Obama Administration Cuts A Deal With HSBC

Dear Mr. President,

So the criminal elites at HSBC who laundered billions of dollars for drug cartels and terrorist organizations are off the hook—no criminal indictments against either the bank or the bauksters who run it because it might damage the bank’s reputation and cause instability in the financial markets. Barclay’s Bank, another criminal enterprise, is guilty of manipulating global interest rates but they too, get off without a criminal charge because it might de-stabilize the financial markets. Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan, all repeat offenders of fraud and financial crimes against the public also fined but no criminal indictments. A few years ago we were told that these banks were too big to fail and the U.S. government, using our tax dollars, had to bail them out. Now, not only are they too big to fail, they’re too big to indict. Reading about the HSBC case, I began to suspect that the government has additional motives for not prosecuting the banks; these criminal enterprises have become a new revenue stream! Without the political hassle of raising taxes, the Treasury and Injustice Departments cut deals with these crooks to let them off the hook if they cough up some of their ill-gotten gains. I know it’s a bit far-fetched, but still, when you start adding it up, it’s a pretty impressive total. Here’s a partial list of fines the government has collected in 2012: HSBC, $1.9 billion; Standard Chartered, $667 million; the five big mortgage fraudsters, $25 billion; Barclay’s, $479 million; and UBS has put aside $610 million in expected fines. Several articles I read, point out that the banks now consider these fines little more than the cost of doing business. Happy days are here again! The government, in effect, has sanctioned banks to do whatever they want to so long as Treasury gets a cut. I know your spinmeisters wouldn’t put it that way, but from out here on the hustings, that’s the way it looks, Mr. President. You might as well do away with all those regulatory bodies that the Republicans have tried to eliminate for years, or maybe just change their mission statement to determine which laws have been broken lately by which banks and send a bill to the banks. Better yet, why not just have a bagman assigned to each bank and do away with the charade of investigations and hearings and the façade of justice. Of course, in the end, it’s We the People who pay for this, but then, what do you care so long as your Wall Street friends play ball?