Back in the 80's Leona Helmsley famously said, "We don't pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes."

She could just as easily have said the same about committing terrorism.

The big, international banks have been funding terrorism for decades, yet no one goes to jail for that.



For at least half a decade, the storied British colonial banking power helped to wash hundreds of millions of dollars for drug mobs, including Mexico's Sinaloa drug cartel, suspected in tens of thousands of murders just in the past 10 years – people so totally evil, jokes former New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, that "they make the guys on Wall Street look good." The bank also moved money for organizations linked to Al Qaeda and Hezbollah, and for Russian gangsters; helped countries like Iran, the Sudan and North Korea evade sanctions; and, in between helping murderers and terrorists and rogue states, aided countless common tax cheats in hiding their cash.

"They violated every goddamn law in the book," says Jack Blum, an attorney and former Senate investigator who headed a major bribery investigation against Lockheed in the 1970s that led to the passage of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. "They took every imaginable form of illegal and illicit business."

That nobody from the bank went to jail or paid a dollar in individual fines is nothing new in this era of financial crisis.

Now some people might be under the impression that the banks were simply unaware that they were violating the Trading With The Enemy Act.

Not so.



"It is anticipated that Iran will become a source of increasing income for the group going forward," the memo says, "and if we are to achieve this goal we must adopt a positive stance when encountering difficulties."

The "positive stance" included a technique called "stripping," in which foreign subsidiaries like HSBC Middle East or HSBC Europe would remove references to Iran in wire transactions to and from the United States, often putting themselves in place of the actual client name to avoid triggering OFAC alerts.

In case you are curious, KJ McElrath on The Ring Of Fire just finished a three-part series explaining exactly how banks launder terrorist money.

You might be incline to think that after being caught red-handed like this might make the banks think twice about laundering terrorist money in the future.

Think again.



America's largest banks are to propose a complete overhaul of how financial institutions investigate and report potential criminal activity, arguing that rules imposed in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks and strengthened during the Obama administration are onerous and ineffective, sources said.

On the other end of the spectrum is the little people, where any suspicious activity will get the book thrown at you. And if you haven't done anything? Well, authorities have an answer for that too.



But as with earlier FBI stings that primarily targeted Al Qaeda sympathizers, most of the targets of the bureau’s ISIS stings are aspirational, not operational.

In the majority of ISIS stings, targets were not in direct contact with ISIS representatives and did not have weapons of their own, government evidence showed.

Since 9/11, about 800 people have been prosecuted for terrorism, roughly 300 were in FBI stings.

Yet more than half of them have since been released.



The release of people convicted on terrorism-related charges with little if any monitoring by law enforcement might suggest U.S. government officials believe they can be fully rehabilitated following minor prison terms. A more likely explanation is that many of these so-called terrorists weren’t particularly dangerous in the first place.

More often than not, the terrorist case against these pathetic individuals is 'manufactured' and the target is mentally ill.



Downs also said that the FBI often targets particularly vulnerable people, such as those with mental disabilities.

"Very often, they [the FBI] target people who are genuinely psychotic, who are taking medication," he said.

In some cases the government has to forcibly give them much needed medical help just so they can by sane enough to stand trial.

That's not to say that there isn't a real terrorism problem.

It's just that our government created that problem, sometimes unintentionally, sometime knowingly, and sometimes intentionally.

But the government isn't 'little people', so none of them go to jail either.

It's funny. Our government uses your tax money to fund and arm al-Qaeda, but if you send those very same al-Qaeda groups $20 directly, without using Wall Street banks or the CIA as middle men, our government will toss you in a hole and throw away the key.