“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
- George Orwell’s Animal Farm
It’s been many, many years since I read George Orwell’s Animal Farm, but the message conveyed in it will remain with me forever. The book is many things, but more than anything else, it is a portrayal and critique of human nature and the political systems that we create. For those that need a refresher, or have not read the book, here’s the basic plot.
There’s a farm headed by a Mr. Jones, who drinks so much he becomes unable to take care of the farm and feed the animals. Over time, the animals (in particular the pigs), decide human beings are parasites and the pigs lead a revolt and run Mr. Jones off the property. They change the farm’s name from Manor Farm to Animal Farm and create a list of 7 commandments. They are:
- Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy.
- Whatever goes upon four legs, or has wings, is a friend.
- No animal shall wear clothes.
- No animal shall sleep in a bed.
- No animal shall drink alcohol.
- No animal shall kill any other animal.
- All animals are equal.
Rather quickly, the pigs assume leadership over the farm and one pig in particular, Napoleon, consolidates power after running his primary competitor off the property. It goes downhill from here fast. The pigs start to walk on two legs, drink alcohol and sleep in beds, amongst other things. Understanding that their new lifestyle in in direct contrast with their original seven commandments, they simply decide to make some adjustments. The adjustments are:
- No animal shall sleep in a bed with sheets.
- No animal shall drink alcohol to excess.
- No animal shall kill any other animal without cause.
Rather quickly, even these adjustments becoming too binding for the glutinous and power hungry pig oligarch class. They decide to just condense everything down to one commandment: All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.
The above process is one for the ages, a process that has been reenacted time and time again by our species over the millennia. It is exactly what is happening in these United States right now.
The reason I spend so much time on the Constitution and civil liberties these days is because I can see the above unfolding right before my eyes. I also see an opportunity to stop it before it reaches its final, most destructive stage. Whether it’s the
Department of Justice turning journalism into a criminal act, the IRS going after political enemies, or our Noble Peace Prize winning President
droning thousands of innocent men, women and children all over the world with flying robots, the oligarch class in this country is dismantling the Bill of Rights one amendment at a time.
Once the founding document that has served this nation so well over the centuries (certainly not perfectly, but still far better than other nations), is chipped away at enough that it is rendered meaningless, the final more brutal and in your face feudal structure will be implemented. We cannot allow this to happen under any circumstances.
There are countless examples of rampant criminality and corruption as well as blatant evidence of a two-tier system of justice in America today. Too many to note or write about, but in this case I want to focus on this concept of “money laundering” in light of the recent shutdown of Liberty Reserve. This is how
the Wall Street Journal describes the story:
The money was virtual, but prosecutors say the crime was real.
Officials brought charges against a group of men who allegedly manufactured an Internet-based currency to launder about $6 billion in ill-gotten gains, a sign of authorities’ rising concern with digital cash.
Liberty Reserve, which was incorporated in 2006, was a “bank of choice for the criminal underworld,” according to the indictment, which said the operation allegedly laundered the money through 55 million transactions before it was shut down earlier this month. The company has about one million users world-wide, including about 200,000 people in the U.S., according to prosecutors. They called the plot one of the largest money-laundering operations ever uncovered.
A spokesman for Liberty Reserve couldn’t immediately be reached for comment. Prosecutors said Tuesday that they arrested five of the seven men charged in the indictment Friday in Spain, Costa Rica and Brooklyn, N.Y., and charged them with operating an unlicensed money-transmitting business. The officials said they plan to seek extradition of those arrested abroad, and that the two remaining men are at large.
On Tuesday, in the first use of the 2001 Patriot Act against a virtual currency, the Treasury Department invoked a section of the law to choke off Liberty Reserve from the U.S. financial system. The Treasury’s proposal would prohibit U.S. financial institutions from opening or maintaining accounts for foreign banks that process transactions for Liberty Reserve and require special steps to guard against any transactions involving it.
Ok, now let’s compare the above to the way the authorities went after major financial institutions found laundering hundreds of millions of drug cartel money.
HSBC is the most high profile example. From
Reuters:
(Reuters) - HSBC Holdings Plc agreed to pay a record $1.92 billion in fines to U.S. authorities for allowing itself to be used to launder a river of drug money flowing out of Mexico and other banking lapses.
Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel and Colombia’s Norte del Valle cartel between them laundered $881 million through HSBC and a Mexican unit, the U.S. Justice Department said on Tuesday.
“We accept responsibility for our past mistakes. We have said we are profoundly sorry for them, and we do so again. The HSBC of today is a fundamentally different organization from the one that made those mistakes,” HSBC Chief Executive Stuart Gulliver said.
Bank officials repeatedly ignored internal warnings that HSBC’s monitoring systems were inadequate, the Justice Department said. In 2008, for example, the CEO of HSBC Mexico was told that Mexican law enforcement had a recording of a Mexican drug lord saying that HSBC Mexico was the place to launder money.
