Politics And Mafia Are The Same Thing

Good essay from the blog Wolf Street:

Clearly, cozy ties between politicians and organized crime are hardly a problem exclusive to Spain. Nor are they a new problem: in 1920s Chicago the political class was perfectly at ease hobnobbing at speakeasies with Al Capone and his motley crew of ruthless bootleggers. Indeed, throughout history marriages of convenience have taken place between people and organizations on opposite sides of the legal divide. Lest we forget, in the mid 19th Century, the British Empire became arguably history’s largest ever drug trafficker when it began exporting – at the barrel of a gun – vast quantities of opium grown in India to China.

However, as John le Carré laid out in his brilliant 2010 novel Our Kind of Traitor, what makes this new phase of globalization different is that big capital now enjoys the right of way across pretty much every border and free access to just about every port of call, including the “see no evil, hear no evil” jurisdictions of the world’s myriad tax havens. As long as this trend continues – and given the current pressures to further liberalize the financial system, it almost certainly will – the thin line between so-called “respectable” and criminal society will continue to blur. A perfect illustration of this was when Forbes magazine decided, in 2009, to include Chapo Guzman, Mexico’s most wanted (and recently captured) drug lord, in its Rich List.

Money, after all, has no moral compunction. It can move with remarkable ease and speed from the blood-soaked operations of Mexican narco traficantes into the construction project of a luxury 5-star hotel in Barcelona. Indeed, according to Saviano, Spain’s historic construction boom was quite literally coke-fueled, with much of the money that kept it going coming from the international drugs trade.

Money has never been more mobile, and in this age of post-crisis financial crisis, our governments and banks just can’t get enough of it. In the wake of Lehman’s collapse, Antonio María Costa, the former Under-Secretary of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, warned that the European banking system had lowered its security barriers, opening the floodgates to drugs money. Indeed, Costa went on the record, stating that the European financial systems were as good as saved by the global drugs trade – a very serious accusation, but one to which not a single European government, bank or EU institution has deigned to respond. The silence, as they say, is deafening.

http://wolfstreet.com/2014/07/13/politics-and-mafia-are-same-thing-jailed-spanish-politician/