Sara Carter – The Swiss government will be auctioning a collection of 25 supercars in September worth more than $13 million. The seized vehicles allegedly belonged to Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue, son of the Equatorial Guinea’s president who took power through a coup in 1979. He is now facing various charges of corruption and money laundering. Continue reading
Greg Hunter – Financial expert and investment advisor Catherine Austin Fitts contends the Federal Government allows pension funds to be robbed. Fitts explains, “Our pension funds have real money. Those pension funds basically finance the government and what the government is doing. So, they buy Treasury securities, and then the government turns around and gives that money to the black budget firms. It goes down the rabbit hole, and, meantime, what we get back in our pensions is an IOU from the government, which now we owe ourselves.
We are giving up real money, and what we are getting is an IOU from ourselves back. If you step back and look at it at the highest level, it is a huge money laundering scheme.”
Ellen Brown – In a blatant example of “do as I say, not as I do,” the US government is profiting handsomely by accepting marijuana cash in the payment of taxes while imposing huge penalties on banks for accepting it as deposits. Onerous reporting requirements are driving small local banks to sell out to Wall Street. Congress needs to harmonize federal with state law.
Thirty states and the District of Columbia currently have laws broadly legalizing marijuana in some form. The herb has been shown to have significant therapeutic value for a wide range of medical conditions, including cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, multiple sclerosis, epilepsy, glaucoma, lung disease, anxiety, muscle spasms, hepatitis C, inflammatory bowel disease, and arthritis pain.
The community of Americans who rely on legal medical marijuana was estimated to be 2.6 million people in 2016 and includes a variety of mainstream constituency groups like veterans, senior citizens, cancer survivors, and parents of epileptic children. Unlike patented pharmaceuticals, which are now the leading cause of death from drug overdose, there have been no recorded deaths from marijuana overdose in the US. By comparison, alcohol causes 30,000 deaths annually, and prescription drugs taken as directed are estimated to kill 100,000 Americans per year. Continue reading
Charles Hugh Smith – We all know the rich are getting richer, and the super-rich are getting super-richer. This reality is illustrated in the chart of income gains, the vast majority of which have flowed to the top .01%–not the top 1%, or the top .1% — to the very tippy top of the wealth-power pyramid:
Though all sorts of reasons have been offered to explain this trend–I’ve described the mechanisms of financialization here for years–two that don’t attract much mainstream media attention are money laundering and control fraud, i.e. changing the rules of what’s legal so what was illegal yesterday is legal today–presto-magico, illegally skimmed wealth is now “legal.”
Katherine Frisk – Has anyone seen this article: ‘Unprecedented’ Amount of Child Porn Discovered in the Vatican,“or even remembers the events of 2014? Here are a few extracts:
“…the Vatican reports of Wesolowski not only possessing more than 100,000 images and videos of children being forced into sex acts but also of him sexually abusing multiple children in Poland and the Dominican 
Republic …” he “…had been placed under “protective” house arrest, but mysteriously died before the case even reached a “courtroom”. “
“There were more than 160 videos of teenaged boys being forced to masturbate for the camera and perform sex acts on one another.In addition, the boys were raped and forced to perform sex acts on adults, as well.Wesolowski was tedious and protective of his child porn collection, filing more than 86,000 images into categories in locked folders.”
“…According to the Guardian, beyond the child pornography cases, Vatican authorities are battling an array of crimes including drug trafficking and money laundering.”
More recently we had this report: : Vatican’s Finance Chief, Cardinal Pell, Charged With Multiple Sex Assaults. Continue reading