The shocking truth about Saudi Arabia that Facebook doesn't want you to know

In March 2022 Facebook deleted one of my posts about the tyrannical government in Saudi Arabia, and accused me of "hate speech".

I was allowed to appeal, but only by clicking a button saying that I disagreed with their decision. There was absolutely no means of submitting evidence that what I'd said was true.

The deleted image, and
Facebook's warning

The deleted post made a number of claims about Saudi Arabia, which I will substantiate in this article.

"The Saudi tyranny just mass executed 81 people"

This is a completely uncontroversial statement of fact.

This barbaric mass execution was widely reported across scores of media sources, including the BBC, left-leaning outfits like Byline Times and hard-right broadcasters like GBNews (archived) It was also condemned by the United Nations, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. 

Saudi Arabia is "committing war crimes in Yemen"

Saudi Arabia's ongoing bombardment of Yemen hardly gets a fraction of the coverage of Putin's attack on Ukraine, but that doesn't mean that it isn't happening.

Human Rights Watch have documented multiple Saudi war crimes in Yemen, and it should be widespread knowledge that the Saudis have bombed all kinds of civilian targets from funeral gatherings, to children's school busses.

Saudi Arabia "fund and support terrorism"

In 2016 Hillary Clinton's leaked emails demonstrated that the US government were well aware that Saudi Arabia were funding terrorism in Syria.

Furthermore US President Joe Biden has openly admitted that Saudi Arabia provided "hundreds of millions of dollars and thousands of tons of weapons" to Al Qaida's successor organisations in Syria.

Then there's Boris Johnson, who accused Saudi Arabia of "twisting Islam" and conducting proxy wars across the middle east.

Saudi Arabia have also provided funds to terrorist insurgencies in Afghanistan, which led to the creation of Al Qaida, and the 9/11 terrorist attack on the United States, in which 15 of the 19 attackers were Saudis.

Saudi Arabia "brutally repress political opposition"

Saudi Arabia's repression of political opposition is well documented. Amnesty International reports that in Saudi Arabia freedom of expression, association, and assembly are all repressed.  

Their repression of political dissent is so extreme that they've even sentenced a 14 year old child to death for attending a pro-democracy march!

It's hardly hateful conduct to point out that one of the most tyrannical regimes on earth is politically repressive.

Saudi Arabia "dismember critical journalists"

This is clearly a reference to the Jamal Khashoggi assassination, where the Saudi regime lured him to the Saudi embassy in Turkey, where they tortured him, murdered him, dismembered his body, and dissolved it in acid. 

The murderers then reportedly took Khashoggi's severed fingers back to the Saudi leader Mohammed bin Salmen as a trophy, because he'd boasted that he'd cut off the fingers of any writer who criticised him.

Khashoggi was just one of the dissidents and critical journalists targeted for assassination by the so-called "Tiger Squad".

Saudi Arabia are "misogynists and homophobes"

Saudi Arabia is one of the most repressive regimes on earth for women's rights, and they still have the death penalty for homosexuality.

Even when they don't condemn homosexuals to death, they dish out utterly barbaric punishments like public lashings, and long prison sentences.

Saudi Arabia "threaten terrorist attacks against western countries to get their own way"

The Saudi regime famously threatened terrorist attacks against Britain in order to get an investigation into corrupt arms deals shut down, and during a spat with Canada a verified Saudi Twitter account posted a photoshopped picture of a 9/11 style terrorist attack against Canada!

Boris Johnson went to Saudi Arabia to "grovel for more oil"

Johnson's grovelling trip to Saudi Arabia was widely reported. And the reason for his visit was repeatedly given as seeking an oil deal in an attempt to reduce reliance on Russian energy supplies.

Conclusion

I've substantiated every single assertion in the banned infographic, but the truth simply doesn't matter to Facebook.

They've set up reporting systems that are incredibly easy to game. Whether a post is true or not is completely irrelevant. The simple truth is that if the post gets mass reported, then it'll be deleted as hate speech, no matter how easy it is to substantiate literally all of the points.

