Re: Ten Theses on the Panama Papers
On 7 Apr 2016, at 4:15, Florian Cramer wrote: Berger is by far not the only one with this opinion. After I posted his article here, WikiLeaks retweeted the link to Nettime's archive and Berger's piece. Before, Wikileaks tweeted the following (so we can consider it WikiLeaks' official position on the matter: Berger makes those points, but they're drowned out by all his cranky noise -- like the opening words: What did you learn from the Panama Papers? That African, Russian, Ukrainian and Asian 'elites' are corrupt? Well, this should have been known a for long time... I'm deeply skeptical about 'data journalism,' but Berger's dismissal -- in his second paragraph -- is just silly: the ICIJ...seems to mix up investigative journalism with data journalism. The latter, a new form of journalism, takes some database and looks, with filters and search terms, for info snippets that lend themselves to headlines. And so on. Yes, many other people have made the same points -- and done a much better job of it. Funding sources do indeed exert subtle and not-so-subtle pressure on journalists -- I've experienced this firsthand and returned half of a substantial 'journalism' grant when the funder tried to tell me what I couldn't say. So, yes, the US-centrism of the funders is a serious consideration in evaluating how the Panama Papers are handled. But that can have many different valences. For example, where are all Russian and Chinese funders who might balance out a US agenda? Ah, yes, right... But my point isn't to stage a naive reenactment of Cold War oneupmanship. The questions can and should be mobilized positively: we should *also* ask about support from entities based in (to go down a list of nominal GDPs) the EU, Japan, Germany, the UK, France, Brazil, Italy, India... And we should think in terms of regions, not just nations, because transnational civil society networks that cross potentially hostile borders would bring additional kinds of legitimacy. The implication, of course, is that it's not just a matter of funding: it involves everything from legal nuts and bolts to much more diffuse questions about perceived legitimacy in different contexts and the insight and confidence to ask challenging questions. (Are there Indian nationals in the Panama Papers? No doubt. Pakistanis? No doubt. Are there citizens in both countries who have a shared interest in reasserting authority over cynical and corrupt officials and structure? YES.) There are many critical points to be made along these line, but fetishizing funding above everything else doesn't tend to do that. On the contrary, it explicitly affirms the unimaginative idea that money equals power. Leaks like the Panama Papers should provide an opportunity to show, on every level and in every way, that there are forms of power that don't depend on money. Cheers, T # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: Ten Theses on the Panama Papers
To assure official and congenial approval and financial support for disclosure it is essential to choral "not like WikiLeaks" then scream big numbers and Titanic significance, yes dear passengers, the ship is unsinkable. Why even the Snowden Unsinkable Molly Brown distances itself from the horrifying Lusitania. And why not, impermeable WikiLeaks assures its sailors that really, really big, super important, government-shaking, "Leaks" (capitalized as in capital) have established the benchmark for pleasant voyages through turbulent seas of mega-tera bytes of digital flotsam and plastic. Never mind that disclosures upsetting to Queegs are as old as Queens, the customary way of succeeding the flag officers with new, terrifically bloated and blared ways to get off asses and mass steal from the super-big stealers. Where in the Panama (nee Pentagon) Papers are the riches of Cuba, Nicaragua, North Korea, Sudan, all the rogues so irritating to Wall Street-ICBM itchy fingers ready to annex ever more Truman Doctrine dirt farms atop fossil treasures. Hark: NGOs are not non-governmental, merely pretend to be to maintain tax avoidance services to bloated porkies just like Mossack Fonseca. At 04:15 AM 4/7/2016, you wrote: > > On 5 Apr 2016, at 14:42, Florian Cramer forwarded: >> Panama Papers - not the Scoop but the Flop of the Century > > Florian, I'm pretty confident that Jens Berger's eruption won't age > hold up very well, and I really wonder why you bothered to forward such > a load of bollocks. And to follow that up with intimations that most of > the major foundations are behind the fact that no US citizens have been > named in the first 36 hours? I'm under no illusions about the many > roles that the upper echelons of US civil society have played in > shaping (some would say distorting) the world for decades, but Berger's > tantrum and your follow-up would be very much at home on Fox News. Berger is by far not the only one with this opinion. After I posted his article here, WikiLeaks retweeted the link to Nettime's archive and Berger's piece. Before, Wikileaks tweeted the following (so we can consider it WikiLeaks' official position on the matter: <...> # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: Ten Theses on the Panama Papers
