Sunday, January 27, 2013
Indian "holy man" perplexes doctors
Doctors and experts are baffled by an Indian man who claims not to have eaten or drunk anything for 70 years - but is still in perfect health.
A team of scientists and doctors in Sterling Hospital, in the western Indian city of Ahmedabad, are studying the claims of Prahlad Jani, a local holy man, who is over 70 years old.
He claims to have been blessed by a goddess when he was 8-years-old, which has enabled him to survive without sustenance and that he derives energy through meditation.
Most people can live without food for several weeks, with the body drawing on its fat and protein stores. But the average human can survive for only three to four days without water.
Al Jazeera's Imran Khan reports.
Friday, January 25, 2013
Physicists Find Evidence That The Universe Is A 'Giant Brain'
Huffington Post UK | By Michael Rundle
The idea of the universe as a 'giant brain' has been proposed by scientists - and science fiction writers - for decades.
But now physicists say there may be some evidence that it's actually true. In a sense.
According to a study published in Nature's Scientific Reports, the universe may be growing in the same way as a giant brain - with the electrical firing between brain cells 'mirrored' by the shape of expanding galaxies.
The results of a computer simulation suggest that "natural growth dynamics" - the way that systems evolve - are the same for different kinds of networks - whether its the internet, the human brain or the universe as a whole.
A co-author of the study, Dmitri Krioukov from the University of California San Diego, said that while such systems appear very different, they have evolved in very similar ways.
The result, they argue, is that the universe really does grow like a brain.
The study raises profound questions about how the universe works, Krioukov said.
"For a physicist it's an immediate signal that there is some missing understanding of how nature works," he told Space.com.
The team's simulation modelled the very early life of the universe, shortly after the big bang, by looking at how quantum units of space-time smaller than subatomic particles 'networked' with each other as the universe grew.
They found that the simulation mirrored that of other networks. Some links between similar nodes resulted in limited growth, while others acted as junctions for many different connections.
For instance, some connections are limited and similar - like a person who likes sports visiting many other sports websites - and some are major and connect to many other parts of the network, like Google and Yahoo.
No, it doesn't quite mean that the universe is 'thinking' - but as has been previously pointed out online, it might just mean there's more similarity between the very small and the very large than first appearances suggest.
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One is only micrometers wide. The other is billions of light-years across. One shows neurons in a mouse brain. The other is a simulated image of the universe. Together they suggest the surprisingly similar patterns found in vastly different natural phenomena. ~David Constantine
Mark Miller, a doctoral student at Brandeis University, is researching how particular types of neurons in the brain are connected to one another. By staining thin slices of a mouse's brain, he can identify the connections visually. The image above (left) shows three neuron cells (two red and one yellow) and their connections.
An international group of astrophysicists used a computer simulation last year to recreate how the universe grew and evolved. The simulation image (right) above is a snapshot of the present universe that features a large cluster of galaxies (bright yellow) surrounded by thousands of stars, galaxies and dark matter (web).
Planned Obsolescence for the Monetary System: The 4-Hour Workday
Buckminster Fuller once said: "You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete." Let's make that happen then. Let's make this current Monetary System obsolete by establishing the 4-Hour Workday worldwide and lead the path into a new model, a Resource Based Economy.
Last August I wrote an article presenting the 4-Hour Workday campaign as a transition plan toward a Resource Based Economy, which received a lot of positive reviews. In order to better grasp the concepts in this article it would be a good idea to read that August article first, if you haven't read it already.
A great example that illustrates B. Fuller's quote is Feudalism. The Feudal Lord was very powerful and owned the land. Slowly, the Feudal Lord started to lose his power, and the rise of merchants (and many other factors) made Feudalism an obsolete system until it disappeared. We are all familiar with the term Planned Obsolescence, a concept that our "wonderful" system has brought to us that deliberately makes products break faster or become obsolete faster, creating unnecessary waste and a toll on the environment. Well, it is time to give this system a taste of its own medicine: a Planned Obsolescence to this Monetary System through work-time reductions. How would that happen?
Having a society that is only required to work four hours a day would mean the following:
1.- A path toward a no-growth economy will be developed. Productivity increases can be used in two ways: We either use it to produce more output in the same amount of time, or we use it to produce the same output but with less amount of time. A fundamental part of a no-growth economy is to utilize the increases in productivity to work less instead of producing more, and the 4-hour workday will enable us to do that. The environment will have a chance to breathe again in a no-growth model.
