If you want to ban abortion…
You should have been aborted.
“Golly gee Mark, this metaverse thing sure is swell.”
Summer’s coming…
When people cannot accept the truth, they ban it.
Quick, burn that book before anyone gets any ideas!
Cops’ imaginary fears send addicts to real jail
Despite what you may have heard, cops have a relatively safe job. Cops are injured and killed with less frequency than roofers, truckers, fishermen, and pizza-delivery people. Cops are basically armed bureaucrats and their primary role is to file reports about crimes, not intervene in dangerous situations.
Now, you may have heard that cop deaths are way, way, way up over the past two years. That is actually true — cops have been slain in unprecedented numbers since the pandemic began. Nearly all those deaths are the result of catching covid. Naturally, police unions (which are not actually unions) are fighting tooth-and-nail against vaccine and mask requirements for cops.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/12/us/police-covid-vaccines.html
(You’ve heard of “suicide by cop?” This is “suicide by cop union.”)
The rhetoric about the dangerous life of a cop doesn’t merely serve to make cops feel romantic about their form-filling and rule-enforcing. It’s the foundation of the narrative that makes it okay for police officers to murder people suspected of minor crimes using overwhelming, unjustifiable force: that force is hand-waved away as the inevitable result of the daily terror of being a cop on the mean, mean streets.
The latest mutation of this mean-streets story is the nonsensical claims that police officers are in daily risk of dying because they might be touched by someone experiencing a fentanyl overdose, and, in so doing, absorb a fatal dose of fentanyl through their fingertips.
This isn’t a thing. There’s a reason fentanyl users snort it and inject it, rather than rubbing it between their fingers.
It’s not a thing when the Sacramento Bee reports it:
https://www.sacbee.com/news/california/article253325223.html
It’s not a thing when CNN reports it:
https://www.cnn.com/2017/05/16/health/police-fentanyl-overdose-trnd/index.html
Now, looking at these reports, it seems that some cops actually believe they have been poisoned (either that or they’re putting on quite a show). That doesn’t make it real. History is full of extraordinary popular delusions, imaginary diseases spread by social contagion.
The delusional belief in fentanyl overdose by contact high doesn’t just hurt impressionable cops who scare themselves into flopping around on the ground, moaning. That’s because those same cops then go on to charge people who experience fentanyl overdose with assaulting an officer by means of their imaginary Opiod Death-Touch.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/police-overdosing-touching-fentanyl-experts-152505198.html
These additional charges are adding years to the sentences of people experiencing addiction or just those guilty of simple possession. This despite the fact that the DEA has revised its guidance and now admits that there’s no serious risk of fentanyl skin absorbtion:
The myth is all-pervasive in cop circles and has spread to other first responders, with many now hesitating to resuscitate people in overdose. 80% of NYC first responders now believe in skin-penetrating fentanyl:
As Tim Cushing writes for Techdirt, this delusion is so strong because “courts and lawmakers cut cops all sorts of slack under the assumption that cops should be given every opportunity to be wrong.”
It’s true that cops experience some danger on the job — just not as much as the pizza-delivery person who dropped off your pepperoni pie yesterday.
Image:
Zack Middleton (modified)
CC BY-SA 2.0
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/
its of utmost importance you have sound on while watching this
Can I pet your dog?
The once and future mass-resignation and what it means for working people
Once upon a time, a terrible disease swept the lands, prompting a great wave of resignations as low-waged workers walked off the job, rejecting offers of pay raises that would have been unthinkably lavish just a few years earlier. Their bosses went nuts.
The former employers of these workers slammed them as lazy and greedy, and called upon their fellow bougies to take up “unskilled” labor and scab those proles back into the workplace. When that didn’t work, they passed laws that banned desperate bosses from bidding up wages. That didn’t work either, so new crimes were put on the books that made it easier to slam unemployed people in notoriously cruel prisons. That failed, too, prompting cuts to the already grossly inadequate welfare system, trying to starve workers back into their jobs.
That also failed. In the end, the situation led to a mass redistribution of wealth and a period of unheralded pluralism and opportunity for workers whose families had been stuck in low-waged, dead-end work for generations.
