CAPITALISM'S ACHILLES HEEL Dirty Money and How to

204 CAPITALISM’S ACHILLES HEEL
Strained States. Hundreds of billions in cumulative outflows undermine stability
and progress in Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Egypt, Nigeria, Angola,
Argentina, Venezuela, Indonesia, the Philippines, and many more
countries and could take a heavy toll on China and other transitional economies.
Severe Poverty. Foreshadowing Part II of this book, dirty money has an
enormously damaging impact on the poorer 80 percent of the world, taking
resources out of their countries.
Corporate Criminalization. In western countries themselves, thousands
of businesspeople participating in falsely priced transactions are placed in a
position of being, quite possibly, indictable for felony offenses. What are the
costs of criminalizing our own citizenry?
Western bankers and businesspeople anxiously seek to hold on to parts
of the dirty-money structure. Many bankers want to keep tax-evading
money flowing out of other countries into western deposits. Many corporate
executives want to keep false pricing and tax manipulation as central features
of global enterprise. Still others want you to believe that these are minor, benign
parts of the dirty-money equation. The argument is often made that it
is not our responsibility to enforce the tax laws and pricing laws of other
countries. While this is an important legal matter, it misses a much more
fundamental concern of western nations. Is it in our interest to break the tax
laws and pricing laws of other countries, and likely our own laws in the
process? When we do, we promote lawlessness in international trade and finance.
This adds our hands to the mechanisms that move dirty money
around the world. This adds our hands to the techniques that sustain drug
dealers, racketeers, human traffickers, illegal arms merchants, despots, and
tyrants. This adds our hands to the methods that worsen poverty and deprivation
and produce failed states. And, disturbing as it may be, this adds our
hands to the instruments that enable terrorists to fly planes into the World
Trade Center and the Pentagon and into the ground in Pennsylvania, and to
blow up trains in Madrid and embassies in East Africa and nightclubs in Bali
and hundreds of other atrocities around the world.
Global capitalism is not to blame for the world’s ills. But the way global
capitalism is practiced has become a contributing factor to global ills. The
hundreds of billions of dollars escaping illegally every year out of weaker