HSBC, too big to jail, is the new poster child for US two-tiered justice system
DOJ officials unblinkingly insist that the banking giant is too powerful and important to subject to the rule of law
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/12/hsbc-prosecution-fine-money-laundering
HSBC was given a ‘record’ fine for ‘punishment’ for their wrongdoing. Of course, every penny of that came from _stock holders_, so I am not clear how that is actually punishing any of the criminals in the organization. Sure, some executives have had to ‘defer’ some of their bonuses and authorities are working to ‘claw back’ past bonuses (it is not clear to me that that is even legal, so I am quite sure that nothing will come of it and it is only announced for show), but again, how is that any sort of punishment? People see the figure of “$1.9 billion dollars” and think it is a huge number, but didn’t we _just_ have a lottery that was over a half a billion? Of course, as is clear to me (and I expect most of my reader(s)), this fine is all a sham promulgated by our government to create the illusion that it is doing its job. The reality is that it is specifically NOT doing its job because in an oligarchy only the common people are subject to law and justice…
That’s not merely a dark day for the rule of law. It’s a wholesale repudiation of it. The US government is expressly saying that banking giants reside outside of – above – the rule of law, that they will not be punished when they get caught red-handed committing criminal offenses for which ordinary people are imprisoned for decades. Aside from the grotesque injustice, the signal it sends is as clear as it is destructive: you are free to commit whatever crimes you want without fear of prosecution. And obviously, if the US government would not prosecute these banks on the ground that they’re too big and important, it would – yet again, or rather still – never let them fail.
Is this not the definition of a police state?
And, of course, these HSBC-protectors in the Obama DOJ are the same officials responsible for maintaining and expanding what NYT Editorial Page editor Andrew Rosenthal has accurately described as “essentially a separate justice system for Muslims,” one in which “the principle of due process is twisted and selectively applied, if it is applied at all.” What has been created is not so much a “two-tiered justice system” as a multi-tiered one, entirely dependent on the identity of the alleged offender rather than the crimes of which they are accused.
Based on my recollection of history we had some of these same problems after the crash in the ’20s and after a several year stutter start some action was finally taken. Perhaps we will get a new Congress and administration in 4 years that will bring the bright light of justice to these activities. I don’t have much hope for that, though.
As the Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz warned in 2010, exempting the largest banks from criminal prosecution has meant that lawlessness and “venality” is now “at a higher level” in the US even than that which prevailed in the pervasively corrupt and lawless privatizing era in Russia
I am convinced that things will have to get a lot worse before they have any chance of getting better.
Just last weekend I was in a discussion with some close friends that drove home the United States’ third-world status. Not only do we have the typical corrupt third-world politics (see above), but our infrastructure is also third-world. We can’t even keep our roads maintained! Naturally, anything underground is out-of-site, hence out-of-mind, so when it starts to fail (our water system primarily; fortunately we as a nation have been too cheap to put our electrical grid underground) it will fail big time. Bridges, of course, are in serious disrepair and we can expect a lot more of these mysterious collapses.
I wonder, can things get better without getting incredibly bad?
