Jeremy Corbyn Calls on British PM to Tackle Tax Avoidance
teleSUR – April 5, 2016
Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn slammed David Cameron on the tax avoidance scandal saying the “unfairness and abuse must stop.”
The leader of Britain’s main opposition party called on the government Tuesday to tackle tax havens, saying it was high time British Prime Minister David Cameron stopped allowing “the super rich elite [to] dodge their taxes.”
“There cannot be one set of tax rules for the wealthy elite and another for the rest of us,” Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn said at the launch of the party’s campaign for local elections next month.
“The unfairness and abuse must stop… I say this to the government and to the chancellor, no more lip service, the richest must pay their way.”
After leaked documents from a Panamanian law firm revealed how the world’s powerful use secretive offshore company structures to stash their wealth, Cameron has come under pressure to clamp down on tax evasion in British-linked territories after the “Panama Papers” implicated his father, Ian Cameron, in running an offshore tax-evasion fund.
What I Learned From the Panama Papers
James Corbett | April 4, 2016
The Panama Papers are out and the Panama Papers propaganda is out right along with it. So why does this new mega-leak seemingly only expose those in the State Department crosshairs or expendable others and not a single prominent American politician or businessman? And what does this have to do with the OECD’s plan for a global taxation grid?
SHOW NOTES AND MP3: https://www.corbettreport.com/?p=18320
Kremlin Spokesman Says His Wife Never Owned Offshore Companies
Sputnik – 04.04.2016
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Monday that his wife, figure skating champion Tatiana Navka, had never owned any offshore companies.
According to the Panama Papers leak, Navka became the beneficial owner of British Virgin Islands-based firm Carina Global Assets Ltd. in 2014.
“I can say an important thing based on my own example. It is claimed that my wife had an offshore company from 2014 to 2015. The thing is: my wife does not and has never owned any offshore companies,” Peskov told reporters.
On Sunday, Germany’s Suddeutsche Zeitung published alleged documents from the Panamanian Mossack Fonseca company in which the newspaper confirms ties to a number of world leaders and their circles to offshore schemes.
The German publication specifically notes Chinese President Xi Jinping, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, Azeri President Ilham Aliev, Moroccan King Mohammed VI, Saudi King Alman ibn Abdul-Aziz al Saud, the late father of British Prime Minister David Cameron, and a number of individuals allegedly close to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“Based on this, I’m personally inclined to doubt the accuracy of these and other reports. I can only state what I know for sure, what has to do with me personally,” he added.
Mossack Fonseca
Xymphora – April 4, 2016
“Selective Leaks Of The #PanamaPapers Create Huge Blackmail Potential”. This is curious. The lying media spinners are certainly corruptly attempting to slur people like Assad and Putin, but what is striking is the lack of evidence against big enemies of the Empire. Nobody is going to be impressed by the fact that somebody that Putin is acquainted with, or a cousin of Assad, is on the list. Certainly, the leaker, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, which could be called Wikilame, is one of those criminal propaganda organizations funded by the usual suspects which cause so many problems these days. But some of the leaks are interesting, which you wouldn’t expect if it was entirely the usual scam.
“Panama Papers: Hundreds of Israeli Companies, Shareholders Listed in Leaked Documents Detailing Offshore Holdings” Gaydamak and Ofer are very interesting perps from a conspiracy point of view, and usually receive full protection from the Jew-controlled media.
“New Zealand’s FMA, the Breder Suasso Conundrum, Mossack Fonseca, and #panamapapers” The leak was actually a year ago, so the timing of the propaganda release may be a clue.
Nevada: “The Law Firm That Works with Oligarchs, Money Launderers, and Dictators”. Note the amazing – or sadly not amazing – Twitter back and forth between Silverstein and Ames, with this classic tweet:
“.@MarkAmesExiled @pierre Yeah, he and @ggreenwald both in lounge chairs at moment drinking Snowden’s Blood on the Rocks. Can’t be bothered.”
