Review: "Billion Dollar Whale: The Man Who Fooled Wall Street, Hollywood and the World" by Tom Wright and Bradley Hope

 

Let us respect the colonialist plunderers of old. At least they had to risk "cannibals" and malaria. Today's plundering colonialists risk bad sushi and paper cuts in hotel lobbies in Switzerland and Singapore.

Reading Tom Wright's and Bradley Hope's Billion Dollar Whale: The Man Who Fooled Wall Street, Hollywood and the World engendered in me the same nausea and disgust I felt after reading The Secret World of Oil by Ken Silverstein. Every dollar extracted from the poorer nations of the world is a dollar taken away from development efforts. And while Wright's and Hope's narrative takes advantage of the extravagence of Jho Low, the central character, to maintain the reader's interest, it matters not if the people who extract the money spend it on birthday parties, yachts and jewelry or actual productive business enterprises. It's all theft from the world's poor.

The looting of 1MDB is the subject of Billion Dollar Whale. Former Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak oversaw the creation and management of 1MDB, a sovereign national fund, and, through cronies and bankers, pilfered millions (tens, hundreds?) of USD. 

The best passage in the book is towards the end, on p. 371:

It contrasts somewhat with the pass that the authors on p. 229 provide to the bankers and accountants who facilitated and handsomely profited from this plunder:

Western financial institutions, from Goldman to auditors and private banks, had unwittingly helped Low get away with it, impoverishing Malaysia. (emphasis added)

When people talk about corruption, it makes actions like these seem like accidents. Liberals say thing like, "They took advantage of loopholes." and "Regulation must be strengthened." Radicals ask: what if the whole financial system is designed to continuously prevent capital accumulation for development in the Global South?

Listen to the Citations Needed Podcast Episode entitled Western Media’s Narrow, Colonial Definition of "Corruption". This link is free and has show notes, but requires a Patreon User ID. This link doesn't require a login.

P.S. 2023-11-27 - Another important lesson from this colonialst plundering is the centrality of military force in international finance. Can you image what the United States government would do if confidence artists stole money from powerful people in the United States and used it to buy assets in militarily weak countries? The United States would demand transfer of assets and punitive reparations under threat of economic sanctions and military attack. Some libertarian-types imagine capitalism without government coercion. That is clearly a fantasy, as, at the end of the day, capitalists rely on military and police to protect their capital.

Comments on "Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World" by Anand Giridharadas

If you've found yourself wanting to scream at the "thought leaders" shoved down your throat on Public Broadcasting Service, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World will help you translate your rage into coherent English. Author Anand Giridharadas gives us an "insider-outsider" view of MarketWorld:

MarketWorld is an ascendant power elite that is defined by the concurrent drives to do well and do good, to change the world while also profiting from the status quo. It consists of enlightened businesspeople and their collaborators in the worlds of charity, academia, media, government and think tanks. It has its own thinkers, whom it calls thought leaders, its own language, and even its own territory -- including a constantly shifting archipelago of conferences at which its values are reinforced and disseminated in translated into action. MarketWorld is a network and community but it is also a culture and state of mind.

These elites believe and promote the idea that social change should be pursued principally through the free market and voluntary action, not public life and the law and the reform of the systems that people share in common; that it should be supervised by the winners of capitalism and their allies and not be antagonistic to their needs; and that the biggest beneficiaries of the status quo should play a leading role in the status quo's reform. [p. 30]

Review: How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood by Peter Moskowitz

I attended a trade show in New Orleans or Baton Rouge a year or two after Katrina. There's plenty of down time at trade shows when I would exchange small talk with the people manning neighboring booths. One person shocked me by telling me that the flooding had the silver lining of cleaning out the city. I didn't understand at the time that what he meant was that it would facilitate capitalists' exploitation of the space previously occupied by displaced black residents of the city, whom he and policy makers at all levels viewed as expendable at best and liabilities at worst.

Peter Moskowitz's book How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood wants people to understand the following:

• Gentrification isn't an inevitable or natural process. Students of capitalism have long ago noted why, if unchecked, it would occur, but human societies don't have to choose to follow capital's dictates.
• In the United States, racist policies have ensured that the negative impacts of housing crises fall on black and brown people.
• Policy makers at the federal, state and municipal levels have adopted gentrification & suburbanization as vehicles for economic growth and have subsidized these processes.

Review: From Makka to Las Vegas: Critical Theories in Architecture and Sanctity by Ali Abd al-Ra`uf

Yomna al-Saeed wrote a review in English of an Arabic book. The review was published at onislam.net on September 21, 2015. The book's title is

 من مكة إلى لاس ڤيجاس
أطروحات نقدية في العمارة و القداسة

which I've translated to From Makka to Las Vegas: Critical Theories in Architecture and Sanctity. Its author is علي عبد الرؤوف Ali Abd al-Ra'uf. It was published in 2014.