Throughout her storied political career, Waters has been embroiled in numerous controversies, including abusing her power to enrich family members, getting a communist dictator to harbor a cop-murdering Black
Panther fugitive still wanted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and accusing the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of selling crack cocaine in black neighborhoods.
Considering her record and documented history of poor ethical and moral fitness, it’s outrageous that Maxine Waters is up for chair of the ultra-powerful House Financial Services Committee, which has jurisdiction over the country’s banking system, economy, housing, and insurance.
https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2018/11/will-looming-global-economic-meltdown.html
"Wall Street billionaires are pushing a new plan to swipe the profits of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac from U.S. taxpayers–and in the process revive the system of privatized-profits and public-risk that contributed to the severity of the Great Financial Crisis."
The Moelis plan stands out as a strikingly bold grab for control of the companies and their profits. It calls for the dividend payments to the Treasury to cease so that the companies can rebuild capital. Shockingly, it also calls for the cancellation of the senior preferred stock altogether–with no compensation for the past risk and future profits currently due to taxpayers. It is as if a company proposed to do a stock buyback by proposing to cancel its shares rather than purchasing them for cash.
So will Maxine Waters be the crusading
financial protector of our 401k plans and save
America from the next financial bubble? Well,
there will certainly be lots of harassment and
shakedowns. But don't count on her steering
us clear of Wall Street excesses. If history is
any guide, Mad Maxine will be way too busy
raising money from the people she is now in
charge of regulating. Stephen Moore is a senior
fellow at The Heritage Foundation
Waters, who represents some of Los Angeles’ poorest inner-city neighborhoods, has also helped family members make more than $1 million through business ventures with companies and causes that she has helped, according to her hometown newspaper. While she and her relatives get richer (she lives in a $4.5 million Los Angeles mansion), her constituents get poorer. JUDICIAL WATCH
THE (REALITY) OF THE DEMOCRAT PARTY:
Anti-Semitic, open borders for cheaper labor and funded by criminal banksters… and these pols are making vast fortunes sucking the blood of America!
https://globalistbarackobama.blogspot.com/2018/09/obomb-muslim-anti-semitic.html
We must not let them cheat their way to power over the rest of us. Their ongoing vote fraud must be stopped and the Democrats need to take a look at themselves and at what they have become. It's not a pretty picture. What they have become threatens to destroy the greatest nation on the planet and they are doing it on purpose. They have nothing but contempt for the US as founded and for those of us who love this country. PATRICIA McCARTHY – AMERICAN THINKER
“Then we suffered the rattling election of Barack
Obama, whose active membership in a white-,
Jewish-, and America-hating church was well
known to the electorate. His close personal
relationship with the likes of his adored
Rev.Jeremiah Wright and Louis Farrakhan was no
secret. Obama was open about his goals. He told
us he was out to "fundamentally transform
America" and the world.” ALAN BERGSTEIN
“There is a deep racist and anti-Semitic disease in the leadership of the Democrats. As Senator Cory Booker brings his hatred for the Jewish State to the Senate, he should be asked whether he agrees with his hero, “The only good Zionist is a dead Zionist we must take a lesson from Hitler”. DANIEL GREENFIELD
Clinton, a serial rapist, is welcomed to McCain's funeral, as is his wife, who as a "manifest felon" is the epitome of every unscrupulous behavior and trickery she can get away with by committing fraud, harming American lives, and lying to the American public. By Eileen F. Toplansky
MAXINE WATERS USES NAZIS TACTICS TO HARASS TRUMP
…. But where was her big mouth when Obama and the Clinton were sucking in bribes and looting the poor of Haiti, or operating a fraudulent slush fund charity????
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2018/06/her-corruptness-rep-maxine-waters.html
"But what the Clintons do is criminal because they do it wholly at the expense of the American people. And they feel thoroughly entitled to do it: gain power, use it to enrich themselves and their friends. They are amoral, immoral, and venal. Hillary has no core beliefs beyond power and money. That should be clear to every person on the planet by now." ---- Patricia McCarthy - AMERICANTHINKER.com
THIS IS MAXINE WATER’S MELTDOWN STATE OF CALIFORNIA
In 2013, California lawmakers passed legislation that allowed illegal aliens to obtain driver’s licenses if they can prove to the Department of Motor Vehicle (DMV) their identity and state residency. The plan was one of the largest victories to date by the open borders lobby.… JOHN BINDER – BREITBART.com
“Attorney General Eric Holder's tenure was a low point even within the disgraceful scandal-ridden Obama years.” DANIEL GREENFIELD / FRONTPAGE MAG
MAXINE WATERS, LOUIS FARRAKHAN, ERIC HOLDER and BARACK OBAMA – RACIST, VIOLENT HATE MONGERS!
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2018/09/black-ghetto-nazi-maxine-waters.html
Rep. Maxine Waters is fine with Farrakhan. And the left is fine with Waters. Eric Holder recently posed with Farrakhan. DANIEL GREENFIELD / FRONTPAGE MAG
MAD MAXINE: THE BANKSTERS’ DELIGHT…. Only the Obombs and grifters Hillary and Billary have sucked in more bribes from banksters than this evil woman.
https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2018/11/judicial-watch-maxine-waters-unfit-to.html
"So, will Maxine Waters be the crusading financial protector of our 401k plans and save America from the next financial bubble? Well, there will certainly be lots of harassment and shakedowns. But don't count on her steering us clear of Wall Street excesses. If history is any guide, Mad Maxine will be way too busy raising money from the people she is now in charge of regulating." Considering her record and documented history of poor ethical and moral fitness, it’s outrageous that Maxine Waters is up for chair of the ultra-powerful House Financial Services Committee, which has jurisdiction over the country’s banking system, economy, housing, and insurance. JUDICIAL WATCH |
|
Throughout her storied political career, Waters has been embroiled in numerous
controversies, including abusing her power to enrich family members, getting a communist dictator to harbor a cop-murdering Black Panther fugitive still wanted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and accusing the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of selling crack cocaine in black neighborhoods. JUDICIAL WATCH
Hot mic: Biden suggests Maxine Waters run for Senate and encourages Nancy Pelosi to 'keep it up'
Naomi Lim
President Joe Biden encouraged California Rep. Maxine Waters to run for Senate during a bill signing event at the White House, which produced a series of hot microphone moments for the president.
"Senator, I hope. You think I'm kidding, I'm not," Biden said Wednesday as he greeted the lawmaker who is often mocked by conservatives.
JUDICIAL WATCH
Maxine Waters Unfit to Chair House Financial Services Committee
Considering her record and documented history of poor ethical and moral fitness, it’s outrageous that Maxine Waters is up for chair of the ultra-powerful House Financial Services Committee, which has jurisdiction over the country’s banking system, economy, housing, and insurance.
With Democrats taking control of the House of Representatives, come January the 14-term California congresswoman is expected to head the committee, which also has jurisdiction over monetary policy, international finance, and efforts to combat terrorist financing.
Throughout her storied political career, Waters has been embroiled in numerous controversies, including abusing her power to enrich family members, getting a communist dictator to harbor a cop-murdering Black Panther fugitive still wanted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and accusing the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of selling crack cocaine in black neighborhoods.
A few months ago, the 80-year-old Democrat from Los Angeles encouraged violence against Trump administration cabinet members. “If you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd and you push back on them and you tell them they are not welcome anymore, anywhere,” Waters said at a summer rally in Los Angeles. Judicial Watch filed a House ethics complaint against Waters for encouraging violence against Trump Cabinet members.
Among her most corrupt acts as a federal legislator is steering millions of federal bailout dollars to her husband’s failing bank, OneUnited. Waters allocated $12 million to the Massachusetts bank in which she and her board member husband held shares. OneUnited subsequently got shut down by the government and American taxpayers got stiffed for the millions.
