LINK to Guardian editorial on "organized crime".
The essential thing criminologists miss about organized (or not so organized) "crime" is that it is the flip side of the same coin, on the other side of which is the "legal" exploitation of man's natural and human environments.
Granted, "criminal" exploitation tends to be - but certainly isn't always - more ruthless than legal exploitation (just think of the tobacco and advertising industries which have spent and earned billions encouraging people - especially young people - to smoke, despite all the evidence for the terrible harm it causes, or the oil industry's denial of its role in causing climate change), and some "regulation" is certainly better than none, but the difference between "legal" and "criminal" is not as black and white as the state (which decides what is and isn't legal) would have us believe.
The crime currently being committed, quite legally, against our own children and grandchildren through our continuing ruthless exploitation and spoiling of their planet - despite all the warning about the consequences - is as morally reprehensible as anything the Mafia has ever done.
The editor of this editorial needs to smell the air and look down at the pile of corpses which constitutes the "moral high ground" on which he or she is standing, as they pontificate about the evils of organized (or not so organized) "crime".
The root cause of crime (legal and illegal) is the individual's perverted biological propensity to ruthlessly exploit his environment (natural and human) in man's continuing (but rationalized and unrecognized) primordial struggle for survival, advantage and "success", now largely reduced to the pursuit and exercise of POWER, e.g. money, social and professional status, the moral high ground, etc.
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