If This Doesn't Send TBTF Bank CEOs To Jail ..... What Will?

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

Same sex bank accounts? :(
Miscegenated IRAs?
CDO abortion clinics?

LIBOR: History’s Largest Financial Crime that the WSJ and NYT Would Like You to Forget

Weepin' Buddha on a decline!!!!

Where are the pitchforks?

Kids, parents & teachers can go to jail for cheating on K-12 school tests, or failing to pay college tuition loans ... but what the uber crooks do isn't illegal? Or not enforceable?

Why? Because stopping their wrongs would supposedly cause greater wrongs? BULLSHIT!!

It's past time for J&J Sixpack to tackle White Collar Crime head on. Before we effectively get an "Equal Looting Rights Act" jammed down our throats. The only rate of interest that matters is our own rate of interest in what's being foisted on us.

If you let the 3 Control Fraud figures below shuffle your future options around among their 3 dunce caps, you're going to lose just by paying to watch the crime. The only sane thing to do is to NOT allow them to operate. If you don't participate, they'll just rob your neighbor, then your kids, and then your supposed retirement savings. Guess what, once they've already stolen your Congress & Constitutional rights, your retirement savings aren't as secure or as valuable as your former privacy was.

So, the only thing we need to keep under control is our electorate's passivity.  Too much of nothing is not a good thing.

We've now become accomplices to our own crimes against ourselves. Isn't mass suicide illegal too?

Att. Gen. Holder Talks As Though All Criminals Are Equally Bad ... Some Are Just More Equal In Impunity Than Others

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

Is this who we are? WWGW think?



Dear Att. Gen. Eric Holder,

How about leaving some WHITE COLLAR CRIME backdoors open for regulators?

For Pete's sake! Get a clue.

This guy can't see context for the mirror?

In what follows, the semantics have been blatantly translated to more relevant analogies, in an attempt to redirect the topic to protecting the innocent.

What about all the forms of BS which are locking law enforcement regulators out of understanding increasingly popular Control Fraud methods?

Surely it is fully possible to permit private enterprise to provide personal incentives while still adequately protecting aggregate options?

When a Middle Class is in danger, law enforcement and Public Policy needs to be able to take every legally available step to quickly find and protect Main Street and to stop those that abuse both the Middle Class and democracy. It is worrisome to see both Control Frauds AND public officials thwarting our ability to do so.

In his recent comments, Holder became just the latest government official to willingly be a hypocrite ... for financial gain, no matter how indirect.

Though Holder didn’t mention Goldman-Sachs or any other TBTJ banks by name, his remarks systematically avoided mentioning the documentation repeatedly offered by Bill Black since the resolution of the S&L Crisis 20+ years ago.

National, state and local citizen and law enforcement officials have complained loudly that the TBTJ banks are undermining efforts to fight White Collar Crime, including money-laundering and financial terrorism. The TBTJ's newest lobbying system, BS-8, has Congress so thoroughly bought that the lobbyists brazenly say that White Collar Crime is itself no longer illegal. Citibank's & JP Morgan's lobbying and "revolving door" system automatically began using direct and indirect incentives and re-election pressures decades ago, on all regulators and Congresspeople, unless they specifically opt into the bankster protection racket, described in unwritten agreements never intended to be released to honest citizens. (It will take months or years for reality to filter out and reach most people currently attempting to honestly participate in democracy.)

TBTJ financial industry executives have consistently said that less regulation better protects the privacy of Control Frauds by reducing the security of the Middle Class against a wide range of intrusions, by co-opted governments, White Collar criminals and Innocent Frauds on the bankster's payroll. American financial companies have been particularly eager to demonstrate their commitment to reduced citizen rights in the aftermath of the revelations by former litigation director of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, Bill Black, detailing the extensive overreach of TBTJ financial lobbies.

Holder never bothers speaking honestly to the Global Alliance Against Financial Abuse of the Middle Class and Democracy in General, regardless of where their diverse chapters try to meet. In fact, to my knowledge he's never raised the issue of preserving civic protections from large-scale Financial Control Fraud.

