Psychotropic Industry Making a Killing

May 15, 2012 Leave a comment

By LUIS MIRANDA | THE REAL AGENDA | MAY 15, 2012

The largest medical conspiracy is not the one that causes physical disease to hundreds, thousands or millions of people, but the one that is set in motion to control the minds of people. Today, the psychotropic industry not only makes billions of dollars a year through the sale of pharmaceutical products used by psychiatrists and psychologists to “treat” their patients, but also, knowingly and purposely deplete the minds of those who use such products.

The way in which Psychiatry as a pseudo-science became relevant in modern society is one story in itself. Large medical organizations, academia and powerful foundations are responsible for the adoption of “curing” techniques that originated back in the early 20th century which sought to treat patients with archaic, torturous procedures that were nothing more than live human experiments whose effectiveness were based on nothing but hunches. With the advancement of science, psychiatrists saw an opportunity to achieve the goal they had not been able to achieve despite multiple trials with their insane physical treatments.

In 1967, psychiatrists met in the island of Puerto Rico to conspire and create what they thought was the best way to make people mental servants of the medical-scientific-pharmaceutical industry. Their plan was to create, provide and even mandate people to take a whole new range of psychotropic products that they’d recommend as the only solution for a list of nonexistent mental diseases that people would be made to believe they actually had. During their meeting, these so-called medical experts and men of science, such as Heinz Lehmann, Joseph Zubin, Nathan Kline, Charles Savage and others, expressed their desire to control people’s minds. They produced a document or report called “Psychotropic Drugs in the Year 2000″ where they outline their plan for the future.

The purpose of these psychiatrists was clear, as it was expressed by Wayne O. Evans. “We see a developing potential for nearly a total control of human emotional status, mental functioning, and will to act.” What Evans described was the medical establishment’s complete plan to bring people under control with the use of pharmaceutical products that would be pushed through trusted scientists, medical journals and ultimately with the help of medical doctors who were to a great extent indoctrinated into believing the drugging someone for life was the best way to cure their mental and physical illnesses.

Psychotropic drugs used to treat problems like dementia, stress, depression and other supposed mental conditions aren’t safe at all. In fact, they are responsible for a wide range of side effects including violence, desire to commit suicides and homicide in addition to making patients addicted. In the best case scenario, psychotropic drugs have managed to kill more people; not help them, than cure them of their physical ailments. Their side effects are almost never studied before they are put out and the addiction they cause is simply referred to as dependence. Psychotropic drugs, which are legally sold and recommended by health practitioners are responsible for more deaths than illegal street drugs. According to research, over half of the people who commit suicide in the United States are patients or users of psychotropic drugs prescribed to them. A short list of these drugs include: Zoloft, Paxil, Prozac, Wellbutrin, Effexor, Seroquil and Ultram, among others.

In the past few weeks, multiple reports in the media have pointed to abuse of psychotropic drugs by soldiers who are sent to the battle field even though they are mentally unprepared to face the reality brought to them when in combat situations. Psychotropic drugs are even given to soldiers as a way to mentally flush their brains and eliminate any fear, phobia or intolerance to the crude reality of a combat zone, so they can be deployed 3, 4 or more times. As reported by Fox News, psychotropic drugs are responsible for military suicides, and warnings about the consequences of their use and abuse have been issued by psychiatrists themselves, the ones not committed to use prescription drugs to cure anything and everything. They’ve said that “the risk from side effects is too great.” The calls to stop using prescription drugs to make soldiers tolerant to the stress of the battlefield have become louder and louder. “There’s no way on earth that these boys and girls are getting monitored on the field,” said Dr. Peter Breggin, a New York-based psychiatrist. “The drugs simply shouldn’t be given to soldiers.”

But the use and abuse of psychotropic drugs doesn’t only happen in the army. It also occurs in mental institutions, which in most cases are places filled with people who were forced by their doctors to be imprisoned in such places “for their own good”, and who are then submitted to long and painful medical treatments that include the intake of prescription drugs for the rest of their lives. Many of these patients are children who are deemed by their doctors as troubled, which qualifies them to become lab rats in a mental institution where they are loaded with psychotropic drugs — that are often in their experimental phase — in order to calm down or in theory eliminate the origin of the trouble pointed by the medical expert. Children as young as 7 suffering from neglect, abuse or who simply were not raised by two parents, are prescribed antipsychotic drugs for the rest of their lives, and are taught that only the continuous use of pharmaceutical drugs will take them out of their supposed mental illness. Drugs like Lexapro and Vyvanse are responsible for children suicide. Others are prescribed Symbyax, a drug that supposedly works as an anti-depressant, even though its label clearly states that it may lead to suicide.

Today, 100 million people around the world are on psychiatric drugs. How did we come to this? Their doctors convinced them that they were mentally sick. They talked them into believing that every mental or emotional experience was an example of a mental or emotional disease. They told them that stress, anxiety, depression and every other reaction to their lives experiences were treatable diseases and that they had the solutions and the cures for them. Although more and more psychiatrists confess that their profession lacks the science they often claim to have, that their analysis and treatment of patients is a trial and error process, when they are in front of their patients, many of these professionals do not hesitate to recommend drugs that will only worsen any mental or physical medical problem. “We don’t have any blood tests, or any other medical tests that are definitive for any mental disorder,” said a psychiatrist from New Jersey, outside and medical convention venue. This statement was similar to what another psychiatrist from Mexico City said: “If you come to my office and tell me you are depressed, there is no medical test or blood test…” And the testimonies about the medical uncertainties of psychiatry and their so-called medical cures continue: “There aren’t currently any available tests to verify your diagnosis,” said a psychiatrist from Greece.

