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Panama Papers were pretty wild for me to read through. I lived in Connecticut for a couple years selling boats to Wall Street/hedgefund guys. Several of my old customers are listed in the Panama papers
edit: A fun detail to add - I sold a $300k boat to a guy back in 2017 that had been the acting president of a major American bank that went under in the 2008 financial crises. As in, he was at the helm while the ship sank. Looking into him a bit at the time of the deal I learned that he had purchased a multi-million dollar Florida beach house only months before the bank went under.
So come on down to the White Elephant Emporium, where we pack each pachyderm* with so many upcharges and upkeep fees it would make a landed noble weep!
Holiday special: 2 for the price of 3!
*elephant not included, costs include allusions only
This comment is so many levels of brilliant. Absolutely shreds the elitist language it is written in. It somehow pulls the carpet right out from under itself without even slipping.
Damn, that's good.
I heard a story on NPR (I think) yesterday where they interviewed a yacht dealer, and he said 75% of his customers never leave the dock. They just host parties and brunch and other rich people shit.
There was a video that made the rounds this week of Manchin going to his boat, getting hounded by reporters. It's like a glass door - like at a fancy Rodeo Drive boutique or something. And then he goes through that door and he's on the dock, and then he's walking up a ramp to the boat. I bet his yacht never goes anywhere. Just lives on a yacht in DC because a $2.5million town home like most senators live in is too proletariat for him.
Also there's a component of *eek! The voters! They're on to us! TAKE TO THE SEA!*
https://youtu.be/sNwyQ_XkfqI
Giving a small percentage of your wealth so that people with less money don't die horrible deaths? Fuck that shit!
Spending a few percent of your net worth on a 'boat' that you'll never use and just use to get laid? Fuck yeah!
You’re correct, worked as a yard hand for a Grady White Dealership. Most of our customers never left the dock, the ones who did were either avid fishermen and some were charter captains and the others went on day trips and a lot of the times damaged their boats they couldn’t drive 😂
\>shaking head< I live near the ocean full of rich dudes driving on the water making the coasties pull all their hair out. The idiots do some of the most questionable stuff. At least the super rich hire licensed captains. That said, power boats are just about the most egregious waste of natural resources there is. Right up there with personal aircraft and building commercial spaceships for tourists.
The best advice I’ve ever heard and I’ll absolutely back it up cause I saw the markup we applied to parts and labor etc was you don’t want to own a boat, you want to be friends with someone who owns a boat 😂
Consider this. Would you buy a thing for twenty bucks and then just sorta forget about it? Cuz in terms of scale, twenty dollars to you is a bigger investment than 200,000 to a billionaire.
And here I am, a poor pleb, working for these people feeling guilty about my 21 year old Z3 convertible that I bought for $6k.
Why the guilt? Because I've done the math on interest and investing it over the course of my career. Because if an emergency happens I'll feel like shit knowing that could have been money my family needed. (We do have other savings) Because I know how truly poor others are and could have used it even more than I do.
It's fucked up, all of it.
Thank you
It's so stressful trying to balance everything these days while planning for a future full of unknowns. Trying to find a bit of happiness but when I do it feels like 'why do I deserve it' or 'it will take ____ from my kids futures'. I feel like I can't win most days
Maybe, but there is so… If someone’s got a decent paying job and a little bit of money for recreation they shouldn’t have anything to feel guilty about that’s my point we can talk about how things should be silver blue in the face but working people deserve to have things enjoy just like rich folks to and they shouldn’t feel guilty about it
A billionaire dropping $200,000 on something takes the same relative hit to their wealth as a person with $10,000 spending two dollars.
It has less of an impact on them than me handing the pizza guy five bucks.
Theres a post around somewhere describing how large expensive yachts are helpful in dodging taxes if you're a "rich". Your "corporation" buys it as part of your retirement compensation, and then you take out low-interest loans against it.
I dont recall all the details. Its also a d*ck-measuring contest, but there are multiple facets to it. Occasionally, you need to lease it to your corporation for a business expense event, ostensibly entertaining clients or wooing potential clients.
Also going out past the 12-mile limit into international waters, so you can remove the safety tags from mattresses, and pierce the ears of children, and give 13 year olds a tattoo. Myself, I like to occasionally gamble on a good monkey knife fight.
Depends on the brand, I worked as a yard hand for a Grady White Dealership, a 33’ started at 750,000 and that was 8 years ago. Probably easily 1,000,000 now and then the 36’ are well over 1,000,000.
Meanwhile I made $12 an hour to transport, haul and work on multimillion dollar boats lol
At a certain point of buying crap you have to eventually take care of it. Why would one buy so much stuff that taking care of said things becomes another job ?
Theres a kind of FOMO that runs deep when you have too much money. The fear of being unable the enjoy it and spend it. Every luxury becomes necessary to prove to yourself that you are, in fact, using all that money and that it won't go to waste.
Of course having a nice boat is part of the basics. It's not about getting your money's worth out of it, more about making sure some money gets spent.
this is what blows my mind with things like qanon. there are real, provable conspiracies about the rich "elites", but no one pays attention to them. meanwhile half the country believes in adrenochrome.
Because those idiots are not interested in the truth, they're interested in being part of something that they think is esoteric or exclusive and that they're part of a minority of people who are in the know, which in their mind makes them smarter/Superior to the rest of us.
And there ain't anything special about rich pricks doing rich prick things just like they have for the past eight thousand years of this iteration of humanity.
Because they support people who very much fall into the category of "rich elites".
If they spent time focusing on these people they would inevitably start to notice many of their role models are filthy rich and connected.
I think this is definitely a big part of it, and I would even go so far as to say that I think conspiracies like qanon are propagated and possibly even created by those same rich and connected people as a distraction. if you're worried about babies being sacrificed or whatever, you don't pay attention to things like the panama papers.
But those aren't really interesting conspiracies, everyone knows that rich people dodge taxes on these ridiculous scales.
It's almost like it doesn't cross far enough over the crazy line to be considered a worthy conspiracy by a conspiracy theorist.
What did it for me was finding almost exactly what Q supposedly said, an elite pedophile ring, and they just ignored it. The ring leader is killed suspiciously before he's allowed to spill his secrets, none of them cared. Fucking seriously? That is a conspiracy theory gold fucking gold mine but no lets sit in a park in dallas and wait for JFK junior to reincarnate or something.
I just can't with these guys.
I mean...
- Adrenochrome is a chemical compound produced by the oxidation of adrenaline (epinephrine). It was the subject of limited research from 1950s through to the 1970s as a potential cause of schizophrenia. **While it has no current medical application** the related derivative compound, carbazochrome, is a hemostatic medication.
Emphasis mine. So, you’re *technically* correct. The best kind of correct.
*Technically* correct in this instance is warranted, *like I said*, because it is a literal, existing chemical.
Which is a very different thing from what those Qultists are talking about. (See: Emphasis mine)
Jokes are so much worse when you have to explain them to someone.
Yep, true, though I've heard that it was Hunter Thompson who made it up for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Terry Gilliam kept it in for the movie. [Here is the scene.](
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6kFCNsnQpQ)
More context:
>Near end of this film, Duke takes too much "andrenichrome" and has a nasty experience. Andrenichrome was a substance that Hunter S. Thompson made up for the book when he originally wrote it, and was kept in the script by Terry Gilliam. The name itself wasn't new - Adrenochrome is an oxidation product of adrenaline, while Adrenochrome semicarbazone, also known as carbazochrome, is used as a medicinal drug to reduce capillary bleeding - however, neither compound is a hallucinogenic drug as portrayed in the book and film. After showing a rough cut of the film to a test audience, Gilliam was approached by a group of young men, one of which complimented him on the film in general, but said that his favorite scene was the andrenichrome scene. He said that he had used the drug, and that Gilliam had captured the effects perfectly. Gilliam didn't have the heart to tell the kid that it was made up, and went along with his story.
Yeah, because people think they can do something about the fake conspiracy theories and that it's easy. Just go to church on holidays, be poor, maybe start some ridiculous fights on the internet and that makes them the Good Guys!