> On 5 Apr 2016, at 14:42, Florian Cramer forwarded: > >> Panama Papers - not the Scoop but the Flop of the Century > > Florian, I'm pretty confident that Jens Berger's eruption won't age > hold up very well, and I really wonder why you bothered to forward such > a load of bollocks. And to follow that up with intimations that most of > the major foundations are behind the fact that no US citizens have been > named in the first 36 hours? I'm under no illusions about the many > roles that the upper echelons of US civil society have played in > shaping (some would say distorting) the world for decades, but Berger's > tantrum and your follow-up would be very much at home on Fox News. Berger is by far not the only one with this opinion. After I posted his article here, WikiLeaks retweeted the link to Nettime's archive and Berger's piece. Before, Wikileaks tweeted the following (so we can consider it WikiLeaks' official position on the matter: "In total, Guardian has released, 2 #PanamaPapers documents. Süddeutsche Zeitung, 0 documents." "#PanamaPapers: If you censor more than 99% of the documents you are engaged in 1% journalism by definition." "US govt funded #PanamaPapers attack story on Putin via USAID. Some good journalists but no model for integrity." "The US OCCRP can do good work, but for the US govt to directly fund the #PanamaPapers attack on Putin seriously undermines its integrity." "#PanamaPapers Putin attack was produced by OCCRP which targets Russia & former USSR and was funded by USAID & Soros." Craig Murray, former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, wrote the following on his blog: "Whoever leaked the Mossack Fonseca papers appears motivated by a genuine desire to expose the system that enables the ultra wealthy to hide their massive stashes, often corruptly obtained and all involved in tax avoidance. These Panamanian lawyers hide the wealth of a significant proportion of the 1%, and the massive leak of their documents ought to be a wonderful thing. Unfortunately the leaker has made the dreadful mistake of turning to the western corporate media to publicise the results. In consequence the first major story, published today by the Guardian, is all about Vladimir Putin and a cellist on the fiddle. As it happens I believe the story and have no doubt Putin is bent. But why focus on Russia? Russian wealth is only a tiny minority of the money hidden away with the aid of Mossack Fonseca. In fact, it soon becomes obvious that the selective reporting is going to stink. The Suddeutsche Zeitung, which received the leak, gives a detailed explanation of the methodology the corporate media used to search the files. The main search they have done is for names associated with breaking UN sanctions regimes. The Guardian reports this too and helpfully lists those countries as Zimbabwe, North Korea, Russia and Syria. The filtering of this Mossack Fonseca information by the corporate media follows a direct western governmental agenda. There is no mention at all of use of Mossack Fonseca by massive western corporations or western billionaires â the main customers. And the Guardian is quick to reassure that âmuch of the leaked material will remain private.â What do you expect? The leak is being managed by the grandly but laughably named âInternational Consortium of Investigative Journalistsâ, which is funded and organised entirely by the USAâs Center for Public Integrity. Their funders include Ford Foundation Carnegie Endowment Rockefeller Family Fund W K Kellogg Foundation Open Society Foundation (Soros) among many others. Do not expect a genuine expose of western capitalism. The dirty secrets of western corporations will remain unpublished. Expect hits at Russia, Iran and Syria and some tiny âbalancingâ western country like Iceland. A superannuated UK peer or two will be sacrificed â someone already with dementia. The corporate media â the Guardian and BBC in the UK â have exclusive access to the database which you and I cannot see. They are protecting themselves from even seeing western corporationsâ sensitive information by only looking at those documents which are brought up by specific searches such as UN sanctions busters. Never forget the Guardian smashed its copies of the Snowden files on the instruction of MI6. What if they did Mossack Fonseca database searches on the owners of all the corporate media and their companies, and all the editors and senior corporate media journalists? What if they did Mossack Fonseca searches on all the most senior people at the BBC? What if they did Mossack Fonseca searches on every donor to the Center for Public Integrity and their companies? What if they did Mossack Fonseca searches on every listed company in the western stock exchanges, and on every western millionaire they could trace?
