ICIJ has published searchable databases from its major projects — including Offshore Leaks and Pandora Papers — that contain profiles of “power players” and “confidential clients” and link to original corporate records and legal filings. Many of these documents are also available on DocumentCloud, a widely used repository used by investigative centers.

Among open data tools, Cosic highlighted:

OpenCorporates, a key global company database that often gives the first overview of an oligarch’s corporate footprint.
Property and land registers, especially in jurisdictions favored by elites. Spain’s Property Cadastre, for example, allows name-based searches for a fee and helps map villas on the coast owned via offshore entities.
OCCRP’s Investigative Dashboard, which lists corporate, land, and court registries for many countries, and which is a good starting point when you do not know which authority holds a particular dataset.

She also recommended OpenSanctions, which aggregates sanctions lists from multiple jurisdictions and, crucially, all major spelling variants of sanctioned individuals’ names.

For politically exposed persons, Cosic mentioned specialized PEP databases she uses to double-check whether she has missed any companies tied to a target. And while commercial databases such as Sayari or Orbis can be costly, she urged newsrooms to negotiate temporary or discounted access, sometimes in exchange for credit in published stories.

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Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Wednesday released a study that found that artificial intelligence can already replace 11.7% of the U.S. labor market, or as much as $1.2 trillion in wages across finance, health care and professional services.

The study was conducted using a labor simulation tool called the Iceberg Index, which was created by MIT and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The index simulates how 151 million U.S. workers interact across the country and how they are affected by AI and corresponding policy.
[…]
The index treats the 151 million workers as individual agents, each tagged with skills, tasks, occupation and location. It maps more than 32,000 skills across 923 occupations in 3,000 counties, then measures where current AI systems can already perform those skills.

What the researchers found is that the visible tip of the iceberg — the layoffs and role shifts in tech, computing and information technology — represents just 2.2% of total wage exposure, or about $211 billion. Beneath the surface lies the total exposure, the $1.2 trillion in wages, and that includes routine functions in human resources, logistics, finance, and office administration. Those are areas sometimes overlooked in automation forecasts.

~ Full article…

June 1982. A powerful Italian banker tied to the Vatican is discovered hanging beneath London’s Blackfriars Bridge—pockets weighted with bricks, cash on him, and a passport under an alias. Was it suicide or an execution tied to one of Europe’s wildest finance scandals?

This video breaks down the fall of Banco Ambrosiano, the Vatican Bank’s entanglement, the secret P2 lodge, mafia allegations, and how multiple inquests shifted the “suicide” narrative toward murder—yet no one was ever convicted

~ Video…

In a 2015 interview with Yahoo News, Carpenter said that They Live is “a documentary. It’s not science-fiction.” Conceived during Reaganomics, the story examines a society obsessed with consumerism and greed. The villains are aliens from another planet and represented the Reagan Republican government and greedy bankers of the 80s.

According to Carpenter, it has only gotten worse. “It’s morphed into something really bizarre. The same problem – unrestrained capitalism – still exists. Everything is built to make a profit.”
[…]

When Nada puts on the special sunglasses, he is bombarded with subliminal messages hidden within the pages of magazines, on billboards, and in other forms of advertisement. Nothing is left to the imagination when humans are subliminally told to Consume, Obey, Buy, Conform, Stay Asleep, Do Not Question Authority, No Independent Thought, and Money is Your God!

Carpenter created They Live as a warning against greed and propaganda. While filming, Carpenter was surprised by people not noticing or paying attention to the props with subliminal messages. As if it was normal.

~ Full article…

Privatisation in Nigeria’s utilities has been a cautionary tale. Since the 2013 electricity sector reforms, tariffs have skyrocketed, blackouts persist, and jobs have dwindled – leaving millions without affordable access. Similar patterns in water and waste sectors exacerbate inequality, particularly for low-income and rural communities. The summit’s discussions revealed how these policies, often backed by global lenders, undermine worker rights and public accountability.

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The United Nations has warned that Gaza faces a “human-made abyss” and that rebuilding the territory could cost more than $70 billion over several decades, The Guardian reported. A report by the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) highlighted that Israel’s military operations have “significantly undermined every pillar of survival” for Gaza’s 2.3 million residents, leaving the population in “extreme, multidimensional impoverishment.”

UNCTAD noted that Gaza’s economy contracted by 87% between 2023 and 2024, reducing GDP per capita to just $161, among the lowest in the world. The West Bank has also suffered from economic decline, attributed to violence, settlement expansion, and restrictions on worker mobility. The report added that withholding of fiscal transfers by Israel has limited the Palestinian Authority’s ability to provide essential services or invest in recovery, at a time when urgent rebuilding and crisis response are needed.

~ Full article…

The effort appears mostly driven by national security concerns, particularly a desire for the government to prop up strategic industries and lessen America’s reliance on foreign countries like China for key resources. Some officials are hopeful the equity stakes will generate a windfall for taxpayers, but the likelihood of that is unclear. Many of the companies are facing financial headwinds, and some could take years to become profitable.

