Replies to post #468215 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[zab]

You can keep whining about whatever you think you know about immigration, but if someone comes to our border and asks for asylum from some country, there is the American law on immigration that must be enforced.

Many in this forum has explained to you many times that the paperwork alone is not a quick process, years can pass, in the meantime those immigrants can stay in America while it is processed.

Now the Conservatives did come up with a new procedure to speed up that process, some say it could be a mere six month wait, it was drafted by the Republican House, and it was the first time in over a decade that anything was proposed.

But trump heard about it and told those same House Republicans to not pass it.

You might not like the American Immigration laws, but one more time these immigrants are not illegal, they are following the laws of the United States of America.

[arizona1]

jeopardizing public health and public safety because some of the migrants might pick lettuce.

The biggest threat to our public health and safety are not the migrants coming here, but the MAGA morons who love their guns more than their kids and kill just for the thrill of it. That, and the anti-vaxxers who refused to get the covid vaccine; killed over 1.3 million people and have their sights set now on spreading polio and measles.

And just a FYI, you might want to read the constitution about asylum seekers.
https://acnur.org/fileadmin/Documentos/Proteccion/Buenas_Practicas/11349.pdf

Without immigrants, our economy would collapse, but you illiterate racists are just too ignorant of economics to understand it.

[arizona1]

[fuagf]

conix, How many American drug users have "Stop being an ally to the cartels." you pressed that upon.

"Your defense of illegals--yes, they are illegals--is tiresome. Support LEFAL immigration. Defend the border. Stop being an ally to the cartels."

Yeah, good idea if you would. Speaking of tiresome. you will always be a superficial
skater, and no more than a nuisance to those interested in going deeper.

America’s real border problem

[...]

‘We’re going to build the wall’ ranked among President Trump’s most recognisable election campaign slogans. But, even the highest wall can’t stem the flow of dirty dollars sustaining the drug cartels. The epic HSBC case shows the limits of the United States’ unique approach to money laundering.

From the moment he descended the gilded escalator at Trump Tower to launch his presidential campaign, Donald Trump declared that Mexico sends the United States drugs, crime and rapists. Asked to apologise, the candidate would only add infectious disease to his list. ‘Bad hombres’ became a central grievance for the Trump campaign. ‘Build the Wall’ became its refrain.

In reality, arrests on the Rio Grande peaked at the turn of the millennium. More Mexicans have left the US than have arrived since 2009, according to fact checkers. Mexican immigrants are more likely to be vaccinated than the average US citizen, and less likely to commit violent crimes.

The seed of truth in President Trump’s narrative is that North America has a drug problem. Multinational gangs cause untold misery on both sides of the border, with Mexico suffering an astonishing 23,000 drug-related murders last year. The serious question for policymakers and legislators is not how to stop the slowing flow of immigration, but how to dam the continuing flood of dirty money that pumps life into the drug cartels. ‘Building a wall will do nothing to solve or even impede the problem of drug money being repatriated back to Mexico where it’s laundered,’ says Richard Elias of Elias Gutzler Spicer.

The only solution to money laundering is anti-money laundering (AML). But, what sort of AML? Five years ago, the US caught HSBC banking billions in suspect Mexican cash. Faced with the greatest scandal of money laundering history, the US deferred prosecution in favour of massive fines and regulation under the gaze of a court monitor.

[...]

Despite a general hostility to the administrative state, the Trump administration has actively carried on the fight against money laundering. One too-cynical column predicted that President Trump’s first move would be to deregulate luxury real estate, because he has a history of selling condos to oligarchs and kleptocrats (like Haiti’s ‘Baby Doc’ Duvalier, who bought a Trump Tower unit through a Panamanian shell company). But, in February, President Trump renewed a successful ‘targeting order’ that forces title insurers to report cash buyers of upscale New York properties. Adding to the irony, Trump’s FinCEN has spent much of its time hounding casino operators. Maybe it’s not curtains for corporate transparency after all.

[...]

‘At the very least’, says Greene, ‘I haven’t seen retrenchment on any of what FinCEN does.’

