CAPITALISM'S ACHILLES HEEL Dirty Money and How to

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CHAPTER 2
PLAYING THE GAME
DIRTY MONEY” is money that is illegally earned, illegally transferred, or
illegally utilized. If it breaks laws in its origin, movement, or use, then
it properly merits the label.
If you think this is just a matter for bankers and law enforcement officials,
do the following. Take the dollars, pounds, euros, rubles, pesos, or
other currency out of your wallet or purse. You could very well have your
fingers literally on cocaine. According to several studies, upward of 90 percent
of paper money in New York, Miami, and London, and, it is suspected,
other major cities as well, contains trace elements of drugs. 1 And drugs are
the smaller part of the dirty-money problem.
There are three forms of dirty money that cross borders: criminal, corrupt,
and commercial. The criminal component includes proceeds from a
boundless range of villainous activities including racketeering, trafficking in
counterfeit and contraband goods, alien smuggling, slave trading, embezzlement,
forgery, securities fraud, credit fraud, burglary, sexual exploitation,
prostitution, and more. However, in the statutes of many nations, the only
financial inflows from criminal activities that are barred are those arising
from drugs, bank fraud, and certain acts of violence, including terrorism.
The corrupt component stems from bribery and theft by foreign government
officials. While the United States outlawed paying bribes in 1977,
handling the proceeds of foreign bribery was not barred until 2001, and
most European nations began only in the late 1990s to legislate against paying
bribes or banking the proceeds of corruption.
The commercial component of cross-border dirty money has two features
that distinguish it from legitimate outflows. First, it is usually tax evading,
although that is not the primary motivation for such transfers. And
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