2.- A switch in patterns of consumption. For example, people who work longer hours are more likely to choose to eat out instead of cooking healthier meals at home, or to buy produce mostly shipped from other regions or countries instead of growing their own food right in their own backyard, or to spend on a car and gas instead of using public transportation or, even better, riding a bicycle. Reducing the working time will encourage people to move away from these patterns of consumption that have high carbon footprints, and gravitate toward activities that are more self-sufficient and less dependable on the system. The Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) published a study this past November of 2012 which concludes that countries with shorter work hours tend to have lower ecological footprints, carbon footprints, and carbon dioxide emissions (Schor et. al, 2012)
3.- It also means that current models that are being developed, models that focus on sustainability and a symbiotic relationship between human beings and the environment, will become more popular since people will have more time to spend on these activities. Permaculture, sharing programs, open-source technologies, time banks, etc., are activities and models that currently exist, but they could become mainstream in a society that is more self-sufficient and enjoys more leisure time.
4.- Full employment will be achieved. Capitalism and its common practices of outsourcing, of wage reduction in order to declare more profits, of workforce reduction and replacement with technology and automation, are aggravating the unemployment problem. Technology should be used to create the output in less time and therefore reduce the workday. The 4-hour workday will increase the availability of jobs so everyone can be employed and have an income. Even more, after the 4-hour workday is established, periodic re-evaluations every 10 years for more reductions to 3 or 2 hours a day (based on productivity increases) will make unemployment a meaningless measure. If in the next 2 or 3 decades we reach a point where we can get the income we need with just 1 hour a day of paid work, and we also begin to move toward activities that are self-sufficient and less dependable on the system, such as growing our own food, time banks, open-source technologies, tool sharing, etc., less and less money will be required to have a decent life. Money then will begin to become unnecessary and obsolete, and its end will be very close to us at that time.
5.- The amount of leisure time people have will increase. This leisure time can be spent on so many things. People would be able to do things they love doing, like playing a sport, reading a book, hiking, etc. But it could also be spent connecting more with family and friends, or maybe connecting with people in the local community, strengthening what economists call "Social Capital." This aspect will improve the psychological well-being of the population.
6.- People will be able to become more engaged with the problems that affect our community and become more active citizens. As another consequence of increased leisure time, people will have time to educate themselves about current issues that affect them and their possible solutions. But not only that, it will also provide more time to educate others, to engage the public and to massively assist to protest against the injustices of our current economic system. Whether it is monetary reform, anti-war movements, corporate takeover of government, etc., these issues that affect our society are without a doubt a battle between injustice and freedom, between the people and the oppressor. Increasing leisure time for the population will make it more likely to obtain higher participation rates in protest, activist movements or independent political campaigns than what we see today. And the participation can include the logistics of designing the campaign's websites, social media, educating ourselves about current issues and solutions, going out to the streets and protest, organize marches, educate others, etc. Essentially, Activism will be similar to the way we are doing it in current times but with 3 or 5 times more involvement from citizens. Thus, the concept of democracy will be redefined, giving more power to the people (which is what democracy really means) instead of giving that power to the politicians and the plutocracy that controls them. The biosocial pressure will be so strong that we could create the change we all want to see in the world.
7.- Our value system will begin to switch from competition to cooperation and from consumerism to sustainability. Imagine that you are a doctor who loves being a doctor and would not want to be restricted to 4 hours. You could work 4 hours per day to get the same income you've been getting and during your leisure time you could continue doing what you love doing and offer medical services to people who cannot afford it or lack health insurance. Or what about the engineer who loves being an engineer and can offer services during his/her leisure time to help nonprofits build houses for the poor people who somehow have lost their home due to economic reasons or an environmental disaster.
Increasing leisure time will create the right environment for values like Individualism and Competition to be replaced with values of Collectivism and Cooperation respectively. And as we described in points number 2 and 3 above, values of consumerism will begin to be replaced by values of sustainability.
In other words, all these 7 aspects (and many more that could be listed here) will set the path to make our current system obsolete and slowly be replaced by a new one that will start taking over.
Let's support the 4-hour workday. Ask your Chapter Coordinator to bring up The 4-Hour Workday as a transition plan into a Resource Based Economy at the international meetings. Help promote it to other organizations like the Occupy Movement, different unions around the world or any other organization. A letter has been written for the occupy movement, which has been published on the main site. Help promote that letter to gain support from the Occupy Movement and Unions of the world. This is a plan that can really make a difference and should be the transition plan into a Resource Based Economy. It won't be easy, but history has shown us that it is possible. We have done it twice already when we reduced the work day from 16 to 12 hours in the mid 1800s and a second time from 12 to 8 hours in the early 1900s. The third time is NOW!
