In 1903 the US bullied Colombia into giving up the province that became Panama. The plan was to create a nation to serve the interests of Wall Street.

This goes back a long way. The Panamanian state was originally created to function on behalf of the rich and self-seeking of this world - or rather their antecedents in America - when the 20th century was barely born.

Panama was created by the United States for purely selfish commercial reasons, right on that historical hinge between the imminent demise of Britain as the great global empire, and the rise of the new American imperium.

The writer Ken Silverstein put it with estimable simplicity in an article for Vice magazine two years ago: "In 1903, the administration of Theodore Roosevelt created the country after bullying Colombia into handing over what was then the province of Panama. Roosevelt acted at the behest of various banking groups, among them JP Morgan & Co, which was appointed as the country's 'fiscal agent' in charge of managing $10m in aid that the US had rushed down to the new nation."

Birth of the Chinese Aircraft Carrier Force

The International Monetary Fund has been caught, red handed, plotting to stage a "credit event" that forces Greece to the edge of bankruptcy, using the pretext of the Brexit referendum.

No, this is not the plot of the next Bond movie. It is the transcript of a teleconference between the IMF's chief negotiator, Poul Thomsen and Delia Velculescu, head of the IMF mission to Greece.

Released by Wikileaks, the discussion took place in Athens just before the IMF walked out of talks aimed at giving Greece the green light for the next stage of its bailout.

Published today are "The Panama Papers", a global publication of eleven millions files of 2.6 terabytes of data made up of emails, documents, letters, property deeds, bank records, contracts and invoices dating back as far as 1977 leaked to journalists. It allows investigators and journalists to dig much deeper into the very murky world of the secretive offshore tax havens sheltering trillions of dollars and assets of the world's most rich, famous and powerful.

From what we know, a year ago, an anonymous source contacted a German news outlet called Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) and submitted encrypted internal documents from law firm Mossack Fonseca headquartered in Panama. The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists has also received a copy, investigated and today publishes its initial findings (HERE).

Mossack Fonseca is considered one of the world's biggest traders of offshore secrecy. The company boasts more than 500 employees and associates operating in more than 40 offices around the world. Needless to say that includes London, Jersey, Isle of Man, Gibraltar, British Virgin Isles and British Anguilla. It's annual billing exceeds £40million.

There are 210,000 companies, foundations and trusts located in 21 offshore jurisdictions contained in the enormous stash of information in the leak along with the details connecting the ill gotten gains of bribery, corruption, weapons and drug dealing along with all manner of crimes perpetrated by individuals from tin-pot dictators to world leaders.

The National Crime Agency (NCA) is Britain's national law enforcement and police agency. It was established in 2013 as a non-ministerial government department, replacing the Serious Organised Crime Agency and has assumed a number of responsibilities of other law enforcement agencies.

It is the UK's lead agency against organised crime; human, weapon and drug trafficking; cyber crime; and economic crime that goes across regional and international borders, but can be tasked to investigate any crime.

Both the NCA and government are acutely aware of the scale of money laundering in Britain that they now admit is completely out-of-control.

In a report by the Treasury and Home Office it clearly stated its concerns but attempts to gloss over its seriousness - "The same factors that make the UK an attractive place for legitimate financial activity - its political stability, advanced professional services sector and widely understood language and legal system - also make it an attractive place through which to launder the proceeds of crime."

The true amount and scale of money laundering in the UK is not known. Banks are by far the biggest problem. They use complex corporate structures and offshore vehicles to conceal ownership and facilitate the movement of criminal assets designed to baffle the authorities and they do so with impunity.

There is a flurry of Saudi diplomatic travel in its region. The context might be the U.S. arrangement with Russia over Syria and Saudi opposition to it. Consider:

April 7 - Saudi king starts Egypt visit in boost for Sisi

Saudi King Salman on Thursday started a five-day visit to Cairo in a show of support for Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, with the leaders due to sign a raft of investment deals.

April 11 - Saudi King Salman meets Turkey's Erdogan

Saudi Arabia's King Salman bin Abdulaziz was welcomed by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan after arriving in Turkey's capital Ankara on Monday.

As part of king Salman's official visit to the country, regional and international issues are expected to be discussed in meetings between Turkish and Saudi officials.
...
During his visit, will later be attending the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) that will be taking place in Istanbul on April 14 and 15.

