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posted by CoolHand on Monday October 15 2018, @05:00PM   Printer-friendly
from the the-rich-getting-richer dept.

Understanding 'Moneyland' — the offshore world of the super-rich

Many of the world's problems — from declining public services to corruption — can be explained in two words: offshore wealth. That's according to investigative journalist Oliver Bullough, who is working to unravel the intricate global web of money and power. To try and de-mystify the idea, Bullough came up with his own word: Moneyland. "I invented 'Moneyland' to try and get my own head around this problem, basically," he says.

[...] One of the greatest stumbling blocks in addressing the issues around offshore tax havens, Bullough says, is that the very term is relatively ambiguous and generally difficult to conceptualise. "'Offshore' isn't a place, it's not the British Virgin Islands or Hong Kong or whatever," he says. "'Offshore' just means not here; elsewhere. It's a legal construct that essentially means something can hide without being anywhere in particular."

To try and de-mystify the idea, Bullough came up with his own word: Moneyland. "I invented 'Moneyland' to try and get my own head around this problem, basically," he says. Moneyland — also the name of Bullough's book on the issue — makes up roughly 10 per cent of the world's wealth, he says. "If you look at its economy, it is the third biggest economy in the world after America and China, it's absolutely massive." Bullough declares London to be the likely capital of Moneyland, followed closely by New York. According to Oxfam, the top three-and-a-half dozen people in the world this year owns the same amount of stuff as the bottom 3.5 billion people in the world.

How far does the Gini curve have to bend before something snaps?


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Thexalon on Tuesday October 16 2018, @03:04PM (1 child)

    by Thexalon (636) on Tuesday October 16 2018, @03:04PM (#749549)

    generally immoral actions of the last 18 years

    You set your cutoff date too late there. Clinton, Bush, and Reagan all bear some of the blame for the current state of things:
    - Ronald Reagan was the guy who accepted wholeheartedly the idea that rich people shouldn't have to pay taxes, and more generally abandoned the idea that had been in place since the 1940's that the economic policies of the US should be aimed at promoting the general welfare of American citizens and instead went for "if it's good for rich people, that's good enough". The 1980's quickly turned into the era of financial flim-flam, culminating in the S&L crash that began rolling in 1986. This also busted the relative balanced books of the US federal budget, which was the first step in Grover Norquist's plan to make the US federal government so small it could be drowned in a bathtub. Say what you will about Gerald Ford, Richard Nixon, and Dwight Eisenhower, but none of them set as their goal as president to make the government not function properly. Other fun stuff that the Reagan administration did included selling chemical weapons to Saddam Hussein (ostensibly to be used against the Iranians, but actually used against the Kurds), and selling all kinds of other weapons to Iran (ostensibly to be used against the Iraqis) and using the proceeds to fund death squads in Central America. Also worth mentioning is his firing of striking air traffic controllers as part of an overall trend of busting unions to the point where unions lost about 1/3 of their membership.

    - George H.W. Bush continued the bad parts of Reagan's policies, and was also the guy that sent the US to war in order to protect his own personal financial interests in Saudi Arabia.

    - Bill Clinton's role was to sell out the Democratic Party and abandon their opposition to all that stuff Reagan and Bush had done in exchange for massive campaign donations from major corporations. Then he followed that up with his push for "free trade" deals, where basically multinational corporations can do whatever they want and governments have to do their bidding (as an example of this, countries have been forced under these deals to scrap cigarette warning label laws), and of course also had the side effect of completely busting most of what was left of the American unions. He basically created the model that Democrats have been following ever since: Talk about equal rights for LGBT, racial minorities, women, etc but don't actually do anything to try to enforce it. And any movement towards improvements to the economic situation of working people (a.k.a. the vast majority of the country) gets denounced as unrealistic socialism. Before Clinton came along, it was the Republicans calling the left-wing folks pinkos, after Clinton came along that was now also the view of the supposedly left-wing Democrats too.

    Everything George W Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump did were merely logical extensions of what those guys did. For instance, most of George W Bush's people were Reagan people doing what they had wanted to do back in 1990. Most of Barack Obama's people were Clinton's people, and Obama stated in an interview that the president he admired most was Reagan. And as for Trump, Trump is exactly what you get when you actually believe the rhetoric of the Reagan administration, complete with the "burn the government to the ground" mentality.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 16 2018, @06:07PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 16 2018, @06:07PM (#749622)

    Every politician in history shares some of the blame for putting us where we are. 2000 was a big tipping point when the election was stolen from Al Gore and everyone went "guess that is the system at work!" and then 2001 shot us off into cowardly and angry dystopia-land where the government took a LOT more power and no one blinked because "thoughts and prayers" and "bogeymen everywhere!"

    I stand by the last 18 years being the colossal fuckup of note. Even saint obama let this fucked up system keep rolling, I guess the simple fact is that we are a country dependent on the war machine and even the best intentioned leader will have a hard time pushing back against such momentum. Well, at least until the populace gets tired of the endless life of war.