Let's get started
In solidarity
Alex Hartley
TZM Colorado Chapter Member.
http://blog.thezeitgeistmovement.com/blog/alex-hartley/planned-obsolescence-monetary-system-4-hour-workday
Wednesday, January 16, 2013
Ending The TRUTH EMBARGO
For Immediate Release
January 15, 2013
Los Angeles, CA - CHD2 Productions will hold a media event at the Sundae Film Festival in Park City, Utah to launch a major event/documentary project. At the press conference Apollo14 Astronaut Dr. Edgar Mitchell, the sixth person to walk on the Moon, will be introduced as the international spokesperson for the Citizens' Hearing on Disclosure and Jeremy Kenyon Lockyer Corbell will be announced as Director of a documentary film, Truth Embargo, based upon this Citizens' Hearing. See film Trailer.
The media event will be held in the Aspen Room at the Park City Peaks, 2121 Park Avenue, Park City, UT on Friday, January 18 from 2-3 pm MST.
The Citizens' Hearing on Disclosure will be produced by Paradigm Research Group and will take place between April 29 and May 3 in Washington, DC at the National Press Club where the main ballroom will be turned into a "Congressional Hearing Room." This unprecedented project will bring top researchers from around the world along with government/agency witnesses to testify for 30 hours over five days before former members of the United States Congress. The subject of this hearing is an extraterrestrial presence engaging the human race. The motto of this hearing is, "If Congress will not do its job, the people will." The last time the Congress of the United States held a hearing on what is arguably the most important issue in the world today was in 1968 before the House Committee on Science and Astronautics.
Producing the accompanying documentary film Truth Embargo will be Just Cause Entertainment, a film/television/special effects company located in Marina Del Rey, California.
Just Cause Entertainment President Reuben Langdon and Paradigm Research Group Executive Director Stephen Bassett will moderate the press conference. Langdon and Bassett will be meeting throughout the week with activist writers, directors and producers regarding endorsements for the Citizens' Hearing project.
Truth Embargo mini-trailer: www.youtube.com/embed/23ZxPuDOkfsCHD2 Productions Contacts:
Stephen Bassett - 202-215-8344
Reuben Langdon - 818-324-6294
Media Interview Contact: Janet Donovan, Creative Enterprises International,
202-904-1035 (cell), 202-822-9318
_______________________________________
CHD2 Productions, LLC 4130 Del Rey Avenue, Marina Del Rey, CA 90292 prg@paradigmresearchgroup.org
Tuesday, January 15, 2013
Ben Fulford (Jan 14 2013) ~ Signs Of Cabal Defeat Are Proliferating
Furthermore, 311 tsunami and nuclear terrorist attack accomplice Senator J. Rockefeller announced he was not running for re-election. This is a sign the Rockefellers are joining the Bush clan in being ousted from secret power. In France, meanwhile, another cabal leader, former President Nicholas Sarkozy is facing criminal prosecution on charges of accepting bribes from foreign leaders. Then we have a mysterious visit by Obama to the Pentagon for a “personal fitness boot camp,” on January 12th.
Secret negotiations, meanwhile, continue to remove the US dollar from Federal Reserve Board control and into the hands of the 180 nation BRICS coalition. Despite attempts by cabalists to derail these talks, they are proceeding smoothly.
Also, the situation in the Middle East has taken a dramatic turn as control of Iraqi oilfields is being handed over to prominent Kurdish families as a part of the process of creating a Sunni super-state encompassing Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Libya. Three prominent Kurdish activists were killed last week to help facilitate this process, according to MI5 sources. The Turkish government is being offered Kurdish oil money in exchange for allowing limited autonomy for Kurds. The killed activists were taking a more hardline stance than Mr. Ocalan, the jailed Kurdish leader who is negotiating with the Turks on this issue. If you ever saw the movie Midnight Express, about a Western male prisoner repeatedly raped in a Turkish jail, you might wonder if a Kurdish leader in a Turkish jail is the best person to be put in charge of the negotiations. One of the killed activists was Ocalan’s girlfriend.
In any case, it is the Talabani and Bazani families that now control the Kurdish oil in Northern Iraq, according to MI5. Turkey is expected to de facto donate a slice of its territory to the emerging Kurdish state in the Syrian, Iraqi, Iranian, Turkish border region in exchange for oil. This state would then become a part of the emerging Sunni alliance.
In Japan, meanwhile, the new government of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has begun to force the Bank of Japan to issue more money. However, Abe still needs a credible backer in the underworld and among right-wingers to make sure his government does not succumb to secret bullying and personal threats as was the case with previous post-war governments. He has already been warned to avoid jingoism and concentrate on fixing the economy. In particular, he was told to call off his planned invasion of the island of Takeshima, controlled by South Korea but claimed by Japan. In a similar vein, efforts by cabalists to provoke a fight with China over the disputed Senkaku or Daiyu Islands will get nowhere.
Abe’s government is also aware that relying on the United States for Japanese protection is not a viable long-term strategy. That is why he is visiting Vietnam, Korea and Indonesia this week in the hopes of finding Asian partners who are also wary of Chinese hegemony. His government will further make approaches to Russia and India over the coming months in the hopes of building an alliance of nations that border China.
