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Here is your open thread for the mid-week on December 19th, 2012. You may post random links and off-topic discussions here. Also, if you have an idea or a topic you’d like to see covered in an article, please make it known.
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The Obama bakster fellatio continues. Don’t blame me, I voted for William K. Black.
The lesson is that if you run a crime syndicate of sufficent size, and that shutting you down will result in job losses. no problema. Obama, Holder and Breuer have got your back.
http://www.mainjustice.com/2012/12/14/spitzer-offers-brutal-assessment-of-breuer-hsbc-settlement/
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“The goal is not to bring the drug cartels down,” said Breuer, adding that the department meant to avoid the loss of jobs and “systemic” harm to the economy.
http://www.newyorklawjournal.com/PubArticleNY.jsp?id=1202581158679&HSBC_Agrees_to_19B_Penalty_in_MoneyLaundering_Probe&slreturn=20121119114740
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RE: Blurtman @ 2 – RE: Blurtman @ 1 –
I have the feeling this is just the tip of an iceberg. I think these guys will be rolling all over each other to stay out of jail.
Drug trafficking is by estimates a Billion dollar industry in the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars depending on what you read, and believe.There is no way this amount of cash, cash money, because there is no credit in the drug business, never touched the banking system.
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RE: David Losh @ 3 – No, Dave. Drug users and small time dealers, disproportionately minority, will continue to be jailed, while the rich primarily white enablers go free. This country really has been hijacked by the banking industry, who can commit no crimes.
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RE: Blurtman @ 4 –
The moral of the story is: if you’re going to either commit major fraud or major drug laundering, be an executive of a major bank. You’ll be protected, you’ll be too big to fail.
The banking lobby is very powerful. It doesn’t matter what the law is or what the people want. Some lobbies are way too powerful, and have influence that is harmful to the interests of most Americans. The insurance lobby, for one. The pharmaceutical industry. AIPAC. And the banking industry. They have a stranglehold on our economy.
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RE: Ira Sacharoff @ 5 – Dark times for America.
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If You’re Selling Your Seattle Home over the Holidays
They recommend Christmas decorations, albeit keep them non-religious.
http://seattletimes.com/html/designdecor/2019884651_hreholidaystagingxml.html?prmid=head_main
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RE: Blurtman @ 4 –
Do you remember the program Miami Vice. They spent years looking for the drug king pin, and I think in the last episode they were talking to an older, white, bank executive, who admitted that they had found him, and no one was going to care.
There is no doubt in my mind that the drug business is run by some of the very people who run some our largest corporation. It’s just the course of business, that if you do business in certain parts of the world trade offs are expected.
What I’m saying about HSBC is that there will be investigations that will go nowhere, but these guys will never be free from the stigma. Whatever they were doing that part is over. What will continue is the questioning.
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RE: Ira Sacharoff @ 5 –
Yes Ira
I read in this month’s Fortune magazine that the Mexican Drug Cartel currently has 10 main establishments in America….I heard from a recent MSM source a main office was in a California prison….something like 40,000 dead in Mexico alone to date with drug cartel beheadings, yes, worse war there than Iraq and Afghanistan…sad.
Time to put the crimelords out of business.
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By Ira Sacharoff @ 5:
Don’t forget the military industrial complex. We’ve been in some kind of war nearly continuously since WWII. That’s quite a while ago. And don’t forget big media, which trounces on logic and convinces the public that all the other lobbies are really good guys.
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By softwarengineer @ 9:
Put the crime lords out of business? Are you joking or serious? Nobody in government really wants to do that. You should get off that couch and learn what’s going on around you.
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RE: Macro Investor @ 10 – Yes, our wonderful media. Yesterday I couldn’t believe my ears while listening to ABC’s radio news when they stated that .223 bullets (as used in last week’s school shooting) are designed to fragment, despite the fact that this is completely untrue (and would violate international treaties). There is no fact-checking any longer in network news; we are in full-blown propaganda mode now.
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RE: Macro Investor @ 11 –
One Can Only Hope (i.e. I-502 seemed to do it for instance)
But yes, I know what you’re saying, foreign/corporate control of America has got even our Social Security Agency overlooking MASS identity fraud to keep our lower waged insourced replacement workers with Social Security Numbers….hades the banksters are involved in and aware of this identity fraud too [credit agencies too]….if they are using our SSN, we’d never know it most likely too….they mask it well.
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RE: Macro Investor @ 10 – Which is why “The War on Terror” was an absolute dream come true for The Complex. What war is better than one which can never be declared as won and completed. A blank check.
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RE: wreckingbull @ 14 –
Don’t Throw the Seattle Boeing Defense Income Baby Out With the Mortgage Interest Tax Deduction Water Though
I don’t know which will damage Seattle real estate more; defense cuts or mortgage interest tax deduction cuts….they sound equal to me.
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Home Mortgage Interest Rates Bottomed Out, Now Going Up Again?
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/slight-uptick-mortgage-rates-spooks-165206512.html;_ylt=Ai4clGO1ne1.d17bgglB5xiiuYdG;_ylu=X3oDMTQ4bWhuNzAxBG1pdANDTkJDIFRvcCBTdG9yaWVzBHBrZwMwYzg1OTZiZi05ZmQwLTNlYmItOWNhZS1lZGM1MzVhMWJjNDcEcG9zAzQEc2VjA01lZGlhQkxpc3RNaXhlZExQQ0FUZW1wBHZlcgM4OGQ2NjkxOS00OWZlLTExZTItYjM3Zi1mODVlYWM1NzU4NmY-;_ylg=X3oDMTFpNzk0NjhtBGludGwDdXMEbGFuZwNlbi11cwRwc3RhaWQDBHBzdGNhdANob21lBHB0A3NlY3Rpb25z;_ylv=3
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By redmondjp @ 12:
The world is topsy turvy. The panel on Fox News Sunday was less educated on guns and gave worse information than the person The View brought in on Monday .
