Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 196

Nevada, a Tax Haven for Only $174

In 2012 CNBC visited an enterprising, then 65-year-old man who lived in a truck stop town just outside Reno, Nevada. Robert Harris was a former bartender who helped people avoid taxes. Harris lives in a sandstone-colored stucco house with a green lawn, a cutout in a neighborhood of near-identical homes. It is also the listed address of some 2,400 shell corporations.

Harris wasn’t a prying man—and that was his business model. For $174, he would set up a company––licensed and legal in Nevada––that a person could move money through without a link to his or her real identity.

“I don’t do any investigative work on the people,” Harris told CNBC. Sure, he told the TV network, he might raise alarm if he knew a venal official or terrorist had used his service to launder money. But, he added, that was only “if I knew. That’s the thing. If I know.”

Nevada showed up prominently in the Panama Papers, the recent leak of 11 million documents from the law firm Mossack Fonseca (MF), the Panamanian firm that specializes in shell corporations. In one story, reported by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, MF fought a court order filed in the U.S. District Court in Las Vegas that would link it to a subsidiary based in the city. The Panamanian firm didn’t want that, because that subsidiary was being investigated for helping create 123 shell companies used to steal millions of dollars from government contracts in Argentina. The subsidiary, backed by Nevada’s strong secrecy laws, offered nearly the same services as Robert Harris—albeit on a much more international scale.

Places like the Cayman Islands, Switzerland, and the British Virgin Islands, have traditionally been where the wealthy send their money to avoid taxes, but this has been changing, perhaps most dramatically since 2007. In an op-ed in the Las Vegas Review Journal, after learning of his state’s ties to the Panama Papers on Monday, columnist John L. Smith wrote:

It shouldn’t be surprising if nefarious characters or the family members of corrupt politicians are found to have been hiding behind shell corporations crafted in Nevada. It’s what we do.

The secrecy provided under the state’s laws of incorporation is no accident. It’s a revenue source.

There’s nothing illegal about opening a corporation in Nevada. The state offers tax benefits. It also removes much of the liability from the owner in case of a lawsuit. States such as Wyoming, South Dakota, and Delaware offer much the same benefits of incorporation as Nevada. Indeed, a 2012 report in The New York Times noted that companies including American Airlines, Apple, Coca-Cola, Ford, JPMorgan Chase, and Walmart, were all incorporated in Delaware, largely because of the tax breaks the state offers.

Then, in 2007, came revelations that Americans had cheated the U.S. government out of billions of tax dollars by concealing them overseas—mostly in Switzerland, which led Congress to pass the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, a law that forced foreign banks operating in the U.S. to disclose their dealings with U.S. clients. That same year, 2007, the Nevada secretary of state’s website asked, “Why incorporate in Nevada?” The answer: “Minimal reporting and disclosing requirements. Stockholders are not public record.”

Nevada loosened its corporation laws in 1991, according to the Las Vegas Sun, hoping to make it a “Delaware of the West” and attract corporations with its low taxes and high secrecy. It made tens of millions of dollars. In 2006 alone, the Las Vegas Sun reported the state took in $87 million. One of the companies that made its way there was Rothschild Wealth Management & Trust, a firm with a storied history that was looking to move after the crackdown on Swiss banks. It chose Reno.

An article in Bloomberg Businessweek in January highlighted the ease  and appeal of Nevada for a firm like Rothschild. In the article, a lawyer for Rothschild & Co. gave a presentation in San Francisco on how to avoid paying taxes. In it, he presented a hypothetical using a man named Wang, “who is from the People’s Republic of China, concerned that information about his wealth could be shared with Chinese authorities.”

Putting his assets into a Nevada LLC, in turn owned by a Nevada trust, would generate no U.S. tax returns, Penney wrote. Any forms the IRS would receive would result in “no meaningful information to exchange under” agreements between Hong Kong and the U.S., according to Penney’s PowerPoint presentation reviewed by Bloomberg.

It’s easy to create an LLC, hide money in it or even launder cash through it. A reporter with Fusion created her own LLC in Delaware, without any ID. Journalist Ken Silverstein did the same in Delaware, in 15 minutes over the phone for $292. He asked a friend to sign for the company, which he called Medellín Cartel Successor Entity, but neither he nor his friend appeared on the paperwork. And to make sure he was doubly protected, Silverstein flew to Las Vegas (though the trip was unnecessary) and set up another company, linked to his first LLC, but once-removed. At that point, he wrote, he “was positioned to go into business as a drug trafficker or arms trader or dictator’s bagman.”

And if all of that sounds like too much hassle, there’s always Robert Harris, who still operates his company, NBI, out of his Nevada ranch home on Wedge Lane. I spoke with Harris on the phone Tuesday. He was a bit apprehensive to talk with the media, because he said the CNBC report four years ago made him look like he was a millionaire, or a deviant catering to foreign millionaires and criminals. In truth, he said he earns a little more than $50,000 each year creating LLCs. He is now 70, and most of his business is domestic––usually someone in Indiana, or Illinois, or wherever, who dreams up a business and wants to take advantage of Nevada’s zero corporate income tax. And yes, he still has a laissez-faire view of people’s privacy.

“If you want to incorporate, fine. You pay the fee,” he said. “Nevada doesn’t investigate, so why should I?”

Harris hasn’t changed his prices, and he still offers basic setup for the rock-bottom price of $174. Although if a client is really looking for that Nevada-based facade, Harris says he will open and host a phone line linked to the corporation at his home. That package is $949. Just click “add to cart.”

The People v. O.J. Simpson: Case Closed?

On Tuesday, FX aired the final episode of Ryan Murphy’s American Crime Story: The People v. O.J. Simpson. Over 10 episodes, the show revisited, rehashed, and painstakingly recreated the details of the murder trial of Simpson in 1994, considering the case’s manifold implications regarding race, justice, celebrity, and the media. Four Atlantic writers consider how the show succeeded in examining the trial through a modern lens.

Spencer Kornhaber: In 2006, If I Did It, the book in which O.J. Simpson offered a supposedly hypothetical account of killing Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman, prompted such public outcry that its first edition never even hit shelves. James Wolcott at Vanity Fair got hold of a copy, though. “Justice and injustice have always seemed incidental to the Simpson case, tangential to the cesspool soap opera,” he wrote in his review. “After finishing If I Did It, I didn’t feel any inward swelling of moral outrage or righteous disgust, didn’t hatch any profound insights into sex, race, and violence in America—I just wanted everyone connected with it to go away.”

The notion of the Simpson affair as a sordid and ignoble piece of history, at best a cautionary tale but mostly an embarrassment that should be forgotten, is commonly held. American Crime Story: The People v. O.J. Simpson, on some level, rebukes it. For nearly every figure transformed by the media spectacle into caricature or villain, it countered with a complicated human being trying to do the right thing. Last night’s finale left open the question of whether there was a wider lesson to be learned, but it made very clear that there were wider forces at work to explain the not-guilty verdict that many people found baffling. It also made clear that those forces are still at work today, and that to disregard them is to miss how the world functions.

