One of the mysteries for me is why the world’s financial institutions are so anxious to do business in America that they lobby their governments to bail them out of the FATCA 30% withholding regime by signing up for an IGA. Is it really so important for them to have access to American financial products and Wall Street, so they can find themselves again at the receiving end of the next Wall Street fraudulent derivative scheme to sell them crap and then laugh about it?
I am reminded yet again tonight, about how many financial firms and people around the world have been harmed by the 2008 financial crisis brought to us by our Titans of Wall Street, who still, five years later have not paid any prosecution price for their greed and fraudulent behavior. And the FFIs want to be able to continue to access more of this? Go figure.
If you haven’t watched this excellent PBS Frontline Documentary, I strongly recommend it. The Untouchables.
Idiots! It’s like they have no clue at all as to how the 2008 financial crisis actually happened, they’re too far leveraged in US investments to get out without taking a bath, or they simply don’t want to see the cold hard truth of the matter.
Frankly, if the US government cannot even be bothered to go after these crooks, then I can’t be bothered to place any money in any American bank, or really have a lot of faith in the US dollar for that matter. Meanwhile, I can’t even think about making any investments in the future without dumping US citizenship first. Not unless I want to be a masochist in their stupid tax form and penalty club, and pay them for the privilege!
I watched this. It was sickening. The assistant attorney general, who is interviewed, admits that there is a two tiered justice system. People who are “too big” to prosecute for fear of the effect on the financial sector and the economy and then the rest of us. Probably not a coincidence that the DOJ announced a week later that the assistant was being replaced. Not to worry about him. He already has a cushy private sector job.
The revolving door between Wall Street, the WH and govt appointed jobs should make it clear that there can be nothing but window dressing justice for the masses.
And yet, where was the public outcry? Liberals were silent. Just as they are about drones.
@a, Ah yes, the two systems of US justice – big US banks and bank executives agree on settlements for actual tax crimes under the BSA and other US law, and no-one goes to jail. The US government says they are ‘too big to fail’ and ‘too big to prosecute’. They basically give them a license to continue the same types of behaviour – as long as they pay a toll in settlement fines from time to time. Just the cost of doing business.
Individuals living outside the US, with entirely legal local accounts, who’ve paid a full set of taxes where they work and live, are threatened by the IRS and Treasury with jail time in public statements by Geithner and others – re our last best chance to come in and become compliant, and avoid criminal charges and prison under the BSA. When even in the absence of any US tax owed, the ‘crime’ is merely having an ordinary transparent bank account where you live – just because it is outside the US. Or, even having any connection to a non-personal workplace or other non-personal account in the community where you live.
Badger, you understand the system perfectly. But, it’s really always worked this way. It just hasn’t always been so obvious and the USG hasn’t always had the freedom to be so obvious about it.
More and more the US is a scary place, but I understand that living in a scary place requires a certain amount of turning blind eyes or one would go mad. Unfortunately, living outside the scary place, one doesn’t have the luxury of employing blindness as a defense mechanism.
I was reading in the Globe today about how Jacobsen basically issued a warning to Canada and Alberta about our nasty little tar sands problem. We (Canadians) must get in line with US thinking on the environment if we want the US to allow the XL or even buy our oil. Translation: we (America) don’t really need your oil badly at the moment, so think about saving it for us for a time when we have no choice. Of course when that day comes, the USG will simply take it from us but in the meantime, they seek to threaten us into not selling it to anyone else and if this hurts our economy or diminishes our lifestyles, well that’s the cost of being a “special friend and ally. Right?
Hey, we’re also talking about a society where if you’re some famous twit like Lindsay Lohan, you can do as much wrong as you want, and not have to suffer any serious consequences, whereas if any regular Joe like us did the same shit, we’d be thrown in prison for at least 15 years or so.
So of course, by that same notion, why would they go after the banks that have screwed everything up in 2008, when they can just give them a taxpayer bailout, instead? Indeed, if the government won’t even bother to prosecute, then who do you think is really running things over there? Neither party is going to say shit, because they would have to bite the hands of the bankers and their lobbyists that feed them in order to do it.
There is no liberty and justice for all in the USA, and anyone that says otherwise needs to stop sniffing the Krazy Glue.