What he will find out, though, is that the 180 nation BRICS alliance, including China’s neighbours, does not function according to the Western created mentality of thinking of other countries as enemies.
World peace and harmony is the new approach and he had better figure that out.
Under the radar, meanwhile, efforts to get historical Asian gold deposits incorporated into the global financial system continue to blocked by cabalist forces. The people trying to prevent this make claims the gold is “communist Chinese,” in order to try to prevent it from being sold in exchange for a basket of currencies.
For that reason, the Chinese have been taking all the dollars they have and spending them on as many physical commodities as they can buy. The huge Chinese stockpiles of gold, food, iron ore, metals etc. that have resulted may be used to back a final push to remove the US dollar from cabal control.
One plan being considered is for the BRICS to offer to exchange all US dollars for a new commodity backed currency (or various national currencies) during a fixed time period after which dollars would no longer be accepted.
This would force the United States to start issuing a government currency like greenbacks or else face complete economic collapse and chaos.
It is in the interests of the West to come to a compromise over that gold before the situation in Europe and North America deteriorates to the point of revolution.
On that note, the question of how long Obama will remain in power also remains unanswered. The gnostic illuminati say the staged Sandy Hook shooting incident may prove to be fatal for the Obama regime. The evidence that this was a staged mass shooting or else kidnapping of kids for Satanic ceremonies is becoming overwhelming. Here, for example, is Obama posing for a photo with one of the victims two days after she was supposed to have been shot. Here is another link
It may be that the entire Sandy Hook psychological warfare operation was deliberately sabotaged so that it would rebound back on the regime. The “personal fitness boot camp,” that Obama was forced to attend is pentagon talk for a disciplinary session, according to a Pentagon source. The military are, in fact, very upset about this incident and are trying to locate the children and round up the paedophilic Satanists who were entrapped by this flawed psy-ops.
That is also what is happening with the case of Jimmy Savile of the BBC. Savile used his job as a famous TV personality to recruit children for paedophilic politicians, according to MI5 sources. One of the most notorious was former Prime Minister Edward Heath who was “getting kids and killing them,” the MI5 sources say. The other Prime Minister was Gordon Brown who had “a prolific taste for young boys.”
Heath had his affairs at the Kensington Gardens hotel which, unbeknownst to him, was a KGB run hotel. Brown was subsequently photographed having sex with young boys and blackmailed by the KGB. The third Prime Minister linked to paedophiles is Tony Blair. However, the only hard evidence against Blair was the he once approached a man in a public toilet and asked for sex. The man happened to be an undercover police officer and Blair was arrested, the MI5 sources say.
We must ask ourselves “are these the sort of people we want to rule over us?”
Benjamin Screaton Fulford is a Canadian journalist living in Japan. He was born in a diplomat's family. His great-grandfather is George Taylor Fulford. In the early 1980s he went to Japan to study at Sophia University.
benjaminfulford.net/
Collective-Evolution – Why Did The Media Keep The Recent Peaceful Icelandic Revolution Quiet?
January 11, 2013 Did you know about the peaceful Icelandic revolution that took place over the last 5 years? If you didn’t, it is likely because it was never televised or talked about very much at all on mainstream news. One would have to be part of the right websites or Facebook pages to even find out that this has been going on. Why is this the case? Why keep something so monumental hidden from the public?
First let’s discuss what took place with this revolution, then it will become much more clear as to why this was never televised.
It was during a time of a lot of financial turmoil around the world and and stories were popping up all over the news of how banks around the world had been crushing or minimizing rebellions by receiving massive bailouts to keep them alive. The Iceland story is different because, there was no crushing or ending the rebellion, instead, the people rose up. This is why this was not seen on TV anywhere. If the rest of the world knew that the people won, it may give them some ideas.
During the financial turmoil of 2008 and 2009, the people of Iceland forced their government and banks to resign. How did they do this? Peacefully. The following is a summation of what steps they took over a porcess of several years, and it all began with each one of them realizing this couldn’t continue.
How to Start a Revolution – Learn From Iceland!
2008 – The main bank of Iceland is nationalized. The Krona, the currency of Iceland devaluates and the stock market halts. The country is in bankruptcy.
2008 – Citizens rise up at Parliament and succeed in forcing the resignation of both the prime minister and the effective government. New elections are held.
Yet, the country remains in a bad economic situation. A Parliament act is passed to pay back 3,500 million Euros to Great Britain and Holland by the people of Iceland monthly during the next 15 years, with 5.5% interest.
2010 – The people of Iceland again take to the streets to demand a referendum. In January of 2010, the President of Iceland denies approval, instead announcing a popular vote on the matter by the people.
