S4 E7 — And What’s Up with the Justice Department?

I can’t say it looks that way — unless justice comes so delayed. With Putin’s war in Ukraine sucking up all of the headlines and hours upon hours of on the streaming coverage on the ground, the congressional committee investigating The January 6th Insurrection seems to be relegated to a back burner status. And what’s up with the Justice Department?

“The Tau of Steves: What You Don’t Know Could Fill a Book”

“5” Steve Zahn, 51: “There will be evidence that, contrary to popular belief, life may really be fair after all. Justice comes in many forms, including poetic or delayed. Things turn out the best way possible.” Scorpio

Hi and welcome to Saturday’s 7th Episode in Season 4 of “Our Disruptively Resilient Year” on this 12th day of March in the spring of 2022.

We concluded the three-year examination of how bits of wisdom changed — during the “normal” pre-pandemic year compared to the pandemic year, and more recently to the paradoxically normal year.

Season Four continues now within domestic and global chaos.

Previously in Season Four, The Disruptively Resilient Year

S4 E6 —Hey Listen Up. Is This What You Need to Succeed?; S4 E5 — New Season of Domestic and Global Chaos; S4 E4 —Is This Our Disruptively Resilient Year?

Related from Season Three, the Paradoxically Normal Year

S3 E7 — Who Can Resist Ricky Gervais Calls in this Paradoxically Normal Year?; S3 E6 — What’s the Half Life of Wisdom?; S3 E5 — Another Year Another Baby, Could Have Been Stevie like Stevie Nicks, but Noooooo!; S3 E4 — What a Fool Believes She Sees

Related from Season Two, the Pandemic Year

S2 E7 — Smart Moves and Shifting Opportunities; S2 E6 — No We Don’t Share Your Precious Little Frickin’ Data; S2 E5 — Second Season Sneak Preview: My Pandemic Year’s Natural Experiment; S2 E4 — Sneak Preview: Day 4 of My Pandemic Year’s Natural Experiment

Related from Season One, the Normal Year

S1 E7 — Day 7 of My 1-Year Experiment; S1 E6 — Day 6 of My 1-Year Experiment; S1 E5 — Day 5 of My 1-Year Experiment; S1 E4 — Day 4 of My 1-Year Experiment

Context

David Enrich begins his book with a suicide in “Deutsche Bank Dark Towers: Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump, and an Epic Trail of Destruction” and then meticulously details its Russian money laundering operations

- Deutsche’s Russian business surged after revenues had fallen 50% due to the 2008 financial crisis.
- Putin’s Russia, poured in to Deutsche from deals it did with VTB Bank, linked to the Kremlin’s intelligence apparatus.

Deutsche positioned itself as a crucial cog in “The Laundromat” by doing what couldn’t be done — processing cross-border transactions for banks that were too small and didn’t have offices outside their home countries.

By 2014, tens of billions cycle through the Laundromat, according to Enrich.

Looking for desperately needed profits Tim Wiswell, Enrich identified, cooked up a new scheme to help Russians secretly whisk their money out of the country. Deutsche engaged in a practice known as Mirror Trades.

A Russian customer paying in rubles at a Russian brokerage firm buys shares of a blue-chip stock offered through Deutsche’s Moscow office.

“That same brokerage—using a legal entity like Cyprus—would sell the same quantity back to Deutsche’s London arm, which would pay the Russian brokerage in dollars.”

The trades canceled each other out, but now Russian currency was in dollars rather than rubles.

The next step was to transfer to a bank account in a Western democracy in the original Russian customer’s name.

Enrich said, “… more than $10 billion, would flow from Moscow to London, through DBTCA in New York, converted into dollars and transferred back to Cyprus’s customers who were Putin’s relatives and close friends.”

To add another layer of opaqueness to these transactions, Deutsche computer systems in Moscow and London and New York didn’t communicate with each other at all.

Evidence

Holiday Theme for The Day:

…all the reason you really need. Love, art, exploration and many other endeavors can seem, on their face, to be pointless. There is no logical purpose for embarking, only a magnetic pull where the logic should be. Maybe you only do the thing because you can’t not do it.

“5” Steve Zahn, 51: “There will be evidence that, contrary to popular belief, life may really be fair after all. Justice comes in many forms, including poetic or delayed. Things turn out the best way possible.” Scorpio

I can’t say it looks that way — unless justice comes so delayed. With Putin’s war in Ukraine sucking all of the headlines and hours upon hours of on the ground streaming coverage, the congressional committee investigating the January 6th insurrection seems to be taking a back burner status. And what’s up with the Justice Department?

Random ones that make me want change my sign.

Today’s Holiday Birthday:

Success is not an award, a number on a chart or an amount in the bank. Success is a feeling, and one you’ll cultivate and recreate many times over. You’ll revel in certain aspects of your work and tend to details that elevate you to excellence. A study will thrill you and you’ll travel to pursue deeper knowledge.

“3” Steve McQueen (1930 – 1980): “Uninspiring work makes you lethargic. Perhaps it has to be done, but does it have to be done by you? Once you get into an interesting project, it will be like you’re plugged into a power plant.” Aries

So, is this another delay like justice being served? So far today I’m not feeling the power plant juice.

“4” Steve Smith, 30, Stevie Nicks, 72: “People everywhere are engaged in their own internal battles. Sometimes these conflicts go undetected to even their nearest and dearest. Whether you are on the giving or receiving side of help, things are improving.” Gemini

Why is it that we all know this, but forget about it. Introverts seem to be at the top of his list with their internal battles. But, obviously it ain’t easy to detect the conflicts lying beneath the surface when just the iceberg tip is what we see.

“5” Steve Carell, 57; Steve Martin, 74; Steve Wozniak, 69: “There’s an ace up your sleeve and you’re about to play it. Once you do, the game is yours. Apply your winnings to improving your favorite thing. It will be a thrill to watch something go from good to fabulous.” Leo

It may be too early to publicize my stealth project — other than to say it’s a work in progress known simply as Phase Two. Stay tuned.

What’s Going On …

Literally Bottled and Set Adrift from KnowWhere Atoll

- @KnowLabs suite of 36 digital magazines according to my analytics, grew from 12044 this week to 12148 organically grown followers.
- Orange County Beach Towns 152 viewers stopped by the week before.

Foresight

Quality-of-Life

Long-Form

- “The Last Leonardo: The Secret Lives of the World’s Most Expensive Painting” by Ben Lewis. Review: “In 2017, Leonardo da Vinci’s small oil painting the Salvator Mundi was sold at auction. In the words of its discoverer, the image of Christ as savior of the world is “the rarest thing on the planet.” Its $450 million sale price also makes it the world’s most expensive painting. For two centuries, art dealers had searched in vain for the Holy Grail of art history: a portrait of Christ as the Salvator Mundi by Leonardo da Vinci. Many similar paintings of greatly varying quality had been executed by Leonardo’s assistants in the early sixteenth century. But where was the original by the master himself? In November 2017, Christie’s auction house announced they had it. But did they?”
- “Here, Right Matters: An American Story” by Alexander Vindman. “We’d long been confused by the president’s policy of accommodation and appeasement of Russia, the United States’ most pressing major adversary. Russia’s president Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, seizing the Crimean Peninsula, attacking its industrial heartland, the Donbass, from the capital, Kyiv. By 2019, little had changed, Russian military and security forces and their proxy separatists continued to occupy the Donbass. The biggest change was to Ukraine’s importance as a bulwark against Russian aggression weeks earlier, the White House had abruptly put a hold on nearly four hundred million dollars.”

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Inspired by Holiday Mathis – Creators Syndicate

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