Chris Hedges | NAFTA Was CRIMINAL!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-104JMiZes&list=WL&index=5
Two weeks ago, the Biden administration, which is mostly a replica of the Obama administration, “gifted” the Afghan radical Islamist Taliban that enabled al-Qaeda training-camps, whose “graduates” attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 9/11, at least $85 billion worth of weapons and piles of cash.
Chris Hedges | The System Is WEAK
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WA9ELajHZMM
BE PREPARED! WATCH:
Chris Hedges | Undercurrent of REVOLUTION
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3T6gYZRWiKg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-104JMiZes&list=WL&index=5
Chris Hedges | NAFTA, Clinton, and Obama BETRAYED Americans... and Joe Biden was right there with the worst of them!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qryblALiqOI
Biden defended the wealthy in his speech to the donors but begged them to be aware of wealth inequality.
Amnesty Alert: Bill ‘Blows Away All Numerical Limits’ on Employer-Based Green Cards — for an Entire Decade
The Democrats’ proposed amnesty for migrants creates a hidden pipeline for U.S. employers to flood more cheap foreign graduates into millions of middle-class careers needed by American graduates.
‘This is the American aristocratic class being rewarded for being in financial bed with the Democratic Party,” said Robert Law, director of regulatory affairs and policy for the Center for Immigration Studies.
Democrat leaders “are blowing away all the numerical limits” on employers offering green cards to employees, said Rosemary Jenks, policy director for NumbersUSA. “There’s no limit anywhere.”
The bill was revealed Friday, and on Monday, was quickly rushed through the House judiciary committee without C-SPAN coverage. Mark Zuckerberg’s astroturf empire is marketing it as a relief bill for deserving illegal migrants — but it boosts investors by dramatically expanding the flow of cheap workers, government-funded consumers, and room-sharing renters into the U.S. economy. Democrat leaders hope to squeeze the bill through the Senate via the 50-vote reconciliation process.
The expanded foreign worker pipeline will remain open until at least September 2031, even though many millions of Americans will need jobs during the next ten years after they graduate with debts and degrees in health care, accounting, teaching, business, design, science, technology, or engineering. “If you’re in the pipeline by September 30, 2031, you’re in [the 2021 amnesty bill],” Jenks added.
People attend a protest supporting DACA, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, at Foley Square in New York, on August 17, 2021. (Photo by KENA BETANCUR/AFP via Getty Images)
The new pipeline is created in Section 60003 on page 12 of the draft bill, which says, “The secretary of State shall exempt an alien (and the spouse and children of each alien) from the numerical limitations described in sections 201, 202, and 203.”
Section 201 sets annual limits of 226,000 green cards for “family-sponsored preference” and the “employer-based” green cards that companies can offer to cooperative foreign workers. Section 202 sets so-called country caps for Indian or Chinese workers who are trying to earn green cards via their employers.
The white-collar pipeline is hidden under obscure legal references, and it connects and widens existing pipelines that are unmentioned in the amnesty bill. The pipelines include the well-known H-1B program and the little-known but huge Optional Practical Training (OPT) program invented by deputies working for President George W. Bush. A similar pipeline expansion was included in the January immigration bill introduced by Biden’s deputies.
The imported visa workers are fed into an indentured workforce that now includes at least one million foreign graduates, including J-1 science workers, L-1 managers, and Curricular Practical Training students. The workforce also includes an uncertain number of illegal white-collar workers, including B-1/B-2 visitors.
These pipelines bring roughly 600,000 foreign graduates into the U.S. workforce each year — although about half leave after two to three years — even as about 800,000 Americans graduate from four-year c0lleges with technology-intensive degrees, such as engineering, health care, management, science, software, and architecture.
In this Saturday, Aug. 6, 2011 file picture, students attend graduation ceremonies at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, Ala. (AP Photo/Butch Dill)
The draft bill also allows the roughly one million foreign students in the United States into the green card pipeline — along with all future foreign college graduates who get into the pipeline by late 2031.
U.S. executives and foreign-born managers use the green card workforce to displace many Americans who sought desirable careers at Microsoft, Intel, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon, in numerous other Silicon Valley firms, science laboratories, insurance companies, consulting firms, universities, hospitals, and major banks.
Amid this displacement, median salaries for Americans with bachelor’s or advanced degrees rose slowly. Overall, salaries rose only by 15 percent in the 40 years from 1979 to 2019, according to a December 2020 report by the Congressional Research Service. During the same period, the median housing prices also rose by 500 percent. Correspondingly, investors’ wealth in the stock market rose by 900 percent during the same period.
The green card workforce tilts the playing field against American graduates and their parents, said Kevin Lynn, founder of U.S. Tech Workers:
Parents are hoping that their kids will find lucrative careers in science, technology, engineering, mathematics [health care, business, and design, but] they’re going to be competing with foreign people that are prepared to work for much less, because to them, it’s not the salary [that matters], it’s the pathway to citizenship, and companies exploit that.
The government’s offer of green cards with citizenship for the migrants and all their children and descendants “is the greatest deferred compensation bonus that can be offered,” said Law.
He continued:
That’s exactly why employers dangle it there to entice foreign workers. The employer holds all the cards there, which ensures that the foreign worker stays compliant and immobile, and doesn’t ask for a raise or better working conditions. There’ll be no point in sending an American to college — which continues to become astronomically expensive — when you won’t get a decent job and you might not even get a job. You’re must just rack up debt, and then you’re going to end up living back at home, and be forced onto the dole.
This is creating a permanent underclass of actual Americans who used to view colleges as an opportunity for advancement.
In many cases, executives prefer foreign graduates for the desirable starter jobs because the workers do not have the legal rights held by Americans.
Without legal rights, they can be sent back to their poor homelands at the direction of a mid-level manager. This lack of power allows executives to pay them little, ignore their opinions, work them long hours, switch them from one location to another, and transfer from one company to another company.
This photo taken on May 22, 2019, shows Indian youths at a class for a three-month course on computer hardware at a training centre run by the National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC) under the Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship (MSDE) in New Delhi. (Photo credit should read PRAKASH SINGH/AFP via Getty Images)
Most of these foreign gig workers are imported and paid by pyramids of sweatshop subcontractors. This domestic outsourcing means they cannot complain as they are hired, fired, moved, and abused by Fortune 500 clients. These prestigious companies face minimal risk of bad publicity from the many progressive journalists who are required to cover the concerns and priorities of migrants.
In the tech sector, their foreign workers’ lack of skills is not a problem for most companies’ executives. Most of the foreign graduates are mid-skilled workers hired for drudgework, such as maintaining and modifying software at insurance companies, which would ordinarily go to recent American graduates.
The exclusion of innovative American graduates minimizes the risk that corporate technology or business secrets will be leaked when American graduates quit or form rival companies. This informal knowledge-sharing was critical to Silicon Valley’s growth versus tech centers in other cities — but was largely shut down by the tech leaders in the early 2000s. The CEOs first used an illegal hiring cartel but then shifted to greater use of foreign graduates. The result is that the tech industry uses the green card workforce to corral the technology under their control.
When Americans work alongside visa workers, they often face fraud, discrimination, and hostile work conditions, partly because U.S. executives can dismiss their professional advice. But they also face workplace harassment because foreign-born managers can use the visa program to sell American jobs to foreign graduates in exchange for illegal, backdoor payments.
“I was brought up that if you find an [technical problem] issue, raise it immediately,” one American professional told Breitbart News. However, the rules are different in an office run by Indian managers who gain from the expanded outsourcing instead of long-term innovation and profitability. He said:
When you find a bug, don’t announce it [to your department colleagues]. Announce it to your [Indian] boss [because] they want to make sure it’s not their problem and not their bug. Don’t go through the normal process.
“This is the [white-collar version of the] ‘Any Willing Worker‘ provision” that President George W. Bush pushed in 2001, Law added. “This is a big payback to Silicon Valley for their continued dedication and financial support of the Democrat Party.”
Zuckerberg’s Astroturf Empire: ‘This Is the Year’ for Amnesty
Congress will pass a mass amnesty this year, says a chorus of pro-amnesty activists in Mark Zuckerberg’s astroturf empire.
“Congress is going to pass a pathway to citizenship,” said a tweet from Todd Schulte, the president of Zuckerberg’s amnesty lobby group, FWD.us. “It’s going to happen via the reconciliation bill … this is the year,” he tweeted.
Zuckerberg’s deputy, Alida Garcia, echoed Schulte:
“We’re gonna win,” tweeted Frank Sharry, director of the Zuckerberg-funded Immigrants Voice. “This is the year.”
“This year is our year,” tweeted Lorella Praeli, another activist. “Let’s get citizenship done.”
Zuckerberg’s empire of progressive-themed activist groups has lobbied Democrats to insert four big amnesties into the pending $3.5 trillion spending bill. The bill is designed to pass via the reconciliation process, so the amnesties can pass with 50 votes plus a tie-breaking vote from Vice President Kamala Harris in the 100-seat Senate.
The lobbying push is rational. Zuckerberg’s FWD.us network of coastal investors stands to gain from more cheap labor, government-aided consumers, and room-sharing renters.
The network has funded many astroturf campaigns, urged Democrats not to talk about the economic impact of migration, and manipulated and steered coverage by the TV networks and the print media.
But recent polls show that the public views amnesty as a low priority, far behind the economy and the coronavirus plague. “Last week’s NPR/Ipsos poll illustrates the challenge,” wrote Ali Noorani, who runs the national Immigration Forum with some of Zuckerberg’s cash. “For Democrats and Independents, COVID-19 ranks as the most worrying topic of the day … Reverting to their pre-Trump norm, Democrats place immigration near the bottom of the list of concerns.”
But other Zuckerberg-funded activists keep the amnesty-is-inevitable message going.
“‘This is the year,” tweeted Jess Morales Rocketto, another activist working with Zuckerberg’s FWD.us. “Citizenship for millions, and we are not going home empty handed.”
“This has to be the year,” tweeted Maria Praeli, another Schulte deputy at FWD.us. “We have to get it done,” said Praeli, an illegal immigrant who was used to lobby President Joe Biden face-to-face in the White House.
The coordinated message is being echoed by some of Zuckerberg’s allies on the Hill.
“This is the year — let’s get this done,” said a September 10 tweet by Sen. Alex Padilla, (D-CA). “A pathway to citizenship is a key component of a just, equitable, and robust economic recovery,’ Padilla claimed.
The breadth of investors who founded and funded FWD.us was hidden from casual visitors to the group’s website sometime in the last few months. But copies exist at the other sites.