This isn’t a covid story. It’s the story of the post-Black Death labor markets in England, where desperate noblemen passed the country’s first labor law, the 1349 Ordinance of Labourers. Chroniclers of the day urged “knights and churchmen” to get into the fields and shame their social inferiors back into harness.
https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/seth/ordinance-labourers.asp
This threat didn’t get the peasants back into the fields, so the law threatened out-of-work people with prison, capped wages at pre-Black Death levels, and banned begging at funerals (“practically the only form of social welfare available”).
The failure to force workers back into the fields left landholders unable to profit from their lands, prompting sell-offs that created the middle class. Real incomes doubled. This is a pattern that follows every pandemic, according to an NBER paper that found that after every pandemic, wages shoot up and the return on capital tanks:
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w26934/w26934.pdf
I learned about all this from David Dayen’s brilliant longread for The American Prospect, “The Great Escape,” featuring the voices of workers who have — or are thinking of — walking off the job.
https://prospect.org/labor/great-escape-why-workers-quitting-pandemic-trauma/
As Dayen points out, the great resignation includes workers in all kinds of jobs, not just low-waged ones, but resignations are concentrated at the bottom of the wage-scale. It’s not hard to see why: Dayen recounts the stories of workers in national chains that were bought out by private equity looters whose much-vaunted “efficiencies” boil down to slashing wages and imposing cruel and dangerous conditions on workers.
There’s Caroline Potts of Murfreesboro, TN, who loves dogs and was excited to get at job as a groomer at Petsmart. It seemed like a dream-job, but Potts learned she was expected to meet impossible quotas, working at a rate made the experience traumatic for dogs. She also learned that Petsmart management was only paying lip-service to its policy of excluding dogs with seizure disorders or problems with stressful environments. She worried that she was going to preside over the death of one of these dogs. To make things worse, her customers were routinely abusive to her and her employer did nothing to shield her from their bad conduct.
Potts was locked into a two-year noncompete contract and was only able to quit for a rival company by begging her manager to release her from it. Needless to say, many workers in noncompetes won’t be so lucky — and fast-food restaurants lead the nation in the use of noncompete agreements.
Zella Roberts worked in fast food — she was a Sonic carhop in Asheville, NC. When Sonic got scooped up by Roark Capital, the new owners switched to exclusive app- and credit-card-based ordering, with no facility to tip employees. But Roberts was being paid $5/hr, a “tipped minimum wage” premised on the worker being able to make up the difference from tips. It’s illegal to pay tipped minimum wage to workers who can’t collect tips, but that didn’t stop Sonic.
It’s not just fast-food and pets. Ed Gadomski was a 32-year veteran of the IT department in CT’s Waterbury Hospital. When Leonard Green & Partners bought the hospital, they laid him off and then offered him his old job at $13.46/h, a third of his former wage, with no pension or health-care (at a hospital!).
Predictably, regular large-business abuses are sinking to the level of private equity. Reina Abrahamson of Salem, OR was a Wells Fargo customer rep working from home. She was put on minimum salary for six months while Wells processed a request to supply her with a 100 foot Ethernet cable that would reach from her home router to her computer (she supplemented her wages driving for Doordash).
Amazon is a leader in labor abuses. At Stephanie Haynes’s job at an Amazon warehouse in Joliet, IL, she was given tasks that were literally impossible to perform while maintaining six feet of social distance — like lifting a pallet with a co-worker. Haynes lost her fiance to covid and decided it wasn’t worth risking her own life to help Jeff Bezos grow his fortune, so she walked off the job from March to July 2020.
We know only a fraction of what goes on at Amazon warehouses, and that’s by design. Monica Moody was fired from her Amazon warehouse in Charlotte, NC for talking to the press about her labor conditions.
The “essential workers” of the pandemic died in droves — a study found that the highest covid mortality among working-aged people was among cooks, warehouse workers, construction workers, bakers, etc:
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.21.21250266v1.full.pdf
Dayen writes that as intolerable and dangerous as these workers’ jobs were during lockdown, they got worse afterward, when stir-crazy, traumatized, short-tempered customers showed up to scream at them and even assault them as they tried to enforce masking rules and vaccine requirements for entry.
No wonder workers are quitting. But they’re not just quitting — they’re also striking, with or without a union. America has experienced a vast, wildly under-reported wave of wildcat strikes. Take the Jack in the Box franchise in Sacramento where un-unionized workers struck twice. As Leticia Reyes — a worker who took part in both strikes — tells it, the first strike was prompted by management’s refusal to fix the AC during a 109’ heat wave. “The first time, she wouldn’t listen to us, she ignored us. The second time, she told us it wasn’t high temperatures, it was us workers going through menopause.”