Judicial Watch investigated the scandal and obtained documents from the U.S. Treasury related to the controversial bailout. The famously remiss House Ethics Committee, which is charged with investigating and punishing corrupt lawmakers like Waters, found that she committed no wrong doing. The panel bought Waters’ absurd story that she allocated the money as part of her longtime work to promote opportunity for minority-owned businesses and lending in under served communities even though her husband’s bank was located thousands of miles away from the south Los Angeles neighborhoods she represents in Congress.
The reality is that without intervention by Waters OneUnited was an extremely unlikely candidate for a government bailout through the disastrous Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). The Treasury Department warned that it would only provide bailout funds to healthy banks to jump-start lending and OneUnited clearly didn’t meet that criteria.
Documents uncovered by Judicial Watch detail the deplorable financial condition of OneUnited at the time of the government cash infusion. The records also show that, prior to the bailout, the bank received a “less than satisfactory rating.” Incredibly, after that scandal Waters was chosen by her colleagues to hold a ranking position on the House Financial Services Committee she will soon chair. The only consequence for blowing $12 million on her husband’s failing bank was a slap on the hand to Waters’ chief of staff (her grandson) for violating House standards of conduct to help OneUnited.
Waters, who represents some of Los Angeles’ poorest inner-city neighborhoods, has also helped family members make more than $1 million through business ventures with companies and causes that she has helped, according to her hometown newspaper. While she and her relatives get richer (she lives in a $4.5 million Los Angeles mansion), her constituents get poorer.
The congresswoman was also embroiled in a fundraising scandal for skirting federal election rules with a shady gimmick that allows unlimited donations from certain contributors. Instead of raising most of her campaign funds from individuals or political action committees, Waters sells her endorsement to other politicians and political causes for as much as $45,000 a pop.
It wouldn’t be right to part without also noting some of Waters’ international accolades. She has made worldwide headlines for her frequent trips to communist Cuba to visit her convicted cop-assassin friend, Joanne Chesimard, who appears on the FBI’s most wanted list and is also known by her Black Panther name of Assata Shakur.
Chesimard was sentenced to life in prison after being convicted by a jury of the 1979 murder of a New Jersey State Trooper. With the help of fellow cult members, she escaped from jail and fled to Cuba. Outraged U.S. lawmakers insisted she be extradited but Waters always stood by her side, likening the cop-assassin to civil rights leader Martin Luther King.
In fact, Waters wrote Cuban Dictator Fidel Castro a letter to assure him that she was not part of the group of U.S. legislators who voted for a resolution to extradite the cop murderer. Waters told Castro that she opposed extradition because Chesimard was “politically persecuted” in the U.S. and simply seeking political asylum in Havana, where she still lives.
In the 1980s Waters accused the CIA of selling crack cocaine to blacks in her south-central Los Angeles district to raise millions of dollars to support clandestine operations in Latin America, including a guerrilla army. During the infamous 1992 Los Angeles riots the congresswoman repeatedly excused the violent behavior that ironically destroyed the areas she represents in the House. She dismissed the severe beating of a white truck driver by saying the anger in her district was righteous. She also excused looters who stole from stores by saying they were simply mothers capitalizing on an opportunity to take some milk, bread, and shoes.
Should this ethically and morally challenged individual, who has repeatedly displayed behavior unbecoming of a federal lawmaker, be at the helm of an influential congressional committee that oversees the financial sector?
Maxine Waters Pays Daughter Hundreds of Thousands in Campaign Funds
Rep. Maxine Waters's (D., Calif.) campaign paid her daughter hundreds of thousands in campaign funds during the 2020 election cycle, according to Federal Election Commission records.
Karen Waters received $240,000 from her mother’s campaign for a variety of campaign activities, including soliciting campaign contributions from other candidates in exchange for the congresswoman's endorsement on campaign mailers, Fox News reported.
This is not the first time Maxine Waters has used the controversial practice to raise funds for her campaign, and her campaign has paid her daughter for years to help manage the scheme.
From 2006 through 2020, Waters’s campaign shelled out more than $1 million to her daughter—either directly or through Progressive Connections, Karen Waters’s public relations firm—for producing what are known as slate mailers featuring her mother's endorsement of California candidates. Karen Waters raked in more than $200,000 from her mother’s campaign during the 2018 election cycle, the Washington Free Beacon first reported.
Watchdog groups have filed complaints asking the FEC to audit Waters's campaign for using the mailers. The campaign has faced criticism for the mailers since 2010, when one watchdog group first reported that the congresswoman had been paying her daughter to run the operation.
California Democrats including Governor Gavin Newsom, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris have donated tens of thousands of dollars to Waters’s campaign for the endorsement mailers.
Though the FEC caps individual campaign contributions at $2,800, payments for the slate mailers are considered "reimbursements" for Waters’s endorsement. The commission issued an advisory opinion in 2004 allowing Waters permission to run the operation through her campaign.
Waters was first elected to Congress in 1990 and serves California's 43rd Congressional District.
CLEARLY WE KNOW HOW MUCH BILLARY, HILLARY AND THE OBOMB MADE SERVICING CRIMINAL BANKSTERS. ALL PAID VIA 'SPEECH' FEES AT ABOUT $500k EACH. OBAMA PRIDED HIMSELF IN MAKING SURE NO CRIMINAL BANKSTER EVER WENT TO PRISON. MOST OF HIS BANKSTERS CONTINUE TO THIS DAY TO PLUNDER WITH IMPUNITY!
KAMALA HARRIS WAS WAITING ON THE SIDELINES IN CA AS A.G. SUCKING OFF WELLS FARGO AND 'KING OF FORECLOSURES' STEVEN MNUCHIN.
THE OLD WHORE FEINSTEIN FOUGHT AGAINST ENDING 'CONSULTANT FEES TO FAMILY MEMBERS' BRIBES AS HER PIMP HUSBAND, RICHARD BLUM WAS DOLING OUT BIG MONEY TO BOXER SO SHE WOULD VOTE FOR ANYTHING THAT BENEFITED THE CRIME DUAL OF FEINSTEIN-BLUM.
FEINSTEIN IS A WHORE FOR RED CHINA, HAS SERVED THEM LONG FOR 'DEALS' THAT HER PIMP MADE. FEINSTEIN HAS LONG VOTED IN THE SENATE FOR ANYTHING THAT WOULD BENEFIT RED CHINA.
FEINSTEIN IS ALSO THE BIGGEST WAR PROFITEER IN U.S. HISTORY. SHE'S SO FUCKING CORRUPT SHE QUICKLY ENDORSED JOE BIDEN FOR THE PRESIDENCY, AFTER ALL, HE'S A FEINSTEIN CLONE.
Maxine Waters's paid-mailer racket snowballs
By Monica Showalter
When we last visited Rep. Maxine Waters's hightly questionable 'slate-mailer' money-making racket in 2019, where candidates and causes get Waters's endorsement in exchange for cash, her daughter Karen who runs the thing had just pocketed $50,000.
Well, the operation seems to have gotten bigger, and Karen appears to be richer, all from mama Maxine's simple word of endorsement.
According to Fox News, citing federal election data and a 2018 report from the Washington Free Beacon:
The reelection of U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters to another term in Congress last month proved to be something of a financial windfall for Karen Waters, the California Democrat's daughter, federal election data suggest.
Karen Waters received a total of about $240,000 from her 82-year-old mother’s campaign during the election cycle, Federal Election Commission records show.
