8 ms·

Review of Moneyland by Oliver Bullough (2018)

153 points by onemoresoop 7y ago

aritmo 7y ago
It is ironic that Britain is already close to a tax-heaven than they admit.
- sprafa 7y ago
  The Channel Islands, Gibraltar and the Isle Of Man I believe are constantly being used for the purpose of tax evasion, money laundering etc... that’s what frightens me about Brexit - I think the hard Brexiteers actually want to make this easier, not harder. I.e. I met a software guy from Sachs who told me about what he did there. Essentially he built automated software to flag “suspicious transactions”. So ie if 200 million came in from he Faroe Islands the software would flag it as “possibly” an unlawful transfer. It made sure the books were “kosher”. So I asked him Me: oh ok, so then the software blocked those transactions? Him: no. Me: Well did it flag them so they would investigate it? Him: no. Me: What did it do then? Him: It just flagged them. Me: just flagged them? ... so what did it do? What was it for? Him: It was designed so when the Sachs managing team are called to court they can say “oh yeah we’re very sorry our software flagged that as a suspicious activity. We’re really sorry, won’t happen again”. And then they’ll get a 200 million fine on a 3 billion operation. By law they don’t have to do anything else, so they don’t.
  - einpoklum 7y ago
    So a positive thing about Brexit would be that it makes it easier to declare war on the Faroe islands... Only need to fend off the British not all Europeans.
    - sjogress 7y ago
      I'm afraid the Faroe Islands is an autonomous region within Denmark, not Britain.
      - einhverfr 7y ago
        And the Faeroes have never been part of the EU or Schengen. But being part of Denmark for defense purposes, I think they are in NATO.
        jacobush 7y ago
        NATO is mostly a fiction at this point.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  - nicoburns 7y ago
    > The Channel Islands, Gibraltar and the Isle Of Man I believe are constantly being used for the purpose of tax evasion, money laundering etc... that’s what frightens me about Brexit - I think the hard Brexiteers actually want to make this easier, not harder. It's the one single thing that makes me most pro-EU. I don't see how we can fight tax evasion on a country-by-country level. But a economic and geographical bloc as big as the EU has enough clout to have real enforcement power.
    - einhverfr 7y ago
      I am not even sure one can fight tax evasion as the EU as a whole without giving the EU a tax surveillance authority none of the member states want to give it. It's the same thing as a EU-wide immigration issue. Given the EU border powers over all Schengen states? Or just accept that this is going to be contentious forever? The EU is geared towards the latter which is not on the whole a bad thing.
    - goatinaboat 7y ago
      But a economic and geographical bloc as big as the EU has enough clout to have real enforcement power. The EU gave us the double-Irish and the Dutch-sandwich and other tax evasion schemes used by large corporations. They want the exact opposite of “real enforcement power”.
      - sprafa 7y ago
        The EU didn’t do that, states did that. And if I’m not mistaken part of the reason why it went away was the EU kept giving them advice to stop it.
        goatinaboat 7y ago
        The EU requires member countries to let money cross their borders, and grants corporations the right to pay taxes for the entire EU in the member country of their choosing.
alfromspace 7y ago
Imagine if instead of constantly building horrific low-income housing projects to (fruitlessly) retroactively "solve" the problem of middle and lower-class people being unable to afford housing in major metropolitan areas, we didn't poison the market in the first place by treating housing as foreign investment vehicles.
- einhverfr 7y ago
  Yeah. I am in favor of a high tax on absentee ownership of real estate. Deduct the property where you live and where you work. Everything else gets taxed heavily.
  - mytailorisrich 7y ago
    But then either you can afford to buy your home or you have to live on the street...
    - sprafa 7y ago
      Absentee ownership is not equal to renting it out.
    - einhverfr 7y ago
      We should exempt rent-to-own contracts. If the contract vests ownership over a 20 year period or less, then it should count as owned by both sides for the purposes of this tax proposal. Bonus, we reduce the influence of banks.
  - petre 7y ago
    It's pointless. One can have multiple temporary residences. The Swiss have already solved this. You pay the same amount of tax regardless if you keep the property empty, live in it or rent it. It's calculated as a percentage of average rent in that area which gets updated with market prices every 6 months or so. They also have low VAT and corp taxes.
    - 7y ago
whatshisface 7y ago
This article is painting mobility as a bad thing, but it also has a good side. China's capital controls are a big part of how it oppresses people: if they could just leave, China would have no ability to make itself into a productive dystopia. The ideal situation would be if countries had to compete for everyone's presence, but as it stands limitations on mobility mean that only the very powerful can leap over the boundaries and have countries compete for them.
