The Crimes of HSBC

Money Laundering, LIBOR Banking Scandal, Destruction of Indigenous Lands

 

Derrick Broze
Activist Post

Multinational bank HSBC is known for scandals as much as for global banking.

In the summer of 2012 the British multinational bank HSBC was exposed for laundering money for drug cartels, Iran, and moving money for an al-Qaida linked Saudi bank. A report presented to the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigation in July 2012 detailed HSBC subsidiaries transporting billions of dollars in armored vehicles, clearing suspicious checks, and assisting drug cartels in buying planes through Cayman Island accounts. At the hearing David Bagley, HSBC’s head of compliance, resigned in front of the committee stating that, “Despite the best efforts and intentions of many dedicated professionals, HSBC has fallen short of our own expectations and the expectations of our regulators.” In the wake of the investigation and 335-page report HSBC was fined $1.9 billion.

In July 2012 the news broke that HSBC, along with RBS, JP Morgan, Deutsche Bank and other banks were involved with manipulating the London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR)giving off a false impression of credit and providing them with a hefty profit. The European Commission launched an investigation into the claims and now the banks have begun to receive fines for their role in the theft. As of this article eight banks have been fined a total of $2.3 billion dollars, including American banks CitiGroup $95 million and JP Morgan for $107 million. HSBC has not been fined yet but may face fines soon.

Funding violent drug cartels, and financial theft are not the only complaints lodged against HSBC. HSBC is now finding itself the enemy of environmental and indigenous rights activists. The Rainforest Action Network has detailed how an HSBC financed company is forcing the development of oil palms on the lands of indigenous communities in Papua New Guinea.

HSBC-financed palm oil company Kuala Lumpur Kepong (KLK) recently claimed ownership of three land development licenses within traditional indigenous lands. KLK brought in palm oil seedlings and is believed to have begun planting seeds without permission. KLK has been used of using slave labor in Borneo and child plantations in Sumatra.

Although community representatives filed a complaint with the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), the organization charged with overseeing land development within the Palm Oil Industry, the Collingwood Bay case has been largely ignored by the RSPO. It should be noted that HSBC sits on the board of the RSPO. Critics accuse the RSPO of being a mere formality that attempts to legitimize the activities of palm oil firms and their financiers.

The people of Collingwood Bay have responded to the actions of KLK and HSBC with global calls for support. Adelbert Gangai, representative of the over 7,000 people from 326 clans in 22 villages, stated that, “(We) have been marginalized and become slaves on their own land. We do not wish this for the people of Collingwood Bay.”

The Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) released a report,Banking on Extinction, that found HSBC leading the financing of palm oil firms, and the development of indigenous lands. HSBC lent $470 million to palm oil company Triputra Agro. The company has moved forward with plans to clear forest inhabited by endangered gibbons and other species. A rescue mission for gibbons found the animals close to death from starvation believed to be attributed to the destruction of their natural habitat, in Borneo. According to HSBC’s own forest policy they are forbidden from funding activities that destroy “high conservation value areas”.

As the EIA forests spokesman Jago Wadley said: “HSBC’s 60 million customers around the world would be surprised and appalled to learn that such a high-profile and trusted brand is profiting from large-scale deforestation even as it projects a wholesome public image of sustainability.”

Make no mistake, HSBC is not the only criminal financial institution still doing business. These firms have become too big to fail and too big to jail. Banking institutions bankroll governments and finance corporations around the world with ease. Their relationships are further blurred by owning Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) and sitting on the boards of various watchdog agencies. As long as there is an oligarchical, corporatist state existing, the people will continue to be robbed, and mistreated.

As individuals we can choose to take actions that will free us in our daily lives and begin limiting the power of these financial institutions that continue to wreak havoc. Stop using the banks and watch them fail. Invest in your community and cut ties with the big banks. It sounds simple because it is. We have the power to choose what we do with our money and how much we let our desire for goods override our ability to create a more free, compassionate, connected world.

Other sources:

http://blueandgreentomorrow.com/2013/11/08/hsbc-accused-of-bankrolling-deforestation/
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2174785/U-S-probe-accuses-HSBC-moving-7-billion-Mexican-drug-money-working-Saudi-Arabian-bank-linked-terrorism.html#ixzz20tiyTaKK

Credit to Activist Post

Our people cannot even read the Constitution, much less understand it

How to Avoid the Mind-Numbing Weapons of Mass Instruction

December 15, 2013 - Activism, Featured, Main - Tagged: dave hodges, education, federal reserve, government, new world order, police state, the common sense show, tyranny, vaccinations, wall street, weapons of mass instruction - 22 comments

Dave Hodges December 15, 2013 The Common Sense Show

“The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie—deliberate, contrived, and dishonest, but the myth—persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Belief in myths allows the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.”