The dollar figure appears to mirror what Karen Waters received during her mother’s previous campaign in 2018, when the daughter was paid “more than $200,000,” according to a November 2018 report by the Washington Free Beacon.
Which is nice work if you can get it. Seriously, this person makes $240,000 which is nearly equal to what the mayor of Los Angeles makes, or the average U.S. Senator makes, or Maxine herself makes as a House member at $174,000 a year. It's more than House Speaker Nancy Pelosi makes ($223,500). It's certainly more than California's Gov. Gavin Newsom ($210,000) makes.
All for the little task of assembling a mailer to fill the voters' junk mail takings and then the recycle bins in one part of one county, and collecting cash on the content. Running the country's largest state with the world's seventh largest economy, by contrast, is less important stuff. Karen Waters must be brilliant.
Which raises questions as to why Waters, a far left demogogue, is selling her endorsements for cash, and what the payers of these endorsements, are really getting for their money. We know the Waters machine is strong, but so strong as to merit inflated fees and salaries for Waters and her family? This is known as getting rich while in public office. Waters is the only one who's doing this sleazy machine-politics practice on a national scale, but don't imagine other Democrats aren't also looking to cash in.
Everybody wins when Maxine sells her endorsement, Maxine's family with cash, and others with cash turned into newfound power. The only losers are the voters, who get these misleading junk mail flyers in their mail and vote on arguably false premises.
What a racket this is for people like Waters. Still no sign of any legislation to stop this practice.
Image: Gage Skidmore, via Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 2.0
Waters Has Shoveled Over $1 Million in Campaign Cash to Daughter
Joe Schoffstall -
Rep. Maxine Waters (D., Calif.) has now dished out more than $1 million in campaign payments to her daughter following the 2020 elections.
Karen Waters has pocketed $1.13 million for providing an array of services for her mother's campaign since 2003. The majority of the cash is for her role in running a controversial slate-mailer operation, in which California politicians gave money to Waters's campaign in exchange for mailers bearing her endorsement.
The mailers have become increasingly lucrative for the younger Waters over the years. During the 2020 cycle, her payments hit a high of $240,000. That's significantly more than the $90,000 her firm, Progressive Connections, took in during the 2006 election cycle. The Federal Election Commission gave Waters the green light for the mailer operation in 2004.
While slate mailers are commonplace in states like California and Oregon, the practice is extremely rare at the federal level. In fact, Waters appears to be the only federal politician to use a slate-mailer operation. As such, the arrangement between her and her daughter has led to complaints from watchdog groups asking the FEC to audit the campaign.
Many prominent California politicians have paid to be featured on the mailers. Vice President Kamala Harris twice shelled out tens of thousands from her campaigns for a spot on the mailers. California governor Gavin Newsom (D.) and former senator Barbara Boxer (D.) have likewise dished out cash for Waters's support.
The practice has received criticism from local media."While some of these mailers reflect the earnest political values of the organizations that put them together, many are pay-to-play money-makers that blur the line between endorsement, paid advertisement and extortion," CalMatters wrote last year.
Waters's campaign did not return a request for comment.
The Next Hunter? Kamala Harris’s Stepdaughter Cashes in on Biden Presidency
Brooklyn 'artist' Ella Emhoff scores modeling deal with firm run by Democratic donors
Hunter Biden's ongoing legal challenges haven't stopped other members of the Biden family from blatantly exploiting their ties to the president for financial gain. Joe Biden's younger brother, Frank Biden, promoted his relationship with the president in an ad published on Inauguration Day in a Florida business journal.
"My brother is a model for how to go about doing this work," Frank Biden says in the ad for the Florida-based litigation firm where he works as a non-attorney senior adviser. The younger Biden has previously bragged about his success in lobbying his brother on behalf of moneyed interests during the Obama administration.
BARACK OBAMA SPENT HIS EIGHT YEAR BANKSTER REGIME SURRENDERING OUR BORDERS TO MEXICO AND ENCOURAGING ILLEGALS TO VOTE.
OBOMB OPERATED THE MEXICAN FASCIST PARTY OF LA RAZA 'The Race" OUT OF THE WHITE HOUSE AND FUNDED IT WIT U.S. TAX DOLLARS. THE OPERATION WAS HEADE BY LA RAZA V.P. CECILIA MUNOZ, WHO JOINED BIDEN'S PRESIDENTIAL TRANSITION TEAM TO ORCHESTRATE BIDEN'S PREMEDITATED INVASION OF A FOREIGN FORCE.
If Obama committed peccadillos, the media covered for him, but what’s certain is that even the media couldn’t cover for how corrupt his administration was, culminating in the Russia Hoax. ANDREA WIDBURG
Obama and the Broken Nation He Made Come Of Age
A generation doesn’t remember life before the crises he created.
Fri Jun 25, 2021
Daniel Greenfield
32 comments
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
Barack Obama turns 60 over the summer. The AARP cover with Barry posing next to a basketball and a shelf of bestselling non-fiction books he hasn’t read can’t be too far away.
Once the symbol of youthful hipness, the former boss of Hope and Change now lectures “young people” on what they should be doing. His legacy is being carried forward by 78-year-old Biden and the 81-year-old Pelosi. That’s above the average age of 80 of the House Dem leadership.
The average age of the Biden cabinet is two years older than President Trump’s cabinet.
The gerontocratic technocracy uses AOC as its younger foil, but she’s been a stalking horse for Bernie Sanders who will hit the big 80 in the fall. The big donors behind the American Left are even older with George Soros due to hit 90 the same month Obama gets to 60. The even bigger reservoirs of cash flowing into the leftist machine are coming from the foundations of men who were born in the 19th century like Henry Ford, John D. MacArthur, and John D. Rockefeller.
That’s about right for a 19th century ideology whose followers keep trying to make it look young.
Youthful leftism is anarchic. It’s CHAZ, BLM, and Antifa. It’s open air heroin markets, smashed store windows, and political assassinations. Turning that anarchy into collectivism requires hysterical propaganda and rallies that appear anarchic, but are actually tightly controlled, ideas that seem edgy, but are actually the work of men who were born during the age of the steam.
If you think Bernie’s old, Karl Marx celebrated his 203rd birthday in May.
Obama’s policies have aged as badly as Marx, Biden, or their front man. But instead of moderating as they grow older, they only grow more radical. Obama equivocated on gay marriage, while Biden entirely erases the existence of women by calling them “birthing people”. Obama covertly weaponized the government against conservatives, while Biden is doing it openly. Everything from election rigging through H.R.1 to indoctrinating every government employee with critical race theory is happening more openly and blatantly under Biden.
Youthful leftist revolutions break the system while leftist gerentocrats impose the tyranny.
Making tyranny look like freedom requires hefty doses of chaos and outrage that make it appear that the system is being broken when it’s actually being built up. Or as George Orwell wrote in 1984, “One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.” The revolution is the thing it’s revolting against.
The end of history keeps arriving only to vanish like a mirage when the youth reach for it.
"This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal," Obama told his followers. Two years later, he privately snapped, "What does he think I'm supposed to do? Put on my f------ Aquaman gear and swim down there myself with a wrench?"
Thirteen years have passed and if the planet has begun to heal, Democrats won’t admit it.
The moment of epochal change can never be allowed to arrive because it would interrupt the permanent crisis. Salvation is always here and also always out of reach. But there’s always a new generation available to be fooled again because they know the past doesn’t matter.
History is radically revised every generation not just for what it teaches, but for what it doesn’t.
A revisionist history work like the 1619 Project doesn’t just impose a radical new racist history, it displaces the past. Another revisionist history will come along to displace the 1619 Project because manufacturing history churn is vital to destroying any continuity with the past. All the academic lenses being swapped one for the other like a mad ophthalmologist leaves a new generation with a lot of theories, but no clue that they’re being indoctrinated into a lost cause.
