Sanders: The Panama Papers Prove I'm Right, and Also, Time Travel Bernie Sanders seems to think everything he doesn't like is connected. "We now know, as a result of the 'Panama Papers' released by an international consortium of investigative journalists, that more than 214,000 entities throughout the world have been using a law firm in Panama to avoid paying taxes. "At a time of massive income and wealth inequality in the United States and around the world, the wealthiest people and largest corporations must start paying their fair share of taxes. Children should not go hungry while billionaires use offshore tax havens to avoid paying their fair share of taxes. "The Panama Free Trade Agreement put a stamp of approval on Panama, a world leader when it comes to allowing the wealthy and the powerful to avoid taxes. Where to begin? For starters, there aren't that many Americans named in the Panama Papers yet -- and the ones that have been mentioned so far have fraud indictments or other reasons to hide their assets from prying eyes of investigators. If you're a wealthy American, setting up a secret account in Panama isn't a particularly wise way to avoid taxes -- you're probably going to lose money once you add up all the fees, lawyers, accountants, and et cetera. It's only worth it if you want the money to stay hidden -- say, if you're hiding it from an ex-spouse in an alimony fight. But the big headline out of the papers was the number of foreign political leaders who were keeping their money in Panama, a move probably designed to avoid taxes and uncomfortable questions in their home countries. There the issue is hypocrisy and, if the income was never reported, fraud. But it's really hard to believe that Icelandic prime minister Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson set up a company in the British Virgin Islands in 2007 through the Panamanian bank because of a U.S.-Panamanian free-trade deal enacted in 2011. If the Icelandic Prime Minister is hiding his money, that's really an issue for Icelandic law enforcement and Icelandic voters to address. Secondly, the timeline doesn't fit Sanders's perception of the scandal at all. Accounts set up through this Panamanian law firm go back four decades, long before the 2011 Panama Free Trade Agreement. What, were wealthy people setting up accounts in Panama in the 1980s because they could sense that in 2011, the U.S. would set up this free trade agreement? It's not often you see the editorial board of the Washington Post declare, "This Democratic presidential candidate has no idea what he's talking about." Even before the free-trade deal, Panama was under pressure from both the United States and Europe to clean up its tax-haven act; the pressure intensified after the financial crisis of 2008. The Obama administration, backed by members of Congress, made it clear the free-trade deal - which Panama badly wanted, to match a deal between its Central American neighbors and the United States - hinged on a separate agreement granting U.S. tax authorities more access to Panama's financial system. The United States particularly insisted on plugging the "bearer shares" loophole. Panama agreed and changed its laws accordingly -- before the free-trade agreement reached the Senate and Sanders nevertheless voted "no," claiming, wrongly, that it would make the tax haven "worse." In response to our questions, the Sanders campaign didn't address the data, but said the administration had missed an opportunity to completely "eradicate" the Panama tax haven. To us, it looks like the Obama administration's diplomacy resulted in real progress, and that if anyone's entitled to say "I told you so" about that, it would be Clinton. Julian Castro vs. Progressive Activists: Who Do We Root For in This One? We all know that in troubled times, Americans turn to that traditional key position of power and responsibility, that training ground for greatness . . . the secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Okay, so almost no one has actually paid much attention to HUD since Jack Kemp was there, but Julian Castro, the former mayor of San Antonio and perpetual Democratic-party star of tomorrow is in the job now. The man has been hyped as Hillary Clinton's likely running mate since his 2012 convention speech, and HUD is perhaps best seen as the training-wheels stage for vice-president-in-waiting Castro. Unsurprisingly, the same Democrats who find Hillary Clinton to be too moderate and friendly to Wall Street see the same flaws in Castro: With Bernie Sanders' durability exciting progressives at their potential to shape the Democratic race, a coalition of groups -- many of them backers of the Vermont senator -- are launching a preemptive strike against Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro, aimed at disqualifying