Month: July 2015

JP Morgan to Pay Another Slap on the Wrist Fine for Engaging in Systemic Consumer Credit Card Debt Fraud

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Just yesterday, I published a post titled: Florida Man Sentenced to 2.5 Years in Jail for Having Sex on the Beach. The purpose of that post wasn’t to justify his actions, but rather to highlight the difference between how average citizens are treated under the U.S. “justice” system, and how thieving, remorseless financial oligarchs are treated.

While, Mr. Caballero may have ruined the day of a few beach goers by crudely having sex on a public beach in broad daylight, he didn’t run the U.S. economy into the ground and cause destitution to tens of millions of Americans. Nor did he received trillions in taxpayer backstops and bailouts, only to turn around and pay himself a record bonus and then carry on with extremely profitable, illegal financial schemes. No, it was the bank executives who did (and continue to do) all of that. Guess who ends up in prison?

And now, for the latest financial scam perpetrated by JP Morgan, as well as the insignificant slap on the wrist fine, I present the following from Reuters:

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Meet the Immigrants Building Trump’s International Hotel in Washington D.C.

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When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.

– Donald Trump in the speech announcing his candidacy for President

A Trump company may be relying on some undocumented workers to finish the $200 million hotel, which will sit five blocks from the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue, according to several who work there. A Trump spokeswoman said the company and its contractors follow all applicable laws. But in light of Trump’s comments, some of the workers at the site said they are now worried about their jobs — while others simply expressed disgust over the opinions of the man ultimately responsible for the creation of those jobs.

“It’s something ironic,” said Ivan Arellano, 29, who is from Mexico and obtained legal status through marriage. He now works as a mason laying the stonework for the lobby floor and walls of what will become the Trump International Hotel.

– From the Washington Post article: At Trump Hotel Site, Immigrant Workers Wary

Donal Trump is a class A clown, but readers of this website don’t need me to tell them that. It’s one thing to be strongly against illegal immigration. It’s quite another to demonize and stereotype Mexican immigrants, the vast majority of whom come here merely to work hard and create better lives for their families. Kind of like the many immigrants working on Trump’s mega construction project in D.C.

The Washington Post reports:

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Florida Man Sentenced to 2.5 Years in Jail for Having Sex on the Beach

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Back in May, I highlighted the case of 40-year-old Jose Caballero, who faced 15 years in jail for having sex on a Florida beach in broad daylight. Here’s an excerpt from the post, titled: Florida Man Faces 15 Years in Jail for Having Sex on the Beach (Still No Bankers in Jail):

This story demonstrates how completely and totally broken the U.S. justice system is. Should this couple have been having sex in public and in broad daylight? Absolutely not. Should there be some sort of punishment? Absolutely.

That said, the punishment should fit the crime in a just civilization, and 15 years behind bars for public sex is more akin to what you’d expect in Saudi Arabia. It’s particularly appalling when compared with the license to commit fraud and steal, which politically connected oligarchs have been granted. After all, who was really harmed by this couple’s act? Sure, some tourists may have had their day temporarily ruined or inconvenienced. A three-year-old girl may have seen something, but would probably have no way of understanding what it was. On the other hand, criminal bankers have demonstrably ruined the lives of hundreds or millions, if not billions, of people across the globe. Yet not a single TBTF executive has been prosecuted. They were bailed out instead.

Meanwhile, what about the pastor who faces only four months for molesting a little girl. Yes, you read that right. Our society is so completely fucked up, that two people irresponsibly making love in public will have their lives ruined, while a religious authority caught molesting a little girl receives a slap on the wrist.

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Cronyism Pays – Eric “Too Big to Jail” Holder Triumphantly Returns to His Prior Corporate Law Firm Job

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Trying to determine Barack Obama’s most corrupt, crony appointee presents a virtually impossible task. Every single person he’s appointed to a position of power over the course of his unfathomably shady, violent and unconstitutional presidency, has been little more than a gatekeeper for powerful vested interests. Obama’s job was to talk like a marxist, but act like a robber baron. In this regard, his reign has been an unprecedented success.

All that said, if anyone is a top contender for the worst of the worst of the Obama Administration, it’s Eric Holder. As head of the Department of Justice, he was the one man who could’ve played an enormously positive role in American society, by punishing those responsible for creating the financial crisis that destroyed tens of millions of lives globally. Instead, he chose to actively protect the financial oligarchs and ushered in a tragic new era for these United States. One in which the world suddenly realized that the U.S. is little more than a glorified oligarchy. Essentially an aggressive Banana Republic armed with nuclear weapons and the swagger of a third world dictator.