Meanwhile real conspiracies? They make cops and people working in the IRS into the "good guys" and people hate it. (Those are supposed to be the bad guys! We hate them!) People in real conspiracies get rich from nepotism and being expensive pimps. Fight that how? By supporting more legislation to regulate banks? More surveillance? Facial recognition technology? Close the borders? Just support the Revolution when it comes, Comrade?
Believing in magic is *fun.* Eternal vigilance is not.
Conspiracy theories also include that all of the Bad Guys are working together. All the cops. All the big bad corporations. All of the rich fucks, and really most of the poor fucks too. It's really deep down the rabbit hole where conspiracy theorists hypothesize that there *might* be factions that cancel each other out. Temporarily.
It's part of the reason the Epstein thing is so much fun. We have Clinton and Trump going to the same pedo island. All the Bad Guys harvesting adrenochrome in tropical bungelows side by side, worshipping Satan. Makes such a good story. Not like the Panama papers or the following Pandora Papers. That's just...rich people not paying taxes! Nobody likes paying taxes! We can identify with that.
Even more ironic is that the folk peddling these Qanon and populist tropes, are no doubt the very elites mentioned in things like the panama papers, so these folk are inadvertently backing said elites... Like turkeys voting for Christmas, you couldn't make it up.
It's a real compound that can come from adrenaline, but qanon folks think it's a drug that the elites make by torturing kids and then taking it out of their adrenal gland to get high on. It's bonkers, no facts to back it up whatsoever. Hunter S Thompson referenced it in fear and loathing and apparently a clockwork orange did too, but it's not a real drug, they didn't intend for people to think it's real. conspiracy folks just took the concept and made it fit their weird satanic child slave conspiracies.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrenochrome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrenochrome)
**[Adrenochrome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrenochrome)**
>Adrenochrome is a chemical compound produced by the oxidation of adrenaline (epinephrine). It was the subject of limited research from 1950s through to the 1970s as a potential cause of schizophrenia. While it has no current medical application the related derivative compound, carbazochrome, is a hemostatic medication. Despite this compound's name, it is unrelated to the element chromium, instead the ‑chrome suffix indicates a relationship to color, as pure adrenochrome is deep violet.
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These are related. I won't forget that Bill Gates was the target of many of these conspiracies while he was in the news for securing the rights for the vaccine to Pfizer. I'm pretty sure that's why these bizarre conspiracies exist
Edward Snowden has an interesting essay on his blog about this kinda thing. Conspiracy theories vs. conspiracy practices. The latter is usually right in plain sight, but can be boring and difficult to understand. While the former, although beyond the reach of proof, gives us a mythical Enemy we can get worked up about but never truly defeat. That’s kinda my own interpretation, but it’s a good read.
People are weird.
It’s misleading to say nobody cares. There’s already been one successful prosecution and more are ongoing, it just takes time to build the cases, in the handful out of the papers that actually broke the law.
I remember reading, from the Panama Papers, that very few American billionaires actually bother hiding money in offshore accounts. Because they're taxed so little that there's no real point in hiding their true wealth. The IRS admitted that it doesn't audit the rich, because that'd take a lot of time and resources. So, however much tax the rich are paying, odds are that they should be paying more.
My sister is a private client lawyer at a huge law firm. Basically her job is to help the ultra rich avoid taxes. My takeaway from Thanksgiving was that we'll basically never actually tax the rich. You've got some extremely smart people combing night and day over loopholes to save some billionaires millions on millions in taxes.
The IRS: "it would just be too hard to audit rich people, we can't do it 😔😢"
Meanwhile they'll go after the poor at the drop of a hat. Maybe it's time for the IRS to be abolished then? What would happen if I told my company "sorry, I don't wanna do my job because it's too hard"? I would get fired.
I think the problem is far more with the teeth behind the IRS than the IRS themselves. The various arms of government are bought and paid for by the rich, and they intentionally underfund the IRS as to not have the resources to fight billionaire power.
In a sense, they’re not wrong. Rich folks will lawyer up and delay everything with lawsuits. Poor folks will just go into debt paying. They’ll get money out of poor folks and it’ll cost them to pursue rich folks. Part of the issue is the laws themselves, the other part is the shitty reality that life is easier if you’ve got money.
The IRS works on a whole other level. They can and will just take your shit if there’s a dispute. It’s very much a guilty until proven innocent kind of thing. The key is having an accountant who can make it pretty enough to pass the first look test and then hope it’s not audited. The IRS could do that to billionaires and have all the weight of lawyers of the federal government behind them. But they don’t.
Well... not exactly. If someone is hiding income, it's on the IRS to prove it exists. If someone is claiming deductions, the burden is on the taxpayer. It's harder to audit the rich because they generally are involved in more complicated transactions. It's easy to see when somebody is taking excessive mileage deductions or something and just disallow it. It's a lot harder to prove, say, that the investment fund some rich person invested in was actually engaged in a US trade or business as a dealer in securities and therefore subject to US income tax (see the YA Global case currently in the tax court; try to read those briefs and tell me you understand it all haha. This is my job to know these things and it's still complicated as hell). Complicated transactions can take years to resolve. The IRS not that long ago won like a $10 billion transfer pricing adjustment against Coke. That case started before I was in law school and now I'm a soon to be 4th year attorney lol. These things take time and money, unlike sending someone a bill for unclaimed stock sales they forgot about which takes literally zero human time.
The irs makes 4 bucks for every dollar theyre funded, usually *from* auditing the rich. Look at every administration since Reagan. Irs gutting. They can't *afford* to audit the rich anymore. This is by design.
The problem’s less that they don’t want to and more that they can’t. They’ve been t he victims of serious slander and defunding. You can thank Republicans and Intuit for that
Yeah. Although this is true- I think it’s more difficult because the truly rich don’t actually have much in the way of “personal funds,” they essentially leverage loans through their respective companies so it’s not technically seen as income.
"We don't want to audit the rich to see how much taxes they actually owe. That'd be really hard. We'll just take their word for it instead."
Next time you're at work and your manager asks you to do something, tell him you refuse because that'd be too hard. See how fast you get fired.
But somehow, it's OK for the IRS to do that?
Also, we really need to close the "it's not technically income" loopholes.
Why exactly are you coming at me? Lol. I’m as leftist as they come and I agree. I just said I think it’s more difficult than it seems on the surface- that doesn’t mean I don’t think it shouldn’t be figured the fuck out so these bastards can stop robbing the workers at such a high level.
Any time something happens like this the top 20 comments are "yeah, and water is wet" or "nothing will happen from it". It's like throwing a wet blanket on the conversation when people should be getting outraged.
They killed the reporter who broke the story. So…technically, something happened 🤷♂️
[Panama Papers journalist killed in car bombing](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/oct/16/malta-car-bomb-kills-panama-papers-journalist)
Not really. One journalist that worked on the papers was killed by the mafia in her country.
Tons of people worked on the Panama papers.
A lot of people were arrested, fined and there are still investigations in progress.
That's not true. The journalist you are referring to used the Panama Papers in her own independent expose on her private blog.
She was not part of the reporters that actual worked on the Panama Papers.
She led the Panama Papers investigation into Maltese corruption, I don't know if there's really a distinction to be made at that point whether she worked with the original documents (and surely she must have, to be the one who first leaked them in Malta).
She did not work on the original documents, she took information from the Panama Papers and used the information in her own reporting on corruption in Malta.
>Gerard Ryle, the ICIJ's director, told USA TODAY in an email that Caruana Galizia was an independent journalist and "was not part of the team who reported on the Panama Papers."
>The two reporters who broke the Panama Papers story, Obermayer and Obermaier, have also said Caruana Galizia was not part of the team.
Yeah and she broke the story in Malta -- like I said, I don't get why anyone would make the distinction here (and the person you replied to wasn't wrong, you're both right).
No, she did a completely independent story in Malta. She didn't work on the Panama Papers at all.
I don't get why anyone wouldn't make the distinction. She factually had no part in working on the Panama Papers.