What I like is how many/most of the suggested changes to gun laws would have had no impact on this event, because the guns were legally purchased through normal channels. And the one change that would be effective–an assault weapons ban–won’t be effective for 100 years, when the existing guns of that type are no longer serviceable. People are using this event to push bad proposals that won’t work rather than find proposals that will work.
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RE: Kary L. Krismer @ 17 – Watch. This will be similar to the aftermath of 9/11. Emotionally-charged, poorly-conceived ‘solutions’ to the problem which further political interests, but not public safety.
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By wreckingbull @ 18:
Exactly. As a famous progressive once said: “You never want a serious crisis go to waste . . .”
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By redmondjp @ 19:
Rah Effin Emmanuel? That famous progessive?
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What happened to the edit function? It has saved me in the past and I miss it.
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RE: David Losh @ 3 –
As you would have a clue, Dave. Any major bank at any given point in time has 15-20 regulators working in it, monitoring all sorts of things. Sure, there’s some money laundering and it is caught and regularly prosecuted. In most cases it runs from bank branches outside the country.
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Excellent piece on Washington unemployment by Talton.
http://seattletimes.com/html/soundeconomywithjontalton/2019938310_the_trouble_with_washingtons_u.html
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RE: 2kt @ 22 –
Right, and with a global banking system, individual securities, managed funds, and thousands of land investments, cash just kind of gets lost in the numbers.
The drug business is one of the oldest, and largest businesses in the world.
There is no credit in the drug business so where does the cash come from, and how is it transferred?
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Aubrey is apparently branching out over at the P-I, covering rainbow crosswalks.
http://blog.seattlepi.com/thebigblog/2012/12/19/where-should-rainbow-crosswalk-land-on-capitol-hill/
Isn’t that a safety hazard? Crosswalks should be easily recognizable as such and not cause any confusion or distraction. For this one I could see cars slamming on their brakes for no reason:
http://blog.seattlepi.com/thebigblog/files/2012/12/20121219crosswalk10-600×399.jpg
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By David Losh @ 24:
If you include alcohol, then yes it’s old. But if you’re only including illegal drug trade, that is less than 100 years old, because society hasn’t been stupid for that long of time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_United_States_drug_prohibition
As to where the cash comes from, I don’t know why you think credit is necessary. Perhaps the user takes a cash advance on their credit card, but it really doesn’t matter. In the illegal trade most the cash comes from relatively small transactions which don’t require special financing. The cash from multiple transactions is then accumulated, which without access to banks creates issues.
On the producer side, the product itself is cheap to produce, and only expensive to buy due to the drug laws. Again, no need for much financing.
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RE: Kary L. Krismer @ 26 –
The drug trade is a billion dollar industry. To buy the product, ship it, distribute it, and process the proceeds costs millions of dollars, and it’s not like a auto parts industry that is mostly floated with credit. These people get paid in cash.
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RE: David Losh @ 27 – Yes, they get paid in cash. The problem is moving the cash to where it’s needed, especially if that involves going across international borders.
They don’t need credit. It’s a very high profit industry because the drug laws limit the supply greatly, which drives up the prices.
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RE: Kary L. Krismer @ 28 –
“British bank HSBC has agreed to pay $1.9 billion in forfeitures and penalties, but it has avoided criminal prosecution in connection with the laundering of $881 million from narcotics traffickers in Mexico and for allowing prohibited transactions with Libya, Iran, Burma, Sudan and Cuba.”
Blurtman in comment 1, and 2 was referring to this.
Even big banks can get caught up in the transfer of drug funds, and I personally think it is very wide spread in international business.
I don’t see how billions of dollars remains hidden when all any one would have to do to stop the drug trade is to follow the money, and confiscate it for the public good.
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RE: David Losh @ 29 – That is not credit. That is attempting to move the money and attempting to hide its source (launder it). As I said in post 28, the problem is moving the cash, and what you’re citing to now is their attempts to do just that. But it’s not credit. You were asking:
That is one example of how the cash is transferred. Other times it’s probably physically transferred. But what I was addressing was the first part of that–your comment about credit. They don’t need credit when they are generating cash by the bucket.
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I wonder how much damage an even moderately powerful earthquake would do after two months of fairly solid rain? I like rain, but this is even getting to me.
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RE: Kary L. Krismer @ 31 – The bottom of Lake Washington up north by Kenmore can help answer that. There is more or less an intact forest that slid to the bottom of the lake several thousand years ago.
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RE: wreckingbull @ 32 – Right, but was that a moderate quake after 2 months of rain? ;-)
Seriously, I’m surprised there haven’t been more slides lately. The only ones I’ve read about are by the train tracks various places. That’s what got me thinking about the impact of an earthquake, because I assume the trains shaking the ground are a partial cause of the slides.
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The WSJ reported that the US Justice (?) Department did not bring criminal charges against UBS for LIBOR rigging because they did not want to destabilize the company.
What the Fok!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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