Pam and Russ Martens — A Private Citizen Would Be in Prison If He Had Citigroup’s Rap Sheet

Since its financial meltdown in 2008 and unprecedented bailout by the U.S. taxpayer, Citigroup (parent of Citibank) has been repeatedly charged by its Federal regulators with odious crimes against its pooled mortgage investors, credit card and banking customers, student loan borrowers, and for its foreclosure frauds. It has paid billions of dollars in fines for its past misdeeds while new charges pile up. In 2015, it became an admitted felon for participating in rigging foreign exchange markets. In short, Citigroup is a lawbreaking recidivist. If it were a mere human, it would be serving a long prison term. Instead, its fines for charges of egregious acts are getting smaller, not larger.

Last Tuesday, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), which typically has a good track record of holding the big Wall Street banks accountable for their misdeeds, imposed an unusually feeble fine against Citibank for a litany of abuses against student loan borrowers. The CFPB ordered Citi to pay $3.75 million in restitution and to pay a $2.75 million fine. When combined with the fact that the CFPB did not make Citibank admit to the charges, this amounts to a slap on the wrist to a serial lawbreaker. (See Citigroup/Citibank’s history of misconduct below.)

Adding further insult to the American public, the Board of Directors of Citigroup has kept the same CEO in place for more than five years as these serial abuses of the public trust piled up. Michael Corbat has been CEO of Citigroup since October 2012.

Wall Street On Parade
A Private Citizen Would Be in Prison If He Had Citigroup’s Rap Sheet
Pam Martens and Russ Martens

The Clinton Foundation? — Paul Jay interviews Michael Hudson

Video and transcript.

Michael Hudson
The Clinton Foundation?

Paul Jay interviews Michale Hudson

Paul Robinson — Double Standards

Another paradox of liberalism.

When do so-called liberals become illiberal and hypocritical in their purported defense of liberalism.

This cuts to the heart of the matter, showing how the liberal West is treading on dangerous ground based on illiberal assumptions and specious argumentation about liberalism and its scope.

Irrussianality
Double Standards (short)
Paul Robinson | Professor, Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa

Compare the editorial page of the Washington Post (under the editorship of neocon Fred Hiatt).

Russian provocations led to the downing of its fighter jet by Turkey

See also Anne Applebaum, How Turkey confounded Putin’s favorite narratives, Washington Post Op Ed.

When nuclear powers see the world oppositely, each viewing itself as occupying the moral high ground, it's only a matter of time until.…

See also

What Paul Robinson is talking about.

Counterpunch

The Ideology of Humanitarian Imperialism

Àngel Ferrero interviews Jean Bricmont, Professor of Theoretical Physics at the Université catholique de Louvain

RT — Petraeus may not get jail time for talking to a journalist, but Sterling and others did

Smackdown of US double standard of justice, naming names and circumstances.

Those who make the rules also make the exceptions.

Or is this RT just being "anti-Western"?

RT
Petraeus may not get jail time for talking to a journalist, but Sterling and others did

Peter Maass — Petraeus Plea Deal Reveals Two-Tier Justice System For Leaks

David Petraeus, the former Army general and CIA director, admitted today that he gave highly-classified journals to his onetime lover and that he lied to the FBI about it. But he only has to plead guilty to a single misdemeanor that will not involve a jail sentence thanks to a deal with federal prosecutors. The deal is yet another example of a senior official treated leniently for the sorts of violations that lower-level officials are punished severely for. 

According to the plea deal, Petraeus, while leading American forces in Afghanistan, maintained eight notebooks that he filled with highly-sensitive information about the identities of covert officers, military strategy, intelligence capabilities and his discussions with senior government officials, including President Obama. Rather than handing over these “Black Books,” as the plea agreement calls them, to the Department of Defense when he retired from the military in 2011 to head the CIA, Petraeus retained them at his home and lent them, for several days, to Paula Broadwell, his authorized biographer and girlfriend. 

