Banks financing Mexican drug gangs

[bit_pattern]

Pretty despicable. Your average narcotrafficante rots in jail for decades, at the cost of the taxpayer, simply for meeting a market demand, while the big players who finance these operations get handed billions in taxpayer-funded stimulus money. Something is rotten in the state of Denmark!

Twenty million people in the U.S. regularly use illegal drugs, spurring street crime and wrecking families. Narcotics cost the U.S. economy $215 billion a year -- enough to cover health care for 30.9 million Americans -- in overburdened courts, prisons and hospitals and lost productivity, the department says.

“It’s the banks laundering money for the cartels that finances the tragedy,” says Martin Woods, director of Wachovia’s anti-money-laundering unit in London from 2006 to 2009. Woods says he quit the bank in disgust after executives ignored his documentation that drug dealers were funneling money through Wachovia’s branch network.

“If you don’t see the correlation between the money laundering by banks and the 22,000 people killed in Mexico, you’re missing the point,” Woods says.

 

[Ladewig]

Pretty despicable. Your average narcotrafficante rots in jail for decades, at the cost of the taxpayer, simply for meeting a market demand, while the big players who finance these operations get handed billions in taxpayer-funded stimulus money. Something is rotten in the state of Denmark!

link please.

 

[bit_pattern]

Oops, mah bad!

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-...rtels-admitted-in-wells-fargo-s-u-s-deal.html

It's a long article, useless without the link.

 

[theprestige]

Your average narcotrafficante rots in jail for decades...

If only that were true, the world wouldn't have nearly the drug problem that plagues it today. However, I'm pretty sure the average drug dealer actually spends very little time at all in jail.

... simply for meeting a market demand,

And now I'm having a hard time figuring out your objection to banks meeting a market demand for money laundering, or hit men meeting a market demand for assassination-for-hire, or politicians meeting a market demand for political corruption, or Fox News meeting a market demand, or Rush Limbaugh meeting a market demand, or...

I mean, is there any law broken, any human desire fulfilled that you cannot excuse under the heading of "simply meeting a market demand"?

It's funny, I hadn't really figured you for a laissez-faire economics buff. I had, however, noticed a distinct preference for hypocritical sophistry in your OP.

 

[bit_pattern]

If only that were true, the world wouldn't have nearly the drug problem that plagues it today. However, I'm pretty sure the average drug dealer actually spends very little time at all in jail.

LOL, I'm pretty sure you're wrong!

http://www.justice.gov/dea/agency/penalties.htm

And now I'm having a hard time figuring out your objection to banks meeting a market demand for money laundering, or hit men meeting a market demand for assassination-for-hire, or politicians meeting a market demand for political corruption, or Fox News meeting a market demand, or Rush Limbaugh meeting a market demand, or...

I mean, is there any law broken, any human desire fulfilled that you cannot excuse under the heading of "simply meeting a market demand"?

It's funny, I hadn't really figured you for a laissez-faire economics buff. I had, however, noticed a distinct preference for hypocritical sophistry in your OP.

It's pretty damn basic. I think drugs should be legal, but if they are to be illegal then surely the bankers financing these drug gangs should at the very least be held to the same level of accountability as the player on the street pushing a few keys of blow, no?

 

[Brainster]

I'm having trouble seeing the relationship to politics. Seems more like a social issues and current events thread.

 

[bit_pattern]

Fair call, I posted here 'cos its an American issue, but if the mods want to move it there'd be no argument from me. Heck, I never post in this forum anyway, be better for me if it was in the Current Events forum.

 

[dudalb]

I'm having trouble seeing the relationship to politics. Seems more like a social issues and current events thread.

Wow, like banks "laundering" money for organized crime is something new and shocking.

 

[Mycroft]

Pretty despicable. Your average narcotrafficante rots in jail for decades, at the cost of the taxpayer, simply for meeting a market demand, while the big players who finance these operations get handed billions in taxpayer-funded stimulus money. Something is rotten in the state of Denmark!

Or we could just legalize the drugs removing the profit motive. The corrupt banks would no longer have anything to launder and the associated street crime would go away too.

 

[bit_pattern]

Or we could just legalize the drugs removing the profit motive. The corrupt banks would no longer have anything to launder and the associated street crime would go away too.

Oh, c'mon Mycroft, that would be WAY to sensible! This is war!

But seriously, yeah, I concur 100%.