By Dave Lindorff
It's hard to know whether to laugh or cry as the US goes all out to get its hands on National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden.
We've got the US leaning on Russia to push him out of his sanctuary in their Moscow airport. We've got Obama and the State Department warning countries around the globe not to accept him or allow him to transit their airspace. And now there's smilin' Joe Biden, lecturing Ecuador's President Rafael Correa (threatening would be a better word) about not granting asylum to Snowden, whom the Obama administration and the Republican and Democratic stooges in Congress are branding a "traitor."
Meanwhile, the real traitors who have done so much to destroy America are buying politicians of both parties, using their undue influence to gut any effort at real regulation, all the while earning fat bonuses in their corner offices at megabanks like Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Citi Group, Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase and Wells Fargo. No need to extradite those guys in order to prosecute 'em. They're right here in the USA. All that's lacking is a will to bring charges. But Obama's attorney general, a former corporate lawyer himself, Eric Holder, has already declared that he will not prosecute Wall Street's banks for their frauds in bringing down the US economy.
Even Cyrus Vance Jr., the supposedly tough-on-crime district attorney of Manhattan, whose jurisdiction encompasses the home offices of most of the biggest "too-big-to-fail" banks, won't indict any of them or any of their top executives. It's not that he won't indict a bank, but instead of going after Goldman or Citi or Chase, he has indicted -- ready for this? -- a little independently owned community-based Chinatown bank called Abacus Bank, which has total assets of less than $250 million. That's million. For comparison, the largest US bank, JP Morgan Chase, has total assets of $2.39 trillion dollars, which is almost 10,000 times as big.
And so back to Snowden...
For the rest of this article by DAVE LINDORFF in ThisCantBeHappening!, the new independent three-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative newspaper, please go to www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/1834
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