JOE BIDEN'S OPEN BORDERS
An economy built on extraction migration also radicalizes Americans’ democratic, compromise-promoting civic culture and allows wealthy elites to ignore despairing Americans at the bottom of society.
THE BIDEN'S AND BANKSTERS
A FAMILY OF BRIBES SUCKING PARASITE LAWYERS
The Tragic Tale of Hunter Biden
Hunter Biden Laptop Interview Body Language (2021)
Kamala Saves The Day
We’re Being Mugged Here, There and Everywhere
A "progressive" president takes a wrecking ball to a nation.
In the 1970s – when we had another dogma-driven nonentity in the White House -- we used to say a neo-con is a liberal who was just mugged.
Today, we are all being mugged -- literally and figuratively -- by the feckless policies of a semi-sentient, septuagenarian who’s taking a wrecking ball to the economy, the culture and national security before he builds back whatever.
- Mugged at the pump – The price of gasoline has risen roughly $1.00-a-gallon since Biden took office. It’s expected to reach $4.00-a-gallon sometime this spring. In 2020, we were energy independent for the first time in decades. Then came the green jihad of Abu Joe and cancelling the Keystone XL Pipeline, stopping oil and gas exploration on federal lands and other ozone insanity. At the same time, we made it easier for the Russians to export their energy resources to Western Europe by approving Nord Stream II. As kryptonite is to Superman, so Biden’s anti-energy policies are to the lifeblood of our economy.
- Mugged at the market –Inflation is roaring along at close to a 40-year high. In November 2021, meats, poultry, fish and eggs were up 12.8% over a year earlier. While the president enjoys one of his double-dip ice cream cones (two dips for a drip), middle-class families are taking a savage beating at the supermarket. This is driven by rising energy costs. Biden is too busy “saving” the planet to care about your wallet. Truck drivers can’t fill their tanks with empty rhetoric. In January, the leader of the free world admitted he was astounded when a family friend told him that hamburger meat is now over $5 a pound. “Earth to Planet Joe…”
- Mugged in the schools -- One of the few benefits of online learning during the useless school shutdowns, was giving parents a chilling glimpse of the propaganda shoved down their children’s throats: e.g., that whites bear a burden of racial guilt, that there are 72 genders, that face masks and shutdowns will save us from COVID, and that climate change will destroy the planet pronto, unless we destroy industrial civilization. When parents complained at school board meetings, Biden’s DOJ labeled them domestic terrorists. In San Francisco, last week, the unthinkable happed. In the most liberal city in the country, three woke school board members were recalled overwhelmingly, in what could be a sign of things to come.
- Mugged at the border – ICE has become a travel agency. (“Where would you like to go? We’ll have you on the next available flight.”) As border czar, the president found the one member of his administration more incompetent than himself – Vice President Kamala Harris. As many as one million illegal aliens have entered the country so far on Biden’s watch. With them came disease, crime, human trafficking and enough fentanyl to kill the country many times over. (By May of 2021, more fentanyl had entered the U.S. than in all of 2020.) In place of the Midnight Ride of Paul Revere, we have the Midnight Flights of Joe Biden -- not to sound the alarm, but to cover-up an ongoing crime.
- Mugged by crime – In February, crime in New York city was up 46% over the first two months of 2021. New Yorkers are afraid to walk the streets, go in the subway (where six stabbings took place last weekend) or take a bus. Thanks to the president who practically called cops racists during the 2020 riots, and the stuck-on-stupid policies of woke prosecutors, many blue cities are starting to look like Chicago on a typical Saturday night. Snatch and grab in high-end retail stores, organized shoplifting in the others, children killed by stray bullets in gang shootouts and police murdered in ambushes have become the reality of urban living.
- Mugged by the cancel culture -- High tech censors (led by Twitter, Facebook and Google) have become increasingly braven. In many cases, what used to be a matter of opinion has become “spreading misinformation” or dreaded hate speech, punishable by exile or death. The news media, once a champion of First Amendment rights, has turned a blind eye to this. In academia, cancel culture reigns supreme and you can be evicted for using the wrong pronoun. (Past commitment to liberal causes is no guarantee of future safety.) Even Donald Trump was cancelled by the twits of Twitter.
- Mugged with masks – The leitmotif of COVID mandates is “just shut up and do as you’re told.” They asked us to follow the science, as they make up the science as they go along. While mask mandates are being withdrawn for fear of retaliation in November, school kids (the least vulnerable part of the population) are still forced to mask up in many states. You can decide for yourself, they magnanimously tell us, but adults need to make decisions for children. By adults, they don’t mean parents, but politician and bureaucrats.
- Mugged beyond the border -- We were mugged in Afghanistan. Now we’re being mugged in Ukraine by an administration that mistakes talking tough with being tough. The badly botched withdrawal from Afghanistan – including gifting tons of sophisticated military equipment to the Taliban – was a disaster whose repercussions will be felt for years to come.
As recently as two years ago, comedian Bill Maher was the very model of a modern liberal talker. Today, he actually makes sense. Still a liberal, he’s reacting logically in a country where reality is being bashed, battered and bruised on a daily basis.
After they’ve had some common sense knocked into them, the more realistic among the liberal tribe may end up over here with the rest of us deplorables and bitter clingers.
Senator Rick Scott's promising 11-Point Plan to drain the swamp and fulfill the MAGA agenda
Sen. Rick Scott, the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC), released an 11-point agenda for Republicans on Tuesday morning. The plan was proposed in his personal capacity from his own campaign.
If the polls are any indication, it increasingly appears that the Republicans will retake control of both the Senate and the House during the midterms.
Scott's plan certainly looks promising. It follows the MAGA agenda and even has a plan to drain the Washington swamp.
It refers to the need for controlling national debt that, for the first time in the history of the U.S., exceeds $30 trillion due to gratuitous spending of taxpayers' dollars on pursuits that help only the Washington power brokers. It refers to the desperate need to control inflation.
It addresses the importance of freedom of expression and the dire need to confront the woke mob who want to indoctrinate everyone from young children to armed forces personnel.
It addresses the importance of equality and proposes ending any reference to ethnicity on government forms.
It calls on schools to encourage children to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, stand for the National Anthem, and honor the American flag on a daily basis. It also urges schools to include lessons about American greatness in their curricula.
The plan also takes a pro-life position, stating that "unborn babies are babies."
There is mention of the crisis on the southern border and the need to complete the border wall and name it after President Donald Trump. The plan calls on the GOP to "strip all federal funding from 'sanctuary cities' and prosecute elected officials who flout our immigration laws."
The plan emphasizes the need to combat the drug crisis and fight the crime wave that is plaguing the nation. It refers to the need to halt the vaccine mandate. It calls for the enacting of national voter ID laws to combat rampant electoral fraud.
It denounces the Biden administration for the hasty withdrawal from Afghanistan, which has left that region unstable and harmed the U.S.'s reputation.
The plan commendably declares the obvious, which is controversial with woke Democrats, that there are just two sexes.
To sum it up, the focus is on all matters relevant to regular Americans, irrespective of ideology or party. It appears that Scott's team is listening to regular people and their problems.
The plan will appeal to most GOP voters. It will also be liked by working-class Democrat voters who are irked that their party no longer cares for them and has been hijacked by the self-righteous, hypocritical Washington elite.
A key portion of the plan that has largely been ignored is as follows:
It calls for needs for "term limits for the Washington ruling class — 12-year limits for Congress and government bureaucrats," noting there should be "exceptions for national security reasons only."
This section of the plan also wants to "forbid politicians from becoming lobbyists" and make it so "no government employee can make more than 5 times the national median individual income."
It also calls for the elimination of "federal programs that can be done locally." It also recommends that government agencies be moved out of "Washington and into the real world."
This portion of the plan also calls for all government bids and contracts "to be publicly available on the internet."
It mentions "selling off all non-essential government assets, buildings, and land, and use the proceeds to pay our national debt."
Finally, it refers to barring "federal government from using your tax dollars for advertising campaigns."
To sum it up, this is a high-level plan to dismantle the Democrat Washington establishment that has become a self-serving, self-preserving, self-promoting, and self-centered cabal. President Trump presented a similar plan to drain the swamp back in 2015.
The Democrat Washington Establishment is the root cause of most problems in the U.S.
They have shipped working-class jobs overseas. They have mandated lockdowns that have destroyed lives socially and economically. They also find innovative ways to enrich themselves via legalized corruption. They manipulate the boundaries of their electoral constituency to remain in power forever. To sustain their power, they brand their political opponents as racists and domestic terrorists. While the national borders remain open, they focus on securing the border of foreign nations as an excuse to enter into optional wars so their arms dealer allies can earn millions.
We are living in times when it is nothing short of courageous for a senator, especially a Republican, to release a plan that benefits regular people. This will at least start a conversation.
Because it takes on the Democrat Washington Establishment, Scott will be the recipient of intense wrath from the Democrats and even members of his own party.
His plan will be called far-right, racist, sexist, transphobic, and promotion of White supremacy. There may be some panelists on MSNBC who will claim that the author of these points was none other than Vladimir Putin.
Hopefully, Scott will not be even slightly affected by this and will remain steadfast.
Official Senate portrait.
The Washington Democrat establishment has grown into an evil empire after decades of growth and fortification. They will place all impediments before those such as Scott attempting even the slightest of changes that diminish their power and shrink their ill-gotten profit from the gravy train.
Scott has to remember that the Russia Collusion hoax was concocted because President Trump had triumphed in the 2016 election despite opposition from the establishment.
Releasing the plan on a public platform is an astute move by Scott.
In the coming days, it would make sense for Sen. Scott to release catchy and consumable brief videos on every social media platform available that succinctly cover all the points of his plan. It may also help if Scott can develop a précis of all his points that will fit on one page that can be circulated among people as pamphlets. This would be the only way to mainstream it and make it go viral.
Scott must also build a coalition of lawmakers in the Senate and the House. This must include those running for elections and primary challengers. This may involve some revisions and alterations, but it will be worth the effort.
This will place pressure on the GOP leadership that includes Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell and House minority leader Kevin McCarthy to include them in the manifesto.
If the GOP adopts this plan, it will almost certainly be a triumph. If the GOP implements even part of this plan, especially the parts that attempt to challenge the monopoly of the Washington Establishment, Republicans will be guaranteed electoral victories for a long time. It will also bolster Rick Scott's image as a potential candidate for leadership in the near future.
Consider then the national corporations, where so many Americans are employed, each of them necessarily based in a single state. Cut off the head, and suddenly you're left with a bunch of dead limbs — Walmart, Amazon, Applebees, Target, Tesla, Boeing, Chevrolet, etc. — companies that, in the event of a war, would immediately cease to function cross-country are oftentimes dependent on one another, and would immediately throw a hundred million out of work, if not more. And I haven't mentioned agribusiness here, or Big Pharma, or all the thousands of companies that make computer chips and innumerable widgets that none of us knows about but we're extremely dependent upon.