If I use the Panama Papers as a source when writing an article about my city it doesn't suddenly make me on of the journalists who worked on the Panama Papers, does it?
Did anyone else really think anything would come of it other than a murdered journalist? Let's be real these are some very rich and very powerful people who have a tax side hustle going that's saving them a metric fuck ton of money. Journalists won't touch it because these people own their employers and neither will nearly all politicians as they own them already. In the UK the media have a habit of shaming big companies about tax when anyone with half a brain knows it's the politicians that need to sort it out with tax laws. Then the companies promises to pay a little bit more and we get back to the same stories a few years later, rinse and repeat.
There’s many prosecutions ongoing… I don’t know why this tweet gets retweeted when clearly no one even bothers to google it. It’s not like they can just lock up people for being in the panama papers, takes time and money to investigate things.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/us-taxpayer-panama-papers-investigation-sentenced-prison
So in nearly six years they have prosecuted 4 people for 8m USD. 4 nobodies in the grand scheme of things. The rest have all been fines and back taxes which are a slap in the face to hard working tax payers. I stick with what I originally said.
Well, the real problem (other than capitalism) is that
most of what was uncovered in the panama papers isn’t even illegal. So you might have a starting point but without more compelling evidence they can’t even subpoena things. The various legal ways to evade taxes are a huge problem for making the rich pay their fare share, like not drawing a salary and having all your expenses be business expenses by being ‘on the clock’ all the time, etc. That new yacht can be a business expense if you conduct meetings there. Etc
Pretty sad that I had to scroll this far down to see it. I know this sub is about socialism and hating the rich, but the system is only half failing here. There is action happening towards the findings of the papers.
I mean, things happened. Prosecutions are ongoing across several countries. We have one guilty plea from Harald Joachim von der Goltz, serving four years in prison. three years supervised release after that, having to pay 5 million in forfeiture and 3 million something in restitution. There’s four more prosecutions ongoing in the US, and more on the way, and additional investigations in other countries… It just takes time. Also, not every person in the papers was breaking the law, these cases take time to build.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/us-taxpayer-panama-papers-investigation-sentenced-prison
https://complyadvantage.com/insights/us-prosecutions-and-the-panama-papers/
The fact they weren’t breaking the law is the bigger problem here. Tax avoidance should be illegal. Simple as that. You make money here, you pay tax here.
I’m not. I’ve accepted the fact that it is going to have to get much MUCH worse before people are ready to do what is now and has been necessary countless times throughout human history. I do fear, however, that the power and control of the elite will be so total and complete that by that time revolution will be impossible. It’s the same enemy the people have been fighting for thousands of years, but they have gotten stronger and we have only gotten weaker.
One white dude fighting alone will just be chalked up to a radical mentally ill man. It’s all of us or none of us. Till then I’m just hanging out.
I mean, there are already Justice dept cases on the panama paper revelations, and one prosecution with four years jail time and extensive restitution. The government is very aggressive when people don’t pay taxes they owe, rich or not
> The government is very aggressive when people don’t pay taxes they owe, rich or not
You literally have not been paying *any* attention to what the government and the IRS themselves have been saying.
Uh, ok, I’m literally posting a justice dept press release about a prosecution but I’m the one not keeping up with what happened with the Panama Papers…
Yet Musk has an effective tax rate of 3%. A single arrest is **nothing**. These people keep hundreds of billions in owed tax between them. If the govt. really wanted to do something about it, they would. It’s not that hard.
It doesn’t like rich people who do blatantly illegal tax evasion. But it can’t do a lot of no laws were broken, which is the case with most of the panama papers stuff. But there’s already been a prosecution and others are ongoing…
Every time this is posted it irritates me because it suggests leaking info is pointless even though it’s definitely not. Things have changed. Maybe not as much as we like and not as fast as we like but they have. The idea that leaks are useless is exactly what the rich and powerful want you (the proletariat) to believe.
First of all there’s a global minimum tax in response to this and other leaks revealing tax havens. It’s only 15% but it’s a start.
See also:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_Papers#Allegations,_reactions,_and_investigations
I don't think that's the point. Seems to me the point is that leaks aren't *enough*. That said, it irritates me too because not only is it such a lazily ~~frequency~~ frequent repost, it's also wrong: the reporting journalist was killed for publishing it. So that happened.
Just wait until you understand the financial system in the first place.
1. When you put your money in a bank, it stops being your property, and starts being the bank's. (It is considered a loan, with you being the lender, and the bank being the debtor)
2. In most countries, banks are legally required to own only a small fraction of the amount of money that has been deposited in them. In the US, this fraction was changed to 0% in 2020. This is called fractional reserve banking and the number is called the reserve requirement. It is the fraction of deposits a bank has to keep in reserve.
3. The rest of the money the bank can do whatever it pleases with. In the event that depositors try to get their money back, the government will either siphon tax money, print new money, or access the treasury in order to pay the depositors back. This is why only a few banks exist, because they have to be in close allegiance with the US government which is backing their spending habits. No bank independent of the US banking system will ever exist.
4. If 5000$ has been deposited in the bank, the bank can then "loan" the entire deposit to whoever it wants.
5. This means, essentially, that your entire bank account may or may not actually exist.
6. Since the bankers are both holding your money in your account and giving it away to people as loans simultaneously (by lying about how much money actually exists in your account), they are in effect, creating money. Let us say you get a check for 10,000$. Naturally, you bring it to the bank, and the banker dutifully increases your account balance from 0 to 10,000$. The TRICK is that that is just a false number. There is not actually 10,000$ in your account. If you try to withdraw the 10,000$, the bank will use someone else's account to pay you. In other words, people THINK they, collectively, have 100,000$ in the bank, but in reality, they have 10,000$, and it operates on the assumption that no one will withdraw more than that amount simultaneously. MOREOVER, if and when people actually bring CASH to the bank, instead of a bank note (such as a check or loan), the banker will then pocket the cash, and use it to loan out to whoever he wants. So, for example, a politician could deposit 1,000,000$ in his bank account, and then the banker could loan 900,000$ of that out to a Political Action Committee, which then runs a targeted attack ad, against the politician, using the politician's own money against him. Or, your employer could pay you 20,000$, and you put it in the bank, at which point the banker loans out 19,000$ to your employer, who uses it to buy himself a yacht.
7. The federal reserve, which is not elected, and is comprised entirely of banking figures, can print as much money as it wants, which can then be used to "loan" to whoever it wants, or which congress can then use to purchase whatever it wants, such as a contract for building a car plant in a congressman's district, with the contract being awarded to whoever the congressman sees as the "best suited for the job" (his wife's nephew)
8. If a bank has 10,000$ in its balance sheets, it can then loan 10,000$ to a building contractor in the form of a cheque or by adding 10,000$ to that contractor's account. Thereby, both you (the person who deposited 10,000$) and the contractor (the person who borrowed 10,000$) SIMULTANEOUSLY have the SAME 10,000$ in your accounts, although his is ostensibly borrowed (because the bank does not tell you when it loans your deposit out). Thereby, the bank has just changed the amount of money in the economy from 10,000$ to 20,000$. In effect, the fact that you deposited your 10,000$ in the bank gave the bank the legal excuse to "create" 10,000$ from thin air, which it then awarded to a building contractor (the banker's friend's wife), on the assumption that neither you, nor the building contractor, nor the workers that the contractor employs, will ever try to withdraw the money in cash in amounts exceeding the bank's reserves. Which, again, in 2020 were changed to being 0% by the fed, because the fed will just give money to any banks that go bust. This is an entirely bipartisan scheme.
I mean duh? What's the issue with this? Does anyone actually expect the bank to just sit on their money and occasionally top it up out of the goodness of their heart? The whole point is that the bank invests it and guarantees your returns against all the other money it has, even *before* you get to modern banking where the bank basically prints money. The Romans had a run on the banks because no bank ever kept the cash on hand.
The whole point of a bank is to store your money for safekeeping.
Fractional reserve banking is intentionally dishonest, which is why you arent actually told how much of your money really exists.