Sure, recent gutting of diverse Federal regulatory agencies has already greatly emboldened White criminals, as TARP and the aftermath showed, including providing implicit guarantees for abusers to avoid detection. In a snowballing number of cases, perpetrators are using clouded policy to cheaply and easily bypass tens of thousands of lines of former legal protections that had existed for 70 years or more - and to leverage that ability to operate from anywhere in the world. It shouldn't be a surprise that many Control Frauds rush to take advantage of "regulatory encryption" and anonymizing White Collar Crime practices to conceal contraband practices and disguise perpetrator positions.

In response to all this, Holder has essentially called on all citizens to work with him to look the other way while Wall Street guts Main Street, and ensures that law enforcement ignores the ability, with court-authorization, to at least attempt to obtain enough information to even initiate White Collar Crime investigations, such as catching mega Control Frauds.

Even with the new forms of Control Fraud, government officials maintain access to many sources of data related to the execution of Elite Financial Fraud, including the records of calls, texts and other communications kept by lobbyists, Congressional staff and Public Regulators alike. Even worse are the extensive, passive collusion agreements that most regulatory agencies now take for granted, by claiming that they "can't afford to prosecute rampant White Collar Crime," resulting in paltry fines for massive frauds against Jane and Joe Sixpack. Police and District Attorneys rarely even get search warrants on which to use third-party tools to try to unravel the levels of corruption involved in on decisions to not prosecute massive mortgage frauds and other financial schemes. Courts can and often have ordered the entire Middle Class to furnish up the keys that would otherwise preserve the future of entire generations against domination by a few Super Crooks.

Capiche?

Why Doesn't He Pitch Fiat, White Collar Crime Relief To Citizens?

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson.)

Not a big enough protection racket?

Ex-NSA Chief Pitches Banks Costly Advice on Cyber-Attacks

Where's the line between innocent fraud & racketeering?

Are we assigning enough people and resources to adequately monitor that line ... and regulate who crosses it?

Who's telling Main Street that the financial industry was among the likely ... initiators ... of a major attack on the Middle Class?

$1 million/month? Is he joining a crowded field of .... White Collar Criminals ... or just demonstrating that the MICC can co-opt Wall St. any time it wants to?

After all, he and the NSA must have information that most tycoons ... shall we say, 'don't want brought to light' any time soon?

If he's that good, why doesn't he just go to work for Google, IBM, Yahoo, or other existing IT industry titans? Move over good dogs, a mean old dog's moving in?

And the touted threat? Rerouting data that might be used to make money in rogue stock-market transactions? I thought that's what Wall St. DID with Main St.'s financial resources? Translation: Banksters want to retain that business for themselves, and the NSA can show them how? [For a hefty piece of the action.]

Two decades after gutting every financial regulatory agency, from CFTC to the FBI White Collar Crime Task Force and on to the SEC itself - not to mention gutting Glass-Steagall - we now need more people in select regulatory positions? No one could have predicted this, right?

Banks that not long ago had 10 or 15 people repelling computer invaders now have 50 to 100 people “that do nothing but respond to attacks and review intelligence,” Joe Nocera, head of the financial-services cybersecurity group at PriceWaterhouseCoopers LLP, said in an interview. 

The largest banks are allocating the most resources. JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) has 1,000 people focused on the danger and will spend $250 million this year, Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon said in an April letter to shareholders.

And it only gets more unbelievable.

“I don’t want to be Chicken Little and say the sky is falling,”Benjamin Lawsky, superintendent of New York’s department of financial services, said in an interview. “But we really need to focus on this issue.”

And, says a clueless Congressperson:

“What I’m concerned about is we’re going to have a 9/11 in cyberspace,” he said. “We don’t need to suffer this kind of attack.”