No, Nope, No: It Is Not Time for a Civil War
Charlie Kirk was asked recently, at one of his lectures, whether now is a good time to "use the guns." He answered that it isn't, and I agree with him but only partially for the reasons he stated.
Simply put, the idea that right-wingers could start a revolution and win one, at this point in history, is comedy — and no, I don't care if that's the sole reason we have a Second Amendment and we have more AR-15s. First off, we don't own any of the institutions — including any branches of the military, which, although staffed with lots of great and respectable men, are currently run by woman-drafters, white-shamers, and tranny-loving butt-kissers.
I would add to this that social and big media are owned almost entirely by the left wing, which means we have no platform to mass-communicate. Do we run the CIA, or the FBI, or any national organization built to maintain law and order in a crisis? No — all of it is in possession of the left wing, which gives leftists a clear advantage in organization and persecution.
More importantly, I would posit that these United States are so completely interdependent that any kind of real split, even without bloodshed, would result in mass starvation and eventually death. This isn't the 1860s, when clothes could be homespun and farms were all family-owned. There isn't a single business in these states that maintains its existence within a single state: everyone is dependent on other businesses in other states, and many times in other countries, to supply what he needs to function on even a basic level.
Consider then the national corporations, where so many Americans are employed, each of them necessarily based in a single state. Cut off the head, and suddenly you're left with a bunch of dead limbs — Walmart, Amazon, Applebees, Target, Tesla, Boeing, Chevrolet, etc. — companies that, in the event of a war, would immediately cease to function cross-country are oftentimes dependent on one another, and would immediately throw a hundred million out of work, if not more. And I haven't mentioned agribusiness here, or Big Pharma, or all the thousands of companies that make computer chips and innumerable widgets that none of us knows about but we're extremely dependent upon.
This isn't even considering water sources and power grids, two things that have the potential to wreck life as we know it and send whole regions into anarchy and the Stone Age. Where are the power plants? The transmission lines? What are the sources of power — dams, or coal, or solar, or nuclear? Idaho Power is only one company, and it powers large parts of Oregon. Who powers the others? What do we do if credit cards won't work? And what about banks in general? How do we get gas to the gas stations — and know if they'll be able to pump gas anyway without electricity? And who will own and run the phone towers? The right-wing yahoo claims to love free enterprise so much — could he have forgotten how businesses work, and where?
What we would be talking about, assuming that any kind of civil war were to get underway, is a drastic shift in living standards that would require, upon the start of things, a strong central government, ready to provide the basic necessities and put millions of people to work immediately — a kind of government typically known as "war fascism," which is the type of government our hotheads (and especially the libertarians) are worst at, and to which at bottom they're morally opposed.
So I urge them to give their "dream" up. The answer to American differences, at least for the foreseeable future, will never be civil war. And in fact, I don't believe that many right-wingers think it is. But I'm tired of the poorly thought out, unserious moralistic responses to the hotheads — who require a firm no, as all yahoos do, and not the namby-pamby suit-and-tie "violence is not the answer" non-answers they've been getting.
In the meantime, I would advise them to consider the observation of Tolstoy in Anna Karenina:
There are people who when they meet a rival, no matter in what, at once shut their eyes to everything good in him and see only the bad. There are others who on the contrary try to discern in a lucky rival the qualities which have enabled him to succeed, and with aching hearts seek only the good in him.
So take the latter route. See how the liberals crush us in everything we call silly — which is actually important. Stay armed and informed, but go into acting, writing, singing, and teaching. In other words, make a dent on the culture of the nation, and try for once to be interesting instead of just winning a bunch of arguments. Life, after all, is passed on through things as embarrassing as sex — and never through lectures.
Jeremy Egerer is the author of the troublesome essays on Letters to Hannah, and he welcomes followers on Twitter, and Facebook.
Image via Max Pixel.
The Obama/Biden Justice department refused to enforce immigration laws. Politicians and bureaucrats in sanctuary cities and states were above the law.
The Democrats Are Turning America into the New Venezuela
The Bill of Rights is very clear and does not have any stipulations pertaining to the Second Amendment. There are no conditions attached to the Second Amendment, such as the type of firearm, number of bullets in the magazine, caliber size, manufacturer, or how many firearms you can have on you or in your home. The Second Amendment clearly states that the citizens of the United States have the right to keep and bear arms. It’s that simple. Nothing more. Nothing less.
The Democrats use every opportunity, no matter how minuscule the connection might be, to oppose the right to keep and bear arms for law-abiding citizens. Pro-gun organizations are attacked and insulted for any reason if it gives the gun controllers an angle to push their agenda to strip almost all Americans of their God-given right to protect themselves against aggressors, private or governmental ones. Social media giants help the cause by making invisible or banning posts they disagree with.
Our constitutional rights are disappearing at the combined hands of government and giant corporations. Stripping the people of their right to protect themselves is a slippery slope toward the downfall of a free country. It can rapidly turn a beautiful, resourceful, and free country into a living hell for its citizens. The radical Democrats are on a path to dismantle the United States, the way Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro and his predecessor Hugo Chavez have destroyed Venezuela in a matter of a decade.
This year in June, it will be ten years since Venezuela banned private gun ownership. The new law banned all commercial sales of firearms and ammunition to private gun owners. President of Venezuela Nicolas Maduro had succeeded Hugo Chavez, who had already installed a socialist regime.
Maduro’s ultimate goal was to disarm all civilians to keep the Marxists in power no matter what. The only people who could buy firearms and ammunition since June 2012 have been the military, police, certain groups like security, and let’s not forget, the supporters of Nicolas Maduro’s regime.
Their excuse was that more had to be done to combat the more than 18,000 murders that Venezuela had had the year before in 2011. That was the excuse and one that lots of Venezuelans bought. Many didn’t yet realize what it would mean for their own safety against a radical leftist government that was out to impose iron-fisted control over its people and prevent the people from fighting back against a brutal regime.
It’s scary. It’s very scary, because it did not stop there, and violence and murder rates were not reduced, much less eliminated. The Maduro dictatorship dismantled the Venezuelan constitution and now fully dominates the people by force.
Political violence continues in Venezuela
For years, and with intensive pressure by the Obama Administration, the Democrats in the United States have also encouraged Americans to give up their firearms, while the politicians become better protected by armed guards themselves, paid for by the taxpayers. The very same people who tell you to hand over your firearms and ammunition are those who spend your tax dollars for their personal protection. It’s funny how that works.
In many places, state governments – the liberal-run states – have encouraged people to engage in buy-backs. The Obama Administration most assuredly encouraged this brutal attack on our Second Amendment. Like Nicolas Maduro, Obama’s objective was to disarm all Americans and make them vulnerable to iron-fist rule. Surely, you remember when he thundered out to millions of Americans that change was on its way, but did he explain to you what kind of change he wanted? No, not in detail, because he knew, and the Democrats know, that no one would have voted for him had he been honest and transparently disclosed that “fundamental change” meant discarding the Constitution’s “negative liberties” – the limits on what government can do to you.
The Democrats are sly. They snake their way into your life piece by piece and infiltrate all aspects of American life. They encourage you, bribe you with money. If you give up your guns out of your own volition, you are the only one to be blamed. You know that, right? You took the bait, and now they got you under control because you have no firearms to protect yourself and your family if ever there’s a need.
And in socialist regimes, there will be a need.
Less than a decade after Maduro banned all gun and ammunition sales to private Venezuelans, reports started to emerge about how Venezuelans regretted terribly that they had let their dictator take their guns. Venezuela has become a living hell for its people. Their radical leftist government has descended into a cruel socialist nightmare.
Today, the Venezuelan people are starving to death. Millions are out of work. Buildings are deteriorating. Violence erupts in the streets. The shelves are empty. Inflation is through the roof. Their votes do not count anymore. Freedom of speech has been criminalized. Their right to own property without worrying that the government can take it any minute is ever-present. They do not have the right to defend themselves under the socialist government, and the future of the Venezuelan children is looking bleak.
It sounds like Venezuela’s just a little further down the path Democrat-run cities across America are on, doesn’t it?
The Maduro regime called for a gun-free Venezuela, but what the people got was a prison. That’s something that the American people must consider when they foolishly give up their rights, whether it’s the right to freedom of speech or the right to keep and bear arms. Once you give up your rights, there is no turning back without bloodshed.
In 2017, the Venezuelan government armed 400,000 Loyalists. Only those who are loyal to Dictator Maduro’s iron-fist rule are allowed to keep and bear arms. In 2018, many Venezuelans had by then realized their mistake and called the gun ban “a declaration of war” against the people. They were right to feel that way.
The disarmament of any nation makes its people defenseless against tyrants. Only the oppressors have guns. It’s about social control backed by force.
It’s not about security. It’s about a monopoly on gun control, mind-control, violence, and money. Let’s not forget the role of money. Money is the number one motivator in robbing the people, as the government itself produces almost nothing. Venezuela is a perfect example of that.
All dictatorships start this way: take control away from the people, make them defenseless, own them. It’s modern-day slavery. It’s not slavery as in a private master and slave. It’s the state owning its people.
Gun control is people control and the taxpayers pay for it. This is the truth and it’s up to you what you do with it but demand your God-given right to keep and bear arms and to freedom of speech.
Photo credit: YouTube screengrab (cropped)
Karina Schmitt has a Bachelor of Arts, is co-host and host, author and publisher, political critic on 24Nyt.dk, and bilingual a life coach.
THE DEMOCRAT PARTY FOR BOTTOMLESS BANKSTER BAILOUTS AND BILLIONAIRES FOR WIDER OPEN BORDERS TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED.
One can thus easily conjure up the image of Justin Trudeau, the entirety of the Biden Administration, Nancy Pelosi and her Congressional minions, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates, the denizens of major corporate boardrooms, the professoriate at any major university, the “journalists” at the New York Times and the Washington Post and a litany of Hollywood actors and producers among a sea of duplicitous faces within the ruling class.
Because of the egocentrism and megalomania of the current ruling class, our country is inexorably and stealthily marching toward a tyrannical one-party socialist oligarchy beholden to a globalist agenda.
The Treason of the Ruling Class
Because of the egocentrism and megalomania of the current ruling class, our country is inexorably and stealthily marching toward a tyrannical one-party socialist oligarchy beholden to a globalist agenda. These elites, in their determination to achieve political and societal status in perpetuity, are willingly allied with the relatively small number of true believers in their midst whose sole focus is to transform America into another failed socialist nation.
In a major step toward accomplishing that goal, the ruling class in both Canada and the United States have calculatingly acquiesced to these ideologues maliciously exploiting the Covid-19 pandemic in order to permanently consolidate their political and societal status.
The current and ongoing fascistic actions of the government in Canada in dealing with the trucker protest have revealed that this process is more advanced in Canada than it is the United States. However, this nation is not far behind as its government has also declared a de facto war on America’s unwashed masses they claim are marinated in white supremacy and racism as these “deplorables” endlessly plot insurrections and domestic terrorism.