Even when psychiatrist and drug makers know that their products have dangerous side effects and that the scientific base for the manufacturing of these products is faulty to say the least, they have no problem whatsoever to wake up every morning to go to their offices and recommend the pharmaceuticals to their unsuspecting patients. Many of these patients often become part of the list of at least 3000 people a month who directly die because of the use of psychotropic drugs recommended by their doctors. Many people were shocked on September 11, 2001, when around 3000 people were murdered during the terrorist attacks in New York and Pensilvannia. Most people fail to realize that as bad as 9/11 was, the kind of crime committed that day is actually replicated monthly or perhaps more often by doctors prescribing pharmaceutical drugs to their patients. According to publicly available data, 70% of the psychotropic drugs used by people with supposed mental disease are prescribed by their trusted medical doctors. “They use what I call statistical contortionism. They manipulate the numbers to make them look fantastic and hide the bad numbers,” says Shane Ellison, an organic chemist who used to work for as a drug researcher for pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly.

According to the film Making a Killing: The Untold Story of Psychotropic Drugging, the number of psychotropic drugs has grown exponentially since 1966. Back then there were a total of 44 different products. Today, the number reaches 176 different pharmaceutical drugs available for doctors to sell to their patients. It is through this direct relationship between doctors and patients together with clever marketing directed to medical professionals — in seminars and conferences — that the pharmaceutical industry managed to do exactly what elite psychiatrists had planned 40 years ago. The top five pharmaceutical drugs sold around the world bring in about $18 billion dollars for Big Pharma every year. This is about the same amount obtained when we add up the GDP of half of the nations of the world. As a whole, the psychiatric industry, says the film, makes a grand total of $330 billion dollars a year of the health and well-being of millions of people around the world.

This article is just a quick summary about how the pharmaceutical industry’s unholy alliance with the medical industry helped drive the goals planned for many decades ago. We recommend you watch the film Psychiatry: An Industry of Death, in order to obtain a strong background about the origins, workings and goals that the pseudoscience of Psychiatry has for all of us. Then, for a more contemporaneous view on what is the Psychiatry Industry doing right now and how the unholy alliance works, please watch the film Making a Killing: The Untold Story of Psychotropic Drugging. Furthermore, pass the information contained in this article and the films cited above to as many people as possible.

The Real Agenda encourages the reproduction -in part or in full- of its content. The only requirement is to give credit as it is due by citing the origin of the information AS IT APPEARS on the news reports hosted on the website.

Filed under Asia, Africa, Latin America, North America, Special Reports, World, English Tagged with , , , , , , , , ,

The ‘Gender-free’ Society Sets Foot in Argentina

May 10, 2012 Leave a comment

Cristina Fernandez’s led government has officially endorse government-sponsored, taxpayer-financed sex changes and hormone therapy for transgender people.

ASSOCIATED PRESS | MAY 10, 2012

Adults who want sex-change surgery or hormone therapy in Argentina will be able to get it as part of their public or private health care plans under a gender rights law approved Wednesday.

The measure also gives people the right to specify how their gender is listed at the civil registry when their physical characteristics don’t match how they see themselves.

Senators approved the Gender Identity law by a vote of 55-0, with one abstention and more than a dozen senators declaring themselves absent — the same margin that approved a “death with dignity” law earlier in the day.

President Cristina Fernandez threw her support behind the law and is expected to sign it. She has often said how proud she is that Argentina became Latin America’s first nation to legalize gay marriage two years ago, enabling thousands of same-sex couples to wed and enjoy the same legal rights as married heterosexual couples.

For many, gender rights were the next step.

Any adult will now be able to officially change his or her gender, image and birth name without having to get approval from doctors or judges — and without having to undergo physical changes beforehand, as many U.S. jurisdictions require.

“It’s saying you can change your gender legally without having to change your body at all. That’s unheard of,” said Katrina Karkazis, a Stanford University medical anthropologist and bioethicst who wrote a book, “Fixing Sex,” about the medical and legal treatment of people whose physical characteristics don’t fully match their gender identity.

“There’s a whole set of medical criteria that people have to meet to change their gender in the U.S., and meanwhile this gives the individual an extraordinary amount of authority for how they want to live. It’s really incredible,” she said.

When Argentines want to change their bodies, health care companies will have to provide them with surgery or hormone therapy on demand. Such treatments will be included in the “Obligatory Medical Plan,” which means both private and public providers will not be able to charge extra for the services.

“This law is going to enable many of us to have light, to come out of the darkness, to appear,” said Sen. Osvaldo Lopez of Tierra del Fuego, the only openly gay national lawmaker in Argentina.

“There are many people in our country who also deserve the power to exist,” Lopez said.

Children also get a voice under the law: Youths under 18 who want to change their genders gain the right to do so with the approval of their legal guardians. But if parents or guardians want a gender identity change and don’t have the child’s consent, then a judge must intervene to ensure the child’s rights are protected.

Argentina need not worry about vast numbers of people demanding sex changes, Karkazis predicted.

“This isn’t going to create a huge demand on the national health system for these procedures. They’re difficult, painful, irreversible. And this is why many people don’t do it,” she said.

But because the law says people can legally change their identities without having to undergo genital surgery or hormone therapy, these changes can be more benign and even reversible, if some day the person’s self-image changes.

Other countries, including neighboring Uruguay, have passed gender rights laws, but Argentina’s “is in the forefront of the world” because of these benefits it guarantees, said Cesar Cigliutti, president of the Homosexual Community of Argentina.

“This is truly a human right: the right to happiness,” Sen. Miguel Pichetto said during the debate.”

