What are Pandora's papers? The leaked files of 14 offshore service providers link more than 330 public officials, including 35 world leaders, to offshore fortunes.
Pandora Papers: Fighting Corruption or Distracting Mechanism?
"Corruption and impunity in the [Central American] region undermine democracy, fuel irregular migration, and pose a threat to our national security because they support criminal organizations and transnational crime." Kenneth A. Polite Jr., United States Department of Justice he speculated that the Panama Papers scandal consisted of a maneuver to redirect huge financial flows from tax havens to the United States.
Corruption or exploitation?
Why are there rich and poor? If that is not natural destiny or divine design, there must be another explanation. Marx devoted his life to investigating it. From the three volumes of his masterpiece, Capital, it is concluded that it is the exploitation of the worker, the unpaid work that the capitalist steals from those who work, from those who produce wealth, that which is called surplus value, that is the origin of the abundance of some over the poverty of others. Corruption is an absolutely marginal element in this dynamic. What is done with the money thus generated and where it is kept (in "respectable" banks or in obscure tax havens) is totally anecdotal, marginal. If a public official of the State - which is always the State that defends the capitalist class - commits a corrupt act (he takes a "tip", for example), the reason for the poverty of the population is not there. In any case, he is only recycling, using - or, if you will, using improperly - part of the wealth generated by those who work.
Corruption is “an evil that corrodes societies and cultures, is linked to other forms of injustice and immoralities, causes crimes and murders, violence, death and all kinds of impunity; it generates marginality, exclusion and fear (…) while illegitimately using power to its advantage. It affects the administration of justice, electoral processes, the payment of taxes, national and international economic and commercial relations, and social communication. (…) It reflects the deterioration of moral values and virtues, especially honesty and justice. It is an attack against society, the moral order, democratic stability and the development of the peoples ”, declared the Ecuadorian bishops in 1988. Without a doubt, corruption is an abominable practice, like so many others that human beings carry out on a daily basis. But vehemently denouncing it, as is done now, is it not an alibi - one more among many - that tries to distance us from the true causes of injustice and social exclusion? Corruption is a consequence, not a cause! Never lose sight of this. To speak of corruption - even beating the chest - is to hide the true cause of inequities in global society.
Today, the capitalist system offers benefits to no more than 15% of the world's population (with 0.1% accumulating wealth in an insane, immoral, abominable way), while the other 85% suffer unspeakable hardships. It is not because of corruption that this happens! It is the very structure of the system. Corruption is a questionable practice, because it shows the blatant theft of money through a ruse, because it shows the moral baseness that exists among human beings: the official who keeps public money is as corrupt and questionable as the citizen who gives a bribe to the policeman; The teacher who asks a student for "favors" to promote her in her subject is as corrupt and embarrassing as the worker who steals a roll of toilet paper in the bathroom of her company. But no way! These behaviors constitute the causes of the enormous, infamous, unbearable socio-economic differences that populate the world.
"It is because of the corruption of venal officials that people do not receive services in their countries of origin [Central America] and migrate to the United States," reason the leaders of Washington. Not so at all! It is the chronic poverty of these societies (with 60 or 70% of their population low levels of poverty and extreme poverty) that is why their populations go from “wet” to the supposed “American dream”. The corruption of a president, minister or mayor only aggravates the situation of historically impoverished, excluded and subjected populations.
If it is due to corruption, in the United States there are plenty of examples. If there is “influence peddling” in the poor countries of the South, lobbying companies officially operate in Washington, that is, groups that pressure / influence decision-making spheres to achieve their objectives. By the way: the commercial area that most appeals to lobbying companies, clearly stated: the infamous influence peddling, is the military-industrial complex, to "invent" wars that result in subsequent contracts (very high!) With which provide arms to the armed forces. Will the senators who promote these wars be "white popcorn"? Will there be corruption there?
It is striking that for some years the central powers raised the issue of corruption as the ultimate cause of human misery. Absolute falsehood! It is the nature of the system that does not allow solving its bottlenecks: more food is produced than necessary to feed everyone well, but if that does not pay off, it is preferred to throw away a third of it every day, to maintain "Competitive" prices. Already an orthodox liberal like David Ricardo, at the beginning of the 19th century, a classic of British economics as much as Adam Smith, glimpsed what was the origin of wealth: the exploitation of the working class. But because of its ideological limits, he couldn't tell. Karl Marx, a communist, said it bluntly. To prove it, he devoted decades of his life to the study of economics. The surplus value or surplus value (from the German "Mehrwert") is the monetary expression of the value that the salaried worker creates above the value of his labor power. That is, the monetary expression of surplus labor.
Stop fooling us! Corruption is just a small edge of the system, not even the most important. That a mayor or a congressman keep a change, or get his mistress a good job as a secretary just so that he goes to collect the salary, that he asks for bribes to get a law or to grant a concession in an infrastructure work, It is not there the cause of the person dying every 7 seconds in the world due to lack of food, nor the 10,000 people a day who emigrate to the North in infamous conditions.
PANDORRA PAPERS: LASSO, PINERA, ABINADER...
Media bombs (distractors)
The so-called “Panama Papers” (or Panama Papers), made public on April 6, 2016, consisted of a delivery of 2.6 terabytes of information by an unidentified source to the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, who later shared with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ, by its initials in English, financed entirely by US organizations: various foundations, USAID, CIA), revealing the concealment of company properties, assets, profits and tax evasion of heads of State and of government, world political leaders, politically exposed individuals, and personalities from finance, business, sports, and the arts. The cry went up to heaven, as if the true and ultimate cause of human hardship had been discovered. After the media noise, everything remained absolutely the same.
