Panama Papers reveal London as center of ‘spider’s web’ … As-well as shining a spotlight on the secret financial arrangements of the rich and powerful, the so-called Panama Papers have laid bare London’s role as a vital organ of the world’s tax-haven network. – JapanTimes
Further down in this article, we’ll discuss the unraveling political system in the US, which is now clearly revealing that parties choose candidates not primaries. Taken together, these developments show once again the impact that the Internet is having on hitherto private structures and their propaganda.
The Panama Papers revelations have convulsed Britain in a variety of ways. The personal affairs of Prime Minister David Cameron have been exposed in the leaks, and he may yet have to resign.
And in the US, as powerful political forces fight back against popular electoral choices Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, anger over the entire primary process is growing and may eventually result in significant political change.
It is certainly important to note such developments – and take them into account when making personal and professional decisions on a variety of fronts. As Western mythologies evaporate, civil society itself becomes more tenuous and prone to disintegration.
The Japan Times is a mainstream media outlet. As such, we are surprised to find an article critical of the City. We don’t often read items in the mainstream media that focus on London’s City, certainly not from the standpoint of white-collar criminality.
It provides further evidence – as has been broadly speculated – that the furtive release of the Panama Papers was a botched mission, possibly led by the CIA.
Why botched? Because of the obviousness of the results. Those who had their information released were often those who were in opposition to the West’s current financial structure. People like Vladimir Putin and the Prime Minister of Iceland who had led an effort to put bankers in jail for various financial transgressions.
Meanwhile, individuals like David Cameron, Prime Minister of Britain were caught up in the leaking. This was surely not its intended purpose and further reinforces the idea that the affair was neither smoothly conducted nor efficiently planned.
It certainly was ambitious in scope, a massive leak that encompassed some 11.5 million emails. The intention is ambitious as well, to embarrass enemies of the Anglosphere and further support international regulation shutting down “offshore” entities.
But the blow-back from this operation is exposing the City itself to an examination that was surely not the intended outcome.
It would seem to show that those behind such ventures still have not figured out how to control the free-flow of information on the Internet that accompanies such obvious manipulations.
In the US, the political process picking the next president is imploding and, as it does, it presents a more naked version of reality.
That the political-industrial structure has allowed the veil to be ripped away from mechanism of power politics, thus exposing it, is a shocking development.
One can argue about intentions surrounding this development but one cannot argue with the result: A mythology of democracy has been decimated.
As people wake up to the reality of their social structures and their own manipulation, the ramifications will have increasing impacts.
Those pressing for globalism are now willing to forego discretion to press ahead with their larger goals. They are, apparently, are now willing to have more of the infrastructure underlying international constructs revealed.
Revelations of the City as entrenched at the heart of a “spiderweb” of white-collar tax evasion and exposure of the US political system as one manipulated by forces at the very top of society … these insights cannot be undone. They are fracturing the mythologies of democracy and self-determination.
This can’t be said politely: the entire status quo in America is a fraud.
The financial system is a fraud.
The political system is a fraud.
National Defense is a fraud.
The healthcare system is a fraud.
Higher education is a fraud.
The mainstream corporate media is a fraud.
Culture–from high to pop–is a fraud.
Truth is a dangerous poison in centralized hierarchies: anyone caught telling the truth risks a tenner in bureaucratic Siberia. (In the Soviet Gulag ,a tenner meant a ten-year sentence to a labor camp in Siberia.)
And so the truth is buried, sent to a backwater for further study, obfuscated by jargon, imprisoned by a Top Secret stamp, or simply taken out and executed.Everyone in the system maximizes his/her personal gain by going along with the current trajectory, even if that trajectory is taking the nation off the cliff.
Consider the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, a $1+ trillion failure. The aircraft is underpowered, under-armed, insanely overpriced, insanely over-budget and still riddled with bugs after seven years of fixes, making it an unaffordable maintenance nightmare that puts our servicepeople and nation at risk.