The prosecution in the case, it often seemed, made just that error by ignoring the larger context of the trial and asking the jury to do the same. But Marcia Clark’s closing argument, as portrayed on the show, was pretty deft: It opened by acknowledging the vicious racism of Mark Fuhrman, but then implored for the jurors to separate that racism from the evidence. Watching it unfold, it seemed hard to imagine how she and Chris Darden could have done better. The facts were clear, the narrative straightforward, the logic seemingly airtight. What’s to argue with?

The answer: the entire presumption of logic, justice, and cause and effect upon which she built her case. Because Johnnie Cochran’s closing argument told the jury to think bigger than the blood splatters before them. He said the trial was about the struggle against racial injustice in America. It was about immoral police officers. It was about not being able to trust the evidence because of who was presenting it and who was implicated by it. When The People v. O.J. Simpson opened with footage of the Rodney King beating, it hinted that it would demonstrate that race is the lens through which the O.J. trial makes sense. In this finale, the divided reactions of whites and blacks reacting to the verdict around the country completed that task.

But one of the twists of this ending was that it brought in other lenses through which to view the case, too. Cochran’s, “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit” wasn’t really about race; it was about reasonable doubt. The jury was shown as arriving at its acquittal in an astonishingly quick four hours not through a profound debate about prejudice but through the simple impression that even if Simpson was guilty, the prosecution hadn’t proven it. Maybe that’s all this case showed: how standards for certainty and doubt can vary.

The notion of the Simpson affair as a sordid and ignoble piece of history is commonly held. The People v. O.J. Simpson, on some level, rebukes it.

And it turned out, too, that the prosecution had a social agenda viewers hadn’t fully seen before. Marcia Clark used the post-trial press conference to tie Nicole Brown Simpson’s death to the plight of domestic-abuse victims more broadly. And in her conversation with Chris Darden, she revealed that her fervor for vengeance for victims was rooted in her own rape. Of all the capital-I Issues this show has focused on in the past nine weeks, domestic violence has not seemed high on the list. This finale snapped things into perspective: Of course the trial was about this topic. Just not in the jury’s mind and in a large part of the public’s mind, as much as it was about other topics.

The filmmakers constructed the final hour pretty smartly, I thought. The first half portrayed the final bits of legal maneuverings, and then lingered in the excruciating moment when the nation was made to sit through courtroom formalities before learning the verdict. The impact of that verdict was made wrenchingly clear on reactions within and outside the courtroom. Then came the aftermath, in segments. First we got the heartbreak and disbelief of the prosecution and the victims’ families. Then there was a happier corrective, with a focus on O.J. and the defense, most poignant when Cochran watched Bill Clinton address racial tension over police. The epilogue, imparting the fates of the various players and paying tribute to Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman, added a bit of factual finality.

But the very last scripted portion, with O.J. throwing a party and realizing he’d lost friends, read the most ambiguously of all. Perhaps that’s no surprise, given the show’s complex treatment of complex material all along. But 10 weeks of drama adds up to this: the decimation of O.J.’s social life? Or was it more profound: the survival of a human at the cost of his celebrity?

What do you all think? Did The People v. O.J. need more moral clarity—more side-taking, more condemnation? Or did it offer those things and I just miss it? And why didn’t we get more Kato Kaelin?

Megan Garber: Kato! I’d totally forgotten about Kato in all this. I have no idea about why he wasn’t around more; I do know, though, that I didn’t miss him. (Sorry, Kato.)

To the moral clarity question, though, I love your idea that the show explores “how standards for certainty and doubt can vary.” To me, one of the things the series overall accomplished so effectively was its Rashomonic illustration of events, from beginning to end: We got so many subjective takes on the trial, so many different ways of looking at the same thing. And what’s amazing: They were all, for the most part, equally viable. Most everyone here, in their way and on some very legitimate and true level, thought they were doing the right thing. Even, it seems, O.J.! Even Dominick Dunne, the Vanity Fair journalist! Even the show’s resident smarm-in-a-suit, Robert Shapiro!

The finale deftly—and really powerfully, I thought—brought all of that prismatic perspective-ing home: Johnnie Cochran, tearing up as he watched President Clinton publicly grappling with race because of the work he’d done, feeling that he’d just won a victory not just for O.J., but for an entire community. Chris Darden, bitterly informing his former adversary that all he’d achieved, in the end, was to hold that community back. Marcia Clark, revealing how profoundly personal the trial had been for her. Gil Garcetti, coming to terms with the fact that, after decades of public service, losing the “trial of the century” would be the thing people would remember about him.

And then there was Robert Kardashian (whom the show early on, after some groan-worthy, irony-dripping comments about the fleetingness of fame in the first few episodes, blessedly separated from his reality-star offspring). His arc, I thought, was one of the most fascinating the show offered. In slowly coming to doubt O.J.—and, in the end, in coming to be sure of O.J.’s guilt—Kardashian mirrored the evolution that I figure many, many Americans underwent during the real trial: a slow realization that O.J., that affable athlete-hero, might also be a murderer.

We got so many subjective takes on the trial, so many ways of looking at the same thing. And they were all, for the most part, equally viable.

At first I wasn’t sure about the casting of David Schwimmer in that role—whether the sitcomic ham he had perfected on Friends would translate to true-crime drama—but, in the final episodes of the series, he swayed me. That moment, in the finale, when he burst out of the Ford Aerostar that had taken him and O.J. back to Brentwood after O.J.’s release from jail—the moment that found him looking like someone who’d almost drowned before finding a pocket of air to save him—struck me as especially powerful. Here was this man, the sycophant turned skeptic, escaping from a moral vacuum. Here was yet another person who did the right thing, as he understood “the right thing” to be: doubting O.J. Leaving O.J. And then leaving him with that powerful symbol of morality: a Bible.

That’s why I’m not sure I agree that the show was ambiguous about the meaning of that final (and, ooooof, horrifically awkward) party. To me, the finale at that point seemed pretty damning of O.J.: all those zoomed-in shots of his face, as if the show’s cinematographer were willing him into showing remorse. All those suggestions of how terribly tone-deaf, and disrespectful, that party was to O.J.’s children, and to the victims, and to the country. That scene that saw O.J. gazing at the statue he’d long ago erected of himself in his backyard, as the old stadium crowds cheered him along in his mind—that was the moment, as I read it, that O.J. decided to live in denial, and to surround himself with other people, in the absence of Robert Kardashian, who would think of him only as “Juice.” The moment, basically, when If I Did It sprang to life.

