April 18, 2019 – Former Peru President Alan García, who just shot and killed himself as police were moving to arrest him for massive corruption, ran a killer paramilitary organization during the late 80s. The US knew about it but said and did nothing. I found and declassified a document in the Reagan Library revealing this and wrote about it for the Miami Herald in 2006. García was running for president again, and the Herald held the story till after the election so it would not affect the vote. So voters would not know García had run a paramilitary organization.
For 19 years, impresario Scott Siegel has been delving into the past of American musicals to put before theater and cabaret fans the best known and hidden gems of the decades. And also presenting some of the finest performers to them. He picks a couple of years. The years 1943 and 1951 in this show were typically marked by blockbusters and some shows I never knew.
This very funny, clever, often campy satire of black life and stereotypes by Jordan Cooper hits every button, starting with a noisy evangelical church service for Brother Righttocomplain who is being interred because he was murdered by the election of First Negro President of these United States.
Truth and a bit of fantasy. A quite extraordinary play of how generations of an immigrant family create a major financial institution that starts as a southern cotton farming supply shop and ends as a multinational bank whose crash helps bring on the Great Recession of 2008.
The story is contemporary, subtle and surreal. Anne (a brilliant Isabelle Huppert), who has done nothing in life except be a mother, plays out scenarios about her husband, her son and his girlfriend. The very inventive Florian Zeller writes this not as a narrative that moves smoothly through time, but as a time-shifting, repeating replay of the same events. Under Trip Cullman‘s smart, austere direction, it vividly becomes apparent.
March 5, 2019 – This is the audio of the panel on the Browder/Magnitsky hoax that filmmaker Andrei Nekrasov, Browder tax-fraud collaborator Jamison Firestone of Firestone Duncan, and I spoke at in November 2018 in London. It was called “The Sergei Magnitsky Case: Fact vs. Fiction.” Andrei and I spoke fact, Firestone repeated Browder’s fiction!
Feb 27, 2019 – This is my radio interview today on Fault Lines with Lee Stranahan and Garland Nixon, the latest in a series blowing the whistle on convicted tax cheat and fraudster William Browder. Browder, who used offshore shells to move and launder profits on which he evaded taxes, was invited by the tax committee of the European Parliament to talk about how to combat offshore tax evasion. French member of parliament Nicolas Bay, the only truth-teller there, asked why he had gotten Andrei Nekrasov’s film The Magnitsky Act: Behind the Scenes banned from a screening at the parliament. Browder was enraged!
A satire about media ought always to be in fashion. The current revival of the film “Network” as a play works brilliantly to skewer corrupt television.
This revival of Sam Shepard‘s satire about the Hollywood movie business doesn‘t hit that mark. Maybe it worked in 1980 when it premiered, but nearly 40 years later, it‘s too over-the-top. Interesting as a piece of the times. The centerpiece is a faceoff between two brothers, one clean-cut Austin (Paul Dano) a screen writer with a mild, almost milquetoast demeanor. The other is scruffy bearded Lee (Ethan Hawke), who once made money with a pit bull in dog fights and talks in either a threat or a sneer.
Feb 19, 2019 – The European Parliament‘s tax committee a few weeks ago invited an admitted tax cheat, William Browder, and welcomed him as an honorable guy who could tell them how to solve the problem that he, evidence shows, represents. It seemed surreal.
The European Parliament created the Tax3 committee to deal with issues raised by the Panama Papers, Luxleaks, Paradise Papers and the like. And Browder, who set up his Russian investment fund on a network of offshore shell companies in Cyprus and the British Virgin Islands, including one listed in the Panama Papers, was the chief expert at the Jan 29 hearing.
Jan 22, 2019 – To Sven Giegold, German Green member of the European Parliament who heads the Greens-Left caucus on corporate, financial and offshore corruption. We met in 2003 in Porto Alegre, Brazil, when we both were founding members of the Tax Justice Network, set up to fight international tax fraud. I am concerned that the Parliamentary Assembly, a sister organization of the European Parliament where you serve, has Jan 22 adopted a major resolution to urge member countries to pass “Magnitsky Acts” of the sort the US passed in 2012 that would build higher the barrier to the Russians‘ attempt to collect on tax cheat William Browder‘s offshore tax scams.
The backdrop is a full mirror that captures the audience and, above them, a photograph of a plantation mansion. A way of subtly saying this play is also about the viewers. A piano is playing as if for a cotillion.
Jan 10, 2019 – Lies exposed on my Fault Lines interview today: Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberly Strassel’s declarations that William Browder’s accountant Sergei Magnitsky was arrested for exposing a tax fraud by Russian officials. Echoed by a US Justice Department indictment of Russian lawyer Nataliya Veselnitskaya, who defended the Russian company Prevezon, target of a political attack by the DOJ on behalf of Browder. Both claims are fabrications based on no evidence.
