the United States is widely recognized as a leading source of offshore money: during the Union Bank of Switzerland tax-evasion scandal, it emerged that, at that bank alone, U.S. clients had almost twenty thousand Swiss-based accounts. In the hedge-fund industry, it is considered perfectly normal and entirely legitimate to domicile funds in tax havens like Grand Cayman or the British Virgin Islands.
.. of the roughly fourteen thousand intermediaries—banks, law firms, company-incorporation firms, and other middlemen—with which Mossack Fonseca worked over the years in order to set up companies, foundations, and trusts for its customers, six hundred and seventeen were based in the United States.
.. the United States isn’t among the ten countries for which Mossack Fonseca created shell companies. (Hong Kong, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom held the first three places)
.. Perhaps it deliberately avoided having a large presence in the United States, so as not to attract the attention of U.S. authorities. Or perhaps there was too much competition. An article published in The Economist in 2012 pointed out that the business of setting up shell companies in tax havens is competitive and includes a number of well-established firms
.. But, in 2010, the United States and Panama signed a trade-promotion agreement that, among other things, obliged Panama to provide to the U.S. authorities, on request, “information regarding the ownership of companies, partnerships, trusts, foundations, and other persons ..
Trumps Alligations about Opponents
But then again, he insisted that the guy who rushed the stage in Dayton, Ohio had “ties to ISIS.” And he suggested former Breitbart reporter Michelle Fields could have had a “pen bomb.” He claimed his infamous interview with Chris Matthews wasn’t “run on television [in its entirety] because it was too long” and that the network “cut out” his answers.
Richard Rohr: Blinded by Privilege
In country after country that I’ve spoken in over the years, the laity have come to accept that the bishops and priests look out at reality from the side of management and seldom from the side of the laboring class, where Jesus unquestionably resided. When and where we did have servant leadership, the church flourished; where they didn’t, we often experience, to this day and with good reason, a virulent anti-clericalism.
.. Since we do not consciously have racist attitudes or overt racist behavior, we kindly judge ourselves to be open minded, egalitarian, and therefore surely not racist. Because we have never been on the other side, we largely do not recognize the structural access we enjoy, the trust we think we deserve, the assumption that we always belong and do not have to earn our belonging. All this we take for granted and normal. Only the outsider can spot these attitudes in us.
.. “States of sin” are always incapable of critiquing themselves, which is largely why they are sin to begin with. Evil depends upon disguise and tries to look like virtue to survive.
Look Out for the Trump Pivot!
The “pivot” is a timely example. It refers to the expectation that at some point a leading presidential candidate will transform himself into a more suitable version of a likely nominee. He will “pivot” his attention away from his hard-core base of loyalists in favor of the broader general electorate. He will, in Trump’s case, scale back his hell-raiser, insult-monger bit and become more “presidential.” No doubt Trump’s pivot will be beautiful and be instantly recognized as one of the great pivots of all time.
.. But there is also something openly absurd about the concept of a Trump pivot. Certainly he is capable of changing his views — often and with breathtaking speed. But really, how do you pivot away from saying that Mexicans are rapists? (Will he negotiate “great deals” with more moderate Mexican rapists?) If your campaign is a cult of personality, how can you modulate that personality and still have the cult?
.. “Nothing makes Trump more acceptable today than yesterday or last week – or six months ago,” the Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker wrote this month. “He is still a boastful, volatile, misogynistic, race-baiting, willfully and strategically ignorant, exploitative fear-monger who is guided by profit over principle, and whose hair-trigger temperament has the world on edge.”
.. But Trump follows no such rules, cardinal, unwritten or otherwise. That’s part of the perverse beauty of him. He can be breathtakingly forthcoming about the scam he is attempting to put over. “At the right time, I will be so presidential that you’ll call me and you’ll say, ‘Donald, you have to stop that, it’s too much,’” Trump told Sean Hannity last week. “I can be presidential,” he concluded.