“It is easy to forget and/or never really truly understand why this is such an important issue if you only see anti-money laundering as a paperwork detail,” Sullivan says. “Just look at what is going on at the border currently; you have got the drug lords and their gangs who are absolutely running wild.”
And how do the drug lords finance their activity? Money laundering.
“I don’t mean to speak on some sort of moral high horse here, but there is much more to this AML stuff than just shuffling papers across a desk, and it is really not an issue of Big Brother looking over the average guy’s shoulder,” Sullivan says. “This stuff cuts to the very fabric of who we are as Americans and the future of our children and our country. And if we are able to put a damper on the means to commit and/or continue the various organized criminal activities, then that must be our combined focus to do.”
There are powerful forces in this country who profit mightily from laundered money and thus who do not want this flow of literal blood money to stop. This includes corrupt banks, dirty hedge funds, and no doubt plenty of politicians too.
I would take it that all big launder money ends up in some investment fund or other and I don’t see them closing that door. There isn’t really any difference between big gangsters with car boots stuffed with money looking for a safe bet to increase it and investment bankers doing much the same. In spite of the effect such large sums of money can have in any country, neither of them are much interested in democracy and the welfare of the people, nor are they very patriotic. I suppose it’s a sort of what you could call a “screw you” type of system that we live under. Ah well, that’s capitalism, illegal gangsters and legal gangsters.
At least the overtly criminal mafias are upfront about what they do.