In October 2012, FBI agents interviewed Petraeus as part of an investigation into his affair with Broadwell — Petraeus would resign from the CIA the next month — and Petraeus told them he had not shared classified material with Broadwell. The plea deal notes that “these statements were false” and that Petraeus “then and there knew that he previously shared the Black Books with his biographer.” Lying to FBI agents is a federal crime for which people have received sentences of months or more than a year in jail.
Under his deal with prosecutors, Petraeus pleaded guilty to just one count of unauthorized removal and retention of classified information, a misdemeanor that can be punishable by a year in jail, though the deal calls only for probation and a $40,000 fine. 

As The New York Times noted today, the deal “allows Mr. Petraeus to focus on his lucrative post-government career as a partner in a private equity firm and a worldwide speaker on national security issues.”....

The Intercept

Petraeus Plea Deal Reveals Two-Tier Justice System For Leaks

Peter Maass

Lauren McCauley — Unbroken, CIA Torture Whistleblower Kiriakou To Finish Sentence Home with Family

John Kiriakou, the CIA agent who was jailed for blowing the whistle on the United States' torture program, was released from Loretto Prison in Pennsylvania on Tuesday under orders to finish the remainder of his 30-month sentence at home.
Though glad the whistleblower was finally able to return to his wife and five children, supporters said the development was bittersweet considering that Kiriakou has thus far been the only government official to be punished for U.S. torture. 

"John Kiriakou is a dedicated public servant who became a political prisoner because he brought to light one of the darkest chapters in American history: the CIA’s ineffective, immoral and illegal torture program," said Jesselyn Radack, Kiriakou’s attorney and National Security and Human Rights director of the Government Accountability Project.

"Considering that the last three heads of the CIA engaged in leaks of classified information without being charged under the Espionage Act and that no CIA official who ordered or participated in torture has been criminally punished," Radack continued, "it is a welcome development that Kiriakou can serve the rest of his sentence at home with his family."

RIP American justice. This is just one of the many travesties of justice perpetrated by the Obama Administration, a record that will live in infamy. Some legacy.

Common Dreams
Unbroken, CIA Torture Whistleblower Kiriakou To Finish Sentence Home with Family
Lauren McCauley, staff writer

James Kwak — Why Is Credit Suisse Still Allowed to Do Business in the United States?

The conventional wisdom is that revoking a large bank’s license can trigger potential systemic consequences. But that's not the case here.

Credit Suisse, the gigantic Swiss bank, is clearly a criminal organization. In its guilty plea yesterday, Credit Suisse admitted that it has been actively helping Americans (and no doubt people from all around the world) evade taxes for years:

For decades prior to and through in or about 2009, . . . Credit Suisse did unlawfully, voluntary, intentionally, and knowingly conspire, combine, confederate, and agree together with others . . . to willfully aid, assist in, procure, counsel, and advise the preparation and presentation of false income tax returns and other documents to the Internal Revenue Service.

The Justice Department is crowing about its newfound willingness to convict major financial institutions, with Eric Holder claiming, “This case shows that no financial institution, no matter its size or global reach, is above the law.” The guilty plea certainly seems like a step forward from the neither-admit-nor-deny settlements that banks have counted on for the past decade. But there is a risk that the Credit Suisse deal—the guilty plea coupled with ample assurances that the admitted criminal will be allowed to remain in business—could become the new version of the deferred prosecution agreement: an outcome that makes everyone happy, yet punishes no one, and ultimately becomes just another cost of doing business.

There are two main ways to really punish criminals and deter wrongdoing in the future. One is criminal prosecutions of the individuals involved, ideally getting lower-level employees to cooperate and gathering evidence as far up the management hierarchy as possible. (There are ongoing prosecutions against several Credit Suisse employees.) The other is putting a bank out of business by revoking its license. Even if he escapes jail, no CEO wants that on his résumé. And it seems entirely appropriate for a bank that engages in a decades-long criminal conspiracy that costs U.S. taxpayers billions of dollars.

