PhilPaine.com

This book, by the author­i­ta­tive expert on glob­al mon­ey laun­der­ing, out­lines the involve­ment of the gov­ern­ments, cor­po­ra­tions, and banks in the pro­cess­ing of crim­i­nal mon­ey on a vast scale. But he is more con­cerned with the sys­tem of false book­keep­ing with which the world’s poor­est regions are sys­tem­at­i­cally drained of cap­i­tal. Bak­er is no philo­soph­i­cal light­weight: he remains trapped in a false sys­tem of def­i­n­i­tions and ter­mi­nol­ogy, but he knows that there is some­thing wrong with it. He cor­rectly points out that the cur­rent Con­ser­v­a­tive ide­ol­ogy of glob­al finance has noth­ing to do with Adam Smith’s the­o­ries of free mar­kets, which it vio­lates in every par­tic­u­lar, but is descend­ed, instead, from the moral blank­ness of Jere­my Bentham’s platophistries. But he can­not pull him­self out of his received frame­work to make the nec­es­sary next steps in analy­sis. There is no doubt, how­ever, of his basic decency..