Too Big to Jail: Big Banks Can Finance Terrorists and Walk Away Scot-F

[CPCFTW]

Is that stopping the Obama Administration from killing people they want to eliminate today? They are assassinating enemy Mujaheddin labelled as terrorists, accused drug cartel chiefs, and in at least one extra-judicial killing - the drone execution of Anwar al Awlaki's 16 year old son - nothing more than revenge and sheer spite....but for some reason, they can't pull the same trigger on criminal corporate executives who leave a trail of death and destruction because of their actions in pursuit of more money! And I would include former BP CEO Tony Hayward on that list, since his crime caused the immediate deaths of 11 men, and an untold number of people living along the Gulf, or eat fish and shellfish from the Gulf and will die in the next 20 or 30 years, because BP disregarded warnings about the indiscriminate overuse of Corexit - which will sank the leaked oil to get it out of immediate sight, while both the oil residues and the corexit chemical will keep seeping up to the surface and washing ashore for years to come. There are numerous potentials for criminal charges including manslaughter and murder as well, if BP's operations in Azerbaijan are included in the list of charges. Other major oil companies operating in third world countries are guilty of similar crimes that they are never prosecuted for!

Ok...

Who runs the corporate entity? And who profits most greatly from the corporate entity? And if corporations are granted rights of personhood, why aren't corporations subject to the death penalty like flesh and blood persons are in some states? Back before corporations became people, a corporation chartered in the U.S. more than a century ago, would have its charter stripped from the owners, and its assets would be auctioned off to new owners who were under the same obligations as the offending corporation. No surprise that bankers and billionaires of the Guilded Age made changing those rules priority 1.

The people who can run a corporation can change, there's no reason to give the "death penalty" to a 200B corporation that employs over 250k people when you can just force them to hire new management (which they did). That's like nuking a city to kill Bin Laden.

[CPCFTW]

So did any individual at the bank pay a fine? Did any individual at the bank do any jail time?

The bank itself might have paid a fine, but since the people actually involved in breaking the rules didn't pay the fine or face legal consequences, there's no deterrence.

-k

They have no jobs.

I already said I wouldnt mind if the people involved were prosecuted, but are they even in the US?

[WIP]

First heard this story of Stephanie George on a Young Turks youtube video. In brief, she was handed a mandatory life sentence for drug trafficking even though her actions were little more than holding drugs for her drug-pusher boyfriend. This story seems hugely ironic and a testament to unequal justice today, after the lack of criminal charges applied to any executives of HSBC for money-laundering drug money....and laundering money for Al Qaeda and other declared terrorist groups by the State Dept.. Let's not forget that! Justice and democracy are meaningless slogans in a world where the owners of money control governments.

Edited December 17, 2012 by WIP

[bush_cheney2004]

Druggies and dopers go to jail, not banks.

[Wilber]

Hsbc didn't "launder money". They processed transactions and ignored red flags that those transactions may have been for money laundering. To say HSBC laundered money is just plain ignorant. HSBC isn't a drug cartel, they have no proceeds of crime to launder.

If I rob someone for $100 and then ask you to give me five $20s change for it, did you launder money? No. You facilitated me laundering money.

HSBC did the same but they have a regulatory duty to detect and prevent money laundering. They didn't "launder money". What an ignorant comment.

No, what they did was more akin to a fence.

[GostHacked]

http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/ubs-pay-15-billion-rate-rigging-scandal-18012211

Switzerland's UBS AG agreed Wednesday to pay some $1.5 billion in fines to international regulators following a probe into the rigging of a key global interest rate.

In admitting to fraud in its Japanese unit, Switzerland's largest bank became the second bank, after Britain's Barclays PLC, to settle over the rate-rigging scandal. The fine, which will be paid to authorities in the U.S., Britain and Switzerland, also comes just over a week after HSBC PLC agreed to pay nearly $2 billion for alleged money laundering.

The settlement caps a tough year for UBS and the reputation of the global banking industry. As well as being ensnared in the industry-wide investigation into alleged manipulations of the benchmark LIBOR interest rate, short for London interbank offered rate, UBS has seen its reputation suffer in a London trial into a multibillion dollar trading scandal and ongoing tax evasion probes.

I guess maybe this thread should be an international one since there are a lot of banks tied into this whole LIBOR scandal. But I will throw this here anyways.

[WIP]

From the Worth Repeating Dept. Here's Glenn Greewald's take on Too Big To Jail banks and two-tier justice at the Guardian:

The US is the world's largest prison state, imprisoning more of its citizens than any nation on earth, both in

absolute numbers

and

proportionally

. It imprisons people for longer periods of time, more mercilessly, and for more trivial transgressions

than any nation in the west

. This sprawling penal state has been constructed over decades, by both political parties, and it punishes the poor and racial minorities at

overwhelmingly disproportionate rates

.

