DIRTY LAUNDRY, NOT AN OXYMORON

     Today is laundry day. Co-incedently, I'm watching the film, The Landromat. It has nothing to do with cleaning clothes, or the people you meet at the laundromat. The film is directed by Steven Soderbergh and stars (in order of appearance), Meryl Streep, James Cromwell, Gary Oldman, Antonio Banderas, Sharon Stone, David Schwimmer, and Jeffery Wright. I name all of the principals because they either gave fantastic performances, or did those small roles well that actors tell actors hired to perform those small roles, "There are no small roles, only small actors". I salute them all. The subject, however is the thing that captured my attention (okay, I'm boring). It deals with the "Panama Papers" finance scandal which was revealed in 2016. You may be forgiven for missing that scandal, there were many shocks to decency that year. In fact, our President; the one with the fat belly, the orange wig, the jutting chin, and the abrasive personality, was joined by his family in their participation of the money manipulation that is the subject of the 1.5 million documents dredged up in that scandal.

     While the film is fascinating, and worth multiple viewings, my interest was drawn because of a synchronicity of facts stuck in my fevered mind from past reading. A law firm in Panama, named Mossack-Fonseca, was creating shell-companies for people to lower their tax liabilities. Those people are unsurprisingly, the very people who run corporations who can afford to hire tax attorneys to create those shell corporations; the very people and corporations that got most of the $1.5 trillion tax cut from a congress and presidency dominated by Republicans. The Republican Ayn Rand cultists that emerged from the Tea-party movement. All others stand back; you will be primaried. This kind of hidden finance manipulation has been going on since time immemorial. Victor Hugo once wrote something like, "all great fortunes start with great crimes". Maybe using that kind of hyperbole is misleading. There are probably very nice people with great fortunes. Learning to distinguish them from the rest is problematic. Here's what we can pretty much count on: to win on that scale means misery for a very great number of people. If we think of Antebellum plantation owners, their wealth was dependent on making many people miserable. If we go back to the time of monarchs and those who depended on them, they too, made many people miserable.

     Finance on the level of great wealth is beyond most of our imagination. We read books about this stuff. Well Liberals, anyway. Many years ago I read a book called, "Confessions of an Economic Hit-man", by John Perkins. Fresh from grad school in Economics, he goes to work for an international finance firm as a cost-accountant. His job was to move through the third world estimating the cost of public works projects. These projects were not designed to benefit the public, but to benefit the richest US families and local elites in the affected countries. Costs for these projects were designed to be more than the estimates: the ubiquitous cost over-runs. When the hapless government found itself unable to make the loan payments, what the Mafia would call "the vig", the country was forced to make business or environmental concessions to us, the good old US of A. The term of art for this is "vulture capitalism". You or I would never know of these issues, but the poor subsistence farmer, or fisherman, or other resident of Ecuador, Nicaragua, or Indonesia, any third-world country in the southern hemisphere that has something we want, would know. If the economic hit-men failed to pressure the leader into compliance, then the "jackals" were sent in (special forces). If they failed, then we would finally read about it in the business pages of the morning paper. That is when troops are sent in for one provocation or another. Panama was, not too many decades ago, notable for our troops fighting a war there. We may surmise that international finance companies were unsuccessful at ,making President Noriega compliant, who knows?

     Smedley Darlington Butler, America's only twice honored, Congressional Medal of Honor recipient, also wrote a book exposing our dirty economic laundry, back in 1935. called "War is a Racket". He was sent to Honduras by an international finance firm for a similar mission as John Perkins a generation later. Butler played a key role earlier in our history, in 1933. He was recruited by members of a secret group consisting of: an international finance company, a famous banker, an armaments maker, and others to engineer a soft take-over of the fledgling presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He went to a Senate committee to report this incident, but it remains mostly unremembered by history, though there is a book: "The Plot to 

Seize the Whitehouse", by Jules Archer.

     If you have ever been in a navigable waterway, you will see these orange markers along the shore-line. When those navigation markers line up, one above the other, the skipper of a ship, or other deep-draft vessel, can be confident that the channel is sufficiently deep.

The two books mentioned above, the film The Laundromat, and other reliable sources of information, are navigation markers of a sort. In this case, they warn us of hidden danger. We ignore them at our own peril.