Some 3,000 ‘Hezbollah-tied’ accounts await freeze
Press TV – June 11, 2016
As many as 3,000 more bank accounts, allegedly tied to the Lebanese resistance movement of Hezbollah, reportedly await freeze in the coming days under pressure from the United States.
Those to be affected include “employees, partners, customers affiliated with the party,” Saudi daily Asharq Al-Awsat reported on Friday, citing a source within Lebanon’s Central Bank.
On December 18, 2015, US President Barack Obama signed into law the Hezbollah International Financing Prevention Act.
The legislation says Washington will target those “knowingly facilitating a significant transaction or transactions for” Hezbollah or any individual, business or institution linked to the group.
As per the law, the US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control has been tasked with releasing names of the entities it considers to be associated with the group.
Governor of Lebanon’s Central Bank Riad Salameh has so far ordered 100 accounts frozen in line with the Treasury’s instructions as any failure to abide by the law will result in US sanctions.
“If anyone is suspicious, there can be no leniency, even if the customers have millions of dollars, because the negative repercussions in not abiding by the [US] law will be catastrophic on the bank,” the source said.
Interviewed by the CNBC, Salameh recently said, “Our priority is to keep Lebanon on the international financial map, so we have taken a resolution that we will implement that US law in Lebanon, and we have put in place a structure to do this, to satisfy the objectives of that law.”
On Thursday, Hezbollah reacted to the remarks, saying Salameh’s position “shows that the monetary policy has lost its sovereignty.”
Hezbollah is credited with defending Lebanon against two wars launched by Israel, the US’s strongest ally in the region, in 2000 and 2006.
In recent months, Saudi Arabia, another staunch ally of the US, has also been targeting the resistance movement.
Earlier in the year, Riyadh imposed sanctions on four Lebanese firms and three individuals it accused of having links to Hezbollah, among its other measures against the movement.
Analysts say Hezbollah has come under such pressure due to its involvement in anti-terrorism military operations in neighboring Syria.
The resistance movement has been successfully helping the Syrian army fight Saudi-backed Takfiri militants in order to prevent the Syria conflict from spilling over to Lebanon.
Will Anyone on the Left Stand Up for Brexit?
By Oliver Pawley | CounterPunch | June 9, 2016
Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, The IMF, David Cameron, George Osborne, Hillary Clinton, Mark Carney — it’s a list of names that many on the left would surely like rather see condemned than side with in a democratic debate. Yet the build-up to the forthcoming referendum on Britain’s EU membership sees them doing exactly that. While those figures emblematic of exiting the EU — Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and Nigel Farage — aren’t very appealing to those of liberal instincts, allying with them offers a chance to shake-up the status quo. In an age where democracy is heavily curated by corporate power, is it not better to assume a disruptive islander mentality than a supine federalist one? Will anyone on the left stand up for Brexit?
Rousseau once mocked British democracy by claiming the British public were ‘free only during elections’. Given that it was 1975 last time we had a referendum on European membership and a great deal of power has been transferred from our parliament to the EU since then, by Jean-Jacques’ logic it’s 41 years since we were last ‘free’. Should Britain really fear being in charge of its own affairs more than continuing along its current path?
If we consider domestic politics in Britain we see a governing Conservative Party that in its last two budgets has attempted to rob from the poor and give to the rich to such an extent that it has caused national outcry. Plans to remove tax credits for low earners in 2015[i] and reduce benefits for the disabled this year[ii] have had to be rescinded. With some laughably optimistic predictions about fiscally beneficial future growth the Chancellor, George Osborne, manages to hang on to his tax cuts for the rich. The British public are starting to see what a Tory majority looks like in practice and it’s quite a shock compared to the coalition government that preceded it. Then, the Liberal Democrat party acted as set of humanitarian reins to steer the Conservatives away from their worst excesses and sacrificed itself electorally as a result. Up and down the land voters are feeling the effects of savage cuts to the budgets of their local councils: youth centres are closed, roads go unrepaired, and teachers lose their jobs in a manner that is completely incompatible with building a country fit for success in the twenty first century[iii]. Brexit would cause chaos in the Conservative party, fatally wound Cameron and Osborne, and yet commentators on the left shy away from urging voters to take a shot at this open goal. It’s as though Britain’s liberals are scared of the chance to run the country.
Goldman Sachs warn us that homebuilders and banks would be the worst affected if we chose to leave the EU[iv]. It’s hard to think of two sets of industries that have failed the British people more in recent years. The UK faces a housing crisis because the emphasis has been on serving vested interests by maintaining overly high property and land values rather than focusing on the need to house an expanding population. Banking is lauded in the media as an industry of huge importance to Britain but is there really much future growth to come from it? Banks’ main product is debt, which is something we in the developed world already have too much of. The future of UK banking looks rather more like the moribund loss-making and largely nationalised Royal Bank of Scotland[v] than a dynamic saviour. Brexit might force the UK to diversify its economy away from the dominant property and finance nexus, which provides economic growth but of a precarious, iniquitous and [spoiler alert] ephemeral kind.