The workers got the AC fixed…and their manager got fired. And then the workers struck again, in protest of wage theft (they weren’t getting their mandatory paid breaks and overtime). The owner and his cronies crossed the picket line and tried to do the workers’ jobs…and couldn’t. After three days, management caved.
Says Reyes: “I am no longer scared to speak up. Big companies need us as workers and we should not be afraid to speak up.”
Practically the only place you’ll learn about stories like this one is in Payday Report (“Covering Labor in News Deserts”), a crowdfunded site that has chronicled 1,600 walkouts throughout the pandemic:
Viral phenomena like #QuitMyJob and photos of handwritten “We all quit” signs hint at the true scale of the great resignation, and they inspire others to do the same. There’s good indications that employers are finally responding with better pay, benefits and conditions, but there’s no reason to think they’ve had a true change of heart. If the labor market changes, they’ll claw back those gains in a heartbeat.
But as with the 14th century post-plague labor markets, our workforce’s unwillingness to go back has proved remarkably sturdy. For example, red states that canceled covid relief early in a bid to starve workers back into dangerous, degrading, underpaid jobs are experiencing the same shortages of low-waged workers as blue states where benefits continued without interruption. Part of that might be due to a genuine worker shortage — 2m workers took early retirement during the pandemic, and a legacy of Trump’s ethnic cleansing policy has starved many sectors of precarious and desperate workers.
Cementing these gains over the long term will require institutional shifts: the threshold for a wildcat strike is very high, but labor action gets easier as labor gets organized. New unions are popping up across the country, and existing unions are finding unsuspected reserves of militancy. 1.3m Teamsters have new leaders who are committed to organizing grocery stores and Amazon warehouses:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/19/hoffa-jr-defeated/#teamsters-for-a-democratic-union
And striking nurses and Teamsters, and workers at factories from Kellogg’s to John Deere, are pushing to eliminate the disastrous “two-tier” contracts that destroy union solidarity, rendering unions toothless:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/25/strikesgiving/#shed-a-tier
Companies that seemed immune to unionization, from Amazon to Dollar General to Starbucks, are now fighting pitched battles against their workers using tactics that grow thinner and less credible by the day, as John Oliver documents with characteristic scathing hilarity:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gk8dUXRpoy8
Provisions in the Build Back Better bill don’t go as far as the PRO Act, but they will still add to the union movement’s tailwind.
But it’s workers, not law, who ultimately control the outcome. I’ll give the last word to Christine Johnson, a historian at Washington U in St Louis, whose work on the Ordinance of Labourers is cited by Dayen:
“If you don’t actually change the structures of power, and you don’t actually enact some changes in the labor and social hierarchies, it’s not going to produce lasting improvement in conditions of labor.”
TLDR: strike for what you’re worth.
my naem is Shark
and in the sea
I think this may
be food for me
to see if it
will fit my throat
I test it out
I bite the boat
Here’s a bit of culture for you fuckers!
Inflation or price-gouging?
You can’t turn around these days without bumping into scary inflation talk, and with good reason: asset bubbles, supply chain shocks and energy geopolitics are on their way to wiping out most or all of the wage gains eked out by low-waged workers during the pandemic’s labor shortage.
The underlying message of this scare-talk is that we’ve been too generous with “essential workers,” by allowing them to inch a little closer to a living wage, and now it’s time to roll that back, for their own good. What’s the point of making $0.50/h more if it costs you $1/h more just to eat, sleep and breathe?
The last time this happened, finance ghouls like Larry Summers made the call to sacrifice Americans’ savings and homes to keep the finance sector fat an happy. Today, he’s a major player in the Manchin Synematic Universe, insisting that we can’t save the planet or the people who do the essential work of keeping us alive. No one should listen to anything Larry Summers says. To (mis)quote Mary McCarthy, “Every word he writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’.”
And yet, prices are going up, and people are feeling the pain. If it’s not being caused by giving essential workers a minuscule raise after 40 years of wage-stagnation, what’s really going on?