What we're witnessing is an absurd weaponisation of liberal language in order to erase fact-based criticism of probably the most illiberal regime on earth.

Defenders of this disgusting regime are gaming Facebook's report functions, and using the language of anti-racism to pretend that truthful criticism of Saudi Arabia is racist hate speech.

And by going along with these tactics, Facebook are complicit in attacking the truth.

The deletion of my post came with a warning that the Another Angry Voice Facebook page is under threat of deletion, so if it does disappear, you'll know that one of the main reasons it was deleted out of existence was the fact that I chose to tell the truth about Saudi Arabia, and instead of standing up for the truth, Facebook stood with the tyrannical regime to attack me for telling the truth.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. Access to my online writing will always remain free. If you see some value in what I do, please consider supporting my work with a small donation/subscription.

OR

TTIP is dead in the water, but post-Brexit Britain could be in for something even worse

Remember all that opportunistic Brexiter fearmongering about the TTIP corporate power grab? Remember how they said we had to quit the EU to avoid the horror of this US-EU corporate takeover? Remember how they scoffed when people like me pointed out that it's catastrophically unpopular with the European public, the negotiations are failing (especially after the major leak of secret negotiation documents in May 2016) and that it was as good as dead because Greece and Portugal had vowed to veto it?

Well in the last couple of days the German Vice-Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel has said that the TTIP negotiations have "de facto failed" and the French trade minister Matthias Fekl has publicly demanded the whole thing gets scrapped. Never mind the fact that Greece had a veto the whole time, if the French and Germans are no longer on board, the TTIP project has been completely and totally derailed.

Within a couple of months of the vote for Brexit it's completely obvious that TTIP is doomed.The sooner the whole pro-corporate sovereignty-grab gets thrown on the scrap heap the better for the people of the EU.

Meanwhile in Britain the Tories (who were always passionately in favour of the TTIP corporate power grab) are reinvigorated after Brexit and by the Blairite decision to use Brexit as an excuse to self-destruct the Labour Party instead of holding the Tories to account for Cameron's failed EU gamble and the plethora of lies spewed by the Tory Vote Leave mob.

As a result of this Tory rejuvenation we're looking at the prospect of a savagely right-wing bunch of Tories negotiating a US-UK corporate power grab that will make the failed TTIP project look like a pleasant walk in the park in comparison. We've witnessed a classic "out of the frying pan, into the fire" manoeuvre from the British electorate.

Hillary Clinton is clearly another corporate puppet to follow Obama, so a corporate power grab negotiated between her team and the likes of the Boris Johnson and the disgraced Liam Fox (maybe he'll invite his special friend Adam Werrity along to sit in on the classified negotiations?) could be spectacularly bad. But if the American electorate are bonkers enough to elect Donald Trump as President, just imagine the kind of environmentally ruinous, pro-corporate, anti-worker, consumer protection destroying shit-show Trump and the Tories could concoct between them.

The Tories are still stalling on invoking Article 50 (because they're terrified of actually pressing the economic self-destruct button), so any potential trade deal with the US is years away yet, but it doesn't matter whether it's Clinton or Trump on the other side of the negotiating table, it's absolutely clear that if the Tories are on the British side of the negotiating table, they will be negotiating on behalf of the corporations and the super-rich millionaires who bankroll their party, and against the interests of ordinary British workers.

It's a sad irony that Brexiter fearmongering about the doomed TTIP corporate power grab has led us into a situation where the remainder of the EU quickly ends up chucking the whole TTIP debacle in the bin, while the British public will likely end up getting lumbered with a Tory negotiated US-UK pro-corporate anti-worker charter that's far far worse than the aborted TTIP experiment ever would have been.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

OR

The UK prison labour industry

In August 2016 the US department of Justice announced that they are going to set about phasing out their use of private prisons, which triggered a spate of moral high-horsing from British people who tried to claim that our private prison riddled system is still superior to the US system because at least here in the UK we don't use prisoners as a cheap source of labour.

