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money laundering book review
some new books that might be of interest to some cpunks
------- Forwarded Message
Date: Wed, 1 Oct 1997 11:59:12 -0400
From: Kris Millegan RoadsEnd <[email protected]>
Subject: Fwd: piml] Free Life Commentary - The New World Order
To: [email protected]
- ---------------------
Forwarded message:
From: [email protected] (Roger Cravens)
To: [email protected], [email protected]
Date: 97-09-30 16:54:38 EDT
>From: "Chris R. Tame" <[email protected]>
>Date: Mon, 29 Sep 1997 19:45:58 +0100
>Subject: Free Life Commentary - The New World Order
>To: [email protected] (Multiple recipients of Liberty_NW)
>
>I hope the third issue of my colleague Sean's Free Life Commentary will
>prove of interest.
>
>Chris R. Tame
>Director
>Libertarian Alliance
>
> ------- Forwarded message follows -------
>
>Free Life Commentary
>Editor: Sean Gabb
>Issue Number Three
>29th September 1997
>
>==========================
>"Over himself, over his own mind and body,
>the individual is sovereign"
>(J.S. Mill, On Liberty, 1859)
>==========================
>
>Free Life Commentary is an independent journal of comment,
>published on the Internet. To recieve regular issues, send
>e-mail to Sean Gabb at [email protected]
>
>Issues are archived at http://freespace.virgin.net/old.whig/
>
>Contact Address: 25 Chapter Chambers, Esterbrooke Street,
>London, SW1P 4NN; Telephone: 0181 858 0841
>
>==========================
>
> On the New World Order:
> Two Book Reviews
> by Sean Gabb
>
>
>
> International Efforts to Combat Money Laundering
> William C. Gilmore (ed.)
> Grotius Publications Limited,
> Cambridge, 1992, 335pp, 48 (pbk)
> (ISBN 0 521 46305 X)
>
> Money Laundering: A Practical Guide to the New
>Legislation
> Rowan Bosworth-Davies and Graham Saltmarsh
> Chapman & Hall, London, 1994,
> xii and 304pp, 49.50 (hbk)
> (ISBN 0 412 57530 2)
>
>
>The first of these books is a collection of treaties, plus other
>documents, concerned with the international fight against
>money laundering. The second explains how these treaties
>have been enacted into, and are enforced under, the laws of
>the United Kingdom. Both works will repay the closest
>study. In clear detail, they show the growth of what must
>be called a New World Order, and how, without some
>interposing cause, this may produce a universal slide into
>despotism.
>
>The fight against money laundering begins with realising
>that the "War on Drugs" has been lost. When goods are
>portable and easily concealed, and when demand for them is
>strong enough to bear almost any cost of bringing them to
>market, the main effect of prohibition will be to put a
>bounty on crime. For all the efforts of the past three
>generations, illegal drugs are available in most high security
>prisons. In much of the West, street prices have been
>stable or even falling since 1980.
>
>The official response, however, has not been to give in and
>legalise the trade, but to expand the War to a front where
>previously there had been few hostilities. While keeping up
>their efforts against the trade itself, the authorities have
>turned increasingly to confiscating its proceeds. This new
>approach has three alleged benefits:
>
>First, it will deprive criminals of their incentive to enter
>and remain in the trade;
>
>Second, it will allow the punishing of those in charge of the
>trade - people who never touch or see illegal drugs, but to
>whom the main profits ultimately flow;
>
>Third, it can make the War on Drugs self-supporting, and
>perhaps yield a surplus for other public spending.
>
>There is, however, one practical difficulty. Before the
>authorities can confiscate the money, they must find it. To
>do this, they must keep it from being merged beyond recall
>into the general flow of investment. This involves ending
>bank secrecy and imposing a mass of financial regulation.
>Now, most people - especially the rich - dislike having their
>lives pried into. Nor do banks like higher costs and
>limitations on what business they can do. And so, given
>the present freedom of capital markets, no government
>acting alone can afford a strict policy of confiscation. It
>would, sooner or later, cause a flight of transactions to
>more liberal places.