Many polls show that labor migration is deeply unpopular because it damages ordinary Americans’ career opportunities, cuts their wages, and raises their rents. Migration also curbs their productivity, shrinks their political clout, widens regional wealth gaps, and wrecks their democratic, compromise-promoting civic culture.
For many years, a wide variety of pollsters have shown deep and broad opposition to labor migration and the inflow of temporary contract workers into jobs sought by young U.S. graduates. This pocketbook opposition is multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, bipartisan, rational, persistent, and recognizes the solidarity Americans owe to each other.
FWD.us allies have produced multiple reports claiming very small wage gains for Americans. Those claims are cited in a “50 economists” letter and were debunked by Breitbart News in April.
However, donor-funded GOP leaders have downplayed the pocketbook impact of migration on Americans’ communities. Instead of trying to win worried swing voters by offering pocketbook gains from immigration reform, GOP leaders try to steer GOP base voters’ concerns towards subsidiary non-economic issues, such as migrant crime, the border wall, border chaos, and drug smuggling.
Big Tech, Koch Network Cheer Biden’s Amnesty to Flood U.S. Labor Market
19 Feb 20211,008
4:25
Big tech’s lobbying arm and the Koch brothers’ network of donor class organizations are cheering on President Joe Biden’s amnesty plan that would pack the United States labor market with more foreign visa workers for business to hire over American graduates and professionals.
This week, Biden’s amnesty plan was introduced in Congress by Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) as Democrats look to increase foreign competition in the U.S. workforce while more than 17 million Americans are jobless.
Among other things, the plan would:
· Put nearly all illegal aliens in the U.S. on an eight-year path to citizenship
· Provide $4 billion in foreign aid to Central America
· Expand the U.S. labor market with more foreign visa workers
· Expedite green cards for foreign relatives, otherwise known as “chain migration”
· Potentially add 52 million foreign-born residents to the U.S. population
· Eliminate per-country caps, ensuring India monopolizes employment green cards
· Increase the Diversity Visa Lottery program where visas are given out randomly
· Provide green cards to foreign students who graduate in advanced STEM fields
· Bring already deported illegal aliens back to the U.S. to provide them amnesty
For Amazon, millions of newly legalized illegal aliens, foreign visa workers, and chain migrants who would be added to the U.S. labor market as a result of the plan are a boon to multinational corporations’ profits.
“Today’s immigration reform bill marks an important step in reducing the green card backlog, creating a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers & making our immigration system more efficient,” Amazon officials wrote in a statement. “We look forward working [with] the administration and Congress to advance these proposed solutions.”
Today's immigration reform bill marks an important step in reducing the green card backlog, creating a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers & making our immigration system more efficient. We look forward working w/ the administration & Congress to advance these proposed solutions.
— Amazon Public Policy (@amazon_policy) February 18, 2021
Specifically, aside from providing Amazon with more foreign visa workers to hire, the plan includes a green card giveaway that would create a green card system where only H-1B foreign visa workers are able to obtain employment-based visas by creating a backlog of seven to eight years for all foreign nationals.
The process would reward outsourcing firms and tech corporations for the decades of outsourcing American jobs to H-1B foreign visa workers.
Executives with the Libre Initiative, a Koch-funded organization, also praised the Biden amnesty plan as “an important first step” to securing the green card giveaway for corporations that they have also long lobbied for.
“There is broad support for proposals like a permanent solution for Dreamers, workforce visa reform, removing per-country caps, efficient border security measures and much more,” Daniel Garza with the Libre Initiative wrote in a statement:
Lawmakers should seize the opportunity and demonstrate that partisan gridlock will not keep the American public waiting another 30 years for congress to enact sensible, permanent solutions. We look forward to working with lawmakers to ensure that we can get nonpartisan, sensible solutions past both chambers and enacted into law.
Todd Schulte with FWD.us, a group that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg created to lobby on behalf of tech corporations, called the amnesty plan a “critical moment for immigration policy” and a “substantial step forward.”
“Congress has a once-in-a-generation opportunity to transform a long-failed and too easily weaponized immigration system,” Schulte wrote in a statement. “The time is now and we will seize this moment.”
Despite the business lobby’s insistence that there is a labor shortage, millions of Americans are out of work today and hundreds of thousands of U.S. graduates enter the labor market every year looking for white-collar professional jobs with competitive pay and good benefits.
Already, the U.S. admits about 1.2 million legal immigrants every year. Another 1.4 million foreign visa workers are brought in annually to take American jobs, many in white-collar professions. The latest data reveals that nearly 6-in-10 workers in Silicon Valley, California — the tech industry’s hub — are foreign-born.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
Tech Workers Flee San Francisco
Employees of tech companies in San Francisco, California, can’t leave the city fast enough, fleeing for the potential tech hubs of tomorrow such as Austin, Texas, and Miami, Florida. One former San Francisco exec said: “what else can God and the world and government come up with to make the place less livable?”
Miami Mayor Francis Suarez has been fielding inquiries from top executives in the tech world, such as Tesla CEO Elon Musk, and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, according to a report by NBC News.
The report added that the mayor has also met with former Google Chairman and Clinton lackey Eric Schmidt, and the chairman of Palantir, Peter Thiel, among others.
“There is absolutely no doubt that a big part of the reason why they are moving is that they feel that there is an inhospitable environment for regulation and taxation,” said Suarez.
Miami is not the only city experiencing this type of migration, as tech employees from San Francisco are fleeing to other states offering them better opportunities as well.
Tech workers living in San Francisco had once believed that the high rent, high taxes, long commute to work, and rude neighbors were worth it if they could live in “the epicenter of a boom that was changing the world,” reported SFGATE.
But now, in the wake of the pandemic, tech workers can’t flee the city fast enough, as spending months working remotely in other towns has shown them that the quality of life can be higher elsewhere.
“Tech workers and their bosses realized they might not need all the perks and after-work schmooze events. But maybe they needed elbow room and a yard for the new puppy. A place to put the Peloton. A top public school,” noted SFGATE.
And so they fled to more affordable places, like Georgia, and states with no income taxes, like Texas and Florida. The report added that the number one choice of relocation for people leaving San Francisco is Austin, Texas.
John Gardner, the founder and CEO of the remote personal training startup Kickoff — who fled San Francisco for Miami Beach — told SFGATE that he can’t help but wonder, “what else can God and the world and government come up with to make the place less livable?”
As for Mike Rothermel, a designer at Cisco who moved from the Bay Area to Boulder, Colorado, the tech worker said that he and his wife moved into a $1.3 million house that he “only saw on video for 20 minutes.”
“It’s a mansion compared to SF for the same money,” added Rothermel.
Justin Kan, who co-founded Twitch, tweeted to his followers in August last year, asking them where he should move.
“We’re selling our house and moving out of SF. Where should we go and why?” asked Kan.
We're selling our house and moving out of SF. Where should we go and why?
— Justin Kan (@justinkan) August 17, 2020
“Come to Austin with us. Growing tech ecosystem and Texas is the best place to make a stand together for a free society,” responded Joe Lonsdale, a co-founder of software company Palantir.
Come to Austin with us. Growing tech ecosystem and Texas is the best place to make a stand together for a free society.
— Joe Lonsdale (@JTLonsdale) August 17, 2020
“You start to feel stupid,” said Sahin Boydas, the founder of a remote-work startup, of living in San Francisco. “I can understand the 1% rich people, the very top investors and entrepreneurs, they can be happy there.”
Boydas and his family ended up moving to Austin, where they were able to buy a five-bedroom home on an acre of land for the same price they were paying for their three-bedroom apartment in Cupertino, California.
‘We’re going to get a cat and a dog,” he said. “We could never do that before.”
Boydas also noted that his bills are lower, too, such as the water bill, trash bill, and the cost of dining out at a restaurant with his family — adding that he didn’t even know that there were no income taxes when he moved.
“I run payroll for myself, and when I saw zero, I called the accountant like there’s an error — there’s no tax line here,” said Boydas. “And they were like, ‘Yeah there’s no tax.'”
The report added that there are currently 33,000 members in a Facebook group called “Leaving California,” as well as 51,000 members in its sister group, “Life After California.” In the groups, people share photos of moving trucks, and links to property listings in new cities.
“When people decide to leave San Francisco, they usually don’t know where they want to go, they just want to go,” said Terry Gilliam, the founder of both Facebook groups.
Bear Kittay, the co-founder Good Money, echoed those sentiments, and even acknowledged that some people may find themselves relocating to “a place that is more conservative.”
“The things that make this city ill are not within my control to change,” said Kittay of San Francisco.
“A lot of people are choosing to go to places where there’s opportunity,” he added. “And maybe it’s a place that is more conservative and there can be an integration of dialogue.”
You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Facebook and Twitter at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.
HOME TO DIANNE FEINSTEIN, NANCY PELOSI, KAMALA HARRIS AND GAVIN NEWSOM
Adios, Sanctuary La Raza Welfare State of California
A fifth-generation Californian laments his state’s ongoing economic collapse.
By Steve Baldwin
American Spectator
What’s clear is that the producers are leaving the state and the takers are coming in. Many of the takers are illegal aliens, now estimated to number over 2.6 million (BLOG: THE NUMBER IS CLOSER TO 15 MILLION ILLEAGLS). The Federation for American Immigration Reform estimates that California spends $22 billion (DATED: NOW ABOUT $35 BILLION YEARLY AND THAT IS ON THE STATE LEVEL ONLY. COUNTIES PAY OUT MORE) on government services for illegal aliens, including welfare, education, Medicaid, and criminal justice system costs.
Liberals claim they more than make that up with taxes paid, but that’s simply not true. It’s not even close. FAIR estimates illegal aliens in California contribute only $1.21 billion in tax revenue, which means they cost California $20.6 billion, or at least $1,800 per household.
Nonetheless, open border advocates, such as Facebook Chairman Mark Zuckerberg, claim illegal aliens are a net benefit to California with little evidence to support such an assertion. As the Center for Immigration Studies has documented, the vast majority of illegals are poor, uneducated, and with few skills. How does accepting millions of illegal aliens and then granting them access to dozens of welfare programs benefit California’s economy? If illegal aliens were contributing to the economy in any meaningful way, California, with its 2.6 million illegal aliens, would be booming.