- ClutchBand 7y ago
  Mobility is great but when on .001% of the entire global population gets to do it, and they get to do it much easier than anyone else would have (sometime skirting laws and requirements that normal people would). The rich and elite get special treatment, when they should not. It leads to more unfair conditions.
  - whatshisface 7y ago
    The question should be, how can we give the average person the freedoms that the elites have, not how can we enslave the Chinese elites in the way we've enslaved the average Chinese person.
    - heymijo 7y ago
      Since the freedom in question is economic mobility, it's kind of a moot point for the huge proportion of the U.S. population with limited incomes and little to no wealth to move around.
    - einhverfr 7y ago
      The first point would be policies aimed at distributing ownership of property etc. So for example we could have a high tax for: 1. Real estate not directly used by the owner as his or her residence or place of work. 2. Shares of a business where he or she does not work (Zuck doesn't get taxed as heavily on facebook shares as the investors do) A major part of the problem is that ownership itself is so heavily concentrated that freedom for ordinary people is not possible. But if we have policies which encourage smaller businesses, weaker concentrations of wealth and more ownership by more people that would be a major start.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
turk73 7y ago
Tip of a giant iceberg. America's political class is corrupt to its very core and the biggest mouths are the biggest offenders. Most every US Senator got rich while being...a Senator, hmm. Insider trading is legal for them! Then you have to factor in the intelligence agencies and the long con those groups have been running for decades now. We the people need to stop and think about the heavy tax load (extracted at gunpoint) and consider slowing it down, or at least forcing greater accountability. We are ultimately the ones funding this growing worldwide nightmare. Every Democrat running for President wants to raise taxes, expand the government, and basically wither away our civil rights. The city of Baltimore took in $16Billion in Federal money over a short couple year (?) period and nobody quite knows where all that money went. I'd like my refund check on that, please. Bunch of crooked assholes in government, basically the mob.
theredbox 7y ago
These places are called Hong Kong, Singapore, Ireland, Switzerland and others.
sprafa 7y ago
Moneyland is a good book on this topic. Rich people (top 1%) don’t live or earn money “anywhere” anymore. There’s so much ease to global movement of capital they just move it around so they pay - no taxes - have no accounts with their name on it - launder all their money legally (if need be) - buy up property and invest without any interest in any country in particular. It’s a depressing read.
- kingkawn 7y ago
  Just a temporary state of affairs that will soon be resolved in a global tidal wave of resentment and desperation, not to worry
  - blueboo 7y ago
    A resentment and desperation to be indefinitely contained by the technology we're all building. gj folks!
  - einhverfr 7y ago
    That tidal wave has many faces. Corbyn, Trump, Sturgeon, Brexit, AfD, Bernie, AOC, Syriza, and more. It is global, and radical, and across both the right and left.
  - havetocharge 7y ago
    Will it though? It's a comforting thought, but is there more to it than wishful thinking? There's a shroud of secrecy around this money, so how will all this resentment will be targeted, exactly?
    - sequoia 7y ago
      > so how will all this resentment will be targeted, exactly? If you're a Jew who knows his or her history, you probably know the answer to this question already. Jews frequently get scapegoated by populists (and others) when people are targeting "stateless money changers" regardless of the fact that most of the key players mentioned here are English, Russian, and Chinese.
scandox 7y ago
The idea of The Perpetual Traveller (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_traveler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_traveler) had been around for a long time (at least to my knowledge since the 1960s). It has simply got easier and in fact the group of people who can attempt it, though tiny, has grown much larger.
charliesome 7y ago
For those interested in learning more about the invention of Eurobonds and how they destabilised the postwar Bretton Woods system by enabling free movement of capital across borders, this Guardian article is a fascinating read: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/sep/07/the-real-goldfinger-the-london-banker-who-broke-the-world https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/sep/07/the-real-goldfi...
jussij 7y ago
It is not just the super rich running this scam but almost every multi-national. Just take Apple as one example. Apple is sitting on close to $300+ billion in cash in some offshore tax haven, just to make sure that cash is located outside of the USA to insure it does not attract any tax. This wide spread multi-national tax avoidance has been running at epidemic levels for many decades now. From what I recall Google started this scam and it is still the master of avoiding tax and while the populous is happy to vote in governments that turn a blind eye to this practice, it will remain a very lucrative endeavour.
