The Oligarch World Order
Transnational Elites' Free Zones, Freeports, Special Economic Zones, and Offshore Tax Havens
It’s often been said that the world is split into haves and have-nots; nowhere is this more apparent than in the oligarch world order, where the mega-elites dodge taxes slated for the have-nots with aplomb.
Household-name or not, “mega-elite” billionaires and centi-millionaires, with their propensity to jet-set around the globe on private planes, are a class of people who are not necessarily invested in identifying with the nation-state of their origin or current residency. Instead, they consort with “their kind” on the international stage. The mega-elites’ bird’s-eye view lends itself to a godlike looking down on the 99.5% “masses,” including mere multimillionaires, from a global perspective.
Tech titan billionaire Peter Thiel has gone on record on Piers Morgan Uncensored to declare the concept of nation-states a passé “center-left zombie establishment” and liberal democracies “exhausted.”
Thiel continues, “There is something about the United States that is singularly important. There’s some sense in which the president is the mayor of the U.S. but the dictator or leader of the world. And it matters maybe even more to the rest of the world who’s president than to the people inside the country, which is much harder. It’s much easier to do things outside the country than inside the country in a lot of ways. It’s in some ways important to the whole world who is president.”
On a separate occasion, Thiel has advocated for a “One World State.” It doesn’t get more narcissistic than this frame of mind. Narcissists are control freaks who cannot handle any deviation from the “One True Path” of their distorted, fascistic minds. He admits to the evil of perpetrating a one-world state through the “with teeth” mechanisms of the Antichrist to head off a technology and science Armageddon.
Thiel’s comments reflect a Christofascist expansionist view that treats all land and communities as new frontiers for exploration and conquering, not unlike erstwhile imperialism and colonialism.
Trending on X, Tuesday, January 7th, was #NewWorldOrder with footage of Trump speaking about applying “economic force” rather than military force to annex Canada as a 51st state. Meanwhile, in Canada, Elizabeth May, leader of the Green Party and member of the parliament for Saanich - Gulf Islands in BC, clapped back at Trump in an epic takedown asserting Canada’s sovereignty.
Further data on Trump’s messianic impulse to makeover the globe: NBC news reported January 7th, “Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s 10-year term came to an abrupt end on Monday in part due to party infighting over his handling of Trump and the promise of 25% tariffs that Trump has promised to enact.”
Narcissists, suffering from a cognitive distortion called grandiosity, believe that they are on a cosmic mission in life, which comports perfectly with Trump’s desire to be king of the world and Musk’s desire to be king of the universe. Musk has repeatedly called for humans to become multi-planetary, and he is delusionally fixated on an utterly improbable notion of colonizing the inhospitable planet of Mars.
It’s conceivable that malignant narcissist Musk could whip up enough global strife over the borders and resources of nation-states-cum-network states to catalyze World War III in earnest, such that planet Earth becomes war-torn and unlivable. Mars would then become the escape hatch and his utmost realized dream. In other words, Musk could engineer a dire state of emergency where even Mars would look like a relief from Earth.
Musk’s partner in crime, bully Trump is gunning for the North American continent top to bottom, from the Arctic island of Greenland to Canada to Mexico and the Panama Canal. North of Canada is the Danish territory of Greenland. His imperialist jingoist fever dreams encompass renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America.”
Shockingly, he has not yet suggested the “Gulf of Trump.” And for now, despite his antipathy for Mexico, the state of New Mexico is safe from being renamed New America or New Trump. But, who are we kidding, no matter how we slice it, America is the new Trumpistan.
Now, there are even whisperings of Cuba being part of this North American Reich. Marco Rubio has gone on record to say that Cuba checks all the boxes for being a terrorist state.
In other foreboding updates on the eve of Trump’s incoming regime, Steve Bannon and Elon Musk are headed off in an ideological war. Bannon recently told an Italian newspaper that Musk’s ideas are “really about the implementation of techno-feudalism on a global scale.”
Bannon represents old-school populist MAGA, and Musk, dark gothic MAGA. Bannon is a nativist-protectionist, whereas Musk is a globalist oligarch. The two factions are at polar ends from one another, with the tech bros tilting the scales in their favor — big money winning the day.
Combating a Transnational Crime Syndicate
While the broligarchs are trying their damnedest to exert an international (and multi- planetary) dominion over the rest of us, “serfs,” it’s incumbent on the rest of us to get our act in gear to fight off a subjugating New World Order.
No better place to start than targeting broligarchs’ pocketbooks. Hitting them where it hurts most involves going after the very institutions and business practices that shelter their wealth. This approach goes way beyond boycotting their companies, albeit a mighty tool in the toolkit. It means exposing the vast web of underground dark money to sanitizing sunlight.
Instruments of financial control include tax-evading transnational elites’ sovereign Free Zones, Freeports, Special Economic Zones, and Offshore Tax Havens.
At odds with democracy, these offshore structures make it easy for oligarchs to hide their money from democratic oversight.
Investigative journalist Oliver Bullough writes in his book, Moneyland: Why Thieves And Crooks Now Rule The World And How To Take It Back, “Moneyland is not an easy place to confront, however. You can’t send in an army against it, since it doesn't feature on any maps…It exists wherever there is someone who wants to keep their money out of the reach of their country’s government, and can afford the lawyers and financiers required to do so. If we wish to preserve democracy, however, we must confront Moneyland’s nomad-citizens and find a way to dismantle the offshore structures that make it so easy for them to hide their money from democratic oversight.”