@a, I read that too, with the same trepidation. Jacobsen’s comments of that type always feel like a veiled threat, when they aren’t entirely disingenuous and facile as well (see his comments on US encroachment on Canadian soil re the ‘shared’ border security initiatives, http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2011/12/09/canada_us_need_to_track_people_better_at_border_ambassador_says.html and the infamous ones about the US and IRS not really being after Canadian grannies “in a speech to the Canadian Club of Ottawa on …. “We are not unreasonable. We are not unsympathetic. We are not irresponsible.”… http://canada.usembassy.gov/ambassador/news-and-speeches/18-october-2011-ambassador-jacobsons-remarks-to-the-canadian-club.html ). See also: http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2012/12/13/canada-us-border-deal_n_2294478.html
With ‘friends’ like Ambassador Jacobson, and neighbours like the US, who needs enemies?
Several articles emphasize how he has the direct ear of Obama, so there is no pretending that Obama is not aware of the issues we’re raising, or the way in which > 1 million here are severely and negatively affected by their extraterritorial tax, banking, passport policies and enforcement. Jacobson would have us believe that the ‘new’ and very narrow IRS ‘streamlined’ compliance process for unicorns (as of Sept 1, 2012), is evidence that the US has ‘listened’ to our concerns. It is so secretive that no-one knows how it is going, or how people are being processed, or the quality of outcomes – after 5.5 months in effect, which tells me that there are still lots of those ‘Canadian grannies’ that the IRS will still be more than happy to pursue – despite the happy smiley face that Jacobson and our own Finance Minister put on the situation in official comments for public consumption. Otherwise, the IRS should be happy to demonstrate that they are being reasonable. Instead, as the Taxpayer Advocate underscored in her report to Congress – there are tens of thousands stuck in the Texas pipeline, with no clarity on how the IRS is processing and treating them, and waiting times of > 300-500 days, with the ‘benign actors’ waiting the longest.
I think the US does not understand that they have just created a very large class of deeply disaffected and unwilling US citizens outside the US, who are now motivated to more closely monitor and politically oppose US arrogance, meddling and self-interest in their home countries.
@a
All the more reason to sell the oil to the Chinese, or build that pipe eastward instead. Besides, which one of those idiots over there tried to say that the terrorists on 9/11 all came in from Canada? Would a true friend and ally say that after we let their people land in Newfoundland on the day they shut down their own airspace?
Frankly, we ought to be reducing our trade with the USA, and perhaps even reexamine NAFTA as well.
@ mjh49783, re;
“Neither party is going to say shit, because they would have to bite the hands of the bankers and their lobbyists that feed them in order to do it.”
It is whoever can pay to keep things sweet for themselves and their cronies. http://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/cronycapitalism.asp#axzz2KtMcAdQm
And not just in the US.
@badger
That’s about it, too. Crony capitalism. Meanwhile, I’ve always liked the terms ‘managed democracy’, and ‘inverted totalitarianism’ myself.
‘Managed democracy’ because the democratic process is basically scripted, and is not allowed to be true and dynamic, but it must have the impression of being true and dynamic.
And ‘inverted totalitarianism’ because the true powers that be make efforts at being covert and anonymous, and not be out in the open, like what Adolf Hitler had done in Germany. The true powers that be, rely on a managed democracy to keep them hidden, and to keep the people divided amongst themselves with arbitrary differences, represented by the farcical two-party system. Therefore, they go hand in hand.
Oh, and I almost forgot. If the truth ever did come out over there, the powers that be will have one final defence up their sleeve: public apathy.
They certainly love to talk a good game about how the Second Amendment is their last line of defence against a tyrannical government. Okay, what if they actually are under a tyrannical government? How many of those people there will actually stop talking and start taking action to defend themselves? I submit that they’re under a tyrannical government right now, but I don’t see them doing anything about it.
No one is more hopelessly enslaved than those that falsely believe that they are free.
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Sure, they’ve had a few protesters such as Occupy Wall Street, that had a sense of something being wrong, and want to do something to change it, but the problems are so that there is no way they could effectively articulate their grievances without fully understanding the whole convoluted situation that they’re in. It would take a quality education, a keen mind, and many years worth of trying to work with the system, just to begin to understand how hopelessly bent it is.
Then, you’d also have to convince the hopelessly apathetic, and the brainwashed masses, to lift a finger to even care, and to NOT take a stand against you. We all say how that worked out when cops started beating the shit out of the protesters, and the people were cheering the cops! That, is the ugly face of what inverted totalitarianism is all about, and the consequences people face when they go off script to start demanding rights. If that is not tyranny, I don’t know what is.