The Left has no new ideas. Like Hollywood, it makes old ideas seem new by rebooting them, by making them appear hip and trendy, and by destroying a meaningful connection with the past. And that way audiences don’t realize they’re just seeing the same movie remade over again. What might be creative bankruptcy in a movie theater is a more seriously sisyphean problem described by Churchill as, “Those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it.”
But how does a new generation learn from a past that isn’t allowed to exist on its own terms?
Demonizing the past is a convenient way of obscuring it. The only thing students are taught about the past is that it was a horrible time, its people backward, its customs savage, its learning wicked, its institutions racist, and its ideas horrifying. In postmodern history, the past exists only as a cautionary tale gleaned for historical struggles that fit into the new narrative.
History is an incomplete present whose revolutions were never fully fulfilled. It’s a revolutionary story of a world ruled by villains until they were overthrown by the forces of good. And this revolution against history must continue until all of the past is negated by the present.
The destruction of statues and burning of books forces ‘presentism’ for the past to conform to the dogmas of the moment. The biggest problem with the past isn’t that it’s politically incorrect, but that it’s repeating itself. The Black Lives Matter movement transparently harkens back to the 70s. So do most of the radical social impulses in which the Left cloaks its real power agenda.
The revolutionary chaos is doomed to fail again, but each oscillation breaks the country more.
The social activism is window dressing. A proper Marxist regime has little use for militant minorities, feminism, gay rights, police defunding, transgender bathrooms, pipeline protests, abortion, or any of the other issues the radicals have been using to waste our time. If you doubt that, go look at how many of any of the above you can find in China, Cuba, or North Korea.
The Russian Futurists vowed to throw the art and literature of the past overboard from the “steamship of modernity”. But the Bolsheviks were not looking for disruptive art and when the revolution arrived, modern art was tossed overboard and the former revolutionaries settled down to producing socialist realism and recreating the art of the past for the Soviet Union.
After a brief permissive period, the Soviet Union criminalized homosexuality and insisted on traditional marriages and roles for women. Those feminists who resisted were soon shown their place with one of the more notorious free love figures being forcibly married off by Lenin.
The dictatorship had eclipsed the revolution and the past was quickly rewritten all over again.
As Obama approaches his sixtieth birthday, the age at which Khrushchev struggled for control of the USSR and Mao launched his Great Leap Forward, two events that would require a good deal of historical editing, our American past is already being rewritten. Only those who are at least in their thirties will remember that there wasn’t a racial crisis before Barack Obama.
And there hadn’t been such a crisis for a generation before he took power.
Our racial crisis is not a legacy of 1619, but of 2008. Obama’s victory was not a revolution against a crisis, but the revolution that created the crisis. To a new generation, the racial crisis is a permanent feature of life. They have always lived under the crisis and expect to always live under it. That is why critical race theory and white privilege rants have become so pervasive.
Without a generation coming of age in a world shaped by the toxic idea that all white people are evil and all minorities are victims, no one outside academic circles would have willingly accepted them. And if that generation seems all too easy to radicalize into supporting the most insane policies, that’s because it grew up in a world defined by the hysteria of manufactured crises.
The world as they know it is doomed by melting ice caps, the rich getting richer, and the genocide of black people at the hands of the police. Every radical program is backed by a sense of urgent crisis which is killing people and destroying the future. They can’t imagine a present without the crisis and don’t remember ever living in a world not defined by crisis.
As Obama gets closer to his AARP cover, a generation lives in the world that he made.
Like Obama, his radical political movement speaks endlessly about the past, but has no actual past. Its past is always being reinvented and retold through new narratives, but with no facts.
The Obama revolution has come and gone. We have skipped past it to the Soviet Union of Chernenko and Andropov, of gerontocrats building the tyranny with the beams of revolution. The decline is everywhere as the theories fail, the factories close, and the stores stand empty.
The youth are being rallied to cheer for the revolutionary tyranny of Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and Chuck Schumer who are promising a new era in history no one believes in anymore. Since the election their cause is no longer free college, it’s federalizing elections through H.R.1.
Federalizing elections, eliminating the filibuster, and packing the Supreme Court are compelling issues in Washington D.C., but the regime plotting new coups has little to say to the ordinary people facing high prices for gas and bread. Land, Bread, and Peace has given way to a race for total power over the country as the revolution of Hope, Crisis and Change comes of age.
There’s no change without crisis, and without hope, there’s only hate.
THERE IS NO GREATER THREAT TO AMERICAN DEMOCRACY THAN PERMITING LAWYERS FROM ELECTIVE OFFICE!
When Biden was sold as “normal,” that was the real con. Biden was a known quantity. He was the man who palled around with segregationists, constantly made racist remarks, suffered from chronic foot-in-mouth, used his debauched son and other family members to funnel millions in dirty money to himself, and constantly pawed and sniffed little girls in public. Biden is not normal.
Joe Biden’s and Kamala Harris’s very weird day
By Andrea Widburg
The big headline Thursday was that Biden and the Senate reached a deal on infrastructure. Apparently, it will involve less money than Biden demanded and actually fix some of America’s decaying hard infrastructure (roads, bridges, etc.). Of course, once that’s done, the Democrats will push through all the other items using reconciliation. America will lose…again. But something else happened today, which was that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris proved that their biggest campaign lie might have been their promise to return the White House to “normal.”
Of course, I never accepted the premise that Donald Trump was not a normal president. If you know even a little bit about presidential history, Donald Trump was a whole lot better than many of them. Franklin Roosevelt had affairs, John F. Kennedy had orgies, Bill Clinton had…well, I don’t even want to go there. If Obama committed peccadillos, the media covered for him, but what’s certain is that even the media couldn’t cover for how corrupt his administration was, culminating in the Russia Hoax.
What was really abnormal about Donald Trump’s presidency was the Democrat party’s behavior, especially in the form of its media coverage. Everything Trump did or said was presented as “abnormal,” whether it was his preference for two scoops of ice cream (I applaud the man for that), his Queens accent, his long tie, or his overt and heartfelt patriotism. Had the media reported about him as they did about Roosevelt, Kennedy, Clinton, or Obama, nothing about Trump would have stood out. He would, instead, have been hailed as a man of the people who cleaned up the government.
When Biden was sold as “normal,” that was the real con. Biden was a known quantity. He was the man who palled around with segregationists, constantly made racist remarks, suffered from chronic foot-in-mouth, used his debauched son and other family members to funnel millions in dirty money to himself, and constantly pawed and sniffed little girls in public. Biden is not normal.
And of course, now that Biden is almost certainly suffering from dementia, his tenuous grasp on normalcy is diminishing even more. Having reached an agreement with the Senate about the infrastructure, Biden gave a brief press conference. That led to a viral video of super Biden’s weirdness.
The video that’s making the rounds cuts off the question asked of Biden, which was apparently an ordinary one regarding how much money went to COVID relief. What matters is Biden’s response: With his eyes bugging out, Biden leaned into the microphone and, in the voice of an obscene phone caller gloating about his organ size, announced that he had gotten $1.9 trillion COVID relief.
As an aside, this is disastrous, because COVID, which had a less than 1.8% mortality rate to begin with is over. To continue to print money in order to pay Americans not to work is a short trip to socialism, bankruptcy, and Venezuela.