Fearful of the spread of a populist uprising, the true believers in Canada’s ruling class, as personified by Justin Trudeau, convinced the rest of their fellow ruling elites that they must violently stifle a peaceful grass roots political protest fomented by their deliberate abrogation of individual freedom. They have brutally assaulted the demonstrators they refer to as domestic terrorists by invoking “emergency measures” designed for wartime. This has allowed the government to unilaterally and without any legal basis freeze bank accounts and seize assets, censor non-state-sanctioned media, jail people without due process and outlaw any political demonstrations opposed to the regime.
The true believers within the American ruling class, fearful of a populist uprising, convinced the rest of their alliance to go along with casting the January 6, 2021 protest as an “insurrection.” They have imprisoned many without bail or trial including those charged with misdemeanor trespassing. They have choreographed public displays of arresting those who legally entered the Capitol and some who did not enter the building. Their allies in the financial community have arbitrarily closed people’s bank accounts and businesses. They have recruited the social media conglomerates to censor speech. They have stereotyped of all who voted for Donald Trump as “domestic terrorists.”
Never in the history of this country has there ever been a more mal-educated, narcissistic, gullible, and avaricious ruling class. While unfortunately ignored by the bulk of the American citizenry for far too long, these traits were recognized and exploited by one of this nation’s most pernicious adversaries beginning five decades ago.
The Soviet Union did not intend to conquer but instead to destabilize the United State through societal and political transformation so that it would no longer be an impediment to their plans for global hegemony. In the 1960’s and 70’s the KGB recognized that the quickest way to undermine the United States was through subverting those with elitist mindsets in the political, media, entertainment, education and corporate circles.
The operational tenets of communism/socialism are particularly attractive to these egocentrics because these statist philosophies necessitate a permanent one-party ruling class and relegates the unwashed masses to de facto servitude. Having to not answer to the “deplorable” citizenry and to wallow in one’s superiority is irresistible regardless of the reality of communism/socialism. These elites are oblivious to the potential devastation to the bulk of society in becoming co-conspirators with the true believers in their midst.
As these destabilizing doctrines – the latest iterations focus on racial grievance and “equity” -- inexorably penetrate into societal leadership groups, they become the basis on which controlled opposition is structured. That is why the focus of the KGB was always on penetrating and influencing the elite power circles, as they recognized the egocentricity, gullibility and ignorance of so many among America’s ruling elites.
Yuri Bezmenov, a former KGB agent and defector from Russia explained these tactics in an interview in 1984 when he tried to alert America to what was happening as well as the long term consequences:
Never bother with Leftists. Forget about these political prostitutes. Aim higher. This was my instruction. Try to get into large circulation established media, the rich, filthy rich movie makers, intellectuals, so-called academic circles, cynical egocentric people, who can look into your eyes with angelic expression and tell you a lie. These are the most recruitable people, people who lack moral principles, who are either too greedy, or to suffer from self-importance, they feel that they matter a lot.
These are the people who KGB wanted to recruit. Radicals serve only at the stage of destabilization of a nation. For example, your leftists in the United States, all these professors and all these beautiful civil rights defenders, they are instrumental in the process of the subversion only to destabilize a nation. When their job is completed, they are not needed any more.
The fact that the American ruling class was the primary target for the KGB speaks volumes about who they are and the accuracy of the Soviet strategy. The Communist Chinese adopted these same tactics beginning in the 1990’s. Their ongoing success in destabilizing the United States by effectively owning and manipulating many among the American elite class, including the current occupant of the White House, speaks for itself.
Perhaps the most apt description of this cabal was penned by the best political humorist since Will Rogers. The late P.J. O’Rourke in his seminal work Give War a Chance wrote:
At the core of liberalism is the spoiled child -- miserable, as all spoiled children are, unsatisfied, demanding, ill-disciplined, despotic and useless. Liberalism is a philosophy of sniveling brats.
One can thus easily conjure up the image of Justin Trudeau, the entirety of the Biden Administration, Nancy Pelosi and her Congressional minions, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates, the denizens of major corporate boardrooms, the professoriate at any major university, the “journalists” at the New York Times and the Washington Post and a litany of Hollywood actors and producers among a sea of duplicitous faces within the ruling class.
America, this is who is governing this country, this is who your leaders are.
That is why it is no longer hyperbole to say what is happening in Canada can and in all probability will happen here unless a populist uprising turns on the major corporations, the legacy and social media, the dominant financial institutions, and the universities who are all dominated by the ruling elites. And in November this same populist uprising must turn on all politicians, regardless of party affiliation, who are beholden to or are members of this cabal.
It appears the final steps in the transformation of Canada into a one-party socialist oligarchy beholden to a globalist agenda is well underway. The warnings of so many have fallen on deaf ears in Canada; will they continue to do so here in the United States?
IF THERE ARE TWO MEN WHO CONSTITUTE THE GREATEST THREAT TO DEMOCRACY IT WOULD BE DIVISIONIST SOCIOPATH LAWYER BARACK OBAMA AND HIS SIDE KICK LAWYER ERIC HOLDER.
The office thing might have been improper, but at this point, who cares? More at issue is the extraordinary run Holder just completed as one of history’s great double agents. For six years, while brilliantly disguised as the attorney general of the United States, he was actually working deep undercover, DiCaprio in The Departed-style, as the best defense lawyer Wall Street ever had.
ERIC HOLDER HAS long insisted that he tried really hard when he was attorney general to make criminal cases against big banks in the wake of the 2007 financial crisis. His excuse, which he made again just last month, was that Justice Department prosecutors didn’t have enough evidence to bring charges.
Many critics have long suspected that was bullshit, and that Holder, for a combination of political, self-serving, and craven reasons, held his department back.
A new, thoroughly-documented report from the House Financial Services Committee supports that theory. It recounts how career prosecutors in 2012 wanted to criminally charge the global bank HSBC for facilitating money laundering for Mexican drug lords and terrorist groups. But Holder said no.
ERIC HOLDER’S LONGTIME EXCUSE FOR NOT PROSECUTING BANKS JUST CRASHED AND BURNED
New evidence supports critique that Holder, for a combination of political, self-serving, and craven reasons, held his department back from prosecuting big banks.
JAMES WALSH
THE OBAMA-BIDEN HISPANICAZATION of AMERICA… first ease millions of illegals over our borders and into our voting booths!
How the Democrat party surrendered America to Mexico:
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2014/07/james-walsh-hispanicazation-of-america.html
“The watchdogs at Judicial Watch discovered documents that reveal how the Obama administration's close coordination with the Mexican government entices Mexicans to hop over the fence and on to the American dole.” Washington Times
"This is country belongs to Mexico" is said by the Mexican Militant. This is a common teaching that the U.S. is really AZTLAN, belonging to Mexicans, which is taught to Mexican kids in Arizona and California through a LA Raza educational program funded by American Tax Payers via President Obama, when he gave LA RAZA $800,000.00 in March of 2009!
The “zero tolerance” program was dismantled by Attorney General Erc Holder once it had successfully cut the transit of migrants by roughly 95 percent. Initially, officials made 140,000 arrests per year in the mid-2000s, but the northward flow dropped so much that officials only had to make 6,000 arrests in 2013, according to a 2014 letter by two pro-migration Senators, Sen. Jeff Flake and John McCain.
“The cost of the Dream Act is far bigger than the Democrats or their media allies admit. Instead of covering 690,000 younger illegals now enrolled in former President Barack Obama’s 2012 “DACA” amnesty, the Dream Act would legalize at least 3.3 million illegals, according to a pro-immigration group, the Migration Policy Institute.”
Eric Holder, James Clapper, James Comey, John Brennan, Andrew McCabe and others could repeatedly lie to Congress and/or the FBI and they were all above the law.
“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.
Additionally, the Justice Department under Holder, and now Loretta Lynch, has one of the worst records before the U.S. Supreme Court, losing significantly more cases than either of the Bush or Clinton Departments of Justice. “In most administrations, the department wins about 70 percent of the cases before the Supreme Court; Mr. Holder’s department has a losing record and has lost at least nine cases 9-0–even with Obama appointees Elena Kagen and Sonia Sotomayor on the court,” wrote Jared Taylor of American Renaissance, in a review of “Obama’s Enforcer: Eric Holder’s Justice Department.”
Judicial Watch announced today that it filed a records request with the California Legislature Joint Rules Committee seeking to examine legislative records regarding the state’s employment of former Obama U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. The record request includes:
How Eric Holder Tipped the Scales in North Carolina’s Redistricting Fight
A North Carolina judge who received $200,000 in contributions from former attorney general Eric Holder's partisan redistricting network could soon cast the decisive vote in a legal battle over the state’s congressional maps.
The Holder-backed judge, Anita Earls, serves on the North Carolina Supreme Court, which will likely have the final say over which congressional maps the state adopts. The seven-member court earlier this month rejected maps drawn by the Republican-controlled legislature and is expected to knock down a revised proposal Republicans submitted on Feb. 16. A rejection of Republican maps would be a win for Holder, who formed several redistricting organizations in 2017 to draw congressional districts favorable to Democrats.
Republicans say Earls’s ties to Holder are a conflict of interest and warrant her recusal from the redistricting case. They point to the former attorney general’s endorsement of Earls in 2018, and his redistricting group’s massive donation to her campaign. Holder’s National Redistricting Foundation, which sued Republicans over their maps in November, took credit for the North Carolina Supreme Court’s ruling earlier this month.
"Monied interests appear to have bought a supreme court justice to decide this redistricting case," state senator Amy Galey (R., N.C.) told the Washington Free Beacon.
"Eric Holder paid six figures to elect Earls so she could decide this case," said Galey, who added that Earls should have recused herself from the redistricting case. Earls rejected calls last month to recuse herself from the litigation.
The North Carolina Supreme Court, which has four Democrats and three Republicans, could potentially weigh in on maps drawn by Holder’s organizations. A three-judge panel has until Feb. 23 to rule on the General Assembly’s proposed map. The panel can accept the map, or adopt one of the maps submitted by outside groups. It is unclear what groups have submitted maps, but the National Redistricting Foundation said this month it "looks forward to participating in the redrawing process."
Holder endorsed Earls in 2018 amid his push to elect state judges for the purpose of adopting Democrat-friendly congressional maps. Holder has claimed the groups seek "fair maps" across the country, but tax filings for Holder’s National Democratic Redistricting Committee say its goal is "to build a comprehensive plan to favorably position Democrats for the redistricting process through 2022."
To aid the cause, the National Democratic Redistricting Committee’s PAC gave maximum donations of $5,200 directly to Earls’s campaign, and appears to have funneled another $200,000 to her through the North Carolina Democratic Party. Holder endorsed Earls on Sept. 12, 2018, eight days before the National Democratic Redistricting Committee gave $250,000 to the North Carolina Democratic Party’s judicial fund. The party sent Earls’s campaign $199,000 a few weeks later, according to campaign filings. The party did not respond to requests for comment about the contributions to Earls.
