Update Bahrain:
Protester standing against police stuns Bahrain
Published on 20 Feb 2013
The second anniversary of Bahrain's popular uprising was marked by renewed violence, resulting in the death of a 16-year old boy. In the video, filmed right after the teenager's death, a desperate protester can be seen risking his life to stand up to the police.
The victim's name was Hussein al-Jaziri. According to opposition websites, the teenager was killed by fragmentary bullets.
Overwhelmed by this death, which he had just witnessed, a protester walked up to police and screamed at them. The policemen tried to intimidate him, but seemed thrown off balance by the protester's daring.
"You criminals! You murderers! You hope to escape God's wrath? God will avenge us! Go on, shoot me! Shoot me if you dare, I won't leave!" the man in the video says.
Bahrain's Police fire on citizens playing a friendly game of soccer- All Attacks Obama /Kerry Approved
This is what President Obama means by "The Rule of Law" if an act is codified as legal then it is legitimate and moral. Playing soccer is against the law so those who dare to play a pick up game of soccer are ipso facto criminals who deserve to be tear-gassed, shot, imprisoned, tortured whatever as long as it is all done to the letter of the law .
Government and financial industry too entangled to pursue criminal charges indictments and cancelling of charters or licenses of financial institutions even after they commit numerous criminal offenses.
So Eric Holder and other officials in the Obama administration prefer to go after undocumented immigrants, medical marijuana dispensaries and growers and anyone who smokes pot or anyone supposedly illegally downloading files , films or songs from the internet .
So Obama pursues charges of treason against Whistleblower Bradley Manning rather than go after the alleged War Criminals of the Bush administration or even attempt to insist on substantive changes within the US military and the CIA to stop abuses of POWs or the murdering and torturing of thousands of Iraqi and Afghan citizens .
So Obama like most Americans believes that torturing and murdering civilians in foreign countries is no big deal because War Is Hell and those people shouldn't have I guess been born in those countries if they didn't want to be bombed by the Americans and its quisling NATO allies.
According to Obama the US military and other American institutions such as the CIA and America's prisons and police forces across the board are sacred and no one has a right to criticize these institutions .
Elizabeth Warren Wants HSBC Bankers Jailed, Regulators Have Ties To Bank By: DSWright FDL, March 8, 2013
In a nation that has imprisoned millions (mostly poor, mostly minorities) of people for minor drug offenses a bank that laundered billions of dollars in drug money, HSBC, has walked away with a small fine. No jail time, no charter removal, just a few weeks profit and on the game goes.
Senator Elizabeth Warren is irritated by this clear double standard for the rich and decided to let the regulators know of her displeasure in a Senate hearing.
On Thursday, the Senate held a hearing to ask federal regulators why they are not stopping banks from allowing money laundering. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) was the highlight of the show, slamming a Treasury official who refused to weigh in on whether the banks should face more severe penalties…
In December, the giant international bank HSBC was fined $1.9 billion for illegally allowing millions in Mexican drug trafficking money to be laundered through its accounts. But it’s not just HSBC—this is a systemic problem. Ten banks have been penalized in recent years for failure to comply with anti-money laundering rules.
US Attorney General Eric Holder defends the prosecution and persecution of Aaron Swartz for downloading academic files from the net while Holder claims that the Banks and Wall Street were too big to prosecute for robbing the public of billions and illegally foreclosures on homes . And he didn't mention that he has a major conflict of interests in cases dealing with Wall Street and the banks since many of these bankers and CEOs on Wall Street are friends of his and are friends with others in the top echelon of the Obama administration . So once again we see that the US government and Wall Street and the Banks and the investment industry are too entangled for us to expect objectivity or justice from the US government.
Attorney General Holder Claims Aaron Swartz Prosecution Was ‘Good Use of Prosecutorial Discretion’ By: DSWright at Fire Dog Lake, March 7, 2013
The whole process bore a striking resemblance to what the mafia does when they extort money from small businesspeople. They arrive at the person’s shop for the first time and say the owner forgot to pay them protection money. “Hey we could break your leg but instead we’ll simply take 10% of the gross.” The government charges Swartz under an absurd interpretation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act then says “Hey we could send you to prison for 35 years but instead we’ll simply take a 6 month sentence.”
Department of Justice officials even told Congress that by the end the only reason the odious charges against Swartz would not be dropped was because it would be embarrassing.
Some congressional staffers left the briefing with the impression that prosecutors believed they needed to convict Swartz of a felony that would put him in jail for a short sentence in order to justify bringing the charges in the first place, according to two aides with knowledge of the briefing.
Combine that with the case being brought in the first place because of political prejudices and Eric Holder’s assertion about good prosecutorial discretion falls apart. So we have a flimsy case from the beginning that devolved into a witch hunt and only continued on due to the stubbornness and vanity of the prosecutors. The worst tactics of the so-called justice system used on the most promising of citizens.
These people are eating our society alive.
Meanwhile Eric Holder defends Wall St. and the Banks and in effect argues that the Department of Justice is only meant to go after the powerless and with limited economic means and that it would be foolish to go after those who are rich and powerful and well connected especially if they happen to be friends of his or other top officials in Washington.
If Holder indicted some of these bankers and CEOs he might have to indict himself as a felon ???.
And once again we see the talk of the Rule Of Law by Eric Holder and President Obama is just empty rhetoric except when it comes to the poor and powerless and the not so rich and not so well connected.
Attorney General Holder Says Banks Are Too Big To Prosecute By: DSWright at Firedoglake.com, March 8,2013
In the same hearing where he publicly endorsed the Aaron Swartz prosecution, Attorney General Eric Holder admitted that the reason he has not done his job the last five or so years is because he can’t.
Here’s an unexpected addition to the long list of people who say large banks may be too large to prosecute: Attorney General Eric Holder…
Mr. Holder defended his agency’s track record in testimony Wednesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee. But he conceded that the economic impact of a conviction could be so significant that cases are difficult to pursue.
“I am concerned that the size of some of these institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them,” Mr. Holder told lawmakers. Prosecutors, he said, must confront the problem that “if you do prosecute, if you do bring a criminal charge, it will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy. And I think that is a function of the fact that some of these institutions have become too large.”
There you are. It was not just Lanny Breuer refusing to uphold the law, his boss also believed Wall Street should be above the law. Too Big To Jail is real.
But we should not factor out the other truth in all this, Eric Holder has a massive conflict of interest. While Holder and Breuer were partners at Covington, the firm’s clients included the four largest U.S. banks – Bank of America, Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase and Wells Fargo & Co – as well as at least one other bank that is among the 10 largest mortgage servicers…
A particular concern by those pressing for an investigation is Covington’s involvement with Virginia-based MERS Corp, which runs a vast computerized registry of mortgages. Little known before the mortgage crisis hit, MERS, which stands for Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, has been at the center of complaints about false or erroneous mortgage documents.
Court records show that Covington, in the late 1990s, provided legal opinion letters needed to create MERS on behalf of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase and several other large banks. It was meant to speed up registration and transfers of mortgages. By 2010, MERS claimed to own about half of all mortgages in the U.S. — roughly 60 million loans.
Holder and Breuer were at ground zero of the fraud that brought on the mortgage crisis. Is anyone surprised they have not done anything to hurt their old and likely future clients?
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