Between The Lines - Michael Hudson: "Secrecy for Sale: Inside the Global Offshore Money Maze” Report (Week Ending April 26, 2013)

Award-winning Investigative Journalist Robert Parry (1949-2018)

Award-winning investigative journalist and founder/editor of ConsortiumNews.com, Robert Parry has passed away. His ground-breaking work uncovering Reagan-era dirty wars in Central America and many other illegal and immoral policies conducted by successive administrations and U.S. intelligence agencies, stands as an inspiration to all in journalists working in the public interest.

Robert had been a regular guest on our Between The Lines and Counterpoint radio shows -- and many other progressive outlets across the U.S. over four decades.

His penetrating analysis of U.S. foreign policy and international conflicts will be sorely missed, and not easily replaced. His son Nat Parry writes a tribute to his father: Robert Parry’s Legacy and the Future of Consortiumnews.

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The Resistance Starts Now!

Between The Lines' coverage and resource compilation of the Resistance Movement

"The man who predicted Trump presidential win now says Trump impeachment could happen," AM Joy with Joy Reid, MSNBC, Jan. 21, 2018
"Sketchy Kazakh money finds its way into Trump dealings," The Rachel Maddow Show, MSNBC, Jan. 15, 2018
"Red flags seen in many Trump real estate deals," The Rachel Maddow Show, MSNBC, Jan. 15, 2018
"Secret Money: How Trump Made Millions Selling Condos To Unknown Buyers," BuzzFeed, Jan. 12, 2018
"The Scandals of Donald Trump: Presidential Edition," The Atlantic, May 15, 2017
"Here's what we know so far about Team Trump's ties to Russian interests," Washington Post's ongoing compilation
"What Comey Was Investigating, Explained," The Moscow Project, Center for American Progress

"Donald Trump's Financial Ties to Russian Oligarchs and Mobsters Detailed In Explosive New Documentary from the Netherlands," Dutch TV documentary, Alternet.org, May 12, 2017
Ongoing compilation of Trump's creeping authoritarianism," MotherJones.com
Full resource list ...

SPECIAL REPORT: "The Resistance - Women's March 2018 - Hartford, Connecticut" Jan. 20, 2018

Selected speeches from the Women's March in Hartford, Connecticut 2018, recorded and produced by Scott Harris

SPECIAL REPORT: "No Fracking Waste in CT!" Jan. 14, 2018

Jen Siskind Jennifer Siskind, local coordinator for Food and Water Watch, describes the campaign to stop fracking waste in Connecticut, which so far has led to fracking waste bans in 34 towns around the state. Interviewed by Richard Hill on Mic Check, WPKN Radio, Bridgeport, CT

SPECIAL REPORT: "Resistance Round Table: The Unraveling Continues..." Jan. 13, 2018

Lindsay Kanaly The panel discusses Trump's long history of racism and the Republican voter suppression juggernaut confronting Democrats leading up to the 2018 elections. Special guest: Lindsay Kanaly, a lead organizer of the Women's Marches planned for Jan. 20, 2018. Panel: Scott Harris, Ruthanne Baumgartner and Richard Hill on Resistance Roundtable, WPKN Radio, Bridgeport, CT.

SPECIAL REPORT: "Capitalism to the ash heap?" Richard Wolff, Jan. 2, 2018

Richard Wolff, Economics professor Richard Wolff declares U.S. capitalism to be beyond repair and suggests the need for a radical alternative. Interviewed by Richard Hill

SPECIAL REPORT: Maryn McKenna, author of "Big Chicken", Dec. 7, 2017

Maryn McKenna, investigative journalist and author of Big Chicken, talks about the widespread use and dangers of antibiotics in commercial poultry, beef and fruit production. Interview by Bill Duesing, Richard Hill and Guy Beardsly on WPKN's Organic Farm Stand.

SPECIAL REPORT: Nina Turner's address, Working Families Party Awards Banquet, Dec. 14, 2017

Nina Turner, president of Our Revolution, talks about the fight ahead for progressives as she receives the Working Families Organization Award for Exceptional Leadership Towards Advancing Progress. The event was held in Meriden, CT. Produced by Richard Hill.

SPECIAL REPORT: Mic Check, Dec. 12, 2017

Working Families Party of CT talks strategy and issues for 2018.
Lindsay Farrell, executive director of the Working Families Party of Connecticut, discusses the state's electoral landscape and lays out the issues and strategies that could lead to progressive victories in 2018. Interviewed by Richard Hill.

SPECIAL REPORT: Resistance Roundtable, Dec. 9, 2017

Disturbing developments in the Trump/Republican Agenda
Focus on the tax bill, destruction of our public lands, North Korea and Trump's private CIA. Panel: Scott Harris, Ruthanne Baumgartner and Richard Hill. Special guest: Jo Macallero of Rise and Resist.