>
>The solution has been to try making everywhere in the
>world equally illiberal. Such was the purpose of the
>United Nations Convention Against Illicit Traffic in
>Narcotic Drugs and Narcotic Substances, signed in Vienna
>in December 1988 [full text in Gilmore, pp.75-97]. This is
>one of the most important international treaties of the past
>50 years. It not merely requires its signatory states to
>criminalise the laundering of drug money, and to confiscate
>it where found, but lays down so far as possible a common
>wording for the criminal statutes, and a common mode of
>enforcement. It also requires full and prompt cooperation
>between the signatory states for the enforcement of these
>laws anywhere in the world.
>
>The Convention had little direct or immediate effect on
>British law. Many of its requirements, indeed, had already
>been met in the Drug Trafficking Offences Act 1986. Most
>others were only met in the Criminal Justice Act 1993,
>which enacts the European Community Directive of 1991
>on the Prevention of the Use of the Financial System for the
>Purpose of Money Laundering [full text in Gilmore,
>pp.250-67]. This itself derives from the Vienna Convention
>only through the Council of Europe Convention on
>Laundering, Search, Seizure and Confiscation of the
>Proceeds from Crime 1990 [full text in Gilmore, pp.177-
>91]. Even so, this country is fast becoming a financial
>police state of the kind agreed at Vienna - and where the
>process cannot be traced to the Convention, it can be traced
>to the same international pressures of which the Convention
>is itself a result.
>
>Let me explain. When I talk about a New World Order, I
>do not mean some grand conspiracy of bankers, or Jews, or
>Illuminati, or even - with far more probability - the
>American Government. There are countries where policy is
>largely dictated from outside. But for rich and powerful
>countries, the truth is more complex. Most international
>obligations imposed on this country, for example, were not
>only consented to by our rulers, but were usually proposed
>by them, and are enforced by agencies in which our own
>countrymen often occupy senior positions.
>
>Where others see conspiracies, I see public choice
>economics. Whenever a government tries to do something
>dangerous or unnecessary, like banning drugs or educating
>the poor, it must set up an agency through which to spend
>the allocated funds. Once employed, the agents will - as if
>directed by an invisible hand - start to find more and more
>justifications for expanding their status and numbers. They
>collect the statistics. They know which ones to publish and
>which to hold back. They are the politicians' first and
>favoured source of advice. They have their pet journalists.
>They trade favours with the relevant interest groups. They
>know exactly how to give themselves a pleasing life, and
>how to see off threats to it. Unless the money runs out, or
>the public turns really nasty, they can write their own
>budget cheques.
>
>By natural extension, the same is now happening at the
>international level - though with potentially far worse
>consequences. In the first place, there is limitless money:
>budgets would need to swell unimaginably large to reach
>even one per cent of gross planetary product. In the
>second, public anger seldom crosses borders; and, if all else
>fails, the politicians and bureaucrats in one country can
>shelter behind the excuse of treaty obligations that cannot be
>unilaterally be cast off - not, at least, without consequences
>more horrible than words exist to describe. Third, the
>enforcement of international treaties means the growth of
>what is in effect an international bureaucracy. The local
>enforcers of a treaty may be citizens of the signatory states,
>who will live and work in their home countries, and may
>even occupy positions in the domestic administration. Yet
>these are people who, by virtue of the agreements they
>enforce, and the contacts they make and maintain in other
>countries, are members of an international order. And, in
>at least the case of money laundering, they will share an
>agenda that is often deeply hostile to their native
>institutions.