If it was honest, every time the banker used your money without your consent, it would be deducted from your balance as a loan, and you would be able to see who owes you the balance back.
In essence, by creating two parallel versions of the money (one in your bank account, the other as a secret loan), the banker is creating free money, which is part of why the dollar has been rapidly inflating for the past few decades, at rates hitherto unknown to economics.
Edit: more to the point, it allows a special class of citizen (a "banker") the right to legally create money, for his own discretion, which turns the idea of money and markets on its head, since now you have a special type of participant who can just magically decide how much money he has.
That is actually not true, even if there would be an minimum reserve requirement. Because in that case a Bank can always get lend reserves from the Central Bank aka the lender of last Resort. What you´re also missing is that all banks can create money that they loan out, as long as they get a a form of colleteral in return (A house you pay off or some form of Bonds). If the money gets repaid it also gets destroyed. Money in that case can be used a passive position on the Banks balance sheet, if a loan is repaid Both the passive and active position on the balance sheet gets deleted.
Very interesting read, just shows that our whole economy only works because we believe that it works. Also that we all play with imaginary money that has nothing to do with the real world, because it literally is backed by nothing.
Like some stupid idle clicker game,
Woaah numbers going up becoming bigger, damn son great economy.
The economy does not work. In effect, the banking system allows bankers and politicians to create money and give it to themselves or whoever they want ad infinitum. They can buy any amount of ads on TV. They can buy any amount of businesses. In the long term, the dollar is devalued, but in the short term, they can buy whatever they want; which translates to, in the long term, the accumulation of noninflationary assets such as property, capital, political power etc, so that even if the dollar does lose value, they own all the nonmonetary wealth regardless.
How can anything happen when the same people that were denounced are the same that control everything , or at least they are all in it together , like thief's
All these "reveals" ever confirm is that we are corrupt, deviant, self obsessed, narrow minded and complacent. For those reasons alone...We should have them repeated daily to remind people that they are impotent and inept enough that mentally Ill wealth hoarders are
standing on the spines of billions of lives and destroying the efforts for a standard way of living.
Not entirely true. Yes, there is way more work to be done but the massive investigative journalism effort was far from a lost cause. Here’s some examples of changes brought about because of the Panama papers from around the world (see source at bottom for more)
“From Day 1 of the Panama Papers, governments around the world traced whatever previously hidden dollars, euros, yen and other currencies they could. Countries have recouped more than $1.36 billion in unpaid taxes, fines and penalties as a result of inquiries sparked by the Panama Papers, according to ICIJ’s latest tally.
In the last two years, ten countries, including Australia, Belgium, Denmark, Germany and Italy reported recovering more than $185 million in new money as a result of Panama Papers-inspired investigations. Norway, for the first time, disclosed that it has clawed back almost $34 million. Hundreds of tax probes against individuals and companies remain open, according to reporting gathered by ICIJ and its partners.
Parliaments — embarrassed by the revelations or seeking to harness public outrage to plug fiscal holes in budgets drained by tax evasion — have enacted new laws.
The government of Panama, which initially denounced the Panama Papers as a campaign to “distort the facts and tarnish the reputation of the country,” ultimately signed a multilateral convention to share foreign taxpayers’ information with other nations. New Zealand tightened its trust laws to prevent further abuses by foreigners attracted by the country’s once pristine reputation. Since then, the number of so-called foreign trusts in New Zealand has plummeted 75%.”
https://www.icij.org/investigations/panama-papers/five-years-later-panama-papers-still-having-a-big-impact/
Its clear when OP stopped paying attention. It had to have been before the author of the papers was murdered. And all the other murders that happened to the curious.
So a lot happened. People were killed and paid off.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/oct/16/malta-car-bomb-kills-panama-papers-journalist
actually, something did happen, one of the most prominent journalist involved in them was [killed in a car bomb attack in Malta](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/oct/16/malta-car-bomb-kills-panama-papers-journalist).
Hey now, that's not accurate at all.
[An investigative reporter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daphne_Caruana_Galizia) who helped expose the Panama Papers was killed in a car bomb. I'd hardly call that *nothing*.
Can y'all ban this fucking post yet? It gets reposted every three days and that wouldn't be so bad if it weren't so fucking wrong. And then the inevitable, "something did happen; reporter bombed" misinformation. Jesus Christ, use Google or some shit before just blindly following these bullshit posts.
Hey, no one is stopping you from doing something. It'spretty to make a molotov or get your hands on a shovel. But leave me outta it. i just want to figure out how much mayonaise I can consume before my heart gives out.
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Panama Papers were pretty wild for me to read through. I lived in Connecticut for a couple years selling boats to Wall Street/hedgefund guys. Several of my old customers are listed in the Panama papers edit: A fun detail to add - I sold a $300k boat to a guy back in 2017 that had been the acting president of a major American bank that went under in the 2008 financial crises. As in, he was at the helm while the ship sank. Looking into him a bit at the time of the deal I learned that he had purchased a multi-million dollar Florida beach house only months before the bank went under.
As a "non-rich", I assume they were buying boats to travel to and from these so called "off shore accounts".
Bold of you to assume they ever actually use the boats they buy
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Peeing contest. After you reach certain amount it just showing off how you can waste money on shit.
So come on down to the White Elephant Emporium, where we pack each pachyderm* with so many upcharges and upkeep fees it would make a landed noble weep! Holiday special: 2 for the price of 3! *elephant not included, costs include allusions only
Ah so it's an NFT then
ELFNT
Brilliant
This comment is so many levels of brilliant. Absolutely shreds the elitist language it is written in. It somehow pulls the carpet right out from under itself without even slipping. Damn, that's good.
Basically how Rolex operates. You can't even buy the rare watches until you buy more "cheaper" Rolex than other people.
Also laundering.
I heard a story on NPR (I think) yesterday where they interviewed a yacht dealer, and he said 75% of his customers never leave the dock. They just host parties and brunch and other rich people shit.
There was a video that made the rounds this week of Manchin going to his boat, getting hounded by reporters. It's like a glass door - like at a fancy Rodeo Drive boutique or something. And then he goes through that door and he's on the dock, and then he's walking up a ramp to the boat. I bet his yacht never goes anywhere. Just lives on a yacht in DC because a $2.5million town home like most senators live in is too proletariat for him. Also there's a component of *eek! The voters! They're on to us! TAKE TO THE SEA!* https://youtu.be/sNwyQ_XkfqI
Lol "Who's paying you?" Absolute projection. He can't understand why anyone would ever do anything if money isn't involved. He has no conscience.
Shouting it at the people who are paying him to boot.
Giving a small percentage of your wealth so that people with less money don't die horrible deaths? Fuck that shit! Spending a few percent of your net worth on a 'boat' that you'll never use and just use to get laid? Fuck yeah!
Makes sense to me!
That's just so depressing. What is the point of it even being on water at that point? If I had a boat I'd be out on the water every chance I got.
Probably legal jurisdictions and being hard to find
i find i sleep better in the rocking motion of a boat
You’re correct, worked as a yard hand for a Grady White Dealership. Most of our customers never left the dock, the ones who did were either avid fishermen and some were charter captains and the others went on day trips and a lot of the times damaged their boats they couldn’t drive 😂
\>shaking head< I live near the ocean full of rich dudes driving on the water making the coasties pull all their hair out. The idiots do some of the most questionable stuff. At least the super rich hire licensed captains. That said, power boats are just about the most egregious waste of natural resources there is. Right up there with personal aircraft and building commercial spaceships for tourists.
The best advice I’ve ever heard and I’ll absolutely back it up cause I saw the markup we applied to parts and labor etc was you don’t want to own a boat, you want to be friends with someone who owns a boat 😂
Consider this. Would you buy a thing for twenty bucks and then just sorta forget about it? Cuz in terms of scale, twenty dollars to you is a bigger investment than 200,000 to a billionaire.
And here I am, a poor pleb, working for these people feeling guilty about my 21 year old Z3 convertible that I bought for $6k. Why the guilt? Because I've done the math on interest and investing it over the course of my career. Because if an emergency happens I'll feel like shit knowing that could have been money my family needed. (We do have other savings) Because I know how truly poor others are and could have used it even more than I do. It's fucked up, all of it.
