260: AMERICAN KLEPTOCRACY Greatest Money Laundering Scheme in History with Casey Michel

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It is my pleasure to welcome Casey Michell to the show. He is a writer and investigative journalist based in New York. His previous work has appeared in Foreign affairs, the Atlantic, the New Republic. He worked as a journalist in Eurasia and the United States, has a Master's degree from Columbia University's Harriman Institute, and his book is entitled American Kleptocracy how the US Created the World's Greatest Money Laundering Scheme in History. I can't wait to dive into this topic and it is going to be a lot of fun. Casey, welcome. How are you?

Jason, thanks so much for having me. It's great to be here.

We appreciate you joining us. And you know, the word kleptocracy, Casey, is an interesting word. I think it sadly describes the world in which we are living nowadays. I know that my audience shares the feeling. I know, I feel it. You probably do too. Of course, it feels like the elites are just skimming the last meat off the bone, right? As, as they just are hollowing out America, hollowing out countries. And you know, Covid has just given them even more tools to take away freedoms to surveil, to control the money. You know, the digital dollar is coming, the central bank, digital currencies are coming. I know your next book is on the crypto component of this as well. But just explain for us so we make sure everybody really understands. What is a kleptocracy?

Yeah, Jason, that's a great question. And I will say I did get a little bit of pushback from some folks that I worked with early in the stages of the book. Including that word in the title, you know, it's kind of a, kind of a mouthful of a word. You know, kleptocracy is not something you come across a lot when you're, when you're reading books, when you're reading the paper. But it certainly describes so much of what I think you and I and the other listeners and viewers, some of the others of those right here in the US as well as around the world, have been experiencing for years and years. You know, the technical term of kleptocracy is pretty straightforward. It literally means rule of thieves. So rather than democracy, autocracy, you have a klepto cast of characters running a government, running a regime, running a country, running an economy. I mean, it's really straightforward. You know, think of kleptomania. That's exactly what you see develop in these individual kleptocracies in governments, in regimes, in countries. What I write about is, though, not just single governments, single officials, single regimes. What I'm really writing about when I'm talking about kleptocracy is that what we have in the 21st century is that this is no longer limited to just one regime or one country or one political figure or political force in one place. What we now have is kleptocracy as a transnational international phenomenon closely linked, closely intertwined with the broader offshoring economy. And really, in many ways, we have the edifice of the offshoring economy 30, 40, 50 years ago that modern kleptocracy, modern kleptocrats have used and abused to their end. So what I'm talking about when I write about kleptocracy, it's not just something that happens in the United States or in other countries elsewhere, but that it's a transnational international phenomenon that allows these elite figures, these oligarchic figures, to soak up, to loot as much money as they can, and then to move and hide and especially launder that money elsewhere. Now, this has all kinds of knock on effects, and I know we'll be talking about everything from national security to wealth inequality to jobs drying up on the ground to basic democracy itself, but when I'm talking about kleptocracy, yes, I'm focusing on the American example, and yes, I'm focusing on the American story, but I do think it's worth remembering that this is something we've seen take place around the world, and it's now an international phenomenon.

Was there something that changed in the world? Some inflection point, Maybe a foreign trade agreement or a set of treaties or something that made this easier or more possible for these kleptocrats. Did something change at a certain time period?

Yeah, I mean, Jason, that's a really great question. I mean, the short answer is we didn't just wake up one day and find ourselves here. There wasn't one Specific policy, one specific decision, one specific election that you could point to and say, if that had gone differently, if something had gone differently from that, everything that flowed would have been qualitatively different from that. The metaphor to use, as with so much, is that we were kind of the frogs boiling in the pot. This was the slow rising in temperature, in implementation, in scope and magnitude of a whole range of different policies, different outcomes, different economic implementations that got us to where we are. You just mentioned free trade policy a moment ago. That's absolutely a characteristic. That's absolutely a component of this development. But it's not just the free trade arrangements. It's also things that I write about in the book, like secret financial vehicles, financial secrecy vehicles, like anonymous shell companies, anonymous trusts, anonymous foundations.