Filed under English, Latin America Tagged with , , , , ,

Three Mutations Away from a Flu Pandemic

May 9, 2012 Leave a comment

By LUIS MIRANDA | THE REAL AGENDA | MAY 9, 2012

The way to hell is paved with good intentions. This is the least that can be said about the creation of the most virulent form of H5N1 flu virus in two labs in the US and Holland. It is one of those cases where the medicine is worse than the disease. After lots of celebrations and pats on the backs, scientists revealed that their experiments to mutate the H5N1 flu virus had been successful, and the results had been replicated by different groups in Europe and the United States. What they didn’t seem to realize was that the results of those experiments, just as it happens with any other relevant scientific research, would have to be published to the medical community and then the public. Their satisfaction with the results of the experiments, or perhaps their incompetence, blinded them until some sense came back to them. Then came the censorship.

Initially, the procedures used to produce the mutated bird flu virus were blocked from the public as warnings were issued about the potential that so-called terrorists got a hold of the experiments and produced weaponized flu to spread it around cities with dense populations. Amazingly, that is exactly what the scientists did. They created a bioweapon in a lab, confirmed the results by replicating them in different labs, provided the findings to insiders in the scientific community and government officials, and now, they published the results out so anyone can take them, replicate them and create a pandemic.

The head scientist and virologist Yoshihiro Kawaoka, who works at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Tokyo, confirmed that it only took three changes made to the main gene of the virus to enhance it with the capacity to ‘jump’ from animal mammals to humans. Kawaoka and his team confirmed that after implementing the changes on the gene, the virus was easily and effectively transmissible among mammals. The final result of the research was a hybrid virus that would contaminate populations as fast as the air can carry it all over the planet. It doesn’t get anything easier than that, does it? After obtaining the new virus, the researchers injected it in ferrets where mutations in the gene called hemagglutinin — the H part of the H5N1 name — did the rest.

According to research, one of the mutations observed in the hybrid virus is similar to another found in the virus that affects areas of the world such as the Middle East, Asia, Europe and Africa, where it has killed at least 345 patients without even being weaponized. The 345 number accounts for cases reported as deaths caused by the virus or complications, although many other cases have been left out or simply not reported. Scientist allege that the work performed on the H5N1 virus was necessary in order to learn about it and how it could potentially evolve during a pandemic. They believe that after the first mutation seen in the Middle East, Africa and Asia, the virus will continue to change and that their experiments and results may help save many lives because there will be time to produce a vaccine to fight it. Does anyone see economic intere$t written all over it? This is the big $; I mean S in Health that few people realize the experiment is all about. As if the danger of a weaponized virus transmissible from other mammals to humans wasn’t dangerous enough, the pathogen also has the capacity to ‘jump’ from human to human, just as other flu strains.

The issue with human-made crisis such as the hybrid, lab-made H5N1 virus is that scientists have not figured out a cure to the infection it would cause, only a treatment for an ever changing organism, which only ensures that people will have to use vaccines and other medications for the rest of their lives and still be behind in the game. Not even the scientific inability to measure whether a virus like the H5N1 has the potential or not to become and out of control human transmissible virus was enough to stop well-financed scientists from creating quite a monstrosity. “Our study shows that relatively few amino acid mutations are sufficient for a virus with an avian H5 hemagglutinin to acquire the ability to transmit in mammals,” Kawaoka said.

Yushihiro Kawaoka’s paper, was published in the journal Nature. His is one of two papers around which scientists, government officials and biosecurity experts were debating about before the results were finally put out. Most of the opposition came from the  U.S. National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity, an organization that protested the publication on national security grounds. Those in favor of publishing the results contrasted the public health concerns with a statement that said it was critical to share information in order to harmonize the analysis and response to flu epidemics or pandemics. Everyone else’s hunch is that the people concerned with sharing information are more interested in keeping the money flow going that allows them to finance their research. But scientists said that it was necessary to keep an eye on H5N1 natural changes and what they meant to the scientific community and the public.

Kawaoka’s research has earned him the rock star treatment from colleagues, a dangerous state of affairs if one thinks what can unlimited financing and genius do when they are off the leash. Back in 2003, China directly blamed the U.S. for the death of Chinese people who died after being infected with a violent strain of SARS. Back then, China floated the idea that the SARS virus was the product of a lab experiment that resulted in a bioweapon, a virus that was race specific. Other reports from main stream media even adventured expectations about the H5N1 airborne virus that Kawaoka and his colleagues produced in their labs. Another scientist, Ron Fouchier, who will also published the results of his experiments after the Dutch government allowed him to do so, announced his achievement just last week. His experiment will be published on the scientific magazine Science at a time that is still to be determined. As in many occasions, the US government was the top financier of the experiments conducted by Kawaoka.

The consequences of the artificial creation or mutation of viruses is well-known by the scientific community. The 2009 H1N1 flu pandemic was a result from the games played by scientists who created a hybrid virus with a mutated hemagglutinin gene from H5N1 that fused to the seven remaining genes from the H1N1 virus. Back then, scientists did not create a cure to the potential pandemic and the pharmaceutical industry heavily benefited by offering a useless and dangerous vaccine that hadn’t even been tested properly and which was linked to hundreds of side effects and allergic reactions not disclosed by the makers. Despite the unknowns, both government officials all over the world and pharmaceutical companies themselves guaranteed the safety of the vaccine and justified the absence of valid human trials on the unexpected appearance of the H1N1 virus. Vaccine makers multiplied their average earnings of $50 billion dollars a year as a direct result of the sale of the vaccines, which were purchased by governments with taxpayer money. In 2009, the people of the world were once again the subjects of a worldwide experiment performed under the pretense that it was necessary to learn how much would the correct dosage be for humans. It is important to remember that vaccine makers are immune against legal action should a person determined to have been damaged by a vaccine decide to sue for damages.