The bad news from the FATF

Sharper critics of money laundering policy think the FATF is being diplomatic. ‘The US pays for over 25 per cent of the organisation,’ says Cambridge University’s Jason Sharman, ‘and the organisation is very aware of that. There’s a fine line between maintaining the pretense of objectivity and not annoying the US.’ Even so, the FATF gave Uncle Sam low grades for failing to name the beneficial owners of shell companies – and for failing to regulate lawyers. The FATF focused on the same two key policy gaps a decade earlier. Perhaps the best that can be said, to borrow Transparency International’s phrase, is the US has ‘more roof than holes’.

On beneficial ownership, the US made strides last year by adopting a ‘Customer Due Diligence’ rule, which ostensibly forces banks in the US to name the true owners of new accounts. But, to Global Witness, it’s a flawed and limited rule. Bad guys can still hide by lowering their ownership stake below 25 per cent. Worse, the Treasury will let banks satisfy the rule by merely naming managers. Most fundamentally, the rule doesn’t reach the incorporators of shell companies. If you’re a bad guy, ‘you can still set up a shell company in Delaware on Monday, and open a bank account in Panama on Tuesday,’ says Ostfeld. Incorporation transparency remains ‘the Achilles heel of US AML policy’.

When John Cassara was at FinCEN, he led training sessions for money laundering officials in dozens of countries. ‘Invariably,’ he says, ‘in the class or on a break, I would have a student come up to me and say “I’m working a money laundering case where the bad money from my country goes to this place called Delaware. Can you help us?” There’s nothing I can do. There’s nothing we can do. Do you know how embarrassing that is? I’m standing there preaching the gospel of money laundering and what these guys should do to clean up their act and then they throw Delaware in my face.’

US embarrassment deepened in June, when European Union nations had to pass beneficial owner laws under their new Anti-Money Laundering Directive. Ironically, though the idea has yet to bear fruit in Washington, DC, the EU stole it from a 2008 bill sponsored by then-Senators Carl Levin and Barack Obama. On 29 June, Congress tried to catch up by re-introducing the US Incorporation Transparency and Law Enforcement Assistance Act. Incorporation transparency has always had bipartisan appeal because it would super-charge the fight on drugs and terror. Its champions hope the bill will gain momentum from the newfound support of banks (who don’t wish to be the sole US enforcers of beneficial ownership), and the increased clout of Trump-friendly law enforcement groups who have always liked the idea. While Obama’s Treasury Department favoured some form of incorporation transparency, Trump has yet to take a position. Congress is otherwise occupied.

[...]

The bad news under President Trump

While President Trump has carried on the fight against money laundering proper, AML cannot be viewed in isolation. The Trump Congress’ first act of deregulation of any kind was to rescind the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) rule forcing natural resource companies to disclose payments to foreign nations. ‘The rollback of the extractive disclosure rule shows we are abandoning our position as the anticorruption leader globally,’ says Ostfeld. ‘[This rule was] important for stopping money from going missing in the first place, before the money is laundered. That’s the behaviour we’re trying to stop.’

In AML proper, experts fear that Trump’s rhetoric on the Mexican wall will undermine cross-border cooperation. President Obama offered a timely reminder of its importance by securing extradition of drug kingpin ‘El Chapo’ Guzman on his last day in office. With Trump’s approval rating in Mexico at a world-low of five per cent, we may see less of that. ‘Any US special agent will tell you that collaboration with law enforcement in Mexico is imperative,’ says Elias.

[...]

HSBC: a prosecution deferred

HSBC Mexico presented a case of money laundering as prosecutable as the US is ever likely to see. A drug lord effectively testified that HSBC Mexico was the cartels’ bank of choice in a moment of honesty caught on tape in 2008. And, he could be corroborated by the bank’s own AML director, who helpfully fretted in an email, sent as he resigned in panic, that HSBC had captured up to 70 per cent of the market for dirty money in Mexico.

According to the US indictment, HSBC tellers routinely accepted millions in cash from people with no identifiable income, packed in boxes custom-fit to the dimensions of their bank windows. In one scene, caught on closed-circuit television, the tellers had to get on the floor and count cash all day. Bankers didn’t want to know, so they simply made up know-your-customer data, and opened fictitious ‘offshore’ accounts to get around Mexico’s ban on depositing dollars. At one point, the Mexico AML director fabricated half a year of imaginary meetings. After the US seized a client’s assets for drug laundering, executives refused to drop the client. ‘What is this, the School of Low Expectations Banking?’ emailed an AML officer. Audits frankly concluded that controls were ‘BELOW STANDARD’.