The map in the article header proves how wrongheaded this attitude is. Just because they haven't heard of Britain's prison labour management company One3One, doesn't mean that it doesn't exist, or that it isn't farming out prison labour to ever increasing numbers of private companies that are queuing up to take advantage of prison labour for as little as 30p an hour.

Prisoners in England and Wales are being used as a cheap source of labour in all kinds of industries including printing, textiles, engineering, woodwork, laundry and even assembling plastic poppies for the Royal British Legion.

The idea of training prisoners up with skills so that they are less likely to reoffend when they get out of jail is a vary good idea in principle, but the problem with farming prison labour out to the private sector is absolutely obvious. If scores of companies all over the UK are taking advantage of prison labour for as little as 30p an hour, then this availability of extremely cheap labour has an obvious downwards effect on wages and employment rates in whichever business sectors they become involved in.

Since the Lib-Dems enabled the Tories back into power in 2010, British workers have suffered the longest sustained period of long-term wage deflation in recorded history. The real terms value of British wages has slumped 10.4% since the economic crisis, a wage decline only matched in severity by Greece out of all of the most developed economies in the world.

The Tories have been doing everything they can to reduce wages and the disposable incomes of ordinary people: They've reduced public sector wages in real terms by imposing below inflation 1% pay rises (whilst accepting an 11% pay raise for themselves), they've overseen an exponential rise in people employed on exploitative Zero Hours Contracts, they've repeatedly slashed in-work benefits like Tax Credits and Housing Benefit, they've massively increased the amounts charged for university education and the interest rates charged on this appalling form of Aspiration Tax, they've unlawfully used unemployed people as a massive pool of free labour to distribute to their corporate mates and they've massively expanded the number of prisoners working for private companies too.

The economic effect of prison labour driving down the wages of ordinary workers is bad enough in itself, but there is evidence that the availability of prison labour is actually resulting in real job losses as unscrupulous companies lay off their paid workforces and replace them with prison labour.

Here are some specific examples:

DHL According to the One3One website the global distribution company employs over 800 UK based prisoners to receive orders, pick, pack and ship. Meanwhile they have been shutting distribution centres, laying off hundreds of paid staff across the country (including 330 jobs in Droitwich, 200 job losses in Swindon and further job losses in Scunthorpe and Corby), and slashing wages across their distribution network prompting strike action. This is how Chris Taylor, DHL General Account Manager described the scheme on the One3One Solutions website: "Once you are through the prison door we like to create an environment identical to any DHL workplace". 

Going Green
A Cardiff based loft insulation and solar panel instillation company that laid off 17 workers at their call centre and replaced them with prisoners from Prescoed prison at an hourly rate of just 40p an hour. 

Speedy Hire A tool hire company that sacked 800 workers and shut down 75 depots in 2010. Since then they have massively increased the size of their prison contract to service and repair the tools they hire out, paying Erlestoke, Garth and Pentonville prisons £114,012 for the services of around 100 prisoners during the 2010-11 financial year. 

Timson Ltd
The boss James Timson is happy to act as a propaganda mouthpiece for the government's prison labour scheme, but what he fails to mention in his praise for the programme is that his company's increased use of prison labour coincided with a wave of redundancies that wiped out some 30% of the paid workforce at the company.

CiscoCisco is mentioned by the Tory MP Andrew Selous as being a big player in the government's prison labour scheme. In August 2016 the company announced that it plans to lay off 5,500 workers worldwide. Perhaps they could prevent a few job losses in the UK by bringing the services they've outsourced to prison labour schemes back in-house?

The Tories have tried to dress up their move to massively increase the number of prisoners doing work for private profit-seeking companies as being a socially responsible policy, and with all good propaganda narratives there is a kernel of truth to it. Research clearly demonstrates that prisoners who are engaged in productive activities are less likely to behave violently while in prison, and prisoners who have been trained up with skills are much less likely to re-offend after being released.