Honestly, after watching the video I (a) wanted to take a shower and (b) was extraordinarily worried that election fraud led to this man helming America:
This isn’t the first time Biden’s creeped people out. Here’s a tape showing other Biden obscene-caller moments:
While Biden was boasting, he totally forgot about the dreadful building collapse in a Miami community. One is confirmed dead, but there are worries that 99 others will be counted among the dead. When Kamala, in her role perpetual role the Grim Reaper hiding behind Biden, whispered a reminder into the ear of her “boss,” he giggled:
Since I’m on the subject of Kamala as the Grim Reaper, get a load of this photo op right after Biden and the Senators reached an agreement:
Yes, that’s Kamala hiding in the background on the far right, behind a column:
People noticed:
At this point, it’s unclear whether Biden ordered poor little Kamala-ella to stay home from the ball, if Kamala’s former senatorial “friends” wanted nothing to do with her, or if it’s easier to plot a take-over when nobody’s watching you. All that I can say is that the whole vibe is off.
If you’re looking for normal, you are not going to find it in the Joe Biden White House, and that’s true no matter what the hacks, shills, operatives, and propagandists in the media say.
HSBC laundered hundreds of millions and perhaps billions of dollars for drug cartels responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of people over the past two decades. The bank transferred at least $881 million of known drug trafficking proceeds, including money from the Sinaloa Cartel in Mexico, which is known for dismembering its victims and publicly displaying their body parts.
BEFORE HIS FIRST DAY IN OFFICE AS PRESIDENT, BARACK OBAMA HAD ALREADY SUCKED OFF MORE BANKSTER BRIBES THAN ANY PRESIDENT IN HISTORY. WHAT DID THE BANKSTERS KNOW THAT THE REST OF US DID NOT?
The Republican staff of the US House Committee on Financial Services released a report Monday presenting its findings on why the Obama Justice Department and then-Attorney General Eric Holder chose not to prosecute the British-based HSBC bank for laundering billions of dollars for Mexican and Colombian drug cartels.
Last June, when JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon testified before the Senate on unreported losses of at least $5 billion, sitting behind him was the bank’s chief counsel, Stephen Cutler, who had graduated to that post after serving as SEC enforcement chief.
A key factor in Obama’s newfound and growing wealth are those who profited from his presidency. A number of his public speeches have been given to big Wall Street firms and investors. Obama has given at least nine speeches to Cantor Fitzgerald, a large investment and commercial real estate firm, and other high-end corporations. According to records, each speech has been at least $400,000 a clip.
“Money laundering is a crime that makes other crimes possible. It can accelerate economic inequality, drain public funds, undermine democracy, and destabilize nations—and the banks play a key role. ‘Some of these people in crisp white shirts in their sharp suits are feeding off the tragedy of people dying all over the world,’ said Martin Woods, a former suspicious transactions investigator for Wachovia.’”
BLOG EDITOR: JP MORGAN IS BARACK OBAMA’S FAVE CRIMINAL BANKSTER. THEY HAVE BEEN VERY GENEROU$ TO OBOMB AND HIS BIDENBOY.
“The other banks on the top 10 list are JPMorgan Chase (whose CEO Jamie Dimon was once known as Obama's "favorite banker"), New York Mellon, Standard Chartered, Barclays, HSBC, Bank of China, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Citibank.”
HSBC HAS LONG HAD A HISTORY AS THE CHOICE BANKSTER FOR THE MEXICAN DRUG CARTELS. OBAMA’S BANKSTER REGIME MADE SURE THAT NO ONE WENT TO PRISON AT HSBC. DURING HIS 8 YEARS BANKSTER-OWNED ERIC HOLDER, A SOCIOPATH LAWYER, MADE SURE THAT NO BANKSTER PERIOD SAW PRISON TIME. NOT THEY’RE BACK AT IT. WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT?!?
The report goes on to explain that “even after they were prosecuted or fined for financial misconduct, banks such as JPMorgan Chase, HSBC, Standard Chartered, Deutsche Bank and Bank of New York Mellon continued to move money for suspected criminals.”
In 2012, the Obama administration refused to criminally prosecute Britain’s biggest bank, HSBC, after it acknowledged laundering billions of dollars for Mexican and Colombian drug cartels. Among the bank’s major clients was the Sinaloa Cartel in Mexico, which is known for dismembering its victims and publicly displaying their body parts.
“Attorney General Eric Holder's tenure was a low point even within the disgraceful scandal-ridden Obama years.” DANIEL GREENFIELD / FRONTPAGE MAG
“Judicial Watch’s records request is designed to expose how California state legislators are wasting tax dollars to take care of another corrupt politician – Eric Holder – under the guise of resisting the rule of law on immigration and other matters,” stated Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton. “His record at the Clinton and Obama Justice Departments demonstrates a willingness to bend the law in order to protect his political patrons.”
And it all got much, much worse after 2008, when the schemes collapsed and, as Lemann points out, Barack Obama did not aggressively rein in Wall Street as Roosevelt had done, instead restoring the status quo ante even when it meant ignoring a staggering white-collar crime spree. RYAN COOPER
“The Obama/Biden was the most corrupt, criminal
administration any of us has ever seen, yet the
media cheered or covered up all the abuse of
power, obstruction of Justice and other crimes. “ JACK HELLNER
During his presidency, Obama bragged that his administration was “the only thing between [Wall Street] and the pitchforks.”
In fact, Obama handed the robber barons and outright criminals responsible for the 2008–09 financial crisis a multi-trillion-dollar bailout. His administration oversaw the largest redistribution of wealth in history from the bottom to the top one percent, spearheading the attack on the living standards of teachers and autoworkers.
“This was not because of difficulties in securing indictments or convictions. On the contrary, Attorney General Eric Holder told a Senate committee in March of 2013 that the Obama administration chose not to prosecute the big banks or their CEOs because to do so might “have a negative impact on the national economy.”
Report documents criminality and corruption at heart of global banking system
22 September 2020
An explosive report published Sunday by BuzzFeed News documents the role that major US and international banks knowingly play in laundering and circulating trillions of dollars in dirty money from terrorist organizations, drug cartels and assorted international financial criminals.
The report is an unanswerable indictment not only of the banks, but also of Western governments and regulatory agencies, which are fully aware of the banks’ illegal but highly lucrative activities and tacitly sanction them.
BuzzFeed writes that its investigation demonstrates “an underlying truth of the modern era: The networks through which dirty money traverses the world have become vital arteries of the global economy. They enable a shadow financial system so wide-ranging and so unchecked that it has become inextricable from the so-called legitimate economy. Banks with household names have helped to make it so.”
The report continues: “Profits from deadly drug wars, fortunes embezzled from developing countries, and hard-earned savings stolen in a Ponzi scheme were all allowed to flow into and out of these financial institutions, despite warnings from the banks’ own employees.
“Money laundering is a crime that makes other crimes possible. It can accelerate economic inequality, drain public funds, undermine democracy, and destabilize nations—and the banks play a key role. ‘Some of these people in crisp white shirts in their sharp suits are feeding off the tragedy of people dying all over the world,’ said Martin Woods, a former suspicious transactions investigator for Wachovia.’”
The report goes on to explain that “even after they were prosecuted or fined for financial misconduct, banks such as JPMorgan Chase, HSBC, Standard Chartered, Deutsche Bank and Bank of New York Mellon continued to move money for suspected criminals.”
The extensive report is based on more than 21,000 “suspicious activity reports” (SARs) filed by some of the world’s biggest banks with the US Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN, between 1999 and 2017. FinCEN makes its database of SARs available to more than 450 law enforcement and regulatory agencies across the United States.
What BuzzFeed calls the “FinCEN Files” were leaked to the news outlet more than a year ago. It has since been combing through them, in collaboration with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, which coauthored the report.
BuzzFeed News notes that it also shared the SARs with more than 100 other news organizations in 88 countries. The report, titled “Dirty Money Pours into the World’s Most Powerful Banks,” includes only a small and redacted sample of the news outlet’s hoard of suspicious activity reports.