Individuals living and or born abroad, who have the misfortune to have inherited or conferred US citizenship are persecuted by the criminal sanctions of the BSA Bank Secrecy Act, with FBARs, and now, the tax provisions of the son-of-FBAR, FATCA. Yet, while we are being persecuted for merely having an ordinary legal post-tax, transparent local bank account, US banks are bailed out, and excused for actual wrongdoing under the BSA, on an incomprehensible scale. Ironic and unjust doesn’t begin to describe the vast differences between how honest individuals with local legal accounts are treated by the US – because they live ‘abroad’, vs. the treatment of the ‘too big to prosecute’ banks for actual wrongdoing.
See:
Rolling Stone article calls them ‘Gangster Banksters’
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/gangster-bankers-too-big-to-jail-20130214?link=mostpopular1
Gangster Bankers: Too Big to Jail
How HSBC hooked up with drug traffickers and terrorists. And got away with it
By Matt Taibbi
February 14, 2013
…..”the U.S. Justice Department granted a total walk to executives of the British-based bank HSBC for the largest drug-and-terrorism money-laundering case ever. Yes, they issued a fine – $1.9 billion, or about five weeks’ profit – but they didn’t extract so much as one dollar or one day in jail from any individual, despite a decade of stupefying abuses”….
,,,,,,,,”when you’re Too Big to Jail, you can cop to laundering terrorist cash and violating the Trading With the Enemy Act, and not only will you not be prosecuted for it, but the government will go out of its way to make sure you won’t lose your license…”
,,,,”Breuer and the Justice Department worried aloud about global stability as they explained why no criminal charges were being filed against the parent company.
“Our goal here,” Breuer said, “is not to destroy a major financial institution.”…………..
……..”the explanation Breuer offered for them. “In the world today of large institutions, where much of the financial world is based on confidence,” he said, “a right resolution is to ensure that counter-parties don’t flee an institution, that jobs are not lost, that there’s not some world economic event that’s disproportionate to the resolution we want.”
….”Americans have long understood that the rich get good lawyers and get off, while the poor suck eggs and do time. But this is something different. This is the government admitting to being afraid to prosecute the very powerful – something it never did even in the heydays of Al Capone or Pablo Escobar, something it didn’t do even with Richard Nixon. And when you admit that some people are too important to prosecute, it’s just a few short steps to the obvious corollary – that everybody else is unimportant enough to jail.
An arrestable class and an unarrestable class. We always suspected it, now it’s admitted. So what do we do?”
See also:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/bank-of-america-too-crooked-to-fail-20120314
‘Bank of America: Too Crooked to Fail
The bank has defrauded everyone from investors and insurers to homeowners and the unemployed. So why does the government keep bailing it out?
by the same author, Matt Taibbi
March 14, 2012
Another untouchable too big (or politically important to the US) to prosecute? I wonder.
Are Karzai and his family (many US citizens who moved back to Afghanistan) all IRS tax and FBAR and FATCA compliant on their ‘foreign accounts’? Is the IRS fully cognizant of all of their Afghan ‘foreign accounts’ ? Would the IRS pursue Karzai and his clan the same as they are pursuing ordinary Canadians with TFSAs, Swiss, Swedes, and others?
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/04/world/asia/karzai-family-moves-to-protect-its-privilege.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
…….”“If you are one of the Afghan oligarchs, where you put your money and where you live is an open question now,” Seth Jones, an analyst at the RAND Corporation, said. “That means you are thinking about moving your money and finding a backup option about where to live.
The president’s family — many of whom are American citizens who returned to Afghanistan after an American-led coalition toppled the Taliban in 2001 and brought Mr. Karzai to power — are among those who have prospered the most, by the accounts of many Afghan businessmen and government insiders. …..”