In a word: Profiteering. Giant companies are hiking prices because they know that they have a monopoly, and because they know that their customers will accept higher prices because “everyone knows we have an inflation problem.”
That’s not a conspiracy theory. Corporate execs are bragging about this stuff on their earnings calls, as Dominick Reuter and Andy Kiersz write for Insider.
Colgate-Palmolive CEO Noel Wallace: “What we are very good at is pricing. Whether it’s foreign exchange inflation or raw and packing material inflation, we have found ways over time to recover that in our margin line.”
“Good at pricing” is my new favorite euphemism for profiteering.
Unilever CFO Graeme Pitkethly: “Consumer-facing price is the last lever we normally use to manage inflation. We find that taking several small price increases is more effective than one large price jump.”
Unilever was already staggeringly profitable before the pandemic; it has increased its profits by 4–5% since.
Its archrival, Proctor and Gamble, has also figured out how to raise prices rather than taking a narrower margin, as CFO Andre Schulten puts it: “We have not seen any material reaction from consumers, so that makes us feel good about our relative position.”
Retailers are getting in on the act. Kroger CFO Gary Millerchip: “We’ve been very comfortable with our ability to pass on the increases that we’ve seen at this point, and we would expect that to continue to be the case.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-companies-bet-shoppers-will-keep-paying-higher-prices-11635067802
In other words, we don’t face higher prices because of supply shocks or labor demands — supply shocks and labor demands are the pretense that corporate America is using to hike prices.
https://www.businessinsider.com.au/big-companies-keep-bragging-to-investors-about-price-hikes-2021-11
Corporate America has a lot of room to absorb prices; across the board, the historically unprecedented fat margins these firms extracted before the crisis have grown. Two thirds of US public companies have increased their profits since 2019. 100 of the top US companies have grown their profits by 50%.
There’s a simple reason companies are able to pass these price hikes onto us: they face no competition. Most industries are dominated by five or fewer companies:
https://www.openmarketsinstitute.org/learn/monopoly-by-the-numbers
As Reuter and Kiersz write, when an industry is dominated by just a few companies, they don’t have to explicitly collude to prices — Coke and Pepsi don’t need to meet in a smoke-filled room to coordinate their price-hikes. Their C-suites are filled with people who used to work for their arch-rivals. They see each other at dinner parties and weddings and funerals. They’re executors of each others’ estates and godparents to each others’ kids.
A lot of people were horrified by the sight of all the tech leaders gathered around a table at the top of Trump Tower for a 2017 meeting and photo-op. They wanted to know why the leaders of these companies were all meeting with a racist compulsive liar and authoritarian like Trump.
Fair question, but if you want to ask a more important question, you should wonder how it is that all the tech leaders fit around a single table. Once an industry is concentrated enough that all its leaders will fit around a table, it’s inevitable that they will gather around a table, somewhere.
We treat the leaders of these concentrated industries like they’re archrivals, separated by unbridgeable gulfs. My grandmother used to say, “Does Macy’s tell Gimbal’s?” The implication being that these two bitter enemies couldn’t even exchange a polite word, much less collude on a combined commercial strategy.
But then you get Sheryl Sandberg walking out of Google’s executive row and into a top role at Facebook. If the storied rivalry between the ad-tech duopoly was real, that would be like the CEO of Perdue Farms quitting his job to run PETA. But no one batted an eye.
Or take the Disney-Fox merger. As I wrote in my July Locus column: “From their longstanding rivalry, you’d think they were the Montagues and Capulets, but if that’s so, then that means Rupert Murdoch and Bob Iger were Romeo and Juliet, star-crossed lovers whose desire for one another was so deep and sincere that they brought peace between their warring great houses.”
“Or, you know, maybe it was all bullshit.”
I know which one I believe.
Inflation scare-talk is a whip that corporations and corporate leaders use to justify falling wages, rising mortality, and the race to the bottom in public services. As Bernie Sanders said when he voted against giving the fraud-riddled, bloated US military another $778b in public money, no one talks about inflation or budget constraint when we’re talking about the Pentagon’s baby-killer budget.
https://vermontbiz.com/news/2021/november/16/sanders-statement-778-billion-defense-spending-bill
To understand the real relationship between monetary policy, fiscal policy and inflation, you need to understand where money comes from (governments spend it into existence) and what taxes do (annihilate money to create fiscal space for public programs). Modern Monetary Theory, in other words.One of the best MMT explainers is Stephanie Kelton, and she just did a superb hour-long podcast on this with Michael Moore:
https://www.michaelmoore.com/p/an-inflated-sense-of-inflation-w
The pigs have been fattened, when comes the slaughter?