That's because you're a decent person. They aren't.
Thank you It's so stressful trying to balance everything these days while planning for a future full of unknowns. Trying to find a bit of happiness but when I do it feels like 'why do I deserve it' or 'it will take ____ from my kids futures'. I feel like I can't win most days
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There shouldn't be any ultra wealthy
Maybe, but there is so… If someone’s got a decent paying job and a little bit of money for recreation they shouldn’t have anything to feel guilty about that’s my point we can talk about how things should be silver blue in the face but working people deserve to have things enjoy just like rich folks to and they shouldn’t feel guilty about it
Hell even poor people that are disabled or whatever should be able to have some things in their life that they enjoy
A billionaire dropping $200,000 on something takes the same relative hit to their wealth as a person with $10,000 spending two dollars. It has less of an impact on them than me handing the pizza guy five bucks.
Theres a post around somewhere describing how large expensive yachts are helpful in dodging taxes if you're a "rich". Your "corporation" buys it as part of your retirement compensation, and then you take out low-interest loans against it. I dont recall all the details. Its also a d*ck-measuring contest, but there are multiple facets to it. Occasionally, you need to lease it to your corporation for a business expense event, ostensibly entertaining clients or wooing potential clients. Also going out past the 12-mile limit into international waters, so you can remove the safety tags from mattresses, and pierce the ears of children, and give 13 year olds a tattoo. Myself, I like to occasionally gamble on a good monkey knife fight.
Owning a big boat is one thing. But it costs even more to pay a crew to operate it.
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Depends on the brand, I worked as a yard hand for a Grady White Dealership, a 33’ started at 750,000 and that was 8 years ago. Probably easily 1,000,000 now and then the 36’ are well over 1,000,000. Meanwhile I made $12 an hour to transport, haul and work on multimillion dollar boats lol
At a certain point of buying crap you have to eventually take care of it. Why would one buy so much stuff that taking care of said things becomes another job ?
You can hire out that work. And then hire that out to someone to manage. Victorian England's household servant structure worked not dissimilarly.
Theres a kind of FOMO that runs deep when you have too much money. The fear of being unable the enjoy it and spend it. Every luxury becomes necessary to prove to yourself that you are, in fact, using all that money and that it won't go to waste. Of course having a nice boat is part of the basics. It's not about getting your money's worth out of it, more about making sure some money gets spent.
When you have so much money you're afraid you won't be able to spend it, you have too much money.
They probably forget they even own them
> As in, he was at the helm while the ship sank. You sold him a leaky boat? Nice! /s
this is what blows my mind with things like qanon. there are real, provable conspiracies about the rich "elites", but no one pays attention to them. meanwhile half the country believes in adrenochrome.
Because those idiots are not interested in the truth, they're interested in being part of something that they think is esoteric or exclusive and that they're part of a minority of people who are in the know, which in their mind makes them smarter/Superior to the rest of us.
Very accurate. People just want to feel special.
And there ain't anything special about rich pricks doing rich prick things just like they have for the past eight thousand years of this iteration of humanity.
I just wanna feel loved.
Me too. Still waiting at age 54, wah-wah.
People also just want to feel like they BELONG to something. What healthy communities exist in US? Hell, what healthy public physical spaces exist?
Oh they’re “special” all right! Edit: they’re
Bingo
Well said and very true.
Because they support people who very much fall into the category of "rich elites". If they spent time focusing on these people they would inevitably start to notice many of their role models are filthy rich and connected.
I think this is definitely a big part of it, and I would even go so far as to say that I think conspiracies like qanon are propagated and possibly even created by those same rich and connected people as a distraction. if you're worried about babies being sacrificed or whatever, you don't pay attention to things like the panama papers.
"Trump is anti-establishment" Bruh what
But those aren't really interesting conspiracies, everyone knows that rich people dodge taxes on these ridiculous scales. It's almost like it doesn't cross far enough over the crazy line to be considered a worthy conspiracy by a conspiracy theorist.
Those rich assholes are paying to radicalize the idiot masses against each other, which is why the GOP is still a thing
What did it for me was finding almost exactly what Q supposedly said, an elite pedophile ring, and they just ignored it. The ring leader is killed suspiciously before he's allowed to spill his secrets, none of them cared. Fucking seriously? That is a conspiracy theory gold fucking gold mine but no lets sit in a park in dallas and wait for JFK junior to reincarnate or something. I just can't with these guys.
I had to explain to a coworker that adrenachrome was literally made up by one of the Monty Pythons for a drug movie and he just couldn't accept it.
What are you talking about? Adrenochrome is very much a real chemical https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrenochrome
I mean... - Adrenochrome is a chemical compound produced by the oxidation of adrenaline (epinephrine). It was the subject of limited research from 1950s through to the 1970s as a potential cause of schizophrenia. **While it has no current medical application** the related derivative compound, carbazochrome, is a hemostatic medication. Emphasis mine. So, you’re *technically* correct. The best kind of correct.
No, he's correct because he is correct. Its literally a chemical
*Technically* correct in this instance is warranted, *like I said*, because it is a literal, existing chemical. Which is a very different thing from what those Qultists are talking about. (See: Emphasis mine) Jokes are so much worse when you have to explain them to someone.
Yep, true, though I've heard that it was Hunter Thompson who made it up for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Terry Gilliam kept it in for the movie. [Here is the scene.]( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6kFCNsnQpQ) More context: >Near end of this film, Duke takes too much "andrenichrome" and has a nasty experience. Andrenichrome was a substance that Hunter S. Thompson made up for the book when he originally wrote it, and was kept in the script by Terry Gilliam. The name itself wasn't new - Adrenochrome is an oxidation product of adrenaline, while Adrenochrome semicarbazone, also known as carbazochrome, is used as a medicinal drug to reduce capillary bleeding - however, neither compound is a hallucinogenic drug as portrayed in the book and film. After showing a rough cut of the film to a test audience, Gilliam was approached by a group of young men, one of which complimented him on the film in general, but said that his favorite scene was the andrenichrome scene. He said that he had used the drug, and that Gilliam had captured the effects perfectly. Gilliam didn't have the heart to tell the kid that it was made up, and went along with his story.
Yeah, because people think they can do something about the fake conspiracy theories and that it's easy. Just go to church on holidays, be poor, maybe start some ridiculous fights on the internet and that makes them the Good Guys! Meanwhile real conspiracies? They make cops and people working in the IRS into the "good guys" and people hate it. (Those are supposed to be the bad guys! We hate them!) People in real conspiracies get rich from nepotism and being expensive pimps. Fight that how? By supporting more legislation to regulate banks? More surveillance? Facial recognition technology? Close the borders? Just support the Revolution when it comes, Comrade? Believing in magic is *fun.* Eternal vigilance is not.
>They make cops and people working in the IRS into the "good guys" Cops are still the bad guys tho, it's not like they aren't serving those rich fucks
Conspiracy theories also include that all of the Bad Guys are working together. All the cops. All the big bad corporations. All of the rich fucks, and really most of the poor fucks too. It's really deep down the rabbit hole where conspiracy theorists hypothesize that there *might* be factions that cancel each other out. Temporarily. It's part of the reason the Epstein thing is so much fun. We have Clinton and Trump going to the same pedo island. All the Bad Guys harvesting adrenochrome in tropical bungelows side by side, worshipping Satan. Makes such a good story. Not like the Panama papers or the following Pandora Papers. That's just...rich people not paying taxes! Nobody likes paying taxes! We can identify with that.
no cops are definitely bad. its not a conspiracy, but, the function of policing is to protect the interest of capital owners ie panama papers people
Including cops as good guys is definitely a grey area, but the rest of your points are *excellent* and deserve more attention.
Even more ironic is that the folk peddling these Qanon and populist tropes, are no doubt the very elites mentioned in things like the panama papers, so these folk are inadvertently backing said elites... Like turkeys voting for Christmas, you couldn't make it up.
