LIBOR scam: The banks are cheating you!

Big brother is watching you – but we are also watching them. At the end of each work week, we bring you Freedom Friday.

Americans take note – if you have a foreign bank account make sure you file the right forms. The government doesn’t care if you are 38 or 83, you can face serious jail time. File Your FBAR’s or you may find yourself in a position like Jacques Wajsfelner of Weston, Massachusetts.

Because of his failure to disclose his foreign bank account, Wajsfelner is now looking at FIVE YEARS behind bars in a Day-Glo orange jumpsuit. Oh, one more thing– Wajsfelner is 83 years old. He was born in Germany during the global depression and rise of Adolf Hitler. The Wajsfelner family soon fled the Nazi regime and made its way to the United States…

FYI – FBAR stands for Foreign Bank Account Reporting. This is form 90-22.1 that you must submit to the treasury dept. (not the IRS) each year if you have foreign accounts that exceed $10,000 in a given year. This is calculated cumulative across all accounts, so $6000 in one foreign account and $5000 in another account means you have to report.

Response from Dan Mitchell of International Liberty

Please note that Mr. Wajsfelner didn’t get convicted of not paying tax. He got convicted for the utterly trivial and victimless “crime” of not reporting a foreign bank account.

So the government is sending a completely harmless old man to jail for something that shouldn’t be illegal (and if we had a flat tax, there would be no double taxation of saving and investment, so it wouldn’t matter for tax purposes if your bank account was in Georgetown, Kentucky, or Georgetown, Cayman Islands).

For the record, having a foreign account in the Cayman Islands is NOT illegal; this is an offshore myth. Google goes offshore, and you too can easily set up offshore with a corporate bank account in Hong Kong and a BVI company.

Let’s see how the jail time of our 83-year-old grandpa stacks up to convicted pedophiles and other criminals who actually deserve to be punished.

…Eric Higgins of Port Huron, Michigan, was recently busted for major possession of child pornography and engaging in sexually explicit conversations with juveniles online was given 20 months. Mr. Higgins was a US Customs & Border Patrol agent.

Or Ricardo Cordero, another US Customs & Border Patrol officer was given 27-months for personally smuggling 30 Mexican nationals into the United States, and assisting another smuggler to bring 15 Mexican nationals across the border. This genius even had the smuggler testify as a character witness at his divorce proceeding!

Jon Corzine, former CEO of Goldman Sachs and member of the political elite, who presided over one of the largest plunders in the financial system ever seen during the recent MF Global collapse. He walks the streets freely to this day. Zero Hedge.

What other heinous violations of freedom were in the news this week? Well, it turns out that Bernanke knew about Libor Fixing…

It is a very big deal that Chairman of the Federal Reserve Ben Bernanke and Secretary of the treasury Tim Geithner both knew about libor fraud – and allowed this pilfering of the monetary system to exist for at least four years.

“when the Congressional Financial Services Committee asked the Chairman last month why he never put a stop to the fraud, he replied, “[The Libor rate] is constructed by a private organization in the UK, and so our direct ability to influence that is limited.” Geithner provided a similarly feeble defense.

What’s LIBOR?

You probably should have heard of this scandal by now. It wasn’t covered much in the mainstream news, and The London Interbank Offered Rate might seem like an esoteric financial obscurity, but LIBOR is a tremendously important cog in the machine of the global monetary system.

LIBOR is essentially the rate at which all money is loaned to banks – and this rate has a trickle down effect on virtually all loans and credit such as mortgages. You can correlate that this rate affects almost everything in the economy because LIBOR is the birthplace where credit is created.

Large banks entrusted with the money supply played a rigged game and those at the highest levels of American finance – the Treasury and the Fed – allowed the game to continue.

LIBOR compared to BlackJack

Turns out 3 very large banks (admittedly, more may have done this but remain silent) were fixing these rates in order to profit. They were essentially playing a rigged game, where the odds were not only stacked in their favor – they actually created the odds. It’s like walking into a casino and playing blackjack. Most of the time, the house will win. People accept this, and gambling continues.

In the LIBOR situation, the bankers aren’t content to just win with better odds. They also bet against you behind the scenes AND they stack the deck. It’s like playing a game of blackjack where the casino is the house, but they also have a player at the table who bets against you, they know what cards are coming, and they place bets purposefully where they know the outcome.

Libor was a rigged game on a massive scale, with billions of dollars, that lasted for at least a decade, possibly more.

What’s the fallout? Someone is in prison right? Right?

Surely if you can be jailed for Facebook posts, anyone brazen enough to siphon billions off the global financial marketplace at the highest level must be accountable in some way. Well, not exactly – instead there are some small fines – a fraction of what was stolen. No charges will be filed.

Speaking of being held against your will for Facebook posts, Brandon Raub has been released because a district judge found that he was held against his constitutional rights because he was not arrested (as I had correctly predicted, this was not NDAA).

This week’s sign of the apocalypse:

A British man spotted a lion housecat in the English countryside – and sparked a countywide search for a large feline known more for roaming the African safari than Great Britain.

Nonetheless, when the government learned about a lion housecat lose in the countryside, they threw all resources they had for this pointless witchhunt important operation.

Despite helicopters, infrared cameras, mounted police, and even sharpshooters, the search was a disappointment, and nothing was found.

Had they been searching for bad weather or interbank loan fraud, they might have found what they were looking for…