Pirates of the Crooked Islands

 “Offshore – Stealth Wealth and the New Colonialism” by Brooke Harrington, 2024

This is a book of reporting by a sociologist inspired by C. Wright Mills who joined the world of secretive offshore finance.  After being trained as a wealth manager, Harrington played the ‘dumb’ female outsider and interviewed wealth managers, a fisherman and a debt bounty hunter, who spilled the beans.  Harrington reveals the massive and corrupt nature of ‘offshore’ and onshore money bolt-holes.  Used by billionaires, corporations and millionaires, this archipelago of finance around the world allows them to evade taxes, legal process and publicity, launder money and bribes, and ensure wealth for generations to come. She notes that cash counting machines in the British Virgin Islands broke down due to the suitcases full of banknotes they were required to count, so that tells you something about their money-laundering abilities.

Not surprisingly, these bolt-holes also include Joe Biden’s Delaware, Christie Noem’s South Dakota, Wyoming, Nevada and luxury real estate across the country.  The U.S. is now the #1 haven for hidden billions on the 2022 Financial Secrecy Index, not the Cayman Islands, the Bahamas or the British Virgin Islands. Obama rejected U.S. involvement in the Common Reporting Standards, which would have exposed the owners of many of these accounts.  The OECD and the EU Parliament have also failed to restrain these abuses so far.

Harrington is a pro-capitalist supporter of ‘free’ markets, so she is incensed that the big capitalists who use offshore accounts are getting away with financial murder.  By turns she calls this situation ‘neo-feudalism,’ ‘zombie colonialism’ and old-guard ‘imperial’ behavior, believing we are generally in a ‘post-imperial’ period. As if capitalist oligarchs and their hangers-on wouldn’t use every method for wealth preservation at their disposal!  After all, the initial wealth comes from ‘on-shore’ – from capitalist exploitation, rent and attendant criminal fraud. Off-shore is just the tail end of the profit cycle. She quotes the Libertarian Hayek on the need for rules, honesty, fairness and transparency under capital.  So she feels this is not capitalism, this is ‘theft’ and ‘cheating.’  Then she condemns these offshore havens for being a Libertarian billionaire’s dream. This only confirms she’s a sociologist, not a political economist.

At any rate, let’s see what Harrington has discovered.  The key element in the development of these hiding places is British law and former colonial ‘Commonwealth’ locations and ‘free ports,’ as nearly all of the jurisdictions were originally U.K. linked. The U.K. encouraged their involvement in banking in order to get these mostly poor locations off the British dime.  Secrecy is their main ingredient, allowing shell companies, LLC’s, corporations and individual trusts to hide their ownership, making it very difficult to prosecute the account holders. The British passed the International Business Companies act, which allowed these entities to avoid public audits or bookkeeping too.  Most of them are no-tax or low tax locations to boot, also a U.K. colonial inheritance.  The other aspect is they are based on U.K. ‘common law,’ which allows countries to permit anything not yet forbidden.  Its other benefit is that common law allows an integration of finance across the planet.  Harrington notes that after the Panama, Paradise and Pandora papers, which exposed hundreds of thousands of these underground accounts, only a few people were convicted of financial crimes. After all, what most were doing was still legal or impossible to prosecute.

Drone captures British Virgin Island from above

Harrington’s solution is to go after the ranks of wealth managers – tax advisors, private bankers, trustees - who make it possible for the rich to hide their money, and forbid them from working for tax havens.  Their organization is called the Society of Trust and Estate Practitioners. Exposure and shame is her second weapon. Some jurisdictions have tried this but it hasn’t put a real crimp in the system. She maintains that the 2008 collapse was caused by the failure of 2 hedge funds in the Caymans, so there is also a crisis danger within hidden, unregulated investment hordes. 

In 2022 economists’ estimated that $12T in household wealth was held in these secret accounts across the world.  It is estimated that $110B is lost in taxes per year, and another $500B taxes lost from corporations per year.  21% of rich U.S. citizen’s income goes unreported.  A list of the places that do business outside the U.S. are Nevis, Cyprus, the Cook Islands, the Caymans, Singapore, Mauritius, Hong Kong, Bermuda, Panama, Monaco, Jersey Island, British Virgin Islands, Luxembourg, Switzerland, the Bahamas, Malta and Gibraltar.  She mostly mentions right-wing billionaires using these lock-boxes – Russian capitalists, Nigerian dictators, Robert Mercer, Oleg Deripaska, Putin himself, Peter Thiel, Queen Elizabeth – some using the cash to fund right-wing candidates like Trump and LePen.  