The problem isn't that prisoners are being given the opportunity to work, it's that allowing private companies to profit from very cheap prison labour clearly has a downwards effect on jobs and wages in the wider economy and there are numerous clear examples of companies like DHL, Speedy Hire and Going Green laying off paid workers and then outsourcing work to prisons.

For all of the reassuring guff from the Tories and their buddies at the CBI about how the government's prison labour schemes don't undercut established businesses or destroy jobs, the evidence is absolutely clear that they do.

It costs the taxpayer an average of over £33,000 per year to keep a person in prison, yet the Tories have been busy using this prison population as an almost free source of labour for unscrupulous businesses who want to undercut their rivals by cutting down on their payroll costs.

In my view the clearest solution to prevent unscrupulous businesses using prison labour as a kind of taxpayer subsidy to undercut their business rivals (who actually choose to pay their staff) is to ensure that employing prison labour costs the employer an hourly rate of at least the minimum wage.

The prison could then deduct a proportion of the wage to contribute towards the enormous cost to the taxpayer of keeping the prisoner housed and fed (Accommodation charge). Part of the remaining sum could be contributed towards compensation for the victims of the crime(s) committed by the prisoner.

The problem isn't actually that prisoners are being given the opportunity to work, it's that this Tory drive to provide prison labour to private profit-seeking businesses has created an opportunity for the most unscrupulous profiteers to take advantage of cheap prison labour to lay off their existing staff, or to undercut business rivals who employ workers on real wages.

It wouldn't actually take much effort to prevent unscrupulous profiteers from taking advantage of prison labour to line their own pockets at the expense of wages and jobs in the real economy, but the Tory attitude to Workfare schemes (using the unemployed as another pool of free labour to distribute to their corporate chums) is illustrative of their attitude. The Tory objective is to help unscrupulous profiteers by providing them with cheap or free labour, and the impact of their policies on jobs and wages in the real economy is utterly irrelevant to them. In fact, many Tories would likely celebrate the downwards effect on wages as a brilliant outcome in line with their wage repression policies of the last six years.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

OR

The US is turning against the Prison Industrial Complex, but it's thriving in Britain

On Thursday 18th of August 2016 the US Department of Justice made a hugely significant announcement that they are planning to end the use of private prisons after a report found that private prisons are less safe and provide inferior correctional services than government run facilities.

The huge growth in the US prison population, the widespread use of private prisons in the US and the use of prisoners as cheap labour is a phenomenon commonly referred to as the Prison Industrial Complex. This describes the situation where private companies that profit from running prisons and exploiting prisoners as cheap labour lobby for ever harsher laws in order to boost the prisoner population and their own profit margins.

Civil rights campaigners and hip-hop artists have been complaining about the Prison Industrial Complex for years, noting how non-white people are far more likely to be imprisoned for non-violent offences like drug possession.

When it comes to private prisons the conflicts of interest are absolutely obvious. Government operated prison services have an interest in reducing prisoner numbers through correctional services like education, apprenticeships, anger management courses etc because a lower prison population means either lower taxes, or tax revenues that can be spent on other valuable services like education or infrastructure. Private prisons have an interest in keeping prisoner populations as high as possible in order to boost their profitability, meaning that any efforts to rehabilitate prisoners and reduce the chances of re-offending are utterly counter-productive.

The obvious scope for corruption was highlighted by the appalling 2008 "kids for cash" scandal where two Pennsylvania judges were caught taking bribes from the owner of a private youth detention company in return for sentencing kids for utterly trivial offences like mocking a teacher on MySpace and trespassing in a vacant building!

Another scandal broke in 2016 when an undercover reporter from Mother Jones wrote a damning expose on the private prison business. This was followed soon after by the damning inspector General's report into the private prison business.

The US Senator Bernie Sanders has campaigned against private prisons and the Prison Industrial Complex for decades. Here's his response to the announcement that private prisons are to be phased out.

"It is an international embarrassment that we put more people behind bars than any other country on earth. Due in large part to private prisons, incarceration has been a source of major profits to private corporations. Study after study after study has shown private prisons are not cheaper, they are not safer, and they do not provide better outcomes for either the prisoners or the state.   

