If you want to know why the Wall Street elite and the bankers who robbed us blind are laughing all the way to their mansions, it's because the joke is on YOU. On every American. Because after they robbed the country, and destroyed millions of jobs and trillions of dollars in value, YOU get to pick a nice part of the tab.
To recap: none of the Wall Street/bank executives have gone to jail. All the limp Justice Department and the SEC have been able to do is slap Goldman Sachs on the wrist with a puny fine of $550 million, give a little pinch on the cheek to JPMorgan Chase with a pathetic $153 million fine, put the cost of the $16 billion settlement deal on Bank of America shareholders and customers (because those are the people who will pay most of the cost), and, just the other day, let Standard & Poor's skate away paying $1.37 billion despite a culture of deceiving and misleading investors.
And, to hammer this point again, not a single high executive running those operations has gone to jail or lost a job.
But, this is where it gets better. YOU GET TO PAY PART OF THE FINE. It's nicely tax deductible:
The rating agency Standard & Poor’s, which was accused of helping to cause the financial crisis with its inflated assessments of mortgage investments, is eligible to deduct half of the $1.37 billion settlement with state and federal prosecutors it agreed to this week, according to the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, a consumer-oriented nonprofit. The result would be a roughly $245 million reduction in its tax bill, the research group calculated.
Which payments are deductible and which are not is often a mystery to the public. The overwhelming majority of cases, whether with a government agency or private individuals, are settled, enabling companies to hide just how much of the agreement’s sticker price is eligible for a write-off.
And:
Many of the banks accused of shady mortgage deals and foreclosures that contributed to the financial crisis were able to deduct part of their multibillion-dollar settlements. The same day in 2013 that JPMorgan Chase announced a $13 billion deal with the Justice Department, for example, the bank’s chief financial officer emphasized that $7 billion of the total would be deductible. And $11.63 billion of Bank of America’s record $16.65 billion settlement in August is eligible for a tax break, experts said.[emphasis added]
You pay for this. Because the taxes these thieves claim as deductible from the total amount of the fine is money the Treasury never sees or, in the case of corporations that get refunds, has to pay out.
Someone has to pay for that.
YOU.
In either tax money that goes out the back door to fill the coffers of the thieves.
Or, in reduced services--cuts to Medicare, for example--that are called for by the Serious People who bang the drum about the non-existent deficit crisis...some of the same people who, by the way, made their money in the very financial system that robbed us (Robert Rubin at Citibank comes to mind).
Ain't American capitalism great?