There was that last scene, too, as the show’s credits visually fused its fictional characters with their nonfictional counterparts, that focused on O.J., aged and rejailed and resigned, looking blankly at the camera’s lens. To me, the implication was that, with O.J.’s 33-year sentence for armed robbery, the legal system had once again been manipulated not to address a current injustice, but to correct a past one—in this case, to ensure that the killer of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman would be put to justice. I thought that implication was driven home with the chyron’s note—haunting in its bluntness—that O.J. will be up for parole in 2017.

Then again, though, it really is hard to say for sure. The only thing I didn’t appreciate about the finale was how non-committal it was about what, finally, its real “finale” would be. There were so many different endings here. The Cochran ending, with plastic-cupped office champagne and a “Congratulations” cake. The Clark/Darden ending, with that lovely, terribly sad moment when the pair left their office, headed for a consolation drink, as “Feeling Good” played in the background. The Goldman ending, with the family—bereft of their son and brother, and bereft, too, of what they saw to be justice—alone in their car in the garage of the courthouse, not yet able to get on with their lives. This, I think, was the price the show paid for its fealty to subjectivity: It had so many loops to close. It had so many stories to conclude, if not conclusions to draw.

Which is all, I guess, another way of saying: No wonder there wasn’t more Kato.

Gillian White: On the topic of justice and moral clarity, I think Spencer hit on a great point: Marcia Clark built her case on what, in her mind, was a fair and logical outcome. But both Clark and Cochran had larger agendas, neither of which were inherently immoral. More than once the series showed that Clark’s fatal flaw in the case may have been her inability to understand that justice and fairness can mean different things to different people—and can be pursued in different ways.

To that end, I think the interplay between Chris Darden and Johnnie Cochran was incredibly important, and one of my favorite parts of the entire series. They both very clearly understood the importance of race in this moment in a much more visceral way than their colleagues could. In their final meeting after the verdict, it was abundantly clear that they’d never see eye to eye on what constitutes progress or justice. Their talk was deflating in the most perfect way. And, more generally, poor Christopher Darden. It was impossible not to cringe for him from start to finish, being pushed further and further into a trial he was reluctant to involve himself in, and then being slowly ripped apart.

To my mind, one of the shows greatest successes was its depiction of how O.J.’s largely black supporters were able to compartmentalize their personal feelings about O.J. the man from the O.J. the representative figure. Even in the earliest episodes, black families and neighbors were gathering and alternately condemning or supporting him. But the lines that were drawn weren’t ultimately about O.J. at all—they were about the larger narrative of racial inequality. Cochran’s wife, played by Keesha Sharp, helped to crystallize this idea perfectly in the penultimate episode, saying to her nervous husband, “O.J. is an imperfect vessel, but you got your message out there.” That’s abundantly clear in the juxtaposition of responses to the verdict shown in the finale. Black people celebrating, and white people aghast.

Clark’s fatal flaw in the case may have been her inability to understand that justice and fairness can mean different things to different people.

This entire trial was a moment in race relations that I remember distinctly. It had much less to do with the facts of the case than it did with the question of whether black people, especially famous, rich black people, could actually win in the justice system. That’s a pretty dark, uncomfortable question, especially framed around a murder trial, which is probably why there seemed to be the understanding that the O.J. trial wasn’t a topic to be casually discussed in mixed company.

For all the strings and story lines the series wove together, I think the non-ending ending was actually the perfect way to wrap up the issues and emotions brought up by this trial. Even for its celebrity defendant the controversial verdict wasn’t an conclusion, only a fleeting victory. Open wounds and unanswered questions abound more than 20 years later, the same problems crop up, and O.J. is once again behind bars (for now). So for me, the finale of the series felt fitting: unfinished, unsettling, and unsatisfying. For the families, it was an unfathomably painful murder trial, but for much of the nation it was about so many other things, race, policing, and questions about justice—topics that weren’t neatly going to be tied up after one lengthy trial or 10 episodes.

David Sims: The creators of American Crime Story, Larry Karaszewski and Scott Alexander, have gone on the record as saying that they wanted to tell the story from the point of view that Simpson committed the murders, and dig deep into how his acquittal could have happened. The miniseries was therefore rooted in that procedural approach, looking at every legal misstep and aggressive courtroom tactic and unpredictable public reverberation. So it was hard to manage a satisfying ending: Once the verdict was read and O.J. was being paraded around at a party and airily chatting to his kids, this story’s lack of resolution became abundantly clear.

Cochran and Clark’s character arcs were a pile-up of sympathy and frustration, Robert Kardashian’s moral crisis felt both perfectly understandable and too little, too late, and I was strangely infuriated by Judge Ito’s cry of “You’re shitting me!” when his jury rapidly returned a verdict. His mistake, to allow cameras into his courtroom, was made early in the case, but it was palpable: It turned the Simpson trial into the months-long slog that eventually curdled in the public eye. Those jurors were as sick of the whole situation, and the ruined institution of justice they were meant to serve, as everyone else.

Ito’s mistake turned the Simpson trial into a months-long slog that eventually curdled in the public eye.

Though everyone in this cast was fantastic—Sarah Paulson, Sterling K. Brown, Courtney B. Vance, David Schwimmer, etc., I want to give special mention to Cuba Gooding Jr., who was handed an especially difficult challenge and paid it off incredibly in this finale. Gooding was never quite the right physical match for Simpson, but he did a great job essaying his bizarre, childish state of denial, which was only reinforced as he got more distance from the murders and lived in some alternate reality where he was going to hunt down Nicole’s real killer. That moment with the statue, or giving his prison guard an autograph before he got out of the slammer—it was amazing to see how celebrity reinforced that reality distortion field over and over again. When Simpson tried to put on the glove a few episodes back, he seemed just as delighted as his legal team that it didn’t fit, as if he had forgotten the details of his own crime. Gooding made that childish glee feel very real—and very chilling.

The great trick of American Crime Story was that it always had the pulpy charm of the best Ryan Murphy shows, with propulsive storytelling, preposterous twists, meaty overacting, and crazy guest stars every week. Then, every time you felt like you were having too much fun watching, Karaszewski and Alexander would remind you how sordidly real the case was, how depressing its wider implications were for dialogue on racism and sexism in America, and how little has changed in the intervening decades. American Crime Story was so much fun—until it suddenly wasn’t.

It’s Off: The End of Pfizer’s $160 Billion Allergan Merger

Updated on April 6 at 7:33 a.m. ET

Pfizer has called off its proposed $160 billion merger with Allergan, a deal that would have moved the biggest American drug maker to Ireland to reduce the company’s taxes. The decision, which came Wednesday morning, followed rules this week announced by the U.S. Treasury Department that targeted such deals, which are known as inversions.

“Pfizer approached this transaction from a position of strength and viewed the potential combination as an accelerator of existing strategies,” Ian Read, Pfizer’s chairman and CEO, said in a statement. “We remain focused on continuing to enhance the value of our innovative and established businesses.”

He added that Pfizer planned to make a decision on whether to split its

“innovative and established businesses” by no later than the end of this year.