The National Democratic Redistricting Committee works in concert with the National Redistricting Foundation and National Redistricting Action Fund, a dark money group heavily funded by Swiss billionaire Hansjörg Wyss.
The hefty donations to Earls are not without precedent for Holder’s network. The National Democratic Redistricting Committee spent $165,000 on ads for Wisconsin Supreme Court judge Rebecca Dallet in 2018 and spent $350,000 for Lisa Neubauer's failed Wisconsin Supreme Court bid in 2019. Holder’s committee has targeted Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania most aggressively in its redistricting campaign.
Holder made clear in his endorsement of Earls he was backing her in order to influence redistricting in the Tar Heel State.
"North Carolina is ground zero for gerrymandering," Holder said. "We have to put more people in the State House, State Senate, and we need to have Anita Earls as the next N.C. Supreme Court Justice. She is a great lawyer, she has a great history, she will be a great judge."
Earls has not disappointed Holder’s organization and other progressive groups. The League of Conservation Voters, an environmental group involved in the North Carolina redistricting litigation, called the court’s decision earlier this month a major win for voters who care about "environmental justice and climate action."
"This historic decision follows years of work challenging gerrymandered maps in the Tar Heel State by Eric Holder and the National Redistricting Foundation," said the foundation, which sued Republicans on behalf of a group of voters on Nov. 18.
While Holder has accused Republicans of illegally gerrymandering maps in North Carolina and other states, he has stayed silent on the redistricting in New York, where Democrats passed what has been called the most "egregious" gerrymander in the country so far this cycle. Gov. Kathy Hochul (D., N.Y.) approved a map that could create a seven-seat House swing in favor of Democrats.
Democratic election lawyer Marc Elias pushed for the highly gerrymandered New York maps. He is also the lead lawyer on the National Redistricting Foundation’s lawsuit in North Carolina and has represented Holder’s network on other litigation.
With Biden, one set of laws for them, another set for us
By Jack Hellner
Twenty-one students at three universities were charged with participation in a massive drug ring.
Total proceeds were $1.5 million over a few years. No, they shouldn't have done it. But the penalties for them are draconian: They are in huge lifetime trouble with the law. Their lives will be destroyed, and several will probably go to prison.
Twenty-one people have been charged with dealing drugs on and around college campuses after federal officials uncovered a massive drug ring involving students at three North Carolina universities, authorities announced Thursday.
Martin said that over several years the suspects allegedly moved more than a thousand of pounds of marijuana and hundreds of kilograms of cocaine and other drugs through their supply chain. The drug proceeds exceeded $1.5 million, according to the DEA.
Contrast the students’ treatment with terrorists being let off scot-free by the Obama administration Justice department after Obama dictatorially instructed bureaucrats to drop the years-long investigation into a billion-dollar-a -year drug ring, all to appease Iran.
You see, terrorists are special when Obama/Biden and John Kerry want to appease dictators who pledge death to America as they work on their legacy.
Where were the whistleblowers at the Justice department in 2008, calling out this pure abuse of power by Obama? Where were the congressional hearings and articles of impeachment?
From Politico in 2017:
In its determination to secure a nuclear deal with Iran, the Obama administration derailed an ambitious law enforcement campaign targeting drug trafficking by the Iranian-backed terrorist group Hezbollah, even as it was funneling cocaine into the United States, according to a POLITICO investigation.
The campaign, dubbed Project Cassandra, was launched in 2008 after the Drug Enforcement Administration amassed evidence that Hezbollah had transformed itself from a Middle East-focused military and political organization into an international crime syndicate that some investigators believed was collecting $1 billion a year from drug and weapons trafficking, money laundering and other criminal activities.
The media and other Democrats claim they care about all deaths from drugs, so why don’t they care about all the deaths from terrorism and drug overdoses because of Obama’s actions?
The Justice department, the media, and the politicians of both parties go after pharmaceutical companies for their contribution to the drug crisis, so why didn’t they go after Obama -- and China, the terrorists and Iran, for their major contribution to the problem?
This is what is going on now in San Francisco
According to the Associated Press, 621 people have died in San Francisco of drug overdoses thus far this year, a staggering number that equates to nearly two deaths per day.
On the other hand, just 173 San Fransisco residents have died of COVID-19.
It is an absolute joke to watch Biden and the media claim that the new administration will not interfere at the Justice department when they know how the Obama/Biden administration completely politicized the Justice department throughout their eight years.
When they say that no one is above the law and there will be equal treatment under the law, they are plainly lying.
They not only let terrorists off scot free, IRS bureaucrats who targeted Obama opponents, obstructed justice, destroyed computers and lied to Congress were also above the law.
Hillary Clinton, her aides, and officials throughout government, including Obama, could violate the nation's security laws, could destroy computers, hide documents, and repeatedly lie and they were above the law.
The Justice department could shake down corporations, establish a slush fund, and give kickbacks to political supporters such as ACORN or whatever they call themselves now, and few cared.
Eric Holder, James Clapper, James Comey, John Brennan, Andrew McCabe and others could repeatedly lie to Congress and/or the FBI and they were all above the law.
Bureaucrats could use a fake dossier from a foreign source, paid for by the DNC and Hillary campaign, and lie to the FISA court as they targeted Trump and his supporters, and they, too, were above the law.
Bureaucrats within the Obama/Biden Administration illegally spied on thousands of Americans throughout their eight years in office and they were all above the law. Remember this?
Newly declassified memos detail extent of improper Obama-era NSA spying
The Obama/Biden Justice department refused to enforce immigration laws. Politicians and bureaucrats in sanctuary cities and states were above the law.
The Clinton and Biden families were allowed to use their powerful government positions to solicit massive kickbacks for themselves and their families from foreign sources, and they were and are above the law.
Democrats not only didn’t care about the kickbacks, they impeached Trump for wanting an investigation into the Biden corruption.
While members of the Obama/Biden crime syndicate could violate as many laws as they liked, they were also targeting innocent people like Gen. Michael Flynn and energy expert Carter Page for destruction.
It is no wonder there is so much corruption and criminal activity among politicians and bureaucrats thrives throughout the United States when the press is coopted, asleep, or just don’t care. They frequently bury the stories and actively campaign for the corrupt criminals. It is sad that they support putting corrupt criminals in the White House. They support anyone who seeks to make the government run by leftists more powerful.
Meanwhile, they will seek to destroy anyone who wants to give the power, purse, and freedom back to the people as fast as possible. They don’t care about how many fake stories, such as Russian collusion, they have to peddle in their efforts to defeat political opponents. Evidence and the truth are not important. Anonymous sources are treated as evidence. Only victory for leftists matters and that truly makes the media an existential threat to our survival as a great country.
Image credit: Pixabay public domain
“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.”
Biden’s influence-peddling is consistent with what I wrote in my book, 'Capitol Hills Criminal Underground'
More than three years ago, MedLaw Publishing released my book, “Capitol Hills Criminal Underground” in which I, the book's author, describe a long-running “protection racket” being run by then-Vice President Joe Biden, as well as Attorney General Eric Holder and New York Senator, Chuck Schumer.
The three amigos effectively arranged to have all Wall Street criminal cases directed to the lefty-friendly Southern District of New York, and for the right “payments” the cases would be closed. Money would then go into PACs controlled by Schumer and distributed to all those involved. In return for those payments, there would be no investigations, no prosecutions and no regulatory action. As author, I tracked over $110,000,000 in payments to politicians.
The CIA tracked some of the money-laundering related to the theft by these Wall Street companies and was able to track back the payments to senior DOJ officials and senior politicians like Vice President Joe Biden.
I, and a senior CIA officer, offered this evidence to both FBI Director James Comey and DoJ Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz. They both declined to respond. I filed criminal complaints with the FBI and was told by field agents that senior leadership at the DOJ would not allow anyone to work the criminal complaints.
I want to encourage all Americans to read my book, "Capitol Hill's Criminal Underground" and decide for themselves.
That baleful presence of Eric Holder eyeing the coronavirus as a means to win Democrats' permanent power
Eric Holder is back.
But instead of helping out on the coronavirus crisis as an ethical person might do, his wheels are spinning for using the crisis as a means of attaining permanent Democratic Party power.
The far left former Obama administration Attorney General got an item out on Medium, calling for the skeezy practice of universal mail-in voting, claiming the Wisconsin primary during the crisis was some kind of unspecified travesty:
New from @EricHolder: "Given that the virus is likely to return in the fall, if we do not start taking measures now to protect the franchise, our current voting procedures will put the health of all Americans -no matter their political preference -at risk" https://t.co/dvry9SLQsf
— Patrick Rodenbush (@pnrodenbush) April 14, 2020
Thanks for the concern-trolling for Republicans, Eric. We all know how sincere it is.
Calling for mail-in ballots, online registration, same-day registration, ballot-harvesting, and month-long extended voting periods, all of which are petri dishes for election fraud in that most break the chain of custody to any number of interested players, some break secret ballot, and others can be manipulated by partisan hacks based on known ongoing tallies, Holder writes:
By refusing to move the election or provide adequate alternative voting options as they dealt with the COVID-19 pandemic, Republicans used their gerrymandered majorities in the Wisconsin legislature to force an impossible choice on the people they are supposed to represent: forgo your civic responsibility and stay healthy or cast a ballot and endanger yourself and your community. It remains unthinkable that health care experts would tell citizens that social distancing is a necessity to combat this virus and then politicians forced them to congregate in large groups and wait in long lines to vote. Poll workers afraid for their health did not show up.
Which is nonsense. People stand in grocery lines all the time, socially distancing by six feet. Somehow, Holder thinks voters can't master that in an election situation where lines are usually considerably shorter.
NPR of all outlets reported that Holder's travesty claims in Wisconsin were garbage, the public network reports that Wisconsin turnout in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic was steady and high.
The ballot harvesting, borrowed from Mexico's "perfect dictatorship," the 70-year ruling PRI party, famous for its corruption and socialism, goes on a lot in the U.S. these days already, the camel's nose is already under the tent. Fraud plagued California is the main example, but it also goes on in states with large Latin American-descended populations, by seamy [political operatives known as boliteros and politiqueras, who make sure to bring home the bacon for their party as such flying monkeys are commissioned to do. They are often union thugs, coming to people's houses, standing over them, (we know where you live) pressuring them to vote the way they want them to vote, even if they don't want to vote that way, even if they are illegal and don't want to get into trouble.
Or else.
All of this is part of the Democrats' plan for using the coronavirus to fundamentally transform America. California's Gov. Gavin Newsom said as much about the coronavirus couple weeks earlier.
BLOG EDITOR: DURING THE 8 YEAR BANKSTER REGIME OF BARACK OBAMA AND ERIC HOLDER, HOLDER SPENT A GREAT DEAL OF TIME GOING TO LA RAZA RALLIES TO PROMISE ILLEGALS AMNESTY IF THEY VOTED FOR THE OBOMB.