We have got to end the private prison racket in America as quickly as possible. Our focus should be on keeping people out of jail and making sure they stay out when they are released.  This means funding jobs and education not more jails and incarceration."

The the announcement that the US Department of Justice is planning to let all of their private prison contracts expire over the next five years resulted in an immediate slump in the stock values of private prison companies like GEO.

Even though the evidence against the private prison industry has been compelling, the announcement of the phase-out of private prisons in the US is still surprising because of the predictable freefall in private prison stocks. It's clear that taking away their opportunity to get rich on the back of the US taxpayer, and by exploiting prisoners as free labour is going to make a lot of rich and powerful people very angry indeed.

It's also surprising because the obvious insanity of private for-profit prisons in the US has long been seen as one of the factors that makes the radically right-wing US version of capitalism so much worse than the more social democratic versions of capitalism.

The irony for British people is that we'll no longer be able to high-horse about American capitalism being so much more rabid than our own version because our governments have imitated the US system by introducing a load of private prisons and detention centres in the UK, and they've also been allowing private companies to undercut the legitimate employment market by taking advantage of the UK prison population as a cheap source of labour.

Instead of getting angry about their lost opportunity to profiteer out of the US justice system, these companies could consider shifting their attention to the ongoing Tory marketisation of the UK justice system.

The Tories are creating huge profiteering opportunities by carving up and privatising all elements of the UK justice system. They're not just intent on building more and more privately operated prisons and detention centres and allowing private companies to use prisoners as cheap labour, they've also been busy trying to privatise front line police services (Theresa May is a big advocate of police privatisation), court facilities and services, electronic tagging (subject to a massive £180 million tagging fraud by G4S and Serco), and probation services. They've also been trying to reform legal aid in order to drive smaller specialist practices out of business and hand a bigger market share to multinational behemoths like Serco, G4S and Capita.

The conflicts of interest are absolutely obvious when the privatised police unit that makes the arrest, the forensic science unit, the legal aid lawyer, the courtroom facilities and services, and the private prison are all operated by the same small cabal of corporations, then upon release the probation officer and the electronic tagging company are run by the same corporations too.

If a rare display of evidence based policy making drives the private prison profiteers out of the US justice system, they can be assured that the Tories will welcome them with open arms to help them with their project to turn the UK justice system into a conflict of interest riddled free-for-all for corporate profiteers.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

OR

The leaked TTIP documents

In May 2016 Greenpeace Netherlands released copies of the highly secretive negotiation documents on the TTIP so-called "trade deal" between the EU and the US.

The highly secretive nature of the TTIP negotiations and the extremely anti-democratic attitude of the EU institutions towards opponents of the deal have already created a huge rise in opposition to TTIP. In fact almost 3.5 million European citizens have already signed a petition against TTIP and several European governments are threatening to veto the deal if it is presented in its current format.

One of the biggest complaints about the TTIP corporate power grab is the inclusion of Investor State Dispute Settlements, which are designed to allow multinational corporations to completely bypass national democratic and judicial institutions in order to sue nation states in secretive transnational tribunals. These appalling ISDS rules have already been written into countless so-called free trade deals across the world, allowing corporations to sue countries whenever their democratically elected governments introduce policies that might reduce their profits. From the introduction of plain cigarette packaging, through bans on toxic petrol additives to environmental laws to stop the corporate destruction of the natural environment - multinational corporations have been using ISDS rules to sue governments all over the world.

The leaked TTIP documents show that the US are refusing to budge on demands for removal of the ISDS components of the TTIP corporate power grab. This is no surprise whatever given that the highly lucrative and rapidly growing transnational law industry is almost entirely based in the US*, and many of the biggest beneficiaries of ISDS tribunals so far have been US based multinational corporations.

Greenpeace analysis of the leaked documents also reveal that the TTIP negotiations are designed to weaken European laws and regulations, especially in areas like the food industry, pesticides and insecticides, genetically modified organisms and the chemicals industry.