“It really is a wonderful study,” said Richard Webby, director of a World Health Organization collaborating center that focuses on studies of animal and bird influenza viruses at St. Jude Children’s Hospital in Memphis, Tenn. The World Health Organization itself was one of many entities that paraded around the world pushing people to buy and inject themselves with the H1N1 vaccine to prevent the much feared pandemic. In mid 2009, the U.S. agreed to spend at least $1 billion in flu vaccine production, which makes one wonder how much of that money went to finance experiments such as the one conducted by Kawaoka and his team.

Although he did not show proof of it, Webby said that mutations like the ones that transformed the H5N1 virus into a biological weapon may not occur in the wild. Of course, no one is counting on the virus to reach the virulent pandemic level by itself, now that it has been aided by out of control scientists. He said that viruses such as the one produced in a lab by Kawaoka require changes in functions the field has known for some time are key for avian flu viruses to make the leap to be able to infect humans. “Those include changing the type of cell receptors the viruses bind to, from receptors that are typically found in people only deep in the lungs to ones found in the upper respiratory tract, where human flu viruses attach.”

Other scientists like Webby see the research as a valuable piece of work that will help experts study the mutation mechanism of the virus, which they say, turns it more efficient when spreading from mammal-to-mammal. One of those scientists is Adolfo Garcia-Sastre, a flu virologist who works at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. Although a warning for the potential mass infection has been issued by the scientists themselves, Garcia-Sastre says that the virus may not transmit that easily among humans. He believes that Kawaoka’s work will help scientists pick out viruses that present mutations from those that do not have them in order to study them and come up with solutions to a pandemic threat. This is, though, if the scientists studying them intend to actually help humans avoid such pandemic. The problem with his premise is that the system in place utilized to monitor the behaviours of viruses and other pathogens is rather poor. This deficiency in the monitoring grows exponentially if one takes into account that changes made to viruses in labs can go undetected for a long time, perhaps up until the moment it is released into the air. In a lab environment, where money and time are unlimited, scientists can deal with unsolved problems, tie all the loose ends and achieve any desired result just as Kawaoka did. For example, missing genes can be added or taken out to affect the virulence and the type of living thing it would be most effective on.

If anything positive has come out of this scientific development is the fact that flu scientists and others who seek to play God with dangerous forms of life like viruses and bacteria will be directly under the microscope as they come up with new ways to teach themselves how to create bioweapons for research purposes and for biowarfare. Richard Webby, from the WHO believes that the outcome will end in more monitoring for the kind of research completed by scientists all over the world. ”There’s certainly going to be more paperwork. But in the long run it’s surely going to be a whole lot easier than what we’ve just been through since December of last year.” Sure, but what stops a scientist, or for that matter any other professional, from lying about experimental results to carry out his or her dream to be recognized or to obtain more funding for their signature life project? One only needs to look at climate science (Climategate, hockey stick, rising sea level) in order to find an answer to this question. Or perhaps if you don’t want to go that far, what stops a pharmaceutical company or government controlled entity from carrying out experiments out in the open? Remember Tuskegee?

I guess it all comes down to trust. Do we trust our fame-thirsty scientists or the pharmaceutical companies that hire them or the governments that experimented on humans without their consent?… and continue to do it today?

Filed under Africa, Asia, English, Latin America, North America, Special Reports, World Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

HSBC Permits Money Laundering for Wealthy Clients

May 8, 2012 Leave a comment

Documents and E-mails show that the bank not only doesn’t inquire about the origin of funds, but also works hard to conceal the transfer of large amounts of cash from clients of Iranian, Lebanese, Brazilian and Cuban origin.

Most suspicious transactions are done through the HSBC’s New York and Miami offices.

By CARRICK MOLLENKAMP, BRETT WOLF and BRIAN GROW | VANCOUVER SUN | MAY 8, 2012

In April 2003, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and New York state bank regulators cracked the whip on HSBC Bank USA, ordering it to do a better job of policing itself for suspicious money flows. Staff in the bank’s anti-money laundering division, according to a person who worked there at the time, flew into a “panic.”

The U.S. unit of London-based HSBC Holdings Plc quickly rallied. It hired a tough federal prosecutor to oversee anti-money laundering efforts. It installed monitoring systems for operations that had grown unwieldy during the bank’s U.S. expansion. The aim, as HSBC said in an agreement with regulators at the time, was to “ensure that the bank fully addresses all deficiencies in the bank’s anti-money laundering policies and procedures.”

Nearly a decade later, the effort has failed to satisfy law-enforcement officials.

The extent of that failure is laid out in confidential documents reviewed by Reuters that originate from investigations of HSBC’s U.S. operations by two U.S. Attorneys’ offices.

These documents allege that from 2005, the bank violated the Bank Secrecy Act and other anti-money laundering laws on a massive scale. HSBC did so, they say, by not adequately reviewing hundreds of billions of dollars in transactions for any that might have links to drug trafficking, terrorist financing and other criminal activity.

In some of the documents, prosecutors allege that HSBC intentionally flouted the law. The bank created an operation that was a “systemically flawed sham paper-product designed solely to make it appear that the Bank has complied” with the Bank Secrecy Act and is able to detect money laundering, wrote William J. Ihlenfeld II, U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of West Virginia, in a draft of a 2010 letter addressed to Justice Department officials.

