The JP Morgan-owned cargo ship MSC Gayane, which left port in Peru with stops in Panama & the Bahamas, was boarded on June 17, 2019 by U.S. Justice Department agents after it arrived at the Packer Marine Terminal in Philadelphia. Approximately 20 tons of cocaine were found on board, with an estimated street value of $1.3 billion. The cocaine was hidden in shipping containers carrying legitimate goods, such as wine, Chilean dried nuts, and scrap metal from the United Arab Emirates.
The J.P. Morgan Asset Management vessel Gayane was being operated by the Mediterranean Shipping Company (MSC), which is Switzerland-based, and flew under the flag of Liberia. The Mediterranean Shipping Company is the second-largest container shipping line in the world in terms of vessel capacity, just behind global leader AP Møller Maersk. The Mediterranean Shipping Company is owned by one of the world’s richest couples, Gianluigi & Rafaela Aponte. This is what “respectable” or “high-class” drug dealers look like.
Clearly, both JP Morgan & the Mediterranean Shipping Company are partners in a global drug smuggling cartel. JPM provides finance capital & assets such as container ships, which it leases to the middleman in transportation– the Mediterranean Shipping Company, which blew this drug run– bigtime.
The grand design by JP Morgan & MSC is for the Colombian cocaine kingpins to have a protected route to market for their illicit goods, which they distribute & consume. So certainly this sting hurts JPM interests & their image, which U.S. Attorney William M. McSwain said in a statement was the largest bust & vessel seizure in the agency’s 230-year history.
But this will probably be the limit for U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Twenty tons of coke seized is a HUGE hit for JP Morgan, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they’ve already made a murky deal to get it back. Over $1.3B is a lot of money, which make the world go round.
Here’s more confirmation of that line. The MSC Gayane was released on July 12, after being seized by U.S. Customs and Border Protection on July 4. The message: JP Morgan’s assets are inviolable, no matter what crimes they are involved in. The release of JP Morgan’s drug-running vessel was only reported in the media yesterday, in the Wall Street Journal.
Several crew members on the ship have been charged with knowingly & intentionally conspiring to possess cocaine. Of course, a federal criminal investigation is ongoing, but it appears neither JP Morgan, nor MSC will be a target. The U.S. cocaine market, fueled by the addictions of Washington, Wall Street, Silicon Valley & Hollywood, would never tolerate breaking up these drug cartels, much less attacking one of their own.
Cocaine in the Western hemisphere comes from South America, high up in the Andes, which range from Colombia to Tierra del Fuego. It is at these altitudes in the spine of South America that the coca leaf is grown. Therefore there has to be a secure transportation route near the coca source, to meet the never-ending demand of the U.S. cocaine market.
The 21st century “War on Drugs” has been called Plan Colombia, which was conceived in 1999 as a recycled name for a U.S. foreign aid, military and CIA initiative aimed at partnering with the corrupt Colombian government & drug cartels to eradicate left-wing insurgent & worker groups in Colombia.
As an aside, a slice of the cocaine money is siphoned off by U.S. intelligence services for black ops, untraceable pay-offs, bribes, etc. Plan Colombia’s official objectives to the American public were to end the Colombian civil war by increasing funding & training of its military & para-military forces, while creating an anti-cocaine strategy to eradicate coca cultivation.
Coca eradication is a mainstay U.S. government strategy in the never-ending “War on Drugs,” in place of education & rehabilitation campaigns. This mirrors harsh prison sentencing for illicit drug possession in the US.
With Monsanto, the U.S. military-intelligence complex has a reliable corporate partner in its multibillion-dollar aerial coca eradication campaign, dumping unknown tons of glyphosate throughout the Andes. Glyphosate, known commercially as the weed-killer Roundup, is a broad-spectrum systemic herbicide, crop desiccant & carcinogen.
Herbicidal eradication is being pursued in all the coca-growing regions of the Andes mountain range, where its environmental, health & socioeconomic impact remain mostly unreported in official US news outlets. It should also be noted that coca production for traditional use is legal in Peru, Bolivia & Chile, which makes chemical spraying an act of war against its inhabitants.
This never-ending, US-sponsored violence is the root cause of America’s immigration crisis at the U.S.-Mexican border, where Latin Americans fleeing poverty & violence are being rounded-up by an American Gestapo (ICE), and held in concentration camps like POW’s. For some unexplained reason, this Republican-led march towards fascism is never objected to by leading Democrats, or in the mainstream “liberal” media.
Today, herbicidal-resistant varieties of coca have been developed, either in Monsanto’s labs or by coca farmer ingenuity– or in collaboration. Boliviana negra, also known as supercoca or la millionaria, is a relatively new form of coca that is resistant to glyphosate.
In 1996, Monsanto marketed a patented glyphosate-resistant soybean, making the agribusiness behemoth the most-likely culprit for any glyphosate resistance in coca. So now when a CIA drone sprays glyphosate on a crop of Boliviana negra, it poisons the competitors (everything else) to help the genetically-modified coca grow faster. This gets really messed up when you think it through.
Back to JP Morgan, and their fleet of drug-smuggling vessels, these babies run over $100 million apiece, and the MSC Gayane was built in 2018. JPM & MSC put up $50 million in cash & bond to have it released from US Customs. It should be noted that of the $50M “release fee,” only $10M was in cash, with the rest in bonds.
Forty million dollars is what JP Morgan claims those bonds are worth, and the U.S. government bought it, but it was never proven to the public. Does anyone actually know what those bonds are worth? Does this sound like another scheme to bailout the rich? Until someone proves the worth of those junk bonds, JP Morgan got its $100M ship back for $10M in cash.
That tidy sum bought JPM & MSC a three-days jump before the most conservative of U.S. newspaper’s reported the vessel had been released and was at sea. Just a month earlier the MSC Gayane was busted with 20 tons of cocaine in Philadelphia’s port. and now it was last reported to be steaming across the Atlantic Ocean towards the port of Rotterdam in the Netherlands.
This is where the money goes, and what it is used for. Billionaire capitalists are free to move about at will, with no consequences, while the rest of us are to be restrained & kept to cages. This is a snapshot of the fake economy of the super-rich: wasteful, criminal, and in complete conflict with itself & everything else.
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