John Oliver was biting during his HBO season finale last night on how dissecting President Donald Trump's words can underscore his incoherence and only prompt futility for the media and other outsiders. Knock on wood that's not quite the same with the more than 13.4 million documents constituting The Paradise Papers, namely the latest tale of elites' tax evasion as detailed by 380 journalists form 96 organizations.

On a chilly Chicago soccer field Sunday morning, a young tech executive asked me about them and why disclosure of tax havens used by Apple, Queen Elizabeth, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, Bono and others made much of a difference. It's all mostly legal, right?

For sure: legal if unseemly in the premeditated complexity and confusion by those who benefit from them. And, for sure, connections between the tax avoidance and real world concerns can be hard to understand. So it's fortunate that a fabulous story broken days after the initial, synchronized release of stories on Nov. 5 eliminates any confusion or incoherence and makes such a connection better than some of the initially wonderfully reported tales overseen by the Washington-based Consortium of Investigative Journalists.

Indeed, Development Dreams Stand Still While Mining Money Moves Offshore is by the consortium's own Will Fitzgibbon, who runs its Africa desk and traveled to the tiny landlocked West African nation Burkina Faso that includes a zinc mine owned by Nantou Mining S.A., a subsidiary of the Swiss commodity giant Glencore PLC.

This exhibits a tie between tax avoidance and locals getting shafted, namely a zinc mine taking advantage of offshore tax havens while both its workers and neighbors suffer awful poverty and environmental degradation. In sum:

“Details from leaked Glencore records reveal a story of contrasts. As villagers struggled with hunger, poverty and other hardships, boardroom machinations in faraway Switzerland, Bermuda and other tax havens moved millions of dollars into – and then out of – the small African nation whose name means 'Land of Honest Men.'”

“The details are revealed in files – containing multimillion-dollar sales contracts, board of directors’ decisions, budgets and emails – from the blue-chip Bermuda law firm Appleby. The files document its relationship with the mining company’s parent, Glencore, one of the world’s largest metals, oil and grain traders.”

The documents are among the more than 11,000 million analyzed by the consortium, Süddeutsche Zeitung and 94 media partners, including The New York Times, Guardian and Vice, which “reveal how Glencore made secret payments, battled cash-strapped countries in court, and sought to reduce its tax bill in nations around the world.”

Along the way, the consortium separated discovered “a confidential assessment by Burkina Faso’s tax office that accuses the Glencore subsidiary of abusing tax loopholes and creating fictitious charges by shell companies to reduce taxable earnings and avoid paying tens of millions of dollars in taxes to one of the world’s poorest countries.”

Glencore denies improprieties but this a damning window onto the nexus of avoidance and related injustice, in particular how it involves workers seen by some as de facto slaves (which the company denies) at the country's biggest zinc mine (where housing built for workers “lies largely empty and abandoned,” while a foundation meant to distribute money for social development has fallen way short).

As Mike Hudson, senior editor of the consortium, put it Sunday, “We've struggled to do these kinds of on-the-ground impact stories throughout our offshore leaks investigations, because the harms caused by offshore secrecy and chicanery are, while real and potent, usually indirect (fewer tax dollars for governments means less money for schools and hospitals, etc.) The elaborate layering of offshore tax and secrecy structures often means there are many layers of insulation between questionable activities and their ultimate effects on real people.”