Bankster Campaign Funding

Dear Mr. President,

Foreign banks—HSBC, Barclay’s, Lloyds, Credit Suisse, Royal Bank of Scotland, Standard Chartered, ING—accused of manipulating global interest rates and/or laundering money through U.S. banks for Iran, Cuba, North Korea, Saudi Arabia and Mexico. (One article called them “pariah nations.” Our neighbor Mexico? Our friend and ally Saudi Arabia?) The laundered money allegedly went to drug cartels and terrorist organizations and over the past 3½ years the U.S. Treasury has collected $2.3 billion in fines for this illegal activity, half going to Treasury and half to “other entities” like the Manhattan D.A.’s office. (If crime pays for the banks, why not for the government?) Not much you can do about foreign Banksters but what about the U.S. Bankster community? JPMorgan Chase’s recent $9 billion loss in a complex derivative scheme; Bank of America’s illegal robo-signed foreclosures; Wells Fargo’s ripoff of investors in an internal fund only the bank profited from, warnings buried deep in fine print that no one understood; Citigroup fined over and over for violations of banking regulations. All of them complicit in the global financial collapse, all of them bailed out by U.S. taxpayer dollars and not one of them missing a beat: bloated salaries, obscene bonuses, increased profits from illegal foreclosures, exorbitant fees, added charges, and now they’ve doubled the interest spread on mortgages (the difference between what money costs and what it’s lent out for) which increases the cost of a typical 30-year $300,000 mortgage by $30,000). What have you done to rein in this criminal activity, Mr. President? Why haven’t you called for a re-institution of Glass-Steagall? Why did you sign toothless legislation, watered down by bank lobbyists and Bankster-friendly members of Congress and the Treasury? Why didn’t you object? How do these guys continue to get away with it? Too big to fail? Or too connected to regulate? Today I read that Goldman Sachs (one of the biggest Banksters of them all) was the biggest contributor to your 2008 campaign: $1,013,091. (But in 2012, Goldman is the biggest contributor to the Romney campaign.) I also read in the same article that McCain, unlike you, kept his pledge to limit corporate campaign contributions and stick to the $126 million limit and government funding. You opted out when all that money started rolling in (a total of $745 million, 80% from large donors, mostly corporations), your first broken campaign promise.