The US government maintains a policy of total secrecy in relation to the SARs, refusing to release them even in response to Freedom of Information requests. Earlier this year, the Treasury Department issued a statement declaring that the unauthorized disclosure of SARs is a crime. In an obvious attempt at intimidation and threat of prosecution, the statement added that the matter was being referred to the Department of Justice and the Treasury Department’s Office of Inspector General.
The initial response of the American corporate media has been to bury or entirely ignore the BuzzFeed revelations. Monday’s print edition of the New York Times carried a report on page eight of its business section. The print editions of the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal made no mention of the exposé.
The report is based on more than 22,000 pages of documents concerning over 10,000 subjects and involving more than 170 countries and territories. Nearly 90 banks and other financial institutions are included in the institutions that submitted the SARs.
Deutsche Bank recorded the highest total value of transactions listed in the FinCEN Files: $1.3 trillion, based on 982 suspicious activity reports.
BLOG EDITOR: THE CRIMINAL ORGANIZATION OF WELLS FARGO HAS LONG OWNED THE OLD WHORE FEINSTEIN AND NOW KAMALA HARRIS. AS ATTORNEY GENERAL OF CA, HARRIS MADE SURE NO WELLS FARGO EXECS WENT TO PRISON DESPITE THE MASSIVE ECONOMIC DEVASTATION THIS BANK CAUSED. WELLS FARGO HAS CONTINUE TO BE A CRIME TIDAL WAVE EVER SINCE. AFTER ALL, IT’S EASY AND CHEAP TO BUY A POLITICIAN.
The other banks on the top 10 list are JPMorgan Chase (whose CEO Jamie Dimon was once known as Obama's "favorite banker"), New York Mellon, Standard Chartered, Barclays, HSBC, Bank of China, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Citibank.
One report, filed by JPMorgan in August, 2014, lists over $355 billion in suspicious activity relating to more than 100,000 wire transfers “sent, received or transferred” over the course of a decade by MKS, a Swiss-based company that trades in precious metals.
At least 25 of the people named as subjects in the SARs have appeared on Forbes ’ list of billionaires in 2018, 2019 or 2020.
The findings featured in the BuzzFeed report include:
● Standard Chartered moved money on behalf of Al Zarooni Exchange, a Dubai-based business that was later accused of laundering cash on behalf of the Taliban.
● HSBC’s Hong Kong branch allowed WCM777, a Ponzi scheme, to move more than $15 million even as the business was being barred from operating in three states. Authorities say the scheme stole some $80 million from investors, mainly Latino and Asian immigrants. The firm’s owner used the funds to buy two golf courses, a mansion, a 39.8-carat diamond and mining rights in Sierra Leone.
● Bank of America, Citibank, JPMorgan Chase, American Express and other financial firms processed millions of dollars in transactions for Viktor Khrapunov, the former mayor of Kazakhstan’s most populous city, even after Interpol issued an order for his arrest. Khrapunov fled to Switzerland and was later convicted in absentia on charges including bribe-taking and defrauding the city.
A separate piece by NBC News presents evidence that JPMorgan, Bank of New York Mellon and other banks helped move more than $150 million for companies tied to the North Korean regime.
In other words, the biggest US and international banks have made countless millions in profits serving as money-launderers for organizations labeled "terrorist" such as the Taliban and governments of so-called “rogue states” such as North Korea—with the knowledge and tacit approval of the governments of the US and other major powers—even as these same governments were waging or threatening war against the targeted organizations and overseas regimes.
The BuzzFeed report describes the cynical rationale behind the formality of banks filing SARs, which, for the most part, are never even read by the staff of FinCEN. Over the past decade, the number of SARs filed by major banks has sharply increased, indicating a growth of money laundering and other illegal activities on behalf of criminal clients. Over the same period, the staff of FinCEN has shrunk by 10 percent.
Banks are legally required to file a SAR with FinCEN if they suspect a transaction might be linked to illegal activity. Large banks file tens of thousands of such reports every year. In 2017, 19 large banks filed a total of 640,000 suspicious activity reports, according to a study by the Bank Policy Institute, a lobbying group.
But as the BuzzFeed report explains: “So long as a bank files a notice that it may be facilitating criminal activity, it all but immunizes itself and its executives from criminal prosecution. The suspicious activity alert effectively gives them a free pass to keep moving the money and collecting the fees.”
In its article on the FinCEN Files report, the New York Times noted that JPMorgan wired money to banks in Switzerland, Lebanon and Nigeria on behalf of a convicted money launderer, reported the transactions to British and American authorities, and continued doing business with the client. The Nigerian government is now suing the bank in British court.
This collusion between gangster bankers and capitalist government regulators is a continuation of longstanding policy. In 2012, the Obama administration refused to criminally prosecute Britain’s biggest bank, HSBC, after it acknowledged laundering billions of dollars for Mexican and Colombian drug cartels. Among the bank’s major clients was the Sinaloa Cartel in Mexico, which is known for dismembering its victims and publicly displaying their body parts.
That was in keeping with the policy of the US government of shielding top bankers from any accountability for illegal activities, including those that led to the collapse of the financial system in 2008 and ushered in what at that time was the deepest slump since the Great Depression. To this day, not a single leading executive of a major bank has been prosecuted, let alone jailed, for fraudulent activities that led to the destruction of millions of jobs and the decimation of working class living standards in the US and around the world.
Here, in a nutshell, is the modern-day aristocratic principle that prevails behind the threadbare trappings of “democracy.” The financial robber barons of today are a law unto themselves. They can steal, plunder, even murder at will, without fear of being called to account. They devote a portion of their fabulous wealth to bribing politicians, regulators, judges and police—from the heights of power in Washington down to the local police precinct—to make sure their wealth is protected and they remain immune from criminal prosecution.
Above the law
BARACK OBAMA, THE MEXICAN DRUG CARTELS AND HSBC BANKSTERS
In the latest scandal involving the criminal activities of major banks, the US Justice Department on Tuesday announced a $1.9 billion settlement with British-based HSBC on charges of money laundering on a massive scale for Mexican and Colombian drug cartels.
The deal was specifically designed to avert criminal prosecution of either the bank, the largest in Europe and third largest in the world, or any of its top executives. Even though the bank admitted to laundering billions of dollars for drug lords, as well as violating US financial sanctions against Iran, Libya, Burma and Cuba, the Obama administration avoided an indictment by means of a “deferred prosecution agreement.”
The agreement was in keeping with the policy of the US government of shielding top bankers from any accountability for illegal activities that led to the collapse of the financial system in 2008 and ushered in the global recession. Not a single leading executive of a major bank has been prosecuted, let alone jailed, for fraudulent activities that triggered the present crisis, leading to the destruction of millions of jobs and the decimation of working-class living standards in the US and around the world.
Under the protection of the state, the frenzied speculation and swindling continue unabated, underpinning record profits for the banks and bigger-than-ever multi-million-dollar compensation packages for top bankers.
In a front-page article on Tuesday, the New York Times outlined internal discussions within the Obama administration that led to the decision not to indict HSBC. The Times reported that prosecutors at the Justice Department and the New York District Attorney’s office pushed for a compromise in which the bank would be indicted not for money laundering, but for the lesser charge of violating the Bank Secrecy Act.
BLOG EDITOR: WHY DO THESE BANKSTER POLS THINK WE’RE ALL STUPID? JUST FOLLOW THE MONEY… RIGHT INTO OBOMB’S POCKETS!
Even this, however, was too much for the Obama administration. The Treasury Department, headed by former New York Federal Reserve President Timothy Geithner, and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the federal regulatory agency charged with policing major banks including HSBC, vetoed any prosecution on the grounds that a serious legal blow to HSBC would jeopardize the financial system.