No bank or bank executives have been indicted. Instead, prosecutors have used deferred prosecutions, under which criminal charges against a firm are set aside if it agrees to conditions such as paying fines and changing its behavior.
The difference in approach and in the application “justice” could not be more clear. In the case of Liberty Reserve, the entity was isolated from the U.S. financial system and those arrested will be targeted for extradition. Meanwhile a global manhunt is most likely on for the two remaining men at large. In other words, “money laundering” was uncovered and the “justice” in this case is that the operation was closed and the participants arrested. Ok.
Compare that to the HSBC settlement. No bank or bank executives were indicted despite the clear fact that there was a great deal of irresponsibility and criminality involved here. Not only that, but the bank merely has to pay a portion of its profits and life goes on. Like the IRS agents, they say they are “sorry” and promise to never do it again. That’s what happens when oligarchs or their minions break the law. When a regular citizen breaks the law, your life is ruined forever.
The crackdown on Liberty Reserve has nothing to do with “money laundering.” It’s about a cartel of “too big to jail” banks and the fraud financial system they operate eliminating any players that try to encroach on their turf. That isn’t capitalism, or socialism and it certainly isn’t anything close to freedom. It is a parasitic, oligarch created feudalistic structure that must be done away with. I often hear people say “we never learn from our mistakes.” Incorrect. People learn from their mistakes when there are consequences to their actions. Of course criminals don’t learn from their mistakes when there are no serious consequences to their crimes. Jail time would do the trick for a lot of bankers, politicians and bureaucrats.
In the meantime: Some money launderers are simply more equal than others.
http://www.veteranstoday.com/2013/05/30/vet-hating-mccain-caught-meeting-al-qaeda-kidnapper/
“Vet Hating” McCain Caught Meeting Al Qaeda Kidnapper
Hawkish US Senator McCain met with infamous kidnapper in Syria
Hawkish US Senator John McCain (C) poses with infamous kidnapper in Syria, Mohamed Nour (seen with his hand on his chest and holding a camera)
By Press TV
Related Interviews:
A new report has revealed that, in his recent trip to Syria, hawkish US Senator John McCain met with an infamous terrorist who has been involved in the abduction of a group of Lebanese pilgrims.
Eleven Shia pilgrims were abducted by the militants in Azaz town in the Syrian province of Aleppo in May 2012.
Two of the abductees, who were later freed, recognized the militant that had been involved in their abduction after photos of McCain posing with the abductor were released.
According to the two released captives, Anwar Ibrahim and Hussein Ali Omar, and the family members of the other nine abductees – who remain in the custody of the militants – McCain was photographed standing next to one of the kidnappers, namely Mohammad Nour.
In the photographs released by McCain’s office, Nour is seen holding a camera and wearing a blue shirt.
Following the identification of the kidnapper, McCain’s office claimed that the US senator had been unaware of the identity of the individual he was meeting with.
According to McCain’s spokesman Brian Rogers, the American politician had entered Syria through Turkey in order to visit the top commander of the foreign-backed militants, Brigadier General Salim Idris.
Speaking to Press TV, Dr. Mohammad Marandi, a professor of American Studies at the University of Tehran, pointed out, “One must be too naive to believe that McCain was unaware of the identities of the people he was due to meet.”
The political analyst stressed that the claim by McCain’s spokesman is completely unbelievable as the American senator, who has been openly supporting the militants and the Takfiri groups operating in Syria, must have normally ascertained the identities of every single individual he was planning to meet with.
McCain has never minced his words in calling for US support for the terrorists and the Takfiri militants – who accuse most Islamic sects of being infidels – in Syria.
On May 25, the US senator said that Washington would “take [Syrian President Bashar] Assad’s air power out” if the upcoming Geneva conference on Syria failed.
The Syria crisis began in mid-March 2011, and many people, including large numbers of Syrian army and security personnel, have been killed in the violence. Several international human rights organizations have charged the foreign-sponsored militants of war crimes.
and......
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/05/30/mccain-says-we-can-identify-the-good-guys-in-syria-after-he-unwittingly-meets-with-kidnappers/
McCain says we can identify the good guys in Syria — after he unwittingly meets with kidnappers
POSTED AT 2:41 PM ON MAY 30, 2013 BY ALLAHPUNDIT
You don’t really need more than that headline, do you?
As a metaphor for U.S. interventionism in Syria, it’s hard to do better than this:
Senator John McCain’s office is pushing back against reports that while visiting Syria this week he posed in a photo with rebels who kidnapped 11 Lebanese Shi’ite pilgrims…
“A number of the Syrians who greeted Senator McCain upon his arrival in Syria asked to take pictures with him, and as always, the Senator complied,” Rogers said. “If the individual photographed with Senator McCain is in fact Mohamed Nour, that is regrettable. But it would be ludicrous to suggest that the Senator in any way condones the kidnapping of Lebanese Shia pilgrims or has any communication with those responsible. Senator McCain condemns such heinous actions in the strongest possible terms,” Rogers said.
