Aaron Reinas was just blocks from his home when a San Bernardino, California, sheriff accosted and accused him of burglarizing cars. What happened next reveals the dangers of unchecked police power and the dire consequences individual citizens can face for standing up for their rights. PAR investigates Reinas’s questionable arrest and why police often ignore the law in pursuit of phantom crimes.
Is Ghislaine Maxwell About To Take Down Trump & Clinton? | The Kyle Kulinski Show
I would love to see how Fox and MSNBC would react to this. Would Fox attack Clinton while defending Trump? Would MSNBC attack Trump while defending Clinton? Or would they both avoid the story altogether because it may hurt a member of their “team”.
Full translation of Peng Shuai’s Weibo post, accusing Chinese Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli of sexual assault
I know I cannot explain this clearly, and even if I say it, it won’t matter, but I still want to let it out. I am a hypocrite. I admit I am not a good woman, and am in fact, a very very bad woman. About three years ago, Zhang Gaoli vice president, you retired. You asked Dr. Liu at the Tianjin Tennis Centre to contact me, and asked me with play tennis with you at Kang Ming Hotel in Beijing. After we finished playing tennis, you and your wife Kang Jie brought me to your home. Then you took me into your room. Like what happened ten years ago in Tianjin, you wanted to have sex with me.
That afternoon I was very afraid. I did not expect this to happen – someone helped guard outside (translator note: not very clear what she’s trying to say here), because nobody would believe that a wife would allow this. About seven years ago, we had sex. Then later on after you got promoted to be a member of the Politburo Standing Committee in Beijing, you never contacted me again. I used to bury everything inside me. After all, if you didn’t want to take any responsibility, why did you come back for me, and brought me to your home to have sex? It is true that I don’t have evidence. It is also not possible to leave evidence. Later on you kept denying, but it is true that you were attracted to me first, otherwise I couldn’t have been able to come into contact with you.
That afternoon I didn’t agree, and I kept crying. I had dinner with you and auntie Kang Jie together. You said the universe is very very big. The earth is merely a speck of sand in the universe , and us human beings are smaller than even a speck of sand. You said a lot more than that, and the purpose was basically to persuade me to drop my guard. After dinner, I was still not willing to have sex. You said you hated me. You said in those seven years, you never forgot about me, and you will treat me well etc… I was terrified and anxious. Taking into consideration the affection I had for you seven years ago, I agreed… yes, we had sex.
Romantic attraction is such a complicated thing that explain it clearly. From that day on, I renewed my love for you. Throughout my time with you after that, purely based on our interactions, you were a very good person, and you treated me well. We talking about recent history, as well as ancient eras. You educated me on so many topics, and we had discussions about economics, politics. We never ran out of things to talk about. We played chess, sang, played table tennis, played pool and also played tennis together. We always had endless fun. It was as if our personalities fit perfectly together.
I left home early (translator note: professional athletes in China frequently leave their families at a very early age to train full-time). On the inside, I am extremely deprived of love. In the middle of all of this, I never thought I was a good woman. I hated myself, I hated why I came to this world. You told me you loved me, very very much, and you said you hope in the next life, we can meet each other around the age of twenty, or eighteen. You said you were lonely. You pitied yourself for being alone. We had endless things to talk about, never ran out of topics. You said in your position, it is impossible to divorce. If we met in Shandong (translator note: a province of China, of less political significance than Beijing), you would have been able to divorce, but not now. I thought I would just accompany you quietly, not making any noise.
At the beginning, everything was fine. But as time goes on, things started to change gradually. There was so much unfairness and humiliation. Every time you asked me to go to you home, behind your back your wife said so many ugly and hurtful things to me. All kinds of jeer and mockery. I said I like to eat duck tongue. Auntie Kang Jie would go, “ew so disgusting”. In the winter when Beijing had poor air quality due to smog, auntie Kang Jie would say, “it is because you live in the countryside. We don’t feel that at all here”. Things like that, she said so much of them. When you were with me, she never said those things. It is similar to when we were together. When we were together alone, you acted one way, but when there were other people near by, you would act another way.