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What does this mean? HSBC, in its pursuit of profit, facilitated the activities of drug cartels that have been the target of the so-called “drug war”—a war prosecuted by the Mexican military at the behest of and with the collaboration of Washington—in which over 60,000 people have died. This is in addition to the human suffering caused by the narcotics trade in the US and around the world.
It was allowed to pay a token fine—less than 10 percent of its profits for 2011 and a fraction of the money it made laundering the drug bosses’ blood money. Meanwhile, small-time drug dealers and users, often among the most impoverished and oppressed sections of the population, are routinely arrested and locked up for years in the American prison gulag.
The financial parasites who keep the global drug trade churning and make the lion’s share of money from the social devastation it wreaks are above the law. As the Times put it, “certain financial institutions, having grown so large and so interconnected, are too big to indict.”
Here, in a nutshell, is the modern-day aristocratic principle that prevails behind the threadbare trappings of “democracy.” The financial robber barons of today are a law unto themselves. They can steal, plunder, even murder at will, without fear of being called to account. They devote a portion of their fabulous wealth to bribing politicians, regulators, judges and police—from the heights of power in Washington down to the local police precinct—to make sure their wealth is protected and they remain immune from criminal prosecution.
The role of so-called “regulators” such as the Federal Reserve, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency is to run interference for the bankers. They are well aware that crimes are being committed on a daily basis, but turn a blind eye because criminality is intrinsic to the operations of Wall Street and the profits it takes in.
There is evidence that HSBC and other major banks stepped up their money laundering for drug cartels and other criminal outfits in response to the financial crisis that began to emerge in earnest in 2007 and exploded in September of 2008 with the collapse of Lehman Brothers.
Following a similar “deferred prosecution” deal with Wachovia Bank in 2010 for its drug money laundering operations, Antonio Maria Costa, who then headed the United Nations office on drugs and crime, said that the flow of crime syndicate money represented the only “liquid investment capital” available to the banks at the height of the crisis. “Inter-bank loans were funded by money that originated from the drugs trade,” he said.
There can be little doubt that US regulators and political leaders gave their tacit consent to these operations as part of their rush to rescue Wall Street from the consequences of its own money-mad speculative binge.
The incestuous relationship between bank regulators and the banks comes into full view in the case of another recent bank scandal. Last week, Deutsche Bank was named by three ex-employees in a complaint to the SEC alleging that it fraudulently concealed $12 billion in losses between 2007 and 2009.
The Financial Times noted in passing that Robert Khuzami, the head of enforcement at the SEC, has recused himself from the probe because, before taking his post at the federal agency, he was Deutsche Bank’s general counsel for the Americas from 2004 to 2009. In other words, he was in charge of legally defending the bank at the very time it was, according to whistle blowers, engaging in accounting fraud.
This was also the period when Deutsche Bank and other major banks were making billions by poisoning the world financial system with toxic mortgage-backed securities. Last year, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations devoted 45 pages of a voluminous report on the financial crash to the fraudulent activities of Deutsche Bank.
The report noted that the bank’s top trader in collateralized debt obligations had referred to securities the bank was selling as “crap” and “pigs,” and called the banking industry’s CDO operations a “Ponzi scheme.”
That such a man should be put in charge of policing the banks is, in fact, par for the course. The man who recommended that the Obama administration give Khuzami the job, Richard Walker, the current chief counsel at Deutsche Bank, was himself a former head of enforcement at the SEC.
Last June, when JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon testified before the Senate on unreported losses of at least $5 billion, sitting behind him was the bank’s chief counsel, Stephen Cutler, who had graduated to that post after serving as SEC enforcement chief.
This Augean stable of crime and corruption, which involves every official institution of American capitalism, cannot be reformed. The stranglehold of the financial aristocracy over economic life can be ended only through the mass mobilization of the working class to expropriate the bankers and place the major banks and financial institutions under public ownership and democratic control.
US Justice Department blocked prosecution of HSBC bank for drug cartel money laundering
The Republican staff of the US House Committee on Financial Services released a report Monday presenting its findings on why the Obama Justice Department and then-Attorney General Eric Holder chose not to prosecute the British-based HSBC bank for laundering billions of dollars for Mexican and Colombian drug cartels.
The report, titled “Too Big to Jail,” reveals that in 2012 Holder and other senior Justice Department officials ignored an internal department recommendation to criminally prosecute key bankers at HSBC. The report also documents the fact that George Osborne, then Britain’s chancellor of the exchequer, warned the Obama administration that prosecution of the world’s fourth-largest bank could precipitate a new global financial crisis.
The report states: “Rather than lacking adequate evidence to prove HSBC’s criminal conduct, internal Treasury documents show that DOJ [Department of Justice] leadership declined to pursue AFMLS’s [Asset Forfeiture and Money Laundering] recommendation to prosecute HSBC because senior DOJ leaders were concerned that prosecuting the bank ‘could result in a global financial disaster’—as [Britain’s Financial Services Authority] repeatedly warned.”
HSBC laundered hundreds of millions and perhaps billions of dollars for drug cartels responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of people over the past two decades. The bank transferred at least $881 million of known drug trafficking proceeds, including money from the Sinaloa Cartel in Mexico, which is known for dismembering its victims and publicly displaying their body parts.
In a lawsuit filed against HSBC by the families of Americans killed by Mexican cartels, prosecutors presented evidence that Mexican drug lords were such frequent customers at HSBC that the bank specifically designed deposit boxes for their use that would fit in HSBC bank teller windows.
The report documents the criminal role of the Obama administration in shielding the gangsters who run the major banks in the US and internationally from prosecution for their illegal and socially destructive deeds. It makes clear that the failure of the US government to hold criminally liable a single leading Wall Street figure in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash, which was triggered by rampant fraud and swindling, is the result of a highly conscious and systematic policy.
Holder himself all but admitted as much in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee in March of 2013, when he declared: “I am concerned that the size of some of these institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them, when we are hit with indications that if we do prosecute—if we do bring a criminal charge—it will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy.”
Instead of jailing the banksters, the administration and the Federal Reserve plowed trillions of dollars in public funds into the financial system to drive up stock prices and the already obscene wealth of the financial aristocracy, while making the working class pay the cost in the form of savage social cuts, the destruction of pension and health care benefits, layoffs and wage reductions.
A separate US Senate report released in 2012 already concluded that HSBC had a “pervasively polluted” culture that permitted its top officials to look the other way and allow $7 billion in drug money to flow from Mexico to the US. That year, Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence David S. Cohen stated, “HSBC absolutely knew the risks of the business it pursued, yet it ignored specific, obvious warnings.”
The House report issued Monday states that Holder “misled” Congress as to why the DOJ did not prosecute the bank. After being criticized for his “too big to jail” comments before the Senate in March 2013, Holder sought to walk them back in testimony before the House Judiciary Committee in May 2013. He denied at that time that he was unwilling to prosecute a major bank because of its size and claimed HSBC’s size was not a significant factor in the Justice Department’s decision not to prosecute. The reason, he said, was “lack of evidence.”
The House committee found, on the contrary, that the Asset Forfeiture and Money Laundering section of the DOJ wanted to criminally prosecute bankers at HSBC precisely because their violations of law were so blatant and so well documented.
The report cites a letter sent by Osborne to then-Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and then-Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner in which Osborne warned that prosecuting a “systemically important financial institution” such as HSBC “could lead to [financial] contagion” and pose “very serious implications for financial and economic stability, particularly in Europe and Asia.” Later, Osborne underscored this point in a face-to-face meeting with Bernanke in which they discussed the possible prosecution of HSBC bankers.