JOHN F. KENNEDY

People often ask me, “Dave, how do we turn this around and defeat the globalists”? I frequently tell them that there is no turning this around. I have an attorney who is continually writing to me and stating that we need to teach the people the Constitution. “Mr. lawyer, our people cannot even read the Constitution, much less understand it”.

The parents and grandparents have lost this country to a group of vicious and sociopathic bankers because for 3 generations, Americans have failed to turn off their TV sets and allowed the state to educate their children.This article is about why parents need to home school their children in order to keep them out of the clutches of the government. Yes, there are good teachers and great schools still left. However, there are not enough of them. We need to rescue our children from the propaganda of the state, before they are totally taught to love their servitude and educate them in an environment which will honor true knowledge, not blind obedience.

If the Biblical saying (Hosea 4:6) “My people perish from lack of knowledge.”  is indeed true, Americans should be placed at the top of the endangered species list. We need to educate our children at home before we lose this generation as well.

Dumb and Dumber

Just how dumb are we? Consider a new report from the Intercollegiate Studies Institute about civic literacy concludes that the average American is too dumb to vote intelligently.

 

Over 70% of the test takes, including college students and elected officials flunked the 33 multiple choice question test which covered basic civics.

How bad were the results? Consider the fact that 27% of the elected officials surveyed could not name even one right contained in the first amendment. How will we know when the country is placed under martial law? The answer: We won’t!  But neither will the majority of our leaders.

Rick Shenkman, author of the book Just How Dumb Are We, found that 87% of American college students could not find Iraq on a map. In fact, Shenkman also found that:

- Only 1 in 5 know that we have 100 United States senators.

-Only 2 out of 5 citizens can name the three branches of the federal government.

-Only 20% of young Americans between the ages 18-34 read a newspaper daily. An amazingly low 11% report surfing Internet news sites. 

Among 18- to 24-year-old Americans given maps:

-83 percent cannot find Afghanistan

-76 percent cannot find Saudi Arabia -70 percent cannot find New Jersey

-11 percent cannot find the United States

Only 17% of college graduates understood the contrast between a free market economy and centralized planning. Perhaps this explains why America was not rioting in the streets following the passage of the bail out. I am left wondering what percentage of Americans actually believe that the Federal Reserve is both Federal and has reserves. Soon, nearly 100% of Americans will not be able to find their wallets.

 Class Size

Public or private schools, with class sizes of 30-40 kids,  doesn’t inspire creative or critical thinking. If large classeshave to be on the same page, literally, those who learn faster are held back by those who are slower. Rote memorization does not lead to true understanding.

Mass Indoctrination

The public educational system has always been used as a tool for indoctrinating kids into whatever the currently accepted belief systems and standards of behavior are considered acceptable by the elite. As I have written about, elementary students in San Bernadino, CA., made their students bow on one knee when they heard the teachers whistle. All across this country, all support of the Second Amendment is eviscerated from most schools (e.g. suspending children for drawing a gun, pointing a finger gun, playing imaginary war games on the playground). 

Mass Inoculations

Homeschooling your children can help them avoid the often dangerous and required vaccinations and enforced psychotropic “medications”. There are many concerns of how children cope with the drudgery of forced institutional education by resorting to illegal drugs or prescription drugs obtained illegally.

Mass Illiteracy

It takes the schools of today far too many years to teach reading and writing skills along withbasic grammar, and math. Most of the problem is due to sheer class size. It should take only a few months to learn each of these basic items for most. Today, about 40% of  highschool graduates are lacking in those basic literacy skills. 

Mass Cloning

A generation of making dedicated teachers teach the exact same thing, using the exact same methods, has produced an educational cloning factory. This type of education produces a conditioned response in our children, instead of free and independent thinking. It is an excellent propaganda tool.

Mass Deception

Robert Kennedy Jr. once stated that, “Americans are over entertained and under informed.” You can help switch that around by exposing your children to texts and videos that are not allowed throughout all the grades of public education. How about teaching children how the Federal Reserve system is ripping them off and has been for a century in which the dollar has slipped in value to less than four cents. How about teaching our children how to balance a checkbook. How about allowing children to pursue what they love, learn real history, engage in a critical analysis the present political leadership and most of all, let’s have them learn what the research says about real contentment and long lasting happiness? Our children need to be challenged in ways that are appealing to them. The establishment is interested in using school as an instrument of indoctrination and teaching that the state is sovereign, not the people.