Due to the lack of tax receipts in these cash-holes by the international monied set, the consequence is that the locals pay the taxes. The second thing that happens is that local democracy is thwarted in the interests of the holders of these secret accounts, resulting in a ‘captured state.’  The third thing that happens is that local crime actually increases due to the government-backed impunity of the rich. Rising inequality across the world is the fourth impact, as it solidifies generations of wealth through ‘perpetual trusts’ which live off of rent and investment income far into the future. This is something even Piketty did not – or could not - include in his books. Harrington especially investigates the social situations in the Cook Islands (‘Crook’ Islands christened by some), Mauritius, Panama and the British Virgin Islands to show how being a finance haven has affected the poverty and powerlessness of the locals and indigenous. Harrington calls this an extension of the ‘resource curse’ – it is the ‘finance curse.’  As part of this whistle-blowers, journalists and investigators have been intimidated, jailed, deported or in a case in Gibraltar, done away with.

Colonial theory might allow one to cheer on the looting of the metropolises by these tiny countries, but the benefits go to an international capitalist elite, not to the local working-class, farmers or small shop keepers.  This ‘revenge of the colonized’ is bogus. So what is the real solution?  Clearly the majority of capitalist politicians in hock to their owners will not put a significant dent in international rules around secrecy, money-laundering, estate perpetuity, tax avoidance or legal impunity.  The present capitalist legal system does not function on an international scale, though their economic system does.  So there is a contradiction here.  The capitalist nation-state is still their main operative political and legal vehicle and it is not possible that capital can escape that situation.  The nation-state has to be transcended by the international working-classes in practice, through political power on the local, then national, then international level, with the U.S. being one battleground. In these local jurisdictions some livelihoods are based on secret banking, so that will be a battle there too.  Harrington’s micro-reformist solution cannot grasp the width of the problem.  Blocking wealth advisors might help, but that will force part of the profession underground, as there is still ‘money to be made.’ 

Prior blogspot reviews on this issue, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms:  “The Wealth Hoarders,” “Ozark,” “Capital in the 21^st Century” (Piketty); “Yesterday’s Man,” “Life Under the Jolly Roger” (Kuhn); “Black Sails,” “Trade Wars are Class Wars.”

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog / October 13, 2024

Afro-Pessimist Art?

 “Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated)

This is an art show at the Weisman Museum on the U of Minnesota campus that consists of 15 large-scale prints made by artist Kara Walker. The method is to silkscreen dark, contorted and clichéd figures over the original woodcut prints done by Harper’s Magazine.  Walker has created ‘annotated’ contrasting pieces trying to make a point about the racism of the Union armies for the most part, at least according to the texts accompanying the works. It is difficult to understand the what the picture is about without the text.

Kara Walker - 'Exodus of Confederates from Atlanta'

Along with them are original reproductions of works by Winslow Homer, who depicted the war in painstaking detail through precise black and white drawings of Union and some Confederate soldiers in battle and behind the lines.

The printed descriptions next to the works are Afro-pessimist, intentionally ignoring the key thrust of the Civil War.  Were there northern soldiers who were racist?  Were there depredations of escaping slaves?  Did some profit off cotton trading?  All yes.  What it ignores are the 186,097 black men in the Union army.  What it ignores is the Emancipation Proclamation.  What it ignores is ’40 acres and a mule’ promulgated by Sherman, African-American leaders and abolitionist generals in Savannah.  What it ignores is the key role freedmen and women played in helping Union armies behind the lines, bolstering the war effort.  What it ignores is the steady stream of escaping slaves that went to Union lines or followed the armies.  What it ignores is the ‘white’ soldiers and ‘black’ soldiers who, in practice, smashed slavery, and were injured or died for it.  The absence of context undermines this artistic critique and makes it ring false. 

The Text

The text accompanying the prints makes incorrect or misleading statements about the War.

*One text alleged that union officers “re-enslaved” escaping freedmen.  It thinks the word ‘contraband’ means this.  This purposely misunderstands the term ‘contraband’ – an early legal formulation that allowed Union armies not to return slaves to plantation owners.

*Sherman’s March to the Sea is described as ‘infamous’ – sounding like a Confederate description.

*Union armies in Louisiana seized already picked cotton and sold it in order to fund the war effort.  The text implies that this was just the continuation of slavery.

*The text claims that many African-American women were raped by Union soldiers.  No citations, of course.  Sherman, for instance, made it a point to heavily punish any soldier who raped anyone.  That was U.S. military policy across the board.

*The text highlights several Southern cities that caught fire or were burned… echoing Lost Cause grievances.

*The text maintains there is one ‘dominant’ narrative about the Civil War.  Actually there are two main narratives – one of which contends the Confederacy was a fight for states’ rights, not for slavery.

