Elizabeth Warren To Jon Stewart: Every Law Protects ‘The Tender Fannies Of The Rich And Powerful’

[JonLP24]

31. Yes they do

Elizabeth Warren Wants HSBC Bankers Jailed for Money Laundering

In December, U.S. Justice Department officials announced that HSBC, Europe's largest bank, would pay a $1.92 billion fine after laundering $881 million for drug cartels in Mexico and Colombia. At the time, the Justice Department disputed accusations that it views some banks as too big to prosecute.

The two regulators, Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence David S. Cohen and Federal Reserve Governor Jerome H. Powell, deflected Warren's questions, saying that criminal prosecutions are for the Justice Department to decide.

"If you're caught with an ounce of cocaine, the chances are good you're going to jail. If it happens repeatedly, you may go to jail for the rest of your life," an exasperated Warren said, as she wrapped up her questioning. "But evidently, if you launder nearly a billion dollars for drug cartels and violate our international sanctions, your company pays a fine and you go home and sleep in your own bed at night - every single individual associated with this - and I just think that's fundamentally wrong."
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2013/03/elizabeth-warren-wants-hsbc-bankers-jailed-for-money-laundering/

Trafficking Lawsuit Against KBR for Wrongful Deaths in Iraq Dismissed

Families of 12 Nepali workers killed in Iraq in August 2004 have been denied permission by a federal judge to sue Kellogg, Brown & Root (KBR), the former subsidiary of Halliburton of Houston, in an abrupt reversal of a previous court decision.

The 12 men - Prakash Adhikari, Ramesh Khadka, Lalan Koiri, Mangal Limbu, Jeet Magar, Gyanendra Shrestha, Budham Sudi, Manoj Thakur, Sanjay Thakur, Bishnu Thapa, and Jhok Bahadur Thapa – were killed by militants of the Ansar al-Sunna Army.

The families say the workers were recruited by Daoud & Partners in Jordan to work in a luxury hotel in Amman and promised salaries of $500 a month. After arriving in Amman, the men were taken to Iraq in an unprotected caravan of vehicles on August 17, 2004 to work at the Al Asad base for KBR.

Before the Nepalese arrived at the base, they were ambushed and kidnapped by a group of armed men. On August 31, the captors sent out a video message showing the execution of the one of the 12 men with a message: "We have carried out the sentence of God against 12 Nepalese who came from their country to fight the Muslims and to serve the Jews and the Christians . . . believing in Buddha as their God." The bodies of the men were never found.
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=15921

A U.S. Fortress Rises in Baghdad:
Asian Workers Trafficked to Build World's Largest Embassy

John Owens didn’t realize how different his job would be from his last 27 years in construction until he signed on with First Kuwaiti Trading & Contracting in November 2005. Working as general foreman, he would be overseeing an army of workers building the largest, most expensive and heavily fortified US embassy in the world. Scheduled to open in 2007, the sprawling complex near the Tigris River will equal Vatican City in size.

Not one of the five different US embassy sites he had worked on around the world compared to the mess he describes. Armenia, Bulgaria, Angola, Cameroon and Cambodia all had their share of dictators, violence and economic disruption, but the companies building the embassies were always fair and professional, he says. The Kuwait-based company building the $592-million Baghdad project is the exception. Brutal and inhumane, he says “I’ve never seen a project more fucked up. Every US labor law was broken.”

<snip>

He also complained of poor sanitation, squalid living conditions and medical malpractice in the labor camps where several thousand low-paid migrant workers lived. Those workers, recruited on the global labor market from the Philippines, India, Pakistan and other poor south Asian countries, earned as little as $10 to $30 a day.

<snip>

My March 2006, First Kuwaiti’s operation began looking even sketchier to Owens as he boarded a nondescript white jet on his way back to Baghdad following some R&R in Kuwait city. He remembers being surrounded by about 50 First Kuwaiti laborers freshly hired from the Philippines and India. Everyone was holding boarding passes to Dubai – not to Baghdad.

“I thought there was some sort of mix up and I was getting on the wrong plane,” says the 48-year-old Floridian who once worked as a fisherman with his father before moving into the construction business.
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=14173