{"id":22330,"date":"2012-12-14T17:30:20","date_gmt":"2012-12-14T17:30:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/outrageous-hsbc-settlement-proves-the-drug-war-is\/"},"modified":"2012-12-14T17:30:20","modified_gmt":"2012-12-14T17:30:20","slug":"outrageous-hsbc-settlement-proves-the-drug-war-is","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/outrageous-hsbc-settlement-proves-the-drug-war-is\/","title":{"rendered":"Outrageous HSBC Settlement Proves the Drug War is a Joke"},"content":{"rendered":"

shrinkrants<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

Matt Taibbi:<\/a><\/p>\n

\n
\n

If you\u2019ve ever been arrested on a drug charge, if you\u2019ve ever spent even a day in jail for having a stem of marijuana in your pocket or \u201cdrug paraphernalia\u201d in your gym bag, Assistant Attorney General and longtime Bill Clinton pal Lanny Breuer has a message for you: Bite me.<\/p>\n

Breuer this week signed off on asettlement deal\u00a0<\/a>with the British banking giant HSBC that is the ultimate insult to every ordinary person who\u2019s ever had his life altered by a narcotics charge. Despite the fact that HSBC admitted to laundering billions of dollars for Colombian and Mexican drug cartels (among others) and violating a host of important banking laws (from the Bank Secrecy Act to the Trading With the Enemy Act), Breuer and his Justice Department elected not to pursue criminal prosecutions of the bank, opting instead for a\u201crecord\u201d financial settlement<\/a>of $1.9 billion, which as one analyst noted is aboutfive weeks of income<\/a>for the bank.<\/p>\n

The banks\u2019 laundering transactions were so brazen that the NSA probably could have spotted them from space. Breuer admitted that drug dealers would sometimes come to HSBC\u2019s Mexican branches and \u201cdeposit hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, in a single day, into a single account, using boxes designed to fit the precise dimensions of the teller windows.\u201d<\/p>\n

This bears repeating: in order to more efficiently move as much illegal money as possible into the \u201clegitimate\u201d banking institution HSBC, drug dealers specifically designed boxes to fit through the bank\u2019s teller windows. Tony Montana\u2019s henchmen marching dufflebags of cash into the fictional \u201cAmerican City Bank\u201d in Miami was actuallymore\u00a0<\/em>subtle than what the cartels were doing when they washed their cash through one of Britain\u2019s most storied financial institutions.<\/p>\n

\u2026\u00a0<\/p>\n

So you might ask, what\u2019s the appropriate financial penalty for a bank in HSBC\u2019s position? Exactly how much money should one extract from a firm that has been shamelessly profiting from business with criminals for years and years? Remember, we\u2019re talking about a company that has admitted to a smorgasbord of serious banking crimes. If you\u2019re the prosecutor, you\u2019ve got this bank by the balls. So how much money should you take?<\/p>\n

How about\u00a0\"image\"all of it<\/em>?How about every last dollar the bank has made since it started its illegal activity? How about you dive into every bank account of every single executive involved in this mess and take every last bonus dollar they\u2019ve ever earned? Then take their houses, their cars, the paintings they bought at Sotheby\u2019s auctions, the clothes in their closets, the loose change in the jars on their kitchen counters, every last freaking thing. Take it all and don\u2019t think twice. Andthen\u00a0<\/em>throw them in jail.<\/p>\n

Sound harsh? It does, doesn\u2019t it? The only problem is, that\u2019s exactly what the government does just about every day to ordinary people involved in ordinary drug cases.<\/p>\n

It\u2019d be interesting, for instance, to ask the residents of Tenaha, Texas what they think about the HSBC settlement. That\u2019s the town where local police routinelypulled over (mostly black) motorists<\/a>and, whenever they found cash, offered motorists a choice: They could either allow police to seize the money, or face drug and money laundering charges.<\/p>\n

Or we could ask\u00a0Anthony Smelley<\/a>, the Indiana resident who won $50,000 in a car accident settlement and was carrying about $17K of that in cash in his car when he got pulled over. Cops searched his car and had drug dogs sniff around: The dogs alerted twice. No drugs were found, but police took the money anyway. Even after Smelley produced documentation proving where he got the money from, Putnam County officials tried to keep the money on the grounds that he\u00a0could\u00a0<\/em>have used the cash to buy drugs in the future.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Read more:<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

shrinkrants: Matt Taibbi: If you\u2019ve ever been arrested on a drug charge, if you\u2019ve ever spent even a day in jail for having a stem of marijuana in your pocket or \u201cdrug paraphernalia\u201d in your gym bag, Assistant Attorney General and longtime Bill Clinton pal Lanny Breuer has a message for you: Bite me. Breuer […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[10],"tags":[621],"class_list":["post-22330","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-words","tag-soy-colombiano"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6PWot-5Oa","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22330","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22330"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22330\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22330"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22330"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22330"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}