The Atlantic
Why Is Credit Suisse Still Allowed to Do Business in the United States?
James Kwak

Democracy Now! — Too Big To Jail? Credit Suisse Bank Pleads Guilty to Decades of Tax Evasion, But Execs Avoid Prison

European banking giant Credit Suisse has pleaded guilty to helping American clients avoid paying taxes by concealing assets in illegal, undeclared bank accounts — becoming the largest bank to plead guilty to a criminal charge in 20 years. As part of the plea deal, Credit Suisse will pay about $2.6 billion in penalties and hire an independent monitor. But the bank will not be required to turn over the names of the Americans who used the bank to evade taxes. In addition, no senior Credit Suisse executives will face jail time, and the bank will be allowed to continue operating in the United States. According to The New York Times, the Securities and Exchange Commission voted last week to grant Credit Suisse a temporary exemption from a federal law that requires a bank to hand over its investment-adviser license in the event of a guilty plea. We speak to James Henry, former chief economist at McKinsey & Co., now a senior adviser to the Tax Justice Network and senior fellow at the Vale Columbia Center on Sustainable International Investment.

Democracy Now!
Too Big To Jail? Credit Suisse Bank Pleads Guilty to Decades of Tax Evasion, But Execs Avoid Prison 

Elias Isquith — “It’s total moral surrender”: Matt Taibbi unloads on Wall Street, inequality and our broken justice system

Matt Taibbi, author of "The Divide," tells Salon about Geithner's excuses, Piketty's success and Nixon's cronies

His relentless coverage of Wall Street malfeasance turned him into one of the most influential journalists of his generation, but in his new book, “The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap,” Matt Taibbi takes a close and dispiriting look at how inequality and government dysfunction have created a two-tiered justice system in which most Americans are guilty until proven innocent, while a select few operate with no accountability whatsoever....

MT: The book is really just about why some people go to jail and why some people don’t go to jail, and “the divide” is the term I came up with to describe this phenomenon we have where there are essentially two different criminal justice systems, one that works one way for people who are either very rich or working within the confines of a giant systemically important institution, and then one that works in another way for people who are without means. And that’s what the book is about....

Bureaucracies organically flow toward the easier result, and the easier result is always a smaller company, an undefended person, a low-level drug dealer. They hesitate before it decides to proceed against a well-heeled, well-defended company [against which] they’re going to have to fight for years and years and years just to get the case in court … It’s not just about the poor, it’s more about how there’s a class that enjoys impunity and then there’s everybody else....

Morally, it doesn’t work anymore. You just cannot have a society where people instinctively know that certain people are above the law, because it will create total disrespect for authority among everybody else. And that’s completely corrosive. You need to have people believing in the system to some degree — even if it’s just an illusion, you need to have them believing.

EI: You know, with your comment about how people need to believe in the system to some degree, it occurs to me that in a fundamental way, you’re actually making a small-c conservative argument. You’re not saying we need to burn everything to the ground and start over, you’re saying we need to stick with the principles we supposedly all believe in.

MT: People forget that all my sources come from Wall Street. They’re all capitalists, they’re all ardent capitalists. They grew up, their passion in life was reading Adam Smith and believing in that whole world. And I came into this story six years ago, whatever it was, not really knowing a whole lot about it, but certainly I never would have described myself as an ardent capitalist … When people ask me what the solutions are to these problems, for me, the fastest shortcut to everything being cleaned up is disentangling the government from its unnatural support of these too-big-to-fail institutions, forcing them to sink or swim on their own in the real free market. I never would have imagined myself making that argument five or six years ago, but that’s the argument … These people, not only are they not being prosecuted, but they’re not subject to the normal forces of the market anymore, and in a way that enables them even more … If you were to force these companies to sink or swim on their own they’d be vaporized instantly. We see this every time there’s any hint the government is going to stop bailing these companies out or may consider not doing it in the future — they lose billions of dollars in market capitalization overnight …