I have told you this before, hearing those things made me feel very hurt and humiliated deep down. Since the first day when I knew you, I have never used a cent of your money, neither have I ever used you to obtain any benefits for myself, but this thing called reputation, is so important. Everything that has happened, I deserve it. I have brought everything upon myself.
From the beginning to the end, you told me to keep our relationship a secret, and most importantly of all, I was to never tell your mom we were having sexual relationships. Because it was her who drives me to the Church of the Saviour (translator note: a church in Beijing) every time, and then I would have to change to your car to be able to get into the gated apartment complex. She thought I was always just at your place to play Mahjong or poker. We were always just transparent individuals in each others lives. Your wife was like the queen in The Legend of Zhen Huan (translator note: a very popular show about power struggle within an ancient Chinese royal family), while words couldn’t describe how embarrassed I felt.
There were so many times where I thought, am I still a human? I thought I was a soulless creature, faking, faking everyday, which one is the real me? I shouldn’t have come to this world, but I don’t have the courage to die.
I really want to just live simply, but things turned out different than what I wanted. On the 30th, we argued very badly. You said on the afternoon on the 2nd, we would go to your home to slowly talk it out. Today at noon, you called to say you are busy, denied everything, made excuse to say we would talk another day… and just like this, you disappeared again, just like seven years ago.
You played with me, and dumped me when you are done with me. You said there were no transactions between us. Yes, that is true, our affection towards each other had nothing to do with money or power. But I have a hard time finding closure for, and coming to terms with our three year long relationship. You were always scared I would secretly bring a recording device, and leave evidence. That’s right, other than me, I do not have any evidence to prove what happened, no audio recording, no video taping. The only thing I have is memory from my own messed up self.
For someone as prominent as yourself, I know you said you are not afraid. But it doesn’t matter if I’m hitting a rock with an egg, or being a moth that flies towards the flame, I am telling the truth about what happened between us. With your intelligence and wits I am sure you will either deny it, or blame it on me, or you could simply play it cool. You always say you hope your mother in heaven could bless you. I am a bad woman who doesn’t deserve to be a mother, but you are a father with both boy and girl. I have asked you this before, would you have done the same even to your adopted daughter? Do you still have the courage to face your mother after what you have done in your lifetime? We sure all like to pretend we are virtuous…
When Reputation Matters, Leaks Like the Pandora Papers Can Be Very Effective
Some reports on the Pandora Papers have featured colorful and scintillating headlines (“Secret money, swanky real estate and a Monte Carlo mystery”), but there is a drab, depressing familiarity to the nearly 12 million leaked confidential financial records that throw light on the opaque wealth of powerful public figures around the world.
We see the same ominous pattern as in the Panama Papers leak of 2016 and the Paradise Papers leak of 2017: legalized corruption at the highest levels, on an almost unimaginably vast scale. And it appears that the people most empowered to end this nightmare are the most heavily invested in prolonging it for their own benefit.
Each successive leak drives home the same message: Abandon any hope that government will serve the people or that the rule of law will be applied equally to all, the foundational premises of modern government.
Yet there is some cause for optimism, even if it’s not in the form we might expect. New laws aren’t coming to the rescue, because they probably can’t be created quickly enough or made comprehensive enough to effect meaningful change. But there is evidence that technology and public opinion are shifting the balance against elites’ use of the offshore financial services industry.
For nearly 15 years, I’ve researched that world from the inside, earning certification as a wealth manager and then traveling the globe to study practitioners at work. What I learned is that “tax havens” aren’t really for avoiding taxes: They exist to help elites avoid the rule of law that they impose on the rest of us. The offshore financial industry is generating much of the economic and political inequality destabilizing the world.
Many of the individuals exposed in the Pandora Papers are politicians — more than 330 of them, from 90 countries, including 35 current and former heads of state — and their lifestyles are made possible by exploiting the nations they purport to serve. The revelations highlight several politicians who campaigned on vigorous anti-corruption platforms, like Prime Minister Andrej Babis of the Czech Republic, President Uhuru Kenyatta of Kenya and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine.