In that letter, Ihlenfeld compared HSBC unfavorably to Riggs Bank. In 2004 and 2005, that scandal-plagued Washington bank was fined a total of $41 million after it was found to have violated anti-money laundering laws, and it was acquired by PNC Financial Services.

“HSBC is to Riggs, as a nuclear waste dump is to a municipal land fill,” Ihlenfeld wrote.

The allegations laid out in the Ihlenfeld letter and other documents couldn’t be confirmed. It is possible that subsequent inquiries have led investigators to alter their views of what went on inside HSBC’s compliance operation.

As they are, the documents reviewed by Reuters, combined with regulatory filings, court documents and interviews with current and former HSBC employees, paint a damning portrait of a bank allegedly unable, and unwilling, to police itself or its clients.

HSBC’s U.S. anti-money laundering division – the people charged with ensuring that the bank toes the line of regulators and law enforcement – has experienced high turnover among executives. Since 2005, at least half a dozen overseers have come and gone. Compliance staff also encountered pushback from bankers eager to maintain relationships with lucrative clients whose dealings raised red flags.

In the Miami office – an important center for HSBC’s private-banking and retail operations – a longtime private banker was fired for alleged sexual harassment after he warned compliance officers that clients were engaged in shady dealings.

In one email exchange submitted as evidence in that case, employees debated whether the bank should help a Miami client get around U.S. sanctions by moving the client’s business to HSBC’s Hong Kong office. “I believe that the best outcome would be for the customer to open a relationship with Hong Kong just for leters (sic) of credit purposes. He travels there all the time,” private banker Antonio Suarez wrote in a 2008 email. Suarez has since left the bank and couldn’t be reached for comment.

UNDER THE RADAR

The revelations come as HSBC confronts multiple investigations into its internal policing abilities. The Justice Department, the Federal Reserve, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the Manhattan district attorney, the Office of Foreign Assets Control and the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations are scrutinizing client activities such as cross-border movements of bulk cash, and transactions linked to Iran and other parties under U.S. economic sanctions, the bank said in a February regulatory filing.

“We continue to cooperate with officials in a number of ongoing investigations,” HSBC spokesman Robert Sherman said. “The details of those investigations are confidential, and therefore we will not comment on specific allegations.” HSBC said in its February filing that it was likely to face criminal or civil charges related to the probes.

A successful case against HSBC could result in an onerous fine and represent one of the most significant money laundering cases ever brought against an international bank. It also would draw unaccustomed attention to the challenges governments — and financial institutions — face in monitoring the trillions of dollars flowing through banks’ back-office operations, flows essential to the daily functioning of the global financial system.

“Disguised in the trillions of dollars that is transferred between banks each day, banks in the U.S. are used to funnel massive amounts of illicit funds,” Jennifer Shasky Calvery, head of the Justice Department’s Asset Forfeiture and Money Laundering Section, said in congressional testimony on organized crime in February.

In response to Reuters inquiries about the investigations, Gary Peterson, chief compliance officer of HSBC’s U.S. bank operations, said: “Since joining HSBC in 2010, I’ve been proud to lead an AML (anti-money laundering) team that has vastly increased investments in people, systems and expertise. We are continuously seeking to strengthen our core AML mission: to detect and deter money laundering and terrorist financing – and our efforts are showing results.”

To date, the only enforcement action detailing any anti-money laundering shortcomings at HSBC was a 2010 consent order from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the Treasury agency that is HSBC’s chief regulator. The OCC, calling HSBC’s compliance program “ineffective,” told the bank to conduct a review to identify suspicious activity. This “look-back” was expected to yield a report to HSBC and regulators. The status of the report isn’t known. A spokesman for the OCC declined to comment.

The West Virginia U.S. Attorney’s probe of HSBC, which ran from 2008 until at least 2010, originated in a case against a local pain doctor who allegedly used HSBC accounts to launder ill-gotten gains from Medicare fraud. Over time, the U.S. Attorney’s office began to discern that, as Ihlenfeld wrote in his letter, the doctor’s case was just “the tip of the iceberg” in terms of the volume of suspicious money sluicing through HSBC.

The U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York in Brooklyn – one of the most powerful prosecutors outside of Justice Department headquarters in Washington – has conducted a parallel investigation, in collaboration with the Justice Department’s money laundering section.

Specifics on the investigations have until now been cloaked in secrecy. The documents reviewed by Reuters for the first time fill in some of the details. Taken together, they depict apparent anti-money laundering lapses of extraordinary breadth. Among them, according to the documents:

* The bank understaffed its anti-money laundering compliance division and hired “gullible, poorly trained, and otherwise incompetent personnel.” In 2009, the OCC deemed a senior compliance official at HSBC to be incompetent – the same executive in charge of implementing a new anti-money laundering system.

* HSBC failed to review thousands of internal anti-money laundering alerts and generate legally required suspicious activity reports, or SARs, on transactions picked up by the bank’s internal monitoring system. SARs are important because they are sent to U.S. law enforcement and scrutinized for leads to criminal activity. In May 2010, the bank’s backlog of alerts was nearly 50,000 and “growing exponentially each month,” according to one of the documents.

* Hundreds of billions of dollars moved unchecked each year through various bank operations because of lax due diligence and monitoring of accounts with foreign correspondent banks, which are financial institutions that rely on U.S. banks for processing services. The bank maintained accounts with “high risk” affiliates such as “casas de cambios” – Mexican foreign-exchange dealers – widely suspected of laundering drug-trafficking proceeds, and some Mexican and South American banks.

* In some instances, “management intentionally decided” not to review alerts of suspicious activity. An investigation summary also says, “There appear to be instances where Bank employees are misrepresenting” data sent to senior managers, and where management altered risk ratings on certain clients so that suspect transactions didn’t set off alarms.

