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Bernie Sanders warns of ‘international oligarchy’ after Paradise Papers leak

Bernie Sanders has warned that the world is rapidly becoming an “international oligarchy” controlled by a tiny number of billionaires, highlighted by the revelations in the Paradise Papers.

In a statement to the Guardian in the wake of the massive leak of documents exposing the secrets of offshore investors, Sanders said that the enrichment of wealthy individuals and companies in tax havens was “the major issue of our time”.

He said the Paradise Papers opened the door on a “major problem not just for the US but for governments throughout the world”.

“The major issue of our time is the rapid movement toward international oligarchy in which a handful of billionaires own and control a significant part of the global economy. The Paradise Papers shows how these billionaires and multinational corporations get richer by hiding their wealth and profits and avoid paying their fair share of taxes,” the US senator from Vermont said.

Sanders, who came in a close second to Hillary Clinton in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination last year, pointed the finger of blame for the flourishing of offshore holdings on both Congress and the Trump administration. He told the Guardian that Republicans in Congress were responsible for providing “even more tax breaks to profitable corporations like Apple and Nike”.

The same tax breaks, he said, were being seized upon by super-wealthy members of Trump’s cabinet “who avoid billions in US taxes by shifting American jobs and profits to offshore tax havens. We need to close these loopholes and demand a fair and progressive tax system.”

Paradise Papers Exposes Donald Trump-Russia links and Piggy Banks of the Wealthiest 1 Percent – ICIJ

A trove of 13.4 million records exposes ties between Russia and U.S. President Donald Trump’s billionaire commerce secretary, the secret dealings of the chief fundraiser for Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the offshore interests of the queen of England and more than 120 politicians around the world.

The leaked documents, dubbed the Paradise Papers, show how deeply the offshore financial system is entangled with the overlapping worlds of political players, private wealth and corporate giants, including Apple, Nike, Uber and other global companies that avoid taxes through increasingly imaginative bookkeeping maneuvers.

One offshore web leads to Trump’s commerce secretary, private equity tycoon Wilbur Ross, who has a stake in a shipping company that has received more than $68 million in revenue since 2014 from a Russian energy company co-owned by the son-in-law of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

In all, the offshore ties of more than a dozen Trump advisers, Cabinet members and major donors appear in the leaked data.

Bernie Sanders’ stepdaughter considers running for office

Bernie Sanders’ stepdaughter is considering a run for mayor of Burlington, Vermont, the same office that was the starting point for the independent U.S. senator’s political career.

Carina Driscoll, a former city council member and progressive state legislator, said Monday that she would make a decision by the end of the month. She would not say which political party she would run under or if she would run as an independent.

Democratic Mayor Miro Weinberger is expected to seek re-election in March 2018.

“In my mind it’s time to consider a new direction for Burlington and a new vision and I am exploring whether it’s the right time for that, if there are others who feel the same way and also if it’s the right time for me,” Driscoll said.

Her stepfather was elected Burlington’s mayor in 1981, upsetting the status quo of city politics and launching his political career.

Driscoll volunteered for Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign. She also founded the Vermont Woodworking School in Fairfax and is a mother of two, both factors she is considering as she weighs a run.

This has probably been posted already, but Dore taking down kos & Armando is worth a repeat if so:

Joe Biden Positions Himself as the ‘Anti-Bernie’

Biden, like many mainstream liberal Democrats, seems intent upon not understanding the real lessons of 2016.

This Russian Did His Best to Influence the U.S. Election

Russians who have attempted to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election usually don’t have names: They’re known simply as “the Russians.” Vitali Shkliarov, however, kept a relatively high profile as a political operative working for Senator Bernie Sanders’ understaffed and overworked campaign. His motive for taking that job and for later getting involved in Russia’s peculiar presidential election is the same: He doesn’t like entrenched elites.

The adventure-filled story of Shkliarov, 41, explains something about the nature of the complex relationship between Russians of my generation and the West. Born in the Soviet Union, many of us didn’t see the U.S. and other Western countries as adversaries but rather as models for our country to emulate. As the Soviet project failed and Russia and its satellites opened up to the world, we saw the West as a place to acquire knowledge and experience that would help us fix things back at home. But as we traveled to the West, we saw warts that hadn’t been visible from behind the Iron Curtain. Some of us saw them as evidence that the world was rotten in certain universal ways. Some of these people now power the troll farms, spy operations, corruption networks that exploit the warts. But others, Shkliarov included, stuck to the original plan — and besides, they tried to fix what they didn’t like in the West.

Shkliarov’s chosen arena was one of the most counterintuitive for a Russian in the West: Politics. A native of Gomel, Belarus with a Ph.D. in political and social sciences from the University of Vechta in Germany, he married an American and moved with her to the U.S. There, Shkliarov began volunteering for political campaigns to gain experience. He worked on the second Obama campaign and canvassed for Tammy Baldwin’s successful Senate bid in 2012. In 2016, he says he could have secured a paid job with Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Instead, he chose Bernie Sanders, serving as a jack-of-all-trades operative on mobile teams that worked state primaries. He managed get-out-the-vote efforts, recruited volunteers, did advance work for the candidate. Shkliarov ended the campaign as deputy national political director for outreach. That job was probably the most grimly thankless in the entire hopeful effort: attempting to persuade Democratic superdelegates to abandon Clinton for Sanders.

