I would guess that if you're corrupt to begin with, no larger salary is
going to be big enough. Someone will always be there to bribe you with more.
Take a man/woman standing beside a large pristine lake. They not only
hold a decision-making position about the fate of the purity of that
lake, but they have also been given an offer from a corporate giant to
provide them with $10 million pounds hush money for their decision to
allow industrial activity that will ruin the lake over time.
Over such an issue, either they are the type who can be bribed, or they
are not. Future jobs aside, the decision maker is either pro-environment
or not, and determining this key criterion is in the hands of those who
hire, or perhaps elect. So, their election will depend on top government
officials in most cases. Who we want in those top government positions
are the ones we should most worry about. But look around. Who have we
got in charge?
Now, in the world of high finance, where ethics and morality take a
backseat to profit, it's too often relative to a person's particular
beliefs. Some would not possibly be tempted by a bribe involving wilful
lake pollution, but may well be tempted by a bribe to look the other
way, or overlook, a bankster's crimes because not only will they
personally benefit, but they feel that no one will really suffer from
the criminal activity. Inability to realize the consequences and the
grief they will facilitate is a weak defence, if any, though it's
possible in a few situations. But there is no excuse for the key
players, the masterminds. Their prosecution is a matter of political
will--from the top.
Reasons for lack of political will? Fear, sure. At the core--corruption.
Natalia
On 17/02/2013 8:25 AM, Keith Hudson wrote:
Gangster-bankers are not too big to jail. Nor are banks too large not
to be slammed into administration if necessary. Governments will never
do their job properly (that is, looking after ordinary folk) until
senior politicians and civil servants are paid a great deal more than
at present (in order to avoid corruption by richer folk).
Keith
At 17:25 16/02/2013, D & N wrote:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/gangster-bankers-too-big-to-jail-20130214
*Gangster Bankers: Too Big to Jail*
*How HSBC hooked up with drug traffickers and terrorists. And got
away with it*
by Matt Taibbi <http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog>
February 14, 2013 8:00 AM ET
The deal was announced quietly, just before the holidays, almost like
the government was hoping people were too busy hanging stockings by
the fireplace to notice. Flooring politicians, lawyers and
investigators all over the world, the U.S. Justice Department granted
a total walk to executives of the British-based bank HSBC for the
largest drug-and-terrorism money-laundering case ever. Yes, they
issued a fine -- $1.9 billion, or about five weeks' profit -- but
they didn't extract so much as one dollar or one day in jail from any
individual, despite a decade of stupefying abuses.
People may have outrage fatigue about Wall Street, and more stories
about billionaire greedheads getting away with more stealing often
cease to amaze. But the HSBC case went miles beyond the usual
paper-pushing, keypad-punching sort-of crime, committed by geeks in
ties, normally associated with Wall Street. In this case, the bank
literally got away with murder -- well, aiding and abetting it, anyway.
Daily Beast: HSBC Report Should Result in Prosecutions, Not Just
Fines, Say Critics
<http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/07/18/hsbc-report-should-result-in-prosecutions-not-just-fines-say-critics.html>
For at least half a decade, the storied British colonial banking
power helped to wash hundreds of millions of dollars for drug mobs,
including Mexico's Sinaloa drug cartel, suspected in tens of
thousands of murders just in the past 10 years -- people so totally
evil, jokes former New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, that
"they make the guys on Wall Street look good." The bank also moved
money for organizations linked to Al Qaeda and Hezbollah, and for
Russian gangsters; helped countries like Iran, the Sudan and North
Korea evade sanctions; and, in between helping murderers and
terrorists and rogue states, aided countless common tax cheats in
hiding their cash.
"They violated every goddamn law in the book," says Jack Blum, an
attorney and former Senate investigator who headed a major bribery
investigation against Lockheed in the 1970s that led to the passage
of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. "They took every imaginable
form of illegal and illicit business."
