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BY ERICK SAN JUAN
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Monday, February 27, 2017
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“TRANSNATIONAL criminal organizations and subsidiary organizations, including transnational drug cartels, have spread throughout the nation, threatening the safety of the United States and its citizens… These groups are drivers of crime, corruption, violence, and misery… In particular, the trafficking by cartels of controlled substances has triggered a resurgence in deadly drug abuse and a corresponding rise in violent crime related to drugs… A comprehensive and decisive approach is required to dismantle these organized crime syndicates and restore safety for the American people.”
This is part of US President Donald Trump’s executive order on Feb.9 – powerful and clear. He brought a number of law enforcement officials to the White House and asked them: “What impact do drugs have in terms of percentage on crime?”
They said, 75 to 80 percent.
Trump said, “That’s pretty sad. We’re going to stop the drugs from pouring in. We’re going to stop those drugs from poisoning our youth, from poisoning our people. We’re going to be ruthless in that fight. We have no choice… And we’re going to take that fight to the drug cartels and work to liberate our communities from their terrible grip of violence.”
The proliferation of illegal drugs obviously reached the mighty land of Uncle Sam and the newly elected US President Trump, like our own President Rody Duterte, will make sure that their citizens are protected against the poisonous impact of drugs.
The article of Mike Billington of the Executive Intelligence Review (EIR), “Trump Launches War on Drugs, But Must Target Drug Banks”, clearly states that the international banking system has tolerated the transnational shipment of illegal drugs across continents.
The one problem with the Trump war on drugs — and a potential Achilles heel if not corrected — is the failure to identify and target the actual core of the international drug cartel — the banks which facilitate this business. The publication by EIR in 1978 of the first edition of Dope, Inc., and the subsequent editions of that blockbuster exposé, documented in great detail how the illicit drug business — the biggest business in the world — was reportedly controlled entirely by the West and Wall Street banks, since the time of the British Opium Wars against China, and continuing today.
The identification of the “too-big-to-fail” banks – in London and New York as the headquarters of Dope Inc. – will also provide yet another motivation for the immediate restoration of Glass Steagallto stop the criminal money laundering and speculation which has brought the trans-Atlantic financial system to ruin.
In 2009, after the 2008 near-collapse of the Western banking system, Antonio Maria Costa, then the head of the United Nations office on drugs and crime, stated that international banks had become “drug dependent.” He said: “In many instances, the money from drugs was the only liquid investment capital. In the second half of 2008, liquidity was the banking system’s main problem and hence liquid capital became an important factor. Inter-bank loans were funded by money that originated from the drugs trade and other illegal activities… There were signs that some banks were rescued that way.”
Viktor Ivanov, the director of the Russian Federal Narcotics Service from 2008 until 2016, speaking in Washington in 2011, said: “Drug money and global drug trafficking are actually not just valuable elements of, but as donors of scarce liquidity, a vital and indispensable segment of the whole monetary system.”
Russia and the United States must work in tandem, Ivanov said, to effect a “drastic transformation of the international financial system… To a certain extent, we are observing a revival of the logic of the Glass-Steagall Act, adopted in the US in 1933 at the height of the Great Depression, which separated the deposit and investment functions of banks.”
With the advancement of technology through the internet, every transaction of drug money can be done fast and hard to trace.
It’s the same in our case – the transhipment of drugs through our waterways because of our vast coastline, and the possibility of the presence of some Chinese in our coastguard, drugs come and go without any fuss.
I hope that the recent agreement between coastguards of China and the Philippines to stop sea bandits like the Abu Sayyaf will also be of help in stopping the transport of illegal drugs and its raw materials.
The perception is that even by air, sea, land and the virtual cyberworld, illegal drugs will continue to proliferate because of corrupt people in government. Narco-financiers and politicians now control many nations.
Just like in the movies, now it’s reality./PN
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