Pfizer will pay Allergan $150 million for reimbursement of expenses associated with the now-cancelled merger.

News of the merger was first announced last November. Under the deal, New York-based Pfizer would merge with Dublin, Ireland-based Allergan, and move the U.S. drugmaker’s headquarters to Ireland, but keep its business in the United States. This transaction would have effectively lowered Pfizer’s U.S. tax bill. The entire process is known as a corporate inversion—though this particular merger was technically not one because it was structured to make it look like the smaller Dublin-based drug maker was buying Pfizer.

News of the Pfizer-Allergan merger, which would have created the world’s biggest drug manufacturer, was immediately criticized in the U.S. as unpatriotic by both Republican and Democratic presidential candidates. Indeed as my colleague Bourree Lam noted at the time: “In the morning, [the news] relayed an image of a blockbuster merger that will produce the world’s biggest pharmaceutical company. By the afternoon, the story was a grim picture of a U.S. corporation dodging taxes by seeking refuge on Irish shores.”

At the time, though, few experts thought Pfizer’s deal with Allergan would be blocked by U.S. regulators. Then came the Treasury Department’s new rules Monday, which President Obama said would help plug “one of the most insidious tax loopholes out there, fleeing the country just to get out of paying their taxes.”

Those rules made it more difficult for certain kinds of inversions—especially ones involving “serial inverters,” companies that have done this several times. Pfizer’s proposed deal with Allergan came under special scrutiny because the Dublin-based company is itself the product of several inversions. Under the new rules, many of the deal’s tax benefits were eliminated.

“While we are disappointed that the Pfizer transaction will no longer move forward,” Brent Saunders, the Allergan chief executive and president, said in a separate statement, “Allergan is poised to deliver strong, sustainable growth built on a set of powerful attributes.”

There's Still Time for a Serious Third-Party Presidential Run

How late is too late for an independent or third-party presidential run?

That question is becoming paramount as the Republican Party barrels through its primary season bitterly divided and with the chances growing that it will open its July convention without a nominee in hand. Conservatives resolutely opposed to a Donald Trump presidency have been investigating a third-party bid for weeks, hoping that if they can’t rally the party behind Ted Cruz then at least they’ll be to give the Never Trump movement an alternative not named Clinton in November. And the recent, if hardly surprising, demise of the paper-thin “loyalty pledge” that Republican candidates signed last year means that either Trump or Cruz could conceivably mount an independent campaign if they lose the GOP nomination in Cleveland.

The short answer is that no, it’s not too late for a third-party or independent run, and it might even be possible for someone as wealthy and well-known as Trump to launch a serious campaign as late as July. (Note: Serious does not necessarily mean winning.)

But for the anti-Trump forces scrambling to find a conservative alternative, time is very much running short.

The most organized Never Trump group includes Erick Erickson, the Georgia-based conservative activist and radio host, and William Kristol, the editor of the Weekly Standard. They met in Washington last month with about a dozen other supporters, and Erickson said another meeting is planned for next week. They settled on a two-track strategy of trying to deny Trump the GOP nomination while simultaneously laying the groundwork for a third-party bid if they can’t. With Trump stumbling recently and Cruz defeating him in Wisconsin, the group is, for the moment, focused more on stopping him in Cleveland. For Erickson, that means trying to rally the party around Cruz, a candidate who many members of the anti-Trump GOP establishment despise nearly as much as Trump. Yet as Erickson acknowledged in a Monday phone interview, “there is a real risk if we wait too long.”

The three main options for the anti-Trump group would be to use existing minor-party lines to field a conservative candidate, to create an entirely new party, or to back an independent candidate without a party affiliation. The consensus, Erickson said, is to use existing parties—although they might not be the same one in every state. The Libertarian Party already has a ballot line across the country, and the Constitution Party—which runs on a strict conservative platform—expects to be on as many as 25 state ballots by November. “It’s an all-of-the-above approach,” Erickson said. “If, let’s say, Candidate X is on the Constitution Party in one state and the Libertarian Party in another state, well the Electoral College members are bound to vote not for the party but for the person.”

And who might ‘Candidate X’ be? Who knows. Erickson has talked up former Texas Governor Rick Perry as a possibility, but since Perry has already endorsed Cruz, he isn’t publicly entertaining a third-party run. And given that intra-party divisions are, in part, what led to Trump’s dominance in the first place, it might be difficult to get conservatives to rally around a single alternative.  “We’ll worry about the candidate later,” Erickson told me.

That won’t be good enough for either the Libertarian or the Constitution Party, neither of which is willing to simply let disaffected Republicans walk in and take over their parties. They view the current chaos in the GOP as a nearly unprecedented opportunity to expand their reach—and as a potential threat. “We don’t want a protest candidate,” said Peter Gemma, a member of the Constitution Party’s executive committee who attended the anti-Trump meeting in D.C. “If there’s some Republican who’s in a snit because Donald Trump has got the nomination or it looks like he has the nomination, that’s a protest. We’re an independent party. We think the elephant is dead.”

“We don’t want a protest candidate.”

The Constitution Party’s nominating convention is next week in Salt Lake City, but Gemma said it was possible for individual state parties to drop their affiliation with the national party and put someone else on the ballot. At the meeting, he said he was open to working with the anti-Trump forces, but he told them that any candidate would have to commit to the party and embrace its platform, which lines up with conservative Republicans domestically but stands in opposition to an interventionist foreign policy. “Name recognition isn’t as good as the policy. You’ve got to agree with the platform,” Gemma said. “We don’t care how fancy the guy looks or how he speaks. It’s, ‘Does he understand and will he run with it? And is he committed to stay there?’”

There wasn’t much of a response. “It’s my personal view that they patted me on the head,” he said.

The Libertarian Party has more ballot lines, and it won’t pick its nominee until a Memorial Day convention in Orlando. But its chairman, Nicholas Sarwark, has a similar open-but-wary attitude to the possibility of a GOP defector. “For a change politically, we kind of hold all the cards,” he told me. “So if somebody wants to come to Orlando and try to get our nomination, they’re going to have bring their A game and come and convince delegates that they’re Libertarians, or Libertarian enough. That’s something that’s going to be up to the delegates.”

He or she would also have to compete against several candidates who have been running for months, including former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson and John McAfee, who developed the eponymous computer anti-virus program. To have a chance of winning, Sarwark said, a candidate would likely have to voice their support for marijuana legalization and opposition to the drug war and interventionist foreign policy. “It will be a hell of a fight if someone tries to hijack it,” he said of the convention.

One option that might have been available four years ago but is not now is the Americans Elect line, which won ballot access in 29 states by 2012 but failed to recruit a bipartisan ticket nominated through an online ballot. The organization shut down last year, and its founder, Peter Ackerman, actually went to court to get the ballot lines taken down so they could not be used by a candidate who ran counter to its mission. “We shut down specifically so Americans Elect was not available to anyone else,” Ackerman said.