But that are those come about at a certain time. I mean, you know, people have always had offshore companies. That's not new. I mean, the corporations been around for hundreds of years. Did something change that made this more possible? Like you have all these different countries around the world and even states within the US sort of competing against each other, which I want to say is a good thing in a way. They're competing for business, if you will, by having really favorable corporate laws. And you know, to my libertarian sense, that seems like a good thing. They should compete and be the most desirable jurisdiction to start a company. But the reality is that's not the way it plays out. It's not like they're really opening a real company there. These companies operate virtually and transnationally. They have no loyalty. There's no harm home team idea anymore. You know, they just basically pillage. The best jurisdiction is what they're essentially doing. But did that change at some point? Was there like a time in the 80s or in the 70s or something to that?

Yeah, I would say, you know, according to my report, certainly. You know, again, I'm coming at this on the shoulders of giants of other researchers and journalists who've been working in this space. It really is toward the end of that kind of broader cold war period, late 1980s, early 1990s, especially when you see this sudden surge in this resurgence of this creation of all of these financial secrecy tools, all this broader economic structuring that incentivizes the outflow of all of this questionable illicit suspect wealth from all of these post communist states, all these post colonial states linked directly to all these rising oligarchies, rising dictatorships that are again smothering local populations, looting national treasuries, making sure the bridges and the roads and the hospitals and the schools are never built. And then beyond that, there is no broader free market economy that actually develops in those countries.

Oh, and I mean, I just watched an interesting documentary about disgusting Coca Cola and how they are, they are basically stealing the water supply of people in all these different parts of the world in developing countries. And you know, we had Nestle doing that with their water, I think in California a few years back. That was in the news. So it's not just money, it's resources of every type. And yeah, it's truly awesome.

I wanted to hop on a comment that you made just a moment ago, though. I think your libertarian instinct is exactly correct. And this is really what we saw in terms of the arguments from proponents, especially in the 80s, 90s, 2000s, and maybe even through the 2010s as well, in that we are doing nothing more than creating ease of business, ease of access to funds, to transnational financial flows. The fewer questions that are asked, the fewer regulatory bodies that are required, the easier that it is to set up these systems. Well, then the easier it is to get these investments, the easier it is to find and create these broader, whether it's job creating programs, whether it's successful investments in and of themselves. There's absolutely truth within that. The problem is it's gone so far to the other side now. We have swung the pendulum so much that these tools are being used and abused now by not those of us on the ground. Joe Schmo B business owner who's just trying to support his family or his community. What you have now are these transnational international oligarchic forces that are the ones using and abusing these programs. So again, loot so much money from domestic economies, move it elsewhere, hide it elsewhere, launder it so that it's untraceable from the initial source. No journalists can find it, no authorities or investigators can find where that money came in from. And then beyond that, that money is only used for their benefit. It's never used for any broader kind of economic success stories, economic underpinnings. It's really this kind of rotten edifice that could bring things back to the United States. It was American legislators, it was American policymakers and American politicians that helped create in the U.S. these economic structures that so many of us are all the worse off for years and years later.

Okay, so we made a bit of a leap here, possibly for some who don't understand what this problem really is or means. So basically you have all of these people and companies that are using these offshore jurisdictions to hide Money to keep money away from tax collectors. They're citizens of certain countries, yet they're not paying taxes in those countries. They're extracting their wealth from these countries, but they're not paying their fair share back into the same country. Right. And so they're keeping it away. And we heard of the Panama Papers and the Pandora papers and that's definitely been in the news. But just a couple of stats from your book. And for those of you who are watching on video, you see this on the screen. If not, we'll just basically read it for you. But you know, estimated amount of private wealth located in global financial secrecy jurisdictions, 24 to 32 trillion dollars. That's with a T. Now for a reference, understand that the entire value of the United states economy in one year is just over $20 trillion. The global economy is maybe $85 trillion or so. I'm not exactly sure of the number lately, but somewhere around there. So this is 24 to 32 trillion. It's more than the GDP of the entire U.S. the largest economy in the world and you know, a good percentage of the entire human race's gdp. So that's a lot of real money. Top line estimate of assets held in an anonymous South Dakota trust. So this is right here in the United States. That's almost a trillion dollars, 900 billion. Now, South Dakota, is that used by Americans or only by foreigners really? Because in the US I don't hear a lot about South Dakota as a jurisdiction, but for foreigners, South Dakota is really super popular because I think they have really desirable trust laws and maybe corporate laws too. Tell us about that one. Yeah, yeah.

