Right now the largest, most pervasive criminal activity being carried on in this country is not illegal immigration, it’s not drug sales, it’s not human trafficking, it’s not smuggling, it’s not even the illegal sale of non-FDA approved imported wigs, it’s the industry wide fraud and creative accounting practices of the entire American financial world.
Jeff Connaughton, a former senatorial aide now concentrating on Wall Street and the regulatory system has come out and flatly stated that Wall Street has progressed from the unethical to the criminal with a speed and a voracity that is nothing short of shocking.
The idea that what Wall Street firms are doing is merely unethical, he states, is preposterous. Illegal activity is far past pervasive, it is epidemic. Every single major bank has whole departments committed to fraud, robo-signing affidavits for foreclosures and credit card judgments both of which, despite being blatantly criminal, have become standard bank policy. Both banks and hedge funds routinely withhold any damaging information about the products they sell and trade, a clear violation of all fair trade practices and a felony. In addition many sales are based on insider information, a blatantly criminal activity, also a felony while many other sales are consummated in house, ahead of their client’s orders and to the bank’s own benefit, another felony.
Corrupt accounting is so endemic to the system that industry analysts are forced to figure in estimated levels of fraud just to get a credible picture in their calculations of the public disclosures of major financial companies. Why is this? How can something as blatantly criminal as this be happening? It‘s simple, an almost complete lack of regulation, and in he cases where even the weakest regulation does exist, regulators who are in bed with the big banks.
Matt Taibbi takes it a step further and more deeply into the political realm by suggesting that Obama is allowing it to happen, even encouraging it by his soft stance relative to whether these activities are criminal or just unethical but then soft pedals his own accusation by suggesting that the President has, as an ulterior motive, the building of confidence in the financial system so as to bolster it against collapse. I think Matt is one of the smartest guys out there but if he really believes this, I think he’s way of base. Or, if he’s right, the President is.
What Connaughton seems to be saying is that the President and Tim Geithner are doing the same thing that all the bankers did before the crash, covering up the problems in hopes that it will eventually go away or that it will become the next administrations problem. This is farcical. Covering up the sins of the criminal only makes him think that he can continue getting away with his illegal acts. The only thing that stops crime is punishment and not the little slaps on the wrist that Obama’s regulators have been timidly dealing out to those few who have been confronted with their misdeeds.
The financial sector has been screwing the country for too long. First they were aided by the Bush administration’s relaxing of regulations and now they are being helped along by Obama’s fear of their collapse. It’s a legitimate fear but the solution is pure bullshit. The only way to bolster confidence in the American financial markets is to convince the public that they are stable and honest and the only way to do that is to make them so. If that entails pulling down a couple of the giants and trampling them underfoot, so be it. The problem with our financial, institutions right now is that they all believe that they can cover up their sins by committing more sins. We have to prove that theory wrong. Morgan Stanley’s president James Gorman will sit up and pay attention if he sees JP Morgan’s Jamie Dimon and Wells Fargo’s John Stumpf in handcuffs.
The American public will applaud, not panic if it actually can see our government acting like a government and doing something about a problem. You want to create confidence in the financial sector, Barak, put the crooks in jail and help the honest guys, if there are any, run the system the right way. Of course this means you will have to forget about any financial contributions from that sector of the economy.
And as an added bonus: All-American Bitch of the Month
Alice Walton, who is worth 21 Billion bucks but who doesn’t pay her Wal-Mart employees enough to keep over half of them from being eligible for food stamps. Of course, those food stamps are paid for by the American taxpayers. She calls herself a “job creator” but the jobs she creates don’t pay enough to keep her employees off the dole. Gee, Alice, do you think you could scrape along on say, 20 billion and maybe pay your employees a living wage. Would that be too much to ask?