“I wouldn’t say plenty of time, but there’s more time than the media seems to realize.”

If Cruz or another Republican toppled Trump at the GOP convention, the billionaire could still run as an independent either without a party affiliation, by running on the lines of other minor parties in different states, or by running as a write-in candidate in the 43 states that allow it. (“Trump is easy to spell,” Democratic strategist Tad Devine noted this week in USA Today.) But there’s no indication that Trump’s organization is planning for that possibility, and if he doesn’t lay the groundwork now, the best he might be able to hope for after July would be to play spoiler.

The deadline for running as an independent or new-party nominee in Texas is in May, and those for other key states like Illinois, Florida, and Michigan fall before or immediately after the Republican convention. “There’s a lot of states where you’d be helpless if you didn’t start to do anything until the convention,” said Richard Winger, the longtime editor of a newsletter called Ballot Access News. Another obstacle for Trump would be so-called “sore-loser” laws in a few states, including Texas, that forbid candidates who have appeared on the primary ballot under one party from running in the general election as an independent.

In California, leaders of the right-wing American Independent Party have already tried reaching out to Trump’s campaign about running on their ballot line if he doesn’t get the GOP nomination. But they’ve gotten no response from his national headquarters, said Markham Robinson, chairman of the party’s executive committee. “Our electorate here is, for better or worse, inclined to vote for a celebrity,” Robinson told me. Yet Trump might be reluctant to align with the American Independent Party for the same reason many others in California are: It is best known for having nominated segregationist George Wallace in 1968. “We do suffer from the difficulty of people having too long a memory,” Robinson conceded. “They think we’re still a segregationist party. And that has been obsolete for some time.”

When former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg was considering his own independent campaign, he reportedly set a March deadline for making a decision because he knew how difficult and costly it is to get on the ballot in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Aside from paying for ads and a typical campaign infrastructure, an independent candidate would likely have to spend millions of dollars to hire petitioners who can gather the tens of thousands—in some states, hundreds of thousands—of signatures needed to secure a place on the ballot.

Experts like Winger say that may have been an overly conservative timeline, especially for a billionaire like Bloomberg. Winger is fond of reminding reporters that in 1980, John Anderson didn’t declare his independent run until April 24. “He got on the ballot in all 51 jurisdictions. And the laws are better now than they were then,” Winger said. The bottom line is there is still time for a late twist to this already zany election—but not a lot. “I wouldn’t say plenty of time,” Winger said, “but there’s more time than the media seems to realize.”

After the Panama Papers: How Should Authorities React?

As the fallout from the document leak from the law firm Mossack Fonseca continues, one thing that remains murky is what meaningful reform would look like, given that many of the financial activities unveiled in the Panama Papers are entirely legal. As the journalist Glenn Greenwald has written, the leak has highlighted just how easy it is to set up identity-masking offshore companies and stay within the bounds of the law.

So governments around the world should try to make that illegal, right? That turns out to be a lofty (and likely untenable) aspiration, as there are some legitimate reasons to offshore wealth. But a powerful first step in reforming the current system would be to make these transactions visible, says Gabriel Zucman, an assistant professor in economics at the University of California Berkeley and the author of The Hidden Wealth of Nations: The Scourge of Tax Havens. Zucman’s estimate that $200 billion of tax revenue is lost annually due to tax havens has been cited in just about every article written on the Panama Papers.

“There's a continuum of tax-avoidance, tax-evasion strategies, so there are things that are clearly illegal—having tax and income and failing to report it on your tax return—and then there's a big gray area where you try to disconnect yourself from your wealth, like putting it in shell companies, trusts, and foundations,” says Zucman. He says that the legality of all this shouldn’t be the core question; rather, the focus should be on pushing for transparency in a system where taxes can be dodged so easily. “There's a whole tax-immunization industry. Whether it's legal or not, it's not really the important question,” said Zucman. “The important question is: Why's that possible for rich people to pay less taxes than the rest of us?”

The governments that should be most interested in reforms are the ones losing out the most on tax revenue, which often means the ones from countries whose elites and banks are fondest of offshoring wealth. According to the Tax Justice Network, at the top of this list are the U.S., Brazil, and Italy. Currently, there’s isn’t a global authority overseeing this matter, though the OECD has gotten countries onboard in signing an agreement to share tax information in recent years. But according to researchers, that effort has fallen short: Leonard Seabrooke and Duncan Wigan at the Copenhagen Business School found that the lack of power and resources of tax authorities to stay informed is a great hurdle—perhaps the greatest, since the whole point of a shadow company is to hide information—in regulating the offshoring system, as even the OECD’s information-sharing process is slow and bureaucratic.

As for a solution, Zucman recommends a global financial registry in which international assets can be tracked by tax authorities in different countries, as well as sanctions against financial institutions and countries that don’t comply. (This is also one of the proposals to come out of  the U.K. after the release of the Panama Papers.)

The other big problem with reform efforts is that it’s not enough for just one country to take action. The U.S. would have to be involved, but so would European and Asian countries. An international cooperative effort of this scale is not only logistically difficult, but there are incentives for many countries not to get onboard: The economies of small tax-haven countries, for example, sometimes rely on the money brought in by local companies that assist foreigners with offshoring .

In the months ahead, it will be up to tax authorities of various countries to figure out a way forward. On Monday, a spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Justice said that it would be reviewing the Panama papers to see whether there was evidence of corruption. According to Reuters, authorities in Australia, Austria, France, Sweden, and the Netherlands have announced similar investigations.“What's important is to have a comprehensive approach,” says Zucman.

Honey Maid, Moral Compass for Us All

Graham crackers take their name from Sylvester Graham, a Presbyterian minister who believed that the high-fiber cookies, strategically employed as part of a low-fat and vegetarian diet, would help to suppress devitalizing sexual appetites. The crackers were commercially launched by Nabisco under the Graham name in 1898; in 1925 the company released a new brand of the crackers, Honey Maid—so named for the honey that (while violating Graham’s original concept) gave the crackers their current, characteristic sweetness.

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Graham crackers, since then, have retained much of their original branding: They’re a family-friendly food, the stuff of after-school snacks and after-dinner S’mores, ground wheat whose neatly corrugated rectangles evoke “simpler times” and embody a vague, and vaguely fraught, ideal: “wholesomeness.”

Honey Maid has recently been paying tribute to all that historical symbolism—and redefining it under the guise of progressivism—via an ad campaign proclaiming, “This Is Wholesome.” The campaign involves a series of ad spots featuring blended families (#notbroken, the accompanying hashtag points out) and interracial families and immigrant families and families with same-sex parents—each spot, in its own way, reclaiming the notion of “wholesomeness” for a new century. And, indeed, for a new America. “No matter how things change,” one of the campaign’s taglines goes, “what makes us wholesome never will.”