At least twice George Osborne has warned the British that leaving the EU would cause house prices to fall, the second time he came out with a figure of 18 per cent as an upper bound. UK house prices could halve and they would still be high — particularly in London and the South East. The latest wheeze to extend the bubble appears to be the introduction of intergenerational mortgages.[vi] This kind of financial ‘innovation’ combined with ever rising student debt means Britain’s young graduates face a lifetime of debt servitude. If Brexit really could bring down house prices the millennials and the generation beneath them ought to be clamouring for it, yet the pollsters suggest they don’t and that three-quarters of 18 to 24 year-olds want to remain.[vii]
The threats from the Remain camp that leaving the EU will be a catastrophe for the UK’s economic cooperation with the continent are overblown. Anyone who has spent any time in central London recently will have noticed the huge quantity of continental Europeans employed in the capital. It seems very unlikely that their home countries, many of which are beset with economic difficulties, would want all these people delivered back to them. It is also hard to believe that those countries would wish to jeopardise tourism from the UK, or the spending power of British pensioners living out their days in the sunshine of Southern Europe. The idea that deals could not quickly be done to facilitate movement between Britain and the EU as well as mutually beneficial trade agreements is absurd given that it would be in nobody’s interests, least of all big business, to do otherwise. Angela Merkel’s recent hint that Britain ‘will never get a really good result’ in negotiations if it leaves the EU is unlikely to be popular with German firms which exported 90 billion Euros worth of goods and services to the UK last year.[viii]
Much of Britain’s left perceives the EU as some sort of enlightened force for good but this isn’t a notion that stands up to much scrutiny. Has it formed a bulwark against US imperialism as we were told it would? Not at all, European leaders have meekly followed America’s neo-conservative agenda leading to disaster. Indeed, Europe’s refugee crisis is the direct result of the Western establishment’s gauche attempts at terraforming Iraq, Libya and Syria into groves of economic opportunity for the few. Sadly, the recent terrorist attacks on European soil haven’t raised the right questions about events both at home and abroad. Instead of trying to curb civil liberties and drop more bombs, European leaders ought to be considering the deeper reasons for discontent. Is Brussels’ Molenbeek district really a hotbed of jihadist sentiment because of a few internet videos and radical clerics or does it have more to do with the 40 per cent unemployment rate of Muslim men?[ix] Is a foreign policy that supports the continued ruination of Muslim lives abroad ever going to be compatible with amicable relations at home? The EU’s eastward expansion has also played a part in the bloody civil war in the Ukraine and heightened tensions with Russia.[x]
Then we have economic policy which has been a disaster. Where was the European sense of fraternity when Greece as in trouble? It completely disappeared. Europe’s leaders chose to protect their failed bankers and broken single currency and throw the Greek people under a bus. Of the 240 billion Euros that was ‘given’ to Greece in 2010 and 2012 a miniscule amount actually went to improving the lot of the Greek people, the vast majority found its way into the coffers of financial institutions.[xi] Compare this to Iceland which sits outside of the EU. Its response to the financial crisis was not to kotow to bankers but to jail them. The government didn’t seek to absorb all the country’s private banking debt but put its people first and financial institutions second.[xii] The Icelandic economy has now recovered to a size above its pre 2008 peak, a target far away from the likes of Greece. While the Goldmanite European Central Bank chairman Mario Draghi prepares to pump money into a corporate black hole[xiii], the youth of Southern Europe see their futures evaporate into a sclerotic mist of unemployment, under-investment and hopelessness. Why does Britain’s left wish to support an EU that propagates such unfairness? Is it not time to admit that Europe has been captured by financiers and will not prosper until their influence is reduced and un-payable debts written-off? Ironically, by leaving the EU Britain may stimulate a shift away from the current failed orthodoxy.
Given seven years of economic stagnation in the Eurozone you might imagine that the lessons of letting unelected technocrats take the big decisions would have created a desire to move to a more democratic system. The truth is that even now EU officials attempt to bargain away our rights with the secretive TTIP agreement. Rumoured to be a corporate manifesto that relegates the role of the state to that of a butler for business interests it’s hard to reconcile it with the needs of the masses[xiv]. So when the most disappointing President of the United States ever, Barack Obama, warns us that we’ll be going to the ‘back of the queue’ for trade negotiations if we exit the EU, we should grab the opportunity with both hands. If the majority of British people were privy to the contents of TTIP it’s likely the idea of being in the queue at all would be deeply abhorrent.
Obama’s is just one of many voices from across the Atlantic urging Britain to stay in the EU. Eight former US Treasury Secretaries wrote to The Times newspaper urging us to stay in. Three names stand out: Larry Summers, Hank Paulson and Tim Geithner. These architects of neo-liberal disaster have overseen a huge transfer of wealth from the bottom to the top in the United States. Summers helped sow the seeds of the 2008 financial crisis as a cheerleader for the Gramm—Leach—Bliley—Act, which repealed much of the Glass—Steagal safety net[xv]. Casino capitalism came to the fore and after the inevitable financial collapse Paulson masterminded the Troubled Asset Relief Programme (TARP) giveaway to Wall Street[xvi]. Geithner continued in much the same vein, scandalously failing to stop executives of AIG being rewarded for failure with enormous bonuses effectively paid for with government money[xvii]. The only people whose interests apparatchiks like these represent are the very wealthiest, the rest of us can safely ignore their advice. Similarly, the warnings of the IMF’s Christine Lagarde should go unheeded; her organisation is there to protect the few not enrich the many[xviii]. Defying the wishes of the IMF is a rare democratic opportunity which should not be ignored by those who seek a fairer world.
The honourable intentions to use European integration as a means to avoid another European conflict as damaging as The Second World War were all well and good, but they are the solution to an obsolete problem. Today’s fight is no longer between nation states but between an exploitative global economic elite and the rest of us. Voting for Brexit is a blow to their ambitions and the natural choice for anyone who wishes to challenge the doomed status quo. Don’t vote for Brexit because you are a small-minded xenophobe, vote for Brexit because it is a chance to challenge the cabal of venal politicians who are dragging Western Civilisation towards crisis with their continued deference to corporate power, misguided use of military force, and disdain for democracy.
Notes.
