The Pandora Papers are the third major cache of secret financial data uncovered by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists over the last five years, following the Panama Papers and the Paradise Papers.
Put together, they reveal what post-1980 neoliberalism and globalization have created, which is a vast global shadow economy that is effectively beyond the reach of any government to meaningfully affect through regulatory action or law enforcement.
Pass a statutory reform intended to control this activity or collect appropriate tax revenues from it? The wealthy and powerful with access to the shadow world will charge the law firms and financial services companies they exclusively employ to find a way around the reform as fast as an army of hackers can find a zero-day exploit. No single government—or even supranational alliance—can keep up without being willing to fundamentally change the rules of the game at a comprehensive scale.
In liberal democracies and authoritarian states alike, the people at the top of the political food chain are frequently participants in the shadow economy—or at the least depend on the money those participants can provide in order to remain politically viable. They know about the instruments being used to shelter and hide cash, property, and other assets. They understand how financialization has made the rich staggeringly richer every single waking second of every day, and how extreme wealth provides access to opportunities that no one else on the planet is permitted to even glimpse.
Even when these troves of data burst forth into the public, and there’s a brief hubbub of controversy, the people and interests exposed by the information are largely supremely unworried. There’s nothing the rest of us can do. We’ll just go on paying taxes and filing paperwork and complying with laws. The only changes that would make a difference are unthinkable in the present order. Imagine a world where no shell companies, no holding companies, were allowed to be the owners of record of properties. Where the financial data behind every property transaction and every individual owner’s ability to pay for that property had to be a matter of public record. Where buying houses or skyscrapers as an asset and leaving them empty incurred heavy financial penalties, where AirBnB wasn’t allowed to hollow out vast swaths of cities as undeclared hotels. Imagine if capital didn’t have unlimited mobility. Imagine if any secret banking systems were declared anathema and allowed no access whatsoever to the rest of the world’s financial systems.
You name the reform, and unless it’s small and inconsequential and aimed at financial strategies primarily in use two decades ago, it’ll never get close to being policy. The people in charge will stop it. The money will stop it. The spice has to flow.
And where would you go, if you set out in your thousands or hundreds of thousands, to confront the shadows? What daylit colossus might you surround or storm? The people who own most of the world and pick the meat from the bones of humanity are ten layers of institutions and places and people away from the rest of us. We glimpse their world if at all vaguely in our 401k, in our endowments and assets, in the advisors we have access to, in people we know who’ve helped the ultra-wealthy with something or other. Even in the merely wealthy visible to us who themselves only dimly glimpse the reality inside the shadows. Nothing that the rest of us can see is really the problem, but it’s also the only thing we can touch. Setting out to pull that all down is just the equivalent of rioting in your own neighborhood when what you mean to do is march down Rodeo Drive.
It’s one of the aspects of Marx’s basic analysis that retains the freshness and ferocity of his thinking when he first wrote it: that accumulation can never stop, that it has to grow endlessly. You can’t even indict the shadow world as a domain of aberrant moral failure, though being set free of almost all constraints is an invitation to monstrosity for many. The Pandora Papers are another glimpse into a world that can’t help but exist within the systems we’ve built. The growth that made our world must in time become maddened and unstoppable cancers.
All the world is owned now: there are no people yet to be found who can be stripped of humanity and made into property, no new land to steal and then claim to own. The planet has been eaten, and there is nothing left now but Erysichthon’s option: devour oneself again and again. The giant wants to expand endlessly towards the stars but ends up a shriveled dwarf alone in vast stinking wastelands of the feces it spewed as it ever-more-frantically shoveled its own flesh into its maw.
When there are no houses and buildings and forests and companies and people left to accumulate, when the estates have been planned so that one’s descendants will have more money each successive generation unto the heat death of the universe, when there are no IPOs left to make a thousand dollars turn into a billion overnight, then make a Juicero. Buy non-fungible tokens. Buy imaginary money. Buy stories and dreams. Rocket to the edge of space, divide up Mars, transfuse the blood of teenagers in hopes of living forever.
Isn’t that what they do in the shadows? We’ll never know, because we who live in the light can’t touch what’s inside even when their shade looms over us and darkens everything we do or might hope for.
Image credit: "Shadow 44" by Luzf4 is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0