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Friday, December 14, 2012

And the band plays on...

The U.S. government officially went into business with the drug cartels this week. The Department of Justice demanded its share of the money the HSBC Bank had taken from the cartels to launder their profits.

Instead of prosecuting the people in the bank who had engineered the scheme to move $9 billion safely for the cartels, the DOJ simply asked the bank to give it $2 billion. Oh, and it told the bank to clean up its act.

Meanwhile, in pursuit of a policy that makes sense to no one except a government employee, the government continues to strip average insignificant individuals, who don't work for banks, of their possessions and put them in prison for drug deals that can be tallied in tens of dollars instead of billions.

3 comments:

Wayne Gilbert said...

Yeah, when I heard about this "penalty" on the news, I wondered why the government didn't take away HSBC's buildings as a forfeiture, for starters.

grudznick said...

Mr. Newland, with this free pot in Colorado law won't there be lots more tickets given out on I-90 near Wasta, SD 34 by Plainview, and US 79 by Hermosa? Lots of tickets and lots of fines.

Bob Newland said...

I haven't heard about free pot in Colorado law.

But, given the fact of small-amount legalization in Colorado, one might confidently prognosticate that arrests on the "drug corridors" (i. e., highways, streets and driveways of So. Dak.) will increase.

Indeed; lots of tickets and lots of fines.