[iii] https://www.jrf.org.uk/report/cost-cuts-impact-local-government-and-poorer-communities
[iv] http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/mar/21/brexit-would-hit-banks-homebuilders-goldman-sachs
[v] http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/2b9428ec-dc58-11e5-a72f-1e7744c66818.html#axzz4AQgnyN7u
[viii]https://www.destatis.de/EN/FactsFigures/NationalEconomyEnvironment/ForeignTrade/TradingPartners/Tables/OrderRankGermanyTradingPartners.pdf?__blob=publicationFile
[xi] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/29/where-did-the-greek-bailout-money-go
[xiii] https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/pr/date/2016/html/pr160602.en.html
[xv] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Summers
[xvi] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troubled_Asset_Relief_Program
[xvii] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Geithner
[xviii] http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/05/the-quiet-coup/307364/
‘All China’s assets in the US might be annulled‘, warns ex-BoE chief, urging countries to diversify
RT | June 9, 2016
Washington may be forced to renege on its huge debt to Beijing under catastrophic circumstances, says the former head of the Bank of England Mervyn King. He suggests governments could mitigate risk by diversifying their assets.
“Who knows what the future holds, but China and other countries do not want to be in a situation where all their international assets are in effect dependent on the US,” said King, who was the Governor of the Bank of England from 2003 to 2013, in an article for Gold Investor magazine.
“Of course the US would not want to renege on its debts, but if some awful conflagration occurred, then all China’s assets in the US might be annulled,” said the former BoE chief, adding that China and other countries should diversify their portfolios, making them less dependent “on the goodwill of other countries.”
China is the biggest holder of US debt with $1.245 trillion, according to US Treasury data. Over the past 12 months Beijing has cut its Treasury securities 1.3 percent from $1.261 trillion seen last year.
According to the most recent data from March, global central banks sold off $17 billion in US Treasuries. Since the beginning of the year the sell-off has reached $123 billion, which is the quickest pace since 1978.
Russia has steadily shed US assets since the 2008 financial crisis, with holdings dropping from more than $200 billion in 2008 to $86 billion as of March this year.
In May, billionaire George Soros cut investment in US stocks by a third and acquired a $264 million stake in the world’s biggest bullion producer, Barrick Gold.
Hillary’s Pathetic Cover-Up of TPP Support
Clinton allies are stonewalling emails that expose her trade hypocrisy
By Ashley Pratte | Polizette | June 7, 2016
Drip, drip, drip — the spigot of scandal from Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton’s emails continues, this time with a cover-up of her communications on the controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement.
Last July, the International Business Times requested any TPP-related correspondence between Hillary Clinton and the U.S. Trade Representative’s office — and lo and behold, the State Department just announced it will be delaying the request until November. The post-election timing was not lost on anyone paying attention.
Trade has become one of the pivotal issues of the 2016 election. Both presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump and Sen. Bernie Sanders (a persistent pain in Clinton’s side) slammed the proposed TPP, capitalizing on voter frustration with massive job losses stemming from lopsided trade deals.
Clinton, finger ever in the political wind, once praised the massive 12-nation agreement pushed by President Obama and Republicans in Congress, only to flip-flop to opposing the bargain after losing political ground to Sanders.
While Clinton was secretary of state she she praised the negotiations, saying that an agreement with the nations of the TPP would help create new jobs and opportunities and at one point even called it the “gold standard” in trade agreements.
It’s no wonder that with all of her flip-flopping on TPP, she and her allies at the State Department wouldn’t want the public to see her email correspondence on the deal.
Adding to the potential damage for Clinton contained in her TPP emails is the fact she has gone so far as to deny any involvement in the negotiations. “I did not work on the TPP,” Clinton said in July 2015. “That was the responsibility of the United States Trade Representative. I never had any direct responsibility for the negotiations at all.” But even if she did not engage in the negotiations directly, the State Department would have had a seat at the table for the trade negotiations, and she had correspondence with the U.S. Trade Representative.
Clinton’s desperate attempts to distance herself from the TPP she once enthusiastically supported will likely further hamper her efforts to stave off attacks from Trump and Sanders on the unpopular trade bargain. The State Department’s role in covering her tracks until after the election stinks of a Clinton-esque lack of transparency — and adds more complexity to her ongoing email scandal.
Anti-nuke activists begin month-long blockade of atomic facility
RT | June 6, 2016
Anti-nuclear activists are starting a month-long protest against Britain’s Trident nuclear weapons program, arguing it should not be renewed by Parliament later this year.
Peace campaigners are descending on AWE Burghfield in Berkshire, where Britain’s nuclear warheads are maintained and go through their final stage of assembly.
Throughout June, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) supporters will join activists from Trident Ploughshares and groups from across Europe to “blockade, to occupy, and to disrupt” the weapons manufacturing base.
Activists claim the renewal of Britain’s at-sea nuclear deterrent is expensive, unsafe, ill-suited for contemporary warfare and in violation of international commitments.
The nuclear site at Burghfield is run by the Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE), a controversial weapons company which is partly owned by US firm Lockheed Martin.
Last August, AWE was censured by UK regulators for failing to show a long-term plan for handling radioactive waste at its Aldermaston site.
The nuclear weapons factory also faces further action for failing to meet legal obligations to treat radioactive waste by 2014, according to a report published by the ONR last July.
Among the activists will be veteran peace campaigner Pat Arrowsmith, who was the organizer of the historic 1958 march from London to Aldermaston which saw thousands of people march against nuclear weapons.
British protesters will be joined by anti-nuke groups across Europe, including Women for Peace (Finland), Action Pour La Paix (Belgium) and Maison de la Vigilance (France).
“The vast [nuclear weapons] complexes at Burghfield and Aldermaston are founded on a wealth of resources and extraordinary human skill,” CND General Secretary Kate Hudson said.
“What a tragedy that these are utilized for the production of weapons of mass destruction rather than being used instead to secure real human security and meet the real needs of our society.”
The cost of replacing Trident and maintaining a successor program is expected to reach £205 billion (US$296 billion), according to campaigners.
The biggest expense by far is expected to be the day-to-day running costs. At £142 billion over the system’s lifetime, they amount to 6 percent of the total UK defense budget.
Other expenses include decommissioning old warheads, the continued lease of warheads from the US and future refurbishment.
AWE Burghfield will undergo a £734 million upgrade as part of the Trident renewal.