Re: Ten Theses on the Panama Papers
On 04/06/2016 07:17 AM, Florian Cramer wrote: The Cold War has taught us to be suspicious about NGO activity and possible governmental agendas behind them. But Florian, don't you think we're at antipodes from the Cold War? And how much suspicion is really needed to understand those agendas? The elites behind the ICIJ - Ford Foundation, W.K. Kellogg Foundation, Rockefeller Family Fund, Stanley Foundation and McArthur Fund - are all affiliates of the Democratic party and primarily concerned with social reproduction. Their agenda is obvious. The capacity of the Democratic party to govern is threatened in at least three ways: By lack of funds, by the overweening power of the billionaire class, and by populist revolts due to the collapse of life prospects for the majority of the population. Since 2008 the federal government has consistently decried its inability to collect taxes (from Apple, etc) and yesterday, Obama's off-the-cuff remarks about the Panama Papers were to the effect that the problem is, most of these tax havens are legal. There's a reason for that. For forty years the US capitalist class has promoted the idea that government should be shrunk to the point where you can drown it in a bathtub, and the centerpiece of their strategy was and remains tax cuts. As a master of suspicion I find nothing on which to exercise my powers here. These elites desperately need money in order to promote a reform program - and they need much more money than the foundations have in their coffers. They also need to push back at some intractable oppoosition. The world in which our critique even mattered is now very fragile. For years I have been saying this is a major crisis that will change the system, and that too is now obvious. There is a keen and widely shared awareness among intellectuals and even just those who read the news that the so-called democratic societies are at their short-term limits, even as middle and long-term problems grow to vast proportions. At such moments one does not blindly support the status quo ante, for sure - that's what produced the problem - but I do think one has to critically take sides and develop some constructive positions. I have been to Panama City. The towering skyline that emerged over the last ten years is half-empty: it was made by speculative real estate money that has established similar operational bases around the world, to profit from global networks and stateless capital flows. The Panamanians themselves are wonderful people, but the city the TCC has built is particularly dark, the nastiest side of power, drugs, arms, dictators, skullduggery. By comparison, the Caymans, the British Virgin Islands are - quintessentially European. A polite, dignified, tasteful knife in the back with hit squads ordered from Panama. This is very different from the Cold War where two rationalized power blocs confronted each other in a managed growth dynamic. Global capitalism is now evolving chaotically, toward a state of pure unorganized competition between increasingly powerful actors who may be able to protect themselves (and hide their money) over the short term, but who can do nothing to support the reproduction of society. Either there is a collective effort to curb the powers of the Transnational Capitalist Class, and in parallel, to create new powers of governance, or the outcome of these chaotic trends is highly predictable. thoughtfully yours, Brian # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: Ten Theses on the Panama Papers
On 5 Apr 2016, at 9:17, Patrice Riemens wrote: 7. Leaks have become unquestionable. With earlier disclosures, the authenticity of documents leaked could always be credibly disputed. Nowadays the authenticity of materials obtained thru electronic leaks, due to its sheer magnitude and the one to one nature of a digital reproduction, is much more difficult to question. For now, maybe, but that won't last long. On the contrary, I think they'll quickly become *precisely* questionable, plagued with questions about agendas within agendas, the provenance and 'curation' of documents, and so on. It may sound strange to use language associated with connoisseurship in this context, but it isn't; on the contrary, this increasingly leaky world will be defined more and more deeply in aesthetic ways -- because leaks involve *media*. I'll start with one example, an argument I first heard Florian Schneider make, although aspects of it connect to a wider range of work -- for example, Eyal Weizman's forensis initiative and Rabih Mroue's meditations on visuality of confrontation. The basic idea involves a drastic change in the aesthetics of 'authority.' High resolution, precision, stability, and controlled framing used to be the dominant meta qualities of visual 'truths,' but they've given way to a counter-aesthetic: pixelated, chaotic, fragmentary, indeterminate. The more fucked-up a video, the more authentic it seems; and, conversely, the more 'produced' a video, the more artificial it seems. This isn't entirely new (but nothing ever is entirely