Holder’s list of failures and evidence shameless cronyism are virtually endless. I’ve covered many of them on this site. Here are just a few:

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Federal Judge of 17 Years Repents – Compares Damage Done by “War on Drugs” to Destruction of World War II

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The “war on drugs” is one of the most irrational, idiotic and destructive public policy failures in American history, and that’s saying a lot. I’ve covered this topic many times at Liberty Blitzkrieg, but nothing spells it out like the repentant words of a former federal judge, who admittedly ruined countless lives for no reason.

From the Atlantic:

ASPEN, Colo.—Former Federal Judge Nancy Gertner was appointed to the federal bench by Bill Clinton in 1994. She presided over trials for 17 years. And Sunday, she stood before a crowd at The Aspen Ideas Festival to denounce most punishments that she imposed.

Among 500 sanctions that she handed down, “80 percent I believe were unfair and disproportionate,” she said. “I left the bench in 2011 to join the Harvard faculty to write about those stories––to write about how it came to pass that I was obliged to sentence people to terms that, frankly, made no sense under any philosophy.”

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Sign This Petition to Fire Wall Street Crony and SEC Head Mary Jo White

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It didn’t take much foresight to know how much of a compromised Wall Street tool Mary Jo White would be when she was nominated to run the SEC by President Barack Obama. It was so obvious, that I wrote an article all about it before she worked a single day on the job. Here are a couple of excerpts from my 2013 piece: Meet Mary Jo White: The Next SEC Chief and a Guaranteed Wall Street Patsy.

Obama’s nominee to head the SEC, Mary Jo White, is just another gatekeeper appointed to make sure no one ever goes after the Wall Street crime syndicate.  As I have written about many times in the past, Obama does not nominate anyone to a high position of power in government who will not behave like a good little lapdog for Wall Street.

Despite Obama’s propagandist statement about how “you don’t want to mess with Mary Jo,” her background implies she will function as a useful servant to the financial oligarchs.  Forget for a second about that fact at her recent firm Debevoise & Plimpton LLP her clients included the usual suspects such as such as JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM), Morgan Stanley (MS), and UBS AG, but she is actually known as the prosecutor who popularized the “slap Wall Street on the wrist” approach.

Fast forward two years, and people are beginning to catch on. I rarely ask readers to sign online petitions, but in this case I am asking you to do just that. While I don’t expect signing a single petition to change the course of American politics, I think if enough people sign this and it gets sufficient publicity, it will at the very least serve as a very public embarrassment to both Mary Jo and Barry. You’ve gotta start somewhere.

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Robot Kills Worker at German Car Factory

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Here’s an interesting story I came across last night. From the Guardian:

A robot has killed a contractor at one of Volkswagen’s production plants in Germany, the automaker has said.

The man died on Monday at the plant in Baunatal, about 100km (62 miles) north of Frankfurt, VW spokesman Heiko Hillwig said.

The 22-year-old was part of a team that was setting up the stationary robot when it grabbed and crushed him against a metal plate, Hillwig said.

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Study Shows U.S. Police Far More Concerned About “Anti-Government” Domestic Extremists than Al-Qaeda

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U.S. law enforcement agencies rank the threat of violence from anti-government  extremists higher than the threat from radicalized Muslims, according to a report released Thursday by the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security (TCTHS).

The report, “Law Enforcement Assessment of the Violent Extremism Threat,” was based on survey research by Charles Kurzman, professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and David Schanzer, director of TCTHS and associate professor of the practice at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy.

The survey — conducted by the center with the Police Executive Research Forum — found that 74 percent of 382 law enforcement agencies rated anti-government extremism as one of the top three terrorist threats in their jurisdiction. By comparison, 39 percent listed extremism connected with Al Qaeda or like-minded terrorist organizations as a Top 3 terrorist threat.

– From Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy

Since September 11, 2001, the frightened and emotionally pliable American public has gullibly relinquished its civil liberties and free heritage in order to allow the U.S. government to wage unaccountable and unconstitutional war again Al-Qaeda and radical Islamic terrorism across the world.

Many of us have warned for years, that preemptively giving up freedoms to protect freedom could only make sense to a propagandized, ignorant public completely clueless of human history. We warned that any totalitarian apparatus implemented to fight an outside enemy, would ultimately be turned around and used upon the public domestically. We already know this is happening with the NSA’s bulk spying and data collection, and we are starting to see a proliferation of the meme that “domestic extremists are more dangerous than Al-Qaeda,” spreading from the mouths of a corrupt and paranoid political class. I’ve covered this topic on several occasions, for example:

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