UNDER OBAMA THE BANKSTERS LOOTED A TRILLION DOLLARS AND THEY STILL HAVE NOT STOPPED!
Known as the “senator from Wall Street,” Schumer dispensed these bromides to a gang of politicians on the take from various corporate interests, of whom Mark Twain famously wrote: “It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.”
Instead of prosecuting, Holder oversaw a “deferred prosecution” sweetheart deal in which the bank was required to pay $1.9 billion in penalties.
“Attorney General Eric Holder's tenure was a low point even within the disgraceful scandal-ridden Obama years.” DANIEL GREENFIELD / FRONTPAGE MAG
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.
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.
“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.”
“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.”
Special Report: The Hillary Clinton Problem
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WywjHtIzNVU
WILL GRIFTER, CHARITY FOUNDATION HUCKSTER AND SOCIOPATH LAWYER HILLARY CLINTON MURDER JULIAN ASSANGE?
SHE WANTS HIM DEAD! HIS PROXIMITY TO THE TRUTH THAT COULD PUT CLINTON IN PRISON IS A SERIOUS THREAT.
“If the Constitution did not forbid cruel and unusual punishment, the sentence I would like to see imposed would place both Bill and Hillary Clinton in the same 8-by-12 cell.” ROBERT ARVAY – AMERICAN THINKER com
Obama’s Democratic Party administration launched a furious salvo of denunciations, with then Vice President Joe Biden calling Assange a “high-tech terrorist” and Hilary Clinton reportedly asking, “Can’t we just drone this guy?” This opened the floodgates to a torrent of demands from Republicans and the right-wing media for his assassination.
THE DEMOCRAT PARTY’S BILLIONAIRES’ GLOBALIST EMPIRE requires someone as ruthlessly dishonest as Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama to be puppet dictators.
http://hillaryclinton-whitecollarcriminal.blogspot.com/2018/09/google-rigged-it-so-illegals-would-vote.html
Globalism: Google VP Kent Walker insists that despite its repeated rejection by electorates around the world, “globalization” is an “incredible force for good.”
Hillary Clinton’s Democratic party: An executive nearly broke down crying because of the candidate’s loss. Not a single executive expressed anything but dismay at her defeat.
Immigration: Maintaining liberal immigration in the U.S is the policy that Google’s executives discussed the most.
Clinton Foundation Put On Watch List Of Suspicious ‘Charities’
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2015/04/charity-navigator-clinton-foundation.html
"But what the Clintons do is criminal because they do it wholly at the expense of the American people. And they feel thoroughly entitled to do it: gain power, use it to enrich themselves and their friends. They are amoral, immoral, and venal. Hillary has no core beliefs beyond power and money. That should be clear to every person on the planet by now." ---- Patricia McCarthy
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.”
VIDEO:
THE FRAUDULENT CLINTON FOUNDATION EXPOSED.
PAY-TO-PLAY FROM THE FIRST DAY!
Is it a signal that she's back in the game because she's selling her president-ability to the world's global billionaire crowd and laying the groundwork for more funds? There are all kinds of ways for foreign billionaires to get money to the U.S. without consequences, after all. What's more, it's pretty much the biggest base of support she has, which is at least one reason why she lost the 2016 election.
“The couple parlayed lives supposedly spent in “public service”
into admission into the upper stratosphere of American wealth, with incomes in the top 0.1 percent bracket. The source of this vast wealth was a political
machine that might well be dubbed “Clinton, Inc.” This consists essentially of
a seedy money-laundering operation to ensure big business support for the
Clintons’ political ambitions as well as their personal fortunes.
The basic components of the operation are lavishly paid speeches to Wall Street and Fortune 500 audiences, corporate campaign contributions, and donations to the ostensibly philanthropic Clinton Foundation.”