SPECIAL REPORT: On Tyranny - one year later, Nov. 28, 2017

Professor Timothy Snyder, author of the highly acclaimed resistance manual On Tyranny, discusses his book and offers a fresh assessment of the state of our beleaguered republic. Timothy Snyder, history professor at Yale, is introduced by Stanley Heller, administrator of Promoting Enduring Peace, a Connecticut-based organization that sponsored this event at the United Church Parish House in New Haven on Nov. 28. A brief interview with Snyder conducted by WPKN radio producer, Richard Hill, follows his talk.

SPECIAL REPORT: Mic Check, Nov. 12, 2017

Lynne Ide, director of program and policy with the Universal Health Care Foundation of Connecticut, talks about the current state of health care coverage in Connecticut. Interviewed by Richard Hill, WPKN radio producer

SPECIAL REPORT: Resistance Roundtable, Nov. 11, 2017

Focus on the Republican tax plan, the just-released autopsy on the Democratic Party, and Internet censorship by Google, Facebook and Youtube. Including an interview with Hilary Grant, a lead organizer with Action Together Connecticut, who discusses the local results of the recent election, with hosts Richard Hill, Scott Harris and Ruth Baumgartner WPKN producers

SPECIAL REPORT: Rainy Day Radio, Nov. 7, 2017

Two leaders from Redneck Revolt, an anti-racist, anti-capitalist movement, talk about their work organizing with white working class people in Suffolk County, New York. Interviewed by Richard Hill, WPKN radio producer

SPECIAL REPORT: Rainy Day Radio, Nov. 7, 2017

Bruce Gagnon, coordinator for the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space, describes the extent of -- and motives underlying -- the vast US network of military bases around the globe. Interviewed by Richard Hill, WPKN radio producer

SPECIAL REPORT: Resisting U.S. JeJu Island military base in South Korea, Oct. 24, 2017

Joyakol, South Korean peace activist and singer, discusses the crisis on the Korean peninsula and focuses on the resistance to the U.S. huge military base being constructed on Jeju Island. The event was sponsored by the Greater New Haven Peace Council and this audio was recorded by Richard Hill, WPKN producer.
Joyakol discusses Americans' biggest misconceptions about the conflict between North and South Korea and the U.S., Interview by Richard Hill, WPKN producer.

SPECIAL REPORT: John Allen, Out in New Haven

John Allen, founding director of the New Haven Pride Center, Connecticut, talks about his new LGBTQ television show, Out in New Haven, which presents a range of political and cultural issues to the community. Interviewed by Richard Hill on WPKN's Rainy Day Tuesday, Jan. 2, 2018.

2017 Gandhi Peace Awards

Promoting Enduring Peace presented its Gandhi Peace Award jointly to renowned consumer advocate Ralph Nader and BDS founder Omar Barghouti on April 23, 2017.

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THANK YOU TO EVERYONE...

who helped make our 25th anniversary with Jeremy Scahill a success!

For those who missed the event, or were there and really wanted to fully absorb its import, here it is in video

Jeremy Scahill keynote speech, part 1 from PROUDEYEMEDIA on Vimeo.

Jeremy Scahill keynote speech, part 2 from PROUDEYEMEDIA on Vimeo.

Between The Lines on Stitcher

Between The Lines Presentation at the Left Forum 2016

"How Do We Build A Mass Movement to Reverse Runaway Inequality?" with Les Leopold, author of "Runaway Inequality: An Activist's Guide to Economic Justice,"May 22, 2016, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, The City University of New York, 860 11th Ave. (Between 58th and 59th), New York City. Between The Lines' Scott Harris and Richard Hill moderated this workshop. Listen to the audio/slideshows and more from this workshop.

Listen to audio of the plenary sessions from the weekend.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker "Dirty Wars"

Listen to the full interview (30:33) with Jeremy Scahill, an award-winning investigative journalist with the Nation Magazine, correspondent for Democracy Now! and author of the bestselling book, "Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army," about America's outsourcing of its military. In an exclusive interview with Counterpoint's Scott Harris on Sept. 16, 2013, Scahill talks about his latest book, "Dirty Wars, The World is a Battlefield," also made into a documentary film under the same title, and was nominated Dec. 5, 2013 for an Academy Award in the Best Documentary Feature category.

Listen to Scott Harris Live on WPKN Radio

Between The Lines' Executive Producer Scott Harris hosts a live, weekly talk show, Counterpoint, from which some of Between The Lines' interviews are excerpted. Listen every Monday evening from 8 to 10 p.m. EDT at www.WPKN.org (Follows the 5-7 minute White Rose Calendar.)

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Investigation Exposes Companies and Individuals in Secretive Global Offshore Banking Network

RealAudio MP3

Posted April 17, 2013

Interview with Michael Hudson, editor, International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, conducted by Scott Harris. Interview compiled by Evan Bieder, edited by Anna Manzo.

While it is widely known that many of the world’s wealthiest individuals and large corporations have for many years taken advantage of so-called tax havens to avoid paying taxes in their home countries, the identities of many of those people hadn’t been exposed until a recent investigation. The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists recently revealed that they had obtained 2.5 million files that uncovered the names of more than 120,000 offshore companies and trusts, detailing the activities of celebrities, the super rich, politicians and others who use secret bank accounts for the purpose of tax avoidance.