Really? Sort of like the ones that Edward Snowden revealed? And, what about the massive policyspace attack that ALREADY OCCURRED, and hit the Middle Class on Main Street? Apparently that segment of our nation isn't as important to these so-called public servants?


ps:  watch to see which banks (domestic or foreign) are able or allowed to hire this particular "protection" service, and what accessory "services" follow soon after. Sadly, since we the people are "running out of fiat," the Middle Class will never again be able to afford similar protection .... from it's own leaders - unless we da peeps make some fundamental changes in national governance.

William K. Black — Edwin Sutherland: The 75th Anniversary of His Coining The Term White-Collar Crime

History lesson. "There's nothing new under the sun."

Our answer confirms Edwin Sutherland’s intuition while providing the necessary precision on what makes a subset of elite financial frauds vastly more destructive than all other property crimes (of the streets and suites) – combined. Sutherland stressed the white-collar criminal’s high status as the key that made it difficult to prosecute him. We believe that the key is power, not status. The persons who control a seemingly legitimate entity (private, non-profit, or governmental) can cause unique damage if they engage in fraud because the CEO can direct the corporation and cause it to make the firm’s internal and external environment vastly more criminogenic. Status is important, but more as a goal. CEOs (and their spouses) yearn not simply for wealth but also for high social status, and wealth and high position can buy high status. This quest for status can become pathological when, as is exceptionally common, the CEO is a narcissist. The CEO’s high social status is a protection against sanction as Sutherland believed, but the CEO’s power is a far greater protection.

New Economic Perspectives
Edwin Sutherland: The 75th Anniversary of His Coining The Term White-Collar Crime

William K. Black | Associate Professor of Economics and Law, UMKC

Parasites Are Utilizing Control Fraud Strategies To Drive The Latest Epidemic of Cultural Diseases

(commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

We're supposed to be excited that Qatar launches gene mapping to combat diseases?

Good move, but it'll be too late, and too little, if we and other nations don't address social issues generating an order of magnitude greater impact on societies.

For decades, the most statistically relevant public burdens have been the human crime syndicates which parasitize human cultural systems. Such "human culture parasites" have long since moved on to Control Fraud, and operate on a whole new level.

Combatting physiological disease is a tactic. Meanwhile, the parasite world is already employing actual strategies, and moving on to hijack even our national policies! That's why all we're getting only Pyrrhic victories in arenas which, increasingly, THEY already own outright. Meanwhile, our Cultural Health Burden dwarfs even our net, public health burden.

That's also why it's not even remotely good enough that we're Using 'Open Source' Tools to Fight Sexually Transmitted Infections.

That's nice, mundane, and necessary, but it is not by any means sufficient. It should be as incidental as wetting your pants in a dark suit. We have orders of magnitude bigger parasitic burdens to defend against. How about using OpenSource tools to to fight Cultural Infections transmitted through Control Fraud?

To address our biggest burdens, we need orders of magnitude more OpenSource Meme Mapping. First to educate people about the range and hierarchy of cultural burdens, continually identify the overwhelmingly dominant ones, and then to combat those emerging Cultural Diseases. We've already waited far too long to add Control Fraud and White Collar Crime to that list, and move them to the top.

A large part of every parasite's toolkit is dedicated to sowing distractions and confusion, and diverting attention elsewhere. That's how the strategy of divide & conquer works. It doesn't just set us against one another. It also diverts too many of us to less important targets. Like diverting nearly all FBI agents from White Collar Crime to international, physical terrorism, not to mention keeping the bulk of our police diverted to Blue Collar vs White Collar crime. Has anyone compared the actual, comparable losses from blue collar crime and and even physical terrorism damage vs White Collar Crime as separable burdens on society? 

It's not even close!

Solution? So far, the Control Frauds buy Congresspeople purely to keep our attention diverted to terrorism and Blue Collar Crime! It's called politics. Masquerading as politics and policy, the social parasite strategies have successfully made our national economy a poor person's burden and a 1% solution.

