Stiffdog undercover.

Stiffdog undercover.

Stiffdog’s just back from interviewing Bo at the White House with this chilling exclusive. “Wuff everybody. Bo is good, you know, looking forward to Christmas dog biscuits and that but he’s been listening in. Did you know that humans have three world economies, the state, the criminal and the terrorist? It’s like the first is in green dollars and the other two are in dark dollars; like dark matter, you can’t put your finger on it but it has to be there somewhere. Well they also count in trillions. The criminal economy is straightforward, sex, drugs, fake goods, crime etc, but the terrorist economy is murkier. There are always people who want things doing they can’t do themselves because it wouldn’t look good on their résumé. They can’t use criminals because they’re immoral so they need people who are so passionate about something they’ll do anything ‘for the cause’. Now world governments always need stuff doing they can’t be seen to be involved in. Enter terrorist economics. The CIA for instance has been funding terrorist activity since World War II all over the world, the Far East, South America, Sadam Hussein, Osama Ben Laden etc, often arming and funding them with profits from the local drugs trade. See the Iran-Contra Affair. They simply couch what they wanted doing in the terms of the poor unsuspecting believers beliefs.
But the problem when dealing with ‘believers’ is they may start doing what you want because it coincides with what they want but they usually carry on doing what they want even when it diverges from what you want. So Ben Laden, by now well connected into the dark dollar economies, starts biting the hand that he used to work for in the name of Islamic fundamentalism and goes a smidgen too far on 9/11. Bush retaliates by passing legislation on money laundering and stuff, which cuts the green dollar off from the dark dollar and removes the latter from the American economy and the US finds a hole in its numbers.
Meanwhile the Talaban and el-Qaeda backed by dark dollars continue fighting for Islam in Islamic countries that in general don’t want them against green dollar backed US troops. The suicide bomber is actually fighting not for Islam but the terrorist economy. But increasingly the dark terrorist economy is drifting towards the criminal economy as they come to rely more and more on funding from narcotics. The poor suicide bomber, in a surreal play on the World Wars, is dying to be replaced by poppy fields. Maybe if this was pointed out to him he might not be so keen to strap on his exploding cummerbund.
Bo says dogs would play it differently. “1/ stop talking about threats to National security because the criminal/terrorist alliance isn’t interested in states. 2/ legalise drugs so nation states take control of the narcotics trade and turn dark dollars back to green, and 3/ interrupt dark money movements. And for God sake make people realise this isn’t an idealistic struggle anymore, it’s just about dark economics!” With thanks to Loretta Napoleoni, research economist.