TTIP negotiators have already defined things like energy efficiency labels; fuel efficiency standards for cars; sustainable public procurement policies; regulation of unconventional fossil fuel extraction, including shale gas and tar sands; sustainability standards for bio-energy; and the banning of climate-damaging f-gases in appliances such as refrigerators and freezers as "technical barriers to trade".

It's absolutely clear that TTIP is designed to weaken European standards and create a situation where European governments are powerless to restrain the excesses of multinational corporations, because they will be sued in US dominated secret transnational tribunals every time they try to introduce new laws that multinational corporations object to.

John Hilary of War on Want had this to say about the TTIP leaks:

"We have long warned that TTIP is a danger to democracy, food safety, jobs and public services. Now we see it is even worse than we feared. Today's leak shows the European Commission preparing to sell us down the river, doing deals behind closed doors that will change the face of European society for ever. It is simply unacceptable that a group of unelected officials should be allowed to contemplate such a thing without any public scrutiny."

The fact that the people of Europe are reliant upon secret documents leaked via Greenpeace in order to get a proper idea of what is being negotiated between unelected technocrats behind closed doors is appalling, especially since the establishment class are always willing to trot out the Orwellian mantra of "if you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear" in order to justify the highly intrusive, privacy destroying state surveillance powers they want to award to themselves.

Now that it's absolutely clear that the TTIP corporate power grab will erode European standards and allow multinational corporations to completely bypass democratic and judicial institutions in European states, the deal should be scrapped in its entirety. What is more, the EU should begin an enquiry into how secretive negotiations towards a damaging, anti-democratic corporate power grab were ever allowed to develop so far in the first place.

• If you want to download the leaked TTIP documents and look at them for yourself, here's the link again.

• If you would like to join the 3.4 million+ people who have signed the petition against TTIP, here's that link.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

OR

* If you want to know more about the transnational law industry I highly recommend this German documentary.

The Panama Papers

The leaked Mossack Fonseca "Panama Papers" contain some 11 million documents. That's over 2 terabytes of data, yet the way the information has been released has allowed much of the mainstream press to immediately fixate their coverage upon enemies of the west, especially Vladimir Putin, whilst including little or no information on the involvement of major western corporations and American politicians, or information on the deep British involvement in the scandal.  

The "corporate media gatekeepers"  

In an article entitled "Corporate media gatekeepers protect western 1% from Panama leak" the anti-corruption blogger Craig Murray points out that: "whoever leaked the Mossack Fonseca papers appears motivated by a genuine desire to expose the system that enables the ultra wealthy to hide their massive stashes, often corruptly obtained and all involved in tax avoidance ...Unfortunately [they] made the dreadful mistake of turning to the western corporate media to publicise the results".

In his blog post Murray goes on to reveal that the leak is being managed by an entity named "The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists" which despite its grandiose name is hardly an unbiased independent organisation, being funded as it it by entities like the Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Endowment, the Rockefeller Family Fund, the W K Kellogg Foundation,The Sigrid Rausing Trust (the Tetrapak empire) and the Addesium Foundation (George Soros).

It's clear that an organisation that is heavily funded by foundations belonging to US based corporate billionaires have been cherry-picking the data and selectively releasing what they choose to. If you visit the ICIJ page detailing the leaks it turns out that they don't list a single US leader, politician or public official as being involved in the scandal!

The way that the initial leaks have been handled means that the focus of the mainstream media coverage has primarily been aimed at enemies of the West (especially Vladimir Putin), with most of the rest of the coverage focusing on government and public officials and their families from an assortment of countries, very few of them western countries.

The mainstream coverage of the leak has uniformly failed to point out that the main clients of businesses like Mossack Fonseca are corporations and corporate executives establishing networks of offshore shell companies. Still, it hardly seems like a surprise that an investigative team massively funded by the US based foundations belonging to corporate billionaires is not directing their focus on American involvement, or the massive web of corporate shell companies.