We need more OpenSource discussion, immediately, if we're going to ramp up an effective social-immune-system. Right now, the parasites have most of our fledgeling, social-immune responses diverted to attacking ourselves! As an example, see the discussion here.

At the very moment that White Collar Crime is at a historic peak, in both absolute magnitude and also proportion of national output, the majority of both our population and our clueless politicians are ACTUALLY DISCUSSING further dismantling the USA, and thereby further enabling the Control Frauds, through steps like more deregulation, less governance, reduced public initiative, and more privatization of the public Commons, right down to private ownership of prisons and highways. We may as well cede the atmosphere to frauds and pay them rent so that we can breathe.

If return-on-coordination is always the highest return, by far .... then for our own sake less invest LESS in coordination? Werks fur mi!  And, it works exquisitely for the Control Frauds looting our increasingly uncoordinated nation.

Neighborhood Watch Programs Needed Everywhere, To Protect Citizens And Whole Communities From Rampant WhiteCollar Crime.

Commentary by Roger Erickson

What'd Teddy Roosevelt warn us about, 100 years ago?

"A man who has never gone to school may steal from a freight car; but if he has a university education, he may steal the whole railroad."

Yet here we are, 100 years on, still not listening. It's amazing that we regulate so much of our little, BlueCollar issues so well, and so thoroughly ...while refusing to regulate so much of the WhiteCollar activities which have far greater net impact on the general welfare of our people.

Here's just one of endless, random examples:

"DPNR officials called for a halt to the practice" of collecting used cooking oil from restaurants ... ? Oh my God!!! Stop them, quick, before they cause the unemployment rate to spike and the housing industry to collapse!

Meanwhile, we're arguing over whether to halt or even accurately assess the activities of banksters who just cost us ~$29Trillion dollars of OUR "diverted" investment! Not to mention that they DID collapse the entire, national housing industry.  Just a local issue? Nothing left to see? Move along?  Are you @#$%^&! kidding me?

Was this electorate born in a barn? Or is that just where they've ended up, through no fault of their own?

Let's see, for the people who "don't go to graduate school," we have DNR, FDA, CDC, EPA, building codes, parks & planning, zoning boards, etc, etc, etc - aka, BlueCollar regulation out the wahoo. We're adequately awash in local/state/federal agencies for regulating what Jane & Joe Sixpack do in their own communities.

So is there analogous WhiteCollar regulation out the wahoo? Far from it! And yes, deregulating WhiteCollar crime WAS a big deal. Those stealing a loaf of bread, or a song, are still regulated. Those stealing whole industries are NOT. Just another example of disparity in citizen rights. Some of us really are far more free than others, and it is NOT the Middle Class that's the equal beneficiary of Constitutional freedoms.

Simultaneously to us being highly regulated, too few are watching - too lazily - the far bigger activities of the merchant raiders pillaging any & all communities at will. For the unwashed, over educated elite, it's still easy to steal and privately own the whole damn railroad, national infrastructure, entire Congress, POTUS, or even the complete, national currency system!!!

What? There's already too little regulation of WhiteCollar activity excesses... by the SEC, Fed, DOJ, FBI, state/county/local-police, etc, etc - and even continued calls from the crooks themselves for EVEN LESS REGULATION? Ya think? So why is that?

Do we need some rebalancing? How about neighborhood watches everywhere, to protect citizens and whole communities from the rampant WhiteCollar crime, not just the petty BlueCollar crime.

Hey Jane and Joe. When is enough enough?

Isn't it time for a higher incidence of citizens arrests, of elite, White Collar, criminal Control Frauds, masquerading as Public Servants, Federal Agency Heads, Treasury Secretaries, Congresspeople and even WhiteHouse residents? Stop voting them in, and start indicting more of them instead. Tomorrow would be a good time to start.

Crime Doesn't Pay? (much?) Luckily, Control Fraud Is No Longer A Crime?

Commentary by Roger Erickson

World’s most lucrative criminal activities [supposedly]

this doesn't seem believable, but that's just my gut feeling.

pharma is only #5 ?