new): we can find prehistories in the enigmatic blurring in photos of disappeared kommissars, the umpteenth-generation photocopies that of cultural arcana that circulated with punk and experimental music, older films like Coppola's _The Conversation_ and Antonioni's _Blow-up_, and newer ones like _The Blair Witch Project_. But some of it is new: the way that blocky pixelation and portrait framing suggest a phone camera and precious video uploaded against al odds, buffers of audio without video, the sounds of hardware being jostled and scraped. But those very qualities are easy -- maybe the easiest -- to forge. The other extreme is a very different aesthetic, but one that will be much harder to identify as such because it'll be scattered across seemingly disparate artifacts in many media -- 'declassified' documents with their distinctive blackouts, phone-size screenshots of text messages and supposed deleted social-media profiles and posts, and soon enough voice and video recordings. Again, these techniques have lots of precedents, real and imaginary -- in books (say, novels by people like Le Carre but going back to volume 2 of _Don Quixote_), in film (F for Fake, The Prisoner, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, The Truman Show). But these won't just be forged documents or even dossiers, they'll be 'distributed' in ways that are really boggling. Many of the constituent technics needed t generate and drive projects like this are already commodified: botnets and troll armies planting Markov-generated noise, hardware and networks subverted to perform ever-more subtle man-in-the-middle and replay attacks, and digital signal processing technologies (the most recent that I've seen involves real-time facial motion capture mapped onto archival video -- i.e., using a live actor to control 'old' footage). The pieces of this puzzle have been coming together for decades: transmedia 419 scams, social engineering > phishing > catfishing and spearphishing, 'overidentification' activist projects like the Yes Men. Call it 'just-in-time conspiratorialism.' But beneath all that detail, my point is simple: leaks will be precisely questionable -- and much of the questioning will shift from away from the supposed substance (who? what? when? where? etc) and toward a sort of forensic appreciation. and the scale of material won't be a bug, it'll be a feature. On 5 Apr 2016, at 14:42, Florian Cramer forwarded: Panama Papers â not the Scoop but the Flop of the Century Florian, I'm pretty confident that Jens Berger's eruption won't age hold up very well, and I really wonder why you bothered to forward such a load of bollocks. And to follow that up with intimations that most of the major foundations are behind the fact that no US citizens have been named in the first 36 hours? I'm under no illusions about the many roles that the upper echelons of US civil society have played in shaping (some would say distorting) the world for decades, but Berger's tantrum and your follow-up would be very much at home on Fox News. And... On 5 Apr 2016, at 19:11, morlockel...@yahoo.com wrote: Maybe I'm missing something, but the mere notion that something that 3-400 people have access to (more likely thousands, with associates, managers, etc.) is a tight secret is ... mind boggling. And then when the logistics of distributing all these tera
Re: Ten Theses on the Panama Papers
On 04/06/2016 02:17 PM, Florian Cramer wrote: >On Wed, Apr 6, 2016 at 11:34 AM, Felix Stalder wrote: > >> > Some crucial questions remain unanswered: Why is there no notable US >> > American citizen among the "accused"? >> >> But not for this reason. Much more important, as Brian pointed out, >> is at the US themselves have become the largest tax haven, globally. > >Exactly. But then we have to ask about the possible political agenda >behind the Panama Papers, particularly if you consider the funders of >The Center for Public Integrity that's behind 'The International >Consortium of Investigative Journalists' (ICIJ). They not only include >Soros, but also the Ford Foundation, W.K. Kellogg Foundation, >Rockefeller Family Fund, Stanley Foundation and McArthur Fund, to name >only a few > >(https://www.publicintegrity.org/about/our-work/supporters). > >The Cold War has taught us to be suspicious about NGO activity and >possible governmental agendas behind them. >-F Hi Florian, Could you make your suspicions a bit more explicit? What would the explicit agenda of ICIJ be? Do you have more reasons to be suspicious? I think their work in the past has been really quite solid. Best, Niels -- Niels ten Oever Head of Digital Article 19 www.article19.org PGP fingerprint8D9F C567 BEE4 A431 56C4 678B 08B5 A0F2 636D 68E9 # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: Ten Theses on the Panama Papers
