Regarding America’s Shaky Money Laundering Industry

Some of the crooks who launder dirty money 

through big banks

(source: ICIJ)

Corrupting corporate media ownership

In a rather disturbing article from Wall Street On Parade, Pam and Russ Martens report on two important aspects of the American situation, banking and news reporting. The first is that corporate-owned mainstream media, depends on financing from big banks. Presumably, most of that is in the form of advertising.   

The Martens comment that Federal Reserve Chairman, Jerome Powell, keeps telling Congress and the press that the banks are a “source of strength” in this economic crisis. That false narrative completely omits the fact that the Fed has loaned banks trillions of dollars at less than 1 percent interest. Naturally, the banks prefer the Fed’s false version of reality that big American banks are in great shape. The real reality is that in fact most or all big US banks are in bad shape. The mainstream media keeps reporting this lie because the banks want Americans to believe it and the mainstream media is willing to go along with the lie, presumably due to profit lust. 

Laundering trillions in dirty money

The Martins write about the scope of the money laundering industry and how their work is kept quiet:

“Wall Street On Parade has repeatedly written about critical reports showing serial corruption at these banks that have been censored by those Pulitzer prize winning media outlets. Yesterday provided another example: the New York Times refused to cover the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists’ (ICIJ) stunning report on how five of the biggest banks on Wall Street have continued to launder dirty money for fugitives and suspected criminals. The Wall Street Journal, whose name suggests that perhaps its focus should be Wall Street, failed to put the story on its front page, opting instead to bury it under an innocuous headline about HSBC’s stock hitting a new low.

The same news blackout occurred last year when the public interest group, Better Markets, published an in-depth report on “Wall Street’s Six Biggest Bailed-Out Banks: Their RAP Sheets & Their Ongoing Crime Spree.” Three days after the report came out, major news outlets were still refusing to cover the report. We wrote this in a report three days after the study was released:

‘We checked the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Financial Times, Bloomberg News, Reuters, CNBC, and CNN. We could find no mention of the Better Markets report. (We checked again this morning. There is still a news blackout.)

We know that the Wall Street Journal was aware of the report because Lalita Clozel, a banking regulation reporter for the Wall Street Journal, Tweeted on April 10 that Democrats in the House Financial Services Committee room were handing out the report to journalists while the Chair of the Committee, Congresswoman Maxine Waters, was introducing the bank CEOs.’”

The ICIJ’s report includes this: 

“The FinCEN Files show trillions in tainted dollars flow freely through major banks, swamping a broken enforcement system.

Secret U.S. government documents reveal that JPMorgan Chase, HSBC and other big banks have defied money laundering crackdowns by moving staggering sums of illicit cash for shadowy characters and criminal networks that have spread chaos and undermined democracy around the world.

The records show that five global banks — JPMorgan, HSBC, Standard Chartered Bank, Deutsche Bank and Bank of New York Mellon — kept profiting from powerful and dangerous players even after U.S. authorities fined these financial institutions for earlier failures to stem flows of dirty money.

U.S. agencies responsible for enforcing money laundering laws rarely prosecute megabanks that break the law, and the actions authorities do take barely ripple the flood of plundered money that washes through the international financial system.

In some cases the banks kept moving illicit funds even after U.S. officials warned them they’d face criminal prosecutions if they didn’t stop doing business with mobsters, fraudsters or corrupt regimes.

JPMorgan, the largest bank based in the United States, moved money for people and companies tied to the massive looting of public funds in Malaysia, Venezuela and Ukraine, the leaked documents reveal.”

The FinCEN Files the ICIJ examined are leaked documents that include more than 2,100 suspicious activity reports filed by banks and other financial firms with the U.S. Department of Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN). FinCEN is a US federal financial intelligence unit. It is at center of the global anti-money laundering system. Apparently, FinCEN has been corrupted and/or broken down for quite some time.

As usual, the banks respond to this with lies and propaganda intended to deceive. For example, JPMorgan claimed it has assumed a “leadership role” in pursuing “proactive intelligence-led investigations” and developing “innovative techniques to help combat financial crime.” If JPMorgan is the anti-corruption leader, one can only wonder how corrupt and inept the followers are.

One can also wonder who leaked those FinCEN documents, how they are hiding and how much more sleaze and corruption FinCEN is hiding. When the president makes comments about Americans who are suckers and losers, maybe it applies to all of us who are kept in the dark and fed bullshit. 

Sanctions evaders in the ICIJ database