(weapons #7? hard to believe)

And, are they joking? White Collar Crime isn't even on the list?!!

(Lemme guess. Because it's no longer illegal?
 Then the TBTJ banking lobby should replace WCC on any honest criminology list.)

So why the hell would anyone want to export? Better have a REALLY good reason!

(commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

Is exporting better than just being a merchant preying upon neighbors, with no greater plan? Just a habit to feed? Not all merchants start that way, but habits can be addictive.

St. Louis Fed: Why external trade finance is critical to exporters.

In their own words, exporting is an "externality" that can easily cause as much distributed harm as personal benefit. To an organized community, trade is never free, and must always be intelligently managed.

How can merchants argue for both "free trade" AND export controls?

Depends on who's controlling the export markets! Go out and buy your own Congresspeople. (Ummm .. if we already own them, why are we selling them?)

Didn't some wag say that "The Financial Sector is a lot More Trouble Than It's Worth" (FSMTTIW)?

Planck & Boltzmann once argued that there are no absolutes, only probability functions.

So surely, over 90% of the time, the output of the FSMTTIW probability function indicates that the FSMTTIW? :)

Externality Merchants like the St. Louis FED lobbyists seem to be the only ones who don't think so! Surprise, surprise.

Here's an idea, have the FDA mandate that Externality-Snake-Oil be subjected to the same statistical burden of proof that pharmaceutical clinical trials are. Heck, then we could pay all the unemployed to participate in Financial Clinical Trials! (aka, White Collar Crime :( )

Pre-pay victims so that they can be robbed? Wotta concept! :(

That's rather like stocking private hunting ranges. :(

Is that how the 1% see the Middle Class?

Middle Class Looting - 2.0

(For the refined family, looking for exotic entertainment.

If you have to ask the price, you can't afford it.)

Capitalism, Exporting & Middle Class Looting Testimonials, available in your daily market report.
(Paying members receive guides, transport & all gear, including Golden Parachute rescue guarantees.)

Getting Away Koch Free: New Term Enters the Criminology Lexicon

commentary by Roger Erickson

Koch Brothers [ignored] for corrupting hiring practices at FSU and other Colleges

That's been some time back, and nothing's changed. When was the last time we saw that? The 1890s, when any professor still supporting Abe Lincoln's fiat "Greenback Dollar" could be fired from any faculty by - you guessed it - the banking lobby.

Criminals haven't gotten away Koch free with nationwide treason since ... well, since the last time this happened.  It's not a class war until the victims start fighting back.  Until then, it's only voluntary penitance.  Hint to citizens, it's the crooks who are supposed to be in penitentiaries.

Why Not Just Hire the Mafia?

commentary by Roger Erickson

And the Vatican Bank, .. and the Swiss & Putin as well ... .

Make it a "Standard Cartel" ?

Boris hires adviser to help protect City
"London's mayor Boris Johnson has hired Gerard Lyons, former chief economist at Standard Chartered, to bolster his economic team in the capital as he tries to maintain its position as the world's leading financial centre."

They want to be the world's leading center of White Collar Crime?

Does the UN have a White Collar Racketeering agency as big as UNICEF - to protect the 99% everywhere from lyin' crooks? No? Do the kids know about this? UNWCRA?

Is This What Pending Revolution Feels Like? A Transition, to Communicating Only With Those Not in Power?

commentary by Roger Erickson

How are we supposed to understand this?

"... the CBI calls on the Chancellor to stick to his austerity plans at the same time as firing up the lacklustre economy."

Same thing here in the USA. Orthodox economics has adopted Catch-22.

To sanely plan any investment in self or country, you have to quit reading the news?

Don't even bother communicating with the people in power, because they don't make any sense whatsoever, and are officially insane?

There are always some old fuddy duddies to ignore, but I don't recall the entire government being simultaneously insane, at least not in my lifetime. No idea about internationally coordinated insanity, but it's obviously not just a historical oddity.