Of course he doesn’t condone it. The State Department doesn’t condone jihadism as an ideology either, yet in both cases we’d be asked to make common cause with it in the name of replacing a Shiite fundamentalist regime’s puppet with a Sunni fundamentalist “democracy.” Watch McCain’s interview about his Syria trip below and count how many bad arguments there are for intervention. One, at around 2:40, has him arguing that we can “handle” this because, after all, we have the world’s greatest military. That implication, that we should take this challenge on in part to show that we’re equal to it, is both very McCain-esque very unconvincing. If Russian-made Syrian missiles end up shooting down a few American planes, what’s the next step in the challenge that we’re required to accept? If we succeed in decimating Assad from the air, how do we meet the challenge of restraining Sunni fanatics from ethnically cleansing the Alawites? He says the status quo is terrible, which is true, without ever explaining how deviating from it would necessarily be an improvement.
Two, he claims that we can weed out the good rebels from the bad ones because Jabhat al-Nusra, the most notorious jihadi rebel group, represents only 7,000 fighters or so in a total force of 100,000. Even if his numbers are correct, that’s egregiously misleading. According to a New Yorker report last month, the “overwhelming majority” of rebels are Islamists even if they’re not affiliated with Nusra. Here’s another vignette from Time magazine about Libyan weapons dealers meeting with representatives of various Syrian rebel factions:
[F]irst, the Libyans wanted to know who the Syrians were exactly and which rebel group each represented. There was a representative from Jund-Allah (Soldiers of God), which operates in and around the capital Damascus; a commander from Ansar al-din (Supporters of the Faith) in Lattakia province; and most significantly a man who is one of the seven members of the political office of Jabhat Syria il-Islamiya (the Syrian Islamic Front), one of the country’s largest, most cohesive and strongest Islamist militant coalitions, led by the Salafi Ahrar al-Sham Brigades. (The extremist al-Qaeda-linked Jabhat al-Nusra is not part of this alliance.)
Coffee was ordered — Turkish coffee for the Syrians and cappuccinos for the Libyans. The Libyan from Zintan, wearing faded black jeans, a cream-colored shirt stretched taut across his waist and a gray sports jacket, did most of the talking. He fingered black worry beads, while his colleague from Benghazi listened. His first question was about whether the men around him recognized the FSA and its 14 provincial military councils. All said they did not. “Their commanders are failures, they are corrupt,” the Syrian from Ansar al-Din said.
“There is not even one battalion, in all honesty, that they can control,” the Islamic Front representative said. “These people [senior defectors in the FSA like the one the Libyans had met the night before] were placed as facades, in the beginning, as media personalities, but as real commanders on the ground? Not at all.”
The FSA, a.k.a. Free Syrian Army, is led by Gen. Idris. That’s who McCain met with in Syria a few days ago and that’s who he’s talking up in the clip here as some sort of tip of the American freedom spear in Syria. The FSA also happens to be the same group that, according to the Guardian, has been bleeding troops and even entire units to Jabhat al-Nusra through defections. To quote Bill Roggio, “With mass defections of FSA forces to Al Nusrah, there is no better way to ensure that US funds and weapons will fall into al Qaeda’s hands.” These are our would-be allies.
Three, he actually says at 4:40 that the rebels “are trying to achieve the same thing that we have shed American blood and treasure for for well over 200 years.” It’s one thing to believe that 10 years ago, before a series of exceptionally hard lessons in Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya and Egypt; it’s another to believe it now. It’s so surreally untrue that it eclipses McCain’s one solid realpolitik-minded argument here, that aiding the Sunni rebellion is a way to weaken Iran and, especially, Hezbollah by bleeding them in a Vietnamish quagmire of their own. We’ve spent two years watching Egypt bend towards Islamism and now here’s Maverick attempting to sell the public again on the idea that Syria’s a liberal democracy in the eventual making if we just pick the right people to empower, knowing full well that the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood probably constitutes one of the milder expressions of Islamic fundamentalism among the rebel hordes. What Syria really is is a budding hybrid of Egypt and Libya post-revolution, with some dominant Islamist group at the head of government and even more radical militias roaming the streets. In an implausibly unlikely best-case scenario, you’d end up there with some sort of socialist regime that would keep its boot on the throats of jihadists and keep the country retarded economically. The fact that he can’t sell his interventionism honestly reminds me again that he’s probably, and inadvertently, a better salesman for isolationism at this point than even Rand Paul is.
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 05/30/2013 21:17 -0400
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