HSBC USA laughably classified Mexico as a low-risk country. It failed to monitor over $670bn in wire transfers and $9.4bn in bulk cash from Mexico between 2006 and 2010. Just for starters, prosecutors could trace nearly $1bn of it to major drug cartels. ‘I could probably go to a lot of elementary schools in the world and give that fact pattern,’ says Mazur, ‘and I think that most would follow the logic that this could not have been a bank tricked into carrying out these transactions.’

We now know this was the DoJ’s first instinct too. In a bombshell 2016 report, Congress revealed that DoJ’s Asset Forfeiture and Money Laundering Section had urged the US to prosecute HSBC, rather than to settle for a deferred prosecution agreement. According to the House Financial Services Committee’s report Too Big to Jail: Inside the Obama Justice Department’s Decision Not to Hold Wall Street Accountable, Attorney General Eric Holder overruled the prosecutors under pressure from the United Kingdom finance minister and Financial Services Authority, for fear that it ‘could result in a global financial disaster’. Holder told the public countless times that he’d bring the prosecutable cases. But, either out of wisdom or caution, he dropped the most prosecutable case of all.

In December 2012, US authorities accepted $1.92bn from HSBC to settle admitted violations of money laundering law and economic sanctions. It was far and away the largest Bank Secrecy Act settlement in history (though it has since been superseded by JP Morgan’s $2.05bn fine for failure to report the Bernard Madoff fraud). Most crucially, the US agreed to defer prosecution in return for a five-year monitorship. If, at the end of five years, the bank is not in compliance, the US promised to either extend the monitorship or renew the prosecution.

[...]

The option of private enforcement

Like most great US scandals, HSBC Mexico enjoys a multifaceted legal afterlife. In Zapata v HSBC, plaintiffs’ lawyers last year filed a suit for private civil enforcement on an arresting theory. They argue that US victims of Mexican drug violence can recover treble damages for their personal injuries because, by serving as the drug lords’ banker, HSBC gave material support to ‘terrorists’ under the US Anti-Terrorism Act.

If nothing else, Zapata serves as a grim reminder of dirty money’s human toll. In one incident, a gunman mowed down a pregnant mother in front of her baby daughter on their way home from a birthday party sponsored by the US Consulate. In another, gang members invaded a church wedding, kidnapped the best man and a groomsman, and asphyxiated them with duct tape.

HSBC initially seeks to remove the case from the federal courthouse near the Mexican border where it was filed. Once the venue is decided, the arguments may turn partly on the definition of terror. To be sure, the Sinaloa cartel differs from Al-Qaeda. But, the statutory definition of terrorism may be satisfied by violent criminal acts that merely ‘appear intended to intimidate’ a civilian population. ‘If you hang a disemboweled journalist from a bridge with a sign that says “This is what happened to me for speaking out,” that is clearly an act of terrorism, ’ says Elias.

AML campaigners sympathise with any extra effort to publicise wrongdoing and compensate victims. But, as a matter of policy, private damage suits suffer from the same flaw as public fines. Even huge ones have little deterrent value, because their cost is borne by shareholders.

What happens to a prosecution deferred?

‘Since the HSBC scandal,’ declares Ostfeld, ‘very little has changed’ in US money laundering policy. She sees only a toothless rule on customer due diligence, and an empty-letter memo on individual prosecution. Nor is there any indication of a decline in the underlying transnational crime trends. Certainly, the gangs keep finding ways to launder the funds that fuel their atrocities. Drug violence reached record levels in the first half of 2017, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, with one murder committed every 20 minutes.

https://www.ibanet.org/article/E42EAC26-2841-4949-A115-AFC35794CB00

https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=174105300

[newmedman]

You know what is really tiresome? It's you ranting and raving about a crisis that your GOP created and listening to your paranoid garbage about it for years. You had your chance to help fix the problems with the border, then you punted and blame everyone but yourself.

You believe that nonsense because you need to be outraged about anything without offering any solutions.

[arizona1]

You're legal......maybe you should have been working on the Key Bridge. Why no "thoughts and prayers" from you?

Credit to Geraldo Rivera for this. Who were ON the Key Bridge?