On Wed, Apr 6, 2016 at 11:34 AM, Felix Stalder wrote: > > Some crucial questions remain unanswered: Why is there no notable US > > American citizen among the "accused"? > > But not for this reason. Much more important, as Brian pointed out, > is at the US themselves have become the largest tax haven, globally. Exactly. But then we have to ask about the possible political agenda behind the Panama Papers, particularly if you consider the funders of The Center for Public Integrity that's behind 'The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists' (ICIJ). They not only include Soros, but also the Ford Foundation, W.K. Kellogg Foundation, Rockefeller Family Fund, Stanley Foundation and McArthur Fund, to name only a few (https://www.publicintegrity.org/about/our-work/supporters). The Cold War has taught us to be suspicious about NGO activity and possible governmental agendas behind them. -F # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: Ten Theses on the Panama Papers
On 2016-04-05 23:01, Geert Lovink wrote: > Thanks, Florian. Very interesting. What’s confusing is that the > mainstream media (radio, TV, newspaper) that report about the Panama This is interesting, even crucial, because now other tax authorities may obtain the data from the Australian Taxation Office, and if these requests emanate from 'rule of law', 'democratic' states (as opposed to dictatorships, bent on destroying their political opponents), there is no reason for the Australian government not to oblige. > Papers themselves replicate the myth that the papers are somehow > publicly accessible, searchable etc. There is one exception that I > know of, from what has been reported here. Apparantly the Australian > Taxation Office has a full copy of the entire data set, as became > known yesterday, apart from the 370 investigative journalists that > have worked on the case: > > http://www.smh.com.au/business/banking-and-finance/panama-papers-ato-investigating-more-than-800-australian-clients-of-mossack-fonseca-20160403-gnxgu8.html # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: Ten Theses on the Panama Papers
§I like these points (yours I guess? As you could have got them form someone-else by a simple cut & paste) On 5 Apr 2016, at 15:17, Patrice Riemens wrote: 7. Leaks have become unquestionable. With earlier disclosures, the authenticity of documents leaked could always be credibly disputed. Nowadays the authenticity of materials obtained thru electronic leaks, due to its sheer magnitude and the one to one nature of a digital reproduction, is much more difficult to question. Hence my disagreement with point 7. There are - in my view - as many options to fake, as there are to scrutinise the origin of digital data... The old adagios of 'theft' of ideas or identity hold. When I was reading awhile ago Valentin Groebner. Who Are You? Identification, Deception, and Surveillance in Early Modern Europe. New York: Zone Books, 2007. 349 pp. the pleasure of it was of course how well situations from a far away past could be imagined in our present. Especially where there is a bulk of data, one could slip in easy say 5% of fake documents... which would really hurt someone who is publicly exposed as part of a data set that for 95% is true. This is in itself an example how of why I do not agree with your "unquestionable" leak idea. For the rest of the point... I like them. tjebbe # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: Ten Theses on the Panama Papers
On 2016-04-05 20:42, Florian Cramer wrote: > So what the Panama Papers really are is a warning to whisteblowers > not to "exclusively" give sensitive data to media companies, but to > use whisteblower platforms like Wikileaks instead. Agreed. > Some crucial questions remain unanswered: Why is there no notable US > American citizen among the "accused"? But not for this reason. Much more important, as Brian pointed out, is at the US themselves have become the largest tax haven, globally. Why run to Panama (which could get invaded or strong-armed at any point anyway) when you can go to Delware, Nevada or South Dakota? Well before the Panama Papers, even Bloomberg already run headline like "The World’s Favorite New Tax Haven Is the United States" [1]. [1] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-01-27/the-world-s-favorite-n ew-tax-haven-is-the-united-states > Sure, it's never bad when stories about the international financial > system's obfuscation machinery get out, provoking a political debate > for -- at least -- a couple of days. That these debate have no > political consequences, is part of the choreography. In the short term, yes, but I think what we are seeing here -- and in a myriad of other cases -- is the continuation of the slow but deep de-legitimization of an entire socio-political regime, basically, neoliberalism. This has already gotten so bad, that the only remaining selling-point is fear. And change in the status quo is fought against not with a promise (as was the case up from about 1975 to 2005) but with a threat. Most dramatically, it was on display in Greece last summer where the choice was: torture or end-of-the-world. But the more the de-legitimization goes on, the more people become willing to take risks, to make the jump into the unknown, precisely because it's unknown rather then well-know hell of living within a rotten carcass. At the moment, this opens the way for all kinds of rightwing demagogues, from Trump to LePen and beyond, and for left-wing nostalgia, a la Corbyn and Sanders. But it also fuels much more interesting movements, like the rebel cities in Spain, which are working towards a new re-regionalization within a united Europe, which, as Alex Foti pointed out a couple of days ago, seems one of few vectors of the left that point forward. - -- | http://felix.openflows.com |OPEN PGP: 056C E7D3 9B25 CAE1 336D 6D2F 0BBB 5B95 0C9F F2AC # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: Ten Theses on the Panama Papers