“Mossack Fonseca: The Nazi, CIA And Nevada Connections… And Why It’s Now Rothschild’s Turn”. The theory that the leak is directed at destroying (Nazi law firm) Mossack Fonseca in order to remove a major competitor to the Rothschilds in the lucrative business of using Nevada as a tax haven. That would explain the odd selectivity of the leak, with none of the prominent US crime families implicated.
Mossack Fonseca is in the business of secrecy, so a massive security breach of this nature points to an extremely high-level operation, most probably an intelligence agency.
So we’ve got:
- big names, but no really big names, and in particular no names from the American elites;
- odd delay in the release of details of an old story (with striking Crazy Pierre censorship/assholery);
- very suspicious NGO-connected propagandists involved in the leak story;
- the Nevada tax haven issue seems to be key;
- the law firm would have had top-level security, requiring top-level attack.
The Disappearance of Hillary Clinton’s Healthcare Platform
By Benjamin Day | Common Dreams | March 30, 2016
What would happen if the media lifted the curtain on Clinton’s healthcare platform and introduced any level of scrutiny to her proposed improvements on the Affordable Care Act?
In an extraordinary magic trick, performed on a national scale, Hillary Clinton’s healthcare platform has been disappeared. While policy analysts, news anchors, and columnists have been engaged in an intense debate over Bernie Sanders’s “Medicare for All” proposal, Clinton’s incremental alternative has escaped almost all scrutiny – even among those who say they prefer it.
Combining the election-season writings of our most prolific, liberal-leaning columnists at the New York Times, Huffington Post, Vox, Mother Jones, Politico, The American Prospect, etc. you’ll find dozens of articles critiquing Sanders’s single-payer plan. None have mentioned a single Clinton healthcare proposal as a point of comparison – merely that she supports a philosphy of incremental reform.
Take Paul Krugman, a high-profile advocate of Clinton’s approach to healthcare reform. Krugman has published two op-eds in the New York Times and five additional blog posts arguing that “[progressives] should seek incremental change on health care… and focus their main efforts on other issues – that is… Bernie Sanders is wrong about this and Hillary Clinton is right.” In all seven pieces, Krugman focuses exclusively on Sanders’s single-payer proposal and fails to mention even a single Clinton policy.
The disappearance of the Clinton healthcare platform has even been carried out by pollsters. The Kaiser Health Tracking Survey included a bizarre question in its February 2016 poll, which was widely cited in the press. Respondents were asked to pick one of four possible directions for the future of U.S. healthcare. Among the choices were “The U.S. should establish guaranteed universal coverage through a single government plan” and “Lawmakers should build on the existing health care law to improve affordability and access to care.” Thirty-three percent of Democrats chose the single-payer option, while fifty-four percent chose the incremental option. The questions were clearly intended as stand-ins for the Sanders and Clinton healthcare proposals, but note that the single-payer option is a policy, whereas the incremental option mentions no actual policies, but asks respondents whether they support the (universally desirable) outcomes of improving affordability and access.
What would happen if the media lifted the curtain on Clinton’s healthcare platform and introduced any level of scrutiny to her proposed improvements on the Affordable Care Act? They would find two categories of Clinton proposals: some that are so vague they’re difficult to evaluate, and other more concrete plans that follow in the footsteps of one of Congress’s most practiced healthcare incrementalists: Senator Bernie Sanders.
For example, one of Clinton’s clearest incremental proposals is to repeal the Affordable Care Act’s poorly named “cadillac tax” on health plans with high premiums. She announced this proposal on September 29, drawing the ire of White House spokespeople. The move, however, followed in the footsteps of a Senate bill to repeal the Cadillac tax introduced by Bernie Sanders and seven Democratic Senators just a few days previously on September 24. Clinton’s position was correctly seen by reporters as necessary if she didn’t want to lose labor union support to Sanders.