British involvement

Another factor to consider is the British complicity in all of this. Of course there is the headline grabbing detail that David Cameron's dad was involved, but then it's been public knowledge that David Cameron's dad Ian was a tax-dodger and that David Cameron inherited part of his dad's tax-dodging fortune for years. However the much bigger story is that over half of the 300,000 Mossack Fonseca clients are registered in British administered tax havens.

It also turns out that the UK is second most common country in which intermediaries operate (after the former British colony of Hong Kong) and that by far the most common jurisdiction of incorporation for corporate entities involved with Mossack Fonseca is the British dependency of the British Virgin Islands, accounting for more than half of the total.

David Cameron's response to the leak of the Panama Papers was to spout a bit more empty tough-talking rhetoric and to talk up a summit on tax secrecy in May.

It would take an extraordinary amount of gullibility to believe the bluff and bluster from the likes of David Cameron and George Osborne when it comes to their tough talking rhetoric on tax-dodging, when the Tory party receives millions in donations from tax-dodging individuals and corporations and is led by a guy who inherited his family fortune from his tax-dodging father!

London is indisputably the global capital of the tax avoidance industry and many of the biggest tax havens the global super-rich use to stash an estimated £21 trillion+ are British dependencies like the Cayman Islands, Jersey, Guernsey, Bermuda, British Virgin Islands and the Isle of Man. and the Tory party is heavily bankrolled by the City of London financial sector that has built up a lucrative trade in hiding people's cash overseas.

The idea of a Tory like David Cameron organising a summit on combating tax secrecy is like a fox organising a summit on ensuring chicken safety.

Obvious targets
 

Somehow there isn't a single US politician or official in the ICIJ list, but there are a few sacrificial lambs from other western countries. Interestingly, almost all of them have already been publicly exposed as having offshore business interests or being outright corrupt.

• David Cameron's deceased father (exposed as a tax-dodger years ago)
• Michael Ashcroft (who got to sit in the House of Lords for over a decade despite being a tax-exile)
• Jérôme Cahuzac (a disgraced French politician who is on trial for tax fraud)
• Pilar de Borbón (a member of the Spanish royal family that has been embroiled in one corruption scandal after another for years)
• Micaela Domecq Solís-Beaumont (the wife of the agriculture minister in easily the most corrupt Spanish government since the fall of General Franco)

It's pretty amazing that practically the only western politician to get named in this scandal who doesn't already have some kind of dodgy background is the Prime Minister of Iceland.

What's still to come?

It's worth pointing out that there is still an awful lot of information to be released, so it's entirely possible that the ICIJ team could play it out like the Snowden leaks with a gradual drip-feed of damning revelations stretching out for months. An optimist might expect some actual revelations about US politicians at some point and some damning details on the corporations that make up the majority of the company's client base.

Conclusion

It doesn't matter how optimistic you are about future revelations, the complete lack of information on corrupt US officials in the original tranche of leaks is deeply suspicious, as is the lack of detail on the corporations and corporate executives that make up most of the Mossack Fonseca client base.

Directing so much attention towards enemies of the west (with just a small selection of extremely obvious targets in the west) the ICIJ have helped much of the UK mainstream media to frame to debate on this tax-dodging scandal as being some kind of foreign problem, rather than a problem that the British establishment, British overseas territories, and no doubt a lot of British corporations, are deeply involved in.

Whether facilitating the mainstream media framing of the debate like this was done intentionally or not, because of the way it's been presented it's given an awful lot of British people an excuse to shrug the whole lot off as largely foreign corruption, when British overseas territories are at the very heart of it..

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

MORE ARTICLES FROM
 ANOTHER ANGRY VOICE 
         
Are you gullible enough to believe that the Tories oppose tax-dodging?
           
The pre-election "contract with the electorate" that the Tories want you to forget
                     
The Tory plan to force privatise every school in England
       
What do Tory donors get for their cash?
                             
How the mainstream media frame the political debate
                
Why bailing out RBS was a catastrophic mistake

                                
George Osborne's £22 billion rip-off