Casey Michel in Conversation With Alexander S. Vindman (Lt. Col., U.S. Army, Ret.)

For years, one country has acted as the greatest offshore haven in the world, attracting hundreds of billions of dollars in illicit finance tied directly to corrupt regimes, extremist networks, and the worst the world has to offer. But it hasn’t been the sand-splattered Caribbean islands, or even traditional financial secrecy havens like Switzerland or Panama, that have come to dominate the offshoring world. Instead, the country profiting the most also happens to be the one that still claims to be the moral leader of the free world, and the one that claims to be leading the fight against the crooked and the corrupt: the USA. Casey Michel’s American Kleptocracy (St. Martin’s) examines just how the United States’ implosion into a center of global offshoring took place: how states like Delaware and Nevada perfected the art of the anonymous shell company, and how the Obama administration gutted international efforts to fight massive money-laundering; how post-9/11 reforms brought a flood of illicit finance directly into the U.S., and how Nazi-era lobbyists birthed an entire industry of spin-men whitewashing transnational crooks and despots; how territories like Guam and Puerto Rico opened up their islands to as much offshore money as they could hold, and how everyone from Michael Jackson to The Fugees to The Wolf of Wall Street ended up involved. It also looks at how Trump’s presidency has accelerated all of the trends. Michel will be joined in conversation by Lt. Col. Alexander S. Vindman (U.S. Army, ret.), author of Here, Right Matters: An American Story.

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