"Objective" journalism and the OCCRP

There's an old folk proverb to the effect that "he who pays the piper calls the tune." There's a lot of truth in that.

Mark MacKinnon's byline appears above a story in yesterday's Globe and Mail that was passed along by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, with perhaps a little help from Bill Browder. The story attempts to link Canada's Bombardier to payments allegedly made by shady organized crime figures supposedly in Putin's orbit, a topic on which Browder regards himself the world's leading expert.

The OCCRP home page includes the logos of its sponsors; USAID, Open Society Foundations, ICFJ, and the Global Investigative Journalism Network.

USAID is the "humanitarian" arm of the US government and as such, is used as a tool to advance US interests world-wide.

Open Society Foundations is a George Soros philanthropy. Soros' "philanthropic" interests tend to overlap to a remarkable degree with the interests of the US State Department.

The International Center For Journalists is funded by US government "ngo" National Endowment for Democracy as well as Soros' Open Society Institute, among other foundations.

The Global Investigative Journalism Network gets its money from Google and the Open Society Foundations, among others.

With respect to paying the piper, I think it's rather obvious why the OCCRP fights corruption primarily where and when said corruption can be pinned on America's "adversaries," such as Russia and Venezuela.

I'm not claiming the corruption being investigated by OCCRP isn't real. What I am saying is OCCRP is first and foremost a political tool deployed against perceived enemies of the US ruling class.


That's why they'll never investigate American corruption... or Bill Browder.