But no one in a position of power will speak the truth about the F-35, because it is no longer a weapons system–it’s a jobs program. Defense contractors are careful to spread the work of assembling parts of the F-35 to 40+ states, so 80+ senators will support the program, no matter how much a failure it is as a weapons system, or how costly the failure is becoming.
As for our failed healthcare system, one anecdote will do. (You undoubtedly have dozens from your own experience.) A friend from Uruguay with a high-tech job in the U.S. recently flew home to Montevideo for a medical exam because 1) the cost of the flight was cheaper than the cost of the care in the U.S. and 2) she was seen the next day in Montevideo while it would have taken two months to get the same care in the U.S.
I’ve listed dozens of examples here over the years: $120,000 for a couple days in a hospital, no procedures performed; $20,000+ for a single emergency room visit, no procedures performed; several thousand dollars charged to Medicare for a few minutes in an “observation room” that was occupied by patients, no staff present–the list is endless.
We’ve habituated to fraud as a way of life because every system is fraudulent.Consider the costly scam known as higher education. The two essentials higher education should teach are: 1) how to learn anything you need to learn or want to learn on your own, and 2) how to think, behave, plan and function entrepreneurially (i.e. as an autonomous problem-solver and lifelong learner who cooperates and collaborates productively with others) as a way of life.
Fraud as a way of life caters an extravagant banquet of consequences. While everyone maximizes their personal gain in whatever system of skim, scam and fraud they inhabit, the nation rots from within. We’ve lost our way, and lost the ability to tell the truth, face problems directly, abandon what has failed and what is unaffordable, and accept personal risk as the essential element of successful adaptation.
Since then, there have been an enormous increase in our dependency on electronics, computers, and microelectronics. An attack may never happen. But the more vulnerable the U.S. is to such an attack, the more likely it is to be used against us. In the former days, we worried about Russia. Now we have to be concerned about North Korea and Iran. These could be launched from a not-so-elaborate container ship. The rocket doesn’t have to be accurate. It just has to go up. It’s well within the capability of even an earlier Scud missile, of which thousands have been produced – it just has to have nuclear weapon on top.
Graham expressed concern that Iran also has this offensive capability within their arsenal, and perhaps within their current military doctrine as well.
We have data indicating that the Iranians have launched their versions of Scuds off of the Caspian Sea – not from land, but from the sea – and launched them over land. And we’ve also seen them launch missiles that have gone up and apparently exploded near their highest altitude – when you put those two ideas together – that is an EMP attack.
Why is this so important? Because a single missile with a warhead that actually doesn’t have to be all that large, has the potential to take out the U.S. power grid, destroy our electronics networks, and create an existential crisis like nothing the world has ever witnessed.
The threat of a EMP attack or a solar blast is very real, and one day will leave U.S. defenseless in the middle of a total chaos. Learn how to protect yourself against such an event, take action and don’t get caught unprepared. Watch this video as a first step and learn why and how you need to prepare.
Here’s an excerpted summary from the 2008 Report of the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse Attack that would make great science fiction. Unfortunately, it’s not:
The electromagnetic pulse (EMP) generated by a high altitude nuclear explosion is one of a small number of threats that can hold our society at risk of catastrophic consequences…A single EMP attack may seriously degrade or shut down a large part of the electric power grid in the geographic area of EMP exposure effective instantaneously. There is also the possibility of functional collapse of grids beyond the exposed one, as electrical effects propagate from one region to another…Should significant parts of the electric power infrastructure be lost for any substantial period of time, the Commission believes that the consequences are likely to be catastrophic, and many people may ultimately die for lack of the basic elements necessary to sustain life in dense urban and suburban communities.
Dr. Pry has been focused on the EMP issue for decades. At the CIA, his specific task was to evaluate the Russian nuclear strategy. At that time, the U.S. intelligence community was keenly aware that an EMP attack could existentially threaten the U.S.
Nuclear EMP played a major role in their strategy against us. The goal was to paralyze our military systems, as well as civilian critical infrastructure. The Russians were also hoping it would interfere with emergency action messages to all forces, including ballistic nuke submarines. It was my specialty…to educate policymakers and military leaders about EMP and what the bad guys were planning to do with it.
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