No, the short answer to that, Jason, is absolutely. It's used by Americans as well. The Rothschilds, the Wrigley family, you know, all of these upper crust individuals who, these elements of dynastic wealth, the beneficiaries of dynastic wealth have flocked to South Dakota. I'll pause on South Dakota for just a moment because what you're talking about is exactly right. I know you just mentioned the scope and the scale of the offshoring world. And I think what a lot of folks think of offshore, they still think of, you know, Bermuda or the Bahamas or the Cayman Islands. They don't think of places like the United States and especially states like Delaware, states like Nevada, states like South Dakota.

So here's what's interesting about that, and correct me if I'm wrong, but to a non American, the US is one of the greatest tax havens and offshore money places in the world. But to an American, they use the places you mentioned, Cayman Islands, Isle of Man, Jersey, you know, Nevis. All of these places, right, that we all hear about, the Cook Islands, et cetera, there's a bazillion of them, but that's mostly foreigners looking at the US as a really desirable place, right?

Yeah, no, absolutely. I would say that in terms of scope and scale, it's clearly on the side of non Americans looking to the United States of America for the kind of secrecy provisions that are needed. Just to turn back to South Dakota for a moment, one of the things that South Dakota has pioneered and we saw this most especially with the so called Pandora papers just a few months ago. South Dakota has created this entire industry, this entire edifice of what they call anonymous trusts. Trusts being these financial creations, these legal fictions that have existed for centuries generally as a means of passing on wealth to future generations within that family. But South Dakota has taken this to a magnitude we've never seen. They've created perpetual anonymity that the information of those who are in the trust will never be shared with other governments, with other jurisdictions, other tax authorities, other investigators. Which is why, just to pull back again, we've seen both Americans and non Americans flocking to South Dakota. Now again, that's only an estimate, $900 billion as the top line estimate in South Dakota. It's still a question of how many total assets are actually there, let alone who those assets are connected to. And then beyond that, what those assets are actually doing after they pass through all that anonymity that the state of South Dakota freely offers.

You know, some of this money that we're talking about is totally ill gotten. We're all familiar with. I think it was hsbc. I don't want to get the wrong bank here, but you know, all the banksters are so crooked and slimy it's unbelievable. But I believe it was hsbc, if I'm not mistaken, that had that big scandal a few years ago of, you know, essentially laundering money for drug cartels. So, you know, a lot of this money is like foreign aid money that companies and government officials in, you know, foreign countries are just basically stealing from the people it should be going to, right?

Yeah.

And they're backdoor deals. Some of them are just human trafficking, drug smuggling, all sorts of things like this. But some of them are just like foreign aid where they're just skimming the money, you know, and you know, shame on the United nations, the UN that is basically putting these tin pot dictators in positions of Respect and power within the United Nations. It's absolutely appalling. You know, you get, you get some of these, the biggest offenders, they're on like the Human Rights Commission. I mean, are you kidding me? You couldn't write fiction this good. It's unbelievable.

It's atrocious. I mean, Jason, one stat within that, I mean, you're exactly right. One stat within that is for every dollar in annual foreign aid that Western countries, and obviously especially the United States, which leads the way, gives to developing countries, for every $1 that is given in foreign aid, $3 in untracked illicit capital flight from those developing countries leaves. I mean, this is like putting your finger in a dike, right? It's never going to work. You're just throwing. I know, whatever the metaphor might be, but it's a three to one ratio. For every dollar given, three is lost, right? That cycle can only continue for so long. You see the abject failure of foreign aid program after foreign aid program. And now we have a better idea of why that actually is. Because again, all these financial secrecy jurisdictions, including those in the United States that are all too happy to take all of this money with no questions asked.

Every program is a new boondoggle for the criminals, whether it be the oil for food program or just any of them. I mean, it's just a new way for, you know, the elites to scam the people. It really is. Percentage of us in which anonymous real estate purchases are still legal, 98%. What does that mean?