- situational87 7y ago
  Yes, but you're missing the half of the equation where everyone who is a senior employee gets granted or grants themselves large amounts of stock options, then decides to funnel this tax free hoard of wealth into stock buybacks. It's the most direct and massive transfer of wealth from normal and poor people to rich in the history of any society. It's disgusting and despicable, anyone who owns equities in 2019 needs to recognize they have become a part of this amoral system and work to reform it. We are literally destroying billions of dollars every day to enrich a handful of shareholders (who are already the richest humans that ever lived by any metric). It's the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of humanity squared, and it's only increasing. Google broke records and made headlines by announcing an unprecedented $25 billion in buybacks for this quarter. Everyone else copies Google. This heist is happening right now, today, in the open, and it's totally legal.
  - jussij 7y ago
    > Google broke records and made headlines by announcing an unprecedented $25 billion in buybacks for this quarter. This sort of tax avoidance has been going on for decades. As just one example see the link below to see how Google has been avoiding it's tax responsibility here in Australia: https://www.smh.com.au/business/google-paying-a-fraction-of-the-tax-in-australia-it-should-20150208-139176.html https://www.smh.com.au/business/google-paying-a-fraction-of-... If that same level of tax avoidance was perpetrated by an individual they would be facing decades in prison.
fallingfrog 7y ago
It’s in the best interests of the owners of capital that capital be free to cross any borders with a minimum of friction, but people be stuck where they are. That’s the basic dynamic that creates this kind of situation, and it’s not accidental.
WhompingWindows 7y ago
I was thinking about the super rich, recalling that story where a rich philanthropist made NYU Medical School tuition-free in a surprise announcement. I couldn't help think: why do we live in a system where there are people so rich, that we rely on their kindness for our upper-crust medical students to not have debt? Why not have an economy that limits mega-wealth so we don't need to rely on the generosity of mega-wealthy donors? The subtext here is the vast majority of mega-wealthy donors are NOT going to help the rest of us who helped build their wealth.
- nerdponx 7y ago
  The problem as I see it is that accumulation of wealth-movement power (note that I did not say "accumulation of wealth" because that isn't really at thing) seems to be necessary to some extent in order to overcome collective action problems in society. Funding medical school is a great example -- nobody wants to do it, on their own, but society as a whole wants it to get done. Either you have wealthy individuals do it, or you have the government do it. But someone has to pool a lot of resources in one place and start moving them around, if we want things like free med school to exist. Maybe it's better if the government does it; in theory it leads to better outcomes because the government has better incentives to make good decisions with their wealth-movement power, outweighing the inefficiencies of economic centralization by ensuring that people's basic needs are met across the population. This is what a lot of leftists and liberals will argue. Meanwhile conservatives, libertarians, etc. will point to government track records in actually implementing programs well, engaging in corruption, designing good policy, and becoming extensions of corporate interests. Not to mention generalized waste due to mismatch between "incentives to start projects" and "incentives not to spend money".
Nasrudith 7y ago
Given the plain absurdity I can't help but ask what they are high on if they think a banking system is a neccessity to loot. Banks have certainly been complict but the solution is to hold /actual bad actors/ responsible. Perhaps rhetoric or ideology given that it is dripping with antisemitic dogwhistles taken at face value. Most of those are essentially ancient bullying charging them with being disloyal, rootless, and exploitative after repeatably persecuting them, displacing them and forcing them into a scapegoated "dirty work" that was religiously allowee so they stood to inherit the money after their death. Looting like that has occured through time immemorial - from the occupation of Viking, literal stealing of goods and the very literal colonialism of the East India Company and Leopold. Once again it ammounts to absurd scapegoating - if they actually wanted to hold the kleptocrats accountable they would hold them accountable! Their fortunes aren't going to do them much good when they are isolated from them in prison or death row. It is the blind hierarchical normism of enforcement double standard that is the true root. Ousted dictators aren't responsible for travesties and can retire quietly while enslaved hostages are guilty of materially supporting terrorists.

