{"id":4478,"date":"2016-05-06T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2016-05-06T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/amabhungane.org\/amabhungane\/stories\/the-revolution-will-be-digitised\/"},"modified":"2016-05-06T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2016-05-06T00:00:00","slug":"the-revolution-will-be-digitised","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/further.co.za\/amabwp\/the-revolution-will-be-digitised\/","title":{"rendered":"The revolution will be digitised"},"content":{"rendered":"

The anonymous whistleblower behind the Panama Papers has conditionally offered to make the documents available to government authorities.<\/strong><\/p>\n

In a statement issued to the German newspaper S\u00fcddeutsche Zeitung<\/em> and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, the so-called \u201cJohn Doe\u201d behind the biggest information leak in history cites the need for better whistleblower protection and has hinted at even more revelations to come.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Titled \u201cThe Revolution Will Be Digitised\u201d, the 1800-word statement gives justification for the leak, saying that \u201cincome inequality is one of the defining issues of our time\u201d and says that government authorities need to do more to address it. The statement in full:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Income inequality is one of the defining issues of our time.\u00a0 It affects all of us, the world over.\u00a0 The debate over its sudden acceleration has raged for years, with politicians, academics and activists alike helpless to stop its steady growth despite countless speeches, statistical analyses, a few meagre protests, and the occasional documentary.\u00a0 Still, questions remain: why? And why now?<\/p>\n

The Panama Papers provide a compelling answer to these questions: massive, pervasive corruption.\u00a0 And it\u2019s not a coincidence that the answer comes from a law firm.\u00a0 More than just a cog in the machine of \u201cwealth management,\u201d Mossack Fonseca used its influence to write and bend laws worldwide to favour the interests of criminals over a period of decades.\u00a0 In the case of the island of Niue<\/a>, the firm essentially ran a tax haven from start to finish.\u00a0 Ram\u00f3n Fonseca and J\u00fcrgen Mossack would have us believe that their firm\u2019s shell companies, sometimes called \u201cspecial purpose vehicles,\u201d are\u00a0just like cars<\/a>.\u00a0 But used car salesmen don\u2019t write laws.\u00a0 And the only \u201cspecial purpose\u201d of the vehicles they produced was too often fraud, on a grand scale.<\/p>\n

Shell companies are often associated with the crime of tax evasion, but the Panama Papers show beyond a shadow of a doubt that although shell companies are not illegal by definition, they are used to carry out a wide array of serious crimes that go\u00a0 beyond evading taxes<\/a>.\u00a0 I decided to expose Mossack Fonseca because I thought its founders, employees and clients should have to answer for their roles in these crimes, only some of which have come to light thus far.\u00a0 It will take years, possibly decades, for the full extent of the firm\u2019s sordid acts to become known.<\/p>\n

In the meantime, a new global debate has started, which is encouraging.\u00a0 Unlike the polite rhetoric of yesteryear that carefully omitted any suggestion of wrongdoing by the elite, this debate focuses directly on what matters.<\/p>\n

In that regard, I have a few thoughts.<\/p>\n

For the record, I do not work for any government or intelligence agency, directly or as a contractor, and I never have.\u00a0 My viewpoint is entirely my own, as was my decision to share the documents with S\u00fcddeutsche Zeitung<\/em> and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), not for any specific political purpose, but simply because I understood enough about their contents to realize the scale of the injustices they described.<\/p>\n

The prevailing media narrative thus far has focused on the scandal of what is legal and allowed in this system.\u00a0 What is allowed is indeed scandalous and must be changed.\u00a0 But we must not lose sight of another important fact: the law firm, its founders, and employees actually did knowingly violate myriad laws worldwide, repeatedly.\u00a0 Publicly they plead ignorance, but the documents show detailed knowledge and deliberate wrongdoing.\u00a0 At the very least we already know<\/a> that Mossack personally perjured himself before a federal court in Nevada, and we also know that his information technology staff attempted to cover up the underlying lies.\u00a0 They should all be prosecuted accordingly with no special treatment.<\/p>\n