Salon
“It’s total moral surrender”: Matt Taibbi unloads on Wall Street, inequality and our broken justice system
Elias Isquith | Assistant Editor, Salon

Matt Taibbi: The SuperRich in America Have Become 'Untouchables' in America Who Don't Go to Prison — Amy Goodman interviews Matt Taibbi

Well, this book grew out of my experience covering Wall Street. I’ve obviously been doing it since the crash in 2008. And over and over again, I would cover these very complex and often very socially destructive capers committed by white-collar criminals. And the punchline to all of the stories were basically the same: Nobody would get indicted; nobody went to jail. And after a while, I started to become interested specifically in that phenomenon. Why was there no enforcement of any of this? And around the time of the Occupy protest, I decided to write this book, and then I shifted my focus to try to learn a lot more for myself about who does go to jail in this country, because I thought you really can’t make this comparison accurately until you learn about both sides of the equation, because it’s actually much more grotesque to consider the non-enforcement of white-collar criminals when you do consider how incredibly aggressive law enforcement is with regard to everybody else.

Alternet — Democracy Now!
Matt Taibbi: The SuperRich in America Have Become 'Untouchables' in America Who Don't Go to Prison
Amy Goodman interviews Matt Taibbi

Double standard = privilege

Mark Pascal on MMT

I will return to Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) for the masochists on TMV. There are important points I wish to repeat with respect to MMT. It may describe the underlying operations of monetarily sovereign nations but when a political/economic system is so corrupt, fraudulent, manipulated and criminal, it doesn’t matter what the underlying policies and principles are when those entrusted with running the system cannot do so honestly or competently. In a country where the “rule of law” only applies to the non-elite, non-wealthy and powerless, then anything goes and nothing matters.

The Moderate Voice
On My Writing...
Mark Pascal

(h/t Charles Hayden)

William A. Cohn — Law as Farce

With Obama’s Jan. 17 speech on NSA Spy-Gate failing to quell civil unrest, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board today released its findings that NSA metadata collection is unlawful and should stop. Most revealing was Charlie Savage’s reporting that from May 2006 to August 2013 the FISC authorized Patriot Act Sec. 215 overriding the Electronic Communications Privacy Act without any legal opinion to support the clear violations of the ECPA, let alone the Fourth Amendment. Yes, secret law is an oxymoron – meaning lawlessness.

The torture memos by John Yoo, Jay Bybee, and Steven Bradbury were written because CIA criminality was exposed by leaks, so the Bush cabal felt they needed legal cover. Had Jane Mayer and Dana Priest not used leaked information to write about the outsourcing of torture and secret CIA-run prisons in Europe, no such twisted law, logic and morality as evinced by those memos would be needed. Likewise, but for Ed Snowden and Glenn Greenwald, the FISC would still be the secret handmaiden of the national security state.

Belief in the “trust us” rationale for secret law-making requires belief that the world is black and white, with clear good guys vs. bad guys. Thanks to transparency abetted by technology, we see that all powerful states are dirty. And so, when the Emperor claims that he is well-robed in his language of democracy and rule of law, we clearly see him naked.

Counterpunch

Law as Farce
William A. Cohn

Matt Taibbi — Outrageous HSBC Settlement Proves the Drug War is a Joke

Matt is on the case.

If you've ever been arrested on a drug charge, if you've ever spent even a day in jail for having a stem of marijuana in your pocket or "drug paraphernalia" in your gym bag, Assistant Attorney General and longtime Bill Clinton pal Lanny Breuer has a message for you: Bite me.

Breuer this week signed off on a settlement deal with the British banking giant HSBC that is the ultimate insult to every ordinary person who's ever had his life altered by a narcotics charge. Despite the fact that HSBC admitted to laundering billions of dollars for Colombian and Mexican drug cartels (among others) and violating a host of important banking laws (from the Bank Secrecy Act to the Trading With the Enemy Act), Breuer and his Justice Department elected not to pursue criminal prosecutions of the bank, opting instead for a "record" financial settlement of $1.9 billion, which as one analyst noted is about five weeks of income for the bank.

