Background Briefing: September 22, 2020

On By gram

 

Prying Into a World Awash with Dirty Money Major Banks are Laundering

We begin with the documents from the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, FinCEN published by Buzzfeed News and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists on Sunday and speak with Will Fitzgibbon, a senior reporter at the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. His previous reports include Fatal Extraction, the Paradise Papers and the Panama Papers and he joins us to discuss the FinCEN files which comprise 0.02% of the 12 million Suspicious Activities Reports filed by FinCEN between 2011 and 2017. Major banks including JP Morgan Chase, HSBC, Barclays and Deutsche Bank laundered dirty money with little oversight and of the $2 trillion in suspicious transactions revealed, $1.2 trillion moved through Deutsche Bank. It is worth noting that this is the same bank whose records on Donald Trump’s loans from Deutsche Bank and who guaranteed them, has been at the heart of on-going lawsuits to uncover what Trump has fought so hard to keep from the public. Unfortunately enforcement lags so far behind criminality that according to a 2011 report by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, less than 1% of global illicit financial flows were seized and frozen.

 

The Pentagon Diverts Money for PPE to Engine Parts, Body Armor and Dress Uniforms

Then we speak with Mandy Smithberger, the director of the Center For Defense Information at the Project on Government Oversight about how the Pentagon used taxpayer money meant for masks, swabs and PPE to make jet engine parts, body armor and dress uniforms. We look into the skewed priority of what serves our public safety and national security with the nation under attack by a pandemic, as opposed to fattening defense contractors who have captured our government.

 

Inside China’s Cultural Genocide Against the Uyghurs

Then finally we examine the cultural genocide China is engaged in to subjugate the Uyghurs in a colonial program using sophisticated surveillance techniques in the mass incarceration of over one tenth of the 11 million Uyghurs who undergo imprisonment, child abduction, forced sterilization and forced marriages to Han Chinese. Sean Roberts, a professor of the practice of international affairs and the Director of the George Washington University’s Elliot School of International Affairs joins us to discuss his new book, just out, The War on the Uyghurs: China’s Internal Campaign Against a Muslim Minority.