Crooked Crux

posted 26 Nov 2009 13:38 by Dick Pountain   [ updated 26 Nov 2009 14:16 ]

The events of the last year offer a lot of support to a popular view that all politicians, bankers, journalists and perhaps businessmen in general are crooks. No doubt this comes close to being true in some parts of the world, but for us in the developed West it's a counsel of despair that cannot survive closer inspection - if all politicians were in fact real crooks then they would never have allowed the press to disclose their petty expenses fiddles, nor rolled over so supinely once discovered. Nevertheless an article in the current New York Review of Books called "Illicit Money, Can it be Stopped?" (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/article-preview?article_id=23465) makes for deeply disturbing reading. The authors,  Eva Joly and Raymond Baker, explain how the colossal scale of money laundering, tax evasion and false commercial transactions taken together now account for over $1.5trillion annually, which would have paid for the US bank bailout, or several years of Obama's health reform plans. They describe the three main sources of these illicit money flows, which are bribery and theft; organized crime; and dodgy corporate dealings such as tax evasion and price fixing. Bribery and theft are endemic in many parts of the world, often carried out at the very highest levels of government. The largest modern example is Russia, where oligarchs have stolen between $200 and $500 billion of former state assets since the "privatisations" of the early 1990s. Organised crime includes drug production and trafficking, people smuggling, prostitution and pornography. Corporate shenanigans mainly involve tax evasion by the establishment of offshore entities through which goods are sold at false prices - a carefully structured scheme can ensure close to zero tax liability in the country of production, a hidden profit in the offshore company, and even a loss offsettable against tax in the country of final sale. What over 60% of these illicit money flows have in common is that they are disguised as international trade. To move dirty money abroad, you sell some commodity to a foreign customer at a falsely lowered price - they either give you a kick-back (agreed verbally and not invoiced) of the difference in cash, or else they are party to the false accounting, which makes the transaction almost invisible to investigation. Companies from Barclays and BAE to Enron and WorldCom have indulged in such practices, which may be quite legal given loopholes and weaknesses of international law. The Mafia buys up cover companies to use in laundering drug money by similar schemes. All such schemes depend upon pliable banking institutions, like those of Switzerland, Lichtenstein, Cayman Islands and Vanuatu to operate. The article outlines some of the legal measures that governments like the EU and US, and the World Bank could (are in some cases are) taking to tackle these scams. What interested me most though is the picture it paints of a world economy in an advanced state of decomposition being slowly picked apart by predators and scavengers. The best exposition of this state of affairs that I've read in recent years is by James K. Galbraith (son of the other J. K. Galbraith) in his 2008 book "The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too" (Free Press). He suggests that, far from dismantling the social democratic institutions of economic control established in much of the West following WW2, neoliberal ideologues who have held power - in government, corporations and banks - for much of the last 30 years merely adapted them as levers with which to loot the economy. When Peter Mandelson claimed to be "intensely relaxed about people getting rich" he was equally relaxed about appending "...by legal means".

Fat Harvest

posted 22 Nov 2009 16:45 by Dick Pountain   [ updated 9 Dec 2009 03:04 ]

 
The Guardian ran a far more macabre fat-related story (peru-gang-killing-human-fat). A Peruvian gang has been arrested for murdering people to harvest their body fat and sell it on to the cosmetic surgery industry as an anti-wrinkle treatment. Now fans of Chuck Palahniuk's "Fight Club" (and David Fincher's excellent movie of it) will recognise this as one of its more bizarre and incredible plot devices - our heroes steal waste human fat from liposuction clinics and make it into luxury toilet soap to sell in smart shops. Did the Peruvians get the idea from the movie, did the movie get it from the Peruvians? Is the story even true? The gang is supposed to have been operating in an area where the Shining Path guerillas are active, so it might just be black propaganda put out by the security forces.

I don't know, nor do I care enough to find out: the important point is that such doubts are now immediate and automatic. We're well into that epoch which Guy Debord prophesied in "Comments on the Society of the Spectacle" where fact and fiction become inextricably mixed: "With the destruction of history, contemporary events themselves retreat into a remote and fabulous realm of unverifiable stories, uncheckable statistics, unlikely explanations and untenable reasoning. For every imbecility presented by the spectacle, there are only the media’s professionals to give an answer..."

Fat in Fire

posted 22 Nov 2009 12:18 by Dick Pountain   [ updated 9 Dec 2009 03:04 ]
 
What a fuss about Kate Moss's anti-eating quote that "Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels". Knives are out, accusations fly that Moss is pandering to the "pro-anorexia" lobby, and by implication is almost a murderer. The whole furore is just one more example of the hysterical moralism that's spreading through all levels of our society: carbon footprint; paedophilia; anorexia; you name it. Witches and communists are really old hat I'm afraid.

What really interests me about this row though is a huge reversal it reveals, if you examine the quote closely. Throughout most of human history hunger has been a pain, a punishment even. Voluntarily giving up eating was the province of ascetics, mystics, martyrs and political dissidents, and it was considered as a self-chosen *harm*. Kate's dictum though is based on a utilitarian calculus - feeling skinnier than, hence superior to, the next person, feeling good about your appearance, is a *pleasure* that outweighs the pain of hunger (and maximising pleasure is definitely the goal). So long as we in the rich half of the world have more food than we can eat, narcissism and hedonism will remain our ruling ethic - but for how much longer will that be the case?   

Quantum of Dumb

It feels as though the media reporting of science hit an all-time low this week. This morning the Guardian had the following headline about the Hadron Collider restart on Friday:

• 
  

  Cern prepares to resume 'big bang'

  Particles will begin whizzing around Large Hadron Collider again on Friday following explosion

Not just one but two references to bangs, to cater for those readers who believe it's going to blow us into another dimension, and the nicely ambiguous placement of "following explosion". Last night BBC 2 showed the worst "Horizon" I've ever seen (which is the more heartbreaking since it had been getting steadily back to form over the last year). They let that "nice Alan Davies" - who'd made a fairly amusing Horizon with Marcus du Sautoy about mathematics last year - have another go, this time to explain the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. Then they chose the two most eccentric-looking physicists they could find to be his guides; filmed them in such a way as to make them look barking mad at all times; Seth Lloyd's explanation of quantum locality and Schrodinger's Cat was so inept that most viewers will have concluded it's all rubbish; and Alan Davies kept moaning all the way through to prove his credentials as a paid-up cool anti-intellectual.

It had me shouting at the screen for the first time in my life, and reinforced a growing suspicion that maybe the Copenhagen interpretation is rubbish (though not of course the phenomena that it purports to explain), merely a sop to quasi-religious idealism; that Einstein was right; and that maybe Carver Mead is the only person who's still in touch with reality (http://freespace.virgin.net/ch.thompson1/People/CarverMead.htm).