The banks' laundering transactions were so brazen that the NSA probably could have spotted them from space. Breuer admitted that drug dealers would sometimes come to HSBC's Mexican branches and "deposit hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, in a single day, into a single account, using boxes designed to fit the precise dimensions of the teller windows."

This bears repeating: in order to more efficiently move as much illegal money as possible into the "legitimate" banking institution HSBC, drug dealers specifically designed boxes to fit through the bank's teller windows.

Rolling Stone
Outrageous HSBC Settlement Proves the Drug War is a Joke
Matt Taibbi

Federal and state authorities have chosen not to indict HSBC, the London-based bank, on charges of vast and prolonged money laundering, for fear that criminal prosecution would topple the bank and, in the process, endanger the financial system.

It doesn't take a genius to see that the reasoning here is beyond flawed. When you decide not to prosecute bankers for billion-dollar crimes connected to drug-dealing and terrorism (some of HSBC's Saudi and Bangladeshi clients had terrorist ties, according to a Senate investigation), it doesn't protect the banking system, it does exactly the opposite. It terrifies investors and depositors everywhere, leaving them with the clear impression that even the most "reputable" banks may in fact be captured institutions whose senior executives are in the employ of (this can't be repeated often enough) murderers and terrorists. Even more shocking, the Justice Department's response to learning about all of this was to do exactly the same thing that the HSBC executives did in the first place to get themselves in trouble – they took money to look the other way.

And not only did they sell out to drug dealers, they sold out cheap. You'll hear bragging this week by the Obama administration that they wrested a record penalty from HSBC, but it's a joke. Some of the penalties involved will literally make you laugh out loud.

Jessica Luther — Affluenza: Just the latest excuse for the wealthy to do whatever they want

Talk about over the top double standard and privilege. More like "influenca" than "affulenza." Liberal democracy morphing into plutocratic oligarchy. Inequality of income and wealthy results in social and political and legal inequality.


The Raw Story
Affluenza: Just the latest excuse for the wealthy to do whatever they want
Jessica Luther, The Guardian

Peter Radford — When is a contract a contract?

It used to be comforting to think that the saying “one rule for the rich, another for the poor” was just that: a saying. We could all pretend that America was a land of equal laws, even though we all knew deep down that rich folk can always get away with stuff we can’t.

Now, in these years of crisis, we are exposed to the ugly truth far too frequently. Big business and rich people have one set of laws. The rest of us another. In their laws a contract is inviolate. To break it you have to have extreme extenuating circumstances and/or a well paid lawyer. In our laws a contract is a suggestion. To break it you have to be a creditor who has friends amongst the elite and/or a well paid lawyer.

Real-World Economics Review Blog
When is a contract a contract?
Peter Radford

Bill Black — Why do Conservatives Oppose Prosecuting Elite Corporate Frauds?

There are at least four principles that virtually all conservatives purport to support – except when the potential defendant is socially elite. I have written previously about two of these principles on several occasions – the need for accountability and “broken windows” theory that calls for the prosecutors to make the prosecution of even minor street crimes a high priority if they have, even indirectly, a material effect on the community.

The third principle is that it is vital to punish in order to deter crime.....

The fourth principle, the one this column addresses, is the conservative love of “creative destruction” – a concept made famous by the economist Joseph Schumpeter. I have a simple proposition – there is no more creative destruction than putting a control fraud out of business through a prosecution, receivership, or enforcement action....

New Economic Perspectives
Why do Conservatives Oppose Prosecuting Elite Corporate Frauds?
William K Black | Associate Professor of Economics and Law at the University of Missouri – Kansas City

Double standard of justice. Why? Because the fundamental principle of conservatism is that some people are better than others, whereas the fundamental principle of liberalism is that all are created equal. As a result, there is no reforming conservatism. It is a pernicious doctrine that underlies and justified exploitation by an authoritarian elite, often in the name of "freedom."

