Читать книгу The Wealth Hoarders - Chuck Collins - Страница 15

A few blocks from where Dee’s family office was located are the global Headquarters of the Boston Consulting Group, the company that worked with Isabel dos Santos and her shell companies – and the project to siphon the wealth of Angola into private offshore accounts. From its glitzy glass tower, looking over Boston harbor, the windows face east toward Africa and Angola.

Down the street rises a luxury building called Millennium Tower, one of the several thousands of new luxury apartment buildings constructed in Boston in the last several years. Over 35 percent of the 443 condominiums are owned by shell companies and trusts, and almost 80 percent of the unit owners do not claim a residential exemption, indicating that the condo is not their primary home. The 13,256 square foot penthouse was sold for $35 million to John Grayken, a private equity investor from Texas. Grayken, who renounced his US citizenship to avoid taxes, can legally live in his condominium four months a year.⁹ With average condominiums selling for over $4 million, Millennium Tower is not only a wealthy residence for the rich, but also a “wealth storage unit” for global capital looking to park itself and hold value. Over half the units are acquired by trusts and shell companies, many masking the identities of the real owners. The astronomical prices of these wealth storage units have helped raise average prices, artificially inflating land values and housing costs and contributing to an affordable housing emergency in the city, which includes homelessness, displacement, and increasing incidence of shelter poverty.

I don’t know anyone in my hometown of Boston who was swindled trying to buy a computer from Blue Hippo. It is exactly 7,127 miles from Boston to the Cook Islands, so I’m not planning to visit and see where Joseph Rensin parks his offshore trusts. But I don’t have to go far to find ways the Wealth Defense Industry has touched me personally. In Boston, the Covid-19 pandemic has fueled an unprecedented housing emergency. Tens of thousands of households are unable to pay their rents in the private speculative market. People are marching in the streets in protests over racial injustice and the ways that inequality weakened our society’s ability to respond to the pandemic. Meanwhile the wealth of the billionaire class – the wealth that is not hidden and still measured – is surging in the face of job losses, illness, and death. People are waking up to the ways in which our economic system extracts the wealth of the commons and funnels it upwards into the hands of the few.

Our main concern in this book is about how the Wealth Defense Industry aids the wealthiest 0.1 percent collect a larger and larger share of the national wealth each year and sequester it for future generations. In other words, our overriding concern is about the growth of dynastic wealth and extreme inequality. But we are also concerned with how this system is deployed to protect criminals and scammers who are stealing your personal information, hacking your online accounts, and swindling millions of people.