Maybe I'm missing something, but the mere notion that something that 3-400 people have access to (more likely thousands, with associates, managers, etc.) is a tight secret is ... mind boggling. And then when the logistics of distributing all these terabytes to hundreds of recipients, months ago, without a single accident, is considered, this becomes a virtually impossible proposition. On top of this, it appears that each entity got a custom subset - a major editing task. And none of these thousands - not a single one - sent a copy to Wikileaks? Give me a break. What we have here is a totally unrealistic interpretation of the reality. But then it was only a matter of time when the 'anonymous leaks' strategy will get weaponized and incorporated into media business model. has a full copy of the entire data set, as became known yesterday, apart from the 370 investigative journalists that have worked on the case: # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: Ten Theses on the Panama Papers
Postscript to the above:
The ICIJ is a project of the 'Center of Public Integrity'
(https://www.publicintegrity.org/icij/about) whose major funder is
George Soros,
see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_Public_Integrity#Criticism
-F
On Tue, Apr 5, 2016 at 8:42 PM, Florian Cramer
wrote:
Jens Berger from the German political blog Nachdenkseiten has an
opinion on the "Panama Papers" that indeed gives food for thought
("Nachdenkseiten" means "Food for Thought Pages). Here's a quick
translation:
<...>
# distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
# more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
# archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
# @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: Ten Theses on the Panama Papers
Thanks, Florian. Very interesting. What’s confusing is that the mainstream media (radio, TV, newspaper) that report about the Panama Papers themselves replicate the myth that the papers are somehow publicly accessible, searchable etc. There is one exception that I know of, from what has been reported here. Apparantly the Australian Taxation Office has a full copy of the entire data set, as became known yesterday, apart from the 370 investigative journalists that have worked on the case: http://www.smh.com.au/business/banking-and-finance/panama-papers-ato-investigating-more-than-800-australian-clients-of-mossack-fonseca-20160403-gnxgu8.html. It is not yet known if these 370 journalists were given access to all documents. Best, Geert # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: Ten Theses on the Panama Papers
Nicholas Shaxson has written the so-far definitive book on tax havens, entitled Treasure Islands (2012) - a fantastic book, I am amazed no one seems to be talking about it right now. His central thesis is that with the waning of Empire, British elites sought a way to retain their disporoprtionate power - and found it by setting up a complex offshore financial circuit based in numerous remaining overseas possessions, such as the British Virgin Islands. Shaxson traces this network back to its center, the City of London, which has enjoyed extraterritorial privileges since the Middle Ages. Most importantly, he shows that through its continuous economic competition with the UK, the United States has become one vast "treasure island" - effectively obviating much of the need for US citizens to park their money overseas (although they still do, and the treasure islands are still crucial to many tax-avoidance operations). I respectfully disagree with Patrice and Florian about these leaks. What is being "revealed" here are the basic functions of neoliberal capitalism, and therefore, the modus operandi of what sociologist Leslie Sklair calls "the transnational capitalist class" (the TCC). Since they rule, it is clear that their power will not be dissolved in a day. Indeed, as is said everywhere in the media, "offshore accounts are legal" - because the ruling class effectively writes the law. However, since 2008 those laws are slowly being rewritten and the only reason why is more understanding of the tremendous harm being done by the TCC. The answer to this is not the de-institutionalization that Florian calls for (bypassing the press), but rather, a multiplication of institutional efforts spurred on and kept honest by global grassroots networked civil society. The day when it's possible to say "the TCC" and everyone knows what you're talking about, is the day when things will really start to change. But for large numbers of people to really "know what you're talking about" (and not just spout dangerous populist nonsense like a current US presidential candidate) it's going to take a huge educational effort from all directions. In my view, if more institutions don't take part in that, it's unlikely to happen with the scope and depth required. Anarchy is complementary to, not the opposite of, institutionality. Here's to the Panama Papers, at last, Brian # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: Ten Theses on the Panama Papers
