Cory Doctorow: The Mafia hires good accountants

By Dilip -

The Mafia hires good accountants (permalink)    High-profile leaks like the Pandora Papers and financial collapses like Carillion have shone a spotlight on the role that "the professions" play in enabling international finance crimes, which include both money-laundering and the underlying (ghastly, violent) crimes that produce the money to be laundered.

For example, the Sackler family knowingly and deliberately created the opioid epidemic that has killed more than 800,000 Americans so far, and then used the best, most respectable, highest price bankruptcy lawyers in the country to secure a deal that let them keep billions and deny justice to their victims.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/23/a-bankrupt-process/#sacklers

High-priced, ultra-respectable firms of economists generate millions in billing every year ginning up plausible-seeming, opaquely complex "analyses" that monopolistic firms use to bamboozle regulators into allowing them to undertake anticompetitive mergers that destroy the real economy, communities and jobs:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/21/re-identification/#eu-antitrust

And then there are the auditors – four giant firms have gobbled up all their rivals and merged with one another, while "diversifying" into offering "consulting" services that leave them hopelessly conflicted and signing off on fraudulent books that lead to catastrophic collapses and billions in tax fraud:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/05/behavioral-v-contextual/#ge-fraud

The corruption of the audit industry is especially deadly, since auditors are meant to be the umpires of the world, providing oracular "ground truth" to claims about how companies conduct themselves and what they're making and spending:

https://onezero.medium.com/the-inevitability-of-trusted-third-parties-a51cbcffc4e2

The great finance capitals of the world, like London, are the epicenters of the enablers of global finance crime, where the great and the good have waxed fat on the massive fees they charge to post-Soviet kleptocrats who have colonized both the city and the nation's politics:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/01/collaborators-not-fools/#triple-entry-bookkeeping


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Walter Benjamin: Capitalism as Religion (1921)


Noam Chomsky: Internationalism or Extinction (Universalizing Resistance)


Society of the Spectacle / 'इमेज' - 'Image': A Poem on Deaths in the Age of Covid


Ravi Bhoothalingam: Coronavirus and the Mandate of Heaven


Gastón Gordillo: Nazi Architecture As Affective Weapon


George Monbiot - Asymmetric force: Pegasus spyware is the latest tool autocrats are using to stay in power


George Lakey on Capitalism, public health and the Nordic model


Lynn Parramore: The perverted dreams of western modernity and capitalism may be exhausting themselves


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