153 points by onemoresoop 7y ago

aritmo 7y ago

It is ironic that Britain is already close to a tax-heaven than they admit.

sprafa 7y ago
The Channel Islands, Gibraltar and the Isle Of Man I believe are constantly being used for the purpose of tax evasion, money laundering etc... that’s what frightens me about Brexit - I think the hard Brexiteers actually want to make this easier, not harder. I.e. I met a software guy from Sachs who told me about what he did there. Essentially he built automated software to flag “suspicious transactions”. So ie if 200 million came in from he Faroe Islands the software would flag it as “possibly” an unlawful transfer. It made sure the books were “kosher”. So I asked him Me: oh ok, so then the software blocked those transactions? Him: no. Me: Well did it flag them so they would investigate it? Him: no. Me: What did it do then? Him: It just flagged them. Me: just flagged them? ... so what did it do? What was it for? Him: It was designed so when the Sachs managing team are called to court they can say “oh yeah we’re very sorry our software flagged that as a suspicious activity. We’re really sorry, won’t happen again”. And then they’ll get a 200 million fine on a 3 billion operation. By law they don’t have to do anything else, so they don’t.
- einpoklum 7y ago
  So a positive thing about Brexit would be that it makes it easier to declare war on the Faroe islands... Only need to fend off the British not all Europeans.
  - sjogress 7y ago
    I'm afraid the Faroe Islands is an autonomous region within Denmark, not Britain.
    - einhverfr 7y ago
      And the Faeroes have never been part of the EU or Schengen. But being part of Denmark for defense purposes, I think they are in NATO.
      - jacobush 7y ago
        NATO is mostly a fiction at this point.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- nicoburns 7y ago
  > The Channel Islands, Gibraltar and the Isle Of Man I believe are constantly being used for the purpose of tax evasion, money laundering etc... that’s what frightens me about Brexit - I think the hard Brexiteers actually want to make this easier, not harder. It's the one single thing that makes me most pro-EU. I don't see how we can fight tax evasion on a country-by-country level. But a economic and geographical bloc as big as the EU has enough clout to have real enforcement power.
  - einhverfr 7y ago
    I am not even sure one can fight tax evasion as the EU as a whole without giving the EU a tax surveillance authority none of the member states want to give it. It's the same thing as a EU-wide immigration issue. Given the EU border powers over all Schengen states? Or just accept that this is going to be contentious forever? The EU is geared towards the latter which is not on the whole a bad thing.
  - goatinaboat 7y ago
    But a economic and geographical bloc as big as the EU has enough clout to have real enforcement power. The EU gave us the double-Irish and the Dutch-sandwich and other tax evasion schemes used by large corporations. They want the exact opposite of “real enforcement power”.
    - sprafa 7y ago
      The EU didn’t do that, states did that. And if I’m not mistaken part of the reason why it went away was the EU kept giving them advice to stop it.
      - goatinaboat 7y ago
        The EU requires member countries to let money cross their borders, and grants corporations the right to pay taxes for the entire EU in the member country of their choosing.

alfromspace 7y ago

Imagine if instead of constantly building horrific low-income housing projects to (fruitlessly) retroactively "solve" the problem of middle and lower-class people being unable to afford housing in major metropolitan areas, we didn't poison the market in the first place by treating housing as foreign investment vehicles.

einhverfr 7y ago
Yeah. I am in favor of a high tax on absentee ownership of real estate. Deduct the property where you live and where you work. Everything else gets taxed heavily.
- mytailorisrich 7y ago
  But then either you can afford to buy your home or you have to live on the street...
  - sprafa 7y ago
    Absentee ownership is not equal to renting it out.
  - einhverfr 7y ago
    We should exempt rent-to-own contracts. If the contract vests ownership over a 20 year period or less, then it should count as owned by both sides for the purposes of this tax proposal. Bonus, we reduce the influence of banks.
- petre 7y ago
  It's pointless. One can have multiple temporary residences. The Swiss have already solved this. You pay the same amount of tax regardless if you keep the property empty, live in it or rent it. It's calculated as a percentage of average rent in that area which gets updated with market prices every 6 months or so. They also have low VAT and corp taxes.
  - 7y ago

whatshisface 7y ago

This article is painting mobility as a bad thing, but it also has a good side. China's capital controls are a big part of how it oppresses people: if they could just leave, China would have no ability to make itself into a productive dystopia. The ideal situation would be if countries had to compete for everyone's presence, but as it stands limitations on mobility mean that only the very powerful can leap over the boundaries and have countries compete for them.