A plug-in that lets you turn any page on the Internet into an ad for Honey Maid graham crackers is ridiculous, and also a perfect metaphor for the moment we’re in.

The campaign is brilliant, as advertising goes. It preserves the long history of the Honey Maid brand—now under the guidance of Mondelēz International, the multinational conglomerate that owns it—while putting that brand on the right side of history. And, as of this week, it also includes a whimsical new strain of commercial message: a plug-in called the “Wholesome Button” (available at the website wholesomize.it). Install the plug-in into your browser, go to a web page, click on the button … and, instantly, much of the text on the page is transformed into “wholesome” messages about love and acceptance and inclusivity and the current state of the American experiment.

The “Wholesome Button” did this, delightfully, to The Atlantic’s homepage:

It did this to The New York Times’:

It did this to Buzzfeed’s:

The plug-in works on any other web page, too. So if you wanted to Wholesomize, say, a white supremacist blog, you could do that. (The app ensures that all the converted links in a given page, this being #branding, will lead back to Honey Maid’s YouTube page—featuring the ads that celebrate wholesomeness of the societal, and also apparently the edible, variety.)

A plug-in that lets you turn any page on the Internet into an ad for Honey Maid graham crackers is, of course, ridiculous. It is also a totally perfect metaphor for the moment we’re in when it comes to the public’s relationship with the companies that sell us stuff. Because it’s not just Mondelēz and Honey Maid who have been defining the “wholesome” on behalf of the consumers. Many brands—or, more properly, many #brands—have been hard at work fashioning themselves not just as purveyors of products, but as arbiters of moral values. Recognizing that they’re operating during a time of great change, they’re figuring out how to sell one extremely appealing thing: a particular vision of life as it should be. A reassurance that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Honey Maid’s Internet-happifying plug-in is only the latest attempt to offer that assurance. Panera, until recently most famous for its recognition that the only thing better than broccoli cheddar soup is broccoli cheddar soup served in an enormous, hollowed-out hunk of sourdough, has recently been proclaiming that it sells  “food as it should be.” T.J. Maxx, Marshall’s, and HomeGoods, in the lead-up to 2015’s holiday season, came out with a series of spots announcing that they would be closed on Thanksgiving, “because family time comes first.” (Implicit in the ads, of course, was the message that those stores would also very much be open for business again on Black Friday.)

Ads, as cultural mediums, are extremely intimate. They carry, if they are doing their jobs correctly, profound insights about who we really are, and what we really want.

These ads, on the whole, both streamline and amplify the moral logic of the consumer economy: We are what we eat, maybe, but we definitely are what we consume. They recognize that the stuff we buy—and the food we eat, be it Panera bread bowls or Honey Maid graham crackers or whatever else—are part of a larger context, and a larger conversation. At stake is not just “food as it should be,” but life. Campbell’s, recognizing that, has recently featured soup ads (revealing hashtag: #realreallife) starring two seemingly loving fathers and their adorable toddler. Kohl’s ads from the 2015 holiday season featured an interracial, same-sex couple. Mattel recently featured a boy, for the first time, in an ad for a Barbie doll. After the decision in Obergefell v. Hodges was announced last June, brands from American Airlines to Bravo to Jell-O to Target went out of their way to celebrate the landmark ruling. (So did Oreo, which had previously come out, so to speak, with a “pride cookie.”)

This—brands functioning as arbiters of family values, participating in the culture wars, essentially, by ignoring their existence—makes sense. Ads are, as a cultural medium, extremely intimate. They base themselves, if they are doing their jobs correctly, on profound insights about who we really are, and what we really want. They make audacious but also data-driven assumptions about whom the “we” includes in the first place. Honey Maid’s video ad spots, rendered in the documentary style and washed in a digital gauze that is reminiscent of an Instagram filter, are sweet and heart-warming. They really do suggest a better, more inclusive world.

Because of all that, they’ve been for the most part extremely well-received. A new ad, which fights against Islamophobia, has been viewed on Facebook more than 700,000 times since it was launched yesterday. It has also garnered more than 500 comments, many of them echoing its highest-voted: “Love this!!! So spot on - we have way more similarities than we do differences! Great job Honey Maid.” As the writer Andrew Solomon points out in The New Yorker, “People have long suggested that the new structures of the American family are ‘unwholesome’ as a way of rationalizing intolerance. The idea of what is ‘against nature’ has been central to messages of prejudice about both interracial relationships and homosexuality.” And as Mondelēz International’s senior marketing director, Gary Osifchin, said in a statement when the campaign launched:

We recognize change is happening every day, from the way in which a family looks today to how a family interacts to the way it is portrayed in media. We at Honey Maid continue to evolve and expand our varieties to provide delicious, wholesome products so they can be a part of everyday moments of connection in a world with changing, evolving family dynamics.

What he is suggesting—what the entire “This Is Wholesome” campaign is suggesting—is that, while ads sell us stuff through stories, sure, their real power comes from their status as non-fiction. Ads, being what they are, are fundamentally cynical; the canny trick the values-oriented ads have pulled off is to sell that cynicism as precisely the thing that keeps them honest. We’ve done our research; we understand how things are, and how things should be, the brands are saying. Here, let us explain. It’s a posture that allows the ads to claim description and prescription at the same time. It’s a posture that allows Mondelēz International to build a plug-in that replaces a headline about Donald Trump with one that reads, “Set the Table for Togetherness.”

None of that posturing is strictly new, certainly. Take that famous Coke ad from 1971, recently made infamous again through Mad Men’s series finale: a group of young people, hand-holding upon a mountain, singing about the world they want to build, together. Except, of course, their vision of that world comes through a very specific mechanism. “I’d like to buy the world a Coke,” they intone, full of earnestness and idealism and ostensibly many, many swigs of carbonated sugar-water.

The sing-song-y copy of the ad, it’s worth noting, is presented, grammar-wise, in the first person, and the conditional tense. I’d like. Compare that to Honey Maid’s blithely third-person present: “This is wholesome.” (And: “Stronger bonds strengthen us all.” And: “Togetherness is powerful.”) Compare it, too, to Panera’s “food as it should be,” and to Home Goods’s “family time comes first.” In all those taglines, the subjectivity—and, indeed, the implied humility—have been shed.

These new bits of ad copy aren’t suggestions, or even exhortations; they are simple, strident declarations. Not about the products they are selling, but about the world they are selling it to—and within. Here are ads for graham crackers that, in their insistent progressivism, carry a slight whiff of Sylvester Graham’s old-school, stern paternalism. Here are ads that are convinced they know something about society and its trajectory—so much so that they will whimsically overtake any page on the sprawling Internet with headlines speaking to that knowledge. Here are ads that, unlike so many of their forebears, aren’t just selling a better you. They’re selling a better us.

Who Dodged U.S. Sanctions in Panama?

