Amici:
Stark House Press is running Holiday Specials that can be found right here … Load up now and stuff those stockings, amici. These are some of the best noir classics to be found ... and the book covers aren’t so bad either. Click on this link for all the details:
Who’s Stark House? Stark House is one of the few publishers publishing classic crime fiction with a Mob twist ... and they’ll be publishing one of my very favorite Mob writers on the planet, Dana King. His Grind Joint is another of his Penns River novels. The Allegheny Casino is sold to the people of Penns River as the answer to their financial problems. When a local drug dealer’s corpse is dropped at the casino’s front door a few days before opening, Detective Ben Dougherty is pressured from both inside and outside the department to close the case quickly. Matters are complicated when Russian gangsters—in town to capitalize on the ancillary casino businesses the Chamber of Commerce never mentions—try to muscle the existing mob boss out of the picture. Dougherty, helped by his cousin—a private investigator from visiting from Chicago with a few issues of his own—is caught between solving the murder and avoiding a mob war the small town is ill-equipped to handle.
HSBC …
"HSBC is being held accountable for stunning failures of oversight — and worse — that led the bank to permit narcotics traffickers and others to launder millions of dollars through HSBC subsidiaries, and to facilitate hundreds of millions more in transactions with sanctioned countries," said U.S. Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer in announcing the largest settlement of its kind.
Deferred Prosecution Agreement ... The settlement, part of a deferred prosecution agreement filed in Brooklyn federal court, means HSBC Avoids A Criminal Conviction On Money Laundering And Other Major Charges — which could have amounted to a financial death sentence by blocking the bank's access to the U.S. banking system. The settlement, part of a deferred prosecution agreement filed in Brooklyn federal court, means HSBC avoids a criminal conviction on money laundering and other major charges — which could have amounted to a financial death sentence by blocking the bank's access to the U.S. banking system.
Bottom line, amici: NOBODY IS GOING TO BE PROSECUTED. Money Laundering at this level is a clear violation of federal RICO statutes used to prosecute associates of organized crime of every ilk (the Mob, drug dealers, drug Cartels, sex traffickers, gun runners, people traffickers, etc., hell, they even used it to go after the Catholic Church over hiding sexual predators), but one has to wonder how dealing with drug cartels in this instance somehow eludes that particular nexus. Or maybe HSBC is too big to fail, too?
I’ll tell you this much. You or I do it (money laundering) and we’ll go away. Somehow, however, the champion of the middle class has found an excuse to let money laundering on the largest scale possible, slip through the cracks. This is one more absolute smack in the face to every working slob in America; one more incredible wheel and deal for the Obama administration to count on a media that will ignore this the same way it ignored his leaving unions out to die throughout his campaign. Way to go, Mr. President … we’re not even officially into your second term and you’ve managed to make fools of us all once again.
I’d love to know how Mitt Romney, George Bush, Newt Gingrich, et al would’ve handled this any different. Chances are they wouldn’t have, and isn’t that rewarding to know? Obama in his second term is going to be no different than he was in his first term; another puppet of wall street and/or as incompetent as they come. Tell us again how your administration is working for the middle class, Mr. President. Tell us again about how tough you’re going to be on the banks on Wall Street that caused the fiscal meltdown four years ago.
People were passionate about the Democratic Party’s nominee ... and now he’s proved, once again, he’s no different (certainly no better) than his predecessor. The time has long come for blind faith democratic supporters to wake up already. Does it really make a different which party is in the white house when a so-called “champion of the middle class” like Obama pulls shit like this?
Not to fear, amici ... he’s sure to do a Christmas tree lighting ceremony soon. He’ll have his family around him, the dog and some Christmas music ... and he’ll smile and tell us how much he wishes us all a happy holiday season. He’d give out gifts, but the one he just gave to HSBC probably bankrupted his conscience.
Green Party from here in ... go Green!
Some Foreign Flicks ...
Reading the Complete Stories of Bernard Malamud ... ah, Brooklyn... just wonderful.
— Knucks
Mahler’s Second ... Resurrection ... Gustavo Dudamel conducting probably the most attractive orchestra in the world ...
