These lawyers got caught admitting what many already knew
60 Minutes seemed to have reverted to its journalistic acumen on this recent piece by correspondent Steve Kroft. He covered a Global Witness investigation that went undercover in an attempt to see if some high powered lawyers would be willing to launder money from foreign sources.
To prove our point, we went undercover and approached 13 New York law firms. We deliberately posed as someone designed to raise red flags for money laundering.
We said we were advising an African minister who had accumulated millions of dollars, and we wanted to buy a Gulfstream Jet, a brownstone and a yacht. We said we needed to get the money into the U.S. without detection.
To be clear, the meetings with the lawyers were all preliminary. None of the law firms took our investigator on as a client, and no money was moved.
Nonetheless, the results were shocking; all but one of the the lawyers had suggestions on how to move the funds.
The lawyers suggested setting up a myriad of anonymously owned companies in order to accomplish the task of laundering the money into the United States. Senator Carl Levin told Steve Kroft that he attempted to add a simple one line regulation that would identify the actual owner of every company formed in the U.S. This legislation would likely mitigate laundering through shadow corporations. He said he could never get support. The American Bar Association was always against the regulation. When asked why, he implied the attorneys were protecting their income.
Let me digress and hit my soapbox before I continue with the 60 Minutes story. American workers, take note. Lawyers have a union. The American Bar Association is their union. The Chamber of Commerce is the union for business in general. Every professional group has a union. They work together to fight government and everyone else to protect their interests and they succeed. Yet, many Americans, rank and file workers, have allowed their minds to be coerced by the plutocracy to dislike unions or to shun unions. The individual American worker cannot fight for wages, benefits, and political power alone. They must band together. That banding is called a union. Every American worker should be in a well run union. Don’t complain about corruption in the union. Fix it. The same corruption in any union can likely be found int the Chamber of Commerce, American Bar Association, and any other ‘professional union.’ Yet their members will never attempt to disband. Wake up American worker. UNIONIZE everywhere and vote out all politicians that support ‘Right to Work’ for less states. [End of Rant]
Global Witness co-founder Charmian Gooch told Kroft, “I think that the American Bar Association needs to get behind the need for regulation, in the way that European lawyers have had to do exactly the same.” Kroft ended the segment with a rather poignant admission from a couple of the high powered lawyers, Marc Koplik and Albert Grant.
Global Witness may have inadvertently gotten a sassy answer to that question from attorney Marc Koplik in its hidden camera video. Koplik explained to the representative of the phony African minister why he never worried about government subpoenas.
Marc Koplik: They don’t send the lawyers to jail, because we run the country.
Ralph Kayser: Do you run the country?
Marc Koplik: Still do.
Ralph Kayser: I love it.
Marc Koplik: Still do.
Albert Grant: I should say, some lawyers run the country.
Ralph Kayser: So, you are, you are some of them? Two of them?
Marc Koplik: We’re still members of a privileged, privilege class in this country.
Ralph Kayser: So, how, what does it mean you run the country? It means you?
Marc Koplik: We make the laws, and when we do so, we make them in a way that is advantageous to the lawyers.
The TEA Party movement allowed fear and prejudice to prevent them from a clear eyed view of the real enemies of democracy. Are you ready to elect those not beholding to the Wall Street, the corporatocracy, the oligarchy, and the plutocracy? Wake up America.