Word: thirdly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Drug lords and other lawbreakers are believed to be buying valuable chunks of the American economy, but clever Dutch sandwiches and other subterfuges make it almost impossible for U.S. authorities to track foreign investors. A case in point: blind corporations based in the Netherlands Antilles control more than one-third of all foreign-owned U.S. farmland, many of the newest office towers in downtown Los Angeles and a substantial number of independent movie companies producing films like Sylvester Stallone's Rambo pictures...
Much of the electronic money zips into a secret banking industry that got its start in Switzerland in the 1930s as worried Europeans began shifting their savings beyond the reach of Hitler's Third Reich. Later the country's infamous numbered accounts became a hugely profitable business. Chiasso, a quaint Swiss town of 8,700 inhabitants on the Italian border, has 18 banking offices. But during the past few years, Swiss secrecy has been weakened by a series of cases involving money laundering. Switzerland is now preparing a new law that will make money laundering a crime punishable by prison...
...must pick out the black money from the gray, the tools at hand seem minimal for the task. Says Jaime Chavez, an international banking consultant: "The people who will probably be searching for it have a very limited knowledge of what money movement is all about. How is a third-rate employee of the Justice Department going to dissect the entire financial system to pinpoint the drug money correctly?" During the Reagan years, the budgets of agencies in charge of ctaching financial cheats failed to keep pace with the changing world of money manipulation. Even IRS agents are largely unprepared...
Whatever actions a company takes to help the environment should apply to foreign operations as well as those in the U.S. In too many cases, corporations have complied with antipollution measures at home but ignored them abroad, especially in Third World countries that are too desperate for foreign investment to complain...
International efforts to preserve the biosphere will not succeed unless the Third World goes along with them. The irony is that the laissez-faire, free- market rules that allowed the industrial world to prosper must now be suspended. "If the developing nations, home to 8 out of 10 people, repeat the pattern of development of the North," warns UNEP's Tolba, "if they reach the North's levels of consumer goods and fuel consumption, and if they continue to clear the forests, then our mutual destruction is assured...