ClutchBand 7y ago
Mobility is great but when on .001% of the entire global population gets to do it, and they get to do it much easier than anyone else would have (sometime skirting laws and requirements that normal people would). The rich and elite get special treatment, when they should not. It leads to more unfair conditions.
- whatshisface 7y ago
  The question should be, how can we give the average person the freedoms that the elites have, not how can we enslave the Chinese elites in the way we've enslaved the average Chinese person.
  - heymijo 7y ago
    Since the freedom in question is economic mobility, it's kind of a moot point for the huge proportion of the U.S. population with limited incomes and little to no wealth to move around.
  - einhverfr 7y ago
    The first point would be policies aimed at distributing ownership of property etc. So for example we could have a high tax for: 1. Real estate not directly used by the owner as his or her residence or place of work. 2. Shares of a business where he or she does not work (Zuck doesn't get taxed as heavily on facebook shares as the investors do) A major part of the problem is that ownership itself is so heavily concentrated that freedom for ordinary people is not possible. But if we have policies which encourage smaller businesses, weaker concentrations of wealth and more ownership by more people that would be a major start.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

turk73 7y ago

Tip of a giant iceberg. America's political class is corrupt to its very core and the biggest mouths are the biggest offenders. Most every US Senator got rich while being...a Senator, hmm. Insider trading is legal for them! Then you have to factor in the intelligence agencies and the long con those groups have been running for decades now. We the people need to stop and think about the heavy tax load (extracted at gunpoint) and consider slowing it down, or at least forcing greater accountability. We are ultimately the ones funding this growing worldwide nightmare. Every Democrat running for President wants to raise taxes, expand the government, and basically wither away our civil rights. The city of Baltimore took in $16Billion in Federal money over a short couple year (?) period and nobody quite knows where all that money went. I'd like my refund check on that, please. Bunch of crooked assholes in government, basically the mob.

theredbox 7y ago

These places are called Hong Kong, Singapore, Ireland, Switzerland and others.

sprafa 7y ago

Moneyland is a good book on this topic. Rich people (top 1%) don’t live or earn money “anywhere” anymore. There’s so much ease to global movement of capital they just move it around so they pay - no taxes - have no accounts with their name on it - launder all their money legally (if need be) - buy up property and invest without any interest in any country in particular. It’s a depressing read.

kingkawn 7y ago
Just a temporary state of affairs that will soon be resolved in a global tidal wave of resentment and desperation, not to worry
- blueboo 7y ago
  A resentment and desperation to be indefinitely contained by the technology we're all building. gj folks!
- einhverfr 7y ago
  That tidal wave has many faces. Corbyn, Trump, Sturgeon, Brexit, AfD, Bernie, AOC, Syriza, and more. It is global, and radical, and across both the right and left.
- havetocharge 7y ago
  Will it though? It's a comforting thought, but is there more to it than wishful thinking? There's a shroud of secrecy around this money, so how will all this resentment will be targeted, exactly?
  - sequoia 7y ago
    > so how will all this resentment will be targeted, exactly? If you're a Jew who knows his or her history, you probably know the answer to this question already. Jews frequently get scapegoated by populists (and others) when people are targeting "stateless money changers" regardless of the fact that most of the key players mentioned here are English, Russian, and Chinese.

scandox 7y ago

The idea of The Perpetual Traveller (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_traveler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_traveler) had been around for a long time (at least to my knowledge since the 1960s). It has simply got easier and in fact the group of people who can attempt it, though tiny, has grown much larger.

charliesome 7y ago

For those interested in learning more about the invention of Eurobonds and how they destabilised the postwar Bretton Woods system by enabling free movement of capital across borders, this Guardian article is a fascinating read: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/sep/07/the-real-goldfinger-the-london-banker-who-broke-the-world https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/sep/07/the-real-goldfi...