THE DEMOCRAT PARTY’S BILLIONAIRES’ GLOBALIST EMPIRE requires someone as ruthlessly dishonest as Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama to be puppet dictators.
http://hillaryclinton-whitecollarcriminal.blogspot.com/2018/09/google-rigged-it-so-illegals-would-vote.html
HILLARY CLINTON’S GLOBALIST VISION:
SURRENDER OF OUR BORDERS WITH NARCOMEX AND SUCKING IN GLOBAL BRIBES FOR THE PHONY CLINTON FOUNDATION
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2016/10/hillary-clintons-global-agenda-open.html
Even though it has gone virtually unreported by corporate media, Breitbart News has extensively documented the Clintons’ longstanding support for “open borders.” Interestingly, as the Los Angeles Times observed in 2007, the Clinton’s praise for globalization and open borders frequently comes when they are speaking before a wealthy foreign audiences and donors.
Quarterly earnings put major
banks on path for record yearly
profits
The world’s largest banks posted record third quarter earnings this past week, putting 2021 on track to be the most lucrative year in history for the financial world.
Bloomberg estimates that altogether the leading banks have taken in $170 billion over the last four quarters (starting with the fourth quarter of 2020). This is the most profitable four consecutive quarters for banks in history.
Leading the banks is JPMorgan Chase, which, during this time, made an estimated $131 million per day .
Goldman Sachs made a net third quarter profit of $5.4 billion. This surpassed estimates that it would take in $3.7 billion and was up from $3.4 billion last year. The investment bank has now recorded a profit of $17.7 billion for the first nine months of year, itself higher than any 12-month period in its history. The news sent Goldman shares 3.8 percent higher, having already gained 80 percent this year.
Profits are up at all the major American banks. Bank of America increased its profits by 64 percent, Citigroup by 48 percent, Morgan Stanley by 38 percent, and JPMorgan Chase by 24 percent.
In Europe, banks also performed well, while not as spectacularly as their US counterparts. UBS and Barclays both posted their highest quarterly profit in over a decade. Their profits over the past 12 months were $7.6 and $7.4 billion, respectfully. Deutsche Bank posted its highest profits in eight years.
The stock index for US banks has gone up 59 percent this past year, while for European banks it has risen by 56 percent.
An analyst for Oppenheimer, speaking to the Financial Times, described the quarter as “quite literally off the charts.”
The record earnings come as a historic strike wave begins in the US and global food and energy prices surge. Meanwhile, the pandemic continues to rage, with weekly global deaths of almost 50,000 people, according to Our World in Data .
The surge in bank profits is fundamentally bound up with the unprecedented pumping of money into the stock markets by all the major central banks. In particular, the US Federal Reserve is electronically “printing” $120 billion of new money every month and buying US-backed treasuries and corporate bonds from major banks—flooding these institutions with cash.
This massive loan of money, with no strings attached, allows the banks to gorge themselves on risky financial practices. By trickling down to other sections of capital, stimulating investments, the money encourages acquisitions, corporate mergers and IPOs (initial public offering—when a company goes public with its stock).
Much of the record profits that are being made by these banks comes from precisely this type of speculative activity. Specifically, banks charge large fees for handling mergers, acquisitions and IPOs. They charge fees for advising companies, finding sellers and buyers, executing the financial actions involved and raising capital during the process.
Mergers and acquisitions frequently mean job cuts, eliminating so-called “redundancies” in companies. In the most recent quarter, global merger activity rose to a record $1.52 trillion.
Last quarter, JPMorgan Chase tripled its fees to $1.23 billion, Bank of America increased its fees by 65 percent to $654 million, Morgan Stanley tripled its fees to $1.27 billion, and Goldman Sachs increased its fees by 31 percent, to $1.6 billion.
In a comment to the Financial Times, financier Chris Kotowski said, “[W]ith the Fed printing $120 billion of new money each and every month, every CEO in the world has lots of Monopoly money to play with. So M&A [Mergers and Acquisitions] and investment spending and capital raising will likely remain strong.”
Indeed, this “Monopoly money” is what is keeping capitalist financial markets afloat—markets built on top of a mountain of debt and speculation, liable to pop.
While the Federal Reserve has announced it may begin to draw back the asset purchasing program in November, it has repeatedly delayed this move for fear of sparking a sell-off on Wall Street.