In the end, thousands of prosecutions could stem from the Panama Papers, if only law enforcement could access and evaluate the actual documents.\u00a0 ICIJ and its partner publications have rightly stated that they will not provide them to law enforcement agencies.\u00a0 I, however, would be willing to cooperate with law enforcement to the extent that I am able.<\/p>\n

That being said, I have watched as one after another, whistleblowers and activists in the United States and Europe have had their lives destroyed by the circumstances they find themselves in after shining a light on obvious wrongdoing.\u00a0 Edward Snowden is stranded in Moscow, exiled due to the Obama administration\u2019s decision to prosecute him under the Espionage Act.\u00a0 For his revelations about the NSA, he deserves a hero\u2019s welcome and a substantial prize, not banishment.\u00a0 Bradley Birkenfeld was awarded millions for his information concerning Swiss bank UBS\u2014and was still given a prison sentence by the Justice Department.\u00a0 Antoine Deltour is presently on trial for providing journalists with information about how Luxembourg granted secret “sweetheart” tax deals to multi-national corporations, effectively stealing billions in tax revenues from its neighbour countries.\u00a0 And there are plenty more examples.<\/p>\n

Legitimate whistleblowers who expose unquestionable wrongdoing, whether insiders or outsiders, deserve immunity from government retribution, full stop.\u00a0 Until governments codify legal protections for whistleblowers into law, enforcement agencies will simply have to depend on their own resources or on-going global media coverage for documents.<\/p>\n

In the meantime, I call on the European Commission, the British Parliament, the United States Congress, and all nations to take swift action not only to protect whistleblowers, but to put an end to the global abuse of corporate registers.\u00a0 In the European Union, every member state\u2019s corporate register should be freely accessible, with detailed data plainly available on ultimate beneficial owners.\u00a0 The United Kingdom can be proud of its domestic initiatives thus far, but it still has a vital role to play by ending financial secrecy on its various island territories, which are unquestionably the cornerstone of institutional corruption worldwide.\u00a0 And the United States can clearly no longer trust its fifty states to make sound decisions about their own corporate data.\u00a0 It is long past time for Congress to step in and force transparency by setting standards for disclosure and public access.<\/p>\n

And while it\u2019s one thing to extol the virtues of government transparency at summits and in sound bites, it\u2019s quite another to actually implement it.\u00a0 It is an open secret that in the United States, elected representatives spend the majority of their time fundraising.\u00a0 Tax evasion cannot possibly be fixed while elected officials are pleading for money from the very elites who have the strongest incentives to avoid taxes relative to any other segment of the population.\u00a0 These unsavoury political practices have come full circle and they are irreconcilable.\u00a0 Reform of America\u2019s broken campaign finance system cannot wait.<\/p>\n

Of course, those are hardly the only issues that need fixing.\u00a0 Prime Minister John Key of New Zealand has been curiously quiet about his country’s role in enabling the financial fraud Mecca that is the Cook Islands.\u00a0 In Britain, the Tories have been shameless about concealing their own practices involving offshore companies, while Jennifer Shasky Calvery, the director of the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network at the United States Treasury, just announced her resignation<\/a> to work instead for HSBC, one of the most notorious banks on the planet (not coincidentally headquartered in London).\u00a0 And so the familiar swish of America\u2019s revolving door echoes amidst deafening global silence from thousands of yet-to-be-discovered ultimate beneficial owners who are likely praying that her replacement is equally spineless.\u00a0 In the face of political cowardice, it’s tempting to yield to defeatism, to argue that the status quo remains fundamentally unchanged, while the Panama Papers are, if nothing else, a glaring symptom of our society\u2019s progressively diseased and decaying moral fabric.<\/p>\n

But the issue is finally on the table, and that change takes time is no surprise.\u00a0 For fifty years, executive, legislative, and judicial branches around the globe have utterly failed to address the metastasizing tax havens spotting Earth\u2019s surface.\u00a0 Even today, Panama says it wants to be known for more than papers, but its government has conveniently examined only one of the horses on its offshore merry-go-round.<\/p>\n