Flawed Logic: Swedish Writer Knocks Common Sense Into NATO Supporters
Sputnik | June 6, 2016
Over the past years, ordinary Swedes have been under immense pressure from high-ranking politicians and conventional media, who advocate scrapping the country’s trusted policy of non-alignment in favor of joining NATO. However, minority opinions still persist.
One of the stalwart opponents of joining NATO is the famous writer and journalist Jan Guillou, who last week wittily trounced his antagonists in a column for the tabloid newspaper Aftonbladet.
NATO supporters habitually try to scare everyone out of their wits with a sneak attack on Russia’s part, yet somehow fail to explain why Russia should endeavor such an attack, even if it is one of their trump cards, argued Guillou.
The Russian attack is to be expected “within a few years,” threatened the Swedish army chief Lieutenant General Brännström only half a year ago. Liberal pundits and their trusted military columnists applauded.
“I was not the only one to demand an explanation. What would Russia gain by attacking Sweden? Conquer more forest and iron ore? On the other hand, what would Russia lose by such an attack?” wrote Guillou.
According to Guillou, this question is much easier to answer: the aftermath would be ruined foreign trade and a de facto state of war between Russia and the EU.
“Not a single Liberal could explain why on earth Russia would commit such an economic and political suicide, yet they continued with their saber-rattling as vigorously as before: Sweden should join NATO to fence off the Russian attack that would inevitably ensue if it continued outside NATO,” Jan Guillou wrote.
Of late, Sweden’s military bosses have come up with an “updated” and more nuanced threat. Now, Putin is supposedly intending to limit himself with capturing “only” the strategic island of Gotland, which lies some 100 kilometers off mainland Sweden’s coast. This scenario is part of the following theory: at some point, Russia is inevitably bound to conquer one or several Baltic states (which according to Western think-tanks is manageable in only 60 hours).
A column in the tabloid newspaper Expressen, which is one of NATO’s most keen supporters in Sweden went even on to threaten the poor islanders with Russian nuclear arms. As usual, however, the author refrained from disclosing what joy Russia would get from nuking Gotland, which is quite typical of NATO agitators.
According to Guillou, the biggest problem with a feasible NATO membership is that Sweden would have to abandon its independent foreign policy and become a cog in the US military machine.
“For the question in all its simplicity is as follows: should Sweden cede its [independent] security policy to a Washington-led system through NATO membership?” Guillou asked rhetorically.
“Considering America’s dubious track record when it comes to foolish wars in recent years, it would be a dark perspective. What about future remakes of Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria? <…> As if that were not enough, Sweden would also end up in the same military alliance with Turkey, led by a war-mad dictator, and states such as Hungary and Poland, which are moving away from democracy.”
These are real questions, which incidentally are avoided at all costs by pro-NATO debaters. Instead, they go on in circles with their increasingly stale rhetoric about Russia’s “aggression.” Sweden’s NATO campaign stinks, concluded Guillou.
Jan Guillou is a popular Swedish writer and journalist. His fame in Sweden is rooted in his best-selling detective series, as well as his time as an investigative reporter. Guillou is renowned for his consequent anti-US stance and was previously known for calling Washington “the greatest mass murderer of our time.”
NATO Baltic wargames have ‘political, economic & military motives’
RT | June 5, 2016
The US strategy in Europe is aimed at strengthening its control over EU and NATO states, selling more military equipment to its European allies to make super-profits for its military-industrial complex and to isolate Russia, political author Diana Johnstone told RT.
NATO is holding major sea drills in the Baltic Sea. The BALTOPS exercises, which kicked off on Friday in Estonia and will continue until June 19, involve 15 member states of the military alliance as well as Finland and Sweden.
RT: NATO is conducting major drills across the Baltic. Is there a bigger political message here or is it just an exercise?
Diana Johnstone: Yes, they have been doing exercises like this for quite a while and the pretext changed. At least this time they are not pretending like with the missile shield that it is to protect Europe from Iran. The line has changed now, because the US is coming right out with their aggressive actions toward Russia. You have to see the political, economic and military motives for this. The economic motive is obviously to sell more US military equipment to European allies, who don’t need it and can’t afford it. But that is important for the US military-industrial complex. Politically this is the strengthening of US control of EU countries and NATO countries, and to isolate Russia – to carry out this famous [Zbigniew] Brzezinski strategy of separating Russia from Europe to promote US hegemony over the Europe and the world.
RT: A lot of people in Eastern Europe oppose this kind of strategy. The general public is not particularly happy about this, are they?
DJ: Of course those Baltic States, whose governments by the way are satellite governments of the US. The top officials studied in the West, in the US and Canada. These have gone from being Russian satellites to be American satellites. They pretty much follow the US direction. But that is not the case of the rest of Europe, which is simply ignoring this, like it is not happening. The Czechs are aware of it, so they are protesting. But for instance, here in France nobody mentions this, because frankly people wouldn’t be in favor of it at all. This is destroying defense of Europe. It is just turning into an instrument of US policy.
RT: Last week, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg announced plans to strengthen defenses, particularly against Russian foreign policy calling it “a defensive and proportionate response to Russia’s actions in Crimea and Eastern Ukraine.” At the same time recently he said that they strived “for a more constructive relationship with Russia.” Shouldn’t it be more talking going on, rather than deploying troops and hardware?
JS: We are used to now seeing the US – in the Middle East they say one thing and do the opposite. It’s just amazing to me that people can say things like that. It is totally absurd. Obviously there is nothing offensive about the people of Crimea going back to Russia, to which they belonged before… There is not tiny bit of an aggressive move of Russia towards the West. That is a total fiction… So these people are just lying. They cannot know that.
Letting ‘Wall Street’ Walk
By Michael Brenner | Consortium News | June 3, 2016
Illicit financial behavior has been decriminalized in the United States – for all practical purposes. Despite the revelations of massive misconduct by banks and other financial services businesses, criminal investigations are rare, indictments exceptional and guilty judgments extraordinary.