“Because Clinton’s healthcare platform has received zero public scrutiny, she has had the luxury of floating other policy ideas in broad outlines, too vague to evaluate.”Many of Clinton’s well-defined healthcare proposals are rolled into a package of prescription drug reforms, which she released on September 22, 2015. They bear a striking resemblance to the Sanders prescription drug plan announced on September 1, filed as legislation on September 10. Both would legalize importation of prescription drugs from Canada, where costs for identical drugs are much lower due to Canada’s single-payer healthcare system. Sanders was a pioneer of importation, and in 1999 started driving busloads of American patients who couldn’t afford breast cancer drugs across the Canadian border. Both candidates call for empowering Medicare to negotiate drug prices – even Donald Trump jumped on board in January. Both would ban “pay-for-delay” deals between brand-name and generic drug makers, and increase prescription drug rebates for Medicaid and/or Medicare.
Because Clinton’s healthcare platform has received zero public scrutiny, she has had the luxury of floating other policy ideas in broad outlines, too vague to evaluate. Take the proposal to expand the use of Accountable Care Organizations. How? According to Clinton’s December policy brief: “In the coming months, [Clinton] will provide full detail on her plans for delivery system reforms that drive down costs.” With the primaries drawing to a close, no such details have been released. The same could be said of another proposal to “create a fallback process” to review insurance premium rate hikes in states that don’t already review rates. There has been no explanation of how such a plan would work, or whether it would require new legislation.
This is the double standard at work in almost all national coverage of Clinton and Sanders on healthcare reform: Clinton has been taken at her word that her incremental plans will be politically feasible, succeed in improving affordability and access to care, and are not shared by her opponent. Sanders on the other hand received intense public pressure to release details of his single-payer healthcare proposal, and when he did the proposal was subject to an avalanche of public analysis and scrutiny.
This double standard is all the more remarkable because single-payer healthcare is an established policy, practiced in one form or another in almost every developed nation in the world. Incremental reforms that work within the market-based healthcare system of the U.S. are far more uncertain, and deserve greater scrutiny. They are easier to enact but dramatically more likely to fall short of their goals. This is because incremental reforms in the United States usually focus on expanding access to care, without significant cost controls, in order to avoid opposition from the healthcare industry. The resulting policies are often unsustainable; make little headway against national trends of rising costs and eroding access; or simply move costs around (e.g. from premiums to deductibles and co-payments, or vice versa).
Previous national trends in incremental healthcare reform – from managed care through pharmacy benefit management, chronic disease management, narrow networks, and beyond – have often created lucrative new industries, but had dubious impacts on underlying healthcare costs or access to care. Most of Clinton’s healthcare platform falls exactly into these danger zones, and should be received with a critical eye.
The national discussion of single-payer healthcare reform is long overdue. However, when the full range of national media outlets force one candidate to run on real policies, while allowing another to run on values and aspirations, we aren’t having a real discussion of systemic vs. incremental reform, we are merely aiding the corrosion of informed democracy.
Benjamin Day is the Executive Director of Healthcare-NOW.
‘Scandal of privatized aid’: Free-market consultants cream off £450mn in UK govt funds
RT | April 1, 2016
Free-market consultants in Britain are taking hundreds of millions of pounds ring-fenced to alleviate poverty in the developing world, as the government continues with its agenda of privatizing aid, a damning report has warned.
A study conducted by British NGO Global Justice Now (GJN) raises grave concerns over the sheer amount of aid money the Department for International Development (DfID) has given to consultants Adam Smith International (ASI) for overseas aid projects.
The report, titled The Privatization of UK Aid, was published on Friday.
It found that ASI has won a minimum of £450 million (about US$640 million) in aid-funded contracts over the last five years. DfID funneled almost £90 million of its budget through the consultancy firm, more than the total amount given to human rights and women’s rights groups. This figure is almost double that spent on projects to tackle Aids and HIV, according to the report.
The study examined how much of DfID’s work was geared towards supporting market-based development and the private sector in poor states. Recent projects included backing for a “business advocacy capacity development program” in Zimbabwe, and projects to increase private schooling in Kenya.
The report also analyzed a number of existing case studies on ASI projects, such as the consultancy firm’s role in privatizing Nigeria’s energy system and making Afghanistan “investor friendly” by helping to rewrite energy extraction legislation there.