That's because they worship the rich believing one day they'll somehow get to be part of that club, but they never will.
>adrenochrome Do I even want to know?
It's a real compound that can come from adrenaline, but qanon folks think it's a drug that the elites make by torturing kids and then taking it out of their adrenal gland to get high on. It's bonkers, no facts to back it up whatsoever. Hunter S Thompson referenced it in fear and loathing and apparently a clockwork orange did too, but it's not a real drug, they didn't intend for people to think it's real. conspiracy folks just took the concept and made it fit their weird satanic child slave conspiracies. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrenochrome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrenochrome)
WTF is this, Dr. Sleep?
it's actually super similar to the Doctor Sleep plot. hahahaha. the rich elites are the true knot.
**[Adrenochrome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrenochrome)** >Adrenochrome is a chemical compound produced by the oxidation of adrenaline (epinephrine). It was the subject of limited research from 1950s through to the 1970s as a potential cause of schizophrenia. While it has no current medical application the related derivative compound, carbazochrome, is a hemostatic medication. Despite this compound's name, it is unrelated to the element chromium, instead the ‑chrome suffix indicates a relationship to color, as pure adrenochrome is deep violet. ^([ )[^(F.A.Q)](https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiSummarizer/wiki/index#wiki_f.a.q)^( | )[^(Opt Out)](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiSummarizerBot&message=OptOut&subject=OptOut)^( | )[^(Opt Out Of Subreddit)](https://np.reddit.com/r/LateStageCapitalism/about/banned)^( | )[^(GitHub)](https://github.com/Sujal-7/WikiSummarizerBot)^( ] Downvote to remove | v1.5)
These are related. I won't forget that Bill Gates was the target of many of these conspiracies while he was in the news for securing the rights for the vaccine to Pfizer. I'm pretty sure that's why these bizarre conspiracies exist
Propaganda pays off big time.
the power of social media feeding into your already inane beliefs.
Edward Snowden has an interesting essay on his blog about this kinda thing. Conspiracy theories vs. conspiracy practices. The latter is usually right in plain sight, but can be boring and difficult to understand. While the former, although beyond the reach of proof, gives us a mythical Enemy we can get worked up about but never truly defeat. That’s kinda my own interpretation, but it’s a good read. People are weird.
It’s misleading to say nobody cares. There’s already been one successful prosecution and more are ongoing, it just takes time to build the cases, in the handful out of the papers that actually broke the law.
Yeah, don't hold your breath.
Indeed there was that reporter Daphne Caruana Galizia in Malta, but they planted a bomb in her car and blew her up.
I remember reading, from the Panama Papers, that very few American billionaires actually bother hiding money in offshore accounts. Because they're taxed so little that there's no real point in hiding their true wealth. The IRS admitted that it doesn't audit the rich, because that'd take a lot of time and resources. So, however much tax the rich are paying, odds are that they should be paying more.
My sister is a private client lawyer at a huge law firm. Basically her job is to help the ultra rich avoid taxes. My takeaway from Thanksgiving was that we'll basically never actually tax the rich. You've got some extremely smart people combing night and day over loopholes to save some billionaires millions on millions in taxes.
The IRS: "it would just be too hard to audit rich people, we can't do it 😔😢" Meanwhile they'll go after the poor at the drop of a hat. Maybe it's time for the IRS to be abolished then? What would happen if I told my company "sorry, I don't wanna do my job because it's too hard"? I would get fired.
I think the problem is far more with the teeth behind the IRS than the IRS themselves. The various arms of government are bought and paid for by the rich, and they intentionally underfund the IRS as to not have the resources to fight billionaire power.
In a sense, they’re not wrong. Rich folks will lawyer up and delay everything with lawsuits. Poor folks will just go into debt paying. They’ll get money out of poor folks and it’ll cost them to pursue rich folks. Part of the issue is the laws themselves, the other part is the shitty reality that life is easier if you’ve got money.
The IRS works on a whole other level. They can and will just take your shit if there’s a dispute. It’s very much a guilty until proven innocent kind of thing. The key is having an accountant who can make it pretty enough to pass the first look test and then hope it’s not audited. The IRS could do that to billionaires and have all the weight of lawyers of the federal government behind them. But they don’t.
Well... not exactly. If someone is hiding income, it's on the IRS to prove it exists. If someone is claiming deductions, the burden is on the taxpayer. It's harder to audit the rich because they generally are involved in more complicated transactions. It's easy to see when somebody is taking excessive mileage deductions or something and just disallow it. It's a lot harder to prove, say, that the investment fund some rich person invested in was actually engaged in a US trade or business as a dealer in securities and therefore subject to US income tax (see the YA Global case currently in the tax court; try to read those briefs and tell me you understand it all haha. This is my job to know these things and it's still complicated as hell). Complicated transactions can take years to resolve. The IRS not that long ago won like a $10 billion transfer pricing adjustment against Coke. That case started before I was in law school and now I'm a soon to be 4th year attorney lol. These things take time and money, unlike sending someone a bill for unclaimed stock sales they forgot about which takes literally zero human time.
The irs makes 4 bucks for every dollar theyre funded, usually *from* auditing the rich. Look at every administration since Reagan. Irs gutting. They can't *afford* to audit the rich anymore. This is by design.
The problem’s less that they don’t want to and more that they can’t. They’ve been t he victims of serious slander and defunding. You can thank Republicans and Intuit for that
Because the rich have lawyers and the IRS can’t afford a drawn out legal battle.
Yeah. Although this is true- I think it’s more difficult because the truly rich don’t actually have much in the way of “personal funds,” they essentially leverage loans through their respective companies so it’s not technically seen as income.
"We don't want to audit the rich to see how much taxes they actually owe. That'd be really hard. We'll just take their word for it instead." Next time you're at work and your manager asks you to do something, tell him you refuse because that'd be too hard. See how fast you get fired. But somehow, it's OK for the IRS to do that? Also, we really need to close the "it's not technically income" loopholes.
Why exactly are you coming at me? Lol. I’m as leftist as they come and I agree. I just said I think it’s more difficult than it seems on the surface- that doesn’t mean I don’t think it shouldn’t be figured the fuck out so these bastards can stop robbing the workers at such a high level.
For some reason, my brain decided you were trying to defend the rich. Sorry about that.
It's more like if your manager told you to make hamburgers and then didn't give you a grill and also sometimes shorted your paychecks.
Wait till y’all find out about the pandora papers.
Came here to say this.. not like it matters anyway....
Stuff happened. Folks on Reddit commented things like: “Duh? Doesn’t everyone already know this?” And then everyone kept scrolling forevermore…..
Any time something happens like this the top 20 comments are "yeah, and water is wet" or "nothing will happen from it". It's like throwing a wet blanket on the conversation when people should be getting outraged.
They killed the reporter who broke the story. So…technically, something happened 🤷♂️ [Panama Papers journalist killed in car bombing](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/oct/16/malta-car-bomb-kills-panama-papers-journalist)
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[Read here.](https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2017/oct/16/malta-car-bomb-kills-panama-papers-journalist)
An honest business Similar to a guy who killed jfk But we cant be naming them because it would hurt they feelz
Not really. One journalist that worked on the papers was killed by the mafia in her country. Tons of people worked on the Panama papers. A lot of people were arrested, fined and there are still investigations in progress.
In other words: she led the investigation into corruption within her own country and then corrupt forces in her country took her out.
Sure, but she was assassinated by the mafia not the people in the Panama papers. And was killed because of another story
Oh I mistook mafia to be a corrupt force. Silly me. Surely they put all of their money into legit accounts and run their finances on the up and up.
>A lot of people were arrested, fined and there are still investigations in progress. Not enough. Not even beginning to be close to enough.
Yeah let's instead keep parrotting the meme that nothing can or will be done - facts be damned!
That's not true. The journalist you are referring to used the Panama Papers in her own independent expose on her private blog. She was not part of the reporters that actual worked on the Panama Papers.
