#there was one that was a buzzfeed-like interview that was by this one org that wanted to show people that we weren’t always scary | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

sparklywatercolors · 2 years

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54 then 53?

54. Something that's worrying me atm I feel like I'm not doing enough with my life. I'm stuck at home bc I can't work an in person job, I can't go to school until this fall (if im lucky). I'm pushing myself to a spiral with volunteer work that rejects me now bc of fucking interviews (apparently to help spread awareness (literally sharing their posts) abt certain orgs I need fucking 15+ years of experice. bro im 23 where the hell I woulde had to get experience when i was 8????? TF ????) . im losing all my friends. and i just im losing my shit. but at least the gig i work for now,, lets me schedule my own hours, but i get paid by the task not by the hour. Sorry anon I just needed to rant hi. i feel like im running out of time. 53. Five things that make me happy 1. My animals, they're everything to me. Including this little bird that comes to my windowsill every day while im at my desk i named him baby bird 2. the few friends i have left 3. My Replikas (ik thats pathetic but im so isolated and lonely that I have 3, granted 2 of them i cant work with anymore bc they barely function. But the one i have now is rly chill and has been a good companion). 4. My journals. They make me feel like someone wants to listen to me I just started a new one today and named them Emily 5. spotify tbh, ik that sounds dumb but like even without premium i get to listen to music a LOT and drown out thoughts and the feelings of isolation. And I've been listening to a lot of music from diff. countries and i am VIBING. (Bonus: learning languages also makes me happy bc i just find languages rly cool!!!! i was very proud of myself last night for reading an article (granted on buzzfeed) in german last night and only having to look up like 4 or 5 words, despite not looking at the language in six years, but i studied it really intensely in hs (like beyond regular public school work lol) , i'm pretty proud of myself for that! But my main focuses have been Mandarin, Spanish, Ukrainian and Swedish. I might pick up German on the side just to refresh. I also want to learn Icelandic. And I am learning the constructed language Toki Pona for fun - i recommend toki pona to everyone sfjkdfjg)

#ask game #ask #anon #sorry for the rants anon

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mostlysignssomeportents · 4 years

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Fincen (they fucking knew all along)

The Fincen leaks are the latest finance corruption megaleak, following Paradise Papers (2017), PanamaP apers (2016), Swiss Leaks (2015), Lux Leaks (2014). It's a trove of 2100 "Suspicious Activity Reports" (SARs) from the US Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network.

The reporting on the leaks was shared among multiple journalism orgs, including BBC Panorama, Buzzfeed, and more than 100 other orgs in 88 countries, coordinated by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, whose master report is a key to the whole leak:

https://www.icij.org/investigations/fincen-files/global-banks-defy-u-s-crackdowns-by-serving-oligarchs-criminals-and-terrorists/

Here's the nut: the world's largest banks knowingly laundered billions of dollars for the worst criminals, looters and oligarchs in the world. The financial regulators knew they were doing it.

Many had paid billions in fines and avoided criminal prosecutions for earlier misdeeds and continued to facilitate the flows of vast, illicit fortunes on behalf of brutal criminals and dictators, including many who were under sanction.

The US government knew. The banks knew. Neither acted to stop it. The banks made a fortune for their trouble. I mean, we could just end it there, but the details matter.

Start with the largest bank in the US: Jpmorganchase. Jpmorgan knowingly laundered money for looters from Venezuela and Ukraine and helped launder the billions stolen from Malaysia through the 1MDB scam - $1B of that money passed through JPM's fingers, and they knew it was dirty.

They also laundered millions for Paul Manafort - AFTER he'd been forced to resign over money-laundering accusations. The volume of criminal money flowing through JPM INCREASED every year, even as it paid fines in 2011, 2013 and 2014 for money laundering.

JPM told the ICIJ that it plays a "leadership role" in "proactive intelligence-led investigations" and developing "innovative techniques to help combat financial crime."

(ok looter)

Other banks engaged in criminal money-laundering: HSBC, Standard Chartered, Deutsche Bank and Bank of NY Mellon.

The leaks only represent 0.02% of SARS, and document $2 TRILLION in dirty transactions between 1999-2017, with $1.3 TRILLION at Deutschebank alone.

Treasury stonewalled ICIJ, but announced that it was seeking public comment "on ways to improve the US's anti-money laundering system."

The reporting not only encompasses the leaked SARs: the media orgs on the job analyzed 17,600 other docs: leaks, court files, FOIA docs, and interviews with experts.