Furthermore, the complexion of illegal aliens has changed with far more on welfare and committing crimes than those who entered the country in the 1980s. Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute has testified before a Congressional committee that in 2004, 95% of all outstanding warrants for murder in Los Angeles were for illegal aliens; in 2000, 23% of all Los Angeles County jail inmates were illegal aliens and that in 1995, 60% of Los Angeles’s largest street gang, the 18th Street gang, were illegal aliens. Granted, those statistics are old, but if you talk to any California law enforcement officer, they will tell you it’s much worse today. The problem is that the Brown administration will not release any statewide data on illegal alien crimes. That would be insensitive. And now that California has declared itself a “sanctuary state,” there is little doubt this sends a message south of the border that will further escalate illegal immigration into the state.
"If the racist "Sensenbrenner Legislation" passes the US Senate, there is no doubt that a massive civil disobedience movement will emerge. Eventually labor union power can merge with the immigrant civil rights and "Immigrant Sanctuary" movements to enable us to either form a new political party or to do heavy duty reforming of the existing Democratic Party. The next and final steps would follow and that is to elect our own governors of all the states within Aztlan."
Indeed, California goes out of its way to attract illegal aliens. The state has even created government programs that cater exclusively to illegal aliens. For example, the State Department of Motor Vehicles has offices that only process driver licenses for illegal aliens. With over a million illegal aliens now driving in California, the state felt compelled to help them avoid the long lines the rest of us must endure at the DMV. And just recently, the state-funded University of California system announced it will spend $27 million on financial aid for illegal aliens. They’ve even taken out radio spots on stations all along the border, just to make sure other potential illegal border crossers hear about this program. I can’t afford college education for all my four sons, but my taxes will pay for illegals to get a college education.
THIS IS WHAT ALL BILLIONAIRES WANT: AMNESTY, WIDER OPEN BORDERS AND NO LEGAL NEED APPLY!
"In contrast, Biden has promised to open the door for new wages of blue-collar migrants from Central American and white-collar migrants from India, China, and elsewhere."
New York Times: Wall Street Backs Joe Biden
ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty Images
Wall Street’s many campaign donors are lining up behind Joe Biden, not the incumbent President of the United States, according to the New York Times.
Under the August 9 headline, “The Wallets of Wall Street Are With Joe Biden, if Not the Hearts,” three reporters wrote:
While Wall Street financiers tend to be more socially liberal, they have collectively swung back and forth between parties. Data from the Center for Responsive Politics show the securities and investment community donating more to President George W. Bush in 2004, and then to Mr. Obama in 2008, and then to Mitt Romney in 2012, followed by Mrs. Clinton in 2016, than to their respective presidential rivals.
This year, it’s Mr. Biden. Financial industry cash flowing to Mr. Biden and outside groups supporting him shows him dramatically out-raising the president, with $44 million compared with Mr. Trump’s $9 million.
The donors are already pressuring Biden to pick a business-friendly candidate for vice president, and Biden is signaling a hands-off policy toward Wall Street:
In recent meetings with donors, Mr. Biden has said that while the wealthy are going to have to “do more,” the details of his tax hikes are still being hammered out … in July, the candidate spoke of the need for corporate America to “change its ways.” But the solution, he said, would not be legislative.
“I love Bernie, but I’m not Bernie Sanders. I don’t think 500 billionaires are the reason why we’re in trouble,” Biden said in 2018.
Notably, the article did not mention one of Wall Street’s greatest heartburns with Trump — his on-again, off-again popular push to reduce the immigration inflow of foreign workers, consumers, and real estate customers.
Trump’s popular lower-immigration promise could reduce the federal government’s policy of annually inflating the new labor supply by roughly 20 percent. If implemented, it would force CEOs to pay higher wages and would pressure investors to transfer some of their new investments from the coastal states to the heartland states.
In the last few months, Trump has zig-zagged on his low-immigration promises as his poll ratings stay under Joe Biden’s numbers. But on June 22, Trump blocked several visa worker pipelines and promised regulations to ensure that CEOs are forced to hire Americans first.
In contrast, Biden has promised to open the door for new wages of blue-collar migrants from Central American and white-collar migrants from India, China, and elsewhere.
Those policies are catnip for Biden’s supporters in the technology sector, including former Google chief Eric Schmidt, who is urging the federal government to let companies hire more of their professional workforce from overseas.
Wall Streeters’ resentment towards Trump was noted in one quote from a former Goldman Sach’s investor, James Atwood: “For people who are in the business of hiring and firing C.E.O.s, Donald Trump should have been fired a while ago.”
However, Trump can only be hired or fired by the voters.
Mike Lee's #S386 bill creates a Green Card Lite program for 300K Indian workers.
Lee is backed by Fortune 500, which wants to inflate the Green Card Economy (IOW, indentured foreigners working US jobs to get 140K p/a green cards).
Estb. media is silencedhttps://t.co/fcAB4CbJgk
— Neil Munro (@NeilMunroDC) August 7, 2020
THESE PARASITE BANKSTERS DID MIGHTY WELL UNDER THE BANKSTER REGIME OF LAWYER BARACK OBAMA, LAWYER JOE BIDEN AND THE BANKSTERS' RENT BOY, LAWYER ERIC HOLDER.
THEY LOOTED A TRILLION DOLLARS FROM HOME VALUES AND NOT ONE WENT TO PRISON!
Moody’s Analytics and Goldman Sachs reports to investors have sought to boost Biden’s chances against Trump by cheering a potential “blue wave” on election day. Biden has reportedly promised Wall Street donors, behind closed doors, a return to a globalized, economic status quo that has forced working and middle-class American communities into a managed decline for decades.
“According to figures released this week by the Center for Responsive Politics, Wall Street in particular is favoring Biden’s campaign over Trump’s. The group found that Biden has raised $52.4 million from the finance, insurance and real estate industries, of which $32.2 million came from “securities and investment.”
Overall, the Biden amnesty would likely bring more than 37.3 million foreign nationals to the U.S. — a boon for Wall Street and other corporate interests looking to inflate the U.S. labor market, reduce the cost of labor, invest in more necessary housing while adding as many consumers to the market as possible.
HILLARY CLINTON: The woman
who fought Barack Obama to be
America's first dictator.
In the days of the Cold War, the narrative of the arch-reactionaries and anticommunists revolved around a conspiracy theory according to which the United States had been infiltrated at the highest levels by agents of the Soviet Union.
In the early 1950s, Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy led the anti-Soviet campaign, alleging that Russian spies occupied top positions in the government, in universities, in Hollywood and even in the military. According to McCarthy, “a conspiracy so immense and an infamy so black as to dwarf any previous venture in the history of man” implicated not only the Soviet Union but was also responsible for the “loss of China” in the 1949 Chinese Revolution.
The “Red Menace” was the pretext for attacking and delegitimizing all manifestations of social and political opposition, including the Civil Rights movement, as the work of “outside agitators” who received their orders from Moscow. It was Martin Dies, the Democratic congressman from Texas and initiator of the witch-hunting House Un-American Activities Committee, who declared in his 1940 book The Trojan Horse in America that Moscow had “envisioned an unusual opportunity to create racial hatred between the white and Negro citizens of the United States.”
In the late 1950s, after the heyday of McCarthy, the political thread was taken up by the John Birch Society, founded in 1958 by Massachusetts businessman Robert Welch, who notoriously declared that President Dwight D. Eisenhower was a “dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy.”
In 1964, Welch backed the ultra-right Republican candidate Barry Goldwater, whose failed presidential campaign was heavily influenced by John Stormer’s book None Dare Call It Treason. “Will America continue to aid the communist enemy,” Stormer asked, “to disarm in the face of danger, to bow before communist dictators in every corner of the earth? The decision is yours.”
Nothing is dead in politics. The legacy of McCarthyism is now being revived by the campaign led by the Democratic Party and summed up in a hysterical screed published Wednesday in the Washington Post by Hillary Clinton, the self-professed former “Goldwater girl,” under the headline, “Mueller documented a serious crime against all Americans. Here’s how to respond.”
According to Clinton, “Our election was corrupted, our democracy assaulted, our sovereignty and security violated. This is the definitive conclusion of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s report.” The perpetrator again is Russia, which Clinton, citing the Mueller report, claims has carried out a “sweeping and systematic” attack on the United States.
The Clinton narrative, which is the official line of the Democratic Party, is a monumental lie. Responsibility for Clinton’s defeat in the 2016 elections is attributed entirely to the operations of Russian bots and “Guccifer 2.0,” the persona of the individual who supposedly hacked Democratic Party emails. Her campaign, Clinton writes, was the “target of a Russian plot,” directed by President Vladimir Putin, who “seeks to weaken our country.”
And what did this new “conspiracy so immense” actually involve? According to the Mueller report itself, organizations associated with Russia allegedly spent $100,000 on Facebook ads. This is 0.12 percent of the $81 million spent by the Democratic and Republican election campaigns themselves on Facebook ads, in a campaign dominated by the $5 billion spent by the billionaire backers of the two parties to buy the election.
As for the release of Democratic Party emails, even if one accepts the unsubstantiated claim that it was Russian operatives who turned them over to WikiLeaks, what the emails revealed were true facts about the operations of Clinton and the Democratic National Committee (DNC)—facts that the electorate had every right to know. Among the documents released were Clinton’s speeches to Goldman Sachs and other banks, for which she was paid hundreds of thousands of dollars. Other leaked emails exposed the corrupt efforts of the DNC to rig the primaries against Bernie Sanders.
Clinton lost in the 2016 elections because the Democratic Party, in line with the class interests it represents, made a calculated decision not to raise any social issues or make any appeal to the working class in its campaign against Trump. Do Clinton and company really expect the public to believe that Facebook ads put out by Russian agents were behind the collapse in voter turnout in working-class areas of Michigan, Wisconsin and other states?
The victory of the billionaire demagogue Trump was the result of widespread disillusionment with the Democratic Party after eight years of the Obama administration, which broke every campaign promise and exposed as lies the empty prattle about “hope” and “change.” Obama focused his
energies on bailing out Wall Street and shoring
up the wealth of the corporate and financial
elite.
In her column, Clinton goes on to call for an alliance between the Democratic Party and the Republicans. The situation calls for “clear-eyed patriotism, not reflexive partisanship,” she writes. She urges Republicans to work with Democrats in an intensified campaign against Russia—with or without the Trump administration. She writes: “It’s up to members of both parties to see where that road map [provided by the Mueller report] leads—to the eventual filing of articles of impeachment, or not. Either way, the nation’s interests will be best served by putting party and political considerations aside and being deliberate, fair and fearless.”
