Okay, So Denmark Is Not So Perfect

Capitalism promotes corruption. We have it here in America - no, we are going through an orgy of Trump-led corruption with Elon Musk as messenger boy. Even in Denmark, money corrupts.

The real Scandi noir: how a filmmaker and a crooked lawyer shattered Denmark’s self-image (The Guardian)

In her office, Smajic’s visitors bragged about dodging tax, bribing officials or exploiting the bankruptcy code. She offered them coffee and coaxed forth their confidences. Six cameras and three microphones, secreted in power sockets, captured it all – footage that was turned into a documentary called The Black Swan. In its surreptitious method and breathtaking drama, The Black Swan bore all the fingerprints of its director, Mads Brügger, a provocateur who has spent his career searching for bombshells to drop but who had never quite managed it as well as he did here. Denmark’s national bird is the Cygnus olor, a swan as white as virtue. The Black Swan, in showing such easy, unbridled formulations of crime, blew up Denmark’s idea of itself.

Since airing last May as a five-part series on TV2, Denmark’s biggest television network, The Black Swan has sent the country into convulsions. One out of every two Danes has seen the documentary. After its release, a biker-gang member and his accountant were charged with financial crimes and taken into custody; others, including a municipal official, are under investigation. The Danish Bar and Law Society formally apologised to the minister of justice for the conduct of two lawyers caught on camera; they have been either fired or disbarred. A new money-laundering law was introduced to give banks more oversight over “client accounts” – the kind of accounts in which lawyers pool the funds of several clients and transact on their behalf, and that featured in many of the machinations in Smajic’s office. In her New Year’s speech, Denmark’s prime minister suggested biker-gang criminals ought to be stripped of their pension rights – a detail so specific it was surely inspired by The Black Swan.

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“We’re taught from a young age that cheating the system is not something you do, because you end up pissing on everybody,” Ane Cortzen, a television presenter and Brügger’s sister, told me. “Cheating on taxes is one of the most serious crimes you can commit.” Kalle Johannes Rose, an associate professor at Copenhagen Business School, observed: “Most Danish scandals have to do with the state – public healthcare, public banks, public something or the other. People want to know their high taxes are being spent correctly. If they don’t trust the system, they don’t pay their taxes, and then the house of cards falls down.” The Black Swan thus invited viewers to dwell on their worst nightmare: a shattering of the trust that underpins not just the smooth functioning of their beloved welfare state but the essence of what makes Danes proud to be Danes.

The legal system exists to regulate the harm done to individuals by the economic system.

Five takeaways as Trump’s clash with the legal world intensifies (The Hil)

The political system exists to regulate the harm done to society by the economic system.

U.S. Rep. Victoria Spartz takes tough questions at Westfield town hall

I meant to go to the Muncie meeting, only I got started writing blog posts and ran out of time.

I suspect Denmark will do just fine.

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