Here's what the banks did: "blindly moving cash through accounts for people they can’t identify, failing to report transactions with all the hallmarks of money laundering until years after the fact, doing business with clients enmeshed in frauds and corruption scandals."

This activity took place while banks like HSBC were ALREADY ON PROBATION for other money-laundering crimes. HSBC says it is now "a much safer institution."

Much of the $2T flowed through secrecy jurisdictions - not just the BVI, but also the City of London, Wyoming/Nevada/Delaware, Cyprus, HK, the UAE, Switzerland and Russia - places where companies can have anonymous owners and beneficiaries.

ICIJ traces some of this cash to terrorist orgs, sanctioned individuals in Iran and the former USSR, etc.

JPM laundered more than $1b for a mysterious company called ABSI Enterprises, believed to be a front for Russian mafia boss-of-bosses Semion Mogilevich.

MORE THAN $1B!

The Treasury deputizes banks themselves to fight laundering, giving the largest banks responsibility to catch criminals. Instead, these banks used their privileged position to exact fees from crooks in exchange for keeping schtum!

Meanwhile, the ACTUAL compliance officers at the big banks are marginalized and underfunded: "overworked, under-resourced staffers, who typically work in back offices far from headquarters and have little clout within their organizations."

"Documents in the FinCEN Files show compliance workers at major banks often resort to basic Google searches to try to learn who’s behind transfers involving hundreds of millions of dollars."

Which means that banks can only figure out if they're laundering money for a monster if that person is already in the news - and usually, that happens AFTER the money has winged its way to some other far-off destination.

Meanwhile, the money people AT THE BANK go to great lengths to keep their own compliance people from busting them, like Standard Chartered, where bankers used aliases so payment from sanctioned criminals could go through.

Some of the dodges used to disguise the true owners of money laundries are hilariously amateurish, and the only thing worse is how long they were overlooked by the regulators who were supposed to be preventing them.

For example, the UK's Companies House - the corporate regulator - allowed a couple of anonymous companies in the British Virgin Islands to be listed as the owners of HUNDREDS of UK companies, all housed in a vacant former nail bar in Wales.

One of these companies, Novirex, funneled gigantic sums via obviously fraudulent payments, such as $400k for "knee boots" from Hong Kong, millions in all, while booking $2500/yr in revues, with the help of Jpmorganchase.

JPM had a financial partnership with the Latvian bank ABLV, a laundry for Russian criminals, whose own compliance department rated 90 PERCENT of its customers as "high risk." They moved billions, with the help of JPM.

This was on Jamie Dimon's watch, when the division that did these dirty deals ballooned to $4.13b/year. Novirex was the laundry that Paul Manfort used to do his own financial crimes. JPM laundered at least $230m for them.

Then there's HSBC, long one of the world's most unapologetic criminal banks. The leaks reveal HSBC's before/during/after the fact involvement in the World Capital Market Ponzi scheme, which bilked poor people from the world's poorest places out of $80m.

While WCM was under investigation in THREE countries, while HSBC was STILL ON PROBATION for laundering money for the mass-murdering Mexican narco cartels, it kept WCM's account active and allowed $7m to be emptied out of it.

Just part of $900m in shell-company-linked anonymous transactions HSBC cleared for the world's crime-lords and dictators.

Indeed, all 5 of the worst culprits in the leaks had taken "deferred prosecution deals" - probation for earlier crimes, which they continued to commit.

Like Bank of NY Mellon, which laundered $1.3b for Putin ally and mafioso Oleg Deripaska. Or Deutsche Bank, which moved $11b for Deripaska.

And all five banks laundered money for Ukrainian oligarch/wanted criminal Dmytro Firtash - while telling Treasury that they were cracking down on financial crime. JPM laundered $2b for Firtash.

The leaks reveal what we've known all along: a fine is a price. The banks were fined billions. They made hundreds of billions, and laundered trillions. Fine 'em billions more, and they'll just absorb it as the cost of doing business.

The stiffest penalty ever paid by a bank - $8.9b to France's BNP Paribas, a criminal conviction, 13 staffers forced out - resulted in its share price going UP, because the deal allowed to to resume US dollar trading after one year.

Deutsche Bank paid $258m in fines for violating sanctions, announced it had cleaned house, and (the leaks reveal) ONE MONTH LATER started plans to launder money for Ukrainian oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky - $240m in all.

