People really need to reevaluate their priorities. A lot of people. Globally. Two stories this morning represent polar opposites on the human values spectrum.
The first is Politico’s tale of money laundering of a less-splashy kind. The Washington Post’s series on the Pandora Papers tends to find global money laundering where we expect it: in exotic properties on the French Riviera and in countries with lax financial oversight. Politico’s story exposes the U.S. is one of the latter.
On a 320-acre campus in the late 1990s, Motorola had built a 1.5-million-square-foot facility for manufacturing cell phones in tiny Harvard, Ill. “But within a few years of finishing construction, the bottom had fallen out of Motorola’s business model” and the $100 million site was abandoned, an albatross aound the town’s neck. Then a glimmer of hope for the tiny town:
Then, in 2008 — as the country began tipping fully into the Great Recession — an investor in his early 20s from Miami named Chaim Schochet showed up. Working on behalf of a firm called Optima International, Schochet offered $16.75 million for the empty building. A far cry from the Motorola investment, but more than locals could have hoped for. They happily accepted. Glimmers of potential sprang once more. “Hope burns eternal,” Roger Lehmann, a member of the Harvard Economic Development Corporation, said after the purchase.
At the time, there was no reason to think Schochet and his colleagues were anything but savvy businesspeople, snapping up properties across the Midwest. Optima International was a parent company to a constellation of related firms (including one called “Optima Harvard Facility LLC”). Prosecutors would later dub this the “Optima Family,” with its American operations overseen by two Americans named Mordechai Korf (Schochet’s brother-in-law) and Uri Laber. As the Justice Department alleged in a series of civil forfeiture cases, this “Optima Family” plowed hundreds of millions of dollars into investments in state after state: commercial real estate in Cleveland and Dallas and Louisville, steel factories in West Virginia and Kentucky and Ohio, production plants in Michigan and New York and Indiana. Time and again, these investors swooped in, pledging jobs, revitalization and a lifeline for towns watching their economic lifebloods dry up.
All alleged schemes for hiding ill-gotten funds offshore. Only now, to Russian and Chinese oligarchs and others, the U.S. is “offshore.” Sites across the U.S. Midwest have become low-profile places for stashing wealth out of sight and out of the reach of taxing authorities in other countries. “Investors” swoop in, buy up distressed properties, promise renewal, then leave them to rot. The story is as facination as it is disheartening for what it says about global kleptocracy:
We only know about Harvard because American and Canadian authorities, aided by partners in Ukraine and New Zealand, targeted the specific money laundering networks allegedly linked to Kolomoisky and Gong. But given the miles-wide availability of other American money laundering services — from real estate to private equity, hedge funds to anonymous trusts, artwork to accountants — there’s no reason to think the Motorola plant is the only multimillion-dollar American asset that’s been bandied between parallel kleptocratic networks.
“I’m not sure people do understand how damaging taking dirty money really is to the United States,” former FBI agent Karen Greenaway, who has deep experience investigating post-Soviet money laundering networks, testified in 2019. “Dirty money is like a rainstorm coming into a dry streambed. It comes very quickly, and a lot of it comes very fast, and the stream fills up, and then it gets dry again.”
On the opposite pole is Michelle Goldberg’s profile of Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), the leader of the House Progressive Caucus. Jayapal’s is a classic immigrant story:
Jayapal was born in the South Indian city of Chennai and raised mostly in Indonesia, where her father worked in the oil business. At 16, she moved to America by herself to attend Georgetown. Her parents had fairly conventional ideas about what immigrant success looked like. “To my dad, only three professions were worthy of his ambition for me: doctor, lawyer or business person,” she wrote in her 2020 book, “Use the Power You Have: A Brown Woman’s Guide to Politics and Political Change.”
But after a stint at a leveraged buyout firm and business school, she found the work unfulfilling. A 1989 visit to a giant refugee camp on the Thai-Cambodian border led her into a job in a Seattle international development nonprofit and eventually into politics. Now she is fighting to see President Biden’s agenda passed by Congress and sent to his desk.
The travails of that challenge you know, including progressives leveraging their numbers to ensure both the infrastructure package and the reconciliation bill pass:
The reconciliation bill, otherwise known as the Build Back Better Act, includes some of President Biden’s key campaign promises, which he, obviously, has an interest in enacting. “Build Back Better, the president’s agenda, the Democratic agenda, would have died had we not done what we did,” said Jayapal.
If progressives are able to save the bulk of Build Back Better, Biden’s presidency will be transformative. American life will become less unequal and precarious. Parenting will no longer be a ticket to immiseration for many. Drug prices will go down, and people on Medicare will enjoy added benefits like vision and dental care.
It is the contrast in values and life choices that shakes me this morning. The Pandora Papers reveal a shady, global network of criminals whose only interest is in building their own wealth, often ill-gotten, and in shielding it from the world community that created it for them to plunder. Meanwhile, we have public servants whose principal interest lies in improving the lives of millions. How the former is even a choice is beyond comprehension.