This is, we are one of the key industries that has really profited from the explosion of the growth of the United States as a destination country for illicit questionable suspects. Anonymous wealth has been the real estate industry. And the book goes into why this was, you know, 20, 21 years ago, the American Congress implemented new anti money laundering regulations across a number of industries, especially the banking sector have been relatively successful insofar as they're still on the books. They also implemented basic anti money laundering protocols in the real estate industry a few months thereafter. Now we're talking about 2002. The Treasury Department issued an exemption, what they called a temporary exemption for the real estate industry for these anti money laundering requirements. Treasury Department effectively say, we don't want to throw the baby out with bathwater. We don't want these regulations to strangle the real estate industry in and of itself. And again, you see the logic of it, you know, it's perfectly understandable why they did that. The issue is it's now been 20 years of them studying this issue and These exemptions are still in place. Now the reason that It's a temporary 20 year exemption. I know, I know, yeah, just a.

Temporary few decades, just like Nixon taking us off the gold standard 50 years ago. The temporary, temporary suspension of convertibility half a century ago.

We'll get back to it at some point. I will say the reason that it's 98% rather than 100% and again we're talking about both commercial and residential real estate is because a few years ago the federal government began a new pilot program requiring again basic beneficial ownership information for what had previously been anonymous LLC based purchases of high end condos and mansions, you know, these beautiful beachfront properties in Malibu and Miami and Manhattan finally began requiring the actual, it was the title insurers of all people to identify who exactly it is that they are insuring.

And by the way, I, I just saw a big piece on that about how London is such a capital for this. I mean there are just, there is just illicit foreign money flowing into London real estate like you cannot possibly imagine.

Billions and billions sickening over and over and over again. Much of it tied to, you know, regimes in places like Russia and places like China and places like Venezuela that are obviously, you know, as anti democratic as you're going to find. But yes, you're exactly right.

And if you're complaining about buyers pushing the market up too high, well there you go. It's this illicit foreign money that is just buying up everything in sight. How can you compete if you're a regular family, you know, making a normal income trying to buy a house in any of these places? It's impossible.

I want to jump in with that with two quick points. One, you're exactly right. It has been driving up housing prices for the rest of us because the sellers have no reason not to turn these guys away. And again, there's no questions that need to be asked. There's no regulations whatsoever beyond that. Again, it's not just houses. What I go into in book is that these guys have now been purchasing steel mills and factories and manufacturing plants not in the Manhattans and the Malibu's of the world, but in places like Cleveland, Ohio, places like the Rust Belt, places like the Midwest. And what they end up doing is not revitalizing local communities and not bringing jobs back, but just using those assets to hold and hide funds or to use it as part of a broader transnational money laundering scheme. And so what ends up happening is that not only do the jobs never come back, the remaining jobs, those folks are just laid Off. These are the steel workers, the factory workers that are laid off. The factories begin falling apart, begin imploding. They're never going to come back. And these local communities in West Virginia, in Kentucky, in Texas and Illinois, see these economic crown jewels go to complete rot again because of these systems of kleptocracy that we've been talking about today.

Yeah, look, central banks and governments always cause all these massive distortions in the market. And you kind of can argue both sides, right? You can see that all of these laws that we're talking about and these, these deals and methods that we're talking about on the left, they'll say, well, you got to do more regulation. You got to regulate this. Right? But the problem is the reason this happened in the first place is because of regulation. So if you back up 10 steps, you see that this, all this mal investment was a result of people trying to skirt regulations, right? So it's a complicated problem. And it, it seems like with any of this stuff, Casey, once we get into it, the only way out is to just blow up the whole system and start over. You know, it's like you can't, you sort of can't fix it because there's all these iron triangles of everybody protecting their turf and throw all politicians because they're in on it. You know, I didn't show the slide, but the Nancy Pelosi slide, Right. You know, there was a Twitter account called Nancy Pelosi Stock Tracker. Of course it was taken down because Twitter couldn't allow people to track Nancy Pelosi's portfolio, Right. To see how she's making all her insider trading deals. Right? So, you know, they're protecting her, obviously, and all of these elites just protect each other. So how do we ever solve the problem?