Most potentially culpable actions are overlooked by authorities, slighted, reduced from criminal to civil status when pursued, individuals evade penalties much less punishment, and the appeals courts take extreme liberties in exonerating culprits when and if the odd conviction reaches them.
The last mentioned are establishing new frontiers in the formulation of ingeniously sophistic arguments to justify letting financial malefactors off the hook. As some wit suggests, all 32 or so judicial inventions should be assembled in a legal code called the Goldman Variations.
Our elected officials, our regulators, our politicos and the media have come to accept this as the natural order of things. Business Sections of newspapers, like The New York Times, read like the gazette for the world of organized crime in its heyday when the five Mafia families were on top of their game. (substitute Goldman Sachs, Chase Morgan, Bank of America, CITI, Wells Fargo). As for the Wall Street Journal and the legion of business magazines, they blend features of VARIETY and Osservatore Romano.
The reasons for this phenomenon are multiple: the rule of money in our politics; the neutering of regulatory bodies by the appointment of business friendly officers in symbiotic relationships with former or prospective employers; a wider culture in which the cult of wealth pervades all; and the timidity of a political class that defers to the power centers who enjoy rank, status and respect.
Obama’s appointment of Mary Jo White, from the white gloves law firm Debevoise & Plimpton which specialized in advising and representing Wall Street during the financial crisis (where she was head of litigation), to head the Security Exchange Commission is roughly analogous to appointing Dominick “Quiet Dom” Cirillo, consigliore of the Vito Genovese Mafia family, to run the FBI’s Organized Crime Task Force in Manhattan.
In White’s case, her earlier experience as United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York (the financial district) made her an exceptionally valuable acquisition when she switched sides in 2003 – 2013. Her record at the SEC since 2013 confirms her adherence to the Holder philosophy of leniency toward financial misdeeds – and confirms where her loyalties lie.
Appointments to senior positions dealing with financial matters have been primarily “parachutists.” Several of them are more egregious than the White case. So too was former Attorney-General Eric Holder. Within days of leaving the Justice Department, he was back at his former corporate law firm – albeit as a “counselor” for the one-year stipulated transition period.
During his years in private practice, Holder represented the Swiss private bank UBS. Because of this, he recused himself from participating in the Department of Justice investigation of UBS’s abetting of tax evasion by U.S. account-holders.
Such is the privileged status of our largest financial institutions that the Obama administration has amended, de facto, the Constitution to accommodate their claim to being above the law. Former Attorney General Holder is the author of the doctrine that posits the principle of “too-big-to-prosecute.”
Fearing Economic Damage
Holder’s publicly stated view is that he, the Justice Department and the Executive Branch generally have a right to exempt financial institutions from criminal prosecution when they believe that doing so would cause “unacceptable” damage to the national economy. It first took shape during Bill Clinton’s administration.
Holder presented the full-blown doctrine in a startling confession during testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on March 5, 2011. “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 you do prosecute, if you do bring a criminal charge, it will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy,” Holder said, according to The Hill newspaper.
Holder’s comments didn’t come as a total surprise. His underlings had already made similar confessions to The New York Times the previous year, after they declined to prosecute HSBC for flagrant, years-long violations of money-laundering laws, out of fear that doing so would hurt the global economy.
Lanny Breuer, formerly in charge of doling out the Justice Department’s wrist slaps to banks, told Frontline as much in the documentary “The Untouchables” which aired in January 2011.
Of course, President Obama and Attorney-General Holder had taken oaths to uphold the laws of the land. That pledge does not allow them personal discretion as to whom it applies. Yet, they have acted as if the Justice Department and the Executive Branch generally have a right to exempt financial institutions from criminal prosecution when they believe that doing so would cause “unacceptable” damage to the national economy.
Let us be clear; Holder is not referring to the interpretation and application of any legal standard. He is referring to a purely subjective standard that has nothing to do with the law. In a similar vein, it is reported that the Obama administration has instructed the Department of Justice and the FBI to make mortgage fraud its lowest priority and, indeed, to dismiss hundreds of cases without any investigation whatsoever. (Report of the Inspector General, Department of Justice March 11, 2014).
The administration also improperly has diverted funds appropriated for this specific purpose to other areas. This arbitrary exclusion from investigation of the largest category of financial crime has been made in the face of a well-publicized and solemn undertaking by both President Obama and Attorney General Holder to take bold and expeditious action in this area.
“Equal protection of the laws” is a principle enshrined in the Constitution. There is no allowance for the President or the Attorney General, who serves at the President’s pleasure, to establish special classes of persons who are exempt from the laws’ stipulations – either to make them immune or to deny them due process. Yet, that is what they explicitly have done.
In a commencement address at NYU in 2014, Holder stated bluntly: “Responsibility remains so diffuse, and top executives so insulated, that any misconduct could again be considered more a symptom of the institution’s culture than a result of the willful actions of any single individual.”
The Holder-Obama doctrine concentrates heavily on the disruptive effects on the nation’s (and the world’s) financial system were any of the too-big-to-fail banks brought low by a combination of criminal convictions and financial penalties that were greater than the profits made from systematically skirting the law – as currently done.
Addressing the Problem
That is a highly debatable proposition on purely technical grounds. Whatever the appraisal one makes, there are two straightforward solutions to the problem as stated.
First, one should break them up so that were they to “fail,” the systemic consequences would be manageable. Second, risk is increased rather than lowered by following a legal cum political strategy that has the effect of encouraging the managers of mega-financial institutions to play fast-and-loose in their financial maneuverings.
To return to the analogy of the five Mafia families, a law enforcement strategy that favored civil action over criminal prosecution, that entailed fines rather than prison time, and that kept those fines at a level where they could be calculated as a cost of doing a very lucrative business would result in a flourishing of criminal organizations – at great cost to society.