That nobody from the bank went to jail or paid a dollar in individual
fines is nothing new in this era of financial crisis. What is
different about this settlement is that the Justice Department, for
the first time, admitted why it decided to go soft on this particular
kind of criminal. It was worried that anything more than a wrist slap
for HSBC might undermine the world economy. "Had the U.S. authorities
decided to press criminal charges," said Assistant Attorney General
Lanny Breuer at a press conference to announce the settlement, "HSBC
would almost certainly have lost its banking license in the U.S., the
future of the institution would have been under threat and the entire
banking system would have been destabilized."
It was the dawn of a new era. In the years just after 9/11, even
being breathed on by a suspected terrorist could land you in
extralegal detention for the rest of your life. But now, when you're
Too Big to Jail, you can cop to laundering terrorist cash and
violating the Trading With the Enemy Act, and not only will you not
be prosecuted for it, but the government will go out of its way to
make sure you won't lose your license. Some on the Hill put it to me
this way: OK, fine, no jail time, but they can't even pull their
charter? Are you kidding?
But the Justice Department wasn't finished handing out Christmas
goodies. A little over a week later, Breuer was back in front of the
press, giving a cushy deal to another huge international firm, the
Swiss bank UBS, which had just admitted to a key role in perhaps the
biggest antitrust/price-fixing case in history, the so-called LIBOR
scandal, a massive interest-raterigging conspiracy involving
hundreds of trillions ("trillions," with a "t") of dollars in
financial products. While two minor players did face charges, Breuer
and the Justice Department worried aloud about global stability as
they explained why no criminal charges were being filed against the
parent company.
"Our goal here," Breuer said, "is not to destroy a major financial
institution."
A reporter at the UBS presser pointed out to Breuer that UBS had
already been busted in 2009 in a major tax-evasion case, and asked a
sensible question. "This is a bank that has broken the law before,"
the reporter said. "So why not be tougher?"
"I don't know what tougher means," answered the assistant attorney
general.
Also known as the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, HSBC
has always been associated with drugs. Founded in 1865, HSBC became
the major commercial bank in colonial China after the conclusion of
the Second Opium War. If you're rusty in your history of Britain's
various wars of Imperial Rape, the Second Opium War was the one where
Britain and other European powers basically slaughtered lots of
Chinese people until they agreed to legalize the dope trade (much
like they had done in the First Opium War, which ended in 1842).
A century and a half later, it appears not much has changed. With its
strong on-the-ground presence in many of the various ex-colonial
territories in Asia and Africa, and its rich history of
cross-cultural moral flexibility, HSBC has a very different
international footprint than other Too Big to Fail banks like Wells
Fargo or Bank of America. While the American banking behemoths mainly
gorged themselves on the toxic residential-mortgage trade that caused
the 2008 financial bubble, HSBC took a slightly different path,
turning itself into the destination bank for domestic and
international scoundrels of every possible persuasion.
Three-time losers doing life in California prisons for street
felonies might be surprised to learn that the no-jail settlement
Lanny Breuer worked out for HSBC was already the bank's third strike.
In fact, as a mortifying 334-page report issued by the Senate
Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations last summer made plain, HSBC
ignored a truly awesome quantity of official warnings.
In April 2003, with 9/11 still fresh in the minds of American
regulators, the Federal Reserve sent HSBC's American subsidiary a
cease-and-desist letter, ordering it to clean up its act and make a
better effort to keep criminals and terrorists from opening accounts
at its bank. One of the bank's bigger customers, for instance, was
Saudi Arabia's Al Rajhi bank, which had been linked by the CIA and
other government agencies to terrorism. According to a document cited
in a Senate report, one of the bank's founders, Sulaiman bin Abdul
Aziz Al Rajhi, was among 20 early financiers of Al Qaeda, a member of
what Osama bin Laden himself apparently called the "Golden Chain." In
2003, the CIA wrote a confidential report about the bank, describing
Al Rajhi as a "conduit for extremist finance." In the report, details
of which leaked to the public by 2007, the agency noted that Sulaiman
Al Rajhi consciously worked to help Islamic "charities" hide their
true nature, ordering the bank's board to "explore financial
instruments that would allow the bank's charitable contributions to
avoid official Saudi scrutiny." (The bank has denied any role in
financing extremists.)
(snip--part 1 of 4)
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