Benefit of whitening black money

Maswood Alam Khan

The term 'black money' was born when a swindler told a victim that he ran out of some expensive chemicals needed to wash a huge quantity of deliberately blackened dollar currency notes ( to avoid detection by the border check-posts) smuggled out from an African country. The moment a reader reads in newspapers that the government is allowing black money to be whitened s/he imagines all those goons, thieves, dacoits and robbers swarming the office of National Board of Revenue to legalise their booties and looted money.
   But the fact is not so blackish, neither whitish. There are basically two worlds where people deal in money other than white money: one is black market and the other is underground economy. Robbers, thieves, smugglers, drug traffickers, prostitutes and other criminals, who cannot justify their incomes to law enforcement agencies, usually roam the corridors of black market.
   On the other hand there are some 'white' criminals; they did not directly steal anything or rob a bank or commit a crime for which they have to abscond; they transact in cash in the world of underground economy as they cannot really justify their income before government's revenue collectors. Examples of such 'white' criminals: a mathematics teacher of a government school earning Taka 2 lakh every month by offering private tuitions; a government servant, who by law cannot do business, made a profit of Taka 1 crore by investing his savings with a relation in a real estate business; a physician earning Taka 20 thousand everyday; a customs official bought an apartment from a businessman at 40 per cent discount, the discounted money being the bribe; or doing business online, presently a lucrative area.
   There is another category of dangerous 'white' criminals found mostly in developing countries of Asia and Africa. Both in office and home they speak in regal English; both in summer and winter they wear white shirts and woolen pinstripe suits; they hire foreigners as consultants; they are industrialists with factories equipped with state-of-the-art machinery and their offices are furnished with the latest furniture and the prettiest receptionist available. They make huge money through adulterating food, drink and medicine and spend more on TV advertisements than on research and development; the only research they do in connivance with their foreigner consultants is on how to finesse their adulteration of food and medicine so that adulterated products taste and look better than the original ones, thanks to development of chemistry which can make goat urine smell like ghee and pasted cow dung taste like sweetmeats. As reported, many consumers, getting used to the taste of food adulterated with poisonous toxins, knowingly become dependent on the same adulterated products, shunning the original ones.
   The most lucrative areas of underground economy where one can become rich overnight are pseudonymous joint ventures in poor countries dealing mostly in food, drink and medicine. International swindlers equipped with cutting edge expertise and technical know-how about adulterating food drink and medicine and manufacturing imitations of costly equipment window-shop for their counterparts in poor countries. A few batches of costly tablets made of simply chalk-powders having no ingredient at all churned out at an interval of one hour from the continuous production line may earn the owner an extra few millions of dollars; a little adulteration or tampering with weights in the production line of packed spices similarly may make the owner rich overnight.
   All the above people don't have any crime record with police but they have not (or could not justifiably report) reported their huge earnings, gains or bonanza in their Income Tax Returns. These 'black' and 'white' criminals always look for avenues to stash their money: avenues like offshore banks, gold, properties bought (not yet registered) under Deed of Agreement, antiques like costly art pieces, furniture, rare equipment, vintage cars etc. or in perpetual investments with friends. Some of them route their money via a foreign country in the form of foreign remittance ultimately credited with a local foreign currency account of which s/he is a nominee. They also import goods by themselves or by their trusted associates showing abnormally high buying price (over-invoicing) to transfer money abroad.
   Underground economy transactions are typically cash transactions to evade traceability by governments or complex financial operations involving the use of multiple subsidiaries and tax havens. The recent growth of online commerce has also increased the size of the underground economy.
   Criminals in both black market and underground economy are bad as they deprive the government of revenues. They are also social enemies as they make money at the expense of public interest. We have but to coexist with them as no government in any corner of the world can eradicate their crimes totally. With the variance of criminality of the mathematics teacher not reporting his income to Income Tax Authority and that of the pharmaceutical industrialist producing placebo-like hoax tablets may we classify money belonging to the teacher as 'gray money' and that belonging to the industrialist as 'stark black'-and that belonging to the prostitute as 'light gray'?
   When a government allows its citizenry to whiten their black money all the aforementioned money-earners get equal benefits; they will not be asked in future about sources of their huge ill-gotten money, but they will never be absolved of their crimes committed in earning those black money. The mathematics teacher or the prostitute may, in future, get a little benefit of doubt for their past crimes, but the industrialist will invariably be punished if the government machinery can ever find (possible in Switzerland, but may not be possible in Angola or Bangladesh) in the market a batch of his hoax tablets made of chalk-powders instead of genuine ingredients.
   May it be better to allow whitening of black money for the government to earn some extra revenues? If not, I am genuinely afraid, money worth millions of dollars, dyed jet black (to avoid detection by the border check-posts), will fly away outside of our country with no benefit to our economy.