As the banks make record profits, the bottom half of the US have, collectively, negative wealth. The entire bottom 90 percent of Americans, according to economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, own only 26 percent of the country’s wealth. This leaves the top 10 percent with 74 percent of the wealth—a number that does not even include offshore accounts that fly under the radar!
Few banks expect their profit feast to last.
Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman drew attention in comments last week to the effects of the Fed tapering its cash injections. He stated, “It’s good to be watchful … There’s certainly nothing that suggests there are any issues, but markets are bouncing a little bit. And over the next 18 months, we’ll see more of that as the Fed starts to move.”
JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said he thought that while the cash injections, or “quantitative easing,” as it is known, may be wound down, interest rates would likely remain at record lows for another year. This means inflation “might go higher than people think.” A further surge in the cost of goods, including food and energy, could, itself, lead to significant economic, social and political explosions.
The International Monetary Fund has urged central banks to be “very, very vigilant” about workers demanding higher wages in response to inflation. An IMF report warned that an increase in core prices due to inflation and higher wages could lead to a “spiral of doubt” in the economy that would endanger growth.
A Catch-22 faces the financial oligarchy. Either let the debt bubble balloon further, driven by easy money policies, or burst it through tightening, risking a financial collapse.
Neither option poses a solution. The former risks widespread inflation and devaluation of cash, only making the next financial crisis larger. The latter bursts the bubble that has already grown larger than 2008’s pile of debt.
In either case, the outcome will be the intensification of class struggle both in the United States and globally, as these interconnected, international economic processes reach their logical conclusion.
Republicans block vote on Democrats’ voting reform bill
Senate Republicans blocked a vote on the Democratic Party-sponsored “Freedom to Vote Act” on Wednesday. The motion to move the bill to a floor debate was defeated by a margin of 51 to 49, with Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer voting “no,” a maneuver designed to allow the bill to be brought back for a vote later this year.
As expected, no Republicans voted for the measure, which required 60 votes to end the filibuster.
The defeat of the “Freedom to Vote Act” marks the third time congressional Democrats have failed to pass a voting rights reform bill this year.
The bill was doomed to fail. Senate Republicans have remained resolute in blocking a vote on all Democratic voting bills. This Republican resistance in Congress comes at the same time that Republican-controlled state legislatures around the country are passing laws making it more difficult for Americans to vote, and in some cases strengthening the authority of the state government to impose partisan control over local voting procedures.
The latest legislative defeat is a striking exposure of the political bankruptcy of the Democratic Party. Faced with the biggest assault on voting rights since Jim Crow, the Democrats have refused to mount any serious attempt to defend the most basic of democratic rights.
The “Freedom to Vote Act” itself is a pared-back version of the “For the People Act,” the Democrats’ more expansive voting reform bill, which was defeated twice over the summer. Senate Democrats and the Biden administration have made no serious effort to amend or eliminate the filibuster, thereby allowing the Democrats to pass legislation to protect the right to vote by a simple majority. As on virtually all policy issues, they have bowed to right-wing Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who vehemently defends the filibuster.
In fact, Manchin is carrying out in full the logic of the endless appeals of Biden and the Democratic leadership for “unity” and “bipartisanship” with their Republican “colleagues,” the vast majority of whom continue to support Donald Trump, promote the lie of a “stolen election” and oppose any investigation of the attempted coup of January 6.
The feckless and duplicitous stance of the Democratic Party has only encouraged the Republicans to intensify their attack on voting rights at the state and local level.
At the same time, the Democratic leadership has capitulated to the demands of Manchin that any voting rights bill be designed to appeal to Republican lawmakers. The resulting “Freedom to Vote Act” removed many provisions that were included in the earlier bill regarding campaign finance and electoral redistricting. It also caved in to the Republicans on the enactment of state voter ID measures, which are designed to block working-class and minority voters from going to the polls.
Despite Manchin’s claims that he could win 10 Republican votes for the “Freedom to Vote Act,” not a single Republican voted to end the filibuster and bring the measure up for a floor vote.
After Wednesday’s vote, Schumer said, “Let there be no mistake, Senate Republicans blocking debate today is an implicit endorsement of the horrid new voter suppression and election subversion laws pushed in conservative states across the country.” As though the increasingly fascistic Republican Party is susceptible to moral appeals!