The impact of the text is something a neo-Confederate might cradle to his heart. This is odd considering the artist is an anti-racist and should appreciate context. Her point is to illustrate the added effects the war had on African Americans.  The text was probably prepared by either the New Britain Museum of American Art or The Museum Box, who originated the show.  There is no attribution as to who wrote the text, though it could also have been Walker.  Ameriprise Financial was one of the sponsors of the show, along with the HRK Foundation and the KHR McNeely Family Fund. This show continues until December 29, 2024.

The Weisman has other art, including left-wing works by the WPA, several pictures by modernist Marsden Hartley, the weird sound-hotel installation and some by other African-American artists.  An outstanding series is one of paintings of missing parents, children, wives and husbands sold into slavery, based on ads in St. Paul’s “The Appeal’ looking for them after the end of the Civil War.  The Weisman is free and open Wednesday-Sunday.  Its flying silver exterior was designed by Frank Ghery and it’s on the East Bank of the Mississippi River on Washington Avenue. 

Prior blogspot reviews, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms:  “Civil War,” “Art Museum,” “Sherman.”

The Cultural Marxist / October 10, 2024

Martial Law

 “The Prophet Song” by Paul Lynch, 2023

This is a fiction story about martial law in Ireland, mostly in Dublin.  It’s not exactly political, as there is no identified class behind the crack-down on unions, draft objectors, disloyal employees and protesters.  There are evidently right-wing ‘Party’ men from the National Alliance who have taken over the government and the Oireachtas Eireann (the parliament) lock, stock and gun barrel.  There is no other organized forces evident except a large teacher’s union, which is quickly cowed. The Irish courts, the schools, the secret police, the media, the military, the corporations – all march to the National Alliance Party’s jail-house drummer. But a vague insurrection is happening as a response, led by southern rebels coming closer to Dublin.   

At the center is a family story, of course, of a mother, Eilish, trying to hold together her 4 children, elderly father and husband in the middle of this evolving whirlpool.  It is similar to many movies about middle-class suburbanites whose whole world disintegrates after a disaster, a plague, a war, a monster, a murder.  She loses her Ph.D biology job and passport, she is shunned at the butcher, there are food and power shortages, police and military road blocks and curfews, thugs attack her car and house, her union husband is disappeared and her 17- year old son joins the resistance.  All the while she keeps thinking ‘all this will pass.’ Her addled, elderly father actually understands what is going on better than her.  She is most intent on protecting ‘normality’ and her children and there’s the rub.   

A word about the writing style.  It is almost unreadable.  There are no paragraphs but plenty of long, run-on sentences.  Dialog and description are not separated by anything so you can get lost in the text. There are attempts at lyrical passages, but their flow is disjointed and pretentious. The third person view focuses on the emotions of the mother and it’s endless. The writer poses as the brooding genius on the back cover, enjoying his Booker Prize.  But the format is no match for the story as it is.  A hint of this is in the very title Prophet Song, fronted by a quote from Ecclesiastes about ‘nothing new under the sun.’ Lynch is no Dublin Joyce, so there is that too.

As a factual story about martial law, an emergency regime or a right-wing coup, the book is excellent, as it shows what happens on a developing granular, personal level. What is left of the family hides in their house while the battles edge closer until the rebels arrive, evidently victorious.  Her suburbia returns to semi-normality, like some surreal storm has passed and it’s just a matter of clean-up and bicycles.  Eilish then tells her father that the rebels are “just as bad as the regime” so the book shows her having no clue about politics whatsoever. In a sense this is the saga of an apolitical middle-class woman - an irritating viewpoint at best.  Perhaps this is the intended demographic for this book?

The government counter-attacks with bombs and shelling of the city while the rebels pull back.  Eilish has chosen not to escape to Toronto, Canada where her sister lives with the rest of her family by using forged passports, as she is still expecting her husband and son to return.  That is her mistake. The two sides split the city and even their home is no longer safe.  They live in the developing ruins, as Dublin becomes Gaza. Eventually what remains of the family become vulnerable refugees crossing the Northern Ireland / English border and the Irish Sea, as conditions outside Ireland have oddly remained the same.

Evidently the Biblical ‘prophet’s song’ is about coming death or destruction for individual humans while the world still turns.  Deep stuff, that.  A book that hides history, politics, organization, social struggle and more, it fits the profile of aesthetic and dystopian family books.  If this sounds like your cup of Irish tea, drink up.

Prior blogspot reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms:  “Ireland,” “American War” (Akkad); “Civil War” (Garland); “A Confederacy of Dunces,” “James Joyce,” “New Order / Nuevo Orden” “Democracy in Chains,” “How It Ends” (Rosenthal); “No Nobels,” “Polar Star” (MC Smith);”Parable of the Sower” (Butler). 

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog / October 7, 2024   

Death to the Turds!

