"To acquire this much wealth, one must be comfortable trading in human misery."

[Nevilledog]

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Greg Olear
@gregolear
"To acquire this much wealth, one must be comfortable trading in human misery. It’s what HR professionals call a BFOQ—bona fide occupational qualification."

My new piece up at @damemagazine:
fist holding paper dollar bills
Following the Dirty Money | Dame Magazine
To understand how America's democracy moved to the brink of collapse, we need to look at the underbelly of power—and how it’s funded.
damemagazine.com
10:12 AM · Oct 21, 2021

https://www.damemagazine.com/2021/10/20/following-the-dirty-money/

Many times in the last five years of covering Trump/Russia, I’ve been asked to provide a Theory of Everything—a one-size-fits-all explanation for why the United States teeters on the brink of tyranny, why seemingly-intelligent and wealthy people backed a mobbed-up mountebank like Trump, why Russia behaves as it does, why sketchy folks like Steve Bannon and Erik Prince and Patrick Byrne flit around doing shady shit and rarely seem to face consequences, and so on.

Let me say upfront: I cannot do this. It’s impossible. Every character in this global drama, whether Jared Kushner or Rebekah Mercer or Semion Mogilevich, is his or her own person, with motives unique to him or her. And just because individuals happen to have things in common—both members of the Federalist Society, partners at Jones Day, paramours of Maria Butina, etc.—doesn’t necessarily mean they are all in cahoots. Six people won’t agree on where to have dinner; it strains credulity to believe that a lot more than six people secretly run the world in perfect, monolithic congress.

And yet enough of the business of world-running is done in secret, by individuals of dubious origin, unelected by any government, sitting on riches of inexplicable provenance, that we would be remiss to not pull back the curtain for a gander.

Here are the things I know for certain:

1. It’s about two things: money and power. One begets the other. Both are equally important, but the latter is more difficult to quantify. The only way to so much as glimpse this ugly beast is to follow the money.

2. An unimaginably vast amount of wealth exists “offshore,” beyond the reach of the long arm of the law. Money is parked there in three ways: legitimately (to protect its seizure from corrupt governments, as with Jews safeguarding their assets in the 1930s and 40s); shadily (to avoid or evade taxation, as with uber-rich libertarians in the United States and other Western countries); and feloniously (to hide it from criminal law enforcement, as with mafiosi and corrupt officials of so-called Third World countries). As Oliver Bullough explains in his must-read Moneyland: The Inside Story of the Crooks and Kleptocrats Who Rule the World, these holdings are a combination of “the legitimately scared money mixed with the naughty tax-avoiding money… mixed with the evil looted money.”

*snip*