…and the Panama Papers
There are several “Golden Rules”. The one your Eyewitness’s talking about says: “He who has the gold makes the rules”. And this truism was brought to his mind by the “revelations” coming out fast and furious in the so-called “Panama Papers”. Surely you haven’t missed that, have you, Dear Reader? But just in case, let’s give you a fresher in a nutshell.
There’s this “law firm” out in Panama, Mossack Fonseca that had an employee feeling so wronged he decided to bring down the entire firm. Now you’d most likely say, what should that be of any concern to you? Well, just that the Panamanian backwater law firm just happened to be laundering funds for kings, Prime Ministers, gangsters, athletes, administrators, stockbrokers and every other occupation you could think of that may want to hide their financial transactions from the tax man, that there isn’t a country in the world that wasn’t affected.
And if your country was affected by money laundering, you can be sure YOUR pocket was hit – either directly through some mega scam. Or indirectly by some big ones not paying their taxes and living off your hard-earned money deducted by the Government. But somehow most of the news of the scandal we’ve been getting concerns Russia and its ruler, Putin. What’s going on? Aren’t there fellas and felines from the US and the UK with mega bucks to launder? Or are they more virtuous than the rest of the world.
Well, that’s where the “Golden Rule” comes in. The folks that have the gold and make the rules also control all the news organisations the whistleblower sent the 2.6 terabytes of information. The papers show that some of the major banks in the world are the major drivers of this massive scam. So of the 154-document tip of the 11.5 million-document iceberg we’ve seen, you can bet somebody’s trying to make Putin look bad. This is classic misdirection. Then there’re also the thousands of firms like Mossack Fonseca in the US (think Delaware and US Virgin Islands) and UK. Those folks can stay local.
Will we ever read about the big ones in the US and UK? If history is anything to go by…don’t hold your breath. That we now know David Cameron, Prime Minister of Britain received his posh Eton and Oxford education courtesy of a 1982 fund (Cameron was then 16) filtered through the Mossack Fonseca firm his stockbroker father set up, is probably an aberration.
In the meantime, let’s roast Putin.
…in journalism
What would make a journalist, noted for his contrarian positions in marching to the beat of his own drum, suddenly do a complete somersault and eat words he’d penned only a few days before? And in eating his words, offered not a single excuse as to what had made him issue the original words to begin with. This Eyewitness believes it all has to do with a corollary to the Golden Rule which states that who has the gold makes the rules.
And the corollary was penned by our own national poet Martin Carter after he resigned from a three-year stint as Minister of Culture under the Burnham’s PNC dictatorship-in-the-making: “The mouth is muzzled by the hand that feeds it”. And it’s a “shad…shad” story as another of our famous personalities said.
This Eyewitness does not blame the journalist. While to “tell truth to power” sounds powerfully ethical…we each have responsibilities that we must deal with.
The shame is in the hand that threatens to withhold the food.
and scapegoating
Remember the “scapegoat”? After the Jewish priest had “laid” on it all the sins of the people, it was let out to perish in the wilderness.
So who’s the “leak” that made Harmon the present-day scapegoat for the sins of the coalition Government? We know he’s AFC, of course.
The newbie or one of the old duo?