Phil Hearse examines the corrupt state of capitalism

The Panama Papers' revelations about the rich and powerful hiding untold billions in 'offshore' tax havens may be shocking, but it's hardly a surprise to anyone who knows the first thing about the way that big business works. We are living through a blitzstorm of allegations and controversy about corruption. In the few years alone we've had:

• The revelations in the Panama Papers that hundreds of companies and thousands of individuals, including 72 (!) present or former heads of state, hid their fortunes offshore. The names so far revealed include associates of Russian President Putin, and numerous members of the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party.
• The 'Lux leaks' revelations about how the Grand Duchy of Luxemburg conspires with big business conspires to launder its profits through tax minimal Luxemburg and how major companies like Amazon and Starbucks shift their British profits to Luxemburg and pay little or no tax.
• Revelations that bankers in Britain conspired to fix the 'Libor' rate - the inter-bank lending rate - so their banks could profit from trades or the impression they were worth more than they actually were.
• Repeated allegations of corruption in sport - including athletics, tennis and cricket, either in terms of result fixing or unfairly influencing results through drug use.
• Accusations against prominent politicians, including South African President Jacob Zuma and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, that they used vast amounts of public money to build huge residences.
• British bank HSBC was in 2012 discovered to have received at least $880 billion in investments from the Mexican Sinaloa drug cartel

A lot more things could be added to this list. The world seems to be awash with corruption. So what is it really all about?

Israel has launched dozens of strikes in Syria, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has announced. It marks the first time that the leader has acknowledged such attacks against arms transfers to Lebanon's Hezbollah. "We act when we need to act, including here across the border, with dozens of strikes meant to prevent Hezbollah from obtaining game-changing weaponry," Netanyahu said while on a visit to the occupied Golan Heights on Monday, as quoted by Reuters. The prime minister failed to specify what kind of strikes Israel had conducted in Syria.

Although Israel welcomed a cessation of hostilities in Syria in February, it has indicated that it could still launch attacks there if it sees a threat from the Iranian-backed Hezbollah, whose fighters have been allied with Syrian President Bashar Assad.

Israel is officially neutral on Syria's civil war, but has frequently pledged to prevent shipments of advanced weaponry to Hezbollah, which is based in Lebanon. It has, however, stopped short of confirming specific air operations.

Tel Aviv last fought a war with Hezbollah in 2006. That conflict included rocket strikes inside Israel and an Israeli air and ground offensive in Lebanon. Israeli leaders have stated that since then, Hezbollah has built up and improved the range of rocket arsenal that can now strike deep inside Israel. Tension has been mounting between Tel Aviv and Hezbollah in recent months, with Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah threatening to hit Israeli chemical and nuclear sites.

For a week now, the world has been attentively watching as scandalous revelations that were made by the representatives of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) unfold. As we wrote earlier, this organization is closely connected to the US government and the Soros Foundation, which funded the ICIJ. Moreover, earlier this organization was used by Soros to settle scores with his economic and political rivals. At this time, the political nature of the leak is also evident: a strike against all the enemies of the liberal-left Soros, ranging from Vladimir Putin, and ending with David Cameron. However, there is one more aspect of the problem.

The long-standing war with the Rothschilds

The Investigation into Mossack Fonseca's activity is a continuation of the anti-offshore campaign that ICIJ began in 2013. Then, unknown persons allegedly handed over 260 gigabytes of data regarding the ownership of secret offshore bank accounts to ICIJ director Gerard Ryle. ICIJ published the Offshore leaks, comprising tens of thousands of offshore bank accounts, in which many prominent international figures were implicated, including Baron Elie de Rothschild, the head of French branch of Rothschild dynasty.

Clans of Rothschild, Sachs, Thyssens and Safra, closely associated with the Rothschild family, were the focus of ICIJ Swiss Leaks in 2013. Then the data of a number of Swiss lawyers and trusts was declassified. "They helped clients all over the world establish offshore firms and trusts to protect their assets from tax collectors or over-zealous heirs".

The publication of the so-called Luxembourg leaks was also aimed against the ruling family of Luxembourg, also related to the Rothschilds.

USAID partially funds the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, one of the core journalism organizations involved in reporting the Panama Papers.

In the wake of damning claims by WikiLeaks that the United States government was behind the Panama Papers as part of a ploy to smear Russian President Vladimir Putin, a U.S. State Department spokesperson has confirmed that the government funds one of the organizations involved in reporting the leak and that supporting initiatives that root out corruption around the world is part of U.S. foreign policy. R

Responding to a question about WikiLeaks allegations, State Department spokesperson Mark Toner said Thursday that the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, one of the core journalism organizations that reported the Panama Papers, has "received support from various donors, including the U.S. government," specifically USAID.

OCCRP clearly list USAID as one of its donors on its website. Other funders include the Swiss Romanian Contribution Programme and the Open Society Institute, founded by U.S. business mogul George Soros.