Nor is there anything “implicit” about congressional Republican support for the assault on voting rights.
Schumer continued: “This is supposed to be the world’s greatest deliberative body, where we debate, forge compromise, amend and pass legislation to help the American people. That is the legacy of this great chamber. The Senate needs to be restored to its rightful status as the world’s greatest deliberative body.”
Known as the “senator from Wall Street,” Schumer dispensed these bromides to a gang of politicians on the take from various corporate interests, of whom Mark Twain famously wrote: “It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.”
In attempting to court Republican support for voting reform, the Democratic Party demonstrates that it has nothing to offer to the defense of democratic rights. Throughout the year, the Democrats have sought to channel opposition to restrictions on voting behind phony corporate campaigns, ineffectual political stunts and appeals for electoral support in 2022.
Schumer concluded by announcing that he planned to bring a different voting rights bill, the “John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act,” to the floor as soon as next week. That bill seeks to restore the enforcement powers of the federal government that were stripped from the 1965 Voting Rights Act by the US Supreme Court in 2013.
This is yet one more empty gesture that will meet with the same fate as the Democrats’ previous voting rights bills.
It is a fact that the Obama administration made no serious effort to move legislation through Congress restoring the enforcement powers. The absence of any genuine commitment within the Democratic Party—or the ruling class as a whole—to the defense of democratic rights was definitively demonstrated in 2000, when the Democrats and their presidential candidate Al Gore accepted without a fight the theft of the presidential election through the decision of the Supreme Court to halt the vote recount in Florida and hand the White House to George W. Bush, the loser in the national popular vote.
HSBC laundered hundreds of millions and perhaps billions of dollars for drug cartels responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of people over the past two decades. The bank transferred at least $881 million of known drug trafficking proceeds, including money from the Sinaloa Cartel in Mexico, which is known for dismembering its victims and publicly displaying their body parts.
BEFORE HIS FIRST DAY IN OFFICE AS PRESIDENT, BARACK OBAMA HAD ALREADY SUCKED OFF MORE BANKSTER BRIBES THAN ANY PRESIDENT IN HISTORY. WHAT DID THE BANKSTERS KNOW THAT THE REST OF US DID NOT?
The Republican staff of the US House Committee on Financial Services released a report Monday presenting its findings on why the Obama Justice Department and then-Attorney General Eric Holder chose not to prosecute the British-based HSBC bank for laundering billions of dollars for Mexican and Colombian drug cartels.
Last June, when JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon testified before the Senate on unreported losses of at least $5 billion, sitting behind him was the bank’s chief counsel, Stephen Cutler, who had graduated to that post after serving as SEC enforcement chief.
A key factor in Obama’s newfound and growing wealth are those who profited from his presidency. A number of his public speeches have been given to big Wall Street firms and investors. Obama has given at least nine speeches to Cantor Fitzgerald, a large investment and commercial real estate firm, and other high-end corporations. According to records, each speech has been at least $400,000 a clip.
“Money laundering is a crime that makes other crimes possible. It can accelerate economic inequality, drain public funds, undermine democracy, and destabilize nations—and the banks play a key role. ‘Some of these people in crisp white shirts in their sharp suits are feeding off the tragedy of people dying all over the world,’ said Martin Woods, a former suspicious transactions investigator for Wachovia.’”
BLOG EDITOR: JP MORGAN IS BARACK OBAMA’S FAVE CRIMINAL BANKSTER. THEY HAVE BEEN VERY GENEROU$ TO OBOMB AND HIS BIDENBOY.
“The other banks on the top 10 list are JPMorgan Chase (whose CEO Jamie Dimon was once known as Obama's "favorite banker"), New York Mellon, Standard Chartered, Barclays, HSBC, Bank of China, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Citibank.”
HSBC HAS LONG HAD A HISTORY AS THE CHOICE BANKSTER FOR THE MEXICAN DRUG CARTELS. OBAMA’S BANKSTER REGIME MADE SURE THAT NO ONE WENT TO PRISON AT HSBC. DURING HIS 8 YEARS BANKSTER-OWNED ERIC HOLDER, A SOCIOPATH LAWYER, MADE SURE THAT NO BANKSTER PERIOD SAW PRISON TIME. NOT THEY’RE BACK AT IT. WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT?!?