In March, a referendum and denial of payment is approved by popular vote of 93%. Meanwhile, government officials initiate an investigation to bring to justice those responsible for the crisis. Many high level executives and bankers are arrested. Interpol dictates an order to force all implicated parties to leave Iceland.
An assembly is elected to write a new constitution (based on the Denmark’s) to avoid entrapments of debt based currency foreign loans. 25 citizens are chosen — with no political affiliation — out of the 522 candidates. The only qualifications for candidacy are adulthood and the support of 30 people. The constitutional assembly started in February of 2011. It continues to present ‘carta magna’ from recommendations provided by various assemblies throughout the country. Ultimately, it must be approved by both the current Parliament and the one created through the next legislative election.
It’s quite a story isn’t it? You can most definitely see at this point why this was not covered in newspapers, on radio networks and on television. Imagine seeing this story on TV several times each day wherever you live in the world, do you think the people would start to get ideas? Maybe try the same thing? Most definitely. There is always a constant push of fear, murders, anger, government success, health fallacies and false information, but never do we hear of stories that could be a threat to the system.
Another key factor of this revolution that we has to look at is that it did not come from a place of violence, bloodshed or anger. No guns or fighting! It was simply people getting together peacefully and working things out. This is something this entire world is capable of but believes is impossible. Humanity has been so programmed to give itself little credit in this department. We always hear about how we need to be governed, there are too many crazy people out there, we need a big brother keeping control. The truth is, without the confines and certain rules the system employs, we would be a much more peaceful people mainly because we are no longer acting in survival mode. Now I am not here to say that the system is the only issue because it isn’t, our programming is also very strong in what we have been taught and believe about ourselves. I am simply here to say, this programming can be broken and our consciousness can and is changing.
I also thought it was a big step to see Iceland employ a new means of choosing it’s leaders. Someone who is an adult and has 30 people supporting them can run. This is great as the only reason why we have politicians today who have educations is because the elite needs to know that these people are programmed to repeat this system. Generally they also have to have corporate affiliations as well so they know they can be controlled by money.
Now Iceland is proceeding to actually prosecute some of their formerly most powerful bankers and the Icelandic special prosecutor has stated that it very well may indict some 90 people. Meanwhile, over 200 people, including the former chief executives of Iceland’s three biggest banks, face criminal charges for their activities. While I don’t agree with the judgment factor being used here, I understand that this is the step they feel right in taking.
Hopefully more countries around the world begin to follow suit!
Monday, January 14, 2013
Will JPMorgan Chase Be Held to Account for Money Laundering “Lapses” by US Regulators?
by Tom Burghardt / January 14th, 2013
As a sop to outraged public opinion over Wall Street’s looting of the real economy, criminal banksters are coming under increased scrutiny by federal regulators.
Scrutiny, however, is not the same thing as enforcement of laws such as the Bank Secrecy Act and other regulatory measures meant to stop the flow of dirty money from organized crime into the financial system.
And never mind that President Obama and his hand-picked coterie of insiders from Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo (all of whom figured prominently in recent narcotics scandals) are moving to impose Eurozone-style austerity measures that threaten to ravage the social safety net, the American people are spoon-fed a pack of lies that this cabal will protect their interests and enforce the law when it comes to drug money laundering.
Late last week, Reuters reported that “U.S. regulators are expected to order JPMorgan Chase & Co to correct lapses in how it polices suspect money flows … in the latest move by officials to force banks to tighten their anti money-laundering systems.”
In December, the Department of Justice cobbled together a widely criticized deferred prosecution agreement (DPA) with Europe’s largest bank, HSBC, over charges that the institution, founded in 1865 by British drug lords when the British Crown seized Hong Kong from China in the wake of the First Opium War, knowingly laundered billions of dollars in drug and terrorist money for some of the most violent gangsters on earth.
Despite the fact that DOJ imposed a $1.9 billion (£1.2bn) fine which included $655 million (£408m) in civil penalties, not a single senior officer at HSBC was criminally charged with enabling Mexican drug cartels and Al Qaeda terrorists to illegally move money through its American subsidiaries.
More outrageously, even when stiff fines are levied against criminal banks and corporations, as likely as not “some or all of these payments will probably be tax-deductible. The banks can claim them as business expenses. Taxpayers, therefore, will likely lighten the banks’ loads,” The New York Times disclosed.
“The action against JPMorgan,” Reuters reported, “would be in the form of a cease-and-desist order, which regulators use to force banks to improve compliance weaknesses, the sources said. JPMorgan will probably not have to pay a monetary penalty, one of the sources said.”
Read that sentence again. America’s largest bank, responsible for some of the worst depredations of the housing crisis which tossed millions of citizens out of their homes and fined $7.3 billion (£4.53bn) for doing so, will not be fined nor will their officers be criminally charged for presumably washing black money for organized crime.