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Stephen Leahy in Brooklin, Canada

Climate change is accelerating species extinctions and unravelling the intricate web of life, experts fear.
   Birds, animals, insects and even plants are on the move around the Earth, trying to flee new and increasingly inhospitable local weather conditions. For some, including alpine species and polar bears, there is nowhere to go. And many others, like plants, lack the mobility to stay ahead of changing climatic conditions.
   "We're already seeing species moving, but they're not moving fast enough to avoid potential extinction," says Jeremy Kerr, an ecologist at the University of Ottawa in Canada.
   "The really awful predications about rapid, massive extinction appear to be true, according to the early evidence," Kerr told IPS.
   One of those predictions came last year from the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA), an unprecedented international four-year research effort. The MA warned that up to 30 per cent of all species on Earth could vanish by 2050 due to unsustainable human activities.
   By 2100, it will be a completely different planet if greenhouse gas emissions continue rising at the current rate. Nearly 40 per cent of Earth's continental surface may experience totally new climates, primarily in the tropics and adjacent latitudes, as warmer temperatures spread toward the poles, said a new study published this month by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
   "We are going to be seeing climates that certainly are completely outside the range of modern human experience,"
   said Stephen Jackson of the University of Wyoming in a statement.
   Scientists estimate there are between three and 30 million species of plants, animals, fungi, bacteria and so on, but only 1.4 million have been identified so far.
   The importance of species - and the word "biodiversity" - is not well understood by the public, business or politicians. And yet biodiversity - the sum total of all living species - is what gives us air to breathe, water to drink and food to eat.
   Schoolchildren learn that trees and plants produce oxygen, absorb carbon dioxide, clean water, and so on. However, what is not well understood, even by scientists, is exactly how insects, bacteria, birds, and animals interact with trees and plants to produce the ecological services we rely on, like clean air and water.
   The loss of a few species in a forest or the oceans might not result in any obvious immediate changes, but scientists are beginning to connect the dots. One example of a cascade of impacts was recently documented by Canadian and U.S. marine scientists, who found that a dramatic reduction in shark populations along the U.S. east coast has resulted in population booms for rays and skates, which in turn decimated their food supply of shellfish.
   The loss of the shellfish has reduced water quality and seagrass beds. The cascade doesn't stop there, but that is as far as science has been able to track it.
   Michael Totten, senior director of Conservation International, a global environmental group, offers another example.
   Coastal mangrove forests provide local communities with nearly 90 percent protection from storm surges, studies show. Equally important, mangroves are the nurseries for many species of fish and play a key role in sustaining ocean fish populations, Totten said in an interview.
   The more species there are in an ecosystem, the more resilient it is to change. So the combination of reduced species numbers and climate change is opening the world up for ecosystem collapse, he warned.
   U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon offered a similar message for International Biodiversity Day on May 22, noting that "biodiversity is being lost at an unprecedented rate [and] this, in turn, is seriously eroding the capacity of our planet to sustain life on earth."
   "Unless we do something there will be no tigers, lions or bears left in the wild for my grandchildren," said Stuart Pimm, a conservation ecologist at Duke University in the U.S. state of North Carolina.
   "The impacts will be obvious to even the smallest child and this is a very real possibility," Pimm told IPS.
   Avoiding this grim future is challenging but far from impossible. Halting deforestation is one critical step, since it accounts for more than 20 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions. While tropical deforestation gets nearly all the attention, Canada's 567-million-hectare boreal forest could go in a generation, he said.
   Pimm, along with 1,500 other scientists, urged Canada last week to protect at least half the forest, and manage the other half much more carefully.
   Not only is the boreal "the largest intact forest and wetland ecosystems remaining on earth", it is the single largest terrestrial carbon storehouse in the world, they said in an open letter.
   However, despite its enormous size, 10 percent of the forest has already been touched by mining or oil and gas operations, and another 20 per cent has been clear-cut along its southern tip where biodiversity is richest, they said.
   The second "easy step" to combat climate change and boost biodiversity is reforestation of tropical areas already deforested, Pimm said.
   Seven million square kilometres of tropical forest have vanished in the last 50 years. About two million of that is used for crops while the remaining five million sq km are poor quality lands with a few cattle and goats on them, he said.
   Turning these unproductive lands back into native forest could capture an estimated five billion metric tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere every year for 10 to 20 or more years. Reforestation is also relatively easy thing to do and has enormous benefits for biodiversity.
   Global annual carbon emissions are currently eight billion tonnes.
   "This could take us a long way to carbon neutrality," Pimm said, adding that, "Things are beginning to change. The world has finally got the message on climate change - except for the White House."
   Despite accounting for a quarter of all greenhouse gas emissions, the United States has refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, arguing that the treaty - which mandates emissions reductions by the world's most industrialised countries - would be too costly to enforce.
   - Inter Press Service

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