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Comment by imnotlost | Hacker News Reader

Or you can just be a known drug lord, launder billions of USD through a respected international bank, no one goes to jail, small fine, and they're probably still laundering 10 years later and no one cares. No one is anonymous. They're probably all using SMS and corporate email.

Sell a little bit of drugs through the silk road and you'll get royally f-ed! Sell all the opioids in the world through a public pharma corp and you can keep enjoying your jet-set life and yacht.

The allegedly smartest people in the world are focusing on the dumbest problems while being reamed by the frat-boys that went to Wall Street and Politics, guns and drugs. LULZ.

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Your comment echoes today's Credit Suisse news:

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/feb/20/credit-suisse-s...

“The pretext of protecting financial privacy is merely a fig leaf covering the shameful role of Swiss banks as collaborators of tax evaders.”

And it's more than tax evasion, "include a human trafficker in the Philippines, a Hong Kong stock exchange boss jailed for bribery, a billionaire who ordered the murder of his Lebanese pop star girlfriend and executives who looted Venezuela’s state oil company, as well as corrupt politicians from Egypt to Ukraine".

>Or you can just be a known drug lord, launder billions of USD through a respected international bank, no one goes to jail, small fine,

Are you referring to some specific drug lord? Who?

Pfizer?

That's not the normal definition of "drug lord". Also, was Pfizer involved in money laundering?

https://www.investopedia.com/stock-analysis/2013/investing-n...

My point being, this went on for a long time before they got "busted" and the bank people knew who they were dealing with.

They didn't have to use crypto or tor or whatever to stay anonymous. They just used cash, everyone knew each other. They probably had dinners with coke and champagne. And when they did get "busted", somehow no one goes to prison, there's a small fine (relatively speaking), and everyone walks.

My guess is they're all still in business doing the same thing. The bankers, the regulators, the cartel people...

Some of the actual drug lords did get arrested:

>Since 2009, the investigation has resulted in the arrest, extradition, and conviction of numerous individuals illegally using HSBC Mexico accounts in furtherance of BMPE activity.

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/hsbc-holdings-plc-and-hsbc-ba...

I've never seen any evidence that that's how it went. All the reporting is long on rhetoric and short on evidence; the only things that actually, provably happened is that HSBC used their judgement in a way that the law said they were supposed to use their judgement, and did not automatically assume the most suspicious possible interpretation of payment flow that was happening.

Having worked in banks, you absolutely don't need to assume moustache-twirling villains to explain what happened; ordinary people doing the best they could to help out small businesses and families doing remittances would have had exactly the same outcome. Having spent a couple of months getting access to my own savings after moving overseas, the AML rules are plenty rigid enough already. Bankers are never going to be 100% perfect judges of whether someone is selling drugs and we shouldn't expect them to be.

Indeed, being powerful (influential) can mitigate some factors. But then you got other factors that the common man doesn't have.

Sure, big pharma over does it sometimes but remember that people truly need these drugs sometimes and they are prescribed by well intentioned doctors.

I don't think you can compare a legitimate business publishing public accounting figures, operating within the law, subject to policy by elected officials with the illicit drug trade who's supply chains operate in the dark. These supply chains are probably responsible for thousands of deaths, human trafficking, and unfathomable suffering whose actors you have no possible way of mitigating their actions.

I grow weary of hearing this recurring argument that the relatively minor side effects of a free market being compared to pure evil.

Re. big pharma, imagine how weary the roughly 400k families of people who dies feel.

"Three major drug distributors and the pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson have agreed to a $26 billion settlement with states to resolve thousands of lawsuits over the country's opioid crisis, officials announced Wednesday."

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/4-companies-near-26-bil...

None of these executives were anonymous or ever had to be. They made a ton of money doing bad things, they'll keep most of the money and they'll never go to prison.

They way you deal with this is, obviously in my mind, through the rule of law and a robust functioning society that regulates commerce. Not wild-west free market.

In that vein you have to also prosecute alcohol distilleries, tobacco companies, fast food companies, casinos, lotto companies, ice cream makers, and any other company that makes something that people struggle to control their own consumption. And we do, that's why we have government. At least you have a recourse when these companies operate within the law.

Good Lord, we'll have to sacrifice Google, Facebook and Microsoft (and probably the two As) to the Gods, I'm fairly sure Facebook is certainly worse than fast food companies.

There are some important differences. Alcohol distilleries didn't label/market their products as beneficial ailments intended to cure diseases. Pharmaceutical companies should be bound, at least morally, by the same hippocratic oath that govern the medical profession. Clearly they are not.

>Alcohol distilleries didn't label/market their products as beneficial ailments intended to cure diseases.

But they did? They just did it 100+ years ago. Does that matter?

Of course it doesn’t. We’re talking about who is doing what today.

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