Juggling Dynamite

As with every nascent sector and new business model, the cannibis space is rife with unknowns and enormous risk for would-be investors.  Even less understood perhaps, is that there are also personal mobility risks that come with owning shares in the companies. Believe it or not.  See For Canadian marijuana investors, coming to the US is a ‘crapshoot’ that can end in a lifetime ban:

“…U.S. Customs and Border Protection, or CBP, overseeing border operations — told Politico in an interview published Thursday that border agents would still seek to permanently ban any foreign visitor who admits to working or investing in the cannabis industry, or admits to have taken the drug, even after recreational marijuana use becomes legal in Canada on Oct. 17.

MarketWatch confirmed that stance in an email exchange with a CBP spokeswoman, who said investors could face a permanent ban from entering the U.S.

“Although medical and recreational marijuana may be legal in some U.S. states and Canada, the sale, possession, production and distribution of marijuana or the facilitation of the aforementioned remain illegal under U.S. federal law,” spokeswoman Stephanie Malin said in a statement.

For more watch this direct video link.

Many salient points in this clip.   Here is a direct video link.

Also see The Bailouts for the Rich are Why America is so Screwed Right Now for some further historical context on how financial crisis and resulting lack of trust in the status quo have repeatedly led to populist uprising and autocratic leaders.

I have repeatedly cited the Obama Administration’s failure to break up big banks and prosecute individual executives for their financial crimes, as being a leadership failure of historic proportions.   Author Michael Lewis reported that he directly asked Obama about his lack of action on these issues when Lewis was interviewing the then President for a Vanity Fair article in 2012.  Lewis said that Obama simply didn’t see the systemic financial corruption before him as a defining issue.

There is no excuse for this epic misjudgment on Obama’s part, but it turns out there is also more to the story.  Apparently, Obama did, in fact, order the break up of at least Citigroup in 2009, but his then-Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner (fresh from heading the New York Fed and on his way to running a hedge fund today), simply ignored the President’s order.  See He was the Resistance inside the Obama White House:

According to credible accounts, Geithner slow-walked a direct presidential order to prepare the breakup of Citigroup, instead undertaking other measures to nurse the insolvent bank back to health. This resistance to accountability for those who perpetrated the crisis, consistent with Geithner’s demonstrated worldview, had catastrophic effects—including the Trump presidency itself.

…Geithner and his bank regulator colleagues made sure a breakup wouldn’t be needed by using Federal Reserve loans, guarantees, and a third bailout to save Citi. Little was asked from the company in return. Geithner had devised “stress tests” to judge how large banks would handle another downturn, and Citi’s initial test estimated that the bank would need $35 billion in additional capital to reassure markets that it was safe. But Citi haggled with regulators, dropping their capital requirement to $5.5 billion, about the same as what the bank paid out in bonuses that year.

Democracy?  Rule of Law?  Accountability? Not in a world ruled by bankers for bankers.  We, the people, must demand resistance to the finance cartel if we are to build a sustainable economy and more stable future.