Once again, Matt Taibbi out does himself in his latest article at Rolling Stone, posted just a few hours ago at the magazine’s website: “’Gangster Bankers: Too Big to Jail.’ How HSBC hooked up with drug traffickers and terrorists. And got away with it.”
If you have any doubts, whatsoever, that, “the banks run the place” -- and how that statement applies to virtually our entire society and at the most depraved level possible, I might add; with Wall Street’s minions in D.C. being led by none other than their “most valuable player,” DoJ Criminal Division chief Lanny Breuer, over the past four-plus years -- many will no longer question this over-arching truth after reading this article.
How craven are these people? Frankly, I don’t think anyone -- at least those with some semblance of a conscience -- will feel the same about Wall Street and its stranglehold upon our country after reading this. It’s tempting to use the trite phraseology: “Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse…” But, I’ll let readers decide for themselves.
Compared to Taibbi’s highly-publicized takedown of Bank of America, his accounts of the pervasive criminal activities of HSBC, which were further compounded by our completely captured government, makes the folks over at BofA look like a bunch of pikers.
Obviously, myself and others have a lot more to report about our country's ongoing mortgage fraud and coverup story, not the least of which being the travesty that’s now occurring with regard to the recently-concluded Independent Foreclosure Review, and our government’s outright eagerness willingness to encourage these ongoing Wall Street transgressions against Main Street (as it has been reported over the past few days). But, as incredibly pathetic as that story is, it pales in comparison to the actions of BofA's partners in crime over at HSBC, and the subsequent inactions of our own government in “response”…
Gangster Bankers: Too Big to Jail
”How HSBC hooked up with drug traffickers and terrorists. And got away with it.”
By Matt Taibbi
Rolling Stone Magazine
February 14, 2013 8:00 AM ET
(February 28th, 2013 edition)
The deal was announced quietly, just before the holidays, almost like the government was hoping people were too busy hanging stockings by the fireplace to notice. Flooring politicians, lawyers and investigators all over the world, the U.S. Justice Department granted a total walk to executives of the British-based bank HSBC for the largest drug-and-terrorism money-laundering case ever. Yes, they issued a fine – $1.9 billion, or about five weeks' profit – but they didn't extract so much as one dollar or one day in jail from any individual, despite a decade of stupefying abuses.
People may have outrage fatigue about Wall Street, and more stories about billionaire greedheads getting away with more stealing often cease to amaze. But the HSBC case went miles beyond the usual paper-pushing, keypad-punching¬ sort-of crime, committed by geeks in ties, normally associated¬ with Wall Street. In this case, the bank literally got away with murder – well, aiding and abetting it, anyway…
…In closing, Taibbi quotes Lanny Breuer…
…"In the world today of large institutions, where much of the financial world is based on confidence," he said, "a right resolution is to ensure that counter-parties don't flee an institution, that jobs are not lost, that there's not some world economic event that's disproportionate to the resolution we want."
In other words, Breuer is saying the banks have us by the balls, that the social cost of putting their executives in jail might end up being larger than the cost of letting them get away with, well, anything.
This is bullshit, and exactly the opposite of the truth, but it's what our current government believes. From JonBenet to O.J. to Robert Blake, Americans have long understood that the rich get good lawyers and get off, while the poor suck eggs and do time. But this is something different. This is the government admitting to being afraid to prosecute the very powerful – something it never did even in the heydays of Al Capone or Pablo Escobar, something it didn't do even with Richard Nixon. And when you admit that some people are too important to prosecute, it's just a few short steps to the obvious corollary – that everybody else is unimportant enough to jail.
An arrestable class and an unarrestable class. We always suspected it, now it's admitted. So what do we do?