lot of people on Facebook getting all excited about Denis Skinner's showboating, but I'm not impressed.  Anyone can do the name-calling.  (The Tories are the masters of it; it's their game.)  People who think governing the country is a serious business should, y'know, take it seriously.  Corbyn nailed Cameron with some difficult questions about his breaching of regulations and his conflicts of interest.  A pound to a pinch of shit says that will get less coverage than Skinner saying "Dodgy Dave".

 

Sir Alan Duncan's contribution was telling and very instructive of why it is absolutely right to hate and despise Tories.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-36017175

 

 

Aah, yes - Alan Duncan, the "High Achiever".

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/mps-expenses/5304976/Alan-Duncan-claimed-thousands-for-gardening-MPs-expenses.html

 

 

I agree with you I guess he should have made Cameron answer the question but it was nice that for once a Labour MP called the cunt out for what he is and hopefully that name "Dodgy Dave" will resonate around the country.

To be honest Corbyn could have made him squirm with shit hot questions and it wouldn't have made the news anyway or the like of Kussenberg would have ignored it, so at least some shit stuck