Clinton wants a bipartisan foreign policy that is “fearless” in its aggression against not only Russia, but also China. “Unless checked, the Russians will interfere again in 2020, and possibly other adversaries, such as China or North Korea, will as well,” she warns. Unless Trump is “held accountable, the president will likely redouble his efforts to advance Putin’s agenda, including rolling back sanctions, weakening NATO and undermining the European Union.”
Changing what needs to be changed, such words could have been penned by Robert Welch himself. Confronting a fascistic president, the Democrats have managed to frame their entire opposition around a right-wing narrative. If the Democrats had their way and Trump were removed—to be replaced, don’t forget, by the ultra-right Vice President Mike Pence—it is almost certain that the immediate consequence would be war with nuclear-armed Russia.
Inextricably connected to the conflicts over foreign policy is the escalation of the attack on democratic rights within the United States. Reprising the ravings of Dies, social discontent is attributed to the nefarious efforts of Russia to “sow discord” within the United States.
Significantly, Clinton cites as a model the actions of the ruling class after the September 11, 2001 attacks, when “Congress established an independent, bipartisan commission to recommend steps that would help guard against future attacks.” She concludes, “We need a similar commission to help protect our elections.”
The September 11 attacks—a terrorist atrocity that killed nearly 3,000 people—were followed by the Patriot Act, the Homeland Security Department, the Northern Command, domestic spying, Guantanamo Bay, the institution of torture and drone assassinations as government policy, and other crimes. The campaign of the Democrats over the Russian “attack”—a lie fashioned from whole cloth—has been accompanied by far-reaching moves to censor the internet under the guise of combating “fake news.”
The Democrats’ warmongering and attack on democratic rights come together in the persecution of WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange, whose enduring contribution to the population of the world was the exposure of the crimes of American imperialism. For this, Assange is currently imprisoned in Britain, facing imminent rendition to the United States. The courageous whistleblower Chelsea Manning is in jail for refusing to testify against him.
Such is Clinton’s defense of “our democracy.”
All of this further demonstrates that in the conflict between Trump and the Democratic Party there is no progressive or democratic faction. The anti-Russia narrative has not been challenged by any section of the Democratic Party, including Bernie Sanders, who is again seeking to cover up this warmongering party with a thin veneer of social reforms that it has no intention of implementing.
The conflict between the Democrats and the Trump administration is a conflict between two reactionary factions of the ruling class. All those political organizations and groups that are seeking to direct social opposition behind the Democratic Party are playing the most criminal role. They are no less terrified than Trump and the Democrats of the development of a genuine socialist movement of the working class, which will oppose American capitalism and its wars.
GRIFTER AND PHONY CHARITY FOUNDATION FRAUDSTER HILLARY CLINTON’S LONG SERVICE TO AMERICA’S MOST EVIL BANKSTERS
https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2019/08/the-democrat-party-grifter-and-pay-to.html
The judge found these releases, together with the publication of Clinton’s secret speeches to Wall Street banks, in which she pledged to be their representative, were “matters of the highest public concern.” They “allowed the American electorate to look behind the curtain of one of the two major political parties in the United States during a presidential election.”
“Clinton also failed to mention how he and Hillary cashed in after his presidential tenure to make themselves multimillionaires, in part by taking tens of millions in speaking fees from Wall Street bankers.”
CLINTON MAFIA AND THEIR BANKSTERS AT GOLDMAN SACHS
WHO IS TIGHTER WITH THE PLUNDERING BANKSTERS? CLINTON, OBAMA or TRUMP?
The Clinton White House famously abolished the Glass–Steagall legislation, which separated commercial and investment banking. The move was a boon for Wall Street firms and led to major bank mergers that some analysts say helped contribute to the 2008 financial crisis.
Bill and Hillary Clinton raked in massive speaking fees from Goldman Sachs, with CNN documenting a total of at least $7.7 million in paid speeches to big financial firms, including Goldman Sachs and UBS. Hillary Clinton made $675,000 from speeches to Goldman Sachs specifically, and her husband secured more than $1,550,000 from Goldman speeches. In 2005 alone, Bill Clinton collected over $500,000 from three Goldman Sachs events.
Hillary Clinton is simply the epitome of the rabid self – a whirlpool of selfishness, greed, and malignance.
It may well be true that Donald Trump has made his greatest contribution to the nation before even taking office: the political destruction of Hillary Clinton and her infinitely corrupt machine. J.R. Dunn
"Hillary will do anything to distract you from her reckless record and the damage to the Democratic Party and the America she and The Obama's have created."
There is evidence that HSBC and other major banks stepped up their money laundering for drug cartels and other criminal outfits in response to the financial crisis that began to emerge in earnest in 2007 and exploded in September of 2008 with the collapse of Lehman Brothers.
HSBC laundered hundreds of millions and perhaps billions of dollars for drug cartels responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of people over the past two decades. The bank transferred at least $881 million of known drug trafficking proceeds, including money from the Sinaloa Cartel in Mexico, which is known for dismembering its victims and publicly displaying their body parts.
BEFORE HIS FIRST DAY IN OFFICE AS PRESIDENT, BARACK OBAMA HAD ALREADY SUCKED OFF MORE BANKSTER BRIBES THAN ANY PRESIDENT IN HISTORY. WHAT DID THE BANKSTERS KNOW THAT THE REST OF US DID NOT?
The Republican staff of the US House Committee on Financial Services released a report Monday presenting its findings on why the Obama Justice Department and then-Attorney General Eric Holder chose not to prosecute the British-based HSBC bank for laundering billions of dollars for Mexican and Colombian drug cartels.
Last June, when JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie
Dimon testified before the Senate on unreported
losses of at least $5 billion, sitting behind him was
the bank’s chief counsel, Stephen Cutler, who had
graduated to that post after serving as SEC
enforcement chief.
A key factor in Obama’s newfound and growing
wealth are those who profited from his
presidency. A number of his public speeches
have been given to big Wall Street firms and
investors. Obama has given at least nine
speeches to Cantor Fitzgerald, a large
investment and commercial real estate firm, and
other high-end corporations. According to
records, each speech has been at least $400,000 a
clip.
“Money laundering is a crime that makes other crimes possible. It can accelerate economic inequality, drain public funds, undermine democracy, and destabilize nations—and the banks play a key role. ‘Some of these people in crisp white shirts in their sharp suits are feeding off the tragedy of people dying all over the world,’ said Martin Woods, a former suspicious transactions investigator for Wachovia.’”
“Attorney General Eric Holder's tenure was a low point even within the disgraceful scandal-ridden Obama years.” DANIEL GREENFIELD / FRONTPAGE MAG
“Judicial Watch’s records request is designed to expose how California state legislators are wasting tax dollars to take care of another corrupt politician – Eric Holder – under the guise of resisting the rule of law on immigration and other matters,” stated Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton. “His record at the Clinton and Obama Justice Departments demonstrates a willingness to bend the law in order to protect his political patrons.”
And it all got much, much worse after 2008, when
the schemes collapsed and, as Lemann points out,
Barack Obama did not aggressively rein in Wall
Street as Roosevelt had done, instead restoring the
status quo ante even when it meant ignoring a
staggering white-collar crime spree.
RYAN COOPER
“The Obama/Biden was the most corrupt, criminal
administration any of us has ever seen, yet the media cheered
or covered up all the abuse of power, obstruction of
Justice and other crimes. “ JACK HELLNER
During his presidency, Obama bragged that his administration was “the only thing between [Wall Street] and the pitchforks.”
In fact, Obama handed the robber barons and
outright criminals responsible for the 2008–09
financial crisis a multi-trillion-dollar bailout. His
administration oversaw the largest redistribution of
wealth in history from the bottom to the top one
percent, spearheading the attack on the living
standards of teachers and autoworkers.
“This was not because of difficulties in securing indictments or convictions. On the contrary, Attorney General Eric Holder told a Senate committee in March of 2013 that the Obama administration chose not to prosecute the big banks or their CEOs because to do so might “have a negative impact on the national economy.”
Big Banks Throw Support Behind Joe Biden’s Big Amnesty for Illegal Aliens
26 May 2021169
2:28
Six of the United States’ biggest banks signaled support for President Joe Biden’s massive amnesty plan that would put roughly 11 to 22 million illegal aliens on a path to securing American citizenship while doubling legal immigration levels.
During a Senate Banking Committee hearing, the chief executives of Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Morgan Stanley suggested that Biden’s amnesty plan “would ultimately help us build a more robust, stronger economy” in a line of questioning from Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ).
Menendez, in a post online, touted Wall Street’s support for the Biden amnesty plan:
Biden’s amnesty plan, introduced in the Senate by Menendez, would import a foreign-born population nearly the size of California by 2031 as nearly 12 million illegal aliens would have taken advantage of the amnesty provisions by then, previous analysis has found.
Overall, the Biden amnesty would likely bring more than 37.3 million foreign nationals to the U.S. — a boon for Wall Street and other corporate interests looking to inflate the U.S. labor market, reduce the cost of labor, invest in more necessary housing while adding as many consumers to the market as possible.
Wall Street is only the latest special interest to join an amnesty coalition that is currently being spearheaded by Biden and former President George W. Bush.
Others lobbying Republican lawmakers to back the massive amnesty include the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable, the Bloomberg-funded New American Economy, the Texas Association of Business, and taxpayer-funded refugee contractors.
Every year more than 1.2 million legal immigrants are awarded green cards, another 1.4 million foreign nationals are given visas, and hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens are added to the U.S. population. Aside from Wall Street, the big business lobby and Big Tech have lobbied for years for an amnesty and an increase in legal immigration levels to boost their profit margins by cutting labor costs through U.S. job outsourcing.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
Sold Out: How High-Tech Billionaires & Bipartisan Beltway Crapweasels Are ScrewingAmerica's Best & Brightest
By Michelle Malkin and John Miano
Analysis conducted in 2018 discovered that 71 percent of tech workers in Silicon Valley, California, are foreign-born, while the tech industry in the San Francisco, Oakland, and Hayward area is made up of 50 percent foreign-born tech workers. Up to 99 percent of H-1B visa workers imported by the top eight outsourcing firms are from India.
Joe Biden’s Donor List Includes More than 30 Executives Tied to Wall Street
Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden has more than 30 business executives on his donor list that have connections to Wall Street.
Analysis of Biden’s more than 800 big donors, those who have bundled contributions for his presidential bid against President Trump, found that more than 30 of the executives listed have ties to Wall Street.