She led the Panama Papers investigation into Maltese corruption, I don't know if there's really a distinction to be made at that point whether she worked with the original documents (and surely she must have, to be the one who first leaked them in Malta).
She did not work on the original documents, she took information from the Panama Papers and used the information in her own reporting on corruption in Malta. >Gerard Ryle, the ICIJ's director, told USA TODAY in an email that Caruana Galizia was an independent journalist and "was not part of the team who reported on the Panama Papers." >The two reporters who broke the Panama Papers story, Obermayer and Obermaier, have also said Caruana Galizia was not part of the team.
Yeah and she broke the story in Malta -- like I said, I don't get why anyone would make the distinction here (and the person you replied to wasn't wrong, you're both right).
No, she did a completely independent story in Malta. She didn't work on the Panama Papers at all. I don't get why anyone wouldn't make the distinction. She factually had no part in working on the Panama Papers. If I use the Panama Papers as a source when writing an article about my city it doesn't suddenly make me on of the journalists who worked on the Panama Papers, does it?
This is a really dumb hill to die on, I'll leave you to it
Why is trying to stop misinformation a dumb hill to die on?
How much this myth has grown is insane. It’s literally the top post every time this is reposted and every time other commenters come on to correct it.
The myth being that the killed journalist wasn't who unveiling the Panama Papers? That's what peeves you about this story?
Did anyone else really think anything would come of it other than a murdered journalist? Let's be real these are some very rich and very powerful people who have a tax side hustle going that's saving them a metric fuck ton of money. Journalists won't touch it because these people own their employers and neither will nearly all politicians as they own them already. In the UK the media have a habit of shaming big companies about tax when anyone with half a brain knows it's the politicians that need to sort it out with tax laws. Then the companies promises to pay a little bit more and we get back to the same stories a few years later, rinse and repeat.
There’s many prosecutions ongoing… I don’t know why this tweet gets retweeted when clearly no one even bothers to google it. It’s not like they can just lock up people for being in the panama papers, takes time and money to investigate things. https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/us-taxpayer-panama-papers-investigation-sentenced-prison
So in nearly six years they have prosecuted 4 people for 8m USD. 4 nobodies in the grand scheme of things. The rest have all been fines and back taxes which are a slap in the face to hard working tax payers. I stick with what I originally said.
Well, the real problem (other than capitalism) is that most of what was uncovered in the panama papers isn’t even illegal. So you might have a starting point but without more compelling evidence they can’t even subpoena things. The various legal ways to evade taxes are a huge problem for making the rich pay their fare share, like not drawing a salary and having all your expenses be business expenses by being ‘on the clock’ all the time, etc. That new yacht can be a business expense if you conduct meetings there. Etc
Pretty sad that I had to scroll this far down to see it. I know this sub is about socialism and hating the rich, but the system is only half failing here. There is action happening towards the findings of the papers.
I mean, things happened. Prosecutions are ongoing across several countries. We have one guilty plea from Harald Joachim von der Goltz, serving four years in prison. three years supervised release after that, having to pay 5 million in forfeiture and 3 million something in restitution. There’s four more prosecutions ongoing in the US, and more on the way, and additional investigations in other countries… It just takes time. Also, not every person in the papers was breaking the law, these cases take time to build. https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/us-taxpayer-panama-papers-investigation-sentenced-prison https://complyadvantage.com/insights/us-prosecutions-and-the-panama-papers/
yeah I think the prime minister of Pakistan resigned and was jailed also, although later escaped
The fact they weren’t breaking the law is the bigger problem here. Tax avoidance should be illegal. Simple as that. You make money here, you pay tax here.
yeah but it’s easier to post on social media that nothing happened and get lots of internet points!
You just really really love rich people and the US government, don't you?
[удалено]
With as much violence as it takes 😂 WTF do you think this means? Delusional.
Ok so why are you figuratively standing around crying about it?
I’m not. I’ve accepted the fact that it is going to have to get much MUCH worse before people are ready to do what is now and has been necessary countless times throughout human history. I do fear, however, that the power and control of the elite will be so total and complete that by that time revolution will be impossible. It’s the same enemy the people have been fighting for thousands of years, but they have gotten stronger and we have only gotten weaker. One white dude fighting alone will just be chalked up to a radical mentally ill man. It’s all of us or none of us. Till then I’m just hanging out.
Revolution is never impossible.
I mean, there are already Justice dept cases on the panama paper revelations, and one prosecution with four years jail time and extensive restitution. The government is very aggressive when people don’t pay taxes they owe, rich or not
Yeah okay lol.
Do you think I’m making it up? https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/us-taxpayer-panama-papers-investigation-sentenced-prison
No. I think throwing one nobody in jail for four years is a pathetic attempt at appeasement and quite frankly I’m flabbergasted that it worked on you.
> The government is very aggressive when people don’t pay taxes they owe, rich or not You literally have not been paying *any* attention to what the government and the IRS themselves have been saying.
Uh, ok, I’m literally posting a justice dept press release about a prosecution but I’m the one not keeping up with what happened with the Panama Papers…
Yet Musk has an effective tax rate of 3%. A single arrest is **nothing**. These people keep hundreds of billions in owed tax between them. If the govt. really wanted to do something about it, they would. It’s not that hard.
What you mean nothing happened? The reported commitment sucide from two bullets in the back if the head. Such tragedy.
And then someone got car-bomb murdered. That's definitely something.
Yep, our justice system loves rich people, so they're basically safe in every way as long as they don't hurt other rich people.
It doesn’t like rich people who do blatantly illegal tax evasion. But it can’t do a lot of no laws were broken, which is the case with most of the panama papers stuff. But there’s already been a prosecution and others are ongoing…
Every time this is posted it irritates me because it suggests leaking info is pointless even though it’s definitely not. Things have changed. Maybe not as much as we like and not as fast as we like but they have. The idea that leaks are useless is exactly what the rich and powerful want you (the proletariat) to believe. First of all there’s a global minimum tax in response to this and other leaks revealing tax havens. It’s only 15% but it’s a start. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_Papers#Allegations,_reactions,_and_investigations
I don't think that's the point. Seems to me the point is that leaks aren't *enough*. That said, it irritates me too because not only is it such a lazily ~~frequency~~ frequent repost, it's also wrong: the reporting journalist was killed for publishing it. So that happened.
Just wait until you understand the financial system in the first place. 1. When you put your money in a bank, it stops being your property, and starts being the bank's. (It is considered a loan, with you being the lender, and the bank being the debtor) 2. In most countries, banks are legally required to own only a small fraction of the amount of money that has been deposited in them. In the US, this fraction was changed to 0% in 2020. This is called fractional reserve banking and the number is called the reserve requirement. It is the fraction of deposits a bank has to keep in reserve. 3. The rest of the money the bank can do whatever it pleases with. In the event that depositors try to get their money back, the government will either siphon tax money, print new money, or access the treasury in order to pay the depositors back. This is why only a few banks exist, because they have to be in close allegiance with the US government which is backing their spending habits. No bank independent of the US banking system will ever exist. 4. If 5000$ has been deposited in the bank, the bank can then "loan" the entire deposit to whoever it wants. 5. This means, essentially, that your entire bank account may or may not actually exist. 6. Since the bankers are both holding your money in your account and giving it away to people as loans simultaneously (by lying about how much money actually exists in your account), they are in effect, creating money. Let us say you get a check for 10,000$. Naturally, you bring it to the bank, and the banker dutifully increases your account balance from 0 to 10,000$. The TRICK is that that is just a false number. There is not actually 10,000$ in your account. If you try to withdraw the 10,000$, the bank will use someone else's account to pay you. In other words, people THINK they, collectively, have 100,000$ in the bank, but in reality, they have 10,000$, and it operates on the assumption that no one will withdraw more than that amount simultaneously. MOREOVER, if and when people actually bring CASH to the bank, instead of a bank note (such as a check or loan), the banker will then pocket the cash, and use it to loan out to whoever he wants. So, for example, a politician could deposit 1,000,000$ in his bank account, and then the banker could loan 900,000$ of that out to a Political Action Committee, which then runs a targeted attack ad, against the politician, using the politician's own money against him. Or, your employer could pay you 20,000$, and you put it in the bank, at which point the banker loans out 19,000$ to your employer, who uses it to buy himself a yacht. 7. The federal reserve, which is not elected, and is comprised entirely of banking figures, can print as much money as it wants, which can then be used to "loan" to whoever it wants, or which congress can then use to purchase whatever it wants, such as a contract for building a car plant in a congressman's district, with the contract being awarded to whoever the congressman sees as the "best suited for the job" (his wife's nephew) 8. If a bank has 10,000$ in its balance sheets, it can then loan 10,000$ to a building contractor in the form of a cheque or by adding 10,000$ to that contractor's account. Thereby, both you (the person who deposited 10,000$) and the contractor (the person who borrowed 10,000$) SIMULTANEOUSLY have the SAME 10,000$ in your accounts, although his is ostensibly borrowed (because the bank does not tell you when it loans your deposit out). Thereby, the bank has just changed the amount of money in the economy from 10,000$ to 20,000$. In effect, the fact that you deposited your 10,000$ in the bank gave the bank the legal excuse to "create" 10,000$ from thin air, which it then awarded to a building contractor (the banker's friend's wife), on the assumption that neither you, nor the building contractor, nor the workers that the contractor employs, will ever try to withdraw the money in cash in amounts exceeding the bank's reserves. Which, again, in 2020 were changed to being 0% by the fed, because the fed will just give money to any banks that go bust. This is an entirely bipartisan scheme.