The ICIJ report, titled, "Secrecy for Sale: Inside the Global Offshore Money Maze,” made public many of the companies that operate out of tax havens in far-flung places around the world that include the British Virgin Islands, the Cook Islands, Singapore, the Cayman Islands and Lichtenstein. The records detail the offshore holdings of people and companies in more than 170 countries and territories.

The scope of the tax revenue loss is staggering. Last year, a Tax Justice Network investigation found that the super-rich in the U.S. and around the world are hiding at least $21 trillion in offshore accounts, avoiding paying hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes in their home nations. Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Michael Hudson, senior editor with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalism, who discusses his group's investigation, its impact and some of the public policy options available to the international community to prevent the future loss of tax proceeds that fund government programs and services.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Our director, Gerard Ryle, who was a journalist in Australia for many, many years, was working on a big financial scandal there for three years – eventually wrote a book about it – it had some offshore elements. And as a result of his reporting, he made contacts which eventually lead him, and us, to getting the documents. Then we decided, when we got the documents and started looking through them and trying to figure out what’s there – we decided we’re not going to be a passive conduit, we’re not just going to put these out there. We’re going to do what we do best and be reporters so we started looking at what’s there and using other documents, court records – you know, just shoe-leather reporting – calling people and double-checking things and making connections between what’s in the documents and what’s out there in public records to try and do these stories. So we put out a couple dozen stories so far and we continue to plan on reporting on what we found over the rest of the year.

BETWEEN THE LINES: Michael, what’s been the repercussions of the revelation, of some of the names that have turned up of this enormous trove of heretofore secret files of those folks with enormous amounts of money in these offshore tax havens? I know that there has been some repercussions in France. Maybe you could summarize some of the other things that have happened as a result of your reporting.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Right, in France the president went on national television on Wednesday and basically vowed to eradicate tax havens and the New York Times has given us, ICIJ, at least partial credit for, sort of, forcing that. In other places like the Philippines, the government, in response to our stories, about Ferdinand Marcos’ daughter, who is now a provisional governor, about her British Virgin Islands offshore entity, the government has promised to do an investigation to see if her offshore trust holds any money and if some of that money may have been some of the billions that her father allegedly took out of the country before he lost power. You know, in Mongolia – the deputy speaker – the Mongolian parliament has said, as a result of our reporting on his Swiss account and his offshore company, he has considered stepping down. There’s an investigation in India of some of the names that we’ve revealed. So there’s been a big response. The other response is that the IRS and other tax authorities in Germany and Canada and other places have demanded that we turn over out data so help them track down tax avoiders, tax evaders.

BETWEEN THE LINES: And what’s been your response to that request for these documents?

MICHAEL HUDSON: You know, our response is we’re not an arm of government. As soon as a news organization is perceived as working for the government … our job is to get the information out there and we are publishing a lot of the documents as we write stories. But, you know, part of what we’re doing is we want to investigate these governments, too, and look at how good a job they’re doing. So we can’t be, you know, working with them or being agents of the government. We have to maintain our independence.

BETWEEN THE LINES: From a reporter’s point of view, if you were to recommend changes in our national, or the international, system of banking to prevent this kind of abuse of secret bank accounts and trillions of dollars out of the reach of legitimate taxation, what are some of the primary things you’d recommend?

MICHAEL HUDSON: Right, you know, I try not to get into recommending specific policy ideas. That’s just not my job. I mean, I’ll be writing about those and I’ll be talking to experts and trying to look at them as we continue. I mean, I can say that most of the experts, folks who are critics of the offshore world, say that the key thing, or one of the key things, is just making sure that the ownership of companies is something that’s transparent. You should be able to go to the British Virgin Islands and find out, on the Internet or with a phone call, and find out who really owns a specific company.

If you’re thinking about doing business with this company or you run across this company somehow or you’re a lawyer trying to collect money because of a fraud case, you should be able to find out who owns that company. There shouldn’t be a sort of faux-director, a faux-share holder, who’s on the official documents actually serving as a front man for the real people behind the company. That’s one thing, and, you know, that’s a problem not just in the British islands but in places like Delaware and Wyoming which, in a sense, are sort of internal U.S. tax havens where it’s very hard to find out who’s really behind companies.

I think the other thing, the other sort of choke point is, you know, the era of – where people who were involved in drug dealing or fraud or other crimes – the era of suitcases stashed with wads of, you know, hundred dollar bills – that’s over. I mean money moves by the click of a computer key so, and that means they go through banks. So even if money is being moved off shore and it’s officially held in a trust in the Cook Islands in the South Pacific, it’s actually often really in a JP Morgan bank in Manhattan or HSBC bank in London.

To read the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists’ “Secrecy for Sale: Inside the Global Offshore Money Maze” report, visit www.icij.org/offshore.