Sherman, the HSBC spokesman, said the bank cleared the backlog of alerts and has remained current. Sherman also said the bank “regularly reviews risk ratings. We have revised and strengthened our country risk rating review policies.”

Spokesmen for the U.S. Attorney in Wheeling, West Virginia, and for the U.S. Attorney in Brooklyn declined to comment. The Justice Department in Washington also declined to comment, citing “an ongoing investigation into this matter.”

THE MIAMI CONNECTION

HSBC was born in 1865 as the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corp in the then-British colony of Hong Kong. It had little presence in the U.S. market until its purchase in the 1980s of Marine Midland Banks Inc based in Buffalo, New York.

Now the fifth-largest bank in the world in terms of market value, HSBC had $2.6 trillion in assets at the end of 2011 and operations in 85 countries and territories. Its North American business, which includes HSBC Bank USA and a consumer finance unit, accounts for about 5 percent of HSBC’s profit.

In 1999, HSBC’s U.S. unit paid $10 billion to buy Republic New York Corp and a European affiliate, banks controlled by Lebanese financier Edmond Safra. The deal doubled HSBC’s private bank to 55,000 clients with $120 billion in assets and broadened business in New York, Florida, Latin America and Europe.

The purchase also yielded one of the world’s biggest banknote businesses, an operation that handles bulk cash exchanges between central banks and large commercial banks. In 2003, HSBC plunged into the U.S. market for subprime lending, paying $14 billion for Household International Inc.

By then, all banks faced U.S. regulatory pressure aimed at stopping shady money flows. In the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks, the Patriot Act took effect, attempting, among other things, to choke off terrorist financing by strengthening requirements that banks look for and report suspicious activity. In recent years, U.S. law enforcement added an emphasis on money tied to the illegal drug trade.

When the 2003 order came down from regulators for HSBC to improve its anti-money laundering efforts, the bank had no centrally organized means of monitoring the movement of money across borders. That’s when it hired Teresa Pesce. Pesce came from the high-profile U.S. Attorney’s office in Manhattan, where she made a name for herself as a tough prosecutor overseeing money laundering prosecutions.

Pesce ”knew the ropes,” according to a person who worked in compliance at the time, and the sense among many staffers was that a “savior was here.” One of her first initiatives was to order the installation of the Customer Account Monitoring Program, or CAMP, a technology system designed to filter suspicious retail transactions across HSBC’s U.S. operations.

In 2006, regulators lifted their 2003 order, according to people familiar with the situation.

Pesce left the bank in 2007 to run KPMG LLP’s anti-money laundering consulting business. A lawyer for Pesce declined to comment.

Despite Pesce’s efforts, problems with HSBC’s program persisted. In 2009, the OCC determined that Lesley Midzain, a compliance executive with little direct experience running anti-money laundering programs, was incompetent. She was in charge of the installation of a monitoring program to replace Pesce’s CAMP system, which the OCC had determined was “inadequate to support the volume, scope and nature of international money transfer transactions,” according to the documents reviewed by Reuters. Efforts to locate and obtain comment from Midzain were unsuccessful.

The former compliance-division staffer said that in the Miami office in particular, with millions of dollars from Mexico, Brazil, Argentina and other countries flowing through the Premier private-banking business for wealthy clients, “it was a nightmare to figure out what was going on down there.”

Those observations mesh with allegations in a 2010 lawsuit against HSBC brought by Tomas Benitez, a longtime private banker in South Florida who had worked at Republic Bank. Benitez alleged that HSBC fired him in January 2009 after he warned colleagues that clients had violated U.S. restrictions on trade with Iran and Cuba.

HSBC said in a court filing that it fired Benitez for alleged sexual harassment – allegations Benitez denied.

In court documents, Benitez alleged that during an audit meeting in 2008, an unidentified federal bank examiner told HSBC employees that a client referred to only as “CM” “had multiple affiliations whose ties to Iran and Cuba were part of their ordinary course of business.

At a follow-up meeting, the account was discussed because of indications its owner “was funneling large amounts of funds in and out, with no apparent business purpose,” Benitez alleged. He told Clara Hurtado, director of anti-money laundering compliance at HSBC’s private bank in Miami, that the account had ties to Iran and Cuba and “as a result, it should not be maintained,” according to the lawsuit.

After the meeting, Benitez alleged, another banker said “he would not allow Benitez’s word and suspicions to defeat a million-dollar-plus account relationship.” The account wasn’t terminated, Benitez alleged.

Hurtado declined to comment. She left HSBC in 2009, according to her LinkedIn account.

In an email exchange submitted as an exhibit in the lawsuit, Hurtado and other HSBC employees discussed whether the bank could help a Miami client avoid violating U.S. sanctions by issuing letters of credit for the client from the bank’s Hong Kong offices, according to Benitez’s lawsuit. “Clara, we are persuing (sic) another solutions……(anything but losing the account!!!),” Suarez, the private banker, wrote in an email. The banker suggested issuing the letters of credit through Hong Kong.

In January 2009, HSBC fired Benitez. In late 2010, a federal judge dismissed his case and demand for pay, saying there was no evidence of a connection between Benitez’s concerns about the accounts and the firing. The judge didn’t address Benitez’s allegations about illicit transactions.

Benitez’s Miami lawyer, Mark Raymond, declined to comment on his client’s behalf.

HSBC spokesman Sherman declined to comment on Benitez’s case. “It’s inappropriate to comment on unsubstantiated allegations in termination of employment cases,” he said.