jussij 7y ago

It is not just the super rich running this scam but almost every multi-national. Just take Apple as one example. Apple is sitting on close to $300+ billion in cash in some offshore tax haven, just to make sure that cash is located outside of the USA to insure it does not attract any tax. This wide spread multi-national tax avoidance has been running at epidemic levels for many decades now. From what I recall Google started this scam and it is still the master of avoiding tax and while the populous is happy to vote in governments that turn a blind eye to this practice, it will remain a very lucrative endeavour.

situational87 7y ago
Yes, but you're missing the half of the equation where everyone who is a senior employee gets granted or grants themselves large amounts of stock options, then decides to funnel this tax free hoard of wealth into stock buybacks. It's the most direct and massive transfer of wealth from normal and poor people to rich in the history of any society. It's disgusting and despicable, anyone who owns equities in 2019 needs to recognize they have become a part of this amoral system and work to reform it. We are literally destroying billions of dollars every day to enrich a handful of shareholders (who are already the richest humans that ever lived by any metric). It's the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of humanity squared, and it's only increasing. Google broke records and made headlines by announcing an unprecedented $25 billion in buybacks for this quarter. Everyone else copies Google. This heist is happening right now, today, in the open, and it's totally legal.
- jussij 7y ago
  > Google broke records and made headlines by announcing an unprecedented $25 billion in buybacks for this quarter. This sort of tax avoidance has been going on for decades. As just one example see the link below to see how Google has been avoiding it's tax responsibility here in Australia: https://www.smh.com.au/business/google-paying-a-fraction-of-the-tax-in-australia-it-should-20150208-139176.html https://www.smh.com.au/business/google-paying-a-fraction-of-... If that same level of tax avoidance was perpetrated by an individual they would be facing decades in prison.

fallingfrog 7y ago

It’s in the best interests of the owners of capital that capital be free to cross any borders with a minimum of friction, but people be stuck where they are. That’s the basic dynamic that creates this kind of situation, and it’s not accidental.

WhompingWindows 7y ago

I was thinking about the super rich, recalling that story where a rich philanthropist made NYU Medical School tuition-free in a surprise announcement. I couldn't help think: why do we live in a system where there are people so rich, that we rely on their kindness for our upper-crust medical students to not have debt? Why not have an economy that limits mega-wealth so we don't need to rely on the generosity of mega-wealthy donors? The subtext here is the vast majority of mega-wealthy donors are NOT going to help the rest of us who helped build their wealth.

nerdponx 7y ago
The problem as I see it is that accumulation of wealth-movement power (note that I did not say "accumulation of wealth" because that isn't really at thing) seems to be necessary to some extent in order to overcome collective action problems in society. Funding medical school is a great example -- nobody wants to do it, on their own, but society as a whole wants it to get done. Either you have wealthy individuals do it, or you have the government do it. But someone has to pool a lot of resources in one place and start moving them around, if we want things like free med school to exist. Maybe it's better if the government does it; in theory it leads to better outcomes because the government has better incentives to make good decisions with their wealth-movement power, outweighing the inefficiencies of economic centralization by ensuring that people's basic needs are met across the population. This is what a lot of leftists and liberals will argue. Meanwhile conservatives, libertarians, etc. will point to government track records in actually implementing programs well, engaging in corruption, designing good policy, and becoming extensions of corporate interests. Not to mention generalized waste due to mismatch between "incentives to start projects" and "incentives not to spend money".

Nasrudith 7y ago

Given the plain absurdity I can't help but ask what they are high on if they think a banking system is a neccessity to loot. Banks have certainly been complict but the solution is to hold /actual bad actors/ responsible. Perhaps rhetoric or ideology given that it is dripping with antisemitic dogwhistles taken at face value. Most of those are essentially ancient bullying charging them with being disloyal, rootless, and exploitative after repeatably persecuting them, displacing them and forcing them into a scapegoated "dirty work" that was religiously allowee so they stood to inherit the money after their death. Looting like that has occured through time immemorial - from the occupation of Viking, literal stealing of goods and the very literal colonialism of the East India Company and Leopold. Once again it ammounts to absurd scapegoating - if they actually wanted to hold the kleptocrats accountable they would hold them accountable! Their fortunes aren't going to do them much good when they are isolated from them in prison or death row. It is the blind hierarchical normism of enforcement double standard that is the true root. Ousted dictators aren't responsible for travesties and can retire quietly while enslaved hostages are guilty of materially supporting terrorists.