The report goes on to explain that “even after they were prosecuted or fined for financial misconduct, banks such as JPMorgan Chase, HSBC, Standard Chartered, Deutsche Bank and Bank of New York Mellon continued to move money for suspected criminals.”
In 2012, the Obama administration refused to criminally prosecute Britain’s biggest bank, HSBC, after it acknowledged laundering billions of dollars for Mexican and Colombian drug cartels. Among the bank’s major clients was the Sinaloa Cartel in Mexico, which is known for dismembering its victims and publicly displaying their body parts.
“Attorney General Eric Holder's tenure was a low point even within the disgraceful scandal-ridden Obama years.” DANIEL GREENFIELD / FRONTPAGE MAG
“Judicial Watch’s records request is designed to expose how California state legislators are wasting tax dollars to take care of another corrupt politician – Eric Holder – under the guise of resisting the rule of law on immigration and other matters,” stated Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton. “His record at the Clinton and Obama Justice Departments demonstrates a willingness to bend the law in order to protect his political patrons.”
And it all got much, much worse after 2008, when the schemes collapsed and, as Lemann points out, Barack Obama did not aggressively rein in Wall Street as Roosevelt had done, instead restoring the status quo ante even when it meant ignoring a staggering white-collar crime spree. RYAN COOPER
“The Obama/Biden was the most corrupt, criminal
administration any of us has ever seen, yet the
media cheered or covered up all the abuse of
power, obstruction of Justice and other crimes. “ JACK HELLNER
During his presidency, Obama bragged that his administration was “the only thing between [Wall Street] and the pitchforks.”
In fact, Obama handed the robber barons and outright criminals responsible for the 2008–09 financial crisis a multi-trillion-dollar bailout. His administration oversaw the largest redistribution of wealth in history from the bottom to the top one percent, spearheading the attack on the living standards of teachers and autoworkers.
“This was not because of difficulties in securing indictments or convictions. On the contrary, Attorney General Eric Holder told a Senate committee in March of 2013 that the Obama administration chose not to prosecute the big banks or their CEOs because to do so might “have a negative impact on the national economy.”
Report documents criminality and corruption at heart of global banking system
22 September 2020
An explosive report published Sunday by BuzzFeed News documents the role that major US and international banks knowingly play in laundering and circulating trillions of dollars in dirty money from terrorist organizations, drug cartels and assorted international financial criminals.
The report is an unanswerable indictment not only of the banks, but also of Western governments and regulatory agencies, which are fully aware of the banks’ illegal but highly lucrative activities and tacitly sanction them.
BuzzFeed writes that its investigation demonstrates “an underlying truth of the modern era: The networks through which dirty money traverses the world have become vital arteries of the global economy. They enable a shadow financial system so wide-ranging and so unchecked that it has become inextricable from the so-called legitimate economy. Banks with household names have helped to make it so.”
The report continues: “Profits from deadly drug wars, fortunes embezzled from developing countries, and hard-earned savings stolen in a Ponzi scheme were all allowed to flow into and out of these financial institutions, despite warnings from the banks’ own employees.
“Money laundering is a crime that makes other crimes possible. It can accelerate economic inequality, drain public funds, undermine democracy, and destabilize nations—and the banks play a key role. ‘Some of these people in crisp white shirts in their sharp suits are feeding off the tragedy of people dying all over the world,’ said Martin Woods, a former suspicious transactions investigator for Wachovia.’”
The report goes on to explain that “even after they were prosecuted or fined for financial misconduct, banks such as JPMorgan Chase, HSBC, Standard Chartered, Deutsche Bank and Bank of New York Mellon continued to move money for suspected criminals.”
The extensive report is based on more than 21,000 “suspicious activity reports” (SARs) filed by some of the world’s biggest banks with the US Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN, between 1999 and 2017. FinCEN makes its database of SARs available to more than 450 law enforcement and regulatory agencies across the United States.
