Month: July 2019

Author: Oliver Bullough

Welcome to Peter Olszewski’s review of the 2018 Economist ‘book of the year’ 

I don’t understand the exotic fiscal intricacies employed by the rich, which is possibly why I’m not rich.

I don’t really understand shell companies, companies within companies, offshore trusts and some such, which is why I don’t have any.

Hence it was with trepidation that I began reading Oliver Bullough’s startling book, Moneyland, which explains how the super-rich stay super rich.

Happily, the book promptly put me at ease, because the author stressed that the whole point of the machinations the super-rich undertake to hide their money is an unparalleled complexity that few can understand,  apart from a tribe of high-priced lawyers paid to create and hide dosh behind said complexity.

Bullough writes, “The physicist Richard Feynman supposedly once said: ‘if you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don’t understand quantum mechanics.’

“I feel the same about the way offshore structures have warped the fabric of the world. But if this dizzying realization sends me out of the house and away from the screen, there’s no escaping it.  The building where I buy my morning coffee is owned in Gibraltar.”

Gibraltar of course being one of those countries dubbed an offshore haven, and Bullough gives an easy-to-understand example of the concept of offshore – of being legally absent while being physically present.

He discusses the pirate radio stations that began emerging in the UK in the 1960s when the BBC had the only radio licence and writes that these radio stations, 

 “…moored their vessels outside British territorial waters, set up radio equipment, and broadcast pop music back into the UK. Many people called these radio operators pirates, but others called their stations something else: offshore.”

Bullough notes that the concept of offshore was useful, and the term started to be employed to describe financial transactions as well.

Bullough also cynically notes,  “If we spent all of our time trying to puzzle out what is really happening, we’d have no time to do anything else.  It’s no wonder most sensible people ignore what the super-rich get up to.” 

And what the super-rich get up to is amassing so much money that the amounts can make heads spin, and that there is so much money sloshing around looking to be spent that it has created a new field of economic study, plutonomy 

According to Investopedia, plutonomy is an economy that exhibits massive income and wealth inequality, and where the spending and consumption activity of an extremely wealthy minority have an outsize impact on the economy.  

And according to Bullough, plutonomy also leads to, or creates, a new world.

“I call this new world Moneyland,” he writes, “Maltese passports, English libel, American privacy, Panamanian shell companies, Jersey trusts, Liechtenstein foundations, all add together to create a virtual space  that is far greater  than the sum of all their parts.”

Moneyland is the province of the world’s new ruling class, a global super-rich society interested only in amassing super wealth.

The inhabitants of Moneyland broadly fall into two categories: those who earned their wealth legally and wish to hide it, and those who earned their wealth illegally and need to hide it.

The latter includes criminals as well as sundry despots who head countries and strip the country’s coffers bare via corruption and other means, while spending, for example, $1.04 million on a wrist watch when their ordinary citizens struggle to live on $10 a month.

As Bullough writes, “It is remarkably easy to loot a country providing you are in charge of it.”

Author Bullough presents his case in a tightly and sparely written book, dense with information that shocks.

He avoids the tabloid trap of describing how disgusting the behaviors of rich people can be, although he does give an example of traveling first class with a super-rich woman who wore diapers because she couldn’t be “bothered” going to the toilet, and who became embroiled in an argument with the flight attendant as to who would change the diaper.  The flight attendant ended up doing the dirty work.

But Bullough does give plenty of examples of the disgusting amounts people spend on things, such as the aforementioned $1.04 million watch, and he bemoans the fact that some of the best real estate in some of the best parts of the world’s best cities   sits mostly empty – London apartments, for example, worth figures like $55 million that are used only a couple of weeks a year by wealthy wives who drop into town for shopping sprees.

On the obscenity of  such property, Bullough quotes another author,  New Yorker Michael Gross and his 2014 book, ‘House of Outrageous Fortune: Fifteen Central Park West, the world’s most powerful address.’

Gross writes,  “Fifteen Central Park West is more than an apartment building. It is the most outrageously successful, insanely expensive, titanically-tycoon- stuffed real estate development of the twenty-first century…it represents the resurrection and the life of our era’s aristocracy of wealth.

“No longer dignified, unified, well-born, or even well-bred, they enjoy unheard-of-incomes and the most extraordinary standard of living in history.”

And yes, Trump and his cohorts do get mentioned in the book.

And yes, Bullough does ultimately sound the warning that this inequality, this profligacy must end, will end, and the end will probably be messy.

He quotes Brooke Harrington, author of books such as Capital Without Borders, and Pop Finance.