Now Holder's grabbed the football and is running with it, making an end to normal voting a fundamental part of the Democratic Party platform. It goes with their other offensive that I described earlier today, which is encouraging a flood of illegals, with PRI (or worse, Chavista) values into the country, and then changing the secret ballot voting system from one-man one-vote to an extended harvest mechanism, extended over a long period, with zero verification of who actually cast the ballot, and a broken chain of custody, allowing for all manner of fraud that Democrats view as beneficial.
Never let a crisis go to waste, to paraphrase Democratic operative Rahm Emanuel. Holder is one baleful presence. No matter what the crisis, all he can see is new ways to extend Democratic Party power.
Image credit: AFGE, via Wikimedia Commons // CC BY-SA 2.0
CALIFORNIA COMRADES CHOOSE COMRADE HOLDER
https://sacramentocitizen.wordpress.com/2017/01/11/california-comrades-choose-comrade-holder/
Any attorney general who is not an activist is not doing his or her job.
Eric Holder
In Part One of this series, we exposed the Chicano Marxist take over of the California legislature and their plans to defy federal immigration laws and expected actions of the incoming Trump administration. Gov. Jerry Brown’s nomination of Xavier Becerra to be California’s next Attorney General was the first of many steps to protect the pervasive lawlessness of the radical left. Becerra has already taken an aggressive and combative stance against President-elect Donald Trump, vowing to fight Trump’s efforts to enforce immigration laws, and even block attempts to deport criminal illegal aliens. Trump’s campaign centered on building a wall along the United States border with Mexico to keep out illegal immigrants, violent gangs, and terrorists posing as immigrants.
Xavier Becerra, currently a 12-year member of Congress, is an admitted member of MEChA, or “Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan,” often likened to a Latino KKK.
Becerra has publicly defended MEChA, even though the Chicano supremacist group evangelizes discrimination against non-Hispanics and calls for the killing of Border Patrol “pigs.” MEChA’s rallying cry is: “For the race, everything; For those outside the race, nothing.”
Becerra’s Radical Plans
Recently, the State Assembly Committee on the Office of the Attorney General asked nominee Becerra to detail his plans on the issues of immigration, civil rights, the environment, policing and consumer protection – apparently the only issues the California Legislature is interested in Becerra defending.
In a letter released Saturday, Becerra praised California’s policies helping illegal aliens get driver’s licenses, free college tuition, and free lawyers to represent them in deportation cases, calling it “national leadership.”
“All of these policies and programs are representative of California’s values as a welcoming state,” Becerra wrote to the Assembly committee.
Becerra also took a shot at Trump for proposing to create a registry of Muslim immigrants during the campaign.”Disturbing statements uttered during the recent Presidential campaign have given rise to legitimate fears that the new federal administration might seek to adopt policies that would discriminate against people based on factors such as their religious belief,” Becerra wrote. “Any such policies would be antithetical to the deepest constitutional values and traditions of this nation — a nation founded in part by men and women fleeing religious persecution.”
“I have no intention of allowing this policy through the doors of California,” he wrote.
Like a good progressive foot soldier, Becerra also vowed to fight for abortion, calling it “reproductive freedom.”
Becerra said he will support California’s recent legislation expanding voter registration and participation in elections. He might want to look into the 650,000 newly registered California voters, registered online only weeks before the election. According to the Los Angeles Times, “98% of all the growth in California’s voter ranks in 2016 happened in just the last 45 days of the registration season.”
As Attorney General, Becerra has vowed to continue enforcing policies to combat climate change and work to “transition Californians to a low-carbon way of life.” Becerra added that a part of environmental protections is safe drinking water and vowed to “pursue the goal of providing safe drinking water to all Californians.” Perhaps Becerra can begin by supporting the safe drinking water bills that Assemblyman Devon Mathis has tried to get passed over the last two years? In Mathis’ district, wells began going dry in East Porterville more than three years ago, with more continuing to dry up every day.
Assemblyman Devon Mathis, R-Porterville, authored the bills to provide $10 million to homeowners (not farmers) to dig deeper wells and clean contaminated ones.
Both bills passed through the Assembly and a state Senate committee without opposition, only to have Senate Appropriations Chairman Ricardo Lara, D-Los Angeles and Mecha activist, put both bills on suspense– one after the other, killing them and depriving 10,000+ low-income individuals access to running water. Sen. Lara was playing politics with this Republican bill, despite the 10,000 poor people who need the clean water.
Sanctuary Cities
California, through its 35 Sanctuary Cities, is clearly violating U.S. Federal Immigration law. Recently, Democrat members of the State Legislature proposed two bills: SB 6 by Sen. Ben Hueso, to create a state program to fund legal representation for illegal aliens facing deportation, and AB 3 by Assemblyman Rob Bonta to create taxpayer-funded training for defense attorneys and public defenders on immigration law for illegal aliens.
And now California is going to try to prevent the new Presidential administration from enforcing federal immigration law despite the fact that the Constitution clearly imposes a duty on the president and the executive branch, to enforce the law.
Hiring Eric Holder… for what?
Democrats in the California State Legislature apparently decided Becerra isn’t enough legal muscle, and recently hired former Obama Attorney General Eric Holder to fight a “clear and present danger” from President-elect Trump… the same former Attorney General Eric Holder who was once blasted for helping to trigger a “war” on police and called America “a nation of cowards” on the issue of race. However, he now says he sees his “younger” self in Black Lives Matter activists… this is who California hired to assist California’s top law enforcement officer?
Since Trump — who is not referring to himself as “The Office of President-Elect,” as his predecessor did — has not yet taken office, nor any official actions, it is hard to see specifically for what purpose Holder has been hired.
There certainly is poetic justice in hiring the failed Attorney General of the failed Obama Administration to defend the failed and deteriorating policies of the Jerry Brown administration and radical Democrats running the state.
Described as a “devious, power-hungry, racial zealot,” Eric Holder is also a dubious choice since he is the only U.S. Attorney General in history to be held in contempt of Congress, when he refused to turn over Operation Fast and Furious documents to Congress. One of the most reckless law enforcement operations ever conducted by the Justice Department, it involved selling guns to Mexican drug cartels, and resulted in the death of a U.S. border patrol agent, Brian Terry, as well as hundreds of Mexican citizens.
Under Holder’s watch at the DOJ Civil Rights Division, more than half of all the lawyers hired were chosen from four radical, anti-American organizations: the ACLU, National Council of La Raza, NAACP, Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, and the Lawyer’s Committee for Civil Rights, John Fund and Hans von Spakovsky outlined in their 2014 book, “Obama’s Enforcer: Eric Holder’s Justice Department.”
Additionally, the Justice Department under Holder, and now Loretta Lynch, has one of the worst records before the U.S. Supreme Court, losing significantly more cases than either of the Bush or Clinton Departments of Justice. “In most administrations, the department wins about 70 percent of the cases before the Supreme Court; Mr. Holder’s department has a losing record and has lost at least nine cases 9-0–even with Obama appointees Elena Kagen and Sonia Sotomayor on the court,” wrote Jared Taylor of American Renaissance, in a review of “Obama’s Enforcer: Eric Holder’s Justice Department.”
Judicial Watch announced today that it filed a records request with the California Legislature Joint Rules Committee seeking to examine legislative records regarding the state’s employment of former Obama U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. The record request includes:
All contracts between the California Legislature and former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. or Covington and Burling.
All communications between the California Legislature and former U. S. Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. or Covington and Burling about the Legislature’s retention of Holder and/or Covington and Burling.
“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.”
The hiring of Eric Holder by the California Legislature confirms a lack of confidence in Xavier Becerra by Gov. Brown and Democrats in the Legislature–which must be quite humiliating for Becerra, especially after his promise to uphold California’s “progressive” policies on immigration, Obamacare, energy, and criminal justice. “If you want to take on a forward-leaning state that is prepared to defend its rights and interests, then come at us,” Becerra said, directing his comment to Trump. Choosing Holder also reiterates the anti-American, anti-Constitution, anti-religion movement of Marxists in America, but particularly in California. The biggest obstacle standing between Marxism and Marxist domination of the world is America, and the U.S. Constitution. And standing between a Marxist takeover of America is California – only when California is destroyed can Marxists proceed.
ERIC HOLDER’S LONGTIME EXCUSE FOR NOT PROSECUTING BANKS JUST CRASHED AND BURNED
New evidence supports critique that Holder, for a combination of political, self-serving, and craven reasons, held his department back from prosecuting big banks.
July 12 2016, 8:05 a.m.
ERIC HOLDER HAS long insisted that he tried really hard when he was attorney general to make criminal cases against big banks in the wake of the 2007 financial crisis. His excuse, which he made again just last month, was that Justice Department prosecutors didn’t have enough evidence to bring charges.
Many critics have long suspected that was bullshit, and that Holder, for a combination of political, self-serving, and craven reasons, held his department back.
A new, thoroughly-documented report from the House Financial Services Committee supports that theory. It recounts how career prosecutors in 2012 wanted to criminally charge the global bank HSBC for facilitating money laundering for Mexican drug lords and terrorist groups. But Holder said no.
When asked on June 8 why his Justice Department did not equally apply the criminal laws to financial institutions in the wake of the 2008 economic crisis, Holder told the platform drafting panel of the Democratic National Committee that it was laboring under a “misperception.”
He told the panel: “The question you need to ask yourself is, if we could have made those cases, do you think we would not have? Do you think that these very aggressive U.S. attorneys I was proud to serve with would have not brought these cases if they had the ability?”
The report — the result of a three-year investigation — shows that aggressive attorneys did want to prosecute HSBC, but Holder overruled them.
In September 2012, the Justice Department’s Asset Forfeiture and Money Laundering Section (AFMLS) formally recommended that HSBC be prosecuted for its numerous financial crimes.
The history: From 2006 to 2010, HSBC failed to monitor billions of dollars of U.S. dollar purchases with drug trafficking proceeds in Mexico. It also conducted business going back to the mid-1990s on behalf of customers in Cuba, Iran, Libya, Sudan, and Burma, while they were under sanctions. Such transactions were banned by U.S. law.
Newly public internal Treasury Department records show that AFMLS Chief Jennifer Shasky wanted to seek a guilty plea for violations of the Bank Secrecy Act. “DoJ is mulling over the ramifications that could flow from such an approach and plans to finalize its decision this week,” reads an email from September 4, 2012, to senior Treasury officials. On September 7, Treasury official Dennis Wood describes the AFMLS decision as an “internal recommendation to ask the bank [to] plead guilty.” It was a “bombshell,” Wood wrote, because of “the implications of a criminal plea,” and “the sheer amount of the proposed fines and forfeitures.”
But after British financial minister George Osborne complained to the Federal Reserve chairman and the Treasury Secretary that DOJ was unfairly targeting a British bank, senior Justice Department leadership reportedly sought to “better understand the collateral consequences of a conviction/plea before taking such a dramatic step.”