I mean, Jason, look, you're exactly right. You know, it's, it's, you know, as we talked about just a moment ago, right, the offshoring world in and of itself, the size of it, the scope of it, is comparable to a superpower. It's comparable to the US or China. It's effectively this invisible superpower unto itself. You know, how are you going to blow? You can't, you can't just blow up a superpower overnight. What is it going to take? What are we going to require? What's going to need? And again, I will say, you know, the book ends on something of an optimistic note because of things like the Pandora papers, Paradise Papers, you know, Panama Papers themselves, revealing the scope and scale of this, including, you know, especially things like political changes, political dynamics in the US this brand new rethinking where the US Is, where it's going, and what kind of policies will be required in the future. I mean, we are really going through this kind of tidal wave shift of understanding how the broader global economy, as well as within that the American economy, economy should operate, what kinds of policies need to be implemented, what kind of policies need to be tossed out. I really think we're going through this incredible shift in broader philosophy, broader economic philosophy and understanding in the US as well as globally that again, I don't know whether that means the policies that are required will be implemented. I have no idea if this is going to ever make a dent in this issue because we're talking about such a gargantuan scale of set of problems. But I will say that the optimism that I have for where we are right now does stem from the fact that you and I are even having these conversations. Because I don't know if we would have been having these five, six, seven years ago. I don't know if these similar conversations elsewhere, similar revelations elsewhere would have been happening, would have moved anything five, six, seven years ago. But just how quickly things have changed, just how many conversations I've certainly been having on my end. The fact that this book can actually exist, here we are in early 2022, is certainly a reason that I have some form of optimism, however misplaced it might be.

Well, Casey, I'll tell you something. You and your peers are doing possibly the most important job in the world, investigative journalism, and there is so little of that anymore. I mean, it's just all but disappeared. The media just parrots the sort of company line, the government line, whatever it is. You know, what's happened in the media to investigative journalism, it used to exist in a real way. Now there's like a few people, you being one of them, you know, hardly anybody, right?

I will say, and I know plenty of absolutely wonderful investigative journalists, certainly plenty who would like to be and deserve to be making far more money than they are right now. I mean, you know, that's part of the broader conversation about how media has shifted, consolidated, fallen apart. And again, we're only talking about right here in the U.S. but again, this.

Has been taking place, and investigative journalism cost real money, gotta have real budgets to, you know, subscribe to things and to travel to places and to meet people and to go undercover. That takes a tremendous amount of resources. Whereas most news media, they just use the wire services, they look at the other news media, they report the same stories, you know, with a different face on them. It's a joke. I mean, we call what we call journalism nowadays is a complete, complete joke.

No, you know, it's clickbait and, you know, easy headlines is the same thing everyone else is saying. Look, I, you know, I don't want to, you know, play myself up too much. I'm in an incredibly fortunate position to find myself. I've married a wife who's wonderfully successful and far more successful than I'll ever be, is able to support my work in and of itself. And I do say, I do want to say, to the credit of the other journalists, you know, the topics that I write about in the book, they have to require the time and resources that so many others. So I certainly don't begrudge anyone else for not writing this book. I was in a wonderfully fortunate position to be able to put this together. And I just hope that it's able to make the kinds of impact and spark the kind of conversations that I certainly hope will emanate from the book now being out.

Okay, so a question. I didn't ask, you know, any topic, anything from the book or your work in general that you want to share, just share some more stuff on light on this problem, if you will.

Well, sure, Jason. That's a wonderful question. Thank you so much. Again, the book is consolidating so much of my investigative work, so much of my research in this space, all the conversations with policymakers, all the conversations with other investigators, all the details of other investigations elsewhere that have really been brought together, as I tried to do in this one single, coherent narrative, I will say the most surprising element of the response was the book is that folks have been saying it's actually readable, it's actually enjoyable, and it actually goes by pretty quickly. So for a topic as in many ways depressing, as well as complicated as transnational money laundering and plutocracy itself, I do hope folks are able to get in, get out relatively quickly. And knowing full well that there are some, maybe not fun stories per se, but at least memorable ones, it doesn't have to be as depressing as it is all the time. But again, this is my first book, and I certainly hope it stands the test of time or at least continues to spark these kinds of conversations moving forward.

I've got to also ask you, before we let you go, who are some of the biggest offenders? I mean, we've all heard about Vladimir Putin, you know, of course, Saddam Hussein. All these folks have these zillions of dollars. Who knows the number? You know, we talked about Nancy Pelosi, there's many other American politicians that are just totally crooked. Of course, it's amazing how some of these people pretend to be like, you know, the man of the people. Yet they've got, you know, big mansions, they live in multiple homes. It's just unbelievable.

