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Nor The Misleaders Of The Oppressed
Who Strive To Be In ‘Partnership’ With The 1%)
Occupy Wall Street — ‘We Are The 99%’
The resistance continues at Liberty Square:
U.S.
How Did Drug Money Laundering Become a Non-Prosecutable
Crime: The Stench Spreads on the HSBC Settlement
By
Pam Martens
Yesterday, Lanny Breuer, the Assistant U.S. Attorney General for the
criminal division of the Justice Department, appeared on CNBC to defend
the deferred prosecution agreement with the global banking giant, HSBC –
a deal which settled drug money laundering and other crimes for $1.9
billion without prosecuting any HSBC employee.
What Breuer was effectively defending was the five years that his
former law partner, John Dugan, was HSBC’s primary banking regulator
and did nothing to rein in the outrageously lawless behavior at the bank.
Dugan headed the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC),
which regulates all national banks, from August 4, 2005 through August
14, 2010. During that period, according to the Senate Permanent
Subcommittee on Investigations, the OCC turned a blind eye to abuses at
HSBC. In fact, it was not until Dugan left the OCC that a report was
issued in September 2010, detailing five years of alarming conduct at
HSBC that went unpunished.
U.S. Attorney General, Eric Holder, Assistant U.S. Attorney General,
Lanny Breuer, and former OCC head, John Dugan, all hailed from the
corporate law firm, Covington & Burling. When Dugan, who also
functioned as a bank lobbyist prior to heading the OCC, stepped down
from the Federal agency in 2010, he returned to Covington & Burling’s
Washington, D.C. office and now chairs the firm’s Financial Institutions