Wachovia Paid Trivial Fine for Nearly $400 Billion of Drug Related Money Laundering. If this news story does not prove that banks are effectively above the law, I don’t know what does.
The Guardian, in an account yet to be picked up anywhere in the US media (per Google News as of this posting, hat tip readers May S and Swedish Lex) reports that Wachovia was at the heart of one of the world’s biggest money laundering operations, moving $378.4 billion into dollar-based accounts from Mexican casas de cambio, which are currency exchange firms. While these transfers took place over a period of years, the article notes that it equals 1/3 of Mexican GDP.
And the resolution? Criminal proceedings were brought against Wachovia, though not against any individual, but the case never came to court. In March 2010, Wachovia settled the biggest action brought under the US bank secrecy act, through the US district court in Miami. “On numerous occasions,” say the court papers, “monies were deposited into a CDC by a drug-trafficking organisation.
Rick Ayers: An Inconvenient Superman: Davis Guggenheim's New Film Hijacks School Reform. Davis Guggenheim's 2010 film Waiting for Superman is a slick marketing piece full of half-truths and distortions.
The film suggests the problems in education are the fault of teachers and teacher unions alone, and it asserts that the solution to those problems is a greater focus on top-down instruction driven by test scores. It rejects the inconvenient truth that our schools are being starved of funds and other necessary resources, and instead opts for an era of privatization and market-driven school change. Its focus effectively suppresses a more complex and nuanced discussion of what it might actually take to leave no child behind, such as a living wage, a full-employment economy, the de-militarization of our schools, and an education based on the democratic ideal that the fullest development of each is the condition for the full development of all. The film dismisses with a side comment the inconvenient truth that our schools are criminally underfunded. Restoring Honor, One Lie at a Time. Honor. To restore honor, we must first know what it is. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, honor is “a clear sense of what is morally right.”
The American Heritage Dictionary says that honor is “personal integrity maintained without legal or other obligation.” “Morally right” and “maintaining personal integrity” sound a lot like some of the catch phrases of televangelists and evangelicals. These ideas are similar to ideas like “Thou shalt not bear false witness” and “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.” One of the most interesting points of conflict for the “restoring honor” crowd is the so-called “social conservative” interaction with Republican big business politics. Now “social conservatives” are lining up to support the Republicans again.
Several thinkers smarter than I have been attributed with the observation that repeating the same action over and over while expecting a different result is a definition of insanity. Tom Hall. Interest-group spending for midterm up fivefold from 2006; many sources secret. Interest groups are spending five times as much on the 2010 congressional elections as they did on the last midterms, and they are more secretive than ever about where that money is coming from.
The $80 million spent so far by groups outside the Democratic and Republican parties dwarfs the $16 million spent at this point for the 2006 midterms. In that election, the vast majority of money - more than 90 percent - was disclosed along with donors' identities. This year, that figure has fallen to less than half of the total, according to data analyzed by The Washington Post. The trends amount to a spending frenzy conducted largely in the shadows. The bulk of the money is being spent by conservatives, who have swamped their Democratic-aligned competition by 7 to 1 in recent weeks. "The outside group spending is primarily being driven by the political climate," said Anthony Corrado, a professor of government at Colby College who studies campaign finance. Interest-group spending for midterm up fivefold from 2006; many sources secret.