The unusual government intervention into the private market is fueling some concerns, including the opacity of the process, the potential for favoritism, corruption and market distortions, along with the possible loss of taxpayer funds should the investments fail.

Aaron Bartnick, a fellow at Columbia University and a former Biden White House official, said there were serious questions about whether the government role in private industry would address national security vulnerabilities and deliver a return on taxpayer dollars.

“In the absence of a clearly articulated strategy,” he said, the concern was that “this could just devolve to arbitrary deals that favor friends or disfavor foes.”

~ Full article…

The Whitlam government’s removal took place amid immense worldwide political instability that triggered ruling class fears of social revolution, including in Australia.

The period from 1968 to 1975 was marked by the most convulsive uprisings of the international working class since the aftermath of World War II. Not only was US imperialism facing opposition at home and internationally to its barbaric neo-colonial war in Vietnam. Workers internationally were on the offensive, demanding higher wages and better conditions.

In May-June 1968, France was convulsed by an indefinite general strike that brought the government of President Charles De Gaulle’s regime to its knees and it only survived with the assistance of the Stalinist Communist Party. In Italy, a wave of strikes erupted in what became known as the “Hot Autumn” of 1969. In 1970, the social democratic-Stalinist “Popular Unity” coalition Allende government was elected in Chile on the basis of a raft of populist promises to ameliorate social conditions.

In 1974, workers’ struggles erupted in Britain, culminating in the bringing down of the Heath Conservative government. In the same year, President Richard Nixon was forced to resign in 1974 as US imperialism and its puppet government plunged toward final defeat in Vietnam in April 1975. In Europe, military and fascist dictatorships fell one after another in Portugal, Greece and Spain from 1974 to 1976, amid mass popular opposition.

These political upheavals were fuelled by a deep crisis of the profit system internationally, as the post-World War II boom was coming to an end. The ability of US imperialism to stabilise global capitalism based on its own overwhelming economic domination and the betrayals by Stalinism of the post-war, working-class upsurge was ending. International trade and financial arrangements had been underpinned by the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement, which made the US dollar a world currency convertible to gold at the fixed rate of $35 per ounce.

In August 1971, facing inflation at home and a looming international run on gold, Nixon ended the gold backing for the US dollar, destabilising the global monetary system. That gave rise to stagflation—soaring inflation and unemployment—intensified by the quadrupling of oil prices in 1973–74 and the worst worldwide recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

~ Full article…

The great English historian, Christopher Hill, writing on the causes of the English revolution pointed out that despite the bravery of the revolutionists they were unable to overcome the monarchy’s blocking of reforms because they had a “stop in the mind” they believed in the dominant ideology of the time that the King was King by “divine right” he was God’s representative on earth. It’s hard to challenge that. But that ideology was shattered when along came Cromwell who suggested they cut off the King’s head and see what happens. The ideology was a sham and a new day was born.

~ Full article…

For the reformist left, the oxymoron of capitalist democracy could simply be ignored. Now, the reformist left felt it became part of the club; it had the illusion – as most of the so-called leftists have until today – that it could change the system from the inside, while in reality, it was the system that was changing the left.

Although neoliberalism and postmodernism are two sides of the same coin, their existential condition was the capitulation of the anti-capitalist left. Meanwhile, its new task became to provide legitimation for the system both abroad and at home.

Post-World War II has been virtually universally conceived in an anti-historical fashion. Not only the rise of fascism appeared as an anomaly, disconnected from its liberal ties, but also the so-called welfare system (or Keynesianism) was embraced acritically. It ignores its existence as a reaction to the Soviet Union’s welfare state. Moreover, without a socialist path going on, it is, in fact, a system of managing and controlling the (precarity of the) masses so that any emancipatory expectation never comes to fruition while the system is assimilated and protected by those same people being exploited.

And this connects with the second function of the Keynesian system, namely, to destroy any empathy towards the other, to reaffirm the values of capitalist egoism. While third-world countries were being plundered and those who fought against classical colonialism were demonised, capitalist welfare was sustained on the backbone of underdeveloped countries.

The reformist left therefore renders war, plunder, destruction, and exploitation as reasonable enterprises. Simultaneously, the power of the left, which was previously anchored on the people, faded; the people, conversely, lost representation because the reformists not only parroted the narratives of the status quo but distanced themselves from the masses with their irrational claims disconnected from the broad demands of the people in their daily lives.

This, in turn, resulted not only in the lack of representation of the people by the intelligentsia but even more importantly in the total de-politicisation of the masses, whose spiritual lives lost connection with the world around them. “There is no such thing as society,” as Margaret Thatcher proclaimed.

Consequently, people were not only atomised at work by the capitalist class, their power as a class, which had existed until that moment, was declared extinct. Now, there was only economic, political, and social atomisation.

~ Full article…