CAPITALISM'S ACHILLES HEEL Dirty Money and How to

FATF is not an organization established by treaty. It is an intergovernmental
body, with 33 members and 20 observers as of this writing and
several regional cooperating groups. It cannot impose conditions on
members or nonmembers; however, its recommendations are generally
accepted as international standards. The United States, with a narrow definition
of money laundering as is covered in this chapter, hardly meets
FATF expectations.
In addition to FATF’s recommendations, many other international
efforts are focused on global money laundering and their underlying
crimes, briefly summarized in the preceding box. These are just some of
the international efforts—organizations, conventions, consultative
groups, and more—aimed at attacking and curtailing global money laundering.
Dozens of bodies, thousands of people, millions of documents,
and billions of dollars concentrated on staffing anti–money laundering
programs became a feature of our globalized world by the start of this
new century.
THE PATRIOT ACT
Magnitudes and Misunderstandings 177
Which obviously means that when terrorists struck on September 11,
2001, an enormous apparatus was already in place and primed to trace
their dirty money, and the entire world was psychologically attuned to the
urgency of this task, because of all the attention given to criminal money
laundering over the preceding 30 years. Right? Regrettably, nothing could
be further from the truth. Which leads to October 2001, the U.S.A. Patriot
Act and the ugliest period ever in the history of anti–money laundering legislative
efforts.
With glaring weaknesses in U.S. laws and hundreds of billions of dollars
of dirty money streaming into U.S. banks, several senators had been pushing
for stronger anti–money laundering legislation for years. Most prominent in
this effort were Senators Carl Levin of Michigan, Charles Grassley of Iowa,
and John Kerry of Massachusetts. But they faced ideological foes within the
Senate Banking Committee, who, by September 2001, had already stopped
some 11 bills containing strengthened anti–money laundering provisions
from getting to the Senate floor. The latest of these, entitled the “Money
Laundering Abatement Act,” was introduced by Senator Levin on August 3,