PRESS RELEASE
Panama Papers Expose Hits Agents of British Empire
April 8, 2016 (EIRNS)—As EIR’s intelligence sources had forecast at first break of the "Panama Papers" tax-evasion and money-laundering scandal, three of four days in, it is the British financial empire and its agents who are being hit. Cases in point: David Cameron and Barack Obama.
Obama’s 2011 Panama Free Trade Agreement now appears in its true light, not just as free trade—already opportunistically opposed by every Presidential candidate of both parties—but as a money-laundering, tax-evading free trade agreement.
An added twist is that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pushed for the Panama agreement, while Senator Bernie Sanders voted against it. Sanders has immediately reinjected it into the primary campaign, saying it showed Clinton "unqualified for the office of President." Clinton and her media fans and party supporters like Sen. Carl and Rep. Sander Levin have reacted furiously.
A front-page Washington Post article today led, "The Panama Papers’ detailed revelations of a massive international tax-haven scheme have snowballed this week into a fierce debate among Democrats over President Obama’s trade policies with the tiny Central American nation, and again laid bare sharp divisions with the party over such agreements.
The article, like the Post’s lead editorial attacking Glass-Steagall (see separate report), is written primarily to defend Clinton and debunk Sanders’s charges. It cites such "disinterested" parties as the deputy U.S. trade representative who negotiated the agreement, or the Levins, who got it through Congress. They claim that the agreement gave the [wildly overextended] IRS "critical tools to go after U.S. tax cheats who use Panama. But in fact, there is no automatic reporting of special-purpose companies being created and accounts opened, as there is in Canada, for example; rather the IRS has to guess what to ask for in advance, in each individual case.
"The Panama Papers," says Lori Wallach of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, "just shows once again how entirely cynical and meaningless are American presidents’ lavish promises of economic benefits and policy reforms from trade agreements. [Obama’s] "investor protections and official U.S. stamp of approval made it safer to send dirty money to Panama."
The April 14 Clinton-Sanders debate in New York City, as Lyndon LaRouche observed earlier this week, "is liable to be some fun." He added today, "She can’t defend herself, or Obama, now."
