by Jon Rappoport
July 1, 2022
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Because people forget, and because recent history and its crimes go down a hole where they sit in the dark and decay without consequences, I bring back some of my earlier articles. Here is one, from 2012:
Aside from their normal duties, banks serve as a social construct. They assure the population that money is in the right place. Vaults, accounts. Banks are where the money goes.
Of course, that idea has broken down in recent years, as people have become aware that banks do bad things.
Still, people maintain a certain amount of faith in these archons of money.
There is one thing, though, that must not happen. It would register too high a psychic shock for the population: bankers going to jail. Not just one or two of them, but a whole gaggle. All sorts of bankers being led off in chains would shatter public confidence. The people might realize that:
Bankland is gangland.
So, in order to maintain some semblance of public confidence in banks, a legal wrinkle is introduced.
You launder billions in drug money and terrorist money, and when you get caught, you say you’re sorry and you go free. It’s paradise.
There’s an official DOJ name for the apology. It’s called “deferred prosecution.”
The guilty-as-sin bankers a) say they’re sorry, b) swear they won’t do it again, and c) pay a fine, which always turns out to be a minor fraction of the proceeds of the criminal enterprise.
WND reports: Stuart Gulliver, chief honcho at banking behemoth HSBC, which was found guilty of massive money laundering, said the bank accepts responsibility “for past mistakes…we have said we are profoundly sorry for them, and we do so again.”
And poof. Gulliver walks.
Whereas, the last time I looked, if you’re moving cocaine in New York, rather than laundering the cocaine profits, “I’m sorry” doesn’t quite cut it when you’re busted.
By the way, the meaning of the word “defer” is “postpone” or “put off” until later. But with bankers, deferred prosecution is a cover for absolutely no criminal prosecution at any time and no prison sentences ever. I guess they didn’t want to call it “making prosecution vanish.”
Also, Mr. Gulliver of HSBC, if you noticed, was apologizing for “mistakes.” Laundering billions of dollars was evidently a series of accidental and unintended happenings, much like adding columns of numbers incorrectly. These people know how to twist meanings.
In bankland, the only thing keeping a CEO from sleeping at night is the inability to stop laughing.
John Cruz, the whistleblower who helped take HSBC down, had a slightly different take on the bank’s “mistakes.” He called the government’s $1.9 billion fine “a joke.” He said, “This bank is organized crime.” He asserted that HSBC has laundered trillions of dollars.
Cruz gave the DOJ tapes of bank employees discussing their crimes, but apparently deferred prosecution won the day. No jail for anyone.
Bill Conroy, one of the best drug-war reporters around, writing at NarcoNews, names the following banks who have been accused of major laundering and, instead of criminal trials, have been granted deferred prosecution:
Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase, Wachovia (bought by Wells Fargo), ING, Standard Chartered, American Express International.
A nice group. A high-toned group.
“What did you do at the office today, Daddy?”
“I laundered four hundred million dollars for the Sinaloa Cartel, Jimmy.”
Sidebar: When you live in bankland, and you end up on the short end of your own criminal scam pushing mortgage-backed derivatives, you win “deferred prosecution plus.” No apology necessary, and you can lay your hands on a few hundred billion from the government, as part of a bailout. This is even easier than washing drug dollars.
The government will tell you their bank regulators are stretched thin, overworked, and underpaid. But correct me if I’m wrong, isn’t the whole point of laundering money turning monstrous amounts of raw cash into digitized entries in bank accounts?
And if so, aren’t there places in the pipeline where giant containers full of money actually arrive at back doors?
Aren’t those back doors, in whatever countries they exist, rather easy to spot? Don’t the CIA and numerous other intelligence agencies have time to find those doors…if they want to?
Actually, in bankland, you have powerful intelligence agencies standing by to grease your rails and watch your back.
And life keeps getting better.
Do you seriously think these alphabet government agencies handle guard duty, year after year, decade after decade, watching the back doors and taking their little piece of the cartels’ action, while the privileged residents of bankland rake in the more serious money?
No, no. The agencies want and get full partnerships. In the whole enterprise.
In the cologne-scented atmosphere of bankland, consequences are deferred.
You go to an Ivy League school, you get your degree, you move to New York, you go to work for a bank, and after a while you wash billions of dollars for the Sinaloa. You take the train back to Scarsdale every night and ride home in a taxi. You vote Republican or Democrat. You occasionally explain to yourself why you have to do what you do.
You know all the best people. You look at them and they look at you, and a silent understanding passes between you. A recognition that you’re both in the same basic kind of business.
You’ve long since decided that, in this world, there are the strong and the weak. If on many streetcorners, in many cities around the world, addicts are showing up to get their next jolt, that’s their problem. You have no problems. You live in bankland.
Oh the stories you could tell. But you don’t.
Your bank loves that liquid cash. And all that money finds its way into the legitimate economies of many countries, and isn’t it a good thing? It’s alchemical. You’re turning the bad into good.
Surely you are.
If Occupy Wall Street had started out with gigantic signs featuring names of prominent banks above the phrase, WASHING BILLIONS IN DRUG MONEY, do you think network television cameras would have been down at Battery Park every day, and do you think moron news anchors and the White House would have been praising those fearless youths in the Park?
Do you really think so?
(To read about Jon’s mega-collection, The Matrix Revealed, click here.)
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Jon Rappoport
The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free NoMoreFakeNews emails here or his free OutsideTheRealityMachine emails here.
