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Stefan Claudiu
The Zeitgeist Movement - Orientation Guide
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General
crime
, as derived from the pursuit of money, ranges from petty theft to illegal sales to fraud to violent
robbery. This byproduct of the monetary system is often not given the thought needed to understand its source, for many tend to dismiss these "criminals" as some kind of social anomaly, rather than relating their basis to the need to survive. The inherent stress and other side effects associated with deprivation are also overlooked.
The `Merva-Fowles' study, done at the University of Utah in the 1990s, found powerful connections between unemployment and crime. They based their research on 30 major metropolitan areas with a total population of over 80 million. Their findings found that a 1% rise in unemployment resulted in: a 6.7% increase in Homicides; a 3.4 % increase in violent crimes
; a 2.4 % increase in property crime. During the period from 1990 to 1992, this translated into: 1459 additional Homicides; 62,607 additional violent crimes; 223,500 additional property crimes.5 If you were to take a well-to-do, ethical, `stand-up' person, strip them of their wealth and resources and drop them into a poor city with nothing but the shirt on their back, there is a very high probability that this person will begin to lie, cheat and steal in order to survive. It is no surprise that the poorest neighborhoods in the United States maintain the highest crime rates. A person born into a deprived environment, with little resources, poor education and few opportunities for work will do what they need to do in order to live. The point here is that economic depravity (scarcity), not so called genetic "criminal tendencies", creates this kind of aberrant behavior.
Corporate Crime, which is almost always exclusively profit related, takes many forms: Planned Obsolescence; Market Manipulation; Outsourcing; Price Fixing; Monopolistic Collusion; Labor Exploitation and Governmental Collusion are just a few to note. From Enron's deliberate shutting down of California's Power Plants to boost its Energy stocks6, to the Bayer Corporation's knowing distribution of HIV tainted drugs7, it should be clear to most people that corporate crime is constant and often times more insidious than "General Crime", for the repercussions tend to affect very large
5 6 7
Merva & Fowles, Effects of Diminished Economic Opportunities on Social Stress, Economic Policy Institute, 1992
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/04/national/04energy.html http://www.naturalnews.com/News_000647_Bayer_vaccines_HIV.html 12
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