Re: <nettime> Ten Theses on the Panama Papers

[Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com>]

On 04/06/2016 07:17 AM, Florian Cramer wrote:

>    The Cold War has taught us to be suspicious about NGO activity and
>     possible governmental agendas behind them.

But Florian, don't you think we're at antipodes from the Cold War? And 
how much suspicion is really needed to understand those agendas?

The elites behind the ICIJ - Ford Foundation, W.K. Kellogg Foundation, 
Rockefeller Family Fund, Stanley Foundation and McArthur Fund - are all 
affiliates of the Democratic party and primarily concerned with social 
reproduction. Their agenda is obvious. The capacity of the Democratic 
party to govern is threatened in at least three ways: By lack of funds, 
by the overweening power of the billionaire class, and by populist 
revolts due to the collapse of life prospects for the majority of the 
population. Since 2008 the federal government has consistently decried 
its inability to collect taxes (from Apple, etc) and yesterday, Obama's 
off-the-cuff remarks about the Panama Papers were to the effect that the 
problem is, most of these tax havens are legal. There's a reason for 
that. For forty years the US capitalist class has promoted the idea that 
government should be shrunk to the point where you can drown it in a 
bathtub, and the centerpiece of their strategy was and remains tax cuts. 
As a master of suspicion I find nothing on which to exercise my powers 
here. These elites desperately need money in order to promote a reform 
program - and they need much more money than the foundations have in 
their coffers. They also need to push back at some intractable oppoosition.

The world in which our critique even mattered is now very fragile. For 
years I have been saying this is a major crisis that will change the 
system, and that too is now obvious. There is a keen and widely shared 
awareness among intellectuals and even just those who read the news that 
the so-called democratic societies are at their short-term limits, even 
as middle and long-term problems grow to vast proportions. At such 
moments one does not blindly support the status quo ante, for sure - 
that's what produced the problem - but I do think one has to critically 
take sides and develop some constructive positions.

I have been to Panama City. The towering skyline that emerged over the 
last ten years is half-empty: it was made by speculative real estate 
money that has established similar operational bases around the world, 
to profit from global networks and stateless capital flows. The 
Panamanians themselves are wonderful people, but the city the TCC has 
built is particularly dark, the nastiest side of power, drugs, arms, 
dictators, skullduggery. By comparison, the Caymans, the British Virgin 
Islands are - quintessentially European. A polite, dignified, tasteful 
knife in the back with hit squads ordered from Panama. This is very 
different from the Cold War where two rationalized power blocs 
confronted each other in a managed growth dynamic. Global capitalism is 
now evolving chaotically, toward a state of pure unorganized competition 
between increasingly powerful actors who may be able to protect 
themselves (and hide their money) over the short term, but who can do 
nothing to support the reproduction of society. Either there is a 
collective effort to curb the powers of the Transnational Capitalist 
Class, and in parallel, to create new powers of governance, or the 
outcome of these chaotic trends is highly predictable.

thoughtfully yours, Brian

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