Reponse to the Panama Papers has been pretty much all over the place, and this juxtaposition represents what I think is the best reaction so far, threading the needle between expecting the revelations to touch off a firestorm and dismissing it with the Will Rogers' faux-wisdom of "they all do it."
Neither Davies nor Sorensen prescribe an answer, but neither do they shrug it off, except within the bounds of sarcastic political commentary.
The question they raise is central: "Here it is. What are you going to do about it?"
My own response is that the "Here it is" portion may be so complex that it won't drive people to the point of doing anything about it.
That's cynical, but not nearly as cynical as dismissing it all as something nobody can do anything about.
A lot will depend on how it is reported. "Competently" would be a good start.
After all, we went on for months about Whitewater, and, as far as I could tell, no editors or reporters ever wandered by the business desk to ask "Is this something?"
Because it wasn't, as anyone who had ever covered commercial real estate could have told them.
This is a lot more complex than that, and this time, yes, it is something.
On the Media has provided a very solid analysis of the whole thing, and, if I were Chief of the Brain Police, I'd make it illegal to comment publicly on the topic until you've listened to that collection of testimony and analysis.
Indeed, "they all do it."
But saying "they all do it" is closely allied to saying "shut up and keep picking the cotton."
First of all, assuming the entire world is like the plantation you live on is ignorant. Second, accepting your place on the plantation is, well, maybe not "cowardly" but certainly not heroic and perilously close to approving of your manacles.
But, at the other end of the spectrum, expecting the sky to fall is a bit optimistic, and expecting it to fall all by itself is just silly.
Here is Jonathan Pie with an entertaining rant, and perhaps it will get some people off the couch, but he seems to vacillate between being impotently furious over the futility of it all and demanding that London Bridge be filled with traitors' heads on pikestaffs as it was in the Good Old Days.
I'm not sure either is helpful, though, as I say, getting people off the couch is a first step to whatever comes next.
And, while what's happening overseas, where people genuinely are pissed off and about to get up off the couch, is promising, I'll confess to feeling a great deal of futility over the American response, much of which seems like deja vu.
See, I remember the Pentagon Papers, another massive data dump: Everyone bought a copy, though admittedly few people read through them.
But, to start with, "everyone" wasn't everyone. It certainly didn't include Archie and Edith Bunker, but it also didn't include Mike and Carol Brady.
The audience for this was largely the "everyone" who already knew our entry into the war had been based on dubious grounds, and who remembered the part of the process that hadn't been hidden.
We may not have known all along exactly what did or didn't happen in the Gulf of Tonkin, but we did remember what had been promised:
The Pentagon Papers provided, on one hand, a certain satisfaction in "I told you so," and there were rare moments when someone actually admitted that maybe they should have listened.
But the leak would have come to naught, except for a couple of factors that we certainly didn't anticipate then and that I'd be stunned to see come around now:
The main one was that the criminal efforts to discredit Daniel Ellsburg did not occur in isolation, but were part of a massive criminal subversion of the legal system that began to fall apart, not so much with the initial release of the Pentagon Papers in June of 1971, but a year later, nearly to the day, when a security guard at the Watergate complex noticed tape keeping a door unlocked and reported a burglary in progress.
The outrage that drove Nixon from office was not over the Byzantine entanglements revealed by the papers, but over the outrageous crimes of the White House Plumbers and the Committee to Re-Elect the President, only portions of which involved the covert war on Daniel Ellsburg.
These revelations, you must realize, required the presence of all of these things:
- people at the top of the power structure like Sam Ervin, Howard Baker and other examples of a type of Senator who has, I am afraid, largely walked away in disgust over the past several years,
- a level of indifference to internal security that resulted in the existence (and disclosure) of the White House Tapes and
- the presence on the Supreme Court of a majority who refused to sanction a cover-up.
And the result was that Nixon was forced to resign and the American people insisted on reforms to make sure nothing like that could ever happen again.
Which, if you review the above list, I think you'll agree we have now put into place. It could never happen again.
If you want to feel better about things, check out those On the Media links, because the US Supreme Court is no longer in charge of what gets published, and, this time, the Whole World Is Doing More Than Watching.
Even if we're not
The only reason there isnt more outrage in the US is because so few names have been trotted out from the Panama Papers... and the only reason for that?
Too simple: https://docandraider.com/comic/panama/
Posted by: sean martin | 04/12/2016 at 09:04 AM
A point made in those OTM links, but also that we're so close to Panama (not geographically, but by treaty) that there's way too great a risk of being caught -- there are several safer places.
And also because there's a lot to sort through yet -- the show ain't over.
Posted by: Mike Peterson | 04/12/2016 at 09:50 AM