Lodged in the buzzy terabytes of the Panama Papers, which have brought down Iceland’s premier and inspired a media blackout in China, are the names of nearly three dozen individuals or companies that have been sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department.

According to documents, Mossack Fonseca, the Panamanian law firm accused of creating tax havens for celebrities and world leaders alike, also apparently helped some of its clients skirt American blacklists. Among the listed names, the BBC reports, are Kim Chol Sam, a North Korean official, and Daedong Credit Bank, a bank, both with links to North Korea’s nuclear program and its arms sales.

Also named is Rami Makhlouf, the billionaire cousin of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and John Bredenkamp, a businessman accused of being a crony of Zimbabwe’s leader, Robert Mugabe.

In some cases, Mossack Fonseca severed its relationship with the party following the enactment of U.S. sanctions. In the case of Makhlouf, the Panama Papers suggest MF “continued to front six businesses—including one company called Drex Technologies” after he was sanctioned in 2008.

Pangates International, another company listed in the Panama Papers, stands accused and blacklisted by Washington of providing fuel for Assad’s air force to carry out strikes that have killed thousands of civilians in Syria’s civil war. Mossack Fonseca was said to have represented Pangates months after it was blacklisted by the U.S. Treasury Department.

In a statement, the law firm claims it “never knowingly allowed the use of our companies by individuals having any relationship with North Korea, Zimbabwe, Syria and other countries that have been listed as sanctioned.”

Benjamin Schmidt, the managing director of the Camstoll Group, a sanctions and illicit-finance risk-advisory firm, said part of the problem with names on a sanctions list is they appear to exist in isolation.

“The leaked records out of Panama serve as a reminder that sanctioned actors are often supported by global networks and front companies,” Schmidt wrote in an email. “Banks, multinational companies, and NGOs need more information than simply names on a sanctions list to be sure they aren’t dealing with an entire web of bad actors.”

Watching the ‘Panama Papers’ News in Russia

MOSCOW—After a community of investigative journalists uncovered documents appearing to show that scores of world leaders and public officials could be engaged in money laundering, tax avoidance, and various forms of financial wrongdoing, the disclosures were splashed liberally on front pages around the world.

But in Russia, coverage was spottier.

Reporting by the International Committee of International Journalists (ICIJ) in Russia’s newspapers and online media that close associates of President Vladimir Putin hid money offshore appeared to be divided along political lines, with the clutch of liberal-minded independent outlets giving the findings generous coverage.

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Initially Russian television stations, which set the news agenda across the country’s 11 time zones, entirely skipped the so-called Panama Papers, leading instead with revelations of a doping scandal—in London.

State-run Rossia 1 and First Channel, and private stations REN-TV and NTV, failed to mention any aspect of the report in lengthy morning-news programming on April 4. Their segments led with news of a fire in Tomsk, the Syria crisis, and the migrant crisis in the European Union.

The stations meted out special attention to a doping scandal in London exposed by the Sunday Times on April 3 in which a private British doctor said he prescribed performance-enhancing drugs to 150 athletes from Britain and abroad.

Vesti TV station did mention the ICIJ report in a news story on its website in the middle of the night—but only in relation to allegations that soccer legends Lionel Messi and Michel Platini were implicated. Apart from a follow-up on Messi and Platini, Vesti next mentioned the ICIJ scandal online only after the Kremlin reacted.

Commenting on the report more than 16 hours after the news broke, Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov lashed out about “Putinophobia,” claiming the ICIJ staff comprises “many former representatives of the [U.S.] State Department, and the CIA, and other special services.”

Initially Russian TV stations, which set the news agenda across the country’s 11 time zones, entirely skipped the so-called Panama Papers.

The ICIJ investigation linked 140 leaders and public officials—including Western-backed Ukraine President Petro Poroshenko—to offshore dealings, but Peskov was quoted by Vesti as saying the attack was all about the West dealing a blow to Russia’s head of state: “Although Putin does not figure factually, and although other countries and other leaders are referred to, and so on, for us, it is of course obvious that the main target of these leaks was and remains our president, especially in the context of future parliamentary elections, and in the context of the long-term prospects.”

Once Peskov had commented, media organizations that had ignored the revelations began their coverage. They included newspapers like mass-circulation, pro-Kremlin tabloid Izvestia, which eventually gave Peskov’s comments condemning “Putinophobia” top billing. The Lifenews tabloid website adopted a similar approach.

The tone of their coverage contrasted starkly with coverage in liberal, opposition-minded outlets like radio station Ekho Moskvy, cable television station Dozhd, or investigative newspaper Novaya Gazeta. Influential business titles like Kommersant, Vedomosti, and RBK covered aspects of the allegations.

English-language broadcaster RT, formerly known as Russia Today, accused Western media of deliberately focusing on Putin and Russia despite the naming of British Prime Minister David Cameron’s father in the ICIJ report.

RT led with the sentence: “Sections of the British public have slammed their local media outlets for ignoring the fact Prime Minister David Cameron’s father was caught up in a massive data leak involving possible tax evasion.”

Cameron’s father died in 2010.

This post appears courtesy of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty .

The Complications of Creating a New Star Wars

The behind-the-scenes documentary that comes with the home release of The Force Awakens opens with a montage of actors and filmmakers in a state of confusion. “Are we allowed to talk about that?” Daisy Ridley asks an unseen interviewer asking an unknown question. Gwendoline Christie: “Am I allowed to talk about the process?” Mark Hamill: “I can’t talk about that.” J.J. Abrams: “This would be after the movie comes out?” John Boyega: “Seriously?”  Christie again, with a cackle: “And then when I do the interviews, don’t say anything?”

It’s a reminder not only of the immense secrecy that surrounded the production of the Episode VII, but also of the double consciousness involved with all aspects of Star Wars—and, to a lesser extent, many other media franchises—these days. The fact that Secrets of The Force Awakens: A Cinematic Journey was filmed before the theatrical release of The Force Awakens in order to be packaged with DVDs, Blu-Rays, and digital copies in April is not unusual, but it is a sign of the forethought involved with a movie like this. Hollywood’s booming nostalgia industry industry is a fundamentally trippy thing, where trying to recycle old film mythology into new film mythology creates a kind of self-consciousness—and a layer of mythmaking about the process itself.

The sequel to Return of the Jedi made 32 years later, the first Star Wars film to not involve George Lucas, would necessarily be a piece of movie history—and unlike some events that end up being history, its participants understood its significance the entire time. So the creation of the film can be considered a performance nearly as much as the film itself was one. In Secrets of The Force Awakens, we see footage of the private Disney shareholders meeting where Kathleen Kennedy announced she’d just hired Abrams. We also see a bit of the famous Episode VII  “table read,” the first time the cast assembled to go through the movie’s script. Two years ago, a photo of that event made for the first substantive bit of info about the movie to be publicized; released in black-and-white, it was a presumptive museum artifact from the start.