CNBC reports:
CNBC reviewed a new list of more than 800 Biden bundlers who raised at least $100,000 for the campaign, and found that several of them had links to financial firms. A few had been mentioned on the initial list of Biden fundraisers that was released in 2019 during the Democratic primary contests. [Emphasis added]
…
Beyond those from Wall Street, Biden’s campaign saw fundraising help from leaders in Silicon Valley, including LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and venture capitalist Ron Conway. [Emphasis added]
Those executives with ties to Wall Street funding Biden’s campaign include:
Frank Baker, Brett Barth, Jim Chanos, Mark Chorazak, David Clunie, William Derrough, Roger Altman, Blair Effron, Jon Feigelson, Mark Gallogly, John Rogers, Jon Gray, Tony James, Jon Henes, Sonny Kalsi, Orin Kramer, Brad Krap, Brian Kreiter, Marc Lasry, Nate Loewenthall, Eric Mindich, Kara Moore, Charles Myers, Alan Patricof, Deven Parekh, Robert Rubin, Evan Roth, Faiza Saeed, Rajen Shah, Jay Snyder, Rob Stavis, and Jeff Zients.
As Breitbart News reported, Biden’s campaign
is being backed by nearly “all the big banks” on
Wall Street, according to CNN analysis, and
Wall Street executives and employees have
donated more than $74 million to elect the
former vice president.
Trump, on the other hand, has accepted far less money from Wall Street — taking just a little over $18 million dollars from financial firms. This is a whopping $56 million less than what Biden has accepted from Wall Street.
Despite his Wall Street, big business, Big Tech, and billionaire donations, Biden has attempted to portray himself as a small-town fighter from Scranton, Pennsylvania.
In a post on Sunday, Biden wrote that “Donald Trump sees the world from Park Avenue,” whereas he sees the world “from where I came from: Scranton, Pennsylvania.” In fact, Biden has raised over $1 million from wealthy Park Avenue donors, more than eight times the less than $130,000 that Trump has taken from Park Avenue residents.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter
Big Tech and Big Law dominate Biden
transition teams, tempering progressive hopes
Alexander Nazaryan administration takes office in January.
WASHINGTON — For six years, Brandon Belford worked as an economic policy adviser to President Barack Obama in the White House and federal agencies. He moved to the Bay Area when Donald Trump became president, part of a massive flight of Obama officials from Washington to Silicon Valley, Wall Street and Hollywood. He took high-ranking positions with Apple and then Lyft, where he is currently the ride-sharing company’s chief of staff.
Now Belford is back, as part of one of the “transition teams” named by President-elect Joe Biden to restock a federal government that has been battered after four years of Trump by hiring new officials and advising the incoming administration on what its first governing steps should be.
Those steps could be timid, judging by the composition of those teams, where Obama-era centrism prevails. That has some progressives worried that Biden represents nothing more than a return to normal, at a time when many of them believe the nation is ready to embrace policy ideas well to the left of center.
“The status quo is killing us,” says former Bernie Sanders press secretary Briahna Joy Gray, who now hosts a podcast called “Bad Faith.”
Belford is joined by dozens of other Democratic operatives who have spent the past four years working at prestigious law firms and think tanks. On these “agency review teams” are high-ranking executives from Amazon, partners at white-shoe law firms like Covington & Burling and enough experts from D.C. center-left think tanks — including six from the Brookings Institution alone — to fill a center-left think tank.
Progressives knew this was coming. “I am very concerned about the role Uber executives would play in this administration,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez D-N.Y., told Yahoo News. Even though she also effusively praised the appointment of Ron Klain as the incoming White House chief of staff, Ocasio-Cortez vowed that corporate America would not “pull the wool over our eyes” when it came to crafting the Biden presidency.
Some have put it less bluntly. “Biden’s transition team is full of wealthy corporate executives who are completely disconnected from the struggles of the working class,” complains left-leaning activist Ryan Knight, whose Twitter handle is @ProudSocialist.
App-based drivers from Uber and Lyft protest in a caravan in front of City Hall in Los Angeles on October 22, 2020 where elected leaders hold a conference urging voters to reject on the November 3 election, Proposition 22, that would classify app-based drivers as independent contractors and not employees or agents. (Photo by Frederic J. BROWN / AFP) (Photo by FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP via Getty Images)More
He was presumably referring to the two dozen agency review team officials who come from law firms like Arnold & Porter. Or to the 40 or so members of the Biden transition who are current or recent lobbyists.
The agency review teams are not exactly settling into their cubicles just yet. For one, President Trump has not yet conceded the election, and the transition has been hindered in part by Republican operatives at the General Services Administration. And agency review is an enormously complex process, one that actually began months ago. The transition teams are supposed to ensure a “smooth transfer of power,” in large part by making sure that capable officials are ready to get to work in their respective agencies the moment Biden lifts his hand from the Lincoln Bible.
Speaking on the condition of anonymity, one member of the Biden campaign working on agency-related matters says teams were primarily tasked with surveying the landscape of the federal bureaucracy. She says that the transition teams would make some hiring recommendations, but only as a secondary function.
With a single exception, the agency review team members mentioned in this article did not respond to requests for comment.
One with a typically impressive biography is that of Aneesh Chopra, who served as the U.S. chief technology officer for Obama before starting his own medical data logistics company, CareJourney. Now he is on the transition team for the U.S. Postal Service, where he will presumably work to undo the alleged damage by another logistics maven: Trump appointee Louis DeJoy.
Of course, most progressives are glad that there’s a Biden transition to speak of, instead of a second Trump term. But they also recognize their own role in the Democratic candidate’s victory.
“Everyone fell into line and did everything they could to get Joe Biden elected,” says Max Berger, a progressive activist who worked for Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign and Justice Democrats, the group that helped elect Ocasio-Cortez to the House in 2018.
Berger recognizes that progressives will be a “junior partner” to the establishment Democrats with whom Biden has been ideologically and temperamentally aligned for a good half-century. They want to be partners all the same, not just the loyal opposition.
Many are cheered by some of the agency review teams. For one, they are notably more diverse, a stark contrast to Trump’s reliance on white males for so much of his advice. On the transition team for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration is Jedidah Isler, the Dartmouth professor who in 2014 became the first Black woman to earn a doctorate in astrophysics from Yale. The transition team for the Small Business Administration includes Jorge Silva Puras, a political leader in Puerto Rico who also teaches entrepreneurship at a community college in the Bronx.
“The presence of labor officials throughout many of the groups is notable,” says David Dayen, executive editor of the American Prospect. In the Department of Education team, for example, are several executives from the American Federation of Teachers.
He called the Federal Reserve and Treasury teams “all-stars,” a sentiment shared by other progressives interviewed for this article. On the Treasury team is Mehrsa Baradaran, a progressive economist who has written on the racial wealth gap. She is also on the Federal Reserve team, along with Reena Aggarwal, a corporate governance expert.
Progressive strategist Elizabeth Spiers says the finance-related teams are not “not quite Elizabeth Warren levels of aggressiveness but also not stuffed with finance people.” Biden’s advisers appear to have learned the lessons of his former boss. During Obama’s first year, he relied on banking executives to help quell the financial crisis. They did so in ways that steered the new president away from progressive proposals, such as nationalizing those very same banks.
There is not a single current executive from Citibank or Goldman Sachs on any of the transition teams. Bank of America has also been shut out. JPMorgan can boast a single toehold in the agency review process: Lisa Sawyer of the Pentagon team. A spokesman for JPMorgan told Yahoo News that the bank was “following the appropriate election laws” and that Sawyer was “not on an agency review team that will touch any banking issues.”
“I think the Biden administration is going to be
surprising to progressives in some ways and
disappointing in others, and the agency review
teams reflect that,” Dayen says. During the
summer, the American Prospect published a
lengthy exposé about Biden’s foreign policy
advisers’ lucrative foray into corporate
America. Many are set to return to the highest
echelons of official Washington.
“I have to be cautiously optimistic,” says Waleed Shahid, communications director for the Justice Democrats.
Relatively young progressives like Shahid are less likely to wax romantic about the way things were in Washington. They are less interested in experience than conviction. But for many in Biden’s camp, a lack of experience was among the several fatal flaws of the Trump years.
“Everyone — right or left — has made the mistaken assumption for years that governing is easy,” says “The Death of Expertise” author Tom Nichols, who teaches at the Naval War College and is an ardently anti-Trump Republican.
“After having a bunch of nitwits and cronies loose in the government,” Nichols wrote in an email, “I think a lot of people on the left are really giving in to the assumption that as long as you’re not Trump, or not a complete idiot, anyone can do it.”
Given the title and theme of his book, Nicholas cautioned against that approach. “It’s a childish and silly approach to government, but it’s a bipartisan problem,” he told Yahoo News.
While progressive may not see their stars like Sens. Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren occupying the Treasury Department, they do very much hope that a Biden presidency amounts to more than a third Obama term. It was unaddressed economic inequality, they believe, that bred the populist resentment that gave Trump an opening in 2016. The coronavirus has only made that inequality worse. That will only increase populist resentment, they worry, to be exploited by a Trump acolyte — or perhaps Trump himself, again — in 2024.
Addressing that inequality, for now, falls to transition team officials like Mark Schwartz of Amazon and Ted Dean of Dropbox, as well as Arun Venkataraman of Visa and David Holmes of defense contractor Rebellion Defense, in which Eric Schmidt of Google is an investor. Many of these officials are veterans of the Obama administration or Democratic offices on the Hill.
“There is a lot of corporate influence there,” says Maurice Weeks, co-founder of the Action Center on Race and the Economy. “And that is troubling.” But he is encouraged by the presence of “hard-core progressives” like Sarah Miller, a former Treasury deputy who is both an anti-Facebook activist and the executive of the American Economic Liberties Project, which seeks to curb corporate power. She is now on the Treasury transition team.
In some ways, the difference is between former Obama officials who, like Miller, went on to become activists and those who moved on to become rich. The latter did only what many government officials had done before them. But at a time of mass unemployment, a stint at the corporate law firm Latham & Watkins (three transition team members) may not seem as impressive as it may have when Obama was president.
“We don’t just want to rewind the clock by four years,” Weeks says.
For many progressives, Trump was a singular threat to important institutions of the federal government, but rebuilding those institutions is simply not as important as rebuilding entire communities shattered by economic, social and racial inequalities.
Wall Street, Big Banks Spend $74 Million Trying to Get Joe Biden Elected
Drew Angerer/Getty Images
29 Oct 2020330
3:03
Wall Street donors from the nation’s biggest banks will end up spending about $74 million trying to get Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden elected.
The latest financial report from the Center for Responsive Politics reveals that Biden is set to rake in more than $74 million from Wall Street, which is more than the financial industry gave President Obama in his 2008 and 2012 campaigns combined.