>
>This can be seen - expressed with almost naive honesty - in
>the book by Messrs Bosworth-Davies and Saltmarsh. Both
>are British police officers: the latter is a departmental head
>at the National Criminal Intelligence Service. Both take it
>for granted that the world needs an international police
>force. Both are unable to believe that anyone can
>disinterestedly object to the necessary harmonisations of
>law, and the corresponding abolition of Common Law
>protections. They "know one senior clearing banker who
>has described this [money laundering] legislation as the
>nearest thing he has experienced to
>'McCarthyism'...".[p.172] Of course, they see things
>differently. The legislation
>
> discloses, on mature reflection, a set of carefully
> structured laws which, with good will, due
> diligence and a modicum of responsible attention
> from the industry as a whole, should not prove
> too burdensome. Indeed, the authors believe that
> some of the regulatory requirements have been
> diluted too much already, in a misguided attempt
> to placate the sensibilities of certain sectors of the
> industry....[Ibid.]
>
>With people like this advising the politicians and lecturing
>the rest of us, little wonder the Drug Trafficking Offences
>Act predates the Vienna Convention by two years! Though
>they will hotly disagree - and even perhaps consider a libel
>writ - Messrs Bosworth-Davies and Saltmarsh cannot be
>regarded as our countrymen. More at home in a gathering
>of Bulgarian or Filipino police chiefs than with any of us,
>they are foreigners with British passports.
>
>Somewhat less honest, though still interesting, is the
>Explanatory Report of the Committee of Experts who
>drafted the Council of Europe Convention [full text in
>Gilmore, pp.192-237]. Though formally subordinate to a
>committee of the various European Ministers of Justice,
>these experts plainly saw their first duty as lying elsewhere.
>Call it "the international community" or their own order,
>their duty was collective and not to any single country.
>
>Look at their dislike of the narrow focus of the Vienna
>Convention. They wanted something that would also allow
>confiscation for
>
> terrorist offences, organised crime, violent crimes,
> offences involving the sexual exploitation of
> children and young persons, extortion,
> kidnapping, environmental offences, economic
> fraud, insider trading and other serious offences.
> [Gilmore, p.204]
>
>But they had to concede that not every European country
>might like its own laws against these acts to be written by
>an international committee. And so they allowed each
>signatory state to reserve whatever of these acts to its own
>legislative process.
>
> The experts agreed, however, that such states
> should review their legislation periodically and
> expand the applicability of confiscation measures,
> in order to be able to restrict the reservations
> subsequently as much as possible. [Ibid.]
>
>And this is only the beginning. As yet, the shape of world
>government exists barely in outline. But the tendency ought
>to be plain. Power is moving from national - and mostly
>democratic - governments to unaccountable and even
>invisible bureaucracies. Liberal institutions that are often
>the work of ages are being hammered into the transmitters
>of unlimited power. We are beginning to known how
>people in the Greek city states felt after absorption into the
>Roman Empire.
>
>When the American militiamen cry out that the United
>Nations is about to invade in black helicopters and plant
>microcomputers in their bottoms, I am at least sceptical.
>This is not the New World Order that I see. What I do see
>is actually worse. We can shoot the helicopters down, and
>dig out the microcomputers, and put the ringleaders on
>trial. We can go about playing the hero of our choice from
>Star Wars. But in the real world, there is no Death Star to
>blow up - no Darth Vadar to push into the void. There is
>just a huge, elastic network of people, all acting in what
>they believe is the public good, most with some degree of
>public support.
>
>How this kind of despotism can be resisted is another
>question, and I have said enough already. But I will repeat
>- the books here reviewed do repay a very close study. At
>the very least, it is useful to see the enemy's future plan
>laid out in such detail.
>
>Sean Gabb
>
>==========================
>If you like Free Life Commentary, you may also care to
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>
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>The Libertarian Alliance
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>
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>
>==========================
>Legal Notice: Though using the name Free Life, this
>journal is owned by me and not by the Libertarian Alliance,
>which in consequence bears no liability of whatever kind
>for the contents.
>--
>Sean Gabb | "Over himself, over his own |
>E-mail: [email protected] | mind and body, the individual|
>Web Page: | is sovereign" |
>http://freespace.virgin.net/old.whig/ | J.S. Mill, On Liberty, 1859 |
>
>--
>Chris R. Tame, Director
>Libertarian Alliance | "The secret of Happiness is Freedom, |
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