The Pandora Papers
By now, you’ve likely heard about the Pandora Papers — the landmark reporting on financial secrecy havens, corruption, and the hidden wealth brought to you by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and its 140 media partners worldwide.
https://www.icij.org/investigations/pandora-papers/
This isn’t the ICIJ’s first rodeo: they’re the same consortium that brought us the Panama Papers and Paradise Papers, leaks from the world’s tax havens and the elite law and accounting firms that enable the wealthy and powerful to live by different rules from the rest of us.
Each of these leaks have been almost unimaginably large: millions of documents, the otherwise invisible paper-trail left by likewise unimaginably vast fortunes amassed by the 0.1%. The scale and scope of these secrets makes them too big for any one news org to report out.
Hence the ICIJ, a consortium of hundreds of news organizations around the world, who bring both the raw human labor-hours and the specific, regional knowledge of the oligarchs implicated in the leaks to the reporting.
The ICIJ’s earlier landmark publications dealt with gargantuan leaks — but Pandora Papers are galactic, 29,000 accounts leaked from 14 offshore firms from all over the world: Panama, Seychelles, Hong Kong, Belize, BVI, Cyprus, Switzerland, Dubai.
https://www.icij.org/investigations/pandora-papers/secrecy-brokers/
The arrangements themselves are characteristic of this kind of elite “financial planning,” which is to say they are idiotically complex, with companies in one country owning companies in another, which own companies in a third.
Each of these arrangements represents a risible fiction: a shell company is a business, a business is a person, that person resides in a file-drawer in the desk of a bank official on some distant treasure island.
10-figure assets can be owned by no one, until the instant some great beast liquidates them, whereupon these mysterious riches can be fully and incontrovertibly controlled by them, but only until the paperwork is signed, whereupon the assets disappear into mystery again.
These arrangements, complexified by their own sake by deranged lawyers and accountants, have various names. Finance regulators and their prey call this MEGO (“my eyes glaze over”). Merely reciting the schemes’ details plunges the listener into a drugged stupor.
I like Dana Claire’s version better, though: “The shield of boringness” — when a straightforwardly corrupt and unsupportable arrangement is armored by layers of pointless complexity.
Some things are hard to understand because they’re complicated — others are complicated so they’ll be hard to understand.
The ICIJ and its partners have done incredible work in trying to penetrate the shield of boringness.
Here’s their Twitter thread, summing up the headline findings:
https://twitter.com/ICIJorg/status/1444703213349969929
And the BBC’s “simple guide to the Pandora Papers leak” is quite good:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-58780561
Reading these guides will give you the top-line findings, like the fact that Andrej Babis, the Czech Republic’s billionaire president, a self-styled “populist corruption fighter” who is up for re-election, used financial secrecy vehicles to acquire a $22m French chateau.
Or that Cherie and Tony Blair avoided £312,000 in tax by buying a multi-million-pound London townhouse for Cherie’s law practice through an offshore shell company owned by an ultrawealthy Bahraini pal of Tony Blair’s.
There’s more — Putin cronies, mafia hitmen, even Shakira (!), all using these offshore secrecy vehicles to buy and sell assets around the world.
I’m not going to rehearse all the scandals here — ICIJ and its partners have done a better job of it than I ever can.
Instead, I want to explore two recurring themes in the reporting.
First, the legality of these arrangements. Over and over again, in all the media organizations’ reports on these leaks, they stress that most of these financial MEGO shenanigans are legal.
What they mean is, these ultrawealthy people and their procurers have found a way to operate by a different set of laws from you and me. As with Propublica’s IRS Files, these leaks reveal two, separate parallel legal-financial systems.
https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/15/guillotines-and-taxes/#carried-interest
There’s a public system, the one you and I send an appreciable chunk of our annual income to, as part of the cost of living in a civilized world where there is fiscal space for public spending on roads, schools, hospitals, public health, firefighting and other necessities.
Then there’s the other system, a system that operates in the shadows, a system you need millions and millions to participate in, a system that lets you pay little tax, no tax, or even negative tax — when states and countries hand working people’s money over to the 0.1%.