him from consideration to be Hillary Clinton's running mate. Tuesday morning, the group will be emailing petitions to several million people attacking Castro on the relatively obscure issue of his handling of mortgage sales and launching a website with an unsubtle address: DontSellOurHomesToWallStreet.org. They're just as open with their political aims: to publicly discredit Castro as a progressive, latching onto the mortgage issue to seed enough suspicion to keep him off Clinton's short list. "It's a situation where the Clinton campaign wants Castro to be a major asset to her chances of winning the White House, and unless he changes his position related to foreclosures and loans, he'll be a toxic asset to the Clinton campaign," said Matt Nelson, the managing director for Presente.org, the nation's largest Latino organizing group that focuses on social justice. Progressives are objecting to the Distressed Asset Stabilization Program, which "allows mortgages going toward foreclosure to be sold to what HUD calls 'qualified bidders and encourages them to work with borrowers to help bring the loan out of default.'" Those qualified bidders include Wall Street banks, and in the progressive mind, those banks are the root of all evil. Deep in Politico's article on this we read, "The mortgages in question tend to be delinquent for over two years." Wait, if you don't pay your mortgage for two years, it's considered too mean and harsh to have your mortgage handled by a Wall Street bank? What's more, last year, HUD announced that under the "loan servicers will now be required to delay foreclosure for a year and to evaluate all borrowers for the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) or a similar loss mitigation program." So there's another potential year's delay. Just how long do these progressive groups think you should be able to avoid paying your mortgage? Remember when the Castro brothers, along with Wendy Davis, were going to turn Texas blue? Good times, good times. Ben Carson: Hey, We're All Bad People, Right? If Ben Carson is a secretly a deep-cover agent undermining Trump from within, all is forgiven. Sadly, the latest comment suggests Carson just doesn't think very hard about what he's saying at any given moment: Later, Carson told host Krista Kafer, who said she will not support Trump if he's the nominee, that he would share her view if the stakes of the election for future generations weren't so high. "For me, it's about the children and the grandchildren," said Carson. "If it was just me, I would be completely where Krista is. I would say, 'hey, I got this, I can deal with it,' but for them, I can't." Earlier, when Kafer said Trump was a bad man, Carson said we all are. "Who isn't? Who among us isn't?" asked Carson. Whoa, whoa, whoa. It's one thing to say everyone is flawed. It's another thing to say everyone is bad, and thus, moral distinctions between two people are impossible. Allahpundit: The host, Krista Kafer, tells Carson flat out that she thinks Trump's a "bad man" (his reply: "Who isn't?") and that she'd never hand the nuclear codes to the sort of person who mocks the disabled. The conversation meanders a bit from there but it circles back at 15:20 to whether Trump's character should matter if he can save the country. It's all about protecting future generations by keeping Supreme Court appointments out of Hillary's hands, says Carson — but "if it was just me, I would be completely where Krista is." Which is both amazing, as a highlight for the ever-expanding Carson "worst surrogate ever" reel, and nonsensical. If it's the Supreme Court you're worried about, why wouldn't you go all-in for Cruz, who's not only a much surer bet to appoint conservative justices but who's more electable than Trump according to every national poll? For cripes sake, Trump is even trailing Hillary now when voters are asked which candidate is more likely to make America great. He can't even beat her on his own campaign slogan. ADDENDA: Howard Kurtz offers a curious new standard: If a caucus system is complicated, and if party procedures are "arcane", then it "starts to look pretty ugly and pretty undemocratic." He's a media critic, right? If the media bothers to explain how the Colorado Republican caucus works -- making it less "arcane" -- then it doesn't look so ugly and undemocratic, now does it? Here it is in three steps: You vote for delegates at your precinct March 1; the delegates you elect vote among themselves for delegates to district and statewide conventions; at the district and statewide conventions, those delegates vote on who goes to Cleveland. Boom. Done. It "seems undemocratic" when the press doesn't bother to read the rules and explain them to readers, because Trump's tantrum that he was cheated is a better story.  | 
Comments
Post a Comment