“Only Now, as i write this, do i realize how i to was fooled by that optical illusion. I went half way around the world in my compulsion to respond to (/11. But the greatest national security threat was not terrorism, it was right here on Wall Street.”

“In the United States, serious and damaging corruption is not getting punished. That means, by default, we deem it to be just fine.”

“For the past three decades, cases of abuse of children by clergy from Island to the United States and Chile to Poland had come to the surface. There were thousands of victims. The handling of the cases was made worse by the seemingly common modus operandi to always protect the church first, no matter what; to silence the victims and pay them off when necessary because reputation came above justice and the safety of children.”

”To add to the clamour, from 2008 onwards, there were plenty of commentators suggesting that business schools were complicit in producing the crash, teaching selfishness and the engineering of fiendishly complex financial instruments that no one really understood.” “ – call the bulldozers in and demand an entirely new way of thinking about management, business and markets. If we want those in power to become more responsible. Then we must stop teaching students that heroic transformational leaders are the answer to every problem, or that the purpose of learning about taxation laws is to evade taxation, or that environmental costs are external to supply chain logistics, or that creating new desires is the purpose of marketing, and so on. In every case, the business school acts as an apologist, selling ideology as if it were science as part of the longest public relations claim in history.”

“Kleptopia follows the dirty money that is flooding the global economy, emboldening dictators and poisoning democracies. From the Kremlin to Beijing, Harare to Riyadh, Paris to the White House, it shows how the thieves are uniting – and the terrible human cost. While we are looking the other way, all that we hold most dear is being stolen.”

“what does it mean to live, to be human right now? Looking at tech in rural China forced me to examine the ideologies that drive the engineers and companies to build everything from AI farming systems and blockchain food projects to shopping sites and payment platforms.”

“Impunity is the norm at sea, not just because of the lack of enforcement but also due to the cast of characters out there who, with questionable credentials and motives, are left to take up the slack. bureaucrats rather than investigators conduct what rare inspections actually occur on vessels suspected of environmental or labor abuses. Vigilantes and private mercenaries, as much as police or navy officers, patrol the high seas and pursue scofflaws. what laws apply in international waters have been crafted over the years more by diplomats and the fishing and shipping industries than by lawmakers or labor lawyers. This has made commercial secrecy a higher priority than crime prevention.”

“The women, minor celebrities in the world of Christian broadcasting, capture the strange fusion between this new, flamboyant gospel of prosperity in America’s celebrity-driven culture. Not only are the wealthy blessed by the Lord and encouraged to engage in a frenzy of outlandish consumption, but also those who are famous, those who have achieved any celebrity or notoriety, no matter how minor, or those who have power, are seen as having important things to say about faith. Wealth, fame and power are manifestations of God’s work, proof that god has a plan and design for believers. This new class of celebrity, plutocrat Christians fuses with the consumer society, one where the lives and opinions of entertainers, the rich and the powerful are news.”

“And as much as the man at the top has set the tone for this ridiculous moment in American history, it’s all the people below him who have really sustained our bylines over the past few years. you can write only so many stories about the United States. below him lies a seemingly unending trail of toxic waste dumped by those ostensibly brought to Washington to drain the swamp they’re now poisoning.”

“Wide-scale infiltration of Western of the Western financial system by Russian organised crime started right on the eve of the collapse of the Soviet Union … The main players of the game were high-ranking officials of the Soviet Communist Party, top KGB leadership and top bosses of the criminal underworld.” – Yury Shvets, former KGB official

“When Trump wanted to reach Russian President Vladmir Putin, via a secret back channel, i was tasked with making the connection in my Keystone Kop fashion. I stiffed contractors on his behalf, ripped off his business partners, lied to his wife Melania to hide his sexual infidelities, and bullied and screamed at anyone who threatened Trump’s path to power. From golden showers in sex clubs in Vegas, to tax fraud, to deals with corrupt officials from the former Soviet Union, to catch-and-kill conspiracies to silence Trump’s clandestine lovers, i wasn’t just a witness to the presidents rise – i was an active and eager participant.”