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Nixon-era laws have shaped western racism and protected ‘enablers’ of financial crimes Tax Justice Network https://www.taxjustice.net/2020/06/05/nixon-era-laws-have-shaped-western-racism-and-protected-enablers-of-financial-crimes/

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This guest blog written by Dr Mary Alice Young of the University of West England proposes that in the aftermath of Covid-19, Western governments must redress antiquated and inherently racist organised crime control laws.
By Dr Mary Alice Young, Researcher and Senior Lecturer in International Criminal Law, University of
the West of England.
mary.young@uwe.ac.uk
In the aftermath of Covid-19, Western governments must redress antiquated and inherently racist
organized crime control laws
Organized crime is not homogeneous, and is wrongly assumed by many policy makers to be so. This
flawed perception of what constitutes organized crime is why countries struggle with ineffective,
outdated, organized crime control laws; modern laws which have been constructed around the
historical and prohibitionist Nixonian "drug war" template from the 1970s including the Organized
Crime Control Act and the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Control Act and which are therefore
predicated on the notion that all types of organized crimes groups operate in a similar manner to
drug trafficking organisations; that organized crime exists as an external threat linked to minority
and ethnic groups; and that the activities carried out by these illicit business ventures must therefore
be treated in a similar manner to drug trafficking offences. Added in to this continuing and incorrect
perception of organized crime, is the fact that the definition of the concept itself is fraught with
various national, regional and international interpretations which are embedded into global legal
systems. Such interpretations of organized crime into the legal systems of countries, also
encompass the assumption that Western efforts to control drug trafficking are the blueprint of so
called “good practice”. Yet none of us, are any the wiser as to what organized crime is and how to
curtail it and efforts to halt its spread remain largely ineffective.
With my colleague Dr Michael Woodiwiss (IASOC Distinguished Scholar), I have written about and
published critical works on the conceptualisation of organized crime and its control using primary
archival data and empirical data in the form of interviews. We have explored and continue to
explore the processes which have contributed to present day organized crime control laws including
those which are designed to combat a myriad of financial frauds and crimes (namely, the global anti-
money laundering template).
Norm shaping, in this context relating to the creation of principles designed to regulate the activities
of criminals, rests upon historical and United States (US) borne assumptions of what constitutes
organized crime. The exportation of organized crime control laws from Western countries, to
vulnerable countries such as those in the Global South, for example Jamaica and other small island
developing states, means that such countries are forced to adopt inflexible, inappropriate and often
irrelevant policies. In Jamaica, the interviews I carried out highlight that the main concerns for law
enforcement involve the illicit trafficking of firearms from the US (where they are manufactured) to
Jamaica where they are used, often ending in the tragic loss of Jamaican lives. However, the
immediate concerns of Jamaican law enforcement officials and policy makers, are superceded by the
priorities of the US which views the lotto scam (a type of advance fee fraud) as a paramount concern
because it victimises US citizens and thus is seen as a direct threat to the US, yet conversely does not
consider the need to examine the illicit traffic of firearms leaving its ports. Laws, policies, reports and
agreements, are therefore tailored to suit the country wielding the greatest financial and political
power at the global level, and so remains the fixed narrative left over from the Nixon era, that
organized crime cannot be home-grown but is carried out by those belonging to ‘The Other’ – groups
which are viewed as not belonging, being different, and existing outside of what is considered
acceptable or normal.
It could be observed that organized crime control laws rest upon inherently dangerous perceptions
of what ‘The Other’ constitutes. Especially given that from the outset, the US war on drugs was a
tactical decision by the Nixon Administration to damage the Black community and conceal anti-
democratic and radical tendencies within the American state. This fact was stated by Nixon’s former
domestic policy advisor John Ehrlichman who stated in a 1994 interview with Dan Baum, that the
Nixon White House had two enemies, these being the anti-war left and black people; by associating
marijuana and heroin with those communities, the White House could criminalise them and
therefore cause the disruption of those communities.
In reality, organized crime cannot be neatly shoehorned into conveniently labelled boxes depicting
characteristics such as race, religion and vocation although we have the popular media and
Hollywood to thank for those demonising stereotypes. Organized crime is adaptive, flexible,
exploitative and sometimes rather mundane. Organized crime moves with us in everyday life:
walking the streets with us and constructing the buildings we utilise, keeping corner shops stocked,
manicuring the nails of hands up and down the country from Aberdeen to Axminster, cocooning
some of us in a false sense of security by offering a chemically induced escape from the everyday,
and allowing some of us to purchase rare works of art, animals and antiquities. It allows some of us
to live a life of unquestionable luxury, and others just to survive on a daily basis. Organized crime
allows the purchasing of everything from breasts and Botox to trainers and takeaways. Organized
crime does not limit itself to class, wealth or status, and we only need to revisit the recent Panama
and Paradise Papers to know that the economically and socially elite are as important to the process
of illicit money movement, as the local drug dealer is to the dispersal of synthetic drugs on a council
estate in the West Midlands.
The vital role of “white collar” enablers in helping to perpetuate organized crime, was recognised
forty five years ago by the United Nations at its Fifth Crime Congress on the 1 September 1975, in
Geneva, Switzerland. On the table for discussion was the issue of ‘Crime as Business’ which
incorporated sub-discussions on ‘Organized Crime, White Collar Crime and Corruption’. The
Secretariat concluded in their final report, that in the context of organized crime as business,
criminal activities were characterised by those of a high social status often possessing considerable
political power which enabled them to use or misuse legitimate techniques in business and
industry, and therefore remain undetected and invisible. The recent financial scandals reported in
the news are evidence of the fact that the movers and shakers in the world of criminal money
management, largely fall outside of The Other classification, and often represent individuals more
closely associated with the American norm of “white” middle-class America and who prioritise
consumption, pleasure and the accumulation of wealth. This is a section of society which was
favoured by Nixon’s administration in 1970 and remains so by the Trump administration fifty years
later.
As the Covid-19 pandemic wreaks havoc across the globe, recent events following the tragic death of
George Floyd at the hands of US law enforcement officers, remind us that the devastating legacy of
Nixon’s war on drugs lives on. The racism, brutality and bigotry directed at the Black community has
been normalised under the guise of so-called crime control laws and criminal justice (and has further
been widened to apply to anyone who does not fit the accepted social norms so visibly promoted in
the West); the dichotomy between the treatment of white collar criminals able to funnel
unquantifiable amounts of filthy money through Western financial centres at great cost to the
societies of developing nations, and low tier, opportunistic, survivalist criminals, has never been so
stark. While it is far too early to predict how organized crime control will be affected by the
pandemic, I urge all governments in the aftermath of this crisis - including the UK government - to
reconsider their fundamental misunderstandings of organized crime. Confusions and
misunderstandings which are predicated on the aforementioned incorrect, historical perceptions
built by US administrations in days gone by, but which continue to inform modern day crime control
initiatives.
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