"Said a Broker to a
Trader: --Mate your getting bloody good at this Libor game...think of me when
yur on your yacht in Monaco won't yu."
"Said The Man Called
"Trader A:" I need you to keep it as low as possible..if you do that"I'll pay
you, you know, "$50,000, $100,000 dollars.. whatever you want"I'm a man of my word."
Notice these
violations of banking regulations are always presented as victimless crimes or
crimes that only affect investors, never people who lose jobs or homes or how
they impact on the economy worldwide,
Most of the coverage
does not link all these financial crimes to the larger effect and impact they
have had on the world.
Last June,
Congresswoman Maxine Waters tried to raise these issues with Ben Bernanke, the
Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank asking him to take action. He retreats
into bland and passionless responses. It didn't seem he was in much of a hurry
to anything. (Watch her efforts on You Tube" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJX-0944ass&feature=player_embedded
Months later, other
regulators in Britain and the US acted but also in a low-key way.
These prosecutions are
highly selective and show a real unwillingness to crack down on bank crimes,
even when they involve drug running.
Former NY State
Governor Eliot Spitzer, and a former prosecutor who went after Wall Street
commented on a refusal to go after the HSBC Bank on these charges, --The
decision to not prosecute in this instance belies everything that the
government has ever done with regard to drug prosecutions everywhere.
"I mean, when you
think about the way they behave toward ordinary people who get caught up in
drug cases, where they seize all your property and they use absolutely the
maximum sentences they can possibly avail themselves of, and in this case they
catch a bank that launders billions of dollars for Colombian and Mexican drug
cartels " for years on end, and they can't find something to charge these
people with?"
"If the law
doesn't apply equally to everybody, then you don't really have a system of law.
It's not just the
banks or governments. The media seems to just be admitting that many banks are
run like criminal enterprises.
I and other in the
independent media have been making these points for years, as the website Zero
Hedge noted:
" Fraud caused the Great
Depression and the current financial crisis, and the economy will never recover
until fraud is prosecuted
" Criminal fraud is the main business model adopted by the giant banks.
" Largely because they are out-of-control criminal enterprises, economy cannot recover unless the big banks are broken up.
" The Obama administration has made it official policy not to prosecute fraud. Indeed, the "watchdogs" in D.C. are so corrupt that they are as easily bribed as a policeman in a third world banana republic.
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