But today, the same catch-all moniker “voodoo economics” has taken on a very different and sinister meaning, in murky arenas beyond U.S. borders that nevertheless do bear directly on maintaining global peace and homeland security. The urgent issue now pertains to the smoke and mirrors other nations, and sub-national groups as well, use to disguise the sources of their financing and the extent of the wealth in their war chests.

Cautionary tales, both foreign and domestic: First let me point out that this menacing connotation to voodoo economics isn’t new. Allegedly (I’m being polite), in the 1930s and 1940s more than one bank in supposedly neutral Switzerland intentionally or inadvertently aided Hitler’s rise to power, contributed to funding his temporary conquest of Europe, and helped hide the fruits of the systematic plundering of occupied countries -- in particular concealing the most despicable of all of the Nazi’s “blood money,” those assets robbed from victims of the Holocaust.

Recently, we’ve watched private-sector accounting frauds of staggering proportions be unearthed time and again, garnering headlines and leading to lawsuits galore. Some of this has undermined the American economy, with a “blow-back effect” that isn’t helping the national deficit at all.

Further afield, and far more deadly, we rather late in the game unmasked just one international underground marketplace that thrived for years unseen, with many millions being exchanged for the most abhorrent imaginable merchandise: Dr. A. Q. Khan’s nuclear black market. We know that Islamist Extremist groups have methods of transferring money below the radar screen of conventional Western forensic financial surveillance and interdiction. But it’s too easy to stop there, with rogues and terrorists, and not talk about looking further, at sovereign states that are busy cooking the books over their current and future warfighting and espionage endeavors and capabilities.

Scary but vital questions: In the current world, where two-thirds of Dubya’s “Axis of Evil” are still acting decidedly evil, and the third third is a roiling hot-bed of violent insurgency, where China is building a huge modern submarine fleet that’s surely not meant to be any white elephant, and where Russia under Putin is striving to regain superpower status, we need to ask some very piercing, unpleasant questions. What line-item spending, meant for premeditated attacks and invasions, is being mislabeled or buried by these and other not-so-friendly foreign powers? And what bizarre “structured transactions,” arranged illicitly with expert advice re crooked accounting, could be in place already or get implemented soon? Such structured transactions, perversions of the regular ones used on Wall Street, could shuffle specie and net worth around invisibly -- allowing armed aggression to break out with total surprise. If there’s one thing we can count on, it’s that the CIA and FBI might not be completely on top of the problem.

Meaningless comparisons: We do know that comparing annual “defense spending” between different countries can be extremely misleading. Not every country handles the details of public bookkeeping the same way. For instance, in the U.S. a large percentage of total Department of Defense budgeting each year goes to payroll and fringe benefits for civilian employees plus the millions of men and women who wear or wore the uniform -- including pension payments, and health care for them and their eligible dependents. If, say, China either doesn’t provide similar benefits or does so through other components of their quasi-Maoist government, the amount they admit they spend each year on defense might have a much bigger core for obtaining hardware than meets the American eye.

In addition, again using China for illustrative purposes, it’s known that much of their current strategic nuclear buildup is being categorized as part of private industry, via contractor firms that are in reality government owned. Thusly, an emerging military power might conceal its genuine strength, and soften the apparent level of its commitment to achieving future regional or worldwide hegemony.

Rogue traders: Things could in fact get much worse, if highly-trained and experienced legitimate financiers and accountants went astray -- presumably for the money and ego -- and sold their talents to ambitious bad actors, the same way WMD scientists do.

As just one example, consider something that was done very extensively, and in most cases quite legally, in the U.S. in the heyday of the Reagan Boom: the “leveraged buyout.”

The basics of a leveraged buyout, again, are fairly simple. You make a hostile takeover of a targeted corporation by buying up its stock, and you raise the money to do so by asking a group of investors to accept as collateral -- for a loan to you of the cash you need -- the value inherent in the very corporation you plan to acquire. In many cases, those loans were structured as “junk bonds.” For a while it looked terrific, and it worked. Eventually, though, the merry-go-round spun so fast it all flew apart. At least one major investment bank in the United States went bankrupt. People were sent to prison. Others lost their shirts. The end of that boom did get ugly.

Voodoo War Bonds: Now, let’s put all these diverse pieces together to identify a potential major threat to America. Imagine the ultimate leveraged buyout, funded by the ultimate off-the-books loans. Imagine junk bonds meant to facilitate the type of hostile takeover that history knows as conquest-by-war. Imagine as the backing for these loans the most demonic of all collateral: wealth to be plundered from the occupied state by the successful aggressor after they invade. Who would conceivably serve as bankers to arrange these covert “junk bonds of evil”?

Who indeed? If financial institutions in Switzerland were apparently willing to do vaguely similar things for Nazi Germany, how can we doubt that somewhere on the globe other institutions -- or individuals or cartels -- with sufficient spare cash and contempt for America might not pony up if offered the promise of very high yield in return for their risky initial investment? The result would be that the next country with the hunger to grab a neighbor’s territory by force might secretly amass the base of capital needed to launch such a hostile maneuver. (Milosevic’s multiple wars in the Balkans, Saddam’s marching into Kuwait, and China’s annexing of Tibet prove that there’s no end to such covetous dictators.) In passing, I note that these observations would seem to argue against the Pentagon optimizing solely for fighting future counter-insurgency battles.

Arms suppliers, and arsenals waiting to happen: There are plenty of private arms dealers, and nation-state weapon exporters too, who’d be more than glad to quietly take such hard cash, obtained through financial chicanery, in exchange for their warfighting wares. In yet another layer of fraudulent accountancy reporting exploited as military camouflage, the weaponry might be held back at the manufacturers, entered on the ledger as “excess inventory” or “stock for eventual sale, built on spec.” There it would sit, waiting to surge to the opportunistic end-user at a moment of their choosing -- catching victims and third parties (including the U.S.) unprepared. So might 21st century-style voodoo economics of evil serve as the enabler of a bloody next-generation war.

JoeBuff.Com / Joe Buff Inc. Joe Buff, President Dutchess County, New York E-Mail readermail@JoeBuff.Com