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Home  At Length Who Robbed the Bank?
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Who Robbed the Bank? |
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Written by James Preston Allen
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Friday, 17 April 2009 |
Just about every week I receive a slew of press releases from the Department of Justice touting the indictment, prosecution and/or conviction in a few of their prime cases. Once in a while you’ll see them in our “News Briefs” column. They range from exotic ponzi schemes, common Medicare fraud, tax fraud cases, and even human trafficking. But every once in a while, they arrest and prosecute an unfortunate bank robber. Now bank robbery isn’t quite what it used to be. The average modern-day stickup artist only gets away with paltry $12,000 or less and it’s a federal crime to boot, if you get caught. Fifteen to 20 years is a long time to spend in a penitentiary for that kind of money.
Fame and fortune hardly goes hand-in-hand any more either. In the old days, Jesse James or Pretty Boy Floyd became folklore legends by robbing the wealthy bankers and then sending off a car load of groceries to the needy families on relief or at least getting even with those damn Yankee railroad barons, who were seen as even bigger thieves than the bandits by the general population. Today, nobody is writing songs about Freddie the Freeway or Sweet-Tooth bandits. The really big bandits, like Bernie Madoff or Ken Lay of Enron fame certainly do grab the headlines but they are nobody’s folk heroes.
What’s even more annoying is that the really, really big bank robbers, the ones who actually own the banks, the insurance conglomerates, and hedge funds—the ones who are basically responsible for tanking our economy to the tune of billions, if not trillions of dollars—are getting off scot-free. Now this is what I call a stick-up job, and for the most part we don’t even know who these crooks are! Even more annoying than the size of their crimes and their seeming ability to remain anonymous is that because of the size of their institutional crimes, we are now obligated to bail them out merely to save ourselves. I’m not sure which is the bigger crime.
This all devolves down onto us citizens who pay taxes and vote, to a damnable choice between total economic disaster—à la the Great Depression—or a shared pain and suffering plan, raising taxes and cutting jobs. At least that’s how it’s presented to us. On May 19, those of us who vote will be posited with these worst of all choices. This is like a Pirates of the Caribbean dilemma, where we stand on a plank with a gun to our heads faced with the choice of dying by the bullet or swimming with the sharks. Most of us will take our chances with the sharks as opposed to the bullet.
Now the anti-tax, neo-Boston Tea-Bag folks are brewing a rebellion that is exclaiming the socialists are coming! Now I’m not sure who is really behind this group of tea-toting rebels, but socialism this is not. For the last 35 years, we have been sold on this Reaganomics concept of less government, less taxes and trickle-down economics equals prosperity for all. We have now seen the end result of such right-wing theories of deregulation of the financial markets promising the almost mythical belief that the “free market” will right itself. I have long been criticized for calling this wrong. Disaster is the word right next to crisis in understanding what needs to be done to correct this Great Recession. The cure is to re-regulate the capital markets, tax the Wall Street bankers at 35 percent, and to redistribute the earnings to the working class by way of reducing the taxes on their wages.
What we have seen over these last few decades is that while the rich have gotten way richer (just look at the million dollar compensation packages of the top CEOs), the working class average wages (adjusted for inflation) have remained flat. This has happened while those who can’t hide their incomes bear an ever-increasing burden of the civic debt. This, I assert is a robbery of the public’s pocket by the thieves who rob you with a ballpoint pen, rather than a six-shooter. Although today, it is by a computer and deregulated legislation.
The best example of this kind of heist was the deregulation and subsequent robbery known as the California energy crisis. Enron was the main culprit and the fact that they were ultimately prosecuted is of little solace since Ken Lay their CEO died before his appeals ran out and he could be sent to prison. Very little of the $30 billion in losses were ever recovered by the state, as Enron went bankrupt before they could be sued. This is the still unresolved problem with the California budget, which no one wants to address—and that includes even our Governator, who rode in on the coattails of reform to cure the state of mismanagement. The odd footnote to this scandal is that after Enron’s collapse it was AIG that went in to purchase their derivatives trading group to expand into this unregulated market that has now gone bust. What do we have to do to avoid going through these things twice?
Didn’t anyone see this coming? Yes, they did a decade before. Her name was Brooksley Born, Chair of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) in 1997. After suggesting that the government regulate this market, she was opposed by Clintonites Larry Summers and Robert Rubin, as well as Alan Greenspan. After her term expired in 1999, she was hardly going to be returned to the CFTC by Bush Jr. in 2001. In the end, what America deserves and what justice demands is that we ultimately hold those accountable who have robbed our banks, pension funds, and insurance plans the same as we would surely prosecute the common bank robber who passes the stick-up note to the teller. Fifteen to 20 years behind bars with financial restitution would not be too much to expect either.
Does the DOJ have a list of their top ten white-collar crooks that they can send me? Do you?
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