person:ken silverstein

The Law Firm That Works with Oligarchs, Money Launderers, and Dictators | VICE | United States

▻http://www.vice.com/read/evil-llc-0000524-v21n12

Tiens c’est marrant, Ken Silverstein dans Vice News parlait déjà de Mossack Fonseca et de Bachar al Assad le 3 décembre 2014. Jérôme Fenoglio ce matin citait sur France Inter, très fier de lui - et en « exclusivité » s’il vous plait - le nom de Bachar dans les #panamaleaks :) Qu’on ne vienne pas me dire après que les journalistes du Monde font leur boulot correctement. #misère (du journalisme français).

https://vice-images.vice.com/images/articles/meta/2014/12/03/evil-llc-0000524-v21n12-1417576773.jpg?resize=*:*&output-quality=75

One purpose of a so-called shell company is that the money put in it can’t be traced to its owner. Say, for example, you’re a dictator who wants to finance terrorism, take a bribe, or pilfer your nation’s treasury. A shell company is a bogus entity that allows you to hold and move cash under a corporate name without international law enforcement or tax authorities knowing it’s yours. Once the money is disguised as the assets of this enterprise—which would typically be set up by a trusted lawyer or crony in an offshore secrecy haven to further obscure ownership—you can spend it or use it for new nefarious purposes. This is the very definition of money laundering—taking dirty money and making it clean—and shell companies make it possible. They’re “getaway vehicles,” says former US Customs investigator Keith Prager, “for bank robbers.”

“The Industry of Ideas”: Measuring the Impact of #Think_Tanks | Boston Review
▻http://bostonreview.net/blog/andrew-mayersohn-transparency-think-tanks-money-politics

Investigating money in politics is a little like studying dark matter: we have to make inferences about what we can’t detect from the behavior of things that we can see. While the “visible” universe of money in politics—mandatory disclosure of campaign contributions, some types of election spending, and lobbying—is sizeable in its own right, it represents only a fraction of the money spent on influencing government. Ken Silverstein’s recent e-book Pay to Play Think Tanks: Institutional Corruption and the Industry of Ideas (PDF) delves into the invisible world, demonstrating that influencers have plenty of other, less transparent tactics at their disposal.

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... consider what (thanks to disclosure laws) we do know about money in politics. The 2012 congressional and presidential elections cost about $6.3 billion in reported spending, and state-level candidates raised another $3.1 billion (per the National Institute on Money in State Politics). About $3 billion in federal lobbying is disclosed every year. While these numbers appear large, they are small relative to the size of the U.S. economy, leading some political scientists to ask why, given the immense economic stakes, corporations and unions spend so little money on politics. Generally, they conclude that lobbying and donations matter at the margins but don’t determine policy outcomes all by themselves. Campaign contributions, for example, are not usually powerful enough to convince a congressperson to vote against his core ideology or his party’s line on a salient issue. Given that wealthy interests are still very good at getting their way, then, it makes sense to look at the aspects of money in politics beyond campaign contributions and lobbying to understand why.

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Silverstein suggests disclosure as a remedy, arguing that think tanks should voluntarily publish their officials’ financial statements as well as their donor list, but provides little evidence that think tanks are worried enough about their credibility to do so. On the contrary, think tanks are probably more concerned about the loss of credibility that would come with disclosing donors and having the media and political opponents pore over the list for embarrassing details. Moreover, disclosure will do nothing to address Silverstein’s other concern, the transformation of think tanks from idea factories into partisan attack dogs. Medvetz’s argument suggests that think tanks simply have too much to gain by “binding” themselves – turning themselves into reliable sources for the media and allies for politicians – to care about the loss of their autonomy.

While the dishonest and the stupid are attempting to railroad everyone into military endeavours devoid of public benefit, let us remember that France stood out of the Iraq war because it had independent orbital imaging capabilities showing that the WMD claims were nonsense... Meanwhile, the USA took for a ride all the blind ones who had decided that US imagery was cheaper and good enough.

Military sovereignty is also about being able to remain peaceful - let us remember that next time the time for budget cuts come: ▻http://fistfulofeuros.net/afoe/spies-for-europe

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The original statement is in this Ken Silverstein piece (▻http://harpers.org/sb-creating-th-1149534425.html):

“They say everyone else was wrong,” said this former official, “but we conditioned them to be wrong. We spend [tens of billions of dollars per year] on signals intelligence and when we reach a conclusion, the people who spend less than that tend to believe us. They weren’t wrong, they chose to believe us. The British, Germans, and Italians don’t have all those overhead assets, so they rely on us. Historically they have been well-served, so they believe us when we tell them the earth is round. The French have their own assets—and guess what? They didn’t go with us”

Guilhem Penent, of France’s IFRI and IRSEM thinktanks, writes in the Space Review (▻http://www.thespacereview.com/article/2340/1) as follows:

“Regarding outer space, France’s main objective is to perpetuate its autonomy and national sovereignty. As sovereignty is the state of determining itself based on its own will without depending on other nations, satellites are, first and foremost, the guarantee of France’s autonomy in assessment and thereby in decision-making”

The decision not to follow the US in 2003 was thus taken by then President Jacques Chirac in accordance with intelligence based for the most part on Earth-imaging satellite HELIOS 1, whose findings were in contradiction which was being said at the UN Security Council. When the war in South Ossetia broke out in 2008 between Russia and Georgia, then President Nicolas Sarkozy, as chair of the Presidency of the Council of the European Union (EU), used images provided by HELIOS 1 and HELIOS 2 to deny Russia’s allegations about the withdrawal of its troops when those troops were actually progressing southward.

This is the first public confirmation, I believe, that the French did in fact stand out of the Iraq war because HELIOS imagery showed that the WMD claims were nonsense

#WMD #Iraq #Helios #France #war #USA #intelligence #Chirac