What BuzzFeed calls the “FinCEN Files” were leaked to the news outlet more than a year ago. It has since been combing through them, in collaboration with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, which coauthored the report.
BuzzFeed News notes that it also shared the SARs with more than 100 other news organizations in 88 countries. The report, titled “Dirty Money Pours into the World’s Most Powerful Banks,” includes only a small and redacted sample of the news outlet’s hoard of suspicious activity reports.
The US government maintains a policy of total secrecy in relation to the SARs, refusing to release them even in response to Freedom of Information requests. Earlier this year, the Treasury Department issued a statement declaring that the unauthorized disclosure of SARs is a crime. In an obvious attempt at intimidation and threat of prosecution, the statement added that the matter was being referred to the Department of Justice and the Treasury Department’s Office of Inspector General.
The initial response of the American corporate media has been to bury or entirely ignore the BuzzFeed revelations. Monday’s print edition of the New York Times carried a report on page eight of its business section. The print editions of the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal made no mention of the exposé.
The report is based on more than 22,000 pages of documents concerning over 10,000 subjects and involving more than 170 countries and territories. Nearly 90 banks and other financial institutions are included in the institutions that submitted the SARs.
Deutsche Bank recorded the highest total value of transactions listed in the FinCEN Files: $1.3 trillion, based on 982 suspicious activity reports.
BLOG EDITOR: THE CRIMINAL ORGANIZATION OF WELLS FARGO HAS LONG OWNED THE OLD WHORE FEINSTEIN AND NOW KAMALA HARRIS. AS ATTORNEY GENERAL OF CA, HARRIS MADE SURE NO WELLS FARGO EXECS WENT TO PRISON DESPITE THE MASSIVE ECONOMIC DEVASTATION THIS BANK CAUSED. WELLS FARGO HAS CONTINUE TO BE A CRIME TIDAL WAVE EVER SINCE. AFTER ALL, IT’S EASY AND CHEAP TO BUY A POLITICIAN.
The other banks on the top 10 list are JPMorgan Chase (whose CEO Jamie Dimon was once known as Obama's "favorite banker"), New York Mellon, Standard Chartered, Barclays, HSBC, Bank of China, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Citibank.
One report, filed by JPMorgan in August, 2014, lists over $355 billion in suspicious activity relating to more than 100,000 wire transfers “sent, received or transferred” over the course of a decade by MKS, a Swiss-based company that trades in precious metals.
At least 25 of the people named as subjects in the SARs have appeared on Forbes ’ list of billionaires in 2018, 2019 or 2020.
The findings featured in the BuzzFeed report include:
● Standard Chartered moved money on behalf of Al Zarooni Exchange, a Dubai-based business that was later accused of laundering cash on behalf of the Taliban.
● HSBC’s Hong Kong branch allowed WCM777, a Ponzi scheme, to move more than $15 million even as the business was being barred from operating in three states. Authorities say the scheme stole some $80 million from investors, mainly Latino and Asian immigrants. The firm’s owner used the funds to buy two golf courses, a mansion, a 39.8-carat diamond and mining rights in Sierra Leone.
● Bank of America, Citibank, JPMorgan Chase, American Express and other financial firms processed millions of dollars in transactions for Viktor Khrapunov, the former mayor of Kazakhstan’s most populous city, even after Interpol issued an order for his arrest. Khrapunov fled to Switzerland and was later convicted in absentia on charges including bribe-taking and defrauding the city.
A separate piece by NBC News presents evidence that JPMorgan, Bank of New York Mellon and other banks helped move more than $150 million for companies tied to the North Korean regime.
In other words, the biggest US and international banks have made countless millions in profits serving as money-launderers for organizations labeled "terrorist" such as the Taliban and governments of so-called “rogue states” such as North Korea—with the knowledge and tacit approval of the governments of the US and other major powers—even as these same governments were waging or threatening war against the targeted organizations and overseas regimes.
The BuzzFeed report describes the cynical rationale behind the formality of banks filing SARs, which, for the most part, are never even read by the staff of FinCEN. Over the past decade, the number of SARs filed by major banks has sharply increased, indicating a growth of money laundering and other illegal activities on behalf of criminal clients. Over the same period, the staff of FinCEN has shrunk by 10 percent.
