DRUG MONEY IS DIRTY. WHAT DOES "LAUNDERING" IT MEAN?
We can use money orders to send money overseas. Our overseas maximum is $1,500 The Hong Kong and Shanghai
Banking Corp. (HSBC, a British bank from colonial times) had a slightly
higher maximum -- billions of dollars.
BIG, RECTANGULAR BOXES OF CASH
HSBC's money came from Saudi Arabia, Bangladesh, and Mexico, injected into the American
banking system (and into the global economy) illegally -- "laundering money". When
a bank in Mexico uses special boxes built to slide exactly through
tellers' windows in order to take in the volumes of cash that their
customers don't know how else to get rid of, you know it is drug
money (but of course, they did not know).
THE PARTICULAR STAINS WHICH MONEY LAUNDERING CAN MAKE GO AWAY
If you are in the ruling family of a country, it may be easy to "ask"
the Treasury or national bank to move millions into another
account. If you rule a drug cartel, it will certainly be easy to
get millions, but it won't be in any account at all -- that's where the
big boxes shoved through the tellers' windows came in. Now both
political rulers and drug kings have big-balance bank accounts, but
there are two problems: 1) the money needs to be moved to an overseas
country where they want to buy their third home, second yacht, first
private jet. And 2) lots of moves to accounts seemingly not owned
by them ("off-shore accounts") need to be made to obscure where the
money came from, and who might need to pay taxes on it. Moving
money
many times to obscure nasty origin, true ownership, and tax liability
is what money laundering is all about. In the end, cash
will flow through the hands of a prestigious person from a prestigious
bank, and everyone at ritzy stores and restaurants looks great.
It's hard work covering your trail. Over $800 million
of the Mexican dollars were documented well enough to prosecute the
bank, yet nobody
went to jail.
The ability of people with power to protect themselves from the law
means that "the rule of law" is broken. Most do not get justice
in a society running on injustice. Using power to evade
the law is usually done to protect wealth. People with wealth
usually want three things: to protect the wealth they have, to acquire
more, and to preserve their ability to do whatever they wish with
whatever
they already have. The list does not usually include helping
others.
Remember: $1,500 in money orders for you, and billions in laundered
money for them, with no jail time. These
white-collar criminals can move a million dollars through the
international banking system for each dollar you can move with your
money order. (And it was drug money -- don't try that line of
work yourself!) They were never humiliated by arrest, never
forced to lose social rank. Being forced to lose social rank
for harming society is called accountability. It does not have to
hurt, it just has to be embarassing. A society which
does not hold those who harm it accountable is a dysfunctional
society. If
those who have done the harm escape the accountability by giving large
sums of money to other people, then the
society is corrupt and dysfunctional.
A dysfunctional society that is also corrupt is harder to fix.
When you notice that you can't seem to fix what's broken, then the
people with wealth who protected the wealth they had, got more, and
kept their freedom have also taken away yours.
--jerry
J. I. Nelson, Ph.D.
Rev 21Sept2016, 9Feb2018 logical flow at end
