Danny Schechter - ColdType

74
financial crisis. A surprising omission, since history teaches
us that all financial crises “contain” a criminal dimension,
either by the intrusion of organized crime, or by the repetition
of criminal operations committed by normal market actors;
and sometimes also through the association of these two
universes.
Crime accompanies, amplifies and sometimes provokes
financial crises. Besides, how can one not be troubled by
the strange public alert American Attorney General Michael
Mukasey launched in May 2008 on the growing threat to
national security represented by “organized crime’s penetration
of the markets?”
So even as experts outside the United States saw this clearly,
the American media and our own politicians played it down.
Two other French experts, Bertrand Monnet and Philippe Very,
professors at Edhec and researchers at the Edhec Institute for
the Management of Criminal Risks, foresaw the fusion of the
criminal and “legitimate economies,” an area few journalists in
the United States investigated.
They explained how this works in an article on “Economic
Crisis and Criminality,” published in Les Echoes:
Organized crime does not launder for pleasure, but to invest
a part of those laundered funds in the legal economy to meet
two objectives: territorial domination and enrichment. Controlling
a business allows a mafia to distribute wealth in the
form of jobs or purchases and consequently, to ultimately
place whole regions under economic dependency. But
investing in the legal economy allows organized crime above
all to benefit from the growth of the businesses it controls
and the profitability of its holdings, just like any other investor.
The present crisis risks enlarging organized crime’s access
to the legal economy. In a context of rarefaction of investments,
the funds resulting from money laundering are, in