No party can exist forever. Political traditions can decline, and then take on new forms; some simply become extinct. All that can be said with certainty is that if the left is to finally leave the 20th century, the process will have to start with the ideas and convictions that answer the challenges of a modernity it is only just starting to wake up to, let alone understand.
I am tired beyond words of the cynical nonsense spouted every day by professional pundits (as well as amateur ones) that politicians are just in it for themselves, want nothing other than glory or the opportunity to fiddle bath plugs on their parliamentary expenses. Attention must be paid. Most MPs, of all parties, are decent people doing a tough job as well as they can.
When do we ever stop to applaud the manifold virtues of our politics? Why are we so receptive to the calumny that politicians are habitual liars? Jo Cox has been added, senselessly and without compensating progress, to the roll-call of people who lost their lives doing a democratic duty.
Bharara argues that publicizing criminal behavior is a public duty, for the purpose of deterrence. “It’s not my job to put out a ten-point program to fix corruption in New York State,” Bharara told me. “Prosecutors alone are not going to solve the problems. But we do want the problems to be solved. I can say that when you have an overabundance of outside income for legislators, when you have an overconcentration of power in the hands of a few people, and when you have a lack of transparency about how decisions are made and who makes them—that it is our job to point that out. We can give these issues a sense of urgency. A lot of people wake up to the possibility of better government when you start putting people in prison.”
In the end I let my offshore structure collapse soon after setting it up. Unlike some of my offshore counterparts I could not afford the annual £700 charge to maintain them.
My offshore empire was built at my kitchen table with just a few thousand pounds and Emily for help. I can only imagine what kinds of opaque and impenetrable structures could be created by those with the financial means large enough to be employing companies such as Mossack Fonseca.
The GoDaddies of tax-havens :
When we asked Nancy and Stephen about whether they are responsible for monitoring shady clients, they told us they wouldn’t necessarily know if their clients were acting outside the law. “We don’t get involved at all. We just serve as the registered agent,” said Stephen. Stephen did say, however, that if for some reason their client was acting suspiciously, he would cut ties immediately.
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Blast from the past :
Today, he says, “Panama is essentially an extension of the U.S. economy.” It harkens back to the early 20th century, when canal workers were paid in American dollars. In the roaring, free-market friendly 1920s, Panama adopted U.S.-style corporate laws. Some U.S. ships, seeking to avoid Prohibition restrictions against serving alcohol onboard, registered in Panama instead. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration was alarmed to find out that, as the U.S. worked to dig itself out of the Great Depression, wealthy Americans were using Panama as a tax haven.
Jurgen Mossack’s family landed here in the 1960s. During World War II, his father had served in the Nazi Party’s Waffen-SS, according to U.S. Army intelligence files obtained by the ICIJ. Once in Panama, the elder Mossack offered to spy on communists in Cuba for the CIA.
Abnormal Capitalist 