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<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial">----- Original Message -----
<DIV style="BACKGROUND: #e4e4e4; font-color: black"><B>From:</B> <A
title=tanstl@hotmail.com href="mailto:tanstl@hotmail.com">David Sladky</A>
</DIV>
<DIV><B>Sent:</B> Monday, July 01, 2013 9:02 AM</DIV>
<DIV><B>Subject:</B> The Real Traitors to America are in Washington and New
York</DIV></DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV dir=ltr><FONT size=-1>
<DIV class=subheadlinestyle><FONT style="FONT-SIZE: 16pt" size=4>Full-Court
Press on Snowden is a Bad Joke<BR><A
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/07/01/the-real-traitors-to-america-are-in-washington-and-new-york/">http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/07/01/the-real-traitors-to-america-are-in-washington-and-new-york/</A><BR></FONT></DIV>
<H1 class=article-title>The Real Traitors to America are in Washington and New
York</H1>
<DIV class=mainauthorstyle>by DAVE LINDORFF</DIV>
<DIV class=main-text>It’s hard to know whether to laugh or cry as the US goes
all out to get its hands on National Security Agency whistleblower Edward
Snowden.<BR>We’ve got the US leaning on Russia to push him out of his sanctuary
in their Moscow airport. We’ve got Obama and the State Department warning
countries around the globe not to accept him or allow him to transit their
airspace. And now there’s smilin’ Joe Biden, lecturing Ecuador’s President
Rafael Correa (threatening would be a better word) about not granting asylum to
Snowden, whom the Obama administration and the Republican and Democratic stooges
in Congress are branding a “traitor.”<BR>Meanwhile, the real traitors who have
done so much to destroy America are buying politicians of both parties, using
their undue influence to gut any effort at real regulation, all the while
earning fat bonuses in their corner offices at megabanks like Goldman Sachs,
Morgan Stanley, Citi Group, Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase and Wells Fargo. No
need to extradite those guys in order to prosecute ‘em. They’re right here in
the USA. All that’s lacking is a will to bring charges for things like mortgage
fraud, derivative fraud, collusion, lying under oath, etc. But Obama’s attorney
general, Eric Holder, a former corporate lawyer himself, has already declared
that he will not prosecute Wall Street’s banks for their frauds in bringing down
the US economy.<BR>Even Cyrus Vance Jr., the supposedly tough-as-nails,
no-nonsense district attorney of Manhattan, whose jurisdiction encompasses the
home offices of most of the biggest “too-big-to-fail” banks, won’t indict any of
them or any of their top executives. It’s not that he won’t indict a bank, but
instead of going after Goldman or Citi or Chase, he has indicted — ready for
this? — a little independently owned community-based Chinatown bank called
Abacus Bank, which has total assets of less than $250 million.
That’s <EM>million</EM>. For comparison, the largest US bank, JP Morgan
Chase, has total assets of $2.39 <EM>trillion</EM> dollars, which is
almost <EM>10,000 times as big</EM>. Worse yet, although Vance, in
indicting the bank, claimed its fraud (a bank employee, fired and voluntarily
reported to regulators by the bank, had been been falsely inflating loan
applicants’ incomes to help them take bigger loans), was “an example of what
brought down the US economy,” actually Abacus has a loan default rate of 0.5%,
which is just one-tenth of the national average bank loan default rate of
5-6%.<BR>Why hasn’t Vance, at least, indicted some of the big banks, which many
knowledgeable analysts and critics have said are little more than giant
organized crime syndicates, in some cases such as B of A, Citibank and HSBC
actually knowingly laundering vast amounts of drug cartel cash? His deputy says
it’s because there is no evidence of prosecutable crimes committed by them!
Probably it’s the same reason Washington politicians won’t go after them: it
would jeopardize all that banker campaign lucre — and Vance surely has his eye
on the New York governor’s mansion in Albany.<BR>And so, back to Snowden, whose
only “crime” has been to expose the galloping fascism of the US government,
which has, behind our backs, established a national domestic surveillance system
so vast and Orwellian that the old East German Stasi or Soviet KGB couldn’t even
dream about having such a thing.<BR>
<DIV>So now we have Vice President Joe Biden, who came to his post from a
position as Senator of Delaware, the state that is the legal home for some of
the most criminal corporations in the country because of its lax oversight laws
and its protections against shareholder activism, lecturing Ecuador about the
importance of the “rule of law,” and threatening the country with loss of its
“most-favored-nation” exemption from import duties on exports to the US if it
grants Snowden asylum from US prosecution.<BR>But wait! As President Correa has
pointed out, his country has been trying for years to get the US to extradite
two bankers, Roberto and William Isaias, to face charges in a bank fraud and
collapse of Filanbanko that was at the center of a US-style systemic bank
collapse. That collapse ultimately cost the little country’s 15 million people a
staggering $8 billion in losses. The two men, who fled to the US in 2000 and
have been protected from prosecution by the US since then, were <A
href="http://laht.com/article.asp?ArticleId=491079&CategoryId=14089">sentenced
in absentia to eight years in jail</A> earlier this year.<BR>Double
standard you say?<BR>Well, let’s face it, the US has become a kind of haven for
international financial criminals, much as Brazil used to be a haven for bank
robbers, and Argentina and Chile for Nazi mass murderers. If colossal bank
fraud, in practice, is not a crime here in the US, then it’s not extraditable.
And as our “Justice” Department head Holder would put it, “We don’t do bank or
banker prosecutions, unless perhaps they are tiny banks. We just prosecute
whistleblowing traitors.”<BR></DIV><EM><STRONG>DAVE LINDORFF</STRONG> is a
founding member of <A
href="http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/">ThisCantBeHappening!</A>, an online
newspaper collective, and is a contributor to <A
href="http://www.easycartsecure.com/CounterPunch/CounterPunch_Books.html">Hopeless:
Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion</A> (AK
Press).</EM><BR></DIV></FONT></DIV></BODY></HTML>