Cory Doctorow: The Mafia hires good accountants
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
Can Capitalism and Democracy
Coexist?
WHITNEY WEBB: Wall Street now monetizes nature
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 Lakey on
Capitalism, public health and the Nordic model