Banks, financial regulators and tax authorities have failed.\u00a0 Decisions have been made that have spared the wealthy while focusing instead on reining in middle- and low-income citizens.<\/p>\n

Hopelessly backward and inefficient courts have failed.\u00a0 Judges have too often acquiesced to the arguments of the rich, whose lawyers\u2014and not just Mossack Fonseca\u2014are well trained in honouring the letter of the law, while simultaneously doing everything in their power to desecrate its spirit.<\/p>\n

The media has failed.\u00a0 Many news networks are cartoonish parodies of their former selves, individual billionaires appear to have taken up newspaper ownership as a hobby, limiting coverage of serious matters concerning the wealthy, and serious investigative journalists lack funding.\u00a0 The impact is real: in addition to S\u00fcddeutsche Zeitung and ICIJ, and despite explicit claims to the contrary, several major media outlets did have editors review documents from the Panama Papers.\u00a0 They chose not to cover them.\u00a0 The sad truth is that among the most prominent and capable media organizations in the world there was not a single one interested in reporting on the story.\u00a0 Even Wikileaks didn\u2019t answer its tip line repeatedly.<\/p>\n

But most of all, the legal profession has failed.\u00a0 Democratic governance depends upon responsible individuals throughout the entire system who understand and uphold the law, not who understand and exploit it.\u00a0 On average, lawyers have become so deeply corrupt that it is imperative for major changes in the profession to take place, far beyond the meek proposals already on the table.\u00a0 To start, the term \u201clegal ethics,\u201d upon which codes of conduct and licensure are nominally based, has become an oxymoron.\u00a0 Mossack Fonseca did not work in a vacuum\u00a0\u2014\u00a0despite repeated fines and documented regulatory violations, it found allies and clients at major law firms in virtually every nation.\u00a0 If the industry\u2019s shattered economics were not already evidence enough, there is now no denying that lawyers can no longer be permitted to regulate one another.\u00a0 It simply doesn\u2019t work.\u00a0 Those able to pay the most can always find a lawyer to serve their ends, whether that lawyer is at Mossack Fonseca or another firm of which we remain unaware.\u00a0 What about the rest of society?<\/p>\n

The collective impact of these failures has been a complete erosion of ethical standards, ultimately leading to a novel system we still call Capitalism, but which is tantamount to economic slavery.\u00a0 In this system\u00a0\u2014\u00a0our system\u00a0\u2014\u00a0the slaves are unaware both of their status and of their masters, who exist in a world apart where the intangible shackles are carefully hidden amongst reams of unreachable legalese.\u00a0 The horrific magnitude of detriment to the world should shock us all awake.\u00a0 But when it takes a whistleblower to sound the alarm, it is cause for even greater concern.\u00a0 It signals that democracy\u2019s checks and balances have all failed, that the breakdown is systemic, and that severe instability could be just around the corner.\u00a0 So now is the time for real action, and that starts with asking questions.<\/p>\n

Historians can easily recount how issues involving taxation and imbalances of power have led to revolutions in ages past.\u00a0 Then, military might was necessary to subjugate peoples, whereas now, curtailing information access is just as effective or more so, since the act is often invisible.\u00a0 Yet we live in a time of inexpensive, limitless digital storage and fast internet connections that transcend national boundaries.\u00a0 It doesn’t take much to connect the dots: from start to finish, inception to global media distribution, the next revolution will be digitized.<\/p>\n

Or perhaps it has already begun.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Source known only as John Doe says income inequality “one of the defining issues of our time” and calls on governments to address it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":22546,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4478","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-stories"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/further.co.za\/amabwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4478","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/further.co.za\/amabwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/further.co.za\/amabwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/further.co.za\/amabwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/further.co.za\/amabwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4478"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/further.co.za\/amabwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4478\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/further.co.za\/amabwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22546"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/further.co.za\/amabwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4478"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/further.co.za\/amabwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4478"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/further.co.za\/amabwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4478"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}