In Tom Stoppard‘s “Travesties, Dada artist Tristan Tzara cuts up a page of text, throws the fragments into the air, and collects them to make a new work. I had the same feeling about how Stoppard wrote “The Hard Problem.”
It‘s astonishing how the politics of Network and the reason for its success have not changed since the Paddy Chayevsky film was screened in 1976. Nearly fifty years, and the story is still based on the reality that a corrupt upper class screws the middle class and the poor to take for itself the wealth everyone else produces and give others the dregs and the shaft. While the “media” glorifies neoliberalism, theatrical “fiction” is the only mainstream place such ideas are permitted.
The Trump Tower meeting gets another intriguing layer
By Philip Bump Washington Post, Dec 20, 2018
“…..When they met, Trump Jr. didn‘t get what he was hoping for. Veselnitskaya, working from prepared notes, walked through an intricate and tangential accusation that a businessman named William Browder had allegedly committed tax fraud in the United States and Russia, as had one of Browder‘s partners, Ziff Brothers Investments, owned by Dirk, Edward and Daniel Ziff. (Notes Manafort took during the meeting and provided to investigators match the narrative above.)
Dec 9, 2018 – At a Council on Foreign Relations meeting on journalism Dec 5, I asked Stephen Engelberg, editor of ProPublica, and Brian Stelter, media reporter and anchor of CNN, why media didn’t report NBC’s killing Ken Dilanian‘s exposé of William Browder’s fake Magnitsky story.
Dec 8, 2018 – Here are videos of my talk at the Offshore Alert Conference in London Nov 13, 2018. Subject: how fraudster William Browder used a Mossack Fonseca network to organize his tax evading. Offshore Alert is a Miami-based newsletter run by journalist David Marchant. It chronicles offshore corruption. People at the 2-day event included government officials, lawyers, accountants and journalists. Video is in 3 sections. First videos talk about Browder’s offshore corruption. The last talks about NBC’s killing its reporter Ken Dilanian’s exposé of Browder’s fakery. It also includes filmmaker Andrei Nekrasov’s comments. Audio is low, so ramp it up on your computer.
This is a play about an important problem for journalism that begins with a trivial arguments over whether the bricks in a building were red or brown. Or maybe what seems like minutae are the building blocks that lead to more serious inventions. As the play by Jeremy Kareken, David Murrell, Gordon Farrell is based on a nonfiction work about a real fact-checker, Jim D‘Agata, I assume it followed its trajectory.
Bertolt Brecht‘s brilliant 1941 allegory of fascism and the rise of Hitler, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, is set in a Chicago that appears helpless to ward off gangsters. A good choice since Al Capone ran the mob for so long there in part by paying off police and politicians. In this satire, the gang is taking over the city‘s cauliflower business, strong-arming merchants into making them “partners.”
Nov 30, 2018 – This is an analysis of the worst William Browder acolyte article I have seen to date, by Marie Brenner, published by Vanity Fair, November 11, 2018. It eschews evidence and simply writes what Browder says as a stenographer would do. The full text is here. Below are the most egregious excerpts with my comments marked **. They are extensive, as the piece is replete with fakery.
Brexit, the decision of Britain to leave the European Union, is the setting for a very clever look at the corruption of politicians on all sides. There are arguments for and against doing a “hard Brexit,” meaning with no agreement with the EU. Prime Minister Masters picks members who oppose each other and lies to each. This play begins to be credible!
This stunning play, sometimes surreal, tells the story of Basra, Iraq, in 2007, from the point of view of the people who lived there, the residents and the militias. The main character, Hero (Karen Alvarado, who also directs), is a woman in search of her disappeared husband, Aqeel (Sufi Malhotra), who was a translator for the British. As counterpoint are militiamen who comment on events in an almost comic fashion.
A firetruck circles houses, watching for threats of arson. Inside one home, a lady serves red wine. Her husband comments, “You open a newspaper, another house burned down.” They are days of mistrust.
It was the coldest Thanksgiving ever in New York, in the low 20s with real feel half that. I wish I had the wool hat and wraparound earmuff concession for the marchers and balloon handlers for this year‘s Thanksgiving Day Parade.
A woman‘s body stained with blood is on the ground. The maid (a terrific Hannah McClean) in white cap, black dress and stockings, arrives with bloodied hands and apron and holding a knife. Backtrack to see how this scene developed. Author Madeline Gould and director Madelaine Moore keep you on the edge of your seat.