The NGO said the legislation, which was later passed into law, lacks transparency and does not protect local citizens’ rights. ASI has also helped to develop new mining legislation and regulations in Papua New Guinea, where the energy extraction technique has a legacy of violent conflict. GJN’s report says the laws have been branded “authoritarian and regressive” by critics.
The NGO argues that Westminster’s increasing use of consultancy firms forces out smaller companies in impoverished states and highlights DfID’s tendency to embrace private partnerships and back private-sector development schemes that risk jeopardizing communities in the developing world. It has called on DfID to explain why it chooses to hire profit-driven British firms like ASI rather than using its own employees or companies in the developing world.
GJN also urged DfID to be more transparent on contractors’ costs, and to release a robust plan on spending more through organizations in developing countries.
DfID defended its use of private contractors, arguing British aid is assisting highly vulnerable people in crisis-ridden states.
“UK aid is focused on tackling extreme poverty, helping people in some of the most fragile and dangerous places on Earth, including war zones and disaster areas,” a spokeswoman for the government department told the Guardian.
“We draw on specialist expertise from charities, NGOs and the private sector to get the job done and get the best value for taxpayers.”
Labour’s Shadow Secretary for International Development Diane Abbott said the government must take a serious look at how aid money is spent.
“UK aid is being used to pay for consultants instead of alleviating poverty in the global south. We must look beyond simply spending 0.7 percent of UK GNI on aid, but look at how it is spent. UK aid should be first and foremost about tackling poverty and inequality and not benefitting the UK,” she said.
“We need to critically assess if the sort of free market reforms that Adam Smith International are enabling in the developing world, using UK taxpayers’ money, are actually helping to alleviate poverty or if they are making it worse.”
ASI defended itself against the allegations in the report.
“The vast majority of the world’s poor are in the informal private sector. To bring people out of poverty, one must address the factors that are keeping them poor,” the firm said in a statement.
“We engage with the private sector to reduce poverty by helping create jobs and make markets more accessible. This type of development is widely reflected in donor strategies and recognized in the 8th sustainable development goal.”
ASI stressed its “expert associates” and employees hail from diverse backgrounds, and are “all committed to poverty alleviation.” The think tank went on to claim the projects mentioned in GJN’s study had been misreported and “taken out of context.”
However, GJN’s campaigns and policy officer, Aisha Dodwell, hit back, saying British taxpayers would be shocked if they knew how much UK aid money was given to free-market consultants.
“UK aid could be used to strengthen public services, support civil society, and build democratic and accountable institutions,” she said.
“Instead of padding the pockets of big UK contractors like Adam Smith International.”
ASI describes itself as a transparent, objective organization dedicated to making public services more robust. It also claims to support economic growth and civil society, while building “democratic and accountable institutions.”
The French Malaise: ”National security” but for which nation?
By Gearóid Ó Colmáin | American Herald tribune | March 31, 2016
Since the Belgian attacks on March 22nd, there has been much talk of Europe’s need to increase security and modernize methods of mass surveillance and control in all public transport, particularly airports and underground trains. One country in the world has received a considerable degree of publicity in this regard: Israel. The Jewish State is now being held up by the French media as a ‘model of security’ which should be emulated by the European Union.
Henceforth, Israeli security methods are to be employed in our Airports. Travelers parking their cars will be interrogated by police and secret service personnel; passengers will be questioned about their destination and further interrogations will ensue if they are perceived to be engaging in prevarication or showing signs of anxiety or stress. Passenger profiling is to become the norm rather than the exception. People’s travel records will be taken into consideration in assessing whether or not they pose a ‘threat’. This ultimately means that all citizens will be treated as though they were terrorists.
The French media have not been embarrassed about suggesting Israeli security methods be introduced throughout Europe, notwithstanding the fact that Israel is a racist and criminal entity which cruelly keeps over a million people locked up in an open air concentration camp, subjecting the native population of the occupied territory to constant state terror and torture. The pro-Israeli propaganda is being aggressively pushed through both national and regional newspapers throughout France.
