Tag: Michael Niemann

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Money Laundering 101

Euro bills hanging out to dry. Public Domain Image

Say you just made a cool million dollars. Except, it wasn’t by legal means. Also say you’re the careful sort. You know that buying a big car, or blowing it on $1,000 bottles of Crystal is going to attract attention of the sort you can’t afford.

How can you enjoy your ill-gotten gains without running afoul the authorities? You’ll need to launder it first. That means make your newfound wealth appear to come from perfectly legal sources.

The traditional way, expertly portrayed in the Netflix series Ozark, involves mingling the illegal cash with legal income to hide its provenance. That’s why Marty Byrd is to eager to buy businesses around the Lake of the Ozarks. The marina, the funeral home, and, eventually the casino are all cash based businesses. They provide a perfect way to get the illegal money into legal accounts. But even then, a sudden spike in income would arouse suspicion.

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Everybody Is A Spy Now

The scene is a trope in many spy novels and movies. The undercover agent moves through a foreign city, she is nervous. She looks at each passerby, is that man an opposing agent? Is the old woman by the vegetable stand really selling potatoes or is she a watcher? That man with the newspaper, is he on the lookout for her? The couple with the dog, innocent pedestrians or counter-intelligence operatives?

Going for a walk in the age of COVID-19 feels a lot like that. Every person on the street is a potential carrier. That old man without a mask, what is wrong with him? That woman sneezing, are those allergies or is she symptomatic? That guy with the water bottle, is that a dry cough or did a swallow go down the wrong pipe.

This is my city, but it is foreign all the same.

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A Usable Past

Angelus Novus —Paul Klee. Labelled “The Angel of History” by Walter Benjamin

In her book Future Histories, Lizzie O’Shea credits Van Wyck Brooks with coining the term usable past. Brooks wrote, “The present is a void and the American writer floats in that void because the past that survives in the common mind of the present is a past without living value.”

O’Shea goes on to point out that, for young people in particular, the past can feel like a dead weight, there to hold us back from creating our future. But she warns us not to ignore the past. If we do, it survives “…as a default genealogy, a mere reflection of the status quo, fixed and irrelevant.”

That term default genealogy struck me as much as the concept of a usable past.

Default means our choice is already filled in for us. That’s why the vast majority of documents generated on MS Word all look alike, Calibri font, 1 inch margins, single spaced. Default also means failure to fulfill an obligation or a debt. By choosing the default history, we are defaulting on our obligation to create and harness a usable past.

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Literary Ashland with Rebel Heart Books

Our March guests were Eileen Bobek and Marcella Bell of Rebel Heart Books in Jacksonville, Oregon. Since 2017, Rebel Heart Books has been an important presence in Jacksonville. As they state on the bookstore’s website: “Independent bookstores are not just physical spaces to house books. They anchor communities. They house real people and ideas, stories of love and hope, pain and loss, failure and redemption and any emotion and circumstance that can be imagined or experienced. Their fuel is a belief in the written word. They take care of people.” In this interview, they tell us how the bookstore grew from an idea to reality, how they choose books and the role an independent bookstore plays in a small community.

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Literary Ashland with Ed Battistella and Michael Niemann

The February 2020 edition of Literary Ashland was a little different from our usual routine. Given the uncertainty about the station’s new location, we didn’t invite any guest. Since both Ed and I have new books coming out this year, we decided to spend the half hour talking about them.

For those of you who may not know this, Ed Battistella teaches Linguistics at Southern Oregon University. He is the author, most recently, of Sorry About That: The Language of Public Apology. His new book, also published by Oxford University Press, is entitled Dangerous Crooked Scoundrels: Insulting the President, Washington to Trump.

My next Vermeulen thriller, Percentages of Guilt, will see the light of day sometime this year. The current shutdowns due to SARS-CoV-2 virus and COVID19, the disease it causes, has thrown a wrench into the schedule. We’ll see how that develops. In any case, give it a listen, you’ll learn something about each of our books.