Criminal groups have shown 'impressive adaptability' to law enforcement actions and to new profit opportunities … Crime 'one of the world's top 20 economies', says UN official … Crime generates an estimated $2.1 trillion in global annual proceeds – or 3.6pc of the world's gross domestic product – and the problem may be growing, a senior United Nations official has said. In the wake of the Arab Spring, the Obama administration is grappling with how to handle. – UK Telegraph

Dominant Social Theme: The UN is on the case.

Free-Market Analysis: This is one of the oldest and hoariest of elite memes. It is the idea that only government can protect individuals from crime.

It is an elite meme because elites have always warred against the middle class – and thus has throughout history created environments where crime flourished even while pursuing legal and military "protection" from crime on behalf of citizens.

Today, it is no different. The power elite that evidently and obviously wants to create some sort of world government is using a variety of what we call dominant social themes to frighten people into giving up wealth and power to globalist institutions.

Most of these themes are scarcity based, and in a sense the "crime war" meme is no exception. It is based on the idea of a scarcity of security. Only the elites can provide the safety that civilian populations crave. Here's some more from the article:

"It makes the criminal business one of the largest economies in the world, one of the top 20 economies," said Yury Fedotov, head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), describing it as a threat to security and economic development.

The figure was calculated recently for the first time by the UNODC and World Bank, based on data for 2009, and no comparisons are yet available, Mr Fedotov told a news conference.

Speaking on the opening day of a week-long meeting of the international Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice (CCPCJ), he suggested the situation may be worsening "but to corroborate this feeling I need more data".

He said up to $40bn is lost through corruption in developing countries annually and illicit income from human trafficking amounts to $32bn every year.

"According to some estimates, at any one time, 2.4m people suffer the misery of human trafficking, a shameful crime of modern day slavery," Mr Fedotov said separately in a speech.

There is no doubt that crime is big business. How could it not be? There is a plethora of laws and regulations pouring down from Western governments now.

In part, this is a result of what we call the Internet Reformation – the information provided by the 'Net that has made people aware of larger elitists agendas. The result has been that the elites have attempted to move ahead with these agendas via a variety of historical tools, in our view.

These tools – war and economic depression – are seemingly distractions that are intended to make people so miserable that they will acquiesce to the elites' globalist agenda.

A big part of this agenda, though little noted, is the ability to police not just nation states but the entire world. The International Criminal Court was created several years ago, but Interpol was created decades before that.

Gradually an international structure is being created that will serve as a full-fledged, worldwide criminal justice system. This is a positive occurence, perhaps, if you are a "law and order" person. But we would argue that such internationalization of policing may do more harm than good.

This is because many nation states are led by ruthless rulers and they will inevitably abuse the system by making serve political rather than criminal ends. When crime-enforcement is internationalized, all sorts of injustices can occur.

Canada recently sent back a Chinese citizen who was wanted by his country for political rather than criminal offenses. Canadian officials did so because they had a binding, international treaty with China.

This web of treaties and globalist criminal enforcement agencies is growing. UNODC, for instance, is only about 15 years old and is another one of these powerful but low-profile agecies. Here's how the UN describes it:

Established in 1997 through a merger between the United Nations Drug Control Programme and the Centre for International Crime Prevention, UNODC operates in all regions of the world through an extensive network of field offices. UNODC relies on voluntary contributions, mainly from Governments, for 90 per cent of its budget.

UNODC is mandated to assist Member States in their struggle against illicit drugs, crime and terrorism. In the Millennium Declaration, Member States also resolved to intensify efforts to fight transnational crime in all its dimensions, to redouble the efforts to implement the commitment to counter the world drug problem and to take concerted action against international terrorism.

Step by step, a globalist criminal enforcement and judiciary effort is being built. It is still invislble to the common man and the justifications being used are appealing ones: fighting the "war on drugs" and "war on terror" in particular.

But over time, once governments are assured that their citizens are enmeshed in a global suveillance network, there is nothing to stop officials from making laws more and more onerous in order to increase their own power and those of their associates. This is the trouble with globalization. Finally, there is no appeal, nowhere to turn. Power corrupts …

The UN is now in the process of discovering a "global crime" problem. It already has created many of the facilities to "solve" this proclaimed issue. It proudly announces its globalist activism. We don't share the optimism.