Banks are legally required to file a SAR with FinCEN if they suspect a transaction might be linked to illegal activity. Large banks file tens of thousands of such reports every year. In 2017, 19 large banks filed a total of 640,000 suspicious activity reports, according to a study by the Bank Policy Institute, a lobbying group.
But as the BuzzFeed report explains: “So long as a bank files a notice that it may be facilitating criminal activity, it all but immunizes itself and its executives from criminal prosecution. The suspicious activity alert effectively gives them a free pass to keep moving the money and collecting the fees.”
In its article on the FinCEN Files report, the New York Times noted that JPMorgan wired money to banks in Switzerland, Lebanon and Nigeria on behalf of a convicted money launderer, reported the transactions to British and American authorities, and continued doing business with the client. The Nigerian government is now suing the bank in British court.
This collusion between gangster bankers and capitalist government regulators is a continuation of longstanding policy. In 2012, the Obama administration refused to criminally prosecute Britain’s biggest bank, HSBC, after it acknowledged laundering billions of dollars for Mexican and Colombian drug cartels. Among the bank’s major clients was the Sinaloa Cartel in Mexico, which is known for dismembering its victims and publicly displaying their body parts.
That was in keeping with the policy of the US government of shielding top bankers from any accountability for illegal activities, including those that led to the collapse of the financial system in 2008 and ushered in what at that time was the deepest slump since the Great Depression. To this day, not a single leading executive of a major bank has been prosecuted, let alone jailed, for fraudulent activities that led to the destruction of millions of jobs and the decimation of working class living standards in the US and around the world.
Here, in a nutshell, is the modern-day aristocratic principle that prevails behind the threadbare trappings of “democracy.” The financial robber barons of today are a law unto themselves. They can steal, plunder, even murder at will, without fear of being called to account. They devote a portion of their fabulous wealth to bribing politicians, regulators, judges and police—from the heights of power in Washington down to the local police precinct—to make sure their wealth is protected and they remain immune from criminal prosecution.
Above the law
BARACK OBAMA, THE MEXICAN DRUG CARTELS AND HSBC BANKSTERS
In the latest scandal involving the criminal activities of major banks, the US Justice Department on Tuesday announced a $1.9 billion settlement with British-based HSBC on charges of money laundering on a massive scale for Mexican and Colombian drug cartels.
The deal was specifically designed to avert criminal prosecution of either the bank, the largest in Europe and third largest in the world, or any of its top executives. Even though the bank admitted to laundering billions of dollars for drug lords, as well as violating US financial sanctions against Iran, Libya, Burma and Cuba, the Obama administration avoided an indictment by means of a “deferred prosecution agreement.”
The agreement was in keeping with the policy of the US government of shielding top bankers from any accountability for illegal activities that led to the collapse of the financial system in 2008 and ushered in the global recession. Not a single leading executive of a major bank has been prosecuted, let alone jailed, for fraudulent activities that triggered the present crisis, leading to the destruction of millions of jobs and the decimation of working-class living standards in the US and around the world.
Under the protection of the state, the frenzied speculation and swindling continue unabated, underpinning record profits for the banks and bigger-than-ever multi-million-dollar compensation packages for top bankers.
In a front-page article on Tuesday, the New York Times outlined internal discussions within the Obama administration that led to the decision not to indict HSBC. The Times reported that prosecutors at the Justice Department and the New York District Attorney’s office pushed for a compromise in which the bank would be indicted not for money laundering, but for the lesser charge of violating the Bank Secrecy Act.
BLOG EDITOR: WHY DO THESE BANKSTER POLS THINK WE’RE ALL STUPID? JUST FOLLOW THE MONEY… RIGHT INTO OBOMB’S POCKETS!
Even this, however, was too much for the Obama administration. The Treasury Department, headed by former New York Federal Reserve President Timothy Geithner, and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the federal regulatory agency charged with policing major banks including HSBC, vetoed any prosecution on the grounds that a serious legal blow to HSBC would jeopardize the financial system.
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.
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