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Administration Again Won’t Indict in Major Financial Crime, Makes Harding Look As Virtuous As Moses

As you can probably guess, I was apoplectic that once again, regardless of how egregious the criminality, the Obama Administration simply refuses to prosecute major financial crime. The depth of the depravity and corruption of this Administration is beyond outrageous. It is a cancer eating away at the core of civil society. We have become a nation where everyone seeks to emulate the lawless robber barons who can get away with virtually any kind of theft, as long as they do it in a way that does not appear to be thoughtful and organized.

In other words, if you appear to be a stupid, disorganized criminal enterprise, as opposed to one that is diabolical and organized, you can act with impunity, steal as much as you possibly can, with absolutely no fear that you will ever face penalties for your crimes.  What this means is that the criminal masterminds behind the Great Wealth Transfer to the crony plutocracy can get away with murder if they simply set it up to look as though there was no single criminal master plan. How difficult is that.

In enabling these massive criminal ripoffs, Barack Obama makes Warren G.  Harding look like a paragon of moral rectitude.

Mark Gongloff at Huffington Post put it well:

One of the great things about being too big to fail is that you’re also too big to jail, apparently.

So saith the Obama administration, via the New York Times, in its front-page story on Tuesday about HSBC’s settlement with the government over money-laundering charges. Though the British banking giant had to pay a wrist-stinging $1.9 billion, the settlement helped it avoid formal criminal charges. The NYT quotes anonymous government officials who say they were skittish about indicting HSBC because formal charges would amount to a “death penalty” for the bank, potentially roiling the financial system.

This is at least three very specific flavors of bullshit.

For one thing, according to University of Notre Dame law professor Jimmy Gurulé, a former assistant U.S. Attorney General and former Undersecretary for Enforcement for the U.S. Treasury Department, the government could have formally charged Europe’s biggest bank in such a way as to help it avoid death. The bank’s U.S. business may have been disrupted for some time, but the bank could have survived. The punishment that was meted out — taking about half a quarter’s profit — was so far removed from a “death penalty” that it can’t possibly be a deterrent for any other big bank.

And even if the government felt it could not formally charge HSBC, it could easily have charged individuals at the bank without causing financial armageddon.

via Obama Administration Essentially Admits That Some Banks Are Too Big To Jail, Which Is Troubling.

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