She lays out what can eventuate in the wake of money launderers and super-clever deviant lawyers working for the super-rich stuffing up the global system.

 “Their work radically undermines the economic basis and legal authority of the modern tax state,” she writes, “Using trusts, offshore firms, and foundations, professionals can ensure that inequality endures and grows in a way that becomes difficult to reverse short of revolution.”  

Moneyland is a great must-read – but be prepared to be disturbed. Be prepared to be angry, very angry.

Peter Olszewski

Delayed Rays of a Star – A Review

Author: Amanda Lee Koe

A chance encounter, a photograph, three cinematic legends captured forever on film at a party in the thrilling world of 1920’s Berlin. This is the opening cue for Amanda Lee Koe’s debut novel, a work of overarching genius destined for a permanent place amongst 2019’s ‘best fiction’ lists.

The three ‘legends’ (and the photograph really happened, it is amongst the opening pages of the novel) Marlene Dietrich, Anna May Wong and Leni Riefenstahl provide the source material and narrative pace for Koe’s 387-page tome. Most will be familiar with the trio: Dietrich – a bi-sexual, gender-blending German actress who renounced fascist Germany to become a Hollywood icon; Anna May Wong – the first Asian star of Hollywood (although she was actually born in California, to Chinese parents), whose type-casting into ‘native’ roles overshadowed her enormous abilities as an actress; and Leni Riefenstahl – actress and film-maker, who immortalized the Nazi aesthetic in ‘Triumph of the Will’. 

Back to that photograph, with this as her entry point Koe moves back and forward across multi- story and time-lines, using what we know about the trio—their experiences and dramas, in sum there non-fiction lives—to fuel and propel the novel’s fictional accounts. While there are numerous uses of this technique by the author, arguably the most powerful comes towards the book’s end, when Anna May is called upon to defend her Hollywood typecasting, a journalist challenging her on a dance routine she once performed:

“Everyone around the dinner table was staring, waiting to see what would happen next. They were no longer trying for discretion. Anna May had made no verbal response to the journalist’s condemnation, but tears were running down her face . . . Cutlery plinked as she rose from her feet majestically. She turned to the journalist. ‘An actress’s authenticity is not in her life’, she said, ‘it is in her performance. Now did I dance well, or did I not?’”

Class!

Phrases such as ‘sprawling’ and ‘ambitious’ have been used to describe Koe’s novel, and there is substance in these terms; however, while that might imply a work that is unwieldy and overreaching, this is not true here, for the tales told are welded expertly into a story that feels holistic, be it one where the parts are interesting in their own right. And it is the presence of numerous bit-characters that ensure the reader is never allowed to tire. They include Hans Hans, an Afrika Korpsman seconded to a Riefenstahl production, a man struggling with lost love and tragedy; Bei Bei, a sex trafficked Chinese migrant who becomes the Sunday maid to the bed-ridden Dietrich, in late 1980s Paris; a blacklisted Jewish writer fleeing pre-War German; a West German bureaucrat; a wolf; a gypsy, the tableau of characters is as opulent as Koe’s language, each adding a thread to her book’s rich fabric.

The book is also a visceral affair, the narrative world rendered authentic through vivid descriptions—from the stench of a urine filled pan to the physicality of sexual encounters—that jar and unnerve (“Today Madame’s stool was shaped just like a petit-croissant”). 

Eventually, for the book is long, one leaves the final chapter with a degree of sympathy for Dietrich et al., with all of the trio having suffered for their fame – cherished and adorned independently from how they regarded their own talent and accomplishments. Indeed only Riefenstahl leaves the novel with any sense of contentment, albeit satisfaction bound together by knots of righteous denial (Riefenstahl lived to be 101, dying in 2003).

Delayed Rays of a Star is nothing short of a fiction supernova – a book to be enjoyed and savored. And personally I envy those who can come to it for the first time – before them the promise of a crisp new page and the print of an old black and white photograph from the Berlin world of 1928. 

The Beekeeper of Sinjar, Rescuing the Stolen Women of Iraq

Author: Dunya Mikhail (meet the author here)

In 2014 a black wave swept across western Iraq. Salafi jihadists, following a fundamental doctrine of Sunni Islam, moved out from the shadow world of ‘hit and run’ insurgency to launch a full-blown campaign to occupy territory and establish a caliphate. Over the ensuing period, from August 2014 to March 2019, when the last fighters were driven out of the Syrian town of Al-Baghuz Fawqani, the group best known by its acronym, ISIS, became the globe’s most potent force of extreme Islam.

