Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and the Impact of the Panama Papers on the Race

Highway leading to Panama City's business district. Vilainecrevette/ shutterstock.com

As I said yesterday , the Panama Papers (documents of offshore bank transactions and accounts that shelter the global rich from taxes) scandal is going to be good for Sanders and bad for Clinton. And sure enough, Sanders had this to say about Panama in 2011, when he opposed a free trade agreement between Panama, a country with a tiny economy, and the US:And what was Clinton's position on this trade pact? In the opinion of U.S. Uncut , a group "established in February 2011 to combat corporate tax avoidance ": "She was on the complete opposite side of the issue." What is for sure is she had nothing substantial to say about how a trade agreement with Panama (Sanders' first point) would generate jobs in the US. She only stated that it would do so by the pure voodoo of opening its market to US products. This same voodoo is being promoted in TPP

In the narrative of the elite (a narrative that received a major and fatal shock with the crash of 2008), trade agreements are never about rich people really, but always the poor, the American worker, the man and woman on the street. The rich are just doing all they can for us at the bottom. That's how they see themselves. That's their man and woman in the mirror. And that's how most politicians represent their causes to us. Read Clinton's press release. She is speaking the language of the elite. What will come out of the Panama Papers is the fact that Sanders really does not speak this language at all.

Some Panama Papers News:

1) The first major political casualty of the leak is Iceland's prime minister, Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson, who resigned today because his name was connected with offshore accounts.

2) Money originating from Panama City has been inflating property values in Miami.

3) Politico claims that US citizens are not prominent in the documents because they prefer tax havens in places that speak English.

4) Apparently, the father of David Cameron, the British prime minister, has no problem with Spanish-speaking tax havens.

4) Editor of Süddeutsche Zeitung on the dearth of US citizens in the leak: "Just wait for what is coming next."