Where to launder your Money

The Sovereign Islands – a stone’s throw off the Australian Gold Coast – are home to a gold-plated neighbourhood. Magnificent mansions line manicured streets with romantic names like King Arthur’s Crescent, Sovereign Mile, and the like. Many have a seagoing yacht tied up at their own jetty. You get there over a bridge and through a security gate. The gate is closed to the public from dusk to dawn.

The locals call it "The Laundry". It is a haven for money gained from illegal activities. Bringing illegal money into this haven makes it legal. Its that easy. But there are others: The Americans and English still prefer the Bahamas, the Caymans, the Channel islands. The Europeans and – strangely – African dictators launder their money in Switzerland and Monaco. The oil sheiks prefer London and the Cote d’Azure. The latest arrivals - Russian mafia, Indonesian and Malaysian oligarchy and HongKong gangsters - love Australia.

If you are poor or if you actually have to work for a living, you don’t need to read on.

If you have old money, you are OK. Because old money is seen to be legal. If you have inherited it from your father – say - an African tyrant with blood on his hands, don’t worry. Non olet, money doesn’t stink. You haven’t killed anyone, you’ve only inherited the money that resulted from the killing. And, of course, you will condemn the atrocities committed by your father while enjoying his money.

But if you have new money, ie you got it from your own illegal activities (link due Sep 05), you must launder it. For this is the only way to become respectable. If you don’t, the authorities will persecute you and try to take it off you. But worse, your peers will look down on you.

So, to become respectable, you need a lawyer, a bank and an accountant.
1 - The lawyer will defend you, and also tell you what you’ve done wrong: "Money Laundering is often a crime that is ancillary to some other wrongful act, such as dealing in drugs, theft or fraud." This is just in case you didn't know. So, there you are. You shouldn’t have done it, but since it has happened, we now need to help you to keep it.
2 – Banks are helpful in that they have their own ways to launder your money - for a fee. Ring a Swiss bank – they have got plenty of experience with the Nazis - and ask for their specialist in ‘Wealth Management’. If you find that the bank isn’t helpful enough, just buy it. It will then do what you require.
3 - Finally, accountants. They will help you to cook the books. If you need to destroy files, ring those who helped Enron. Otherwise, any accountant will do – as long as you pay them generously.

Governments haven’t done anything about it until recently. Banks, accountants, real estate agents, lawyers, casinos have all lobbied against any laws dealing with money laundering. Only now are laws being considered because of "terrorist-related fund raising" . The so-called war on terror makes it possible. The funny thing is that some of these governments finance, and sell weapons to, those very terrorists – through their secret services (all three-letter outfits like KGB, CIA, etc). And to funnel this money to the intended recipients in a discreet way they need – you guessed it – money laundering.

Money to be laundered comes from gaming , arms trade, drugs , trade in women, and the like. Tax evasion, insider trading, etc are called "white collar" crimes and they are seen as "not quite so bad". The banks are lily-white as usual: They do it for the new Russian mafia , or the centuries old Hawala. The Swiss banks – for ages the ultimate authority on money laundering – are losing out to new competition.

Some $300 to $500bn is estimated to be laundered annually. In case you can’t relate to this figure: $1bn is the equivalent of 20,000 workers’ total income.

"The money screamed across the wires, its provenance fading in a maze of electronic transfers, which shifted it, hid it, broke it up into manageable wads which would be withdrawn and redeposited elsewhere, obliterating the trail."

PS: Maybe some of the laundered money could be put to a good use, for a change. For example, to improve the World.

Money ? Money !

If you don’t have it, you want it.
If you’ve got some, you want more.
If you’ve got plenty, it will start multiplying and you get more automatically.

Thats why they say "the first million is the hardest". Talking about millions, there used to be a competition among cities about who had the most millionaires. I think New York was leading the world with something like 200 millionaires per acre. Thanks to economic progress we are now on to a higher level - billionaires/acre.

If you have no money, you are nothing. Having no money is a crime. But you’re actually worse off than a criminal: Without money you get no food, housing, clothes, medical care, nor an education. If you’re lucky, you’ll get some food vouchers.

If you have money, you’ve got two problems: You need to make sure 1) that its ‘old’ money so that you belong to the money aristocracy, and 2) that it is kept safe, because the companion of greed is fear. For solutions to both issues please see my treatise on Money Laundering. If you have no money, don’t bother.

Assuming you have plenty of money, may I ask: Are you super rich, filthy rich, or are you just plain ordinary rich ? This is important for my next ponderings. In case you don’t know where you belong, here is a nice rule of thumb:
"If you can still count your money, you’re not really rich" (John D Rockefeller).

How does one get really rich ? Not from working, nor from saving. So how do you do it ? Well, you just take it from the other guy. Be a ‘Robber Baron’ .

There is only so much money to go around. If A gets more, B will have less. Simple. Put in another way: Your gain will be my loss. Conversely: If you have less, I or somebody else will have more - your money. If someone tries to talk you into a ‘Win-Win’ deal, run. He is about to shaft you.

But hang on, you say, what about those visionary entrepreneurs who ‘add value’ and ‘create wealth’ ? Sounds nice, but it’s actually a sham. But... but... you are saying.. what about Henry Phord, Macrohard Inc., the mighty Ekson company – surely they have created incredible wealth for their employees and shareholders ? Yes, they have - for their shareholders, ie themselves. The confusion – I think – comes from the famous ‘value added’ propagated by the economist clowns . I’ll have none of this nonsense. A’s gain is B’s pain. Full stop.

There was a time when people were preoccupied with love, hate, religion, or politics. Money was only a means to an end. People had dreams. Today – sadly - money is the end. It makes you narrow, single-minded, poor. All you have left is an obsession.

So, if you want to get really, seriously rich, you need to be "amoral, ruthless, pathologically selfish and utterly unburdened by qualms of conscience. You find a lot of these folks in prisons..[and].. in corporate boardrooms ...".

PS: Not much we can do about.
But we can still improve the rest of the World.

How to improve The World

The world is so full of problems and they are so big that I don’t know where to start and in the end I could resign myself to doing nothing. I could go to the pub, have a drink and cry into my empty glass.
No, thats the cheap way out. But what can we do ?

Here is my idea: If we do a few small, but measurable steps to improve things, and if we do them often enough, regularly and sustained, we create a series of small changes for the better. For instance, we could make sure that a hungry child somewhere in the world gets a meal. Click Food to make this happen. Or we could reduce injustice in the world by helping to get a political prisoner released. Click Freedom to make that happen. There are many other buttons that one could press. By pressing just a few of them, we will make a small difference. Sure, its ridiculously small compared to the monumental problems around us. But, if I do it and my friends do it (all my fellow reindeer in Santa's team do it), and if you do it and your friends do it, then – together – we will make a noticeable difference.

So, lets just do it ~ ~ ~ click a few buttons.