The story of the rise and impact of ISIS has been documented in several excellent books, with Joby Warrick’s Pulitzer winning Black Flags and William McCant’s The ISIS Apocalypse amongst the best (for a journalist’s own account of her experiences with ISIS, including the English accented executioner, ‘Jihad John’, check out I Was Told to Come Alone: My Journey Behind the Lines of Jihad by Souad Mekhennet’s, the subject of a forthcoming HOWL review). But across this writing there has been a noteworthy vacuum of words dedicated to the voices and experiences of those who suffered under ISIS rule. This was until 2018 when the English-reading world welcomed the translation of Dunya Mikhail’s The Beekeeper of Sinjar. Rescuing the Stolen Women of Iraq, a book that focuses almost exclusively on the stories of Yazidi women under the caliphate.

Before 2014 most of the world had not heard of the Yazidi, a small religious minority who had lived for centuries under the shadows of the Sinjar Mountains, in northern Iraq. This changed in August 2014 when ISIS fighters starting overrunning their towns and villages, pushing the survivors towards the cold barren flaks of Mt. Sinjar, a mountain that had provided a traditional refuge for this insular people. Down below, away from the drama unfolding on the peaks, ISIS forces moved across the Yazidi homelands, its soldiers engaging in a wholesale campaign to eliminate the Yazidi identity; a group whose religious credo, an amalgam of Christian, Islam, Judaism and Zoroastrainism was heretical to the fundamentalists – a blight to be eliminated (see video). The results included the mass execution of Yazidi men, the forced recruitment of children into jihad militias and the wholesale trafficking and sale of Yazidi women.

It is the plight of these women and the efforts made by numerous Iraqis to help and rescue them that forms the basis of Mikhail’s book. Herein, across its short 200 pages the author—herself a refugee, a journalist and poet driven out of Iraq after she incurred the displeasure of Saddam Hussein—draws on first-person accounts to reveal the reality of death, survival and hope under ISIS rule. These stories, as you would suspect, are harrowing; but there are also moments of light, instances of people and events that show how nothing, no matter how evil, can destroy the capacity for human goodness. True to this is the continuing presence of Abdullah Shrem, the ‘beekeeper’ of the title, who has devoted his life to the rescue of Yazidi women from ISIS enslavement. A modest man with a penchant for the romantic—at one point he tells the author of the motivation he receives from bees, comparing the women he rescues to the queen bees of a colony, the loss of which would signal the death of the hive—he is also driven and practical; a man wholeheartedly dedicated to the recovery of ‘lost’ women from their jihadist captors. 

Another quality of the book, which serves to sustain the reader through some of the darker passages, are the occasional flourishes provided by the author’s poetry—Mikhail is an award winning poet—the verses serving up imagery and sentiments that connect the reader with the emotions unleashed by her accounts. Some reviewers have been critical of this aspect of Mikhail’s writing, but for me it adds another layer of emotional expression that enriches the stories that her verses touch. 

Our girls, our girls, confined in chains, dragging the world along behind them.

Some of them fall to the ground in the water in 

the dirt in the air on the ground,

leaving the world without meaning, like a clock with only 

a long hand.

Who’s left in the village?

As for the stories themselves, as you would expect they are traumatic, often appalling. The account of Nadia, told in the opening pages, is evocative of those that follow: captured by ISIS soldiers while fleeing her home village; transported to a city and separated from her husband and children; transported to another place and sold at auction; beatings, rapes and enslavement until the day comes when, somehow, she is able to make a furtive call to Shrem. After this – escape, a new life, scars and memories—the fate of her husband and children unknown. All of the stories that follow Nadia’s account share elements of her experience, each tale leaving its own mental stain.

If I have one cavil with the book it is the use of the term ‘rescuing’ in its subtitle. This word gives a feel of passivity around those being saved – as if the women in the book are spectators to their fate. Yet as Mikhail’s stories show it is usually their own initiative—the decision to flee a house or to ask for a phone from a stranger—that starts them on the path to escape. ‘Helping the stolen women of Iraq’ might not be as catchy, but I think it is a more rightful depiction of the spirit of the women that fill this tome.

It is inevitable that a volume recounting the rise and excesses of ISIS will leave one shaken, but in weaving together the resilience and strength of the women featured in her pages and the contributions of those willing to help them, one leaves Makhail’s book with their soul intact (just).

Now as the rains set in I will undoubtedly read many more books, but few, I suspect, will be as fine as this one. 

The Beekeeper of Sinjar. Rescuing the Stolen Women of Iraq is available, now, at Monument, Phnom Penh (Norodom Avenue) and Siem Reap (Heritage Walk, in the downstairs atrium). 

Wayne McCallum