Suddenly the curtain is pulled back and I feel as though I understand the very dark side of the Rule of Law. I hadn't known such a thing existed. I didn’t get it before because it is in NUMBERS, which preceded words on those notorious early cuneiform clay tablets.
Cuneiform is distinguished by its wedge-shaped marks on clay tablets, made by means of a blunt reed for a stylus. The term cuneiform comes from cuneus, Latin for “wedge". . . Cuneiform writing began as a system of pictograms, stemming from an earlier system of shaped tokens used for accounting. (Wikipedia)
We’ve been getting financial wedgies all along. Trump “wedged” his tax returns by minimizing his assets to seem small and then “reinvoicing” them with exaggerations for borrowing and wealth boasting. But there's a lot more to it than we thought. Jason Hickel explains clearly on this podcast:
This is beyond moral rot, beyond Mafia racketeering, beyond bad character or the inability to think because of a deteriorating brain. It’s beyond not caring and being lazy. Beyond political polarization. That's all true, but this is more. This is evil world context, possibly what people keep calling the “Deep State,” not about governance except as that gives access to controlling capital and the Rules of Law that govern it. It’s a “long” game that involves passing laws that are unnoticed, maybe for years, until they have too much status to overturn. Too much is at stake for those who got rich on it.
It starts with the ship-based ability of Western European empires to extract valuable resources from less organized places via oceanic trade or railroads. But then it continues with the idea of “capital” which is bookkeeping (writing numbers into a daily journal) the values of those captured resources. It’s pretty hard to keep track of barter of spices, or gold, or drugs UNLESS they can be symbolized and moved around that way, something like the way money is symbolized by slips of paper, legal tender which are basically IOU’s. One can't get barter into a wallet.
We forget that the marks in a journal are only symbols — not real at all. But this false conviction that they ARE real, that bookkeeping records of capital can’t be faked and can be real enough to gamble on, as though the records were horse races, leave us wide open to corruption. I keep thinking about Manafort's secret written ledger, kept in a safe because it was the "real" numbers.
As Hickel explains in the vid, most of the capital of what Trump calls “shit hole” countries are extracted through “re-inventorying” the actual resources taken — that is, creating lying invoices for tax purposes that diminish the credits of the contributing countries, transferring the remaining credits to the “oligarchs” of the US and European countries who control the bookkeeping rules. But Trump with his germ phobia underestimates the fertility of shit and its records of human doings. We can trace Covid-19 through our cities by analyzing the sewage. The internet forgets nothing.
In 1994 regulation of international trade was very much disrupted by changes in the law on the grounds that Free Trade benefited everyone and should not be hindered by rules. This is the point of origin of our present predicament of extreme wealth differences between top and bottom. It is aggravated by a storm of rules about capitalism that charge usurious rates for credit, that suffocate venture capital, that prevent people and countries from advancing if they don’t have capital, which is defined, recorded (inaccurately) and controlled by those who already have a lot of it.
One of the main controllers of capital is the “Lord Mayor of London” which is a vestigial remnant of the 11th century when capital was “invented”. The Lord Mayor is the real head of a nonexistent concept called “London” that isn’t London the city, more like the Pope reigning over Catholicism, a theological construct. This semi-secret entity controls tax havens. It's far older than what we call the Mafia.
The World Customs Organization
http://www.wcoomd.org/en.aspx and the Illicit Trade Report http://www.oecd.org/gov/illicit-trade/ are key monitors of this underground enabling of rich countries raiding the “capital” of poor countries. What I want to know is where the actual resources go. I presume to international corporations to use them in products to sell for profits which are again misreported through false invoicing, and reallocated to pay high salaries. This rake-off of high profits is then spirited away to tax havens known to the WCO.
This is not just what Trump has been doing but what EVERYONE he knows (as he uses as a defense) has been doing. He is governed by the standards of his cohort who “normalize” the fiddling on a grand scale with numbers to disguise what happens with the real resources. We all do that on our own scale, right? Cheat on taxes “a little bit”? Buy something "under the table"? Hire a bit of "contract labor" without withholding?
Righteousness got into it somehow. When I was at seminary, I worked as a receptionist for a counseling center run by an ordained Baptist minister (black) in a UU church, thus morally defended by three layers: two religious denominations and progressives defending racial injustice. He routinely cooked the books so that the insured and entitled people’s fees paid for the indigent but desperate people (often black) who asked for help. This was diverting capital but so was the insurance. How is it different from a politician who diverts capital to tax havens? What exactly is the content of the moralities?
In a culture that values individuals more than communities, there’s not much difficulty, though I’ll be damned if I know what Moscow Mitch is going to do with all that money either for himself or others. He will not live long enough to spend it and Kentucky, which he pretends to protect, could really use it. Accepting capital as something real and good is entering fantasy.
The internet has taken the divergence of capital to an art form and mixed it with money laundering. It’s possible to make a lot of money by time-stamping, moving money to take advantages of inclines in value only differing slightly for a few minutes. Machine governed money moving is almost instantaneous. They call this “hot money.”
What about "hot thought"? "Hot shit" to figure this out.
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