The report documents how Holder and his top associates were concerned about the impact that prosecuting HSBC would have on the global economy. And, in particular, they worried that a guilty plea would trigger a hearing over whether to revoke HSBC’s charter to do banking in the United States.
According to internal documents, the DOJ then went dark for nearly two months, refusing to participate in interagency calls about HSBC. Finally,on November 7, Holder presented HSBC with a “take it or leave it” offer of a deferred prosecution agreement, which would involve a cash settlement and future monitoring of HSBC.
No guilty plea was required.
But even the “take it or leave it” offer was apparently not the last word. HSBC was able to negotiate for nearly a month after Holder presented that offer, getting more favorable terms in the ultimate $1.9 billion deferred prosecution agreement, announced on December 11, 2012.
The original settlement documents would have forced any HSBC executive officers to void their year-end bonuses if they showed future failures of anti-money laundering compliance. The final documents say that, in the event of such failures, senior executives merely “could” have their bonuses clawed back.
In addition, HSBC successfully negotiated to have individual executives immunized from prosecution over transactions with foreign terrorist organizations and other sanctioned entities, even though the original agreement only covered the anti-money laundering violations and explicitly left open the possibility of prosecuting individuals.
As a Justice Department functionary in 1999, Holder wrote the infamous “collateral consequences” memo, advising prosecutors to take into account economic damage that might result from criminally convicting a major corporation.
In 2013, he unwittingly earned his place in history for telling the Senate Judiciary Committee, “I am concerned that the size of some of these [financial] institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them,” which became known as the “Too Big to Jail” theory.
Holder told the Democratic platform drafting committee that “it was not lack of desire or lack of resources” that led to the lack of prosecutions for any major bank executive following the financial crisis. “We had in some cases statutory and sometimes factual inabilities to bring the cases that we wanted to bring,” he said.
The HSBC case, however, shows that lack of desire at the highest levels of the Justice Department was indeed the primary reason that no prosecutions took place.
Former Rep. Brad Miller, D-N.C., who also testified to the drafting committee, cited the HSBC case as an example of the lack of equal application of justice in the Holder era. Referring to the concern over destabilizing the financial system with an HSBC prosecution, Miller said, “That’s not an argument that’s available to too many people: ‘You can’t arrest me for selling cigarettes, it might destabilize the financial system!’ ”
The internal communications in the House report all come from the Treasury Department. The Justice Department, they say, did not comply with subpoenas for information about the settlement.
Holder has returned to Covington & Burling, a corporate law firm known for serving Wall Street clients in 2015. He had worked at Covington from 2001 until he was sworn in as attorney general in Feburary 2009. Covington literally kept an office empty for him, awaiting his return.
Jennifer Shasky, the AFMLS chief who requested the prosecution of HSBC but was overruled, recently resigned as the head of the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network to become a senior compliance officer with HSBC.
Eric Holder, Wall Street Double Agent, Comes in From the Cold
Barack Obama’s former top cop cashes in after six years of letting banks run wild
By
Eric Holder is back at Covington & Burling after serving as U.S. attorney general for six years.
Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty
Eric Holder has gone back to work for his old firm, the white-collar defense heavyweight Covington & Burling. The former attorney general decided against going for a judgeship, saying he’s not ready for the ivory tower yet. “I want to be a player,” he told the National Law Journal, one would have to say ominously.
Holder will reassume his lucrative partnership (he made $2.5 million the last year he worked there) and take his seat in an office that reportedly – this is no joke – was kept empty for him in his absence.
The office thing might have been improper, but at this point, who cares? More at issue is the extraordinary run Holder just completed as one of history’s great double agents. For six years, while brilliantly disguised as the attorney general of the United States, he was actually working deep undercover, DiCaprio in The Departed-style, as the best defense lawyer Wall Street ever had.
Holder denied there was anything weird about returning to one of Wall Street’s favorite defense firms after six years of letting one banker after another skate on monstrous cases of fraud, tax evasion, market manipulation, money laundering, bribery and other offenses.
RELATED
Goldman Non-Prosecution: AG Eric Holder Has No Balls
The $9 Billion Witness: Meet JPMorgan Chase's Worst Nightmare
“Just because I’m at Covington doesn’t mean I will abandon the public interest work,” he told CNN. He added to the National Law Journal that a big part of the reason he was going back to private practice was because he wanted to give back to the community.
“The firm’s emphasis on pro bono work and being engaged in the civic life of this country is consistent with my worldview that lawyers need to be socially active,” he said.
Right. He’s going back to Covington & Burling because of the firm’s emphasis on pro bono work.
Here’s a man who just spent six years handing out soft-touch settlements to practically every Too Big to Fail bank in the world. Now he returns to a firm that represents many of those same companies: Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo, Chase, Bank of America and Citigroup, to name a few.
Collectively, the decisions he made while in office saved those firms a sum that is impossible to calculate with exactitude. But even going by the massive rises in share price observed after he handed out these deals, his service was certainly worth many billions of dollars to Wall Street.
Now he will presumably collect assloads of money from those very same bankers. It’s one of the biggest quid pro quo deals in the history of government service. Congressman Billy Tauzin once took a $2 million-a-year job lobbying for the pharmaceutical industry just a few weeks after helping to pass the revolting Prescription Drug Benefit Bill, but what Holder just did makes Tauzin look like a guy who once took a couple of Redskins tickets.
In this light, telling reporters that you’re going back to Covington & Burling to be “engaged in the civic life of this country” seems like a joke for us all to suck on, like announcing that he’s going back to get a doctorate at the University of Blow Me.
Holder doesn’t look it, but he was a revolutionary. He institutionalized a radical dualistic approach to criminal justice, essentially creating a system of indulgences wherein the world’s richest companies paid cash for their sins and escaped the sterner punishments the law dictated.
Here are five pillars of the Holder revolution:
One is that he failed to win a single conviction in court for any crimes related to the financial crisis. The only trial of any consequence brought by his Justice Department for crimes related to the crisis involved a pair of Bear Stearns nimrods named Ralph Cioffi and Matthew Tannin, who confided in each other via email that the subprime markets were “toast” but told their clients something very different to keep them invested.
After a jury acquitted both in early 2009, the Holder Justice Department turtled. Sources inside the DOJ told me over the years that both Holder and his deputy, fellow Covington & Burling alum Lanny Breuer, were obsessed with winning and refused to chance any case where they felt a jury might go sideways on them. Thus the Cioffi-Tannin case was the last financial crisis case they dared to bring into to a criminal courtroom – virtually every other case ended in settlements.
Two: Holder famously invented a concept called “collateral consequences,” under which the state could pursue non-criminal alternatives for companies if they believed prosecuting them might result in too much “collateral” damage. Britain’s HSBC bank, which admitted to massive money laundering violations, and the Swiss bank UBS, which was caught manipulating the Libor interest rate benchmark, were examples of firms that escaped vigorous prosecution because Holder and his lackeys were, ostensibly anyway, concerned about market-altering consequences.
Significantly, both banks were later caught up in even more serious scandals, leading to criticism that stiffer punishments the first time around might have prevented future damage. Holder’s successor Loretta Lynch was even forced to rip up Holder’s UBS deal for being insufficiently punitive. It’s worth noting that Holder, before he became attorney general, represented UBS at Covington & Burling.
Holder’s lenient policies were deployed at a time when fellow officials like Tim Geithner and Ben Bernanke were using bailout monies to merge troubled firms together and create even larger mega-companies. Chase and Wells Fargo, which swallowed up Washington Mutual and Wachovia in state-aided takeovers, were prototypes of the modern mega-bank. So when Holder wedded “collateral consequences” to these new Too Big to Fail mega-firms, he created Too Big to Jail. This is a huge part of his legacy, the creation of an unjailable class.
Three: Holder also pioneered the extrajudicial settlement, striking huge deals with companies in which judges did not sign off on the agreements. The arrangement prevented pesky judges like the irksome Jed Rakoff (who voided a pair of settlements he felt were inadequate) from protesting lenient justice.
This essentially institutionalized the backroom deal. Everything was done in secret, and there was no longer any opportunity for judges or anyone else to check the power of the executive branch to hand out financial indulgences.
The watchdog group Better Markets described the $13 billion Chase settlement, one of the biggest extrajudicial deals, as “an unprecedented settlement amount [that] cannot…immunize the DOJ from having to obtain independent judicial review of its otherwise unilateral, secret actions.”
Four: There is a huge misconception, pushed equally by odd bedfellows in the financial community and Obama supporters, that Eric Holder didn’t send anyone from Wall Street to jail because “no one broke any laws.”
This preposterous meme grew out of something Barack Obama said on 60 Minutes. Here are the president’s exact words:
“Some of the most damaging behavior on Wall Street — in some cases some of the least ethical behavior on Wall Street — wasn’t illegal.”
Obama, a brilliant lawyer and wordsmith, was not saying that all of the behavior leading to the crash was legal. He merely said that some of the worst behavior wasn’t illegal. Which is true. Meaningless, but true.
Of course, some of the worst behavior was very illegal. This is confirmed in the fact that Holder extracted billions of dollars in settlement monies and even, in a few cases, obtained guilty pleas for crimes like fraud, manipulation, bribery, money laundering and tax evasion.
Anyone who even tries to claim that none of the banks actually did anything illegal should be directed to the HSBC settlement of December 2012. In this deferred prosecution agreement, Europe’s largest bank paid $1.92 billion to settle their responsibility for violations of the Bank Secrecy Act and other laws.
This is from a description of HSBC’s crimes by Holder’s Justice Department:
“As a result of HSBC Bank USA’s AML failures, at least $881 million in drug trafficking proceeds – including proceeds of drug trafficking by the Sinaloa Cartel in Mexico…were laundered through HSBC Bank USA.”
You might remember the Sinaloa cartel for their ISIS-style, unforgettably upsetting torture videos. HSBC washed their cash. They even created special teller windows to make their deposits easier. This is admitted, not alleged.
But Holder went out of his way to let them keep their U.S. charter. He gave their executives a grand total of zero days in jail, zero dollars in individual fines.
To reiterate: HSBC laundered money for guys who chop peoples‘ heads off with chainsaws. So we can dispense with the “but no one broke any laws” thing.
When asked about this in testimony before the Senate, Holder told elected officials he was concerned harsher penalties against firms like HSBC would “have a negative impact on the national economy,” and that this “has an inhibiting influence…on our ability to bring resolutions that I think would be more appropriate.”
Compare this to what he just said after returning to Covington & Burling:
“I think that what we did in the department was, I always like to say, appropriately aggressive. There may be clients that, for whatever reason, will not decide to work with me…”
Oddly enough, Holder used that same phrase – “appropriately aggressive” – in his Senate testimony. In other words, the attorney general said he was “inhibited” from giving “appropriate” punishments just a few moments before claiming his punishments were appropriate. This is classic Clintonian politics, saying two things at the same time, neither of them true.
Five: Holder contributed countless subtle inventions to soften punishments. The most revolting in my view was allowing banks like Chase the courtesy of calling their settlements “remedial payments” instead of fines for wrongdoing.