CNBC reports:
The sum includes contributions that began in 2019 and continued through the first two weeks of October to Biden’s joint fundraising committees and outside super PACs backing his run. Former Goldman Sachs President Harvey Schwartz gave $100,000 this month to the Biden Action Fund, a joint fundraising committee for the campaign, the Democratic National Committee and state parties. [Emphasis added]
Biden also received a ton of financial support from leaders on Wall Street in the third quarter. Going into the final two weeks of the election, Biden, the DNC and their joint fundraising committees had over $330 million on hand. That’s $110 million more than for Trump, the Republican National Committee and their joint committees. Biden’s campaign is on track to raise $1 billion in the six days until Election Day. [Emphasis added]
…
Biden’s campaign chairman, Steve Ricchetti, met with finance executives in January to encourage them to back his candidate, CNBC reported at the time. Attendees included Evercore founder Roger Altman, longtime investor Blair Effron, Blackstone Chief Operating Officer Jonathan Gray, former Citigroup executive Ray McGuire, Centerbridge Partners co-founder Mark Gallogly, and former U.S. Ambassador to France Jane Hartley. [Emphasis added]
Biden, by November 3, will have raised just about $13 million less from Wall Street than Hillary Clinton in her failed 2016 presidential run.
President Trump has received just a fraction of what Biden has taken from Wall Street. By November 3, Trump will finish the race with more than $18 million from Wall Street executives and employees — a whopping $56 million less than Biden’s total.
CNN analysis from September noted that “all the big banks” are backing Biden against Trump this election, as they backed Clinton against Trump in 2016.
Moody’s Analytics and Goldman Sachs reports to investors have sought to boost Biden’s chances against Trump by cheering a potential “blue wave” on election day. Biden has reportedly promised Wall Street donors, behind closed doors, a return to a globalized, economic status quo that has forced working and middle-class American communities into a managed decline for decades.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
HSBC laundered hundreds of millions and perhaps billions of dollars for drug cartels responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of people over the past two decades. The bank transferred at least $881 million of known drug trafficking proceeds, including money from the Sinaloa Cartel in Mexico, which is known for dismembering its victims and publicly displaying their body parts.
BEFORE HIS FIRST DAY IN OFFICE AS PRESIDENT, BARACK OBAMA HAD ALREADY SUCKED OFF MORE BANKSTER BRIBES THAN ANY PRESIDENT IN HISTORY. WHAT DID THE BANKSTERS KNOW THAT THE REST OF US DID NOT?
The Republican staff of the US House Committee on Financial Services released a report Monday presenting its findings on why the Obama Justice Department and then-Attorney General Eric Holder chose not to prosecute the British-based HSBC bank for laundering billions of dollars for Mexican and Colombian drug cartels.
Last June, when JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon testified before the Senate on unreported losses of at least $5 billion, sitting behind him was the bank’s chief counsel, Stephen Cutler, who had graduated to that post after serving as SEC enforcement chief.
A key factor in Obama’s newfound and growing wealth are those who profited from his presidency. A number of his public speeches have been given to big Wall Street firms and investors. Obama has given at least nine speeches to Cantor Fitzgerald, a large investment and commercial real estate firm, and other high-end corporations. According to records, each speech has been at least $400,000 a clip.
“Money laundering is a crime that makes other crimes possible. It can accelerate economic inequality, drain public funds, undermine democracy, and destabilize nations—and the banks play a key role. ‘Some of these people in crisp white shirts in their sharp suits are feeding off the tragedy of people dying all over the world,’ said Martin Woods, a former suspicious transactions investigator for Wachovia.’”
BLOG EDITOR: JP MORGAN IS BARACK OBAMA’S FAVE CRIMINAL BANKSTER. THEY HAVE BEEN VERY GENEROU$ TO OBOMB AND HIS BIDENBOY.
“The other banks on the top 10 list are JPMorgan Chase (whose CEO Jamie Dimon was once known as Obama's "favorite banker"), New York Mellon, Standard Chartered, Barclays, HSBC, Bank of China, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Citibank.”
HSBC HAS LONG HAD A HISTORY AS THE CHOICE BANKSTER FOR THE MEXICAN DRUG CARTELS. OBAMA’S BANKSTER REGIME MADE SURE THAT NO ONE WENT TO PRISON AT HSBC. DURING HIS 8 YEARS BANKSTER-OWNED ERIC HOLDER, A SOCIOPATH LAWYER, MADE SURE THAT NO BANKSTER PERIOD SAW PRISON TIME. NOT THEY’RE BACK AT IT. WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT?!?
The report goes on to explain that “even after they were prosecuted or fined for financial misconduct, banks such as JPMorgan Chase, HSBC, Standard Chartered, Deutsche Bank and Bank of New York Mellon continued to move money for suspected criminals.”
In 2012, the Obama administration refused to criminally prosecute Britain’s biggest bank, HSBC, after it acknowledged laundering billions of dollars for Mexican and Colombian drug cartels. Among the bank’s major clients was the Sinaloa Cartel in Mexico, which is known for dismembering its victims and publicly displaying their body parts.
“Attorney General Eric Holder's tenure was a low point even within the disgraceful scandal-ridden Obama years.” DANIEL GREENFIELD / FRONTPAGE MAG
“Judicial Watch’s records request is designed to expose how California state legislators are wasting tax dollars to take care of another corrupt politician – Eric Holder – under the guise of resisting the rule of law on immigration and other matters,” stated Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton. “His record at the Clinton and Obama Justice Departments demonstrates a willingness to bend the law in order to protect his political patrons.”
And it all got much, much worse after 2008, when the schemes collapsed and, as Lemann points out, Barack Obama did not aggressively rein in Wall Street as Roosevelt had done, instead restoring the status quo ante even when it meant ignoring a staggering white-collar crime spree. RYAN COOPER
“The Obama/Biden was the most corrupt, criminal
administration any of us has ever seen, yet the
media cheered or covered up all the abuse of
power, obstruction of Justice and other crimes. “ JACK HELLNER
During his presidency, Obama bragged that his administration was “the only thing between [Wall Street] and the pitchforks.”
In fact, Obama handed the robber barons and outright criminals responsible for the 2008–09 financial crisis a multi-trillion-dollar bailout. His administration oversaw the largest redistribution of wealth in history from the bottom to the top one percent, spearheading the attack on the living standards of teachers and autoworkers.
“This was not because of difficulties in securing indictments or convictions. On the contrary, Attorney General Eric Holder told a Senate committee in March of 2013 that the Obama administration chose not to prosecute the big banks or their CEOs because to do so might “have a negative impact on the national economy.”
Report documents criminality and corruption at heart of global banking system
An explosive report published Sunday by BuzzFeed News documents the role that major US and international banks knowingly play in laundering and circulating trillions of dollars in dirty money from terrorist organizations, drug cartels and assorted international financial criminals.
The report is an unanswerable indictment not only of the banks, but also of Western governments and regulatory agencies, which are fully aware of the banks’ illegal but highly lucrative activities and tacitly sanction them.
BuzzFeed writes that its investigation demonstrates “an underlying truth of the modern era: The networks through which dirty money traverses the world have become vital arteries of the global economy. They enable a shadow financial system so wide-ranging and so unchecked that it has become inextricable from the so-called legitimate economy. Banks with household names have helped to make it so.”
The report continues: “Profits from deadly drug wars, fortunes embezzled from developing countries, and hard-earned savings stolen in a Ponzi scheme were all allowed to flow into and out of these financial institutions, despite warnings from the banks’ own employees.
“Money laundering is a crime that makes other crimes possible. It can accelerate economic inequality, drain public funds, undermine democracy, and destabilize nations—and the banks play a key role. ‘Some of these people in crisp white shirts in their sharp suits are feeding off the tragedy of people dying all over the world,’ said Martin Woods, a former suspicious transactions investigator for Wachovia.’”
The report goes on to explain that “even after they were prosecuted or fined for financial misconduct, banks such as JPMorgan Chase, HSBC, Standard Chartered, Deutsche Bank and Bank of New York Mellon continued to move money for suspected criminals.”
The extensive report is based on more than 21,000 “suspicious activity reports” (SARs) filed by some of the world’s biggest banks with the US Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN, between 1999 and 2017. FinCEN makes its database of SARs available to more than 450 law enforcement and regulatory agencies across the United States.
What BuzzFeed calls the “FinCEN Files” were leaked to the news outlet more than a year ago. It has since been combing through them, in collaboration with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, which coauthored the report.
BuzzFeed News notes that it also shared the SARs with more than 100 other news organizations in 88 countries. The report, titled “Dirty Money Pours into the World’s Most Powerful Banks,” includes only a small and redacted sample of the news outlet’s hoard of suspicious activity reports.
The US government maintains a policy of total secrecy in relation to the SARs, refusing to release them even in response to Freedom of Information requests. Earlier this year, the Treasury Department issued a statement declaring that the unauthorized disclosure of SARs is a crime. In an obvious attempt at intimidation and threat of prosecution, the statement added that the matter was being referred to the Department of Justice and the Treasury Department’s Office of Inspector General.
The initial response of the American corporate media has been to bury or entirely ignore the BuzzFeed revelations. Monday’s print edition of the New York Times carried a report on page eight of its business section. The print editions of the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal made no mention of the exposé.
The report is based on more than 22,000 pages of documents concerning over 10,000 subjects and involving more than 170 countries and territories. Nearly 90 banks and other financial institutions are included in the institutions that submitted the SARs.
Deutsche Bank recorded the highest total value of transactions listed in the FinCEN Files: $1.3 trillion, based on 982 suspicious activity reports.
BLOG EDITOR: THE CRIMINAL ORGANIZATION OF WELLS FARGO HAS LONG OWNED THE OLD WHORE FEINSTEIN AND NOW KAMALA HARRIS. AS ATTORNEY GENERAL OF CA, HARRIS MADE SURE NO WELLS FARGO EXECS WENT TO PRISON DESPITE THE MASSIVE ECONOMIC DEVASTATION THIS BANK CAUSED. WELLS FARGO HAS CONTINUE TO BE A CRIME TIDAL WAVE EVER SINCE. AFTER ALL, IT’S EASY AND CHEAP TO BUY A POLITICIAN.
The other banks on the top 10 list are JPMorgan Chase (whose CEO Jamie Dimon was once known as Obama's "favorite banker"), New York Mellon, Standard Chartered, Barclays, HSBC, Bank of China, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Citibank.
