In my ideal fantasy world, the various candidates would turn out to have involvement precisely reflecting their moral and intellectual standing. So my fantasy would play out something like this …
Bernie has no involvement and no tax irregularities.
Hillary turns out to not only be one of the largest of the American tax swindlers, but to have a part-time job rounding up new clients for Mossack Fonseca. Further consternation arises when the entire 2.6 terabyte information leak is traced to an unsecured server in Hillary’s basement.
Trump is not implicated. It turns out that he’s too stupid to understand tax havens and in any case has zero trust for anyone south of the Rio Grande. Further investigation, however, finds millions in undeclared taxable income in cash hidden in his underwear drawer and protected by mousetraps.
Suspicion falls on Ted Cruz when someone points out to him that “Mossack Fonseca” is an anagram for “Ass Face Mocks On” and Cruz cannot stop giggling. He becomes seriously implicated in the Mossack Fonseca scandal when investigators discover that he owns the place.
Various sources have stated that the data was mostly scanned image files of documents, that they had to run through OCR to turn into searchable text. That explains the 2.6TB.
To be far he’s the PM of a country with 300,000 people, less than some unincorporated towns in the US. But you can bet that the IRS has already been in negotiation to get their hands on the raw data, probably from before this went public. They will almost certainly cut backroom deals with the richest people that avoid jail time but it could still take down a few more heads of state (or candidates for high office… )
The brother of Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager is a lobbyist for a Russian bank, Sberbank, that’s been linked to Mossack Fonseca. It’s difficult to find 3 or 4 paragraphs that really explain this, so I suggest reading the article, which isn’t very long.
Granted, there are several degrees of separation here but, at the very least, this presents an appearance problem for Clinton, at least IMHO.
Is Sberbank really a private company? It seems like it’s in a gray area.
But yes, it seems like it’s only right-wing sites that are reporting this, so it should be taken with a grain of salt, but I doubt that it’s been fabricated out of whole cloth. The basic facts are likely more or less correct.
I don’t know that this can fairly be held against Clinton, but rightly or wrongly it will be used against her.
As much as it would be fun to see Clinton taken out by this, I’d vote that “n-degrees of separation” is all it amounts to. If you look hard enough, you could probably find a legal or financial connection between Vladimir Putin and the Dalai Lama.
Iceland responded to the default by confiscating foreign deposits and guaranteeing the funds of Icelandic depositors, while essentially forbidding them to convert their money into foreign currency. I think by now the country has repaid much of what was owed to foreign entities and has started to lift the capital controls, but Icelanders may still not have many other options for their money.
There’s a real shocker. You’ve found yet another thing that proves, to you anyway, that democracy and capitalism are failures and we’d all be so much better off with whatever it is you believe in!
Kind of funny how a lot of this is connected to Putin’s buddies, and that in Russia it’s having almost zero impact while in places that actually HAVE democracy it seems to be having a more profound impact (and also being more widely reported…I hear the Chinese are doing their normal bit of suppressing and stifling the story). I’m sure that this somehow plays into your overall theme though…somehow…
To be fair to UY Scuti he didn’t say that democracy was a failure. He said that this was a breach of democracy. In other words, an overriding or bypassing of democracy, which is not necessarily an indication that democracy itself is a failure.
Seems to me that this sort of thing shows why democracies work so well. In places that don’t have democracies and that are affected (or even aren’t affected, such as in China) this story is being suppressed or so distorted that most people in those countries have no idea what’s going on, while in countries with democracies that actually work (thus negating Russia :p) it’s getting wide distribution. Whether people can figure out why it’s important or not (such as many seemingly in this thread) is certainly another issue, but not one that shows a ‘breach’ in either democracy OR capitalism.
And to be fair to me, this isn’t the first thread I’ve seen UY Scuti sing this theme.
Okay, I’m not really familiar with UY Scuti. For whatever reason I don’t recall seeing many of his or her posts.
I agree that a properly functioning democracy is the system that is best equipped to respond to something like this. Whether we currently have a properly functioning democracy is another question.
It is interesting to note that the exposure itself was not due to a properly functioning political or legal system of any type. It was instead the result of an act that would be illegal in nearly any jurisdiction, and yet we all (myself included) seem to think that it’s a good thing.
There’s a real shocker. You’ve found yet another thing that proves, to you anyway, that democracy and capitalism are failures and we’d all be so much better off with whatever it is you believe in!