In 2016, Mr. Babis scolded the wealthy Czechs whose names appeared in the Panama Papers and, in a 2020 interview, proclaimed that a governing philosophy was to “cut off the heads of the ‘corruption-Hydra.’” Now he’s accused of using a string of offshore shell companies to purchase luxury real estate on the French Riviera, including a chateau worth $22 million. (Mr. Babis has denied any wrongdoing and dismissed the report as politically motivated.)
That so little has changed after the Panama Papers and the Paradise Papers is not lost on the public. By my count, there have been fewer than 10 convictions resulting from previous offshore leaks, and only one involved a politician.
People are angry and they know they are being ripped off, but watching successive iterations of public corruption on flamboyant display, followed by no consequences, is an affront to the spirit of democracy. As the economist Thomas Piketty noted even before the Panama Papers broke, many respond to the appeal of ethnonationalist politicians, who promise to crack down on elite corruption.
Yet we do see forms of accountability being imposed that are effective despite being outside the realm of the law. As my own and other recent research on high-net-worth individuals has shown, reputational costs weigh more heavily on them than the threat of fines or prosecution. The laws are no match for the legal armory that the wealthy individuals in this world can afford. And there is evidence that public opinion is changing quickly, in a way that imposes the reputational costs that matter most.
When Mitt Romney ran for president in 2012, many Americans — even on the left — shrugged at the news that his wealth (estimated at the time at $250 million) increased through offshore investments. But in the wake of the Panama Papers, public opinion has grown significantly more negative toward tax avoidance, which, while often legal, is increasingly regarded as immoral and unpatriotic. This mirrors the rapid change that occurred earlier in the 21st century, in which public neutrality toward corporate tax avoidance turned to public outrage and successful pressure campaigns within a few short years.
The Pandora Papers’s reputational impact may deliver some instant karma to Mr. Babis. The Czech police say they will “act upon” his use of offshore shell corporations, and a much swifter public verdict could arrive this week in parliamentary elections that could dislodge the prime minister from power. “He preaches water and drinks French wine,” the leader of an opposition party said.
Technology also offers more reason for hope. It has made it much easier to impose these costs, by facilitating the dissemination of vast troves of data to journalists and the public. The past five years have revolutionized the possibilities for whistle-blowers to maintain anonymity through the use of tools like PGP encryption, allowing them to deliver huge quantities of data from offshore while protecting themselves from retaliation. Five years on, we still do not know the identity of “John Doe,” who leaked the Panama Papers, nor of the person or people who leaked the Paradise Papers four years ago.
That’s remarkable in an era of digital surveillance and will encourage more whistle-blowing. As I found in talking with wealth managers all over the world, a significant number understand that their work has contributed to dangerous levels of economic and political inequality; they want to do something, and many understand that one of the most effective uses of their insider position would be to pull back the veil of secrecy that makes so much of offshore corruption possible.
Formerly, these potential whistle-blowers would have been deterred by the fate of figures like Hervé Falciani, who in 2009 brought forward evidence of widespread tax fraud by private individuals facilitated by his employer, HSBC in Switzerland. Mr. Falciani has been hounded by investigators and caught up in legal limbo ever since, including being convicted in absentia and given the longest sentence ever handed down by a Swiss court for violation of the country’s draconian bank secrecy laws.
But it’s now possible for insiders to act on their conscience without ruining their lives and careers, as well as those of their families. We already see momentum building in the form of the enormous size of the Pandora Papers, which is even larger than the Panama Papers — formerly the biggest data leak in history — and involves information from 14 offshore sources instead of one.
This suggests that whistle-blowers are not only emboldened now, but also may be cooperating internationally, to do what lawmakers cannot: holding accountable the most wealthy and powerful people in the world in the court of public opinion.
Brooke Harrington (@EBHarrington), a sociology professor at Dartmouth, is the author of “Capital Without Borders: Wealth Managers and the One Percent.”