Chapter 1: What are the key elements of the National Defense Authorization Act?
A defense bill that is about much more than defense. From Marketplace, I'm Sabri Beneshour, in for David Brancaccio. This week, the Senate is set to take up the $900 billion National Defense Authorization Act. The House passed it last week. It is more than 3,000 pages of defense policy planning that the Senate will have to dig through. The actual funding of all these plans comes later.
The bill includes a 3.8% pay increase for members of the military. It also includes $400 million of security assistance to Ukraine. But there's a whole lot of stuff in this bill that is not defense-related at all. Marketplace's senior Washington correspondent, Kimberly Adams, has more.
Chapter 2: What controversial issues are included in the defense bill?
The NDAA is considered a must-pass piece of legislation. And because it's one of the few bills that always passes, people throw all kinds of things in there, all kinds of controversial things. debates will happen. William Hartung is with the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.
The House version would cut $1.6 billion in climate-related spending and another $40 million by rolling back diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts.
Chapter 3: How does the airspace provision impact safety near Washington, D.C.?
It's kind of like a lightning rod for things that aren't going to happen, because Congress really isn't getting a lot done these days. One change getting a lot of pushback has to do with the airspace near the nation's capital, opening it back up to helicopter training flights close to a year after one was involved in a deadly plane crash.
Here's National Transportation Safety Board Chair Jennifer Homendy speaking at a press conference after the bill passed. This is a significant, significant safety setback. It represents an unacceptable risk to the flying public, to commercial and military aircraft, crews, and to the residents in the region. Several senators from both parties are already calling to strike that provision.
In Washington, I'm Kimberly Adams for Marketplace. Moving money out of China in significant amounts is hard. The government puts tight limits on it, partly to ensure financial stability. But where there is a will, there is a way, and people have figured out how to get around these limits. And that has spawned a global industry of money laundering dominated by China.
People trying to move money out of that country are paired, perhaps unwittingly, with criminal groups in the U.S. or elsewhere trying to launder their money. More than $150 billion worth a year, the U.S. Treasury Department estimates. This is all according to reporting from The Economist magazine.
And joining us to talk more about this is Su Lin Wong, Asia correspondent for The Economist and host of the Scam Inc. podcast. Welcome. Hi, Sabree. Great to be here. So can we just start by talking about how money laundering works? Can you explain something called the mirror transaction? So you've got a drug cartel in the US and it needs to launder money.
Then you've got a mother in Shanghai who's very wealthy and has a son who's studying in New York City and she wants to buy him an apartment there. But she doesn't have a US bank account and she doesn't have US dollars. Right. China has really strict capital controls. Individual Chinese people, in theory, can only bring out 50,000 US dollars each year.
So to get around this, she contacts a broker online and she will transfer Renminbi from her Chinese bank account, A, to the broker's Chinese bank account, B. And she will be paid or reimbursed in US dollars in some American bank account that she has access to. minus the broker's fee. That is actually often drug money. And so then, well, how do the drug cartels get reimbursed?
They might want Chinese renminbi to buy, you know, fentanyl precursors in China or to buy legitimate goods that perhaps they're now exporting to Mexico. These brokers basically run massive underground banks. So it sounds like it's kind of like I will pay your bill in the U.S. if you pay my bill in China. Yes, exactly. So how and why did China become a leader in this world?
Until not that long ago, there were lots of different criminal groups that engaged in money laundering. But what we've really seen over the past decade is a consolidation of the industry. And that's to do with the Chinese government making it much, much harder for ordinary Chinese to take money out of China.
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Chapter 4: What challenges do individuals face when moving money out of China?
Roomba owners were worried their vacuums would become bricks after the bankruptcy. iRobot says there will be no disruptions. In New York, I'm Sabri Beneshour with the Marketplace Morning Report. From APM American Public Media.