An article appeared in Quest France on Sunday March 27 with the headline: L’aéroport de Tel-Aviv, modèlede sécurité- ‘Tel-Aviv Airport, model of security’.
The report describes the interrogation methods mentioned above which are routinely carried out in Tel -Aviv’s Ben Gourion airport. We are also informed that Israeli security experts from the EL AI airline visited Zaventem Airport in Bruxelles shortly after the terrorist attacks in order to assess the site’s security; they were apparently ‘outraged’ by the lax security at the airport. But the reader is not told who was in charge of surveillance at Zaventem Airport. Security at the airport is in fact provided by ICTS, an Israeli company which was set up by former operatives of Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic spy agency. So Israeli experts were ‘outraged’ by the lack of security provided by Israeli intelligence? http://www.ictseurope.com/global-locations/belgium
According to Sott.net :
‘ICTS uses the security system employed in Israel, whereby passengers are profiled to assess the degree to which they pose a potential threat on the basis of a number of indicators, including age, name, origin and behavior during questioning’.
ICTS provided security at Logan Airport in 2001 when the infamous ’19 hijackers’ allegedly boarded their flight to New York on their way to the World Trade Centre. A few months later in December 2001, Richard Reid, who had previously spent time in Israel, boarded a flight in Paris’ Charles De Gaulle airport heading for Miami. He was carrying explosives which he unsuccessfully attempted to detonate on the plane. ICTS, who were in charge of security at Charles De Gaulle airport, failed once again.
ICTS was in charge of London’s bus security system in 2005 during the terrorist attacks there and on Christmas Day 2009 at Schipol Airport, Amsterdam, the Israeli company failed to prevent ‘knicker-bomber, Nigerian ‘terrorist’ Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the wealthy son of a former Nigerian MP, who boarded a flight from to Detroit without a passport, while carrying explosives. According to US attorney Kurk Haskel who was an eye-witness, Abdulmutallab was escorted on board the plane by a ‘well-dressed’ man of ‘Indian’ origin who told ticket officials that “the man was from Sudan and that it was typical (to let him on the plane without a passport).”
This strongly suggests the terrorists had security clearances.
So now we have a barrage of media sound bites about the effectiveness of Israeli security and the necessity of introducing further police-state measures in Europe, in spite of the fact that Israeli companies are already providing ‘security’ here and doing a spectacularly dismal job at preventing terrorism!
After the March 22nd attacks in Brussels, a video circulated on the Internet drawing attention to the suspicious behavior of an ”eyewitness’ on France 24 news station after the bombs in Zaventum airport. The ”eye-witness” named Alexandre claims to be a Belgian living in America but his accent is unusual. Alexandre, who is supposed to be in shock and trauma after a brutal terrorist attack, suggests that perhaps European authorities will be forced to adopt security measures similar to those in Israel. Although this ”eye witness” experienced a terrorist attack, he admits that he has ‘ no idea’ what the other victims in the Brussels metro bombs went through. The statements are odd and suspicious but there is no way of proving whether the character is a Mossad agent as the video caption implies.
Nonetheless, it is particularly surreal to find the mass media in France promoting the ‘Israeli security model’ when it is Israeli security companies who are responsible for ‘failing to prevent’ so many terrorist attacks. Of course, the Zionist entity is the only real and long term beneficiary of the War on Terror. As Benjamin Netanyahu himself put it in 2007: ” We are benefiting from one thing, and that is the attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, and the American struggle in Iraq.”
There is no reason to suppose that this recent wave of terrorist attacks in Europe is not also ”benefiting” the Zionist entity.
Promoting emigration and multiculturalism in Europe, propping up Zionist regimes such as Saudi Arabia and Turkey who are Wahhabising Europe’s youth, while at the same time fomenting Islamophobia among European citizens, all these policies serve Israel’s imperial ambitions to rule over all the Arabs and Muslims of the Middle East, while maintaining support in Europe and America by reminding its people every time there is an ‘Islamist’ terrorist attack that this is what Israel is fighting every day.