Moreover, were there a practice of Mafia bosses and police commissioners/district attorneys parachuting from one sphere to another, the collateral damage inflicted on all law enforcement would be enormous.
The Holder claim for corporate immunity is unsustainable by any reasonable legal standard and reading of the Constitution. Such reasonableness, though, no longer prevails. Witness the widespread passive acceptance of this novel revolutionary doctrine when it was pronounced – and its only slight rhetorical qualification since.
The radical idea that nominally criminal acts should be understood contextually and that judgment as well as punishment should be administered accordingly opens up a wide assortment of questions about the conduct of our judicial system.
There is no reason why it could not be applied generally to the entire range of criminal conduct and proceedings. Following the Holder-Obama logic, this should be done at every stage of jurisprudence: indictment, trial, judgment and punishment. A recent case in New York City illustrates what the implications might be.
In that instance, a woman was arrested at Kennedy airport for possession of 500 grams of cocaine. She was detained, indicted and convicted of a felony. All that followed the well-trod legal path. It was the sentencing that broke the mold.
Judge Frederick Block placed the woman on probation rather than throwing her into the slammer. His main argument, developed in a closely reasoned 46-page opinion, concentrated on the “collateral consequences” of her conviction. Those consequences were deemed adequate punishment to meet the requirements of the law, society and the felon’s long-term integration into the community. The addition of prison time would have made the punishment disproportionate to the crime. It would have exceeded – not fit – the crime.
What the judge pointed out is that so many legal disabilities attach to anyone convicted of a felony as to deny the person a reasonable chance of pursuing a normal life upon release. Those disabilities include disqualification for all kinds of access to government assistance programs which cover education, housing and employment. The net result would be a high likelihood of recidivism. From society’s perspective, that translates into a higher likelihood of costs associated with welfare, medical care, and possible re-institutionalization. In addition, there are the tangible and intangible costs for possible maintenance of any children she might bear.
The woman in question lives with her mother in New Haven where she was enrolled in college and was working part time as a nail technician. For her, the collateral consequences could be expected to be particularly high. The underlying logic, though, applies generally.
Setting Examples
What about the “systemic consequences?” Isn’t punishment for the commission of a crime supposed to act as a deterrent for others? Yes – in principle. That consideration, however, did not figure in the Holder-Obama doctrine as applied to financial misdeeds whose perpetrators are in a more visible position to set an example.
Indeed, one could argue that the sense of entitlement and expectation of having a right to act with impunity free of worry about accountability is far more pronounced among Wall Street executives than it is among inner city poor. Thereby, the positive value of criminal conviction followed by individual punishment would be commensurately greater in terms of a benefit to society.
The case cited above involves a felonious criminal act whose commission was proven in a court of law. American prisons, today, confine hundreds of thousands whose crimes are of a lesser order. Indeed, a significant percentage may not have committed any crime at all but rather are victims of police campaigns to cleanse the streets of those who allegedly have committed relatively minor misdemeanors.
Draconian enforcement of “zero tolerance” philosophies has led to widespread abuse of the police power in cities like New York. The absurd “three strikes and you’re out” strategy initiated in California and promoted nationwide by President Bill Clinton, has had even more dire results in spiking the incarceration rates, for longer terms – jailing mainly marijuana and other drug users who are a threat only to themselves rather than to society.
Much has been made of the dogmatic claim that a crackdown on misbehavior is the reason for the drastic drop in urban violent crime. This is an urban legend. In New York City, former Mayor Rudi Giuliani and his Police Commissioner Bill Bratton, have been lionized for this supposed achievement. Yet, the story is pure fiction.
The unprecedented sharp decline occurred under David Dinkins, his black predecessor who was widely criticized for being “soft on crime” and stinting in his support for the police. The truth is that violent crime was closely correlated with the crack epidemic and its recession – reinforced by other trends that registered nationwide.
For these categories of criminals and alleged criminals whose misdeeds fall in the category of misdemeanors, Judge Block’s concept of “collateral consequences” is even more compelling. The concept, in fact, should be broadened to pertain to arrest and prosecution as well as sentencing. The consequences to be taken into account properly should aggregate their weight for both the individual and society. Then, there are the intangible costs of mass criminalization and imprisonment.
Unsettling Markets
Yet, while rulings like Judge Block’s may be rare regarding “street crimes,” they have become routine regarding Wall Street crimes, which are not prosecuted in the name of the Holder doctrine concerned about the unsettling effects on investor confidence and markets from casting a dark cloud over “Wall Street.”
Again, this is dubious on technical grounds; and the logical responses obvious. Let us shift ground and think of the unsettling effects produced by legally stigmatizing a considerable slice of inner-city populations. Disruption of families, instilling widespread feelings of persecution, aggravation of relations with the police, more estranged race relations, etc. It may be difficult to place numbers on these costs, but the negative consequences for society are great.
The full extent of the decade-long police “zero tolerance” campaign, and its demoralizing impact on largely minority neighborhoods, is one of the great unreported stories of our times. Corruption was its hallmark: in its misleading justifications, in its methods that systematized entrapment and fabrication of charges (Examples: creating a public nuisance by drinking a beer from a can on the steps of your house; impeding pedestrian movement by stopping to chat while walking your dog at midnight; loitering in the hallway of your own apartment building).
Other elements of the corruption included its degeneration into a crass quota system, its abuse of the criminal justice system that jailed hundreds of thousands of innocents who couldn’t meet bail or hire a lawyer, forcing them to admit to misdemeanors that leave a permanent stain on their records in order to be released, and its exploitation by cynical politicians.
The one first-hand account that tells the tale is Matt Taibbi’s deeply disturbing DIVIDE (Spiegel & Grau 2014). It deals with New York City, but the same phenomenon is visible across urban America.
Collateral consequences can be a valuable concept – one that has multiple meanings. But it should be applied where it serves justice not iniquity.
