Sunday, April 29, 2007
Smoking Gun
Money laundering is commonly understood in the US as a game of Caribbean hide-and-seek by major corporations evading the IRS, or by foreign drug lords looking to invest underworld revenues in aboveworld holdings. While this view is accurate as far as it goes, what it overlooks is the routine role American financial institutions like Citibank play in finding homes for these illicit funds in places such as the Caymans and Bahamas. It also neglects to consider the vast fortunes stolen from government treasuries by dictators in regions like West Africa, with the help of the American, British, and French oil companies operating there. More importantly, as author Nicholas Shaxson details in his book Poisoned Wells, these funds--laundered in London, New York, and Paris--are often used as slush funds for bribing politicians and regulators in Western countries like the three listed, and can easily drag them into supplying these oil republic dictators with armaments and other military involvement.
Lacking independent tribunals to investigate, prosecute, and try our executive branch in the US, oil booms in the Third World simultaneously fund the dismantling of our democratic institutions as well as the burgeoning poverty and instability overseas. Observing what has happened during just one administration devoted to the criminal privatization of the United States Government, it is not hard to see how the continued corrosion of financial fraud could swiftly bring down already frail institutions like the federal judiciary, as well as the Departments of Justice and State.
Lest we think this is a matter solely for international institutions like the UN, oil dictators in the Third World often operate with a gun to their head held by criminal syndicates like ExxonMobil and Chevron. Think about that next time Secretary of State Rice welcomes one of these tyrants to the White House.
Lacking independent tribunals to investigate, prosecute, and try our executive branch in the US, oil booms in the Third World simultaneously fund the dismantling of our democratic institutions as well as the burgeoning poverty and instability overseas. Observing what has happened during just one administration devoted to the criminal privatization of the United States Government, it is not hard to see how the continued corrosion of financial fraud could swiftly bring down already frail institutions like the federal judiciary, as well as the Departments of Justice and State.
Lest we think this is a matter solely for international institutions like the UN, oil dictators in the Third World often operate with a gun to their head held by criminal syndicates like ExxonMobil and Chevron. Think about that next time Secretary of State Rice welcomes one of these tyrants to the White House.