On 05.04.2016 20:42, Florian Cramer wrote: What did you learn from the Panama Papers? That African, Russian, Ukrainian and Asian 'elites' are corrupt? Well, this should have been known a for long time, with or without Panama Papers. Sure, it's never bad when stories about the international financial system's obfuscation machinery get out, provoking a political debate for at least a couple of days. That these debate have no political consequences, is part of the choreography. Next week, there's some other "news of the day", only a month later, nobody will know remember the exact spelling of Mossack Fonseca. These are firm rituals of our attention economy that we can't change. To quote sarcastic grin of Putin's press secretary: "Quality investigative journalism has fallen into oblivion." https://meduza.io/news/2016/04/04/peskov-ne-nashel-v-panamskom-arhive-nichego-novogo-o-putine # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: Ten Theses on the Panama Papers
Jens Berger from the German political blog Nachdenkseiten has an
opinion on the "Panama Papers" that indeed gives food for thought
("Nachdenkseiten" means "Food for Thought Pages). Here's a quick
translation:
Panama Papers â not the Scoop but the Flop of the CenturyÂ
This morning, I rhetorically asked what would happen with the data sets
from Panama that the global media are currently hyping. Replies from
some competent readers of this blog confirm what I had feared: Soon our
dear media will have their next story, and Mossack Fonseca's clients
don't need to worry. According to the information we have at this
point, not even tax and police authorities will gain insight into the
data. As The Guardian wrote, the media and institutions involved
respect the privacy of the offshore companies. So what the Panama
Papers really are is a warning to whisteblowers not
to exclusively give sensitive data to media companies, but to use
whisteblower platforms like Wikileaks instead.
by Jens Berger
What did you learn from the Panama Papers? That African, Russian,
Ukrainian and Asian 'elites' are corrupt? Well, this should have been
known a for long time, with or without Panama Papers. Sure, it's never
bad when stories about the international financial system's obfuscation
machinery get out, provoking a political debate for at least a couple
of days. That these debate have no political consequences, is part of
the choreography. Next week, there's some other "news of the day", only
a month later, nobody will know remember the exact spelling of Mossack
Fonseca. These are firm rituals of our attention economy that we can't
change. It would be unfair, of course, to take the Panama Papers for
questioning these meaningless rituals.
So let's have a different look at the matter: What could a
well-functioning journalism have done with these data? One should
remind oneself what "investigative journalism" really is. As a matter
of fact, the ICIJ, the "International Consortium of investigative
journalists" responsible for analyzing the Panama Papers, seems to mix
up investigative journalism with data journalism. The latter, a new
form of journalism, takes some database and looks, with filters and
search terms, for info snippets that lend themselves to headlines. This
is inexpensive, and it yields ratings and clicks. Checking and
disclosing backgrounds, contexts and interconnections however is an
expensive business. Media companies need to cut their budgets.
The 11.5 million documents of the Panama Papers concern 214,488
offshore companies run by about 14,000 people. As things look like,
none of these 14,000 people will ever end up in court for what they
did. And this has its good reasons. In many cases, Mossack Fonseca's
services aren't even illegal. Let's take one of the most prominent
clients. Salman Al Saud is absolutist king of Saudi Arabia. As such he
is, true to the old saying "l'etat c'est moi", the state himself. He
stands above of the law of Saudi Arabia, a law that doesn't apply to
Mr. Al Saud. So he can't evade tax. What then is the information value
of newspapers like Sueddeutsche Zeitung reporting that Salman Al Saud
controls an offshore company on the Virgin Islands? Also in other
cases, the information value seem to be the information as such. The
reason for this is that we're dealing with newspaper reports that no
court in the world will accept as evidence. As long as the data from
the Panama Papers won't end up with national and international criminal
investigators, the "scoop" will have no practical consequences.