Now they appear, with a similar media commotion, the "Pandora Papers". Another distracting maneuver? That "leak" of 2016, beyond the spectacular commotion, did not change anything. Nor could it change, obviously. Tax havens followed; but the worst: the exploitation continued! The current crisis of the pandemic, in any case, deepened it. The problem is not that there are places to hide money and evade taxes; the real problem is how that money is produced. And that comes only - there is no other way! - from the exploitation of the labor force of the great working mass (urban industrial worker, peasant laborer, employee in the sphere of services, salaried intellectual, housewife who does not earn a salary but contributes to the creation of surplus value). As Bertolt Brecht said: "It is a crime to rob a bank, but a more crime is to found it." Behind all great fortune, inexorably, there is blood.
What are these "Pandora Papers"? According to the conservative Spanish newspaper El PaÃs, they mean that “a constellation of powerful figures from Latin America has made use of tax havens over the years. Despite inhabiting the most unequal region on the planet, this elite has employed a web of trusts, partnerships, and opaque mercantile archives in places like the British Virgin Islands or Panama to avoid public scrutiny of a substantial portion of their assets. (…) Suspicious jurisdictions are their instrument and breeding ground to enrich themselves at the expense of others, transferring the burden of their absenteeism to loyal taxpayers. Sometimes these operations finance major crimes such as money laundering, illegal arms trade or drug trafficking ”. If a medium on the right can say this so clearly, that smells like a trapped cat. Why is now a viscerally anti-communist newspaper from the Catholic hereditary kingdom of Spain allowed to speak out against corruption? Because that, corruption, is not the true heart of the system: it is morally reprehensible, as much as running a red light or cheating on your partner if monogamy is assumed. But the cause of the m is not there. ales of the world. In that sense, it works as a good distractor.
If the Panama Papers –operation prepared by the CIA at the time– required 190 ICIJ journalists, the current operation mobilized 600. Someone close to Putin, who appears denounced in the maneuver, gave the opinion of him: “I am inclined to attribute this material to a provocative yellowishness, nothing more, it does not correspond to serious material, they are absolutely not serious statements, in fact, they are unfounded, "said Dmitri Peskov, press secretary of the Russian presidency. Adding: [although] "the world's largest offshore tax loophole is missing," alluding to the United States
It is curious: current capitalism, in its global neoliberal version, is structurally mafia, corrupt, parasitic. The dominant capital is financial. That is to say: parasitic capital, which has been moving for decades through obscure banking transactions, in many cases through that infamy that is called off-shore banking, that is to say: tax havens. Those corrupt financial assets are the ones who dominate the world system. The Washington Consensus bodies (World Bank and International Monetary Fund), representatives of the great capitalist banks of the great powers, mark the course of humanity. These parasitic capitals have far exceeded productive capital (industrial, manufacturing, agricultural, service industry). Banks are the owners of global finance; therefore, they are the ones who really decide the course of events.
Along with these mega-capital gangsters, two of the big businesses that energize the capitalist economy are the manufacture and sale of weapons (the first business on a planetary scale), and drug activity. The capital flows that these economic branches inject into international finance are monumental. In other words, the industries of death (weapons to kill: the destruction of countries and their subsequent reconstruction, the manufacture of wars in any corner of the Third World, or psychotropics to poison and blind lives), are the main businesses, which they move with corrupt, dark, gangster logic.
Who controls the flow of weapons? (from a personal pistol to a nuclear powered aircraft carrier). Why are drug traffickers, the "bad guys", never Americans? If the United States is the world's leading consumer of psychoactive substances, why do mafia drug trafficking networks never appear on its territory? Consistent studies say the DEA is the world's leading drug cartel. And drug trafficking is one of the most "successful" financial activities today. In current tax havens it is estimated that there are around 30-40 billion dollars. Let us insist: the crucial problem is not that they hide. The problem is how they were generated.
All of that, isn't it highly corrupt? On the other hand, the so-called labor deregulation (read: transfer of industrial plants from the prosperous North to the poor South), a devious maneuver that seeks cheaper labor and the exclusion of fiscal and environmental controls, without unions or demonstrations: isn't it an infinitely corrupt practice?
In short: current capitalism is increasingly based on corrupt, mafia, and nefarious actions. The lobbies that invent wars to sell war tanks and missile planes, aren't they corrupt? Why is this global crusade against corruption emerging now? Also, note well, the corrupt are private figures, "bad" businessmen, tax evaders, but never Americans. Although the system that creates those wars or throws food away so as not to lose money is not spoken a word, never. Curious, right?
Oviously this anti-corruption "democratic spirit" penetrates common morality. Attacking another as a "corrupt degenerate" is comforting. Why are hunger and exploitation, racism or patriarchy not attacked with similar virulence? Are not all of these items equally blemishes that should be discarded? To accuse another of being corrupt satisfies a coarse and morbid moral middle class. Power knows how to implement it in its favor (see the cases of electoral defeats in countries with center-left governments as a result of the media bombardment against corruption: Brazil and Argentina, for example). Why would Nicolás Maduro or Raúl Castro be corrupt, and not Iván Duque or Joe Biden? Why is there talk of the hidden fortune of Putin or Hugo Chávez (will they exist?) And not that of the capitalist mega-companies?
It was speculated that the Panama Papers scandal consisted of a maneuver to redirect huge financial flows from tax havens to the United States. This is possible. What is clear is that both "media bombs": the one from 2016 and the current one, in the midst of the pandemic, are distracting maneuvers that seek to continue positioning corruption as the plague to be fought. And the problem is not there! It is the capitalist system as a whole that creates injustice. Therefore, it is not about fighting corruption but about the system.