Despite the recklessness of senior officials at JPMorgan, including CEO Jamie Dimon, former CFO Doug Braunstein and former CIO Ina Drew over the bank’s massive losses in the credit derivatives market last year, Bloomberg News reported that the board will only “consider” whether to release a report on the fiasco which wiped out close to $51 billion in shareholder value at this “too big to fail” bank.
The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), severely criticized by the US Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in their 335-page report into HSBC, along with the Federal Reserve are expected to issue the cease-and-desist order as early as this week.
Last April, however, when OCC issued a cease-and-desist order against Citigroup for alleged “gaps” in their oversight of cash transactions similar to those of drug-tainted HSBC and Wells-owned Wachovia, which laundered hundreds of billions of dollars for narcotics traffickers through dodgy cash exchange houses in Mexico, no monetary penalties were attached.
A “person close” to Citigroup “attributed part of the problem to an accident when a computer was unplugged from anti-money-laundering systems,” according to The New York Times.
While such bald-faced misrepresentations may pass muster with America’s “newspaper of record,” Citigroup’s sorry history when it comes to facilitating criminal money flows is not so easily swept under the rug.
Late last year investigative journalist Bill Conroy reported in Narco News: “In the 1990s, Raul Salinas de Gortari, the brother of former Mexican President Carlos Salinas, tapped US-based Citibank to help transfer up to $100 million out of Mexico and into Swiss bank accounts. Although US authorities investigated the suspicious money movements, ultimately no charges were brought against Raul Salinas or Citibank–a Citigroup Inc. subsidiary.”
“Again,” Conroy reported, “in January 2010, Citigroup popped up on banking regulators’ radar, this time in Mexico, when a Mexican judge accused a half dozen casa de cambios (money transmitters) of laundering drug funds through various banks, including Citigroup’s Mexican subsidiary. In that case, Citigroup again was not accused of violating any laws.”
However, despite that fact that the OCC’s cease-and-desist order against Citigroup accused the bank of systemic “internal control weaknesses” that opened the institution up to shady transactions by “high-risk customers,” presumably including flush-with-cash narcotics traffickers, the bank was not indicted for criminal violations under the Bank Secrecy Act and did not admit wrongdoing, instead promising to “institute reforms.”
As with Wachovia and HSBC, OCC charged that Citigroup’s “lapses” included “the incomplete identification of high risk customers in multiple areas of the bank, inability to assess and monitor client relationships on a bank-wide basis, inadequate scope of periodic reviews of customers, weaknesses in the scope and documentation of the validation and optimization process applied to the automated transaction monitoring system, and inadequate customer due diligence.”
Additionally, Citigroup “failed to adequately conduct customer due diligence and enhanced due diligence on its foreign correspondent customers, its retail banking customers, and its international personal banking customers and did not properly obtain and analyze information to ascertain the risk and expected activity of particular customers.”
According to OCC auditors, Citigroup “self-reported” that “from 2006 through 2010, the Bank failed to adequately monitor its remote deposit capture/international cash letter instrument processing in connection with foreign correspondent banking.” As I have pointed out, correspondent and private banking are gateways for laundering drug and other criminal money flows.
In other words, replicating patterns employed for decades by the world’s leading financial institutions, organized criminals and terrorist financiers were enabled, with a wink-and-a-nod by the US government, above all by US secret state agencies which siphoned off part of the loot for covert operations, to wash black cash through the system as a whole.
Already stung by billions of dollars in losses due to risky trades in credit derivatives as noted above, MoneyWatch reported “CEO Jamie Dimon can’t blame this on a ‘flawed, complex, poorly reviewed, poorly executed and poorly monitored’ strategy, like he did when the bank lost $6.2 billion on the so-called ‘London Whale’ trade.”
“In many ways,” reporter Jill Schlesinger wrote, “the current potential regulatory action is worse than any trading loss, because it indicates a systemic lapse in controls.”
According to MoneyWatch, regulators “appear to have found a company-wide lapse in procedures and oversight connected to anti-money-laundering (AML) surveillance and risk management. AML controls are intended to deter and detect the misuse of legitimate financial channels for the funding of money laundering, terrorist financing and other criminal acts.”
But there’s the rub; federal regulators are loathe to police, let alone hold to account, those responsible for such illicit transactions precisely because the infusion of dirty money into the system is a splendid means to keep failed capitalist financial institutions afloat, a process which Global Research political analyst Michel Chossudovsky has termed “the criminalization of the state.”
In fact, as former London Metropolitan Police financial crimes specialist Rowan Bosworth-Davies recently wrote on his website: “These institutions exist … to handle and facilitate the through-put of the staggering volume of criminal and dirty money which daily flows through the financial sector, because the profits there from are just so incredibly valuable.”