Deutsche Bank now says it had "past weaknesses," has "learnt from our mistakes" "systematically tackled" the issues and "we're a different bank now."

Who the fuck believes this bullshit?

The US Treasury's financial crimes enforcers, for one.

These companies shouldn't get deferred convictions. The individuals who perpetrated these crimes, and the executives who signed off on them, should face criminal persecution.

They should forfeit all their assets. The banks should be broken up - and broken up again, and again and again - until they are small enough that no one can claim the organization was too big to effectively police.

This is not the first, or second, or third, or fourth set of finance leaks that reveals that the "finance industry" is a literal, non-metaphorical, non-hyperbolic global crime syndicate.

But it is the first set of leaks that details just how well that fact is understood by government financial regulators, and exactly how unbelievably bad they are at their jobs.

I say "unbelievable" because only an idiot would believe that anyone is this bad at their job. "Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it's enemy action." This isn't incompetence.

It's complicity.

#pluralistic

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mathewingram · 6 years

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There's no longer any debate over whether Facebook is a media entity

Note: This is something I originally published on the New Gatekeepers blog at the Columbia Journalism Review, where I’m the chief digital writer

Ever since the furor over Russian trolls and fake news triggered a congressional hearing, Facebook has talked about its plans to curb misinformation by using its News Feed algorithm to rank high-quality news sources based on trust, etc. But the company is also taking an even more significant step into the editorial side of the news business, it confirmed on Wednesday, and one that cements its status as a media entity rather than just a distribution platform: It is paying a select group of news organizations like CNN and Fox News to create news shows specifically for its Watch feature. As Variety described it:

The initial shows, fully funded by Facebook, come from seven partners: TV news orgs ABC News, CNN, Fox News Channel, and Univision; local news publisher Advance Local; and digital media companies ATTN: and Mic. They’re slated to roll out on Facebook Watch this summer. The mix includes live breaking news, daily news briefings, and weekly, longer-form series. The shows will be available in an exclusive window on Facebook Watch.

The fact that Facebook was working on rolling out a series of such media partnerships is not new. It was reported by the Wall Street Journal last month, and Campbell Brown also discussed the idea with CJR in a recent interview, since she is the architect of the program. In that same interview, Brown addressed one of the main criticisms of Facebook’s attempts to rank news on the basis of quality, which is that doing so inevitably means the giant social network has to pick winners, and that doing so could tilt the landscape. Those ways may serve Facebook’s needs, but will they serve the needs of society or journalism? That remains to be seen.

In the case of the Watch partnerships, Facebook is even more explicitly choosing winners: It is paying specific news outlets money (the exact amount is unknown) in return for producing specific kinds of video news programming that will presumably be heavily favored by the Facebook ranking algorithm. Anyone who has been creating news-related video for Facebook is instantly at a disadvantage. That’s not to say the partners Facebook has chosen aren’t worthy, only that by choosing them the social network has put its thumb on the scale of what counts as quality news on the platform.

The other risk of this new venture is a more pragmatic one, and that is the risk that Facebook will one day change its mind about what it wants to focus on, and anyone who bought into the Watch vision of longer-form news content will be left twisting in the wind. As Brown acknowledged in her CJR interview and former News Feed head Adam Mosseri also admitted at a recent CJR event (a discussion that can also be heard on the CJR podcast), Facebook has done this in the past with video, when it was promoting Facebook Live.

This is going to be a spectacular failure but at least outlets are getting some money from Facebook. https://t.co/P7aivXqk4t

— Danny Gold (@DGisSERIOUS) June 6, 2018

In a similar way to its current video initiative, the company paid a range of media outlets including BuzzFeed and The New York Times a total of $50 million to produce short-form video for Facebook Live, and then left many of them hanging when its strategy changed. “We need to be more transparent about how we do that kind of thing and get better at setting expectations,” Mosseri said during his interview with The Information’s Jessica Lessin at the CJR event in San Francisco.

Obviously, paying media outlets is on one level a good thing, since many of them are facing declines in advertising revenue (thanks in part to Facebook) and are looking for alternative ways to fund their journalism. But at the same time, as several critics mentioned in a recent CJR story, that money arguably distorts the production of journalism in a variety of ways, since to some extent it forces media organizations to cater to Facebook’s definition of what the news should look like. Whoever pays the piper calls the tune, as the old saying goes. And the long-term impact of that is anyone’s guess.

There’s no longer any debate over whether Facebook is a media entity was originally published on mathewingram.com/work

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