 “SCUM Manifesto” by Valerie Solanas (1967); Forward by Michelle Tea; Afterword by Freddie Bauer (2013)

This milestone of anarcho-feminism, performance writing, anger and humor has been a steady seller for years.  It is a reflection of a brutalized life of a woman who was subjected to sexual and physical abuse by fathers and step-fathers and left Catholic school at 15.  She lived on the streets, became a prostitute, a lesbian and an asexual, got rejected by Andy Warhol, was incarcerated, spent time in several mental institutions and eventually died of drug addiction complications.  Earlier she had attended the University of Minnesota, doing graduate work in psychology!  Yeah...  Some have compared the Manifesto to Jonathan Swift's “A Modest Proposal” for its over-the-top suggestions about how to rein in male chauvinism and men themselves.

First It was a Handout

SCUM stands for 'Society for Cutting Up Men.”  It's not a real organization of course, just a state of mind.  She claimed it wasn’t her, though she attempted to kill 3 men with her semi-auto .32, including Warhol, basically over a contract dispute.  At the time she was a minor cultural celebrity in New York’s Greenwich Village – being interviewed in the Village Voice, by a local TV Talk show, given money by a publisher for her writing, penning several porn novels, performing in two Warhol films and demanding money for a script she wrote, ‘Up Your Ass,’ from Warhol.  He had lost the script and there was no other copy.  Eventually after getting out of prison after the shootings, she demanded $20K and more movie roles from Warhol, and for him to get her on Johnny Carson.  Essentially she was a failed cultural careerist, an attention-seeking individual with a unique niche she tried to exploit.  I say this to put the material foundation of her life in perspective.

You might call her a lumpen-feminist, an extreme lesbian-feminist, but she also had an anarchist side.  She called for an end to the money-work economy, full and instant automation to free women, an end to censorship, multiple work sabotage strategies, the overthrow of the government and a ‘women’s strike’ of sorts separating them from men, as men have turned the world into a ‘shitpile.’  SCUM had a criminal outlook, not a civil disobedience outlook according to her.  She especially disliked men who were in advertising, the military, corporate CEOs, ‘great’ artists, politicians, religious leaders, landlords, psychologists and so on.  The ‘feminist’ side of Solanas advocated a ‘SCUM Auxiliary’ for men who agreed with SCUM and would grovel at women’s feet.  She said that suicide centers would be established for men to kill themselves.  She advocated individual terror – to “kill all men who are not in the Men’s Auxiliary of SCUM,” using stealth and silent murder.  Remaining men after the purge would become slaves to women. Later artificial sperm banks would replace men, and only women would be born from then on, while babies and death would also eventually be abolished.    

In the SCUM Manifesto, men were boring, half-dead, sex-crazed incomplete females with ‘pussy envy.’  Yet if you think she liked women, think again.  Against the SCUM women who were “dominant, secure. self-confident, nasty, violent, selfish, independent, proud, thrill-seeking, free-wheeling, arrogant females” who were ‘cool’ and ‘groovy’ were the “Daddy’s Girls” – de-brained female assholes who were passive and insecure.  Her words, not mine.  She hated most women too. 

As is clear, every radical progressive movement also expresses morbid symptoms.  Solanas reflects in her fun-house mirror the women’s strike against war in the play Lysistrata; the right of women’s self-defense against rapists and killers; reversing Freud’s absurd idea of penis envy; anti-capitalism and women’s abused and exploited role in societies across the world.  She even parodied AA sessions.  Instead of saying, “I’m Dave and I’m an alcoholic” she would have self-criticism sessions saying “I’m a man and I am a turd.”  

Yet the real impact of this Manifesto is sadness for almost any reader. You can kinda laugh at the dark humor, but ultimately it’s more a reflection on what sexual abuse and violent trauma can do to a person, especially a young woman.  Certainly in the 1960s male chauvinism was legally well insulated and protected by capitalist society, yet the 1950s ‘male head of household’ ideology was beginning to crumble too. This Manifesto is a weird reflection of that period.

Prior reviews on this topic, use blog search box to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms:  “Marxism and Women’s Liberation,” “Feminists and Feminists,” “Fortunes of Feminism” (Fraser); “Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again,” “Marxism and the Oppression of Women” (Vogel); “Mistaken Identity,” “Really? Rape? Still?” “Three Essays by Alexandra Kollontai," “Abortion Referendum in Ireland,” “Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism” and “Red Valkyries” (both by Ghodsee); “Soviet Women – Walking the Tightrope,” “Socialist Feminism and the New Women’s Movement,” “Ireland – What’s Up?”  “Weird Conservative Feminism,” “Freedom Socialist,” “Without Apology,” "Patriarchy of the Wage" (Federici), “FGM.” 

 And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog / October 4, 2024