OBVIOUS TO STOOGES

Around the time Benitez was sounding warnings in Miami, authorities were accelerating an investigation in West Virginia of Barton Adams, a pain clinic operator in the Ohio River town of Vienna. In 2008, the U.S. Attorney in Wheeling indicted Adams on 157 counts of alleged healthcare fraud and other crimes. They allege that Adams moved hundreds of thousands of dollars in Medicare fraud proceeds between a U.S. HSBC account and HSBC accounts in Canada, Hong Kong and the Philippines.

Adams has pleaded not guilty.

In building their case against him, the West Virginia prosecutors determined that HSBC’s compliance problems were systemic. As Ihlenfeld wrote in his letter to the Justice Department: “The Adams money laundering practices – which Moe, Larry, and Curly would dismiss as too transparent – would not be detected by HSBC regardless of who the customer was, or where any transaction occurred.” HSBC, he said, “systematically and egregiously” violated the Bank Secrecy Act.

One document reviewed by Reuters says HSBC developed a “large appetite for risk” after snapping up business with Mexican foreign-exchange houses formerly handled by Wachovia Corp. In 2010, Wachovia agreed to pay $160 million as part of a Justice Department probe that examined how drug traffickers had moved money through the bank.

West Virginia prosecutors focused much of their attention, according to the documents, on HSBC’s failure to report suspicious activity on hundreds of billions of dollars in business from “high-risk” sources.

For instance, 73 percent of accounts with foreign correspondent banks were rated “standard” or “medium” risk and thus weren’t monitored at all, the documents say, noting that oversight of such accounts was “extremely limited despite indications of possible terror financing.” In one example, the bank “summarily cleared as many as 5,000″ internal alerts of suspicious activity from correspondent customers in Argentina after lowering the country’s risk rating.

Investigators cited a litany of failings in the bank’s back-office operations — the vast but mundane business of clearing transactions by moving big sums of money around the globe. In the bank’s “remote deposit capture” business – an operation that electronically zaps checks around the world — HSBC “failed to detect, review and report large volumes of sequentially numbered traveler’s checks” from non-U.S. sources. Such checks are a red flag signaling possible money laundering, regulators have said.

HSBC also repatriated more than $106.5 billion in banknote deposits through foreign correspondent accounts, many of them in Mexico and South America, in a three-year period. And yet, “since 2005, the bank has filed only 19 suspicious activity reports relative to the receipt of bulk cash and banknote activities.”

People familiar with HSBC and the reports said 19 is a low number given the risk of the clients. Between 2005 and 2010, banks and other depository institutions filed more than 3.8 million SARs, according to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, a bureau of the Treasury Department.

Similarly, investigators found that HSBC didn’t report any suspicious activity after Drug Enforcement Administration agents posing as drug dealers deposited millions of dollars in Paraguayan banks and then transferred the money to accounts in the U.S. through HSBC. They have also been examining connections between one of the Paraguayan banks and Hezbollah, the Lebanon-based Islamist group classified by the U.S. as a terrorist organization. HSBC has since ended its relationship with the Paraguayan bank, according to government documents.

Ultimately, the U.S. Attorney’s office in West Virginia entered into plea negotiations with HSBC, the documents show. A person familiar with the investigation said a deal could have resulted in one of the largest settlements ever in a bank money laundering case.

For reasons that aren’t clear, prosecutors in West Virginia were told to stand down while the Eastern District of New York and other Justice Department divisions continued to investigate, according to a Justice Department document and an HSBC regulatory filing. The West Virginia probe could ultimately prove to be a narrow slice of a broader case if criminal or civil charges emerge.

Filed under Asia, English, Latin America, North America, Special Reports, World Tagged with , , , , , , , , ,

Will the Global Political Shakedown be for the best?

May 7, 2012 Leave a comment

By LUIS MIRANDA | THE REAL AGENDA | MAY 7, 2012

All around the world there seems to be a wave of people kicking their leaders’ rear ends. The most recent examples of these manifestations of non-conformity with business as usual politics began in Spain, where Mariano Rajoy took over the steering wheel from a failed Jose Luis Zapatero. Then came Greece, who changed its leader George Papandreou for Lucas Papademos.

Over the weekend, elections in France and Germany, carried on the ball as Moamer Khadafi’s friend, Nicolas Zarkozy was unseated as France’s president. He yielded his post to Mr. Francois Hollande. Angela Merkel suffered significant loses in Germany, as her centre-right government coalition lost power in the state of Schleswig-Holstein. By the end of this week, once the counting of the votes is over with, she could also be a victim of what seems to be a generalized european mini-political quake. In Europe, the only nation that seems to have escaped the technocratic attack was Iceland, whose leaders were not totally in the pockets of the bankers who have now taken over Greece.

Meanwhile, in the United States, most of the media has collaborated to pick Mitt Romney as the Republican candidate for president after Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum realized they did not have enough cash to financed their campaigns or pay their debts. Both Santorum and Gingrich are lobbying Romney to take care of those debts in exchange for their vote and support. Most of the gains made by Romney comes from his beauty contest victories obtained during the caucus and primaries, which enabled him to get the highest number of unpledged delegates among his fellow candidates.

Different from the European contests, the American election system is more like a pageant, and the candidate is only elected during a national party meeting. Conventional wisdom would dictate that Romney would be elected as the man to face a decaying Barack Obama in November, and that is what the main stream media and the Republican Party’s machine has tried to do since both Santorum and Gingrich left the race. But in the middle of all the chicanery created to have Romney be the candidate for president, the wave of American discontent seems to be rising. Although many state caucuses and primaries were reported as won by Santorum, Gingrich and Romney himself, the official results in several of those states had not been announced. In the last two weeks, at least five states have changed the outcome of the previously announced results. It turns out that it wasn’t Romney, Santorum or Gingrich who won those states. It was Texas Representative Ron Paul.