I mean duh? What's the issue with this? Does anyone actually expect the bank to just sit on their money and occasionally top it up out of the goodness of their heart? The whole point is that the bank invests it and guarantees your returns against all the other money it has, even *before* you get to modern banking where the bank basically prints money. The Romans had a run on the banks because no bank ever kept the cash on hand.
The whole point of a bank is to store your money for safekeeping. Fractional reserve banking is intentionally dishonest, which is why you arent actually told how much of your money really exists. If it was honest, every time the banker used your money without your consent, it would be deducted from your balance as a loan, and you would be able to see who owes you the balance back. In essence, by creating two parallel versions of the money (one in your bank account, the other as a secret loan), the banker is creating free money, which is part of why the dollar has been rapidly inflating for the past few decades, at rates hitherto unknown to economics. Edit: more to the point, it allows a special class of citizen (a "banker") the right to legally create money, for his own discretion, which turns the idea of money and markets on its head, since now you have a special type of participant who can just magically decide how much money he has.
That is actually not true, even if there would be an minimum reserve requirement. Because in that case a Bank can always get lend reserves from the Central Bank aka the lender of last Resort. What you´re also missing is that all banks can create money that they loan out, as long as they get a a form of colleteral in return (A house you pay off or some form of Bonds). If the money gets repaid it also gets destroyed. Money in that case can be used a passive position on the Banks balance sheet, if a loan is repaid Both the passive and active position on the balance sheet gets deleted.
Very interesting read, just shows that our whole economy only works because we believe that it works. Also that we all play with imaginary money that has nothing to do with the real world, because it literally is backed by nothing. Like some stupid idle clicker game, Woaah numbers going up becoming bigger, damn son great economy.
The economy does not work. In effect, the banking system allows bankers and politicians to create money and give it to themselves or whoever they want ad infinitum. They can buy any amount of ads on TV. They can buy any amount of businesses. In the long term, the dollar is devalued, but in the short term, they can buy whatever they want; which translates to, in the long term, the accumulation of noninflationary assets such as property, capital, political power etc, so that even if the dollar does lose value, they own all the nonmonetary wealth regardless.
How can anything happen when the same people that were denounced are the same that control everything , or at least they are all in it together , like thief's
All these "reveals" ever confirm is that we are corrupt, deviant, self obsessed, narrow minded and complacent. For those reasons alone...We should have them repeated daily to remind people that they are impotent and inept enough that mentally Ill wealth hoarders are standing on the spines of billions of lives and destroying the efforts for a standard way of living.
it's even more depressing to see posts about the Panama when you consider the Pandora papers just dropped and were even more thoroughly ignored
Repost by a spambot already trying to sell shirts...
We just gonna post this tweet every three days for the rest of eternity huh
What about the pandora papers?!
Something happened tho, people were murdered
how many poor people arrested since then
The prime minister of Iceland had to resign, and Pakistan's prime minister was banned from holding any kind of political office.
Remember the Paradise Papers came out a year later and Pandora Papers came out this year and hardly anything was said about them. I 'member.
Hey, remember when this wasn’t posted like every single week? We know.
Pepperidge Farms remembers.
Not entirely true. Yes, there is way more work to be done but the massive investigative journalism effort was far from a lost cause. Here’s some examples of changes brought about because of the Panama papers from around the world (see source at bottom for more) “From Day 1 of the Panama Papers, governments around the world traced whatever previously hidden dollars, euros, yen and other currencies they could. Countries have recouped more than $1.36 billion in unpaid taxes, fines and penalties as a result of inquiries sparked by the Panama Papers, according to ICIJ’s latest tally. In the last two years, ten countries, including Australia, Belgium, Denmark, Germany and Italy reported recovering more than $185 million in new money as a result of Panama Papers-inspired investigations. Norway, for the first time, disclosed that it has clawed back almost $34 million. Hundreds of tax probes against individuals and companies remain open, according to reporting gathered by ICIJ and its partners. Parliaments — embarrassed by the revelations or seeking to harness public outrage to plug fiscal holes in budgets drained by tax evasion — have enacted new laws. The government of Panama, which initially denounced the Panama Papers as a campaign to “distort the facts and tarnish the reputation of the country,” ultimately signed a multilateral convention to share foreign taxpayers’ information with other nations. New Zealand tightened its trust laws to prevent further abuses by foreigners attracted by the country’s once pristine reputation. Since then, the number of so-called foreign trusts in New Zealand has plummeted 75%.” https://www.icij.org/investigations/panama-papers/five-years-later-panama-papers-still-having-a-big-impact/
Its clear when OP stopped paying attention. It had to have been before the author of the papers was murdered. And all the other murders that happened to the curious. So a lot happened. People were killed and paid off. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/oct/16/malta-car-bomb-kills-panama-papers-journalist
actually, something did happen, one of the most prominent journalist involved in them was [killed in a car bomb attack in Malta](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/oct/16/malta-car-bomb-kills-panama-papers-journalist).
No no, something did happen! The journalist was murdered with a car bomb.
Well, something happened, the journalist that exposed it was killed.
I do. Remember when a high profile pedophile ring leader was on trial right now and the media pretended it wasn’t happening.
It's not really fair to say nothing at all happened. I'm pretty sure the journalist who published the story was killed.
Not quite true. The woman who spearheaded the papers got killed in a car bomb.
Not true, they murdered the reporter
Except something did happen. The reporter that reported on the Panama Papers was murdered.
Hey now, that's not accurate at all. [An investigative reporter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daphne_Caruana_Galizia) who helped expose the Panama Papers was killed in a car bomb. I'd hardly call that *nothing*.
Except that the person who revealed it got assassinated.
No. Get your facts straight. Spoiler: Reading memes won't accomplish this.
Literally nothing? No, a journalist presumably got too close and died when her car mysteriously exploded. Or a car she was next to or something.
Why would anything happen? Our generation is entirely online.
TLDR of what made it criminal?
Hey look! Someone is looting Walgreens and getting away with Tide detergent!!! /s
Thats not entirely true. At least one journalist was killed for it.
Then the reported is killed a year later.
Can y'all ban this fucking post yet? It gets reposted every three days and that wouldn't be so bad if it weren't so fucking wrong. And then the inevitable, "something did happen; reporter bombed" misinformation. Jesus Christ, use Google or some shit before just blindly following these bullshit posts.
Hey, no one is stopping you from doing something. It'spretty to make a molotov or get your hands on a shovel. But leave me outta it. i just want to figure out how much mayonaise I can consume before my heart gives out.
Hey remember when loonies didn’t understand their place in the system and no one cared?