The Shepherds of InEquality

Any product can be trafficked, whether designed for legal use or not. The ease with which these products can be moved, disguised, or pushed to and from anywhere in the world is difficult to grasp. How do they do it? How do we let it happen? The powerful movers and shakers get their ‘mules’ to do the dirty work while they live extravagantly. Mules just make a living. Those who make more than that, take the risk of either losing their lives, being roughed up, or discarded from the only livelihood they know. Most traffickers do not get caught; if they do, they may continue to traffic while serving a jail sentence. Much of the money made by traffickers is seldom found. For some traffickers there is even recognition for their achievements: El Chapo was recognized as the 60th most powerful person in the world in 2013. Traffickers either escape from jail, serve shorter sentences than originally charged, or interfere for their own means in the political arena, and get away with it. Trafficking is pervasive, using any channel, platform, or commodity without a care for the environment and the disruption to communities. The profiteers It is simplistic to align money laundering to criminals and terrorists because that context is misguided. It leaves out a whole population of money launderers who are rich, powerful, elite, connected, mostly educated, and self-dedicated, with the world at their bidding. Money represents the lifeblood of an organization, despite all the hype about corporate governance. For many companies around the world, we will never really know the extent of the money laundered and how it was laundered. It is unfair to mention only seven organizations as examples of what we do know about them, but these are names we all recognize: FACEBOOK was reported as giving several multinational companies such as Netflix, Amazon, Spotify, Microsoft, and Altaba (formerly Yahoo) the ability to access users’ contact information, private messages, and friends’ lists. Did users sign up for this? Mark Zuckerberg, the founder, is, at 35, the sixth richest person in the world, worth $67.4bn (at the time of writing), and faces a lot of controversies still regarding the use of this social media platform for nefarious activity purposes. The ethics behind the billions earned is questionable. Linked to FACEBOOK was Cambridge Analytica; a firm that combined data mining, data brokerage, and data analysis with strategic communication for political electoral processes. Cambridge Analytica acquired and used personal data about FACEBOOK users from an external researcher who had told FACEBOOK he was collecting it for academic purposes. Investigative undercover journalists exposed the CEO boasting about various nefarious deeds and honey traps to discredit politicians on whom it conducted opposition research on the one hand. On the other hand, Cambridge Analytica took on many election campaigns from countries around the world for lots of money. By collecting data from FACEBOOK users to build psychographic profiles on them, Cambridge Analytica was able to create profiles of potential voters which prompted a specific advertising message that would likely persuade such a voter to think accordingly. The Netflix documentary The Great Hack says it all and more. The baby-friendly Johnson & Johnson has been found to have misrepresented the risk of opioid addiction to doctors, manipulating research and helping to drive an epidemic claiming thousands of lives and profiting further by buying poppy-growing companies to supply raw narcotics for itself and other drugmakers. Jerry Oppenheimer wrote a book a few years ago called the Crazy Rich which is a fascinating account of the Johnson and Johnson dynasty over five decades. It is difficult to know if wealth corrupted the Johnson family or merely enabled their bad behavior. Has the company behaved similarly in the past that we do not know about? Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on 15 September 2019, just days after reaching a settlement with more than 2,000 local governments over the alleged role it played in adding to the American opioid addiction crisis by marketing OxyContin, even though the company knew that it was addictive. The Sackler family agreed to relinquish ownership of the lucrative company and agreed to pay $3bn in cash over several years and future revenue from the sale of OxyContin, to assist communities hardest hit by the opioid epidemic. This is an unusual settlement. Normally litigation (usually protracted over years) is the normal legal response. In this way, society benefits by having some $3bn dollars to use to fight the opioid crisis. When there is so much money, it is easy to pay fines to benefit a society that you led to need this assistance in the first place. It was reported in July 2019 that Microsoft Corp agreed to pay about $25.3m, including a criminal fine, to settle U.S. charges that it made improper payments that were used to bribe government officials in Hungary and other countries. The payment of an $8.75m criminal fine to be paid by Microsoft Hungary, according to the U.S. Department of Justice, is part of a three-year non-prosecution agreement in which it ‘admits, accepts, and acknowledges responsibility for employees’ misconduct. Microsoft also agreed to pay nearly $16.6m to settle related civil charges by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission over its activities in Hungary, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, and Turkey, without admitting wrongdoing. Microsoft violated the federal Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in both cases. Amazon’s federal tax bill was $0 for the second year in a row (through a combination in part of legitimate tax credits and deductions) despite nearly doubling its taxable income in 2018 to $11.2bn, from $5.6bn a year earlier. While other taxes were paid, and taxes paid on behalf of employees, the tax incentives Amazon gets through its company structures, inter-company transfers, expenses, and inventories ensure minimal taxation and feeds the master himself, Jeff Bezos, presently the richest person in the world at some $202bn (Aug 2020). It is not illegal, but the tax avoidance trails in the unethical stance of intentional greedy enrichment.