Steal+Hide+Spend=Poverty
Three obvious statements:
1)A large percentage of human problems are caused by human poverty.
2)A large percentage of human poverty is caused by human leaders stealing from the humans they lead.
3)A large percentage of this stealing is possible because the stolen money can be hidden before being spent.
(1) It’s obvious. If you are poor…like, real poor…if you are cold at night because you don’t have shelter or if you are hungry because you don’t have food….then, you my friend, have a totally fcked up cortisol/stress hormone system and are not going to be long for this life. Look at Dharavi or Kibera.
(2) This basically means that a public job like running a healthcare or legal system is turned into a private business. In other words, you, Mr. Regular Citizen, you can get your cancer treatment or a favorable judicial ruling if you pay the politician in charge of the hospital or the courts. Look at Vijay Mallya or Mobutu.
(3)This is done by lawyers, accountants, and tax avoidance trusts and shell companies in "offshore" jurisdictions like, believe it or not, Nevada and South Dakota. These American states have started to compete aggressively for the “offshore” business with places like the Caymans, Guernsey, and Malta. Look at Saytam Computers or the Luanda Leaks.
Panama Papers 2016—- Paradise Papers 2017—-Pandora Papers 2021…..The world has been entertained by three big leaks of the “offshore” world. Panama ended Sigmundur Gunnlaugsson’s gig as prime minister of Iceland and put Nawaz Sharif the former prime minister of Pakistan in jail. I can hardly wait for Hollywood to make the movies.
Wealth….like, I mean, real wealth, real big wealth….allows the people with real big wealth (who got it by hard work, inheritance, or luck…not necessarily in that order!) to be their own nation state. They can pick and choose which laws apply to them from a big worldly smorgasbord of financial “laws”.
The Channel Island of Jersey has a flat tax of 20%, but if you are really rich you can “negotiate” your own personalized rate. The tiny Cook Islands is the Garden of Eden for trusts that can’t be touched. It was Marc Rich’s go-to spot. His widow still receives money from it. Shysters have borrowed money from a bank and stuck it in a trust in this wonderland, then gone “bankrupt”-nudge nudge, you know what-eye-mean!- and screwed the bank…actually the bank’s shareholders.
These “offshore” places are a legal remnant of the British Empire and its rule of law. This empire of the past on which the sun never set, set up common law on the 25% of the earth’s land that it controlled. It is as strong as ever today, legally speaking even though the empire’s financial, military, and cultural strength has wilted. Well. Wilted may be a little strong of a word for the cultural perspective, as the Brits did give us the Beatles! And Boy George. Don’t forget Boy George.
Western liberal democratic governments seem to becoming more and more interested in the money in the “offshore”. Some have speculated that it is a full world GDP in size. The uber-wealthy’s “people” who do this “offshoring” for them are smart and secretive. Why the aforementioned governments with their monopoly on violence don’t go after these professions who tend to live in the cities of Western liberal democracies…(London, England, just to pick one at random..not!) rather than the oligarchs themselves is beyond me. Just before EU sanctions went in effect for him, Roman Abramovich’s “people” got him a Portuguese passport. And guess what? There is a rule that the EU can’t sanction its own citizens. Funny that? Eh?
One wonders if these financial wizards think that governments are just thieves and their clients have a god given right to be individually free of taxes. One wonders whether these monetary magicians steer their clients to do something philanthropic. I suppose some probably do without getting fired.
Btw, there are 80000 non profits in the USA alone, all trying to do good. And where do you think most of the funding for these USA non-profits comes from? Why, from the USA of course. And where do you think most of the money is spent? Why in the USA, of course. Now most of these philanthropists are well meaning for sure, but they want the good causes to be in the USA and the fund raisers with the ice sculptures to be in the USA. Places like Palm Beach and whatnot.
The last thing I wanna mention is Pareto’s Law. That’s where 20% of the people own 80% of the stuff. In extreme cases the top guy owns more than the second guy and everyone below him on the list, and the second guy owns more than the third guy and everyone below him on the list, and so on……….there is something very fractal (sorry, mathematics word) about this. Like. It doesn’t matter what scale you look at, it’s all the same. My guess it that when in comes to human interactions it probably is all the same above the famous Dunbar number of 150.
You might argue about whether 80/20 in Canada should be 90/10 or 99/1 in India? The latter is much more corrupt, right? Hold it. Wait. What? Remember 1998 when Mr. Chretien, our prime minister, gave the Bronfman family permission to take $2B to the Caymans?
Ah, the financial malignancy caused by laws being national and money being international. Coming to an end? I dunno.
Relentless velocity of the lip-tards can bend over backwards to lend And selectively amplify their already quite healthy money dividend. It is a guide to the weird jungle into which you will now descend, And it’s all made possible because they can steal then hide then spend!
The inspiration for this piece came from my buddy, Badminton Andy.