The documentary reveals that Mark Hamill emceed the table read by reciting all the non-dialog text (in the absence of Luke Skywalker having any lines). This was just one of Abrams’s many symbolic staffing decisions. The actor Peter Mayhew can’t walk very well anymore, but he’s shown professing gratitude that he got to wear the Chewbacca costume for scenes that didn’t require a spry seven-foot-tall body double from Finland. Warwick Davis, who was the Ewok Wicket in Return of the Jedi, was brought back for a bit part as a new alien. These efforts were not essential to making the movie, one imagines, but they do add a little more excitement to behind-the-scenes footage and press coverage. The same goes for unrecognizable cameos from Simon Pegg, Daniel Craig, and other celebrities. It’s casting for what’s offscreen as much as what’s on.

A good deal of the documentary demonstrates the impressive work Abrams’s crew undertook pursuing what you might call fictional verisimilitude. To recreate an R2-D2 identical to the one used in the ’70s and ’80s, Abrams’s crew hired fan hobbyists who have been building replica droids for years. To build the Millennium Falcon, they painstakingly rewatched old scenes to get every single antennae and bit of interior paneling correct (the one big update was adding springs to the toggle switches in the cockpit, at Harrison Ford’s request). Even the hologame that Finn starts up on the ship picks up exactly where the one that Chewbacca played in A New Hope left off. These efforts obviously do matter onscreen: You never doubt that these are the same locations, characters, and creatures that were in the original trilogy. But the recreation also has other effects, lending credibility and creating bonus content.

The notion of bonus content figured into The Force Awakens in more concrete ways, too. In the movie, there’s a gag about C-3PO offering to explain why he has a new red arm and no one taking him up on it. In the documentary, Abrams reveals that the backstory of that red arm will be in a comic book. This is confirmation of the sense among some viewers that certain information was withheld from the plot of the movie in part to drum up interest in tie-in video-games, novels, and comics. The lightsaber battle Finn has with a random baton-wielding stormtrooper on Takodana becomes a less inexplicable when you’re told that trooper’s backstory in a StarWars.com post. The relationship between the Republic, the Resistance, the Empire, and the First Order remains hazy to anyone who’s watched the movie one time, but not to anyone who’s read Disney’s spin-off literature.

To recreate R2-D2, Abrams hired fans who built replica droids as a hobby.

The story itself acknowledges its inherently meta aspects in a few ways, including the fact that the movie—the first since the largely maligned prequels—is entirely a search for Luke Skywalker. But a more poignant example might be Kylo Ren, the son of Han and Leia who obsesses over Darth Vader to only a slightly greater extent than many real-life Star Wars fans have. The most exciting part of the documentary is seeing the alternate designs that the art department offered up for many characters and creatures; in Kylo Ren’s case, there were helmets of varying colors and shapes, some of which didn’t so closely resemble Vader’s. Abrams opted for an option that wrapped homage and novelty into a slick package, as he did with so many other aspects of the film.

That a movie freighted with the need to be so much more than just a movie succeeded so wildly at the box office might be seen as miraculous. But it’s probably more accurately seen as inevitable. Whether the franchise is Marvel or DC comics or Star Wars, the force of a movie’s gravitational pull on viewers seems, these days, only to be increased when mass is added by history and Hollywood. The next Star Wars film, a spin-off called Rogue One, is currently in production; so too, surely, is its behind-the-scenes feature.

What Makes Panama a Tax Haven?

News reports based on an unprecedented leak of classified documents have, in very little time, dramatically exposed a secret world of the global elite, where large sums of money are quietly, anonymously, and apparently legally hidden and shuffled around with barely any governmental oversight.

The 11.5 million documents, dubbed the Panama Papers, come from Mossack Fonseca, a Panama-based law firm that handles offshore shell companies. The news organizations with access to the documents, which are not public, have reported only a small portion of their contents, and promise more in the coming days. The actions described in the reports are not necessarily illegal, but they do raise questions about the kinds of legal tax-avoidance services available to the world’s wealthy—and draw attention to Panama and other countries that allow such practices to flourish.

Panama is known as a tax haven, the name given to countries where foreign individuals and companies are taxed at very low, or even nonexistent, rates. In tax havens, international businesses operate outside of their owners’ jurisdictions—offshore—and so enjoy the financial benefits of the country where they are operated. In Panama, that means less regulation and more privacy. Panama doesn’t ask offshore companies to pay income tax on international transactions, sales tax, and other fees—only an annual franchise tax of $300 to the government, according to InSight Crime, which studies organized crime in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Offshore companies can operate anonymously. Their owners’ names and personal information are not filed with any public government registry, and remain secret. Many companies are managed by law firms, like Mossack Fonseca. They’re not required to keep records of any transactions. If the records exist, companies are not required to disclose them to foreign governments and tax agencies.

“When it comes to money laundering, we offer full service: rinse, wash, and dry,” Miguel Antonio Bernal, a Panamanian lawyer and political analyst, told Ken Silverstein, in Silverstein’s 2014 investigative story on Mossack Fonseca for Vice. “You can go to any law firm in the city, from the smallest to the biggest, and open up a shell company with no questions asked.”

Panama also promises privacy to holders of offshore bank accounts: It’s a crime for Panamanian banks to disclose any information about those clients unless they’re ordered to do so by a court, usually in cases that involve serious offenses, like terrorism or drug trafficking. In any other case, if banks talk, they can be fined up to $100,000.

Panama is one of the oldest tax havens in the Americas. In 1919, Panama, then just a 16-year-old nation, began registering foreign ships under its flag to help Standard Oil dodge American taxes and regulations, according to a report by Armando José Garcia Pires, a researcher at Norway’s Institute for Research in Economics and Business Administration. U.S. ships sailing under Panama’s flag could serve alcohol to their passengers during Prohibition. (These days, foreign ship operators can register online and pay no income taxes.) In 1927, Wall Street bankers helped Panama introduce lax incorporation laws, which allowed foreign individuals to open tax-free companies with few questions asked, explains Pires. The boom in offshore business came in the 1970s, when the country passed strict confidentiality laws. Insight Crime’s Arron Daugherty writes Panama quickly became known as a haven for criminal activity under its military dictator Manuel Noriega, who worked with Colombia’s Medellín cartel in the 1980s.

Today, Panama has more than 350,000 international business companies registered, the third-largest number in the world after Hong Kong and the British Virgin Islands, according to the Financial Secrecy Index, which ranks jurisdictions based on their offshore financial activities. In recent years, Panama has made legal and regulatory changes to address money-laundering concerns. In February, the intergovernmental Financial Action Task Force removed Panama from its so-called “grey list,” a roster of jurisdictions the intergovernmental agency considers to have inadequate anti-money laundering provisions. The agency said Panama had made “significant progress” in combating laundering, but law experts say the practice remains widespread. After the Panama Papers reports, and the promise of more revelations, the public may learn just how widespread.