Michael Brenner is a professor of international affairs at the University of Pittsburgh. mbren@pitt.edu
The Lazy Pundit’s Guide to Which Candidate’s Lies You Shouldn’t Care About
By Jim Naureckas | FAIR | June 1, 2016
Thomas Friedman kicks off the summer punditry season with a column (New York Times, 6/1/16) explaining that while “lying is serious business,” some candidates’ lies are more serious than others. For example, “Hillary’s fibs or lack of candor are all about bad judgments she made on issues that will not impact the future of either my family or my country,” whereas “Trump and Bernie Sanders have been getting away with some full Burger King Double Whoppers that will come crashing down on the whole country if either gets the chance to do what he says.”
The Donald Trump portion of the column mainly illustrates the laziness of a wealthy pundit looking forward to beach season. Friedman explains to Trump why “we can’t carpet-bomb the terrorists without killing all the civilians around them”—forgetting, or not caring, that carpet-bombing terrorists was Ted Cruz’s line, not Trump’s.
He demands an explanation from Trump: “On Mexico, please tell me why it would pay for a multibillion-dollar wall on our border and how we would compel our neighbor to do so.” Trump has been claiming since last year, at least, that he could force Mexico to pay for the wall by blocking immigrant workers from sending home money—but Friedman seems not to have heard about it.
His attack on Sanders doesn’t display much more enterprise:
He is promising to break up the big banks. Under what legal authority? What would be the economic fallout? And how would this raise stagnant incomes for middle-class Americans? Bernie mumbles on these questions.
Here Friedman picks the most obvious target, the issue that corporate media—following the lead of the Clinton campaign—most concertedly beat up Sanders over. The problem is that many of those same outlets, when they filed follow-up stories about the controversy (e.g. New York Times, 4/6/16; Washington Post, 4/7/16; Politico, 4/14/16), walked back the criticism, acknowledging that, as the Times’ Peter Eavis put it, “Bernie Sanders probably knows more about breaking up banks than his critics give him credit for.”
Friedman also cites the Tax Policy Center’s figures for increased federal spending under Sanders’ proposals—which mostly come from the Urban Institute’s estimates for the cost of his single-payer plan, which have come under heavy criticism from experts on single-payer financing. Without rehashing the entire argument, it’s worth noting, as the Urban Institute does in its defense of its report, that the bulk of the huge numbers thrown about do not reflect new spending:
Of the $32.0 trillion in additional federal costs, only $6.6 trillion reflects new health spending in the system; the remaining $25.4 trillion is produced by shifting existing state and local government spending and private spending to the federal government.
As for why every other wealthy country can provide healthcare to all citizens and pay considerably less per capita to do so, but single-payer would supposedly raise and not lower costs in the US, the Urban Institute report offers this: “Political compromises with the entire panoply of health care stakeholders would be necessary to make the plan acceptable.” In other words, it’s impossible to do anything that would significantly change the distribution of income in the United States (other than to make it more unequal, as we have already done)—an assumption that not only the Sanders campaign but millions of Americans would certainly reject.
So those are the lies being told by Sanders and Trump, according to Thomas Friedman. What about Hillary Clinton’s “struggles with the whole truth on certain issues”? Not important. “Private email servers? Cattle futures? Goldman Sachs lectures? All really stupid, but my kids will not be harmed by those poor calls.”
Let’s put aside the issue that Goldman Sachs, the benefactor that Clinton won’t come clean about, was intimately involved in the economic crisis that certainly harmed millions of kids, though maybe not Friedman’s. Isn’t there anything else—something that even a low-information pundit like Thomas Friedman might have heard of?
Well, yeah. There is that. “Debate where she came out on Iraq and Libya, if you will, but those were considered judgment calls, and if you disagree don’t vote for her.”
Judgment calls? “I believe the facts that have brought us to this fateful vote are not in doubt,” Clinton said in her October 10, 2002, speech on the Senate floor explaining her vote for war:
In the four years since the inspectors left, intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological weapons stock, his missile delivery capability, and his nuclear program…. If left unchecked, Saddam Hussein will continue to increase his capacity to wage biological and chemical warfare, and will keep trying to develop nuclear weapons…. Now this much is undisputed.
Not only were those facts very much disputed and in doubt, they were flat-out wrong. It’s not clear why questioning cost estimates for your programs qualifies as “lying,” but maintaining that there was no debate about issues that were in fact intensely debated is merely a “judgment call.” But there’s another part of her speech that deals with events that she must have witnessed first hand—and she misrepresents those events:
When Saddam blocked the inspection process, the inspectors left. As a result, President Clinton, with the British and others, ordered an intensive four-day air assault, Operation Desert Fox, on known and suspected weapons of mass destruction sites and other military targets.
This sequence is precisely backwards: President Clinton decided to bomb Iraq, the inspectors left to facilitate that bombing, and subsequently Saddam Hussein refused to allow back in the inspectors who had been used as a pretext for bombing.
These events were reported accurately at the time; presumably Hillary Clinton observed them at close range. Her willingness to reinvent them for political purposes just four years later is a graphic example of how lies can “come crashing down on the whole country”—and why lying is, indeed, serious business.
Jim Naureckas can be followed on Twitter: @JNaureckas.
You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com (Twitter:@NYTimes). Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective.
Unpopular and scandal plagued, what legitimacy does Brazil’s interim government have to impose painful cuts?
The BRICS Post | June 1, 2016
Brazil’s interim government, led by former vice president Michel Temer, is facing a serious credibility crisis. Two ministers were dismissed in the first few weeks after leaked audio appeared to show them conspiring to stifle the ongoing Petrobras corruption investigation.
Meanwhile, Temer’s administration is trying to pass a budget through congress calling for limits on health, education and social spending, defended as bitter but necessary measures to get Brazil’s flailing economy back on track.