This seemingly insignificant semantic tweak allowed the bank to call $7 billion of their settlement a business expense, which meant they could claim it as a tax deduction, which in turn meant that taxpayers like you and me paid a whopping $2.45 billion of Chase’s penalty.
Some of the write-ups of these decisions emanating from the financial and legal press were hilarious. Law360.com, noting that the settlement language meant that 35 percent of the bank’s regulatory burden would be shifted “onto the backs of taxpayers,” pointed out, as if surprised, that the tax treatment “sparked debate” and that “some are even angry about it.” Shocking!
Of course, none of us mortals can deduct so much as a speeding ticket, since we wouldn’t want to use the tax code to encourage speeding. So why was it OK for the nation’s top cop to make fraud or money laundering a tax-subsidized activity?
There were other tricks. Banks that committed multiple violations of the same offense were often allowed to settle or plead to just one count. And in many cases the fines were staggeringly low compared to the volume of crime – BNP-Paribas, for instance, paid $8.9 billion after laundering $30 billion, meaning they paid about 27 cents per dollar of violations.
Holder is a cynic of a type that’s increasingly common in Washington. To follow his Justice Department was like watching an endless reel of The Good Wife – smart lawyers half-cleverly constructing one unseemly moral compromise after another, always justifying it to themselves in the end somehow in the name of keeping the ball rolling.
Holder doubtless seriously believed at first that in a time of financial crisis, he was doing the right thing in constructing new forms of justice for banks, where nobody but the shareholders actually had to pay for crime. You’ve heard of victimless crimes; Holder created the victimless punishment.
But in the end, it was pretty convenient, wasn’t it, that “the right thing” also happened to be the strategy that preserved Democratic Party relationships with big-dollar donors, kept the client base at Holder’s old firm nice and fat, made the influential rich immeasurably richer and allowed Eric Holder himself to crash-land into a giant pile of money upon resignation.
What a coincidence! In any civilized country, it’d be a scandal. In America, though, he’s just another guy selling whatever he can to get by. It was just too bad that what Holder had to sell was the criminal justice system.
THE GAMER LAWYER. BUT THAT IS WHY GAMER LAWYER BARACK OBAMA WANTED HIM AT HIS SIDE TO SERVE HIS CRONY BANKSTERS! FOR THAT MATTER, THIS IS ALSO WHY OBOMB WANTED 'CREDIT CARD' JOE AT HIS SIDE.
Attorney General Eric Holder's bank
prosecution legacy
Darrell Delamaide
WASHINGTON — Is lying on a mortgage application fraud when lenders aren't interested in the truth?
This may sound like an abstract philosophical question similar to trees falling in the forest with no one around to hear, but it was in fact a novel legal tactic that got four defendants in California acquitted of mortgage fraud.
A jury of their peers bought the defense argument that the real fraud was being perpetrated by executives at the lending institutions.
"In the Sacramento case, the jury essentially found that the truth or falsity of the documentation the borrowers provided was immaterial," the Los Angeles Times reported, "the lenders would have made the loans anyway."
The case turned on the expert testimony of William Black, a law professor and tireless critic of the banks, who told the jury that the lenders involved wanted so-called "liar loans" to acquire mortgages rapidly so they could sell them off at a profit. They specifically instructed loan officers not to verify stated income — an invitation for applicants to inflate the figure.
Black, who is affiliated with the University of Missouri-Kansas City, was involved as a regulator in investigating and prosecuting the widespread fraud and corruption in the savings and loan crisis in the late 1980s.
"The saying in the savings and loan debacle is you never wanted to be the guy that was chasing mice while lions roamed the campsite," Black said on the Bill Moyers show last weekend. "So the mice are these alleged tiny frauds type of thing, where they ignore the lions, who are the CEOs of the banks and such."
The acquittal in the California case in August came just ahead of the announcement last month that Attorney General Eric Holder would step down as soon as a successor can be confirmed.
"He will leave behind a mixed scorecard," Moyers said. "A for civil rights, C for civil liberties and F for failing to prosecute the banking executives who brought about the financial calamity of 2008."
The complete failure of the Justice Department to prosecute a single bank executive while levying billions of dollars of fines with individual banks for fraud and other felonies continues to draw criticism from journalists, legal experts and lawmakers.
Not so coincidentally, a story in the New York Times this week said that the Justice Department, still headed by Holder, may indeed prosecute individual traders in connection with its investigation of fixing the foreign exchange markets.
"The charges will most likely focus on traders and their bosses rather than chief executives," the Times dryly reported, citing anonymous lawyers. "As a result, critics of the Justice Department might view the cases as little more than an exercise in public relations."
Eventual fines and guilty pleas for the banks over currency trading would come on top of billions in fines already levied against many of these same big banks — JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, Barclays and UBS are named in the latest Times story — for fixing the benchmark LIBOR rate.
These fines — in addition to settlements for fraud in mortgage securities, in illegal foreclosures and robo-signings, bid rigging in municipal bonds and a host of other infractions in recent years — make it hard to see these banks as anything other than rogue institutions who are willing to systematically violate the law.
Somebody is responsible for that.
Black, who likes to point out that regulators in the S&L crisis made many thousands of criminal referrals that resulted in more than a thousand successful prosecutions, makes no secret of his scorn of the current tactics of the regulators and the Justice Department.
"Apparently modern financial regulators are vastly more sophisticated than we were as financial regulators 25 years ago" Black told Moyers. "Because we had never figured out that the key to financial stability was leaving felons in charge of the largest financial institutions in the world."
Black has argued since the onset of the financial crisis in 2009 that prosecution of individuals will not, as former Treasury secretary Timothy Geithner maintained, destabilize the financial system.
The prosecutions in the S&L crisis, he told Moyers, "greatly enhanced financial stability instead of the other way around."
The guilty executives were no longer a danger to the financial system because they had criminal records. This is not the case in the wake of the recent crisis and heightens the risk of a new crisis.
"If you want to create the next crisis and make it vastly worse," Black said, "leave the people in charge who led the frauds in the senior ranks at the banks in charge of those banks. So now they have all the postgraduate education in how to run a fraud. And they learned that there are no consequences other than good consequences."
Delamaide has reported on business and economics from New York, Paris, Berlin and Washington for Dow Jones News Service, Barron's, Institutional Investor and Bloomberg News, among others.
Eric Holder didn't send a single banker to jail for the mortgage crisis. Is that justice?
US attorney general’s tenure has proven unhelpful to the five million victims of mortgage abuses in the US
Holder has a mixed legacy: excellent on civil and voting rights, bad on press freedom and transparency. Photograph: JONATHAN ERNST/Reuters
The telling sentence in NPR’s report that US attorney general Eric Holder plans to step down once a successor is confirmed came near the end of the story.
“Friends and former colleagues say Holder has made no decisions about his next professional perch,” NPR writes, “but they say it would be no surprise if he returned to the law firm Covington & Burling, where he spent years representing corporate clients.”
A large chunk of Covington & Burling’s corporate clients are mega-banks like JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citigroup and Bank of America. Lanny Breuer, who ran the criminal division for Holder’s Justice Department, already returned to work there.
In March, Covington highlighted in marketing materials their award from the trade publication American Lawyer as “Litigation Department of the Year,” touting the law firm’s work in getting clients accused of financial fraud off with slap-on-the-wrist fines.
Covington, American Lawyer says, helps clients “get the best deal they can.”
Holder has a mixed legacy: excellent on civil and voting rights, bad on press freedom and transparency.
But if you want to understand what he did for the perpetrators of a cascade of financial fraud that blew up the nation’s economy in 2008, you only have to read that line from his former employer: he helped them “get the best deal they can.”
As for homeowners, they received a raw deal, in the form of little or no compensation for some of the greatest consumer abuses in American history.
Before Holder became Attorney General, banks fueled the housing bubble with predatory and at times, allegedly fraudulent practices.
As far back as 2004, the FBI warned of an “epidemic” of mortgage fraud, which they said would have “as much impact as the Savings & Loan crisis.”
They were wrong; it was worse.
Brian T Moynihan, chief executive officer of Bank of America Corp, one of the banks accused of extensive mortgage abuses. Very little of the money from its settlements has gone to help homeowners. Photograph: Bloomberg via Getty Images
And banks and lenders carried through that fraud to every level of the mortgage process. They committed origination fraud through faulty appraisals and undisclosed trickery.
They committed servicing fraud through illegal fees and unnecessary foreclosures.
They committed securities fraud by failing to inform investors of the poor underwriting on loans they packaged into securities.
They committed mass document fraud when they failed to follow the steps to create mortgage-backed securities, covering up with fabrications and forgeries to prove the standing to foreclose.
By the time the bubble collapsed, the recession hit and Holder took over the Justice Department, Wall Street was a target-rich environment for any federal prosecutor. Physical evidence to an untold number of crimes was available in court filings and county recording offices.
Financial audits revealed large lapses in underwriting standards as early as 2005. Provisions in the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, passed during the last set of financial scandals in 2002, could hold chief executives criminally responsible for misrepresenting their risk management controls to regulators.
Any prosecutor worth his salt could have gone up the chain of command and implicated top banking executives.
In 2009, Congress passed the Fraud Enforcement and Recovery Act, giving $165m to the Justice Department to staff the investigations necessary to bring those accountable for the financial crisis to justice.
Yet, despite the Justice Department’s claims to the contrary, not one major executive has been sent to jail for their role in the crisis.
The department has put real housewives in jail for mortgage fraud, but not real bankers, saving their firepower for people who manage to defraud banks, not for banks who manage to defraud people.
Most of the “investigations” of financial institutions over the past six years have swiftly moved to cash settlements, often without holding anyone responsible for admitting wrongdoing or providing a detailed description of what they did wrong.
The headline prices of these settlements usually bore no resemblance to the reality of what they cost the banks.
The National Mortgage Settlement, for example, was touted by Holder’s Justice Department as a $25bn deal. In reality, banks were able to pay one-quarter of that penalty with other people’s money, lowering principal balances on loans they didn’t even own.
Other penalties featured similarly inflated numbers that didn’t reflect the true cost. Banks could satisfy their obligations under the settlements through routine business practices (including some, like making loans to low-income homeowners, that make them money).
A recent series of securities fraud settlements with JP Morgan, Bank of America and Citigroup, which DoJ said cost the banks $36.65bn, actually cost them about $11.5bn. And shareholders, not executives, truly bear that cost.
Incidentally, the Wall Street Journal found last week that the Justice Department only collects around 25% of the fines they impose. So the banks may have gotten off even easier.
The Justice Department has reportedly collected only 25% of the fines it has imposed on banks. Photograph: Petros Giannakouris/AP
These settlements have actually perverted the notion of justice, turning accountability into a public relations vehicle. And Holder’s Justice Department has been guilty of cooking the books: they admitted last August to overstating the number of criminal financial fraud charges by over 80%.