I mean, this is the thing that was fascinating for me, Jason, is that it doesn't matter the regime, it doesn't matter the government, it doesn't even matter how they kind of position themselves in broader global political discourse. Whether it's on the right, on the left or in the center. You see these similar figures emerge, these similar dynamics emerge, these similar kind of typologies of oligarchs and leaders and kleptocrats. And again, I think it gets back to the fact that whether it's right wing nationalists or left wing socialists, even in places like Cuba, the Castro family is absolutely part of this broader issue. Or folks right here in the US it's because of how easy, how understandable, and in many ways how cheap and accessible these systems are. If your pockets are deep enough, you have this entire edifice that's more than willing to welcome in and hide and launder and move as much money as you can provide them. And as you just mentioned, you have these iron triangles that develop policymakers and lobbyists and industries that it's going to take years and years to begin disentangling.

Yeah, it's okay. You didn't name any names though.

Well, look, I mean, you could talk about Putin, you can talk about Maduro down in Venezuela, you could talk about. I mean, my pet, pet favorite is I actually worked as a Peace Corps volunteer in Kazakhstan a decade ago and I have the local dictator there to thank for sparking my interest in international money laundering. And lo and behold, it just came out a few days ago that he has overseen a series of companies investing $8 billion in the British real estate sector. And that's only one case study that we know about. So. Hey, glad to see he's still going strong.

Yeah, it's unbelievable. It really is. Well, okay, so tell us about your next book coming out now. What are you doing with the cryptocurrency stuff? Are you talking about the way that's used as a tool for these things or what?

I do want to say again, it's very early days yet. We don't have the form or the actual structure for the book itself. Crypto is one of those things of broader digital assets that I wasn't able to get into in the book, if only because of so many of the developments we've seen in the last 12 months alone. Publishing, you know, you're finishing the manuscript so much longer than the book actually comes out. But there's this other brand new explosion of tools, industries, networks that have been servicing all of these dirty money needs. And again, crypto and digital assets are only one part of that one prong. What I really want to get into in this next book is potentially how it is that these tools have allowed foreign money to flow into American democracy. I know, again, the book ended up in the first book itself, American Kleptocracy. I'm talking about American systems, American figures. But one of the things that's really interesting to me is as we have these broader discussions about American democracy, what does that really mean? Is it really Americans themselves deciding what that democracy actually is and actually looks like? Jason, I suspect I know your answer to that.

It's the best democracy money can buy. Absolutely.

Absolutely it is.

And that means lobbyists for big corporations and entrenched interests.

Growth industry right there. So early days yet. But boy, God knows there's more than enough material that I left on the chopping block just from this first book to get going on a second.

Yeah, and you know, those digital assets, the cryptocurrencies and the NFTs, what great tools. I mean, the people that want to take advantage of all this stuff must be just foaming at the mouth. We didn't mention it, but you know, they do this with art. And you know, if you want to learn about that stuff, just do some searches and check out how the elites use art as a money laundering vehicle because it's a high value density asset, very portable. They use these free ports around the world and it's just a total scam.

For a shameless self plug. The second half of my book does talk specifically about the art industry, especially the American art industry, which is the largest chunk of what is now the largest unregulated market in the world. All those dirty money flows. But if you don't want to get the book, I did have an article in the Atlantic a few months ago about a figure named Hunter Biden, who folks may be familiar with.

We've heard of Hunter Biden.

All of a sudden an emerging artist, we never really heard of him before, is now getting into the art field and what that tells us about where the art world is right now. So certainly plenty of material. Just look it up.

That's fascinating. Fascinating stuff. Give out your website or tell people your Twitter account until you're deplatformed.

Yeah, sure. My website is my name caseymichelle.com and my Twitter handle is cjcmichelle.com or sorry, but you know, it's the Twitter C.

H E L Casey Michelle. And of course the book is available American Kleptocracy how the US Created the World's Greatest Money Laundering Scheme in History. Check it out. It's available in all the usual places. Casey, thanks so much for joining us.

Yeah, Jason, thanks so much for having me.

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