Is this a bit what if felt like living under the Bolsheviks, or in 1929? General Butler was right, yet the short-term rackets continue to expand beyond just military adventurism, and always at the colossal expense of foregoing long-term growth. We could have been a great nation! Why squander public initiative by doing nothing, by practicing austerity?  It seems almost Neanderthal in scope, and brings one back to the implications of the Austerian Toolkit.

This is worse than "The beatings will continue until morale improves."

Now we have, "Keep a firm hold on our collar, to make sure the beatings get us moving."

Brings new meaning to the term "White Collar Crime."

Proliferating Control Fraud Owns Obama Adminstration

commentary by Roger Erickson

Sr. White Collar Criminals CONVICTED: 

  by Bush 1300+, 

  by Clinton 1000+, 

  by Obama 0.0 (+/-)

The Bush and Clinton administrations’ track records on prosecuting white-collar crime, and the Obama administration’s failure to do so, Schweizer said, is “evidence that this has less to do with some sort of partisan or philosophical issue.”

http://dailybail.com/home/convicted-bush-1300-clinton-1000-obama-00.html

http://dailybail.com/home/special-report-inside-the-department-of-justices-unprecedent.html

http://g-a-i.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/DOJ-Report-8-61.pdf

These posts say it all.  (hat tip Russ Huntley)

Julio Godoy — Bankers or ‘Banksters’?

European media, political leaders, and the citizenry are bashing bankers again, overtly calling them at best accomplices of numerous illegal activities, at worst downright criminals.

The best example of this new wave of anger against bankers is the use of the portmanteau word “bankster” (a combination of banker and gangster), which has become commonplace in media, even in non English-speaking countries.

The term, first coined in the 1930s during the Great Depression and which resurfaced in British media in 2009, appeared on the front page of the French daily Libération on Jul. 18.

Political leaders critical of banks have so far refrained from using the word but everyone else has been having a field day with it.
In a short white paper on banks’ policies released Jul. 21, the head of Germany’s leading opposition Social Democratic Party (SPD), Sigmar Gabriel, accused bankers of “blackmailing governments and states with the (threat) of domino bankruptcy”, of “complicity with criminal activities”, such as tax evasion and money laundering, and of “screwing their own clients”.

Even those commentators who dismissed Gabriel’s banker bashing as political populism agreed that the managers of international private financial corporations have recently done large disservices to their business and their clients.
The list of genuine grievances is long:

****
For independent economists, such delay in establishing new regulation of an obviously rotten industry is proof of the lack of political will among governments to get to the root of the crisis.
“Five years into the worst financial crisis in history, all attempts to regulate banks and funds remain dead letter,” French economist Paul Jorion told IPS. “Despite abundant evidence that (banks and investment funds) cheat all over, again and again, no new rule has been introduced.”

Instead, he added, “the European Union and governments continue to deregulate, pushing their own citizenry into abject misery.”

Read it at IPS | Inter Press Service
Bankers or ‘Banksters’?
By Julio Godoy

CR — Conviction: Fraud for Housing

Bill McBride quotes from "Unwinding the Fraud for Bubbles, which his co-author, Doris (Tanta) Dungey (d. 2008), wrote in early 2007 and in which she distinguished fraud for housing from fraud for profit. The bubble involved both. We are still working it out. So far, very few of the predatory lenders have been either investigated or prosecuted, although some of the "little guys" have. We're still waiting.

Read it at Calculated Risk
Conviction: Fraud for Housing

by Bill McBride

Randy Wray — Banksters, meet Rico

Read it at Economonitor | Great Leap Forward
Louisiana Sues Banksters Under Rico Laws: Will the Biggest Banks Finally Go the Way of the Gambinos?
by L. Randall Wray

Factoid: "Law in the state of Louisiana is based in part on civil law. Louisiana is unique among the 50 U.S. states in having a legal system partially based on French and Spanish codes and ultimately Roman law, as opposed to English common law.[1] Louisiana thus follows the system of most non-Anglophone countries in the world."