The DoJ’s Inspector General criticized this in a March report, and also found that DoJ de-prioritized mortgage fraud, making it the “lowest-ranked criminal threat” from 2009-2011.
As for homeowners, the biggest victims of Wall Street misconduct, they received little relief. Victims who already lost their homes got checks in the National Mortgage Settlement for between $1,500-$2,000, compensating people wrongly foreclosed upon with barely enough money for two month’s rent.
Despite claims that 1m borrowers still in their homes would get principal reductions under the settlement, when the final numbers came in this March, just 83,000 families received such a benefit, an under-delivery of over 90%.
Considering that over five million families experienced foreclosures since the end of the crisis, that relief is a drop in the bucket.
For those still eligible for relief, thanks to the expiration of a law called the Mortgage Forgiveness Debt Relief Act, any principal forgiveness will count as earned income for tax purposes, meaning that homeowners struggling to avoid foreclosure will subsequently get hit with a tax bill they cannot afford.
The Justice Department only recognized this belatedly, creating a fund in a recent Bank of America settlement to “partially” defray tax costs.
For others without that benefit, the help the Justice Department provided will look more like harm.
More important, the settlements didn’t end the misconduct.
Homeowners today continue to lose their homes based on false documents. Because the Justice Department just put a band-aid over the fraud, and didn’t convict any of the ringleaders, the problems went unaddressed, and the root causes never got fixed.
In fact, the entire banking sector’s get-out-of-jail free card gives them confidence that they could commit the same crimes again, with little if any legal implications.
The decision to protect banks instead of homeowners should be laid at the feet of the president and his administration, not one man in the Justice Department. But Holder certainly carried out the policy, even if he didn’t devise it.
We’ll soon find out if Holder merely presided over DoJ in a pause between helping corporate clients at Covington & Burling. But the failure to prosecute during his time in office certainly makes it look like Holder’s sympathies were with those clients even while serving as attorney general.
A Clue to the Scarcity of Financial Crisis Prosecutions
Eric Holder, the former United States attorney general, in 2015. Mr. Holder said in May that the Justice Department did not charge specific individuals after the 2008 financial crisis because it “simply did not have the proof.”
By William D. Cohan
One of the enduring mysteries of the 2008 financial crisis has been why the Justice Department made so few attempts to prosecute the individuals responsible for it, given the abundance of tangible evidence of wrongdoing by Wall Street bankers, traders and executives in the years leading up to the great unwinding.
Yes, the United States attorney in the Eastern District of New York tried, and failed, to prosecute the Bear Stearns executives who were responsible for the two hedge funds that collapsed in July 2007. And yes, in November 2013, Kareem Serageldin, a former senior trader at Credit Suisse, was sentenced to 30 months in prison for inflating the value of mortgage bonds in his trading portfolio, allowing them to appear more valuable than they really were in hopes of receiving a bigger bonus. (Mr. Serageldin was released from prison in March.) But that is pretty much it. The Justice Department’s main accomplishment was extracting $200 billion in civil fines and penalties from a variety of financial institutions in exchange for releasing them from the threat of future prosecutions.
We might never know why Eric H. Holder Jr., the former attorney general, chose to let Wall Street off the hook with just a proverbial slap on the wrist. After six years as attorney general and a short break after leaving government last year, he recently rejoined his old Wall Street law firm, Covington & Burling, in Washington as a partner focused on litigation, complex investigations and regulatory matters.
Mr. Holder does not give many interviews. He declined Gretchen Morgenson’s request last week to discuss his logic for not prosecuting the giant British bank HSBC for money laundering, despite the recommendations of his staff to do so. But in late May, Mr. Holder sat down with David Axelrod, who was the chief strategist for Barack Obama’s two presidential campaigns, for an hourlong conversation on Mr. Axelrod’s “The Axe Files” podcast. Toward the end of the conversation, Mr. Axelrod, a friendly interviewer for sure, asked Mr. Holder about the elephant in the room: Why were so few Wall Street bankers, traders and executives held accountable for the 2008 financial crisis, compared to the many individuals who were sent to jail for their roles in the savings-and-loan crisis of the 1980s?
“There is a fundamental question people have to ask themselves,” Mr. Holder responded. “Do you actually think that if we could have brought these cases, we would not have?” That’s the party line, of course.
He then added that Preet Bharara, the United States attorney in the Southern District of New York, and Loretta Lynch, Mr. Holder’s successor as attorney general and a former federal prosecutor in Brooklyn, would have brought cases against Wall Street if they could have. They didn’t, he said, because “we have a responsibility in the Justice Department to only bring those cases where we think we have a better than 50 percent chance of winning, and if you look at the different ways in which decision-making was made in these financial institutions, we simply didn’t have the ability to point to specific individuals to say that person was responsible for this specific action. We simply did not have the proof. If we could have made these cases, we certainly would have brought them.” He said that he, too, was “frustrated” by the lack of prosecutions of individual wrongdoing, but he did seem to take pride in the “record-breaking” amount of money collected from the banks in the form of civil penalties.
· Unlock more free articles.
But forcing big banks to hand over their shareholders’ money in exchange for burying forever the evidence of wrongdoing is not nearly the same as holding people accountable for their behavior.
Leaving aside for the moment the long list of Wall Street whistle-blowers — among them Richard M. Bowen III at Citigroup, Alayne Fleischmann at JPMorgan Chase, Michael Winston at Countrywide Financial and Peter Sivere at Barclays Capital — who tried to interest law enforcement officials in what they had witnessed at their companies (instead, each of them was fired), there may be another reason the Justice Department has proved to be less than vigilant in its sworn duty to prosecute Wall Street wrongdoing. It has more to do with legal arcana than with a supposed lack of evidence: The Justice Department was afraid that it was misapplying the law — the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery and Enforcement Act of 1989, known as Firrea — used to force Wall Street into financial settlements.
That law gives the government wide latitude to bring civil fraud cases against federally insured depository institutions and has lower burdens of proof than those found in criminal business fraud statutes. Importantly, it also has a 10-year statute of limitations, allowing the government more time to bring a case, or to threaten to bring a case. And since the investigations into Wall Street wrongdoing got such a late start — they really got going in 2012, about four years after the start of the crisis — the 10-year statute of limitations proved to be an effective weapon to get the big banks to settle. Bank after bank capitulated.
But one bank tried to fight, arguing in part that the law had been misapplied. In October 2013, a jury found that Countrywide Financial, by then a subsidiary of Bank of America, had sold about 17,000 shoddy mortgages in 2008 to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac under a short-lived program known colloquially as the “hustle.” In July 2014, after the jury’s decision, federal Judge Jed Rakoff imposed a $1.27 billion penalty on Bank of America.
“While the process lasted only nine months,” Judge Rakoff wrote in his decision, “it was from start to finish the vehicle for a brazen fraud by the defendants, driven by a hunger for profits and oblivious to the harms thereby visited, not just on the immediate victims but also on the financial system as a whole.”
Bank of America appealed the case to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. The bank argued that Judge Rakoff — long known for his tough stance against big Wall Street banks — was unfairly biased against it, that it was unable to present “a meaningful defense” and that “from beginning to end, what took place in this case was not only unfair, but utterly unprecedented.” In a brief filed in support of Bank of America, lawyers at WilmerHale, on behalf of four powerful organizations — the Clearing House Association, American Bankers Association, Financial Services Roundtable and Chamber of Commerce of the United States — argued instead that the very use of Firrea to go after Bank of America in the “hustle” case was the problem because that law was intended to protect a bank from the harm of others, not from itself.
The appeal was the first of a case that relied upon Firrea, so the Second Circuit’s ruling was watched carefully. If it were overturned, that could mean the end of using Firrea as a cudgel to get banks to pay in the remaining 175 or so civil lawsuits still pending against Wall Street.
On May 23, the Second Circuit threw out the verdict against Bank of America and vacated the penalty against it. In its opinion, the court decided not to address the specific issue of the use of Firrea against Bank of America because the bank had “persuaded” the court that the government had not proved that Bank of America violated the law in the first place.
But that the Second Circuit reversed the decision deeply troubles Mr. Bowen, the Citigroup whistle-blower, who was fired from his Wall Street job after alerting his bosses to wrongdoing at the bank and whose pleas for justice have continued to go unheeded.
“Bottom line,” he wrote me in an email from Dallas, where he is a senior lecturer in accounting at the University of Texas campus there, “the D.O.J. could not stand the embarrassment of pursuing prosecutions, only to then have the courts throw out those convictions because the D.O.J. had no legal grounds to pursue them under Firrea. That would be the ultimate proof of the D.O.J.’s incompetence and the reason they have not pursued prosecutions despite the evidence.”
The mystery continues.
William D. Cohan is a former senior mergers and acquisitions banker who has written three books about Wall Street. His latest book is “The Price of Silence: The Duke Lacrosse Scandal, the Power of the Elite, and the Corruption of Our Great Universities.”
An economy built on extraction migration also radicalizes Americans’ democratic, compromise-promoting civic culture and allows wealthy elites to ignore despairing Americans at the bottom of society.
Poll: Joe Biden’s Job Approval Underwater in California
President Joe Biden’s job approval numbers are underwater in California, according to the latest poll co-sponsored by the University of California, Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies and the Los Angeles Times.
Registered voters in California — a typically blue state and his vice president’s home state — appear to be unhappy with the president after a year of poor decision-making, leading to failed policies, such as the supply chain crisis, record-high inflation, and the botched Afghanistan withdrawal.
More importantly, most of the president’s key legislative agenda items have stalled in Congress, thanks to the Republican bloc and two Senate Democrats — Sens. Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) — not willing to give in to the far-left side of their party.
Forty-eight percent of the registered voters in California disapprove of his performance as president. In comparison, 47 percent said they approved of his performance as president, and five percent had no opinion.
In fact, it is noteworthy to add Biden’s approval numbers are way below the 62 percent of voters from the state who voted for him in 2020. In addition, the poll showed that Biden’s poll numbers are only above water in Los Angeles and San Francisco — two Democrat strongholds — while it is underwater across the rest of the state.
This recent poll reversed Biden’s poll numbers from the state last July when the plurality approved of him. At the time, that poll showed Biden with a 59 percent approval and only a 37 percent disapproval.
The poll also noted that the most significant increase for Biden was his disapproval rating and of those that strongly disapprove. Of the current poll’s 48 percent disapproval, 34 percent “strongly disapprove,” a seven percent increase since last July.
Additionally, the poll also found that California respondents are unhappy with Vice President Kamala Harris. Only 38 percent of the respondents approved of her job performance, while 46 percent disapproved of her.
Furthermore, California respondents said they are unhappy with the Democrat-led Congress, which has a 20 percent approval with a 72 percent disapproval.
The Berkeley IGS/LA Times poll asked 8,937 registered voters in California and was conducted in English and Spanish between February 3 and 10. The poll’s estimated margin of error is plus or minus two percentage points.
Jacob Bliss is a reporter for Breitbart News. You can follow him on Twitter.
No comments:
Post a Comment