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Comment by skylan_q | Hacker News Reader

They're not reporting on a shift, they're announcing a shift. Special interests, more than ever, are now going to manufacture the news and release what news they want to in order to pull the strings behind the curtains. Remember that the Panama Papers weren't journalistic in any sense. US corps make the most use of these tax haven schemes in Panama, but hardly anyone in the US was implicated; Nationalists and Putin were primarily implicated.

This isn't about democratization of data and journalism, and it's not about "everyone has a press"

It's about large monied institutions using strong news brands to provide news not for enlightening people, but for their consumption so that they can continue feeding narratives that people already believe. It's not news, it's programming.

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The absence of americans is because the US does its tax fraud in Delaware, not as some sort of smear action by a rouge CIA cell.

http://www.delawareonline.com/story/news/local/2016/04/09/pa...

And Ireland. And Caymans. And Switzerland (esp Zug). And quite a few others to dodge federal taxes. The Delaware and Nevada corps are to maximize local control while dodging state taxes.

You can't make a double irish without the Netherlands!

Delaware provides a mostly sane legal environment for resolving disputes, I've in fact never gotten the impression that dodging state taxes is that big a motivation to register there (as opposed to another state with merely better tax rates), although I could well be wrong. And some states have taxes that are almost a duty to dodge, like Washington State's on gross revenue, even if you're not profitable, designed to capture money from big firms like Boeing in bad as well as good years.

That's interesting. I'll have to look into the dispute aspect of things as nobody has mentioned that before.

Here's a start without telling you anything that's really special about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delaware_Court_of_Chancery See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delaware_General_Corporation_L... for some meat on the subject.

In general, providing sane corporate governance is Deleware's unique selling proposition, and it's a big business for a very small state. I once worked for a company that in the early '90s sold that part of its government a monster Kodak ImageLink scanner (600 lb, peak scanning rate 18 inches per second at 200dpi, realistic rate 3,000 pages per hour), and the people involved in that sale said they really needed it.

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