of a book that sounds fascinating - thank you Laura Miller!

One line is particularly chilling:

"a conscience-free consumerism that is infecting the entire planet."

How sad and how true.

As for legalizing drugs - if it really would solve the problem then what the hell are we waiting for?

Hope a lot of people take the time to read this as it provides a perspective I've never fully understood on crime. Never thought about this interplay of criminal enterprises and the burgeoning global market.

The trick, like Glenny says, is to find a way to regulate this without any one side gaining too much power or conversely creating an entity that would have too much power in and of itself. The question is who could do this? It's certainly not within the U.N.'s capability or mandate. Interpol, given the right working relationships with several of these countries and a large expansion of their resources, might likewise be able to do it.

Still Glenny offers the most provocative and probably effective solution to this problem: simply legalizing drugs. Personally not really sure I like that one, but Glenny does provide some reasons for it.

The question is not could it be stopped, but why hasn't it been. There is only one possible explanation. Governments don't want it stopped.

The criminal underworld is a perfect place to hide their own shady deals. When governments wish to transfer millions of dollars to, say--the Contras in Nicaragua, by say--selling weapons to Iran, they need a place to hide the transaction.

When there are multiple explanations, the simplest is usually correct.

It isn't the "underworld" where the real action is, it is with the governments and the multinational corporations, the "uberworld".

No secret that the same address that had the flight school that trained the "911 hijackers" also was the address on the registration of a plane that was caught with 5.5 tons of cocaine in Mexico and the plane was painted to look like a US government homeland security plane - because it was. McCain also leased the same plane for a previous presidential election campaign. But it is a secret to the public and the media.

Politicians are not just crooked, they are organized crime.

The Guerini Gang in Marseilles, who ran "the French Connection," were the same folks who beat up and killed the Communists on the docks at the behest of the CIA. Quid pro quo?

During the Vietnam War the U.S. was flooded with marijuana and heroin from Southeast Asia. Remember the Golden Triangle, Southern Air Transport and the original Air America?

During the Iran-contra debacle the same planes that flew weapons into Latin America flew tons of cocaine out. At the same time, operators like Monzer al-Kassar who brought NATO weapons to Iran also ran the largest heroin supplies in the world.

It is no surprise that following the NATO invasion of Afghanistan that production of opium shot up, or that Victor Bout, who flew heroin out of there, began working for U.S. subcontractors, flying weapons in.

And the guy who owned the school in Florida where a couple of the 9/11 hijackers learned to fly had a plane busted by the DEA with forty pounds of heroin up in Orlando. Guess what? Everyone walked away.

Drugs are just another revenue stream. Law is just another way of keeping the hoi polloi in line. It applies to some of us, but not to others.

the gangsters who are currently running our government. It's not just Russians and Nigerians who are scamming people and skimming oil profits.

Dubai is herein called "the money laundering capital of the world". Gee...didn't Haliburton just move their offices over there? I guess Dick Cheney has to launder all of that Iraq war profit somewhere.

Terrific article. Curious about the rise of Dubai and its proximity to Iraq where $billions have been stolen simultaneously. Money for Iraq is ordered by the ton, not by dollar amounts. Auditing for government expenditures in Iraq has not been permitted by the criminal Bush administration for obvious reasons. As for money laundering it's so simple it's absurd. I lived in Mexico and just by walking around Cancun it was easy to recognize businesses set up for the purpose of laundering money. Money exchange bureau's set up in an out door closet that are never open for business. A chain of Dr. Scholls foot pad stores which sell nothing but Dr. Scholl products and never open, it seems. These are stores with large front window. Other businesses that charge so much that the vast majority of Mexican can't afford to patronize them.This is just casual observation by walking around a small area of downtown Cancun, not to mention the tourist areas. Legalizing drug will never happen because the governments of the world have too much at stake, not only in the way of corruption but bureaucratic empires set up to supposedly combat the drug trade. Furthermore the U.S. SET UP ITS PHONY DRUG WAR as a means to erode Constitutional rights, not to end drugs.

to include the elimination of slavery and human trafficking as part of one's conditions for doing business? It isn't hard at all. So, why is it not being done?

I am appalled at the way men - yeah men! - in this world behave and act, including the so-called religious leaders (the Pope apologizing for the Catholic Church's systematic abuse of children for atleast 50 years!). Men are what's wrong with the world toay, and men need to start bringing pressure to bear on themselves -and each other - to clean up this world, and stop acting like it's everybody else's problem - or worse, like it's no problem at all.

If another group single group of people were single-handedly committing the overwhelming majority of the crimes, killing, raping women, trafficking in humans, polluting the air and water, arming children and forcing them to kill others, selling dangerous arsenals to those who least need them, and the host of other evils that men are doing all over this world, we would banish them from our communities. Maybe it's time that men were banished.

A research study a few years ago indicated that the genetic make-up of men, that extra chromosone, would eventually make them extinct. I can see why - and I can't wait.