One report, filed by JPMorgan in August, 2014, lists over $355 billion in suspicious activity relating to more than 100,000 wire transfers “sent, received or transferred” over the course of a decade by MKS, a Swiss-based company that trades in precious metals.
At least 25 of the people named as subjects in the SARs have appeared on Forbes ’ list of billionaires in 2018, 2019 or 2020.
The findings featured in the BuzzFeed report include:
● Standard Chartered moved money on behalf of Al Zarooni Exchange, a Dubai-based business that was later accused of laundering cash on behalf of the Taliban.
● HSBC’s Hong Kong branch allowed WCM777, a Ponzi scheme, to move more than $15 million even as the business was being barred from operating in three states. Authorities say the scheme stole some $80 million from investors, mainly Latino and Asian immigrants. The firm’s owner used the funds to buy two golf courses, a mansion, a 39.8-carat diamond and mining rights in Sierra Leone.
● Bank of America, Citibank, JPMorgan Chase, American Express and other financial firms processed millions of dollars in transactions for Viktor Khrapunov, the former mayor of Kazakhstan’s most populous city, even after Interpol issued an order for his arrest. Khrapunov fled to Switzerland and was later convicted in absentia on charges including bribe-taking and defrauding the city.
A separate piece by NBC News presents evidence that JPMorgan, Bank of New York Mellon and other banks helped move more than $150 million for companies tied to the North Korean regime.
In other words, the biggest US and international banks have made countless millions in profits serving as money-launderers for organizations labeled "terrorist" such as the Taliban and governments of so-called “rogue states” such as North Korea—with the knowledge and tacit approval of the governments of the US and other major powers—even as these same governments were waging or threatening war against the targeted organizations and overseas regimes.
The BuzzFeed report describes the cynical rationale behind the formality of banks filing SARs, which, for the most part, are never even read by the staff of FinCEN. Over the past decade, the number of SARs filed by major banks has sharply increased, indicating a growth of money laundering and other illegal activities on behalf of criminal clients. Over the same period, the staff of FinCEN has shrunk by 10 percent.
Banks are legally required to file a SAR with FinCEN if they suspect a transaction might be linked to illegal activity. Large banks file tens of thousands of such reports every year. In 2017, 19 large banks filed a total of 640,000 suspicious activity reports, according to a study by the Bank Policy Institute, a lobbying group.
But as the BuzzFeed report explains: “So long as a bank files a notice that it may be facilitating criminal activity, it all but immunizes itself and its executives from criminal prosecution. The suspicious activity alert effectively gives them a free pass to keep moving the money and collecting the fees.”
In its article on the FinCEN Files report, the New York Times noted that JPMorgan wired money to banks in Switzerland, Lebanon and Nigeria on behalf of a convicted money launderer, reported the transactions to British and American authorities, and continued doing business with the client. The Nigerian government is now suing the bank in British court.
This collusion between gangster bankers and capitalist government regulators is a continuation of longstanding policy. In 2012, the Obama administration refused to criminally prosecute Britain’s biggest bank, HSBC, after it acknowledged laundering billions of dollars for Mexican and Colombian drug cartels. Among the bank’s major clients was the Sinaloa Cartel in Mexico, which is known for dismembering its victims and publicly displaying their body parts.
That was in keeping with the policy of the US government of shielding top bankers from any accountability for illegal activities, including those that led to the collapse of the financial system in 2008 and ushered in what at that time was the deepest slump since the Great Depression. To this day, not a single leading executive of a major bank has been prosecuted, let alone jailed, for fraudulent activities that led to the destruction of millions of jobs and the decimation of working class living standards in the US and around the world.
Here, in a nutshell, is the modern-day aristocratic principle that prevails behind the threadbare trappings of “democracy.” The financial robber barons of today are a law unto themselves. They can steal, plunder, even murder at will, without fear of being called to account. They devote a portion of their fabulous wealth to bribing politicians, regulators, judges and police—from the heights of power in Washington down to the local police precinct—to make sure their wealth is protected and they remain immune from criminal prosecution.
Above the law
BARACK OBAMA, THE MEXICAN DRUG CARTELS
AND HSBC BANKSTERS
In the latest scandal involving the criminal activities of major banks, the US Justice Department on Tuesday announced a $1.9 billion settlement with British-based HSBC on charges of money laundering on a massive scale for Mexican and Colombian drug cartels.
The deal was specifically designed to avert criminal prosecution of either the bank, the largest in Europe and third largest in the world, or any of its top executives. Even though the bank admitted to laundering billions of dollars for drug lords, as well as violating US financial sanctions against Iran, Libya, Burma and Cuba, the Obama administration avoided an indictment by means of a “deferred prosecution agreement.”
The agreement was in keeping with the policy of the US government of shielding top bankers from any accountability for illegal activities that led to the collapse of the financial system in 2008 and ushered in the global recession. Not a single leading executive of a major bank has been prosecuted, let alone jailed, for fraudulent activities that triggered the present crisis, leading to the destruction of millions of jobs and the decimation of working-class living standards in the US and around the world.
Under the protection of the state, the frenzied speculation and swindling continue unabated, underpinning record profits for the banks and bigger-than-ever multi-million-dollar compensation packages for top bankers.
In a front-page article on Tuesday, the New York Times outlined internal discussions within the Obama administration that led to the decision not to indict HSBC. The Times reported that prosecutors at the Justice Department and the New York District Attorney’s office pushed for a compromise in which the bank would be indicted not for money laundering, but for the lesser charge of violating the Bank Secrecy Act.
BLOG EDITOR: WHY DO THESE BANKSTER POLS THINK WE’RE ALL STUPID? JUST FOLLOW THE MONEY… RIGHT INTO OBOMB’S POCKETS!
Even this, however, was too much for the Obama administration. The Treasury Department, headed by former New York Federal Reserve President Timothy Geithner, and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the federal regulatory agency charged with policing major banks including HSBC, vetoed any prosecution on the grounds that a serious legal blow to HSBC would jeopardize the financial system.
What does this mean? HSBC, in its pursuit of profit, facilitated the activities of drug cartels that have been the target of the so-called “drug war”—a war prosecuted by the Mexican military at the behest of and with the collaboration of Washington—in which over 60,000 people have died. This is in addition to the human suffering caused by the narcotics trade in the US and around the world.
It was allowed to pay a token fine—less than 10 percent of its profits for 2011 and a fraction of the money it made laundering the drug bosses’ blood money. Meanwhile, small-time drug dealers and users, often among the most impoverished and oppressed sections of the population, are routinely arrested and locked up for years in the American prison gulag.
The financial parasites who keep the global drug trade churning and make the lion’s share of money from the social devastation it wreaks are above the law. As the Times put it, “certain financial institutions, having grown so large and so interconnected, are too big to indict.”
Here, in a nutshell, is the modern-day aristocratic principle that prevails behind the threadbare trappings of “democracy.” The financial robber barons of today are a law unto themselves. They can steal, plunder, even murder at will, without fear of being called to account. They devote a portion of their fabulous wealth to bribing politicians, regulators, judges and police—from the heights of power in Washington down to the local police precinct—to make sure their wealth is protected and they remain immune from criminal prosecution.
The role of so-called “regulators” such as the Federal Reserve, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency is to run interference for the bankers. They are well aware that crimes are being committed on a daily basis, but turn a blind eye because criminality is intrinsic to the operations of Wall Street and the profits it takes in.
There is evidence that HSBC and other major banks stepped up their money laundering for drug cartels and other criminal outfits in response to the financial crisis that began to emerge in earnest in 2007 and exploded in September of 2008 with the collapse of Lehman Brothers.
Following a similar “deferred prosecution” deal with Wachovia Bank in 2010 for its drug money laundering operations, Antonio Maria Costa, who then headed the United Nations office on drugs and crime, said that the flow of crime syndicate money represented the only “liquid investment capital” available to the banks at the height of the crisis. “Inter-bank loans were funded by money that originated from the drugs trade,” he said.
There can be little doubt that US regulators and political leaders gave their tacit consent to these operations as part of their rush to rescue Wall Street from the consequences of its own money-mad speculative binge.
The incestuous relationship between bank regulators and the banks comes into full view in the case of another recent bank scandal. Last week, Deutsche Bank was named by three ex-employees in a complaint to the SEC alleging that it fraudulently concealed $12 billion in losses between 2007 and 2009.
The Financial Times noted in passing that Robert Khuzami, the head of enforcement at the SEC, has recused himself from the probe because, before taking his post at the federal agency, he was Deutsche Bank’s general counsel for the Americas from 2004 to 2009. In other words, he was in charge of legally defending the bank at the very time it was, according to whistle blowers, engaging in accounting fraud.
This was also the period when Deutsche Bank and other major banks were making billions by poisoning the world financial system with toxic mortgage-backed securities. Last year, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations devoted 45 pages of a voluminous report on the financial crash to the fraudulent activities of Deutsche Bank.
The report noted that the bank’s top trader in collateralized debt obligations had referred to securities the bank was selling as “crap” and “pigs,” and called the banking industry’s CDO operations a “Ponzi scheme.”
That such a man should be put in charge of policing the banks is, in fact, par for the course. The man who recommended that the Obama administration give Khuzami the job, Richard Walker, the current chief counsel at Deutsche Bank, was himself a former head of enforcement at the SEC.
Last June, when JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon testified before the Senate on unreported losses of at least $5 billion, sitting behind him was the bank’s chief counsel, Stephen Cutler, who had graduated to that post after serving as SEC enforcement chief.
This Augean stable of crime and corruption, which involves every official institution of American capitalism, cannot be reformed. The stranglehold of the financial aristocracy over economic life can be ended only through the mass mobilization of the working class to expropriate the bankers and place the major banks and financial institutions under public ownership and democratic control.
US Justice Department blocked
prosecution of HSBC bank for drug
cartel money laundering
The Republican staff of the US House
Committee on Financial Services released a
report Monday presenting its findings on why
the Obama Justice Department and then-
Attorney General Eric Holder chose not to
prosecute the British-based HSBC bank for
laundering billions of dollars for Mexican and
Colombian drug cartels.
The report, titled “Too Big to Jail,” reveals that in 2012 Holder and other senior Justice Department officials ignored an internal department recommendation to criminally prosecute key bankers at HSBC. The report also documents the fact that George Osborne, then Britain’s chancellor of the exchequer, warned the Obama administration that prosecution of the world’s fourth-largest bank could precipitate a new global financial crisis.
