Taibbi: U.S. Gov't. let banksters get away with murder

Here's how Matt Taibbi sums up what British bank HSBC did:

For at least half a decade, the storied British colonial banking power helped to wash hundreds of millions of dollars for drug mobs, including Mexico's Sinaloa drug cartel, suspected in tens of thousands of murders just in the past 10 years – people so totally evil, jokes former New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, that "they make the guys on Wall Street look good." The bank also moved money for organizations linked to Al Qaeda and Hezbollah, and for Russian gangsters; helped countries like Iran, the Sudan and North Korea evade sanctions; and, in between helping murderers and terrorists and rogue states, aided countless common tax cheats in hiding their cash.

"They violated every goddamn law in the book," says Jack Blum, an attorney and former Senate investigator who headed a major bribery investigation against Lockheed in the 1970s that led to the passage of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. "They took every imaginable form of illegal and illicit business."

But here's why the U.S Government didn't prosecute HSBC in its own words:

"Had the U.S. authorities decided to press criminal charges," said Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer at a press conference to announce the settlement, "HSBC would almost certainly have lost its banking license in the U.S., the future of the institution would have been under threat and the entire banking system would have been destabilized."

Again, about a week later, the U.S. Justice Department gave a pass to UBS, which helped to illegally fix the LIBOR rate:

But the Justice Department wasn't finished handing out Christmas goodies. A little over a week later, Breuer was back in front of the press, giving a cushy deal to another huge international firm, the Swiss bank UBS, which had just admitted to a key role in perhaps the biggest antitrust/price-fixing case in history, the so-called LIBOR scandal, a massive interest-rate­rigging conspiracy involving hundreds of trillions ("trillions," with a "t") of dollars in financial products. While two minor players did face charges, Breuer and the Justice Department worried aloud about global stability as they explained why no criminal charges were being filed against the parent company.

"Our goal here," Breuer said, "is not to destroy a major financial institution."

HSBC was given warning after warning. An HSBC employee charged with detecting money-laundering blew the whistle to the FBI. Nothing. This gives the lie, once again, that businesses can be left to regulate themselves. 

And, not to sound like a blood-and-guts conservative, but, without the death penalty (prosecutions, jail time) there is no deterrent. We now have, according to our own government, "an unarrestable class" of banksters who are too socially and economically important to prosecute. To which I say: destroy away!  Off with their heads!  After all, isn't "creative destruction" what free enterprise is all about?  

Gangster Bankers: Too Big to Jail

How HSBC hooked up with drug traffickers and terrorists. And got away with it

By Matt Taibbi

February 14, 2013 | Rolling Stone

URL: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/gangster-bankers-too-big-to-jail-20130214#ixzz2L6TJerww

Obama Admin. confirms that banksters are above the law

The banksters run the world. Even when they break the law, their TBTF banks are too "systemically important" to the financial system to prosecute them, even if it's for something as blatant as laundering drug money:

Nor have any individuals been charged at the five other big European banks that have also managed to dodge formal money-laundering charges in recent years, including British bank Standard Chartered, which entered its own deferred prosecution agreement on Monday. Apparently, all of this constant money laundering was done by robots.

"The message this is sending is if you want to engage in money laundering, make sure you're doing it within the context of your employment at a bank," [Notre Dame law professor Jimmy] Gurulé said in a phone interview. "And don't go small. Do it on a very large scale, and you won't get prosecuted."

By contrast, in 2010, the U.S. Congress took it upon itself to impose a mandatory sentence of 5 years in prison for possessing 28 grams of crack cocaine (that's down from 5 years for 5 grams in the 1980s).  So why isn't laundering billions of dollars of drug money or Iranian embargo money worth a mandatory sentence in prison?  Maybe I sound like an angry black man, but when you make these simple comparisons then you see who writes the laws, and for whom. The game is fixed.

UPDATE (12.14.2012): My man Matt Taibbi also made the obvious banksters-drug users comparison on prosecutions and mandatory sentencing on his Rolling Stone blog a day after I did.

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

By Mark Gongloff

December 11, 2012

URL: http://huff.to/YXKOpr

Bloomberg: U.S. banks financing Mexico's drug cartels

Maybe the Bush Admin. got so distracted fighting terrorists' money laundering after 9/11 that he forgot about drug cartels' money laundering?

According to a Bloomberg report, Wachovia fired -- naturally! -- the head of its anti-money-laundering unit after he blew the whistle on the bank's laundering drug money for Mexican cartels. "If you don't see the correlation between the money laundering by banks and the 22,000 people killed in Mexico, you're missing the point," he said.

No big bank has ever been indicted for violating the Bank Secrecy Act or any other federal law. Large banks are protected from indictments by a variant of the too-big-to-fail theory, as Bloomberg reckoned: indicting a big bank could trigger a mad dash by investors to dump shares and cause panic in financial markets. "There's no capacity to regulate or punish them because they're too big to be threatened with failure."

Anyhoo, this is just one more reason to support increased concentration in the banking sector thanks to bailouts, and to trust free-marketeering bankers to always do the right thing.

The Banksters Laundered Mexican Cartel Drug Money

By Robert Oak

June 29, 2010 | The Economic Populist

URL: http://www.economicpopulist.org/content/banksters-laundered-mexican-cartel-drug-money