Conclusion

The state wants to produce children who are smart enough to do their jobs, but not so smart that they question authority. The banker-run state has accomplished their goal in subverting the Constitution and turning us into passive sheep who are incapable of challenging authority. If we hope to mount any resistance against the tyranny which has taken over our country, we need to remove the tyrants incessant voice from the ears of our children. The biggest reason to home school your children is to reintroduce God to the lives of our young in a manner that integrates His perfect word into the daily lives of our children in a manner which is fully engrained into the lives of our children. 

Home school children consistently outperform public school, home school your children!

“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”

THOMAS JEFFERSON

Credit to The Common Sense

Russia Confirms Tactical Missile Deployment on NATO Borders

MOSCOW, December 16 (RIA Novosti) – Russia confirmed Monday that it has deployed tactical ballistic missiles near its borders with NATO but said the move did not violate international agreements.

Bild newspaper in Germany reported over the weekend that Russia had “quietly” moved 10 Iskander-M (SS-26 Stone) missile systems into its Baltic exclave of Kaliningrad and along its border with the Baltic States and NATO members Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

The deployment marks the realization of threats from Moscow to respond with a firm gesture to NATO plans to place elements of the so-called European missile shield close to Russian borders.

“The deployment of Iskander missile battalions on the territory of the Western Military District does not violate any respective international agreements,” ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov said.

Konashenkov declined to provide details on the number of deployed missiles or their specific locations.

The Iskander-M is a mobile theater missile system equipped with two solid-propellant single-stage 9M723K1 guided missiles with "quasi-ballistic" capability.




With its reported effective range of 400 kilometers (250 miles), the Iskander does not fall into the category of intermediate-range nuclear missiles banned by the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty between Russia and the United States.

The missiles deployed in Kaliningrad could hit NATO targets located in Poland, Lithuania and even in Germany, however.

Credit to RIA Novosti

This GLOBAL Debt Problem Is Going To Cause MASS DEATH..Here's Why.

Japan Launches "No Guts But All The War Spending Glory" Military Plan

We warned last week of the rising nationalism and concerns about Abe's intentions and this evening the escalating tensions in the East China Sea are clear once again. In an effort to "normalize" an officially 'pacifist' policy, a hawkish Abe announced that Japan has tonight increased its military budget notably to buy drones, amphibious vehicles, submarines, and vertical take-off aircraft to boost defenses around the remote Senkaku islands. It seems the farce is getting more surreal as Japan also considers obtaining the means to counter ballistic missiles the point of launch. Why go to war and risk it all by printing and deficit spending your country into oblivion for a 'purpose' when you can do it without spilling a drop of blood?

Via AFP,

Japan said Tuesday it intends to boost military spending by five percent over the next five years, with a hardware splurge intended to beef up defence of far-flung territories amid a corrosive row with China.

The cabinet of hawkish Prime Minister Shinzo Abe agreed 24.7 trillion yen ($240 billion) would be spent between 2014 and 2019, including on drones, submarines, fighter jets and amphibious vehicles, in a strategic shift towards the south and west.

The shopping list is part of efforts by Abe to normalise the military in Japan, which has been officially pacifist since defeat in World War II. Its well-equipped and highly professional services are limited to a narrowly defined self-defensive role.

New defence guidelines approved by the cabinet on Tuesday said Tokyo will introduce a "dynamic joint defence force," intended to help air, land and sea forces work together more effectively in the face of danger.

"China ... is taking dangerous action that can draw unexpected contingencies," said the guidelines.

Via Bloomberg,

The government will also consider obtaining the means to counter ballistic missiles at the point of launch, according to new security plans which set a total five-year budget of 24.67 trillion yen ($239 billion), up about 1 trillion yen on the previous five-year plan.

Japan will set up a marines-style force to deal with any island incursions, equipping it with 17 tiltrotor aircraft and 52 amphibious vehicles, as well as three surveillance drones, according to documents given to reporters in advance.

Of course, the populism garnered by such a move is worrisome as these two powers engage in a bigger and bigger pissing match; but it seems, as we warned here, that no matter the cost, there may be war. Bear in mind this move comes on top of passing the Secrecy bill last week.
The right to know has now been officially superseded by the right of the government to make sure you don’t know what they don’t want you to know. It might all seems like a bad joke, except for the Orwellian nature of the bill and a key Cabinet member expressing his admiration for the Nazis, "just as Germany needed a strong man like Hitler to revive defeated Germany, Japan needs people like Abe to dynamically induce change."

