It looks like you're using an Ad Blocker.

Please white-list or disable AboveTopSecret.com in your ad-blocking tool.

Thank you.

 

Some features of ATS will be disabled while you continue to use an ad-blocker.

 

Post-meltdown international USA organized crime?

page: 1
0

log in

join
share:

posted on Jul, 26 2009 @ 10:52 PM
link   
This being skunkworks, please allow me to play "let's suppose" for a moment...

A few years after the fall of communism, America suddenly started hearing a lot about the "Russian Mafia," both in Russia and in the USA. They quickly acquired a fearsome reputation and seemingly set up shop all over the world.

The whole thing seemed to happen so rapidly ...before the early 1990s. I had never even HEARD of a "Russian mafia." Then all of a sudden, they were everywhere, from New Jersey to New Delhi.

Imagine a post-collapse USA, or one in a deep and enduring depression. I can contemplate a condition where some sort of organized crime syndicate takes over to fill a power vaccum...perhaps through black markets at home, or through dirty deeds abroad. This need not be the traditional "mafia," either. In fact, my guess is it probably wouldn't be. Imagine, for example, if the military collapsed and a rogue colonel set up his own private "for-hire" mafia-like organization dabbling in all sorts of dark deeds. This is exactly what happened to the parts of the Kuomintang after the fall of Republican China, by the way. When the Communists took over China, a certain number of Kuomintang soldiers fled to the highlands of South East Asia and began to produce and export narcotics in great quantities.



posted on Jul, 26 2009 @ 11:13 PM
link   
Russia has always had an organized criminal ellement operating inside and outside of the old Soviet Union for decades and decades before it collapsed.

Like the Italian Mafia in turn of the 20th century New York City organized crime gangs usually spring up in large immigrant communites designed to both protect and prey on their own kind.

Once establishing a power base they always branch out into other geographical areas and other types of illigitimate and legitimate business enterprises using their enconomic and political capital and muscle to do so.

Government and organized crime operate hand in hand. If you make an illegal activity legal most of the profits derive from it plummet. The fact that something is illegal often allows for an exorbiadant markup in that good or service that makes it extremely lucractive.

Even after paying off government officials and others to look the other way the profits are still extreme and most of the wealth is truly passed around.

The mafias would hate and lobby hard against things like narcotics, prostitution and gambling being decriminalized. It would be economic disaster for them.

In short the mafia is the government and the government is the mafia. The two opposite sides of a coin, where for one to exist and flourish the other has to also.

Governments derive most of their power in protecting citizens from crime even to the point that often their tactics in doing so are criminal and criminal to the innocent civilians they are charged with protecting.

Mafias provide the crime that the Government profits off of protecting the people from.

The two litterally can not exist without one another even from the earliest days of civilization.

In fact what your OP says is ultimately mafia does become the government.

George Washington, Ben Franklin, John Adams and the gang were all considered criminals and terrorists!

How a Mafia morphs once it switches roles to complete control into a government is different in many governments around the world.

They all started out as mafias and criminal enterprises though.



posted on Jul, 27 2009 @ 12:09 AM
link   
reply to post by ProtoplasmicTraveler
 


Great reply, thanks.

I guess what I am wondering is whether rogue US elements would spread abroad (in some sort of less-formal, non-diplomatic, non-governmental form) to create an international post-collapse network of criminal expats. Yes, you can argue in some ways that this has already happened with criminal banksters and so on, but one cannot deny there is a difference between officially sanctioned, legally-recognized entites shuffling papers and rogue armed units acting on their own in traditionally criminalized spheres for their own enrichment and plunder.



new topics
 
0

log in

join