In the end, it looks as if the involved media companies used their data
treasure trove only to increase their ratings and print runs. Some
crucial questions remain unanswered: Why is there no notable US
American citizen among the "accused"? Why did Süddeutsche Zeitung and
The Guardian use the publication in a shady manner for running
propaganda against Vladimir Putin? Why are the raw data not being
published?
Every whisteblower can only be advised to strictly avoid the
investigative consortia of the media companies involved in the ICIJ.
With the Offshore Leaks, the Luxemburg Leaks and the Swiss Leaks, ICIJ
& Company did not exactly do a great job. The "villains" got away. If
you really want to make an impact, publish your documents with
Wikileaks. Only then, a transparent and democratic analysis of the
documents will be possible.
Original German article here:
http://www.nachdenkseiten.de/?p=32753
On Tue, Apr 5, 2016 at 3:17 PM, Patrice Riemens wrote:
The theses factory is churning on ...
10 Theses on the Panama Papers
<...>
# distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and
Ten Theses on the Panama Papers
The theses factory is churning on ... 10 Theses on the Panama Papers 1. Never before have so many people owed so much wealth. Even though an even smaller minority of people owe an increasing proportion of the world's wealth, their absolute number have been rising, especially during the last economic boom of triumphant neo-liberalism. Since the crisis their number has stabilized, or even dwindled a little, but it still remains considerable. 2. Never before has wealth been so 'liquid'. Traditional wealth constituted mainly of material stuff: factories, real estate, land, or even money/gold - and not to forget, 'social capital'. All this is still there, but it has been largely 'securitized', transformed into financial instruments leading their own life. Property titles used to be the token for really existing assets, now the roles have been reversed. 3. Never before has wealth been so mobile. Unlike 'solid' assets, financial instruments can be moved around at will - and will be. Here again, traditional profitability was a measure of the actual performance of the 'real' assets. Now it is their financial profitability, bwo 'virtual' positions, which plays that role. 4. Never before has wealth been so velocious. 'Solid' assets always have been acquired and sold and even speculated with, for sure. But this was a process that took sometimes months or even years to take place, with some exceptions taking may be a few weeks or even days. Money itself was moving faster, but banks took one day or two to clear transactions. Nowadays the latency is rather measured in (micro)seconds. 5. Wealth has been digitized. The above points 2, 3, and 4 have been greatly enhanced by information technology (IT). At the same time IT has become mandatory to achieve the objective of profit maximization. This cycle has become vicious, and is the source of the 'accident' befalling Mossack Fonseca, the Panama law/management firm 'victim' of the massive leak referd to as 'the Panama Papers'. 6. Leaks have become an 'integral accident'. In the 'analog' days, a leak the size of the 'Panama Papers' would entail physically taking over the target's premises, and a fleet of lorries to truck the loot out. Now, this is just one (albeit very sophisticated) mouse-click away. 7. Leaks have become unquestionable. With earlier disclosures, the authenticity of documents leaked could always be credibly disputed. Nowadays the authenticity of materials obtained thru electronic leaks, due to its sheer magnitude and the one to one nature of a digital reproduction, is much more difficult to question. 8. But the more we know for true, the less it bears to consequences ... The Panama Papers will most probably confirm that we have swiftly transitioned from 'after Snowden 1.0' to 'after Snowden 2.0'. At the time of the Snowden revelations, the general mood was one of 'we always suspected something like that, now we know' - and now things must and will change. Now we still know, and then even some more, but we also know that nothing will change. 9. ... rather, it bears to negative consequences. My hunch is that even more cynicism and delusion will result from the 'Panama Papers'. A few individuals may go for the chop, but in most cases, the remaining impact will be PR-massaged away, the more so since a majority of ongoings featured in the leaked materials are probably legit - if ethically spurious/illegitimate. It is the (financial-economic-political-social) system itself that is sick to the core, the Panama Papers merely shed lights on its usually more concealed symptoms. 10A. And the Society of the Spectacle marches on ... 10B. All little bits help to break down the walls of Jericho ... Soon the Saints come marching in ... (choice is yours! ;-) # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
