The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World

by Atossa Araxia Abrahamian

Freud notes that the German term heimlich—meaning “homelike, familiar, enjoyable”—is frequently also used to mean its exact opposite. “In general we are reminded that the word heimlich is not unambiguous, but belongs to two sets of ideas, which

without being contradictory are yet very different,” Freud explains. “On the one hand, it means that which is familiar and congenial, and on the other, that which is concealed and kept out of sight.”

“Switzerland functioned to [Hitler’s] entire satisfaction as the Third Reich’s bank vault,” Ziegler writes,

“The fact that this tiny country of only forty-two thousand square kilometers, of which only sixty percent is habitable, with a population of fewer than ten million, is such a powerful offshore center—that

that twenty-seven percent of the world’s offshore fortunes are managed in or from Switzerland—it’s just astonishing,”

Mikhail Bakunin, the famous Russian anarchist leader, lived in Geneva in the 1860s, and spent much of his time radicalizing artisan watchmakers in an anarchist enclave of the Jura Mountains. At the turn of the twentieth century, Vladimir Lenin came to Geneva too. It was there that he plotted the October Revolution, wrote books in the public library’s reading room,

The influence of the nouveaux Russes is inescapable:

we know that corporations are not people, but they enjoy the status of a “person” in political life and in court.

that Puerto Rico’s economic model was designed to increase production and profits for American corporations,”

His creations would be states within states. He called them charter cities.

All that is solid melts into air. —Karl Marx

After all, those who wanted Switzerland already had Switzerland—and Luxembourg, and the Caymans, and any number of places that exacted little or nothing in taxes and had long track records in protecting wealth at all costs. So to entice investors further, the DIFC sold them on something else: law.

Al Owais is a rarity: a native Emirati woman in a position of significant power.

it is against international law to send an asylum seeker back to danger.

Cuba is sitting on millions of dollars’ worth of uncashed U.S. rent payments).

Sovereignty at sea moves like a current, contingent on political gravity, ideological winds, and social friction, which makes freedom of the seas a lot like all other freedoms: more free for some than it is for others.