Instead of prosecuting, Holder oversaw a “deferred prosecution” sweetheart deal in which the bank was required to pay $1.9 billion in penalties.
Families of Americans killed by Mexican drug cartels sue banking giant HSBC
16 February 2016
On February 9, four US families who lost loved ones to Mexican drug cartel violence in 2010 and 2011 filed an unprecedented lawsuit against HSBC Holdings, HSBC Bank USA, and HSBC México S.A. The suit charges that the banking giant knowingly supplied terrorist organizations, namely four major drug cartels, with “material support” by laundering billions of dollars in the years leading up to the murders.
Among the victims cited in the case is US Immigration and Customs Enforcement Special Agent Jaime J. Zapata who was ambushed and murdered by the infamous drug cartel, Los Zetas, while on temporary assignment in central Mexico in 2011. The case received national attention after confirmed reports that at least one of the weapons used to kill him was linked back to the US government. The AK-47 was one of the many weapons essentially funneled to the drug cartels as part of the federal operation known as “Fast and Furious,” in which the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms deliberately allowed firearms dealers to sell weapons to illegal straw buyers in hopes of tracing them back to the cartels.
Other victims included in the lawsuit are Rafael Morales Jr., who was abducted just outside a church on his wedding day, along with his brother and uncle, by members of the Sinaloa cartel with the collaboration of the local police force. All three were later found dead of asphyxiation, their heads wrapped in plastic and duct tape.
Also included in the lawsuit are Lesley and Arthur Redelfs, who were both shot to death in Ciudad Juarez on their way home from a children's birthday party hosted by the US Consulate where Lesley was employed. Lesley Redelfs was four months pregnant.
The basis of the case rests on the US Anti-Terrorism Act, which was modified in the aftermath of 9/11 to allow victims to seek compensation from any organization that supplies terrorist groups with material support or resources. While the US government has not officially labeled them as terrorist organizations, the suit cites the more than 100,000 murders and tens of thousands of disappearances since 2006 in arguing for the right to victims’ compensation.
HSBC’s guilt in laundering billions of dollars for drug cartels is irrefutable. The details of the many, well documented occurrences of the bank’s sidestepping, and in most instances outright disregard for banking laws exposed in the legal proceedings of this case and a related 2012 case are overwhelming. The complaint filed by the plaintiffs’ in Brownsville, Texas on February 9, reveals that HSBC’s Mexican branches routinely accepted and processed exorbitant amounts, hundreds of thousands and sometimes millions of US dollars from clients with no identifiable source of income.
The complaint reads, “HSBC intentionally implemented criminally deficient anti-money laundering programs, processes, and controls, which were designed to guarantee that billions of dollars of illicit proceeds would go through its banks undetected or unreported.” It goes on to explain that in many cases these funds were even delivered in custom designed boxes made to fit the dimensions of the teller windows.
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In spite of the deliberately lax, and during certain periods nonexistent, regulatory system, the compliance function at HSBC Mexico was still able to catch suspicious activity. In December 2008, there were 675 accounts pending closure based on suspicion of money laundering activity. Closures were ordered on 16 of those accounts in 2005, 130 in 2006, 172 in 2007, and 309 in 2008, yet all 675 of these accounts remained open well into 2009, continuing to allow money launderers to make bulk cash deposits.
HSBC Mexico’s former director of money laundering deterrence, in an exit interview following his resignation, was quoted as saying that he believed senior management had “absolutely no respect for AML [Anti-money laundering] controls and the risks to which the Group was exposed and had no intention of applying sensible or appropriate approaches.” The report goes on to explain that the former director attributed the behavior to what he characterized as “a culture [of] pursuing profit and targets at all costs.”
HSBC executives received repeated and explicit warnings about the large scale money laundering schemes from outside sources such as the US State Department as early as 2006, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network—a bureau of the US Treasury Department—as well as several internal warnings throughout 2007 and 2008. Despite this, HSBC Mexico still accepted over $4.1 billion in US dollar cash deposits in 2008, a record amount for the branch. It is widely believed that many banks, including HSBC, only managed to stay afloat through the 2008 financial crisis by catering to these international drug cartels.
The money laundering that is the basis of this new lawsuit was proven in a 2012 prosecution by the US Justice Department. The case ended in a “preferred prosecution agreement” in which the court gave the multinational bank what amounted to a free pass for the largest drug money laundering case in history. Under the conditions of this agreement the bank agreed not to contest the charges of failing to maintain an effective anti-money-laundering program, and violating the Trading With the Enemy Act and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.
What made this case unique, aside from the huge amount of funds proven to have been laundered (at least $881 million), was the Justice Department's brazen acknowledgement of the motives behind its failure to pursue a more aggressive prosecution, namely, the protection of the global capitalist financial markets.
Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer at a press conference justifying why criminal charges were not brought against the bank explained, “HSBC would almost certainly have lost its banking license in the US, the future of the institution would have been under threat and the entire banking system would have been destabilized.” Meaning, the big banks and other multibillion-dollar corporations are exempt from the law so long as they continue lining the pockets of the ruling aristocracy. This decision exposed decisively, once again, the inextricable and corrupt relationship between the various branches of the government and the global financial oligarchs.
The 2012 decision brought down by a Brooklyn federal judge was admittedly not based on any principled fulfillment of the law. Rather, it served to establish a more tangible basis for the legal shielding that had been regularly taking place for this type of giant corporation deemed “too big to jail.”
In lieu of any criminal charge against the responsible parties, the bank was instead fined $1.9 billion, an amount equal to barely five weeks worth of profits for HSBC and far less than it accrued through its laundering of drug money. It constituted a fairly minor cost of doing business. Not a single day of jail time was demanded for the bank executives, who had essentially functioned as the financial arm of the drug cartels.
The relationship between massive international banks such as HSBC and the Mexican drug cartels like Los Zetas and Sinaloa has been one of mutual benefit. Both organizations are driven by an insatiable need for profit demanded by the capitalist system and both are indifferent to the criminal methods by which it is gained.
However, as this case so clearly shows, it is not simply the banks who are complicit in the massive growth and influence of these drug cartels. The banks play an important role in providing a financial system to manage their money, but it is the US Justice Department that has sanctioned such criminal behavior, and the US government as a whole that has created and perpetuated the conditions under which such corrupt and violent drug cartels could thrive.
The US government’s support for Mexico’s “drug war” begun in 2006 has done nothing to curb the growth of the drug cartels and instead has arguably served to intensify it. The Merida Initiative implemented by the US government in 2008, supplied Mexico with over $2 billion in arms aid, provided military training of security forces and sent “advisers” across the border. With large sections of Mexico’s officials and law enforcement officers working in collaboration with the drug cartels, much of these funds and resources have aided the very groups they were meant to combat. One report estimates that the cartels spend more than a billion dollars each year just bribing the Mexican municipal police.
In the case of Rafael Morales, it was in fact the local police force who accompanied the Sinaloa cartel and barricaded the road to the church and it was arms provided by the US government that were used against Zapata in 2011.
On closer examination, the origins of these drug cartels themselves lie in the relations between the US and Mexican governments. Before becoming Los Zetas, the original members of the violent drug cartel were a special forces unit of the Mexican Army trained in the United States at the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia. If HSBC is found guilty of providing material “means and resources” to these terrorist organizations then it seems there should be ample evidence and grounds to also indict the US government as well.
Whatever the outcome of the recent lawsuit, the case has exposed once more the fraudulent character of the “war on drugs,” as well as the staggering levels of criminality of the highest reaches of the financial aristocracy and of the political institutions that represent it.
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