Bullough continues, “The laws of Moneyland are whichever laws anywhere that are most suited to those wealthy enough to afford them at any moment in time…They move their money, their children, their assets and themselves wherever they wish, picking and choosing which countries’ laws they wish to live by. The result is that strict regulations and restrictions do not apply to them, but still constrain the rest of us.”
Moneyland is the dark side or some say the price of globalization. Globalization’s defenders argue that it has lifted more people out of poverty than any movement ever. While a select few profit from Moneyland’s architecture, notably accountants, lawyers, and real estate agents, the corrosive corruption that it engenders can metastasize such that, for example, epidemics can flourish, helping deadly diseases to gain a foothold, namely in sub-Saharan Africa. Additionally, it can incentivize doctors to use the wrong medicines, which in turn emboldens drug-resistant viruses (ex-Soviet countries).
In short, Moneyland undermines national security, public health, and public order.
The advent and ascent of Moneyland, which got its start in the 1950s with the concept of ‘offshore,’ augurs the end of the post-World War II liberal democratic world order. Moneyland signals the end of the global financial architecture that was conducive to open societies. In point of fact, its signature lack of transparency is antithetical to open societies.
The root cause of the immigration crisis at the border is corruption engendered by Moneyland. To scapegoat migrants is to ignore that offshore bandits are looting the world, and this looting is undermining democracy.
Bullough closes out his book with the message that we need to support any politicians prepared to build the coalitions required to do the patient, taxing, technical and unglamorous work of imposing transparency on the ownership of wealth and property in order to find out who really owns what so that we can prosecute the corrupt and identify them as the thieves that they are.
Well, I try my best to be just like I am
But everybody wants you to be just like them
They say, "Sing while you slave," and I just get bored
I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more
“Maggie’s Farm” by Bob Dylan
Next Steps/Conclusion
To untangle the Gordian knot that is the global, transnational spider web of oligarchic power, it’s necessary for nation-states to establish the political will to shutter proliferating heretofore established tax havens that encroach upon the Western liberal world order. Either the West gets a backbone to push back against this Gilded Age, or Big Tech absconds with the corpse. Already, the powers that be in the established Honduran government are duking it out with the exploitative power grab that is Prosperá, a utopian fantasyland built on the largesse of the administrative state or what network state proselytizer Balaji decries as the “Leviathan.”
If the oligarchs continue to put pressure on the existing world order, culturally, politically, and legislatively, they very well may get a Pete Hegseth/Peter Thiel/Steve Bannon-worthy Crusades of their nihilistic fantasies; only it will be IRL and not limited to a fantasy-based video game.
President Biden acknowledged the elephant in the room of the “oligarchy that is taking shape in America” and the “tech industrial complex” in his farewell address from the Oval Office on Wednesday, January 15th, just 5 days out from the inauguration of Trump. Poignantly, he reminded Americans that America is on our watch to protect and guard, saying, “I love America. And I know you do too.”
Further Reading
Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) fighting Moneyland:
Transparency International
The Tax Justice Network
Corruption Watch
Global Witness
Wealth X —articles, analytics on the wealthy
Capital Without Borders: Wealth Managers and the One Percent by Brooke Harrington
Offshore: Stealth Wealth and the New Colonialism by Brooke Harrington
Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right by Jane Mayer
The Offshore World: Sovereign Markets, Virtual Places, and Nomad Millionaires by Ronen Palan
The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World by Atossa Araxia Abrahamian
“Sometimes it is mentally healthy to avoid reality, to take a step back, to isolate yourself, to protect yourself by reframing, repressing and outright falsifying, because the alternative is that you will find yourself in this wasteland, in this horror film, in this place of terror, which is current day reality. And so perhaps the technologies that encourage fantasy, such as social media, and perhaps the delusions we find ourselves more and more addicted to — political delusions, cultural, social, and so on and so forth — perhaps they serve a purpose.
The purpose is to keep us alive until reality itself has changed and has become healthier, more functional, livable, acceptable, bearable, tolerable — a reality which allows one to thrive. The truth is that reality as it is today, doesn’t. And of course this raises a conundrum: if people are delusional, if they live in La La Land, in fantasy, in a dreamscape, if they are dreaming all the time, how would they be able to operate in reality and on reality in order to change it for the better? That’s a conundrum. And the answer is, it’s a problem. If the only solution to a reality which is anomic and dystopian, if the only solution is to escape that reality, then who would be left to change it for the better, to improve it somehow, and to allow us to return to reality, to give up on our delusions and fantasies in order to thrive and prosper and be happy, or content at least in the world as it is?
When the world as it is, is threatening, when the world as it is is hostile, when the world as it is is unbearable and intolerable, who would change it for us if we give up on the world, if we draw the bridges, withdraw, go inwards and constrict our lives and isolate ourselves and avoid all types of interactions except within our more and more demented minds?
If you construct technologies that create virtual bubbles that we can never exit, what in the world will act as an agent of change, or who will act as an agent of change? And this is the terrifying plight of our generation. There have been previous generations who have experienced hardships much harder than ours. We are a bit spoiled. There have been previous generations who have adhered to fantasies.
Religion is an example of a delusional, mentally ill fantasy — God and other such nonsense. But there’s never been a generation, to the best of my knowledge, that combined all these strands into a giant collective pathology. I am not aware of a similar period in history. And so this is a really serious menace when it comes to the very survival of our increasingly more delusional, fantasy-immersed species.” Prof. Sam Vaknin
Many will be surprised to see how things really happen behind the well-kept curtains of the self-proclaimed warriors of the fight against corruption and the fight for morality!
Hypocrites everywhere! But tables have turned!