In his new book Palestine, le malaise Français Franco-Camerounian investigative Journalist Charles Onana shows how the Jewish Lobby in France harassed and demonised President Francois Mitterand for insisting on Yasser Arafat’s visit to France in 1989.
Onana’s study of French government archives prove that the influence of the Jewish Lobby on French foreign policy is deeper and more far-reaching than commonly understood.
Mitterand’s defiance of the Jewish Lobby was continued to a certain extent by President Chirac when he refused to participate in the Zionist-orchestrated war on Iraq in 2003. Since the accession of Nicolas Sarkozy to the French presidency in 2007 and the current regime of François Hollande, Zionism has become almost inseparable from French ruling class ideology. From arch-Zionist Bernard-Henri Lévy’s war on Libya to the war on Syria and a whole series of artificially engineered destabilizations in Africa involving Takfiri Muslims murdering Christians, France has become the bellicose avant-garde of Zionism, carrying out a strategy of chaos which is making the world dangerous for the many but safe for the ‘chosen ones’ and their ever expanding Zionist entity.
Mitterand and Chirac were certainly no friends of French workers nor of the African nations writhing under the yoke of French neo-colonialism, but both leaders had, on the contrary, the merit of setting some limits to Zionist omnipotence. Mitterand’s haughty refusal to ‘apologise’ to Israel on behalf of the French people for the crimes of the Vichy regime, and Chirac’s imperious reprimand of Israeli troops during his visit to Palestine.
[This] contrasts poignantly with the craven, sycophancy of President Hollande’s abasement of the French nation before Israel, when at Netanyahu’s Israeli residence in November 2013 the French president, like a court jester, nauseatingly offered to ” sing a song of love for Israel”.
None of the articles in the French press, published since the Paris and Belgium terrorist attacks mention the criminal ‘negligence’ of ICTS. Instead, we are being told Israeli security is a model we should follow when in fact, we are already living under ‘Israeli security’, the same security agencies who have boasted about committing false flag terrorism against the French public.
In 1979, Israel bombed a factory in France making parts for a nuclear reactor in Iraq. The attack was blamed on ecologists. The Israeli Secret Intelligence Service ( ISIS or Mossad) then proceeded to issue death threats to French engineers working on the project, threatening to kill them and their families if they returned to Iraq. The death threats were issued in the name of an ‘Islamist’ group. All of this was admitted by the Mossad agents themselves in a documentary aired on French television entitled: ‘Droit d’Inventaire: quand le Mossad frappe en France’.
Israel is the only foreign state to have bombed France since the German occupation of the Second World War, a terror campaign admitted by the Zionist entity’s government, yet Israeli companies are providing ‘security’ for French citizens.
Israel’s global role as a pariah state operating outside the norms of international law, flouting all international conventions on human rights, repeatedly committing heinous war crimes and waging wars of aggression, while functioning as a veritable shadow government within the corridors of Western imperial states, this is a problem no nation can continue to ignore. But the few who refuse to ignore it risk their lives.
On March 26 French senator Natalie Goulet received death threats on social media after she wrote a letter to the secretary of state in charge of the budget, requesting clarification for the French government’s policy of giving a 60 percent tax deduction to families who make donations to the Israeli Defense Forces. Although banned in Israel, Betar, the Zionist terrorist militia, regularly issue death threats to their enemies with total impunity from the French state.
But perhaps we should feel ‘safer’ now that the ‘Israeli security model’ is being reinforced as the metropolitan world, our world, slowly metamorphoses into a vast, sprawling Gaza-zone.
Gearóid Ó Colmáin, AHT Paris correspondent, is a journalist and political analyst. His work focuses on globalization, geopolitics and class struggle. His articles have been translated into many languages. He is a regular contributor to Global Research, Russia Today International, Press TV, Sputnik Radio France, Sputnik English, Al Etijah TV, Sahar TV Englis, Sahar French and has also appeared on Al Jazeera. He writes in English, Irish Gaelic and French.