But what legitimacy does Temer’s unelected government have to impose cuts that will seriously affect tens of millions of mainly poor and lower income Brazilians?
Temer’s rise to presidency illustrates Brazil’s acute political dysfunction. More than two dozen parties form often flimsy favour swapping coalitions to gain and maintain power.
Temer’s Brazilian Democratic Movement Party (PMDB) – of no fixed ideology that historically latches onto whoever is in power – was allied to President Dilma Rousseff’s left leaning Worker’s Party (PT). Hence how Temer became vice president.
Weeks before Rousseff’s first impeachment vote, after a 13 year coalition in which the PMDB gained coveted ministerial positions, the party split from Rousseff’s government, essentially allying with the opposition. Temer, by all accounts, played an active role in Rousseff’s downfall.
Rousseff and her supporters call the impeachment process a “coup.” Accused of manipulating government finances to hide a growing deficit ahead of her 2014 re-election, she is currently suspended and awaits impeachment trial at the senate that will most likely lead to her permanent ouster.
Whether Rouseff’s impeachment constitutes a coup or not is widely debated. However dubious, it happened through a legal process.
But now, unpopular and otherwise unelectable Temer is pushing through reforms to roll back Brazil’s social safety net, measures that clearly wouldn’t receive popular support through vote.
Data polls suggest 60 per cent of voters wanted Rousseff impeached, a weak president and poor manager, who presided over Brazil’s worst recession in decades. Yet only 2 per cent would actually vote for Temer and 58 per cent wanted him impeached too.
In fact, 60 per cent want new elections, only plausible if Temer resigns or is forced to stand down. Temer could be impeached on the basis that as Rousseff’s vice, he also broke budget laws. He could also be removed by the electoral court if it’s proven that his and Rousseff’s election campaign received funds from construction firms embroiled in the Petrobras scandal.
So far he has been mentioned in plea bargains relating to the scandal but nothing has stuck. However, Marcelo Odebrecht – chief of one of the main firms involved – has reportedly signed a long awaited plea bargain, which could see many more heads roll in Brasilia.
Temer called for a “government of national salvation.” He famously installed a conservative leaning, all white male cabinet; burying Brazil’s ideal – however illusionary – of being a “rainbow nation” or “racial democracy.” What’s more, at least a third of the chosen ministers are accused of corruption.
Within a week, ministers were talking about shrinking the health system and saying no constitutional right is absolute. Temer even had to warn them to think before speaking.
The scandalous audio leaks began with planning Minister Romero Juca apparently discussing Rousseff’s impeachment as a way to stop the Petrobras investigation. He was suspended.
Next, Temer’s anticorruption Minister Fabiano Silveira stood down after audio revealed him giving advice on dealing with prosecutors to senate president Renan Calheiros, a powerful honcho of Temer’s PMDB party, target of multiple investigations.
In the middle of the leaks, the budget that involves cuts to health, education and social spending to tame the country’s ballooning deficit, was outlined.
Brazil’s economic crisis is already corroding the significant gains made by Rousseff’s Worker’s Party. Under her predecessor’s watch – the popular Luiz Inacio “Lula” Da Silva – millions rose from extreme poverty. In 2014, Brazil was removed from the world hunger map.
A fall in commodities prices, the paralysing corruption scandal at state oil giant Petrobras and Rousseff’s unsuccessful macroeconomic policies saw Brazil’s economy shrank by 3.8 per cent last year, with similar predictions for 2016.
All three of the main ratings agencies have reduced Brazil to junk status. Millions have fallen back into poverty, with unemployment at 11 per cent and over a 1.5 million jobs lost in 2015.
Temer’s so called government of “national salvation” want to implement an austerity programme outlined in his party’s “Bridge to the Future” report, that advocates increased privatizations and public spending limits.
As well as cuts to health and education, Temer’s government hopes to scale back Brazil’s landmark social welfare programme “Bolsa Familia” by at least 10 per cent.
The programme awards poor families a small cash stipend for keeping kids vaccinated and in school. Far from perfect, the programme costs just 0.5 per cent of GDP and reaches 47million poor Brazilians. More cuts are expected to be announced in the coming months.
While such public spending cuts will hurt poor and lower income families, critics say they won’t make much impact on Brazil’s deficit, targeted at US$48 billion for 2016.
Brazil is not Venezuela. It remains the world’s 7th biggest economy with around US$360billion in foreign exchange reserves. Prices of commodities like iron ore and oil, which feed the economy, are on the rise again.
IMF Brazil director Otaviano Canuto pointed out in an interview with BBC Brasil that there is plenty of opportunity to increase taxes on the wealthy, something that no government, including the Worker’s Party, has ever approached. Brazil’s taxes on the rich are the lowest in the G20.
Tax avoidance in Brazil was recorded at more than US$117 billion in 2015, more than twice this year’s fiscal budget deficit target. Meanwhile, Brazilian company JBS, the world’s biggest meat company has moved its base to Ireland meaning it now doesn’t have to pay tax in Brazil. Temer’s finance minister Henrique Meirelles was a former chairman.
Resistance to the Temer government on the streets so far has been visible but lukewarm. Temer’s justice minister Alexandrae Moraes – whose Sao Paulo military police fired 48 stun grenades in 6 minutes at a bus fare hike protest earlier this year – promised to crack down on dissent upon taking office.
Social movement leaders say that they don’t recognise Temer’s government and promise to resist. In a small but symbolic victory, the ministry of culture was reinstalled following occupation, having been cancelled by Temer.
Many view Temer’s government as illegitimate. This sentiment may grow with further damaging audio leaks and sleaze allegations and if the economy doesn’t improve.
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The Naked Emperor’s Newsletter | January 17, 2023
I try not to write about anyone who has died because if it was my family member I would not want to read any speculations about their death. However, in this case I feel that justice has not been given a chance and therefore it needs highlighting. ... continue
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