When these arrangements come to light, its practicioners — plutocrats, elite enablers, captured regulators — always mount the same defense: “This ultra-secret parallel legal system is perfectly legal.” They’re (usually) not lying.
The legality is the true scandal. These leaks reveal, time and again, is that we live under the conservative ideology so summarized by Frank Wilhoit, with “in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”
The beneficiaries of the secret, parallel elite legal system are its architects. The same City of London law firms and banks that sit at the center of these corrupt hairballs also lobby like hell for the creation and expansion of the secret legal system.
The Pandora Papers implicate finance ministers of Pakistan, the Netherlands, Brazil, Malta and France. Of course this corruption is legal — it’s being practiced by the people who write the laws! The King of Jordan’s bullshit is legal because he’s the fucking King of Jordan.
I’ll say it again: the legality of these scams is the true scandal. Ex-UK PM Tony Blair and his wife did something perfectly legal when they ducked hundreds of thousands in tax — they exploited a loophole that Tony Blair could have closed, but didn’t.
Blair — who transformed the Labour Party into an organisation that celebrated the “accomplishments” of billionaires — talks a lot about the evils of tax evasion, but Blair was PM for a decade. If he cared about tax evasion, he’d have closed these loopholes.
The other point to make is that “offshore” is a huge misnomer. The relationship of tiny, poor, finance-blighted tax-havens to the ultra-rich is as a kind of pinball flipper. They exist to make momentary contact with vast fortunes and then fire them off across the ocean.
The Aliyevs are brutal oligarchs who control Azerbaijan. They laundered £400m through distant tax havens, but the money landed in the United Kingdom, where they have bought up vast tracts of land — flipping some of it to the Queen of England’s Crown Estates.
The King of Jordan’s money ricochets from island to island, but it comes to rest — shrouded in secrecy — in Malibu, California, London, and Ascot, where he owns mansion upon mansion upon mansion.
The “offshore” money is firmly onshore. Just as Apple’s untaxed offshore billions were laundered into assets including US Treasury Bills, these dead-eyed monsters own huge swathes of LA, London, New York, Paris, Toronto, Vancouver…
What’s more, the enablers who wax fat by helping the corrupt navigate the secret law system are are largely at arm’s length — for example, many of the clients who fled Mossack Fonseca after the Panama Papers now own shell companies administered from the City of London.
The tax havens are increasingly onshore. Cyprus — the laundry of choice for corrupt Russian billions — isn’t a Caribbean island far from the jurisdiction of European tax investigators. It’s an EU member state, fully signed up to tax and law-enforcement treaties.
The American states are hotbeds of onshore-offshore corruption. Over and over, the Pandora Papers reference South Dakota’s role in helping the ultra-rich hide their wealth from the rest of us, enabling them to remain behind the secret legal system’s curtain.
South Dakota, in turn, is merely the current winner in the US states’ race to the bottom on enabling finance corruption. The granddaddy of corrupt state finance is Delaware, or, as Joe Biden calls it, “The corporate state of Delaware.”
https://prospect.org/power/corporate-state-of-delaware/
In many ways, Delaware is yesterday’s news — legislatures in Nevada and Wyoming have passed suites of financial-secrecy-friendly laws that make Delaware look like a model of financial transparency and corporate control — only to be surpassed by the South Dakota state house.
“Offshore” is bullshit. The call is coming from inside the house.
And the business about how this is all legal? It’s also bullshit. Yes, there are plenty of people who manage these corrupt arrangements without breaking laws, but that’s not the whole story.
Over and over, the Pandora Papers show the same procurers, banks, and structures that are used by “law abiding” plutes are also being used by literal murderers like “Lell the Fat One,” a mafia hitman, and corrupt officials who embezzle billions from government treasuries.
These systems aren’t kept secret because the people who design, operate and use them are planning to share them with us later and don’t want to ruin the surprise.
They know that they’re shady as fuck, and they know they’ve created a system whose beneficiaries include murderers and thieves. They know that the secret legal system is only legal because it’s secret.
They know it is so manifestly unjust and unfair that it could never withstand public scrutiny. The legal, offshore system of finance crimes is neither legal, nor offshore. It’s all around us, and it’s crooked as hell.
skullgrind