“The biggest problem for these banks,” Bosworth-Davies observed, “is that by far the greatest amount of this money is illegal to handle under international money laundering laws. All banking institutions are now effectively subject to international laws which prohibit the handling or the facilitation of criminally-acquired money from whatever source, and that money includes the proceeds of drug trafficking, all other criminal activities (including tax evasion), and the proceeds of terrorism.”
Indeed, “The money they were moving was so huge … that it became very easy to persuade Governments to turn a blind eye, while regulators were encouraged to look the other way, when the banks began engaging in a series of wholesale criminal activities.”
Until OCC reveals the content of its cease-and-desist order pending against JPMorgan Chase we do not know the extent of the bank’s potential criminal “lapses” under the Bank Secrecy Act.
However, as Reuters reported although “no immediate action is expected from US prosecutors,” it is a near certainty that the federal government and complicit media will disappear whatever dirty secrets eventually emerge down the proverbial memory hole.
http://dissidentvoice.org/2013/01/will-jpmorgan-chase-be-held-to-account-for-money-laundering-lapses-by-us-regulators/#more-47218
As a sop to outraged public opinion over Wall Street’s looting of the real economy, criminal banksters are coming under increased scrutiny by federal regulators.
Scrutiny, however, is not the same thing as enforcement of laws such as the Bank Secrecy Act and other regulatory measures meant to stop the flow of dirty money from organized crime into the financial system.
And never mind that President Obama and his hand-picked coterie of insiders from Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo (all of whom figured prominently in recent narcotics scandals) are moving to impose Eurozone-style austerity measures that threaten to ravage the social safety net, the American people are spoon-fed a pack of lies that this cabal will protect their interests and enforce the law when it comes to drug money laundering.
Late last week, Reuters reported that “U.S. regulators are expected to order JPMorgan Chase & Co to correct lapses in how it polices suspect money flows … in the latest move by officials to force banks to tighten their anti money-laundering systems.”
In December, the Department of Justice cobbled together a widely criticized deferred prosecution agreement (DPA) with Europe’s largest bank, HSBC, over charges that the institution, founded in 1865 by British drug lords when the British Crown seized Hong Kong from China in the wake of the First Opium War, knowingly laundered billions of dollars in drug and terrorist money for some of the most violent gangsters on earth.
Despite the fact that DOJ imposed a $1.9 billion (£1.2bn) fine which included $655 million (£408m) in civil penalties, not a single senior officer at HSBC was criminally charged with enabling Mexican drug cartels and Al Qaeda terrorists to illegally move money through its American subsidiaries.
More outrageously, even when stiff fines are levied against criminal banks and corporations, as likely as not “some or all of these payments will probably be tax-deductible. The banks can claim them as business expenses. Taxpayers, therefore, will likely lighten the banks’ loads,” The New York Times disclosed.
“The action against JPMorgan,” Reuters reported, “would be in the form of a cease-and-desist order, which regulators use to force banks to improve compliance weaknesses, the sources said. JPMorgan will probably not have to pay a monetary penalty, one of the sources said.”
Read that sentence again. America’s largest bank, responsible for some of the worst depredations of the housing crisis which tossed millions of citizens out of their homes and fined $7.3 billion (£4.53bn) for doing so, will not be fined nor will their officers be criminally charged for presumably washing black money for organized crime.
Despite the recklessness of senior officials at JPMorgan, including CEO Jamie Dimon, former CFO Doug Braunstein and former CIO Ina Drew over the bank’s massive losses in the credit derivatives market last year, Bloomberg News reported that the board will only “consider” whether to release a report on the fiasco which wiped out close to $51 billion in shareholder value at this “too big to fail” bank.
The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), severely criticized by the US Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in their 335-page report into HSBC, along with the Federal Reserve are expected to issue the cease-and-desist order as early as this week.
Last April, however, when OCC issued a cease-and-desist order against Citigroup for alleged “gaps” in their oversight of cash transactions similar to those of drug-tainted HSBC and Wells-owned Wachovia, which laundered hundreds of billions of dollars for narcotics traffickers through dodgy cash exchange houses in Mexico, no monetary penalties were attached.
A “person close” to Citigroup “attributed part of the problem to an accident when a computer was unplugged from anti-money-laundering systems,” according to The New York Times.
While such bald-faced misrepresentations may pass muster with America’s “newspaper of record,” Citigroup’s sorry history when it comes to facilitating criminal money flows is not so easily swept under the rug.