Where I would disagree with Bill is where he asserts, "Control frauds are the ultimate betrayal of capitalism." I would say that they are the logical outcome of capitalism, which leads to elite capture of the state and exploitation of the people. Only by restraining and ultimately putting an end to capitalism can the situation be addressed in a lasting way. Otherwise, they'll be baaack, zombie-like. Cyclicality is part and parcel of capitalism.

Conservative scholars love (purported) “private market discipline.”  This is the theory that creditors will promptly destroy any control fraud.  The problem is that creditors actually fund the massive growth of control frauds rather than “disciplining” them.  Control frauds report extreme profits.  In the case of accounting control frauds these reported profits are fictional, but the creditors love to fund their growth.  In the case of other forms of control fraud the supra-normal profits produced by the fraud are real, so private market “discipline” is a complete oxymoron.  The creditors eagerly fund these other forms of control fraud because of their highly profitable frauds.

Yves Smith — Tom Engelhardt: Edward Snowden vs. Robert Seldon Lady Shows How Our One-Superpower World Works

Yves here. Tom Engelhardt’s latest piece discusses how, as he puts it in his setup:

Retired CIA agent Robert Seldon Lady, convicted in absentia in Italy for a rendition/kidnapping operation, is picked up in Panama on an Interpol warrant, hits the news for a day, and then is allowed to fly back to the U.S. where he disappears — and despite the Edward Snowden case, the Washington media doesn’t even blink.

Astonishingly, not only did this story come and go with remarkable speed, but there has been nada in the way of follow-up. Until now, where Engelhardt’s piece delves into how and why Lady has been disappeared in order to escape from justice in Italy.

Double-standard and Orwellian double-speak. The US government is shown up as an imperial regime bent on maintaining global hegemony through superpower status. Now there is not longer any pretense about it. There goes US soft power. RIP.

Naked Capitalism

Tom Engelhardt: Edward Snowden vs. Robert Seldon Lady Shows How Our One-Superpower World Works
Yves Smith

Karl Denniger — There Is No Law. Behave Accordingly

If our own government will not act in accordance with the very laws it has passed then you are not obligated to do so either.

The Market Ticker
There Is No Law. Behave Accordingly
Karl Denniger

When there is a double standard of justice, then law erodes and eventually order, too, as the society descends into anarchy. To prevent this, the power structure imposes total control if it can.

Don't say you weren't warned.

Mish piles on. Hypocrites and Bullies Speak on "The Importance of Trust"; Bullies, Bribes, and Foreign Aid

These are significant voices on the Libertarian right.

Glenn Greenwald: Top Officials Are Lying to Our Faces About Government Spying

Government officials take an oath to uphold the Constitution and not only have not done so, but they also have been caught lying about it. This is at least as bad as Nixon's attempt to cover up Watergate, forcing his resignation, and Clinton was impeached for lying to a grand jury. This is way over the top, much more serious than Nixon and Clinton. Is it time for progressives to consider investigating grounds for impeachment?

AlterNet
Glenn Greenwald: Top Officials Are Lying to Our Faces About Government Spying

Branstad says he won’t ‘micromanage’ Iowa troopers after speeding incident

Situation doesn't comprise double standard, governor says....

Branstad rejected assertions that the incident in which the vehicle driver was not ticketed points up a double standard that puts his trooper security detail above the law or that the speeding vehicle put other motorists at risk.

The Gazette
Branstad says he won’t ‘micromanage’ Iowa troopers after speeding incident

Some people are better than others. (Yes, the governor of Iowa is a conservative, the basis of which is that some are better than others.)

Actually, this kind of thinking and behavior is endemic among those who believe that some are better than others. Those who have "made it" to the top of the "meritocracy" consider themselves to be better at managing themselves and situations than others, and laws and regulations are meant only for those that need them, as shown by their lack of success in a meritocracy.