We are sure the world (and the BoJ) will be more than happy to fund this latest Keynesian black hole.

Credit to Zero Hedge

Ash cloud from Mount Etna's latest eruption forces closures Catania airport in Sicily

An ash cloud from Mount Etna's latest spectacular eruption has forced the closure of Catania's airport in eastern Sicily.

The airport said it would remain closed at least until Monday evening. Several flight departures and arrivals were canceled, and at least two flights were diverted to Palermo's airport in the western part of the Mediterranean island.

Etna is Europe's most active volcano. Its latest series of eruptions has lasted for weeks now, occasionally causing a change in flight routes. The eruption hasn't forced evacuation of the villages on the mountain's slopes. Its last major eruption occurred in 1992.

Credit to Foxnews

Global warming' iced by 'coldest days ever

It’s been a bad week for global warming.

Cairo saw its first snow in 100 years. Oregon, like several other states, reached its coldest temperature in 40 years. Chicago saw its coldest days ever, and – as if to add finality to the trend – Antarctica reached the coldest temperature ever recorded anywhere on earth.

But no matter how cold it gets, global-warming adherents insist it’s all part and parcel of what they believe to be abnormal and soon-to-be-catastrophic warming of the planet’s surface due to man’s reckless introduction of “greenhouse gases” into the atmosphere.

Ironically, just a few years ago, believers in anthropogenic (man-caused) global warming – since renamed “climate change” – claimed cold weather and snow would soon be just a memory.

“Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past,” announced the headline in Britain’s newspaper the Independent at the turn of the millennium. The report quoted David Viner, senior research scientist at the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, long considered an authoritative resource for global warming research, as saying snow would soon be “a very rare and exciting event” in Britain.

“Children just aren’t going to know what snow is,” he said.

However, the authoritative reputation of East Anglia was seriously downgraded in 2009 when leaked emails proved researchers there were engaged in a major scheme to manipulate and suppress evidence against global warming, misconduct London’s Telegraph newspaper called “the worst scientific scandal of our generation.”

Fast-forward to last year when much the opposite prediction was being trumpeted by the Mail Online newspaper, which headlined, “Britain faces coldest winter for 100 years as Big Freeze follows floods with wind so strong it blows water upwards.”

That report, which included many references to “torrential rain,” “freezing winter” and “blizzards,” quoted local officials saying they wanted to avoid “a repeat of two years ago, when a lack of gritters and snowploughs caused roads and transport networks to grind to a halt.”

The rhetoric and predictions of global warming acolytes have been every bit as confusing in the United States, with former vice president and carbon-credit entrepreneur Al Gore telling an audience in a 2009 speech that “the entire north polar ice cap during some of the summer months could be completely ice-free within the next five to seven years.” And of course his 2006 documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” famously predicted increasing temperatures would cause earth’s oceans to rise by 20 feet, a claim many scientists say is utterly without rational basis.

How such predictions square with current weather reality – multiple reports of the coldest weather in a generation – is unclear.

Fact: The earth has not warmed for the last 15 years. This now-widely-known truth was confirmed in September in a leaked report, the result of six years’ work by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, touted as the world authority on climate change and its supposed causes.

Indeed, researchers were so flummoxed at the utter lack of evidence supporting anthropogenic global warming that, as the Mail Online reported, the “world’s top climate scientists were told to ‘cover up’ the fact that the earth’s temperature hasn’t risen for the last 15 years.”

“Climategate” exposes the global warming scam. Get it now at the WND Superstore.

In light of all this, why are so many still so alarmed over global warming? And more consequentially, why is the Obama administration still frantically promoting the idea that global warming is an imminent threat?

Last week, for example, the Obama administration was lobbying for the notion that the global warming is endangering the earth, even as a massive snowstorm was moving across the nation.

At Frontpage Mag, columnist Daniel Greenfield headlined his report, “Obama’s global warming task force met as snowstorm shut down federal government.”

 

“Ah, but it’s not global warming anymore,” Greenfield wrote. “After a few too many snowstorms, the Warmists learned their lesson. Now it’s climate change. And it’s responsible for all the weather. If weather happens … then climate change caused it.”

In a recent CNN panel debate, global warming critic Marc Morano of Climate Depot responded to a question suggesting that current record cold temperatures are a harbinger of “climate change.”