…”Mahmoud Karzai was a key figure in the scandal surrounding the near-collapse of the bank, which was Afghanistan’s largest, in 2010. It lost about $900 million in insider deals, much of which is believed to have ended up in secret bank accounts in Dubai. Last year, a federal grand jury in New York began a criminal investigation into Mahmoud Karzai’s business activities in Afghanistan, pursuing accusations of tax evasion, racketeering and extortion. No charges have been brought against Mahmoud Karzai, who is a United States citizen.”….
from; ‘Intrigue in Karzai Family as an Afghan Era Closes’ By JAMES RISEN
Published: June 3, 2012 New York Times
Did the Kabul bank get any bailout? See NPR story from 2010
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2010/09/02/129607778/kabul-bank-woes-spur-call-for-another-u-s-bailout
Kabul Bank Woes Spur Call For Another U.S. Treasury Bailout
by Frank James
September 02, 2010
………..”The two officials were reportedly involved in unauthorized investments involving about $160 million in Dubai real estate, according to a big shareholder in the bank, Mahmoud Karzai, the older brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
Mahmoud is making a suggestion that is likely to gain very little traction in Washington: he’s calling for the U.S. to bail out Kabul Bank.
An excerpt from the Washington Post which has been closely tracking the Kabul Bank story:
Action by the United States, said Mahmoud Karzai, would prevent a run on Kabul Bank and protect other banks, too. He said Kabul Bank is “stable and has money” but cannot withstand a stampede by panicked depositors.
“If the Treasury Department will guarantee that everyone will get their money, maybe that will work,” said Karzai, who holds 7 percent of the bank’s shares, making him the third-biggest shareholder. Karzai, who spends most of his time in Dubai – where he lives in a waterfront villa paid for by Kabul Bank – rushed to Kabul on Wednesday to join efforts to salvage the bank.”………
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/28/world/asia/inquiry-into-kabul-bank-fraud-hits-snags.html
Political Meddling Hampers Inquiry Into Kabul Bank Debacle
By MATTHEW ROSENBERG
Published: November 28, 2012
KABUL, Afghanistan — “Persistent political interference has hampered efforts to unravel the colossal fraud at Kabul Bank, with President Hamid Karzai and a small panel of his top aides actually dictating to prosecutors who should be charged and who should not, according to Afghan and Western officials and the results of a public inquiry into the scandal.”
Did the Kabul bank get any bailout? See NPR story from 2010
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2010/09/02/129607778/kabul-bank-woes-spur-call-for-another-u-s-bailout
Kabul Bank Woes Spur Call For Another U.S. Treasury Bailout
by Frank James
September 02, 2010
………..”The two officials were reportedly involved in unauthorized investments involving about $160 million in Dubai real estate, according to a big shareholder in the bank, Mahmoud Karzai, the older brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
Mahmoud is making a suggestion that is likely to gain very little traction in Washington: he’s calling for the U.S. to bail out Kabul Bank.
An excerpt from the Washington Post which has been closely tracking the Kabul Bank story:
Action by the United States, said Mahmoud Karzai, would prevent a run on Kabul Bank and protect other banks, too. He said Kabul Bank is “stable and has money” but cannot withstand a stampede by panicked depositors.
“If the Treasury Department will guarantee that everyone will get their money, maybe that will work,” said Karzai, who holds 7 percent of the bank’s shares, making him the third-biggest shareholder. Karzai, who spends most of his time in Dubai – where he lives in a waterfront villa paid for by Kabul Bank – rushed to Kabul on Wednesday to join efforts to salvage the bank.”………
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704760704575516052903781616.html
‘U.S. Probes Karzai’s Kin
Prosecutors Focus on Mahmood Karzai, Posing Diplomatic Risks for Washington’
September 27, 2010 By MATTHEW ROSENBERG, DEVLIN BARRETT And ADAM ENTOUS , Wall Street Journal
……”If U.S. prosecutors decide to bring charges against Mr. Karzai, they are unlikely to move until early next year, after a review of Afghan strategy by the Obama administration, officials say. The decision about whether to proceed with a U.S.-based prosecution rests with the Justice Department.
A spokeswoman for the federal prosecutor’s office in New York declined to comment. The U.S. embassy in Kabul said it couldn’t comment on “ongoing legal matters.” “……
…….”Mahmood Karzai’s status as a U.S. citizen would make him easier to prosecute than other Afghans, should prosecutors go forward. He is subject to U.S. tax law, and some of the transactions any prosecution might focus on could involve U.S. government loans, which he sometimes has used to build his businesses.”…
…….”Mahmood Karzai’s years in the U.S. gave him access to people like Jack Kemp, the late Republican congressman and vice presidential candidate, who Mr. Karzai said helped him obtain $5.5 million in U.S. government loans to finance a pair of housing developments.”…..
Pingback: The Isaac Brock Society