Late last year investigative journalist Bill Conroy reported in Narco News: “In the 1990s, Raul Salinas de Gortari, the brother of former Mexican President Carlos Salinas, tapped US-based Citibank to help transfer up to $100 million out of Mexico and into Swiss bank accounts. Although US authorities investigated the suspicious money movements, ultimately no charges were brought against Raul Salinas or Citibank–a Citigroup Inc. subsidiary.”
“Again,” Conroy reported, “in January 2010, Citigroup popped up on banking regulators’ radar, this time in Mexico, when a Mexican judge accused a half dozen casa de cambios (money transmitters) of laundering drug funds through various banks, including Citigroup’s Mexican subsidiary. In that case, Citigroup again was not accused of violating any laws.”
However, despite that fact that the OCC’s cease-and-desist order against Citigroup accused the bank of systemic “internal control weaknesses” that opened the institution up to shady transactions by “high-risk customers,” presumably including flush-with-cash narcotics traffickers, the bank was not indicted for criminal violations under the Bank Secrecy Act and did not admit wrongdoing, instead promising to “institute reforms.”
As with Wachovia and HSBC, OCC charged that Citigroup’s “lapses” included “the incomplete identification of high risk customers in multiple areas of the bank, inability to assess and monitor client relationships on a bank-wide basis, inadequate scope of periodic reviews of customers, weaknesses in the scope and documentation of the validation and optimization process applied to the automated transaction monitoring system, and inadequate customer due diligence.”
Additionally, Citigroup “failed to adequately conduct customer due diligence and enhanced due diligence on its foreign correspondent customers, its retail banking customers, and its international personal banking customers and did not properly obtain and analyze information to ascertain the risk and expected activity of particular customers.”
According to OCC auditors, Citigroup “self-reported” that “from 2006 through 2010, the Bank failed to adequately monitor its remote deposit capture/international cash letter instrument processing in connection with foreign correspondent banking.” As I have pointed out, correspondent and private banking are gateways for laundering drug and other criminal money flows.
In other words, replicating patterns employed for decades by the world’s leading financial institutions, organized criminals and terrorist financiers were enabled, with a wink-and-a-nod by the US government, above all by US secret state agencies which siphoned off part of the loot for covert operations, to wash black cash through the system as a whole.
Already stung by billions of dollars in losses due to risky trades in credit derivatives as noted above, MoneyWatch reported “CEO Jamie Dimon can’t blame this on a ‘flawed, complex, poorly reviewed, poorly executed and poorly monitored’ strategy, like he did when the bank lost $6.2 billion on the so-called ‘London Whale’ trade.”
“In many ways,” reporter Jill Schlesinger wrote, “the current potential regulatory action is worse than any trading loss, because it indicates a systemic lapse in controls.”
According to MoneyWatch, regulators “appear to have found a company-wide lapse in procedures and oversight connected to anti-money-laundering (AML) surveillance and risk management. AML controls are intended to deter and detect the misuse of legitimate financial channels for the funding of money laundering, terrorist financing and other criminal acts.”
But there’s the rub; federal regulators are loathe to police, let alone hold to account, those responsible for such illicit transactions precisely because the infusion of dirty money into the system is a splendid means to keep failed capitalist financial institutions afloat, a process which Global Research political analyst Michel Chossudovsky has termed “the criminalization of the state.”
In fact, as former London Metropolitan Police financial crimes specialist Rowan Bosworth-Davies recently wrote on his website: “These institutions exist … to handle and facilitate the through-put of the staggering volume of criminal and dirty money which daily flows through the financial sector, because the profits there from are just so incredibly valuable.”
“The biggest problem for these banks,” Bosworth-Davies observed, “is that by far the greatest amount of this money is illegal to handle under international money laundering laws. All banking institutions are now effectively subject to international laws which prohibit the handling or the facilitation of criminally-acquired money from whatever source, and that money includes the proceeds of drug trafficking, all other criminal activities (including tax evasion), and the proceeds of terrorism.”
Indeed, “The money they were moving was so huge … that it became very easy to persuade Governments to turn a blind eye, while regulators were encouraged to look the other way, when the banks began engaging in a series of wholesale criminal activities.”
Until OCC reveals the content of its cease-and-desist order pending against JPMorgan Chase we do not know the extent of the bank’s potential criminal “lapses” under the Bank Secrecy Act.
However, as Reuters reported although “no immediate action is expected from US prosecutors,” it is a near certainty that the federal government and complicit media will disappear whatever dirty secrets eventually emerge down the proverbial memory hole.
Tom Burghardt is a researcher and activist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. His articles are published in many venues. He is the editor of Police State America: U.S. Military "Civil Disturbance" Planning, distributed by AK Press. Read other articles by Tom, or visit Tom's website.
http://dissidentvoice.org/2013/01/will-jpmorgan-chase-be-held-to-account-for-money-laundering-lapses-by-us-regulators/#more-47218
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