an update, sort of.

It is not only regular retail that profits from globalisation. As a professor of mine once said in a lame joke: the three trades with the highest return on investment are illegally trading drugs, weapons and women. Adding that the risk is also very high. Currently the amount of work-slaves, prostitutes, refugees, drugs, weapons, black money, poisonous waste, human organs, stolen art and pirated luxury brand goods being traded on a global scale has reached numbers never seen before. Smuggling endangered species for collectors is just the cherry pie on top of this trade. Politicians don’t like to address this issue, because what has brewed up here is too frightening. The newspaper headlines will only mention high number events, like really big drug busts or that fact that the Mexican region close to the Southern border of the USA is basically in the hand of outlaws and that the number of homicides in that area has become so high that the police can’t even keep up with registering the fatalities. More threatening to international economy, and thereby to international politics, though, is the fact that the amount of criminal capital that has accrued is so high it could undermine whole nations. According to estimates of the European Union the annual turnover of “identity theft” has reached 30 billion Euros. Even more money is to be made with faked goods (starting from simple CDs and DVDs to cigarettes and pharmaceuticals up to software and spare parts for cars and airplanes) which is filling suitcases of criminals around the world with 390 billion dollar per year. The UN reports that illegal drugs make up 8 % of the whole world trade. The annual turnover of the global prostitution industry is estimated at 52 billion US dollars.

What is the result of this development? One obvious trend is total surveillance. For businesses and politicians complete control of international money transfers seems to be the only way to get on top of global crime. But all western states would have to agree upon this issue and upon a procedure. Which won’t really happen. Therefore international crime will keep on rising. With unforeseeable social and political effects. Lately in Napoli, Italy, some Roma were accused of attempting to steal children. As an effect their whole dwellings were set to flames and burned down because people kept firefighters from entering the ground where the Roma camp was. Some say the reason for this was the heated up anger about the endless rows of illegal immigrants entering the South of Italy and all the social problems they bring with them. Others point to the Camorra or Mafia as initiator. In Napoli the Mafia is making millions with toxic waste, as has hit the news lately.

International business currently takes other measures. The Swiss company Nestle has a history of unfair working situations and unhealthy ingredients in their food products. In June it became publically known that Nestle ordered their security company to send a “spy” to join an ATTAC group writing a book about Nestlé. The young woman joined the group meetings, met people in their private homes, read all the emails – and sent reports to Nestlé. The German Telecom has been accused of using their technical equipment to listen into the communication of at least one journalist they knew was writing critically about the company. But why shouldn’t they, when politics and state lead the example of total control. The USA traditionally leads the herd of waving civil rights for security reasons. Their latest idea is to search all laptops people carry on board of planes into the US for child porn, terrorist information and probably even copyright infringements. Because in contrast to poverty, war, the ecological disaster and global crime those are the real problems of the world.

From the Chinese provinces to the former Soviet republics and the cocaine regions of Southern America: organized crime is strong almost everywhere. In India the arm of law does not reach into all provinces. Not too far from Cracked Headquarters in Vienna, there are places where the executive forces are weaker than organized crime. The economy of the new state of Montenegro is based mostly on smuggling cigarettes and stealing cars. Following this there also seems to be a trend of neglecting laws in the rich west also. Relatively to people living in an area, the highest ratio of organised crime is neither in Lagos nor in Kazachsthan, it is in British Columbia in western Canada, were according to estimates more than 100.000 people work in growing and trading of marihuana. That is more people than work in mining, in the oil- and gasindustry combined in that area.

Even the most innocent of consumers will be drawn into the networks of organized crime in our globalised age and time. This does not even include people who want to adopt babies from Asia or Africa, who are being fronted with sob stories about foster kids who were actually bought or even kidnapped from their families. Per year 2000 babies from Vietnam alone are being adopted by overseas families. No, the fringes of the network go into almost every detail of everyday life of western consumers. Why are companies from Kik to H&M able to sell t-shirts at a rate of 2 to 5 Euros? Probably because they were produced by working slaves in Mumbai or even worse by children, a fact which Kik in a press release in May admitted they were not able to monitor. Do you know where those flags you are sporting on your car for the Euro08 come from? Even in our countries the working situations in some Chinese restaurants are close to peonage and in Vienna every few years some Chinese are killed and the police is never able to solve those crimes because the Chinese society everywhere still adheres to their century old principles of “don’t tell”. In Great Britain in the year 2004 twenty Chinese died when collecting shells, because their daily wage didn’t earn them enough to sustain. 30.000 Albanian woman alone are working in Western Europe as prostitutes. The UN reports that women trafficked into Western Europe as prostitutes earn about 7.500 dollars per month, of which 7.000 go to the traffickers. People in poor countries sell their organs to pay of debts. All as a part of well organized organisations.

Globalisation is mainly the fact that it is nowadays a lot easier to communicate and transport on a transnational scale. These benefits have been used by business, politics, NGO’s as well crime. But organized crime has the advantage of strict hierarchies and quick processing, little to no state control and paperwork and high financial results making people work hard. Nowadays global crime makes organizations network with each other that were historically separated to form strategic alliances and joint ventures very much as they learned in business school. For global crime the “think globally, act locally”-motto has become a true saying. The internet as a main catalyst for globalisation has enlarged the number of options for crime as well. It is a perfect tool for all kinds of fraud or extortion schemes, money laundering, rig gambling on online sites and so on.

The online black economy, centred on credit-card fraud, corporate blackmail and insider share dealing is thought to be worth $8 billion a year. Finally the fragile financial and economical state of many emerging or transgressing countries is giving rise to corruption and organized crime, especially in Africa and the CEE countries. Never ask where those Russian oligarchs have the money from that they buy super yachts with or spend 100K in one night on champagne alone. So you might see global crime as just the dirty underbelly to global business, but if so, it is long gone beyond obese.