Nevada, Washington State, Iowa, Maine and Louisiana are now official Paul’s states. He has also made significant gains in Minnesota and Missouri. So, while the Romney campaign was enjoying the feeling of inevitability, a hard working group of Paul supporters made sure that their votes had the weight they were supposed to have up until the last moment. The Paul campaign has quietly picked up an important number of delegates after Romney was officially ‘elected’ by the GOP to face Obama in November. With his recent gains, Paul is making strides to force a brokered convention in Florida, as supposed to allow Romney to enjoy a victory lap all by himself.

The issue with all the political revolts both in Europe and in the US is whether those revolts against the establishment corporate-backed candidates has rendered or will render anything positive for the people who booted their leaders out of office. In the case of Europe there has been little progress, especially in Greece. After George Papandreu left, the country accepted so-called financial aid from the European Union and adopted a harsh package of government austerity whose only significant result has been the increase in political suicides. Greece is in a worse condition than ever before. The thought that a rich country would eventually be able to pay for its debt in no longer the ephimerous guarantee that it was before. Greece, one of those supposed rich countries is now less capable of paying off his debt than before the sovereign debt problem became apparent. Neither is France, Spain, Portugal or any other European nation. So in the case of the Greek, the change has not been that great. It has been for the worse indeed.

In the case of Spain, things are much different. The government led by Mariano Rajoy has basically continues the same strategy that Zapatero had, which is a powerful government sponsored economy. Since Rajoy took power, the government has not done anything to generate more revenue other than raising taxes. It has also adopted austerity programs in exchange for financial bailouts as it increases government spending in traditional entitlement programs. Spain’s financial health is worse today that it was before, and perhaps it is even worse than Greece. In addition to the gigantic out of control debt, the socialist government continues to borrow money at a very high cost. The unemployment rate has reached 24% which has spurred major economic problems everywhere. Why will Spain be worse than Greece? Because its economy is four times the size of Greece. Economic activity in Spain adds up to just about 12% of the GDP generated in the Eurozone, which makes it the fourth most important in the old continent and number 10 in the world.  A Spanish default will cause a quake that whose ripples will be felt all over the planet. It could even mean the collapse of the Eurozone, analysts say.

France’s economic prospects aren’t that much better. This state of affairs together with Nicolas Sarkozy’s thirst for war cost him his position as president. But will the change be for the best? Has socialism ever worked for the best? The questions is not rhetorical as France’s new leader is a socialist. France lost its AAA rating, if that means anything, while its unemployment continues to rise, even with cooked numbers to over 10%. The country is today in a similar situation than Spain and Italy, drowning in economic insecurity and a growing inability to pay its debt, which is a country’s best presentation card to gain trust and obtain cheap credit. The lousy results of Sarkozy’s window dressing economic and fiscal policies resulted in no growth, to which he responded with more proposals to change the direction of the country. Too little too late, many would say as he lost the election to François Hollande. Mr. Sarkozy wanted to impose a an increase in the value-added tax on consumption, allow companies more flexibility to negotiate working hours and pay, and enshrine a balanced-budget requirement in the Constitution. His intentions did not pick up speed with the French, who found out about his secret dealing with murdered Libyan leader Moamer Khadafi.

Perhaps the only country that looks better is Germany, both financially and politically. But this state of affairs may not last too long. Angela Merkel is also managed to shine panic among the german people. The latest example of her failure to deliver is the loss of support, although small, could begin to shape what the national election will look like in 2013. As Germany seems to be the only European state with a stronger footing, a different issue becomes center stage. As reported by the Express newspaper, German foreign minister Guido Westerwelle is working secretly to create an all powerful European leadership position that will merge the powers of the presidency of the European Council and the European Commission while leaving the United Kingdom out of the group. “This is a plot by people who want to abolish nation states and create a United States of Europe,” said one of the opponents of the secret group. Tory MP Douglas Carswell said that it doesn’t matter how the powers of the Council and the Commission are arranged, so long as the technocrats in control of Europe don’t have the ability to dictate the people’s way of living. “They are not elected so they have no legitimacy.”

With the new Greek Prime Minister mortgaging the future of the country by adopting new but ineffective austerity programs and calling austerity a “patriotic duty” there doesn’t seem to be a way out for the Mediterranean nation that now lays in the hands of its creditors. Spain, on the other hand seems to be walking in Greece’s direction as its leaders begin to adopt similar policies of indebtedness and government spending without generating any real job opportunities for the growing numbers of unemployed — especially those under 25 years of age — who are now called the lost generation. “This is the least hopeful and best educated generation in Spain,”   said local blogger Ignacio Escolar. Unemployment for the young in Spain has reached 52% this Spring.

It all comes down to the US then, doesn’t it? Will Americans start a ‘summer spring’ that will continue the wave of much needed change, or will they continue to foolishly trust their corporate chosen leaders to bring about change instead of kicking them out for good? It was the Americans who fought the British for temporary independence after all, wasn’t it? With a skyrocketing debt of over $16 trillion and a growing unemployment rate — some 100 million Americans are out of the work force today – Americans will have to choose between the two party dictatorship model that has dragged them downthe hole they’re in today, or the better option that will indeed get the ball rolling to bring about real change. A major shakedown in the United States could be the trigger for a worldwide awakening and/or rise of unimpressed people who will clamp down on their governments out of control collusion with corporate interests. Someone needs to light up the match in order for the fire to ignite.

Filed under English, Latin America, North America, Politics, World Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

← Older posts