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"no matter how far behind-the-scenes and removed you are from the actual crime"

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When Blair comes out with his usual garbage about databases recording everyone's car journeys, home seizures and internment camps for "anti-social" neighbors, etc., North Americans are usually sensible enough to denounce him for the despot that he is. But on this issue I unfortunately don't anticipate as loud a reaction from this side, since far too many North American progressives already support similar things in their own countries. For instance, the "organized crime" laws in Canada and the US which are inexplicably supported by some segments of the left (most appallingly the National Organization for Women, with has spent the better part of two decades trying to enlarge the definition of "racketeering" under RICO to cover political protests and sit-ins). Not to mention the fact that whenever an American who We Don't Like (ie, a right-wing businessman or politician) gets sentenced to several decades in federal prison for some chimeral daydream like "conspiracy to make a materially false statement," babble usually erupts in applause and denunciations of American prisons for being too soft and cushy.

TNI, "crime and globalisation"

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In the words of Susan George: "Globalization is creating a three-track society in which there will be the exploiters, the exploited and the outcasts, the people who are not even worth exploiting."

The current 'corporate-driven, neo-liberal globalisation' results in increasing inequalities between rich and poor, both within and between countries – and many are marginalized, specifically in the less developed world with weak state institutions and fragile economies burdened by debt payments. However, those marginalized will not passively wait until they starve to death, but will create their own means to survive whether in the legal economy or in the illegal one – and more often in the grey area that lies in between. These criminogenic aspects of the globalisation process itself are habitually overlooked.

Marginalization forces people into what one can describe as a ‘migration into illegality’. Not only literally trying to gain access to the sealed of border of the rich developed world where they often end as underpaid illegal immigrants, but also figuratively – migrating into illegal activities because the licit economy has nothing to offer them. A multitude of impoverished are a convenient work force for, and potential victims of, criminal organisations: peasant farmer communities in the Andes and Central and South-East Asia depending on coca bush and opium poppy cultivation simply to survive; human trafficking and prostitution rackets; the slums of major Brazilian city’s taken over by violent and competing drug gangs replacing state authority; an army of impoverished drug ‘mulas’ – couriers – carrying drugs to the consumer markets in the North; piracy of intellectual property rights such as patents, trademarks and industrial design.

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