“So, record cold is now evidence of man-made global warming?” he said. “What evidence would disprove climate change? It seems like no matter the weather, everything that happens, proves it.”

Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club, responded that “top climate scientists in the world, thousands … are as confident that climate change is as real as they are that cigarettes make people sick.” Brune added, dismissively, that global warming is “settled science.”

Really?, asks well-known scientist Art Robinson, who spearheaded The Petition Project which to date has gathered the signatures of 31,487 scientists who agree that “There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plan and animal environments of the Earth.”

 

Among those scientists signing the petition are 9,029 who hold Ph.D. degrees in their field of study.

“We urge the United States government to reject the global warming agreement that was written in Kyoto, Japan in December 1997, and any other similar proposals,” the petition continues. “The proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind.”

Robinson, who has a Ph.D. in chemistry from Cal Tech where he served on the faculty, co-founded the Linus Pauling Institute with Nobel-recipient Linus Pauling, where he was president and research professor, later founding the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine.

He told WND, very simply, that weather does change over time and that the global system goes through cycles, some slightly warmer and some slightly cooler than others.

Right now it’s cool. On Friday, while it was snowing in Cairo for the first time in a century, Jerusalem received up to 20 inches!

Robinson also told WND it’s interesting to be living in a period when carbon dioxide is rising, yet temperatures are flat or going down.

“We just have to get used to fluctuations,” he said. “Earth does go through cycles.”

What, then, is actually behind the widespread obsession – with so little evidence – with global warming, and the resulting desire to implement massive new governmental policies? The answer, says Robinson, is not complicated: “Power and money.”

Power obtained through laws and rules created in response to supposed global warming, measures that limit in major ways what people can do with their own lives and property. Money because when carbon credits are bought and sold, enormous amounts of money changes hands. And someone has to pay the massive costs of implementing all those ambitious “green” ideas.

That huge amounts of money are involved isn’t in dispute. Just weeks ago, the United Nations and World Bank lobbied for spending $600 billion to $800 billion a year on “sustainable energy” to replace oil and gas.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and World Bank President Jim Yong Kim declared the massive infusion of cash necessary in the face of a “rising global thermostat” and implied the money would have to come from the world’s developed economies.

 

WND columnist Lord Christopher Monckton, who advised the late British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher on issues including global warming, a year ago was in Qatar at a conference on climate change and claimed that the strategies proposed to “solve” global warming constitute the real “menace” to democracy.

“It was at once clear that the sole purpose of the climate scam, as the U.N. saw it, was to serve as a Trojan horse allowing it to achieve its long-held ambition of destroying national sovereignty and transferring all real political power to itself,” he said.

“If America stands firm for just a few more years, until it becomes obvious to all that the mad scientists were more concerned with grants than with truth, we may yet prevent the world government that Mr. Ban [Ki-moon] longs for,” he said.

In other words, global warming – “climate change” – is really all about redistribution of wealth and power, according to critics like Monckton, Robinson and others.

The U.S. has already given tens of millions of dollars to the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, but global warming took a severe blow a few years ago when the East Anglia scandal, dubbed “Climategate,” developed.

Examination of hacked emails from Phil Jones, head of the Norwich, England-based Climatic Research Unit, and others there revealed schemes to employ various “tricks” with reporting warming trends so as to squelch skeptics and defame journals that published them.

Among the original emails hacked from East Anglia and posted online was one that identified the researchers’ “problem”: “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August (Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society) 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.” The researchers attempted to cover this up through various means.

Other scandals to plague global warming advocates include:
FOIGate: In which British officials are investigating whether East Anglia scientists refused to follow that nation’s freedom-of-information law about their work.
ChinaGate: In which dozens of weather-monitoring stations in rural China apparently have disappeared, leading to higher temperature averages, since city levels frequently are warmer.
HimalayaGate: In which an Indian climate official admitted in January that he falsely claimed Himalayan glaciers would melt away by 2035 to prod governments into action.
Many others, including PachauriGates I and II, SternGates I and II, AmazonGate (in which a claim that global warming would wipe out rain forests was exposed as a fraud), PeerReviewGate, RussianGate I and II and nearly a dozen others.

One organization that focuses on debunking fraudulent or unsupported global warming claims, The Climate Depot, notes that in 1974, the National Center for Atmospheric Research in the U.S. was very alarmed over “dramatic climate anomalies.” But back then, it blamed the seemingly ominous “climate change” on growing Arctic ice and called global cooling the “new norm.”


Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2013/12/global-warming-iced-by-coldest-days-ever/#SYs9me7qj73PjWp8.99