But not everyone is subjected to that system of penal harshness. It all changes radically when the nation's most powerful actors are caught breaking the law. With few exceptions, they are gifted not merely with leniency, but full-scale immunity from criminal punishment. Thus have the most egregious crimes of the last decade been fully shielded from prosecution when committed by those with the greatest political and economic power: the construction of a worldwide torture regime, spying on Americans' communications without the warrants required by criminal law by government agencies and the telecom industry, an aggressive war launched on false pretenses, and massive, systemic financial fraud in the banking and credit industry that triggered the 2008 financial crisis.

So much for equal justice for all! Now you get the justice you can buy and afford.

[Argus]

The point of the article is that no bank should be big enough that if they were convicted of crimes and collapsed because of it, it would drag the whole banking system under with it.

Simple enough. Break up the banks into smaller institutions.

[Argus]

Maximum penalty is $2M or 5 years imprisonment in Canada, and you think $1.9B is a slap on the wrist.

Yes, given no one went to jail. There were apparently dozens of senior bank officers involved, all of whom were fully aware they were breaking the law. They should all be in prison. Pour encourager les autres

[Argus]

First heard this story of Stephanie George on a Young Turks youtube video. In brief, she was handed a mandatory life sentence for drug trafficking even though her actions were little more than holding drugs for her drug-pusher boyfriend. This story seems hugely ironic and a testament to unequal justice today, after the lack of criminal charges applied to any executives of HSBC for money-laundering drug money....and laundering money for Al Qaeda and other declared terrorist groups by the State Dept..

The socialist guy has a point...

[Argus]

So much for equal justice for all! Now you get the justice you can buy and afford.

This just occurred to you? How many bankers in the savings and loan scandal went to jail? How many in the great mortgage fraud scandal that caused a massive recession and almost bankrupted the world went to jail? How many senior government people went to jail for not watching them as they were supposed to? How many politicians went to jail for being bribed by them to look the other way?

[eyeball]

If anyone should know it would be people who work in a country's tax department.

How come we don't see more of them blowing whistles?

[bush_cheney2004]

How many bankers in the savings and loan scandal went to jail?

Use America's Google to find out...it is free:

After the S&L Crisis, over 1,800 bank insiders were prosecuted between 1990 and 1995, resulting in more than 1,000 officers, directors, and other officials being sent to prison

[WIP]

This just occurred to you? How many bankers in the savings and loan scandal went to jail? How many in the great mortgage fraud scandal that caused a massive recession and almost bankrupted the world went to jail? How many senior government people went to jail for not watching them as they were supposed to? How many politicians went to jail for being bribed by them to look the other way?

I have to admit, I wasn't aware of the scale and scope of the banking/financial fraud until information started slowly trickling out after the 2008 meltdown. And I discovered that Fractional Reserve Banking - which means that banks only have a fraction of the reserves necessary to cover all of their loans, also means that the banks create most of the money in circulation in the first place! A mortgage or loan isn't taken from the bank's, nor anyone else's assets. It's literally created out of thin air as soon as the loan is approved through a debit entry to their own books. And as long as loans...or new money, doesn't exceed reserve requirements, the economy should grow fast enough to absorb the increase in the money supply without creating inflation.....as long as economic expansion is possible. Our present banking system cannot adapt to no-growth or steady state economy, which is going to be an essential very soon, as the environment may already be heading into a spiral of positive feedbacks, and we are hitting hard limits in a number of essential natural resources for manufacturing.

It should have already been obvious that having an economy that depends on constantly making more and more crap and consuming exponential increases in energy is not sustainable on a finite planet. But, to deal with changing to a sustainable economy, we have to recognize that the global banking establishment is every bit as much a threat to the environment and wellbeing of most people as the energy companies are.

Right now, I've just started in to a new book: Web Of Debt, by Ellen Hodgson Brown, which gives an historical perspective on how we ended up becoming serfs to banking and finance. It's a topic I have overlooked for too long, because many people of my father's generation (The Depression) recalled the time when there were strong populist movements that took on the power of the banks; now I have to play catch up for not paying attention to the subject decades ago.

Edited December 21, 2012 by WIP

[Argus]

Right now, I've just started in to a new book: Web Of Debt, by Ellen Hodgson Brown, which gives an historical perspective on how we ended up becoming serfs to banking and finance. It's a topic I have overlooked for too long, because many people of my father's generation (The Depression) recalled the time when there were strong populist movements that took on the power of the banks; now I have to play catch up for not paying attention to the subject decades ago.

It isn't just the banks. You should watch Heist: Who Stole the American Dream sometime.