Peeling the onion

The big banks and the US government are fighting a desperate court battle to keep hidden the way in which they collude to permit the bank executives to freely break the law without risking any criminal penalties.

The reason both the Democratic and Republican establishments are in full on panic mode about the rise of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders is a deep seated fear that the plebs have finally woken up.

Democrats rail against big corporations, while Republicans rail against big government. This scheme has been used to successfully divide and conquer the public for decades while big government and big business successfully schemed to divert all wealth and power to an ever smaller minuscule segment of the population — themselves.

It took awhile, but the people are finally starting getting it and they are royally pissed off. One of the primary mechanisms for this historic elite theft has been the creation of a two-tiered justice system in which the rich, powerful and connected are never prosecuted for their criminality. Instead, the government actively protects them by pretending corporate entities commit crimes as opposed to individuals. Of course, this is impossible, but yet it’s how the government handles white collar crime. The Orwellian named “Justice Department” casually utilizes deferred prosecution agreements (DPAs), in which companies pay a little fine and the criminals themselves walk away with not just their freedom, but ill gotten monetary gains as well.

Nowhere is this most apparent than when it comes to the big banks. The individuals who work at these criminal cartels can literally do anything they want with total impunity. One of the most egregious examples of this was the $1.9 billion settlement arranged with HSBC for laundering Mexican drug cartel money and dealing with sanctioned countries. If you or I did this we’d be sitting in a concrete box eating porridge through a straw for the rest of our lives, but when “masters of the world” at big banks do it, the parent company just pays a slap on the wrist fine and life goes on. That’s how oligarch justice works.

Although the Department of Justice and HSBC thought the money laundering case was settled ancient history, a determined chemist from Pennsylvania is throwing a wrench into their plans and it could have major implications.

One of the surprising things I learned very early after expatriating was that not only were my suspicions about the USA being one gigantic fraud all true, but that many elite Europeans knew all about it.

The anti-American contempt they express tends to be less because they look down on Americans for being overweight, monolingual, and untraveled, but because Americans are so blind to the fact that their government is the largest criminal enterprise on the planet despite having been warned of it in 1961 by President Eisenhower.

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military–industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals so that security and liberty may prosper together.
- Dwight D. Eisenhower, January 17, 1961

It's not as if this machinery has become less influential or less pervasive in the last 50 years, although these days we wouldn't call it the military-industrial complex, but the financial corpocracy. The EU, just so you understand, is an attempt to lay the foundation for something similar across Europe. But it's doomed to failure, because Europe is too nationalistic, too heterogeneous, and too openly corrupt.

There have always been kingdoms and empires. One elite or another has almost always ruled over Man. This is nothing new and the current rulers of the USA are far from the worst that Man has ever known. But Americans don't understand that they are ruled and therefore mistakenly believe they are free. Europeans know they are not.