The report states: “Rather than lacking adequate evidence to prove HSBC’s criminal conduct, internal Treasury documents show that DOJ [Department of Justice] leadership declined to pursue AFMLS’s [Asset Forfeiture and Money Laundering] recommendation to prosecute HSBC because senior DOJ leaders were concerned that prosecuting the bank ‘could result in a global financial disaster’—as [Britain’s Financial Services Authority] repeatedly warned.”
HSBC laundered hundreds of millions and perhaps billions of dollars for drug cartels responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of people over the past two decades. The bank transferred at least $881 million of known drug trafficking proceeds, including money from the Sinaloa Cartel in Mexico, which is known for dismembering its victims and publicly displaying their body parts.
In a lawsuit filed against HSBC by the families of Americans killed by Mexican cartels, prosecutors presented evidence that Mexican drug lords were such frequent customers at HSBC that the bank specifically designed deposit boxes for their use that would fit in HSBC bank teller windows.
The report documents the criminal role of the Obama administration in shielding the gangsters who run the major banks in the US and internationally from prosecution for their illegal and socially destructive deeds. It makes clear that the failure of the US government to hold criminally liable a single leading Wall Street figure in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash, which was triggered by rampant fraud and swindling, is the result of a highly conscious and systematic policy.
Holder himself all but admitted as much in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee in March of 2013, when he declared: “I am concerned that the size of some of these institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them, when we are hit with indications that if we do prosecute—if we do bring a criminal charge—it will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy.”
Instead of jailing the banksters, the administration and the Federal Reserve plowed trillions of dollars in public funds into the financial system to drive up stock prices and the already obscene wealth of the financial aristocracy, while making the working class pay the cost in the form of savage social cuts, the destruction of pension and health care benefits, layoffs and wage reductions.
A separate US Senate report released in 2012 already concluded that HSBC had a “pervasively polluted” culture that permitted its top officials to look the other way and allow $7 billion in drug money to flow from Mexico to the US. That year, Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence David S. Cohen stated, “HSBC absolutely knew the risks of the business it pursued, yet it ignored specific, obvious warnings.”
The House report issued Monday states that Holder “misled” Congress as to why the DOJ did not prosecute the bank. After being criticized for his “too big to jail” comments before the Senate in March 2013, Holder sought to walk them back in testimony before the House Judiciary Committee in May 2013. He denied at that time that he was unwilling to prosecute a major bank because of its size and claimed HSBC’s size was not a significant factor in the Justice Department’s decision not to prosecute. The reason, he said, was “lack of evidence.”
The House committee found, on the contrary, that the Asset Forfeiture and Money Laundering section of the DOJ wanted to criminally prosecute bankers at HSBC precisely because their violations of law were so blatant and so well documented.
The report cites a letter sent by Osborne to then-Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and then-Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner in which Osborne warned that prosecuting a “systemically important financial institution” such as HSBC “could lead to [financial] contagion” and pose “very serious implications for financial and economic stability, particularly in Europe and Asia.” Later, Osborne underscored this point in a face-to-face meeting with Bernanke in which they discussed the possible prosecution of HSBC bankers.
Instead of prosecuting, Holder oversaw a “deferred prosecution” sweetheart deal in which the bank was required to pay $1.9 billion in penalties.
Families of Americans killed by
Mexican drug cartels sue banking
giant HSBC
On February 9, four US families who lost loved ones to Mexican drug cartel violence in 2010 and 2011 filed an unprecedented lawsuit against HSBC Holdings, HSBC Bank USA, and HSBC México S.A. The suit charges that the banking giant knowingly supplied terrorist organizations, namely four major drug cartels, with “material support” by laundering billions of dollars in the years leading up to the murders.
Among the victims cited in the case is US Immigration and Customs Enforcement Special Agent Jaime J. Zapata who was ambushed and murdered by the infamous drug cartel, Los Zetas, while on temporary assignment in central Mexico in 2011. The case received national attention after confirmed reports that at least one of the weapons used to kill him was linked back to the US government. The AK-47 was one of the many weapons essentially funneled to the drug cartels as part of the federal operation known as “Fast and Furious,” in which the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms deliberately allowed firearms dealers to sell weapons to illegal straw buyers in hopes of tracing them back to the cartels.
Other victims included in the lawsuit are Rafael Morales Jr., who was abducted just outside a church on his wedding day, along with his brother and uncle, by members of the Sinaloa cartel with the collaboration of the local police force. All three were later found dead of asphyxiation, their heads wrapped in plastic and duct tape.
Also included in the lawsuit are Lesley and Arthur Redelfs, who were both shot to death in Ciudad Juarez on their way home from a children's birthday party hosted by the US Consulate where Lesley was employed. Lesley Redelfs was four months pregnant.
The basis of the case rests on the US Anti-Terrorism Act, which was modified in the aftermath of 9/11 to allow victims to seek compensation from any organization that supplies terrorist groups with material support or resources. While the US government has not officially labeled them as terrorist organizations, the suit cites the more than 100,000 murders and tens of thousands of disappearances since 2006 in arguing for the right to victims’ compensation.
HSBC’s guilt in laundering billions of dollars for drug cartels is irrefutable. The details of the many, well documented occurrences of the bank’s sidestepping, and in most instances outright disregard for banking laws exposed in the legal proceedings of this case and a related 2012 case are overwhelming. The complaint filed by the plaintiffs’ in Brownsville, Texas on February 9, reveals that HSBC’s Mexican branches routinely accepted and processed exorbitant amounts, hundreds of thousands and sometimes millions of US dollars from clients with no identifiable source of income.
The complaint reads, “HSBC intentionally implemented criminally deficient anti-money laundering programs, processes, and controls, which were designed to guarantee that billions of dollars of illicit proceeds would go through its banks undetected or unreported.” It goes on to explain that in many cases these funds were even delivered in custom designed boxes made to fit the dimensions of the teller windows.
In spite of the deliberately lax, and during certain periods nonexistent, regulatory system, the compliance function at HSBC Mexico was still able to catch suspicious activity. In December 2008, there were 675 accounts pending closure based on suspicion of money laundering activity. Closures were ordered on 16 of those accounts in 2005, 130 in 2006, 172 in 2007, and 309 in 2008, yet all 675 of these accounts remained open well into 2009, continuing to allow money launderers to make bulk cash deposits.
HSBC Mexico’s former director of money laundering deterrence, in an exit interview following his resignation, was quoted as saying that he believed senior management had “absolutely no respect for AML [Anti-money laundering] controls and the risks to which the Group was exposed and had no intention of applying sensible or appropriate approaches.” The report goes on to explain that the former director attributed the behavior to what he characterized as “a culture [of] pursuing profit and targets at all costs.”
HSBC executives received repeated and explicit warnings about the large scale money laundering schemes from outside sources such as the US State Department as early as 2006, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network—a bureau of the US Treasury Department—as well as several internal warnings throughout 2007 and 2008. Despite this, HSBC Mexico still accepted over $4.1 billion in US dollar cash deposits in 2008, a record amount for the branch. It is widely believed that many banks, including HSBC, only managed to stay afloat through the 2008 financial crisis by catering to these international drug cartels.
The money laundering that is the basis of this new lawsuit was proven in a 2012 prosecution by the US Justice Department. The case ended in a “preferred prosecution agreement” in which the court gave the multinational bank what amounted to a free pass for the largest drug money laundering case in history. Under the conditions of this agreement the bank agreed not to contest the charges of failing to maintain an effective anti-money-laundering program, and violating the Trading With the Enemy Act and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.
What made this case unique, aside from the huge amount of funds proven to have been laundered (at least $881 million), was the Justice Department's brazen acknowledgement of the motives behind its failure to pursue a more aggressive prosecution, namely, the protection of the global capitalist financial markets.
Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer at a press conference justifying why criminal charges were not brought against the bank explained, “HSBC would almost certainly have lost its banking license in the US, the future of the institution would have been under threat and the entire banking system would have been destabilized.” Meaning, the big banks and other multibillion-dollar corporations are exempt from the law so long as they continue lining the pockets of the ruling aristocracy. This decision exposed decisively, once again, the inextricable and corrupt relationship between the various branches of the government and the global financial oligarchs.
The 2012 decision brought down by a Brooklyn federal judge was admittedly not based on any principled fulfillment of the law. Rather, it served to establish a more tangible basis for the legal shielding that had been regularly taking place for this type of giant corporation deemed “too big to jail.”
In lieu of any criminal charge against the responsible parties, the bank was instead fined $1.9 billion, an amount equal to barely five weeks worth of profits for HSBC and far less than it accrued through its laundering of drug money. It constituted a fairly minor cost of doing business. Not a single day of jail time was demanded for the bank executives, who had essentially functioned as the financial arm of the drug cartels.
The relationship between massive international banks such as HSBC and the Mexican drug cartels like Los Zetas and Sinaloa has been one of mutual benefit. Both organizations are driven by an insatiable need for profit demanded by the capitalist system and both are indifferent to the criminal methods by which it is gained.
However, as this case so clearly shows, it is not simply the banks who are complicit in the massive growth and influence of these drug cartels. The banks play an important role in providing a financial system to manage their money, but it is the US Justice Department that has sanctioned such criminal behavior, and the US government as a whole that has created and perpetuated the conditions under which such corrupt and violent drug cartels could thrive.
The US government’s support for Mexico’s “drug war” begun in 2006 has done nothing to curb the growth of the drug cartels and instead has arguably served to intensify it. The Merida Initiative implemented by the US government in 2008, supplied Mexico with over $2 billion in arms aid, provided military training of security forces and sent “advisers” across the border. With large sections of Mexico’s officials and law enforcement officers working in collaboration with the drug cartels, much of these funds and resources have aided the very groups they were meant to combat. One report estimates that the cartels spend more than a billion dollars each year just bribing the Mexican municipal police.
In the case of Rafael Morales, it was in fact the local police force who accompanied the Sinaloa cartel and barricaded the road to the church and it was arms provided by the US government that were used against Zapata in 2011.
On closer examination, the origins of these drug cartels themselves lie in the relations between the US and Mexican governments. Before becoming Los Zetas, the original members of the violent drug cartel were a special forces unit of the Mexican Army trained in the United States at the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia. If HSBC is found guilty of providing material “means and resources” to these terrorist organizations then it seems there should be ample evidence and grounds to also indict the US government as well.
Whatever the outcome of the recent lawsuit, the
case has exposed once more the fraudulent
character of the “war on drugs,” as well as the
staggering levels of criminality of the highest
reaches of the financial aristocracy and of the
political institutions that represent it.
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