Why Sanders? As a “post-Soviet rebel,” Shkliarov told me he simply loves “underdogs.”

Of course Bernie Sanders endorsed this novel about a rebel in Vermont

Let’s get small.

That’s the theme of Bill McKibben’s first novel, “Radio Free Vermont,” a little comic story with a big political message.

This is surprisingly new territory for McKibben, the environmental journalist who raised the alarm about global warming with “The End of Nature” way back in 1989. But three decades later, we’ve got 15 percent more CO2 in the atmosphere and a fossil-fuel toady dismantling the Environmental Protection Agency, so maybe comedy is our only refuge.

Not that McKibben has given up the fight. Not at all. The hero of this “fable of resistance” is a ­72-year-old radio announcer named Vern Barclay, who’s inflamed with revolutionary fervor. (A 76-year-old Vermonter you know has already endorsed this book: Bernie Sanders.) When a conglomerate in Oklahoma buys out the local station and lays off most of its staff, Vern realizes just how much his beloved state has been diluted by corporate interests and federal interference. “I wasn’t in Vermont anymore,” he complains, “my own idealized Vermont, where what mattered were your neighbors and your values.” He pines for something “like Finland with fall colors.” After 50 years of chattering into the ether, he’s had it: “I wanted to do something.”

But what can a septuagenarian without money or political connections do?

The answer to that question is the fount of optimism (and comedy) that nourishes this light novel.

The indefensible Republican response to the Texas mass shooting

“This isn’t a guns situation,” said President Trump, when he was asked to comment on the latest in our long string of mass shootings, this one in Sutherland Springs, Tex.

As predictable as the rising of the sun, Republican politicians who have fought so hard against even the most basic measures to limit the bloodshed went to their Twitter accounts and the television cameras to send out their thoughts and prayers, and insist that the last thing we should be doing right now is talking about guns. Or, heaven forfend, “politicizing” the issue in this tragic moment.

That’s what we’ve come to expect from them. But it’s time we demand something more. We know they aren’t going to do anything, not even get behind measures such as universal background checks that have the support of 9 in 10 Americans. So at the very least, we should insist that they be honest about what they believe.

And what they believe is this: The unceasing, relentless, mind-numbing carnage that we in the United States experience because of our gun fetish? Not just the mass shootings — which make up a tiny portion of all those killed with guns — but the day-in, day-out death toll? The pile of bodies, the broken families, the misery and death and despair? Our fellow citizens getting murdered in church, at concerts, at the movies, in nightclubs, in malls, in school? Gun advocates, a group that includes almost every elected Republican, simply do not think it’s a problem.

Let me be clear on what I mean by this. Surely many Republicans are personally horrified by mass shootings and even by daily gun carnage. And sometimes Republicans do offer various readings of this problem that might point to solutions — some genuinely do see this as a mental health problem, for instance. But even in these cases, Republicans do not propose serious solutions to the problem as they’ve identified it.

Presumably there’s some number of gun deaths that would lead them to propose genuine and meaningful solutions — maybe 500,000 a year, or 1 million, or 10 million — but whatever that level is, 35,000 just isn’t high enough for them.

With History of Domestic Violence, Texas Gunman Fits Mass Shooter Profile

The gunman who killed 26 people and injured 20 at First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas on Sunday had been accused of domestic violence in recent years, making him the latest perpetrator of a mass shooting to have a history of abusing an intimate partner or family members.

Devin Patrick Kelley was court-martialed by the U.S. Air Force and served a year in military prison in 2012 for assaulting his wife and baby stepson. The Texas Department of Public Safety has attributed the shooting to “a domestic situation going on,” noting that Kelley’s in-laws attended the church and stressing that it was not motivated by beliefs about race, religion, or politics.

But the latest addition to the list of gunmen who have killed in large numbers after their own “domestic situations” and negative statements about women, has left many arguing that violence against partners and children should be taken seriously as a politically-charged behavior—and as a risk factor for other forms of violence.

On her show Full Frontal last week, Samantha Bee argued that “abused women are the canary in the coal mine for mass shootings,” citing a study by Everytown for Gun Safety which showed that in 54 percent of mass shootings, a partner or family member of the attacker was among the victims.

This will probably be worth listening to:

Tom Perez And Nina Turner And DNC ‘Rigging’

We’re joined by Democratic National Committee Chair Tom Perez and Our Revolution President Nina Turner. We’ll talk about the Donna Brazile bombshells: Did the DNC rig the Democratic primary for Hillary Clinton? Plus, it’s Election Day in some states around the country.

This show will air at Tuesday at 10 a.m. EST.