Criminal law, Justice, Politics

Just Fine: Don’t Bank on the Justice Department to Prosecute Big Banks

DeptofJusticeSubmitted by Elaine Magliaro, Guest Blogger

Last December, I wrote a post titled You Call This Justice? DOJ Criticized for Its Settlement with “Too Big to Jail” Bank HSBC. It appears that the US Justice Department isn’t too keen on bringing criminal charges against ANY wealthy bankers—not just those who work for HSBC, a huge international bank that has knowingly laundered money for drug cartels and murderers. The unethical shenanigans of the banksters of Wall Street that led to the near collapse of the US economy and to a recession don’t seem to merit jail time for the perpetrators—just a slap on the wrist and a fine.  No individual fines are paid though. The mega banks pay the fines and the banksters continue to go about their business…and continue to earn hefty salaries and bonuses.

At “Wall Street Reform: Oversight of Financial Stability and Consumer and Investor Protections,” the first Banking Committee hearing attended by Senator Elizabeth Warren (D, MA), Warren asked bank regulators how tough they really are on the biggest financial institutions on Wall Street and about the last few times they actually took any banks all the way to a trial.

A few weeks ago, Bill Moyers sat down with Matt Taibbi to talk about the HSBC settlement, UBS and the Libor Scandal, Lanny Breuer, Mary Jo White, and the revolving door in Washington, D.C.

Not long after Taibbi’s appearance on Bill Moyers’s program, his article on HSBC , Gangster Bankers: Too Big to Jail, was published in Rolling Stone.

Quoting from Taibbi’s article:

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.

Taibbi added that the Justice Department’s recent $1.9 billion settlement with HSBC was the big bank’s “third strike.”

In late January, PBS aired a Frontline program titled The Untouchables. The following day, David Sirota of Salon wrote about the program. Sirota called it a “stunning report” that exposed how the Obama administration deals with the malfeasance of the bankers on Wall Street.

Quoting Sirota:

PBS Frontline’s stunning report last night on why the Obama administration has refused to prosecute any Wall Streeter involved in the financial meltdown doesn’t just implicitly indict a political and financial press that utterly abdicated its responsibility to cover such questions. It also — and as importantly — exposes the genuinely radical jurisprudential ideology that Wall Street campaign contributors have baked into America’s “justice” system. Indeed, after watching the piece, you will understand that the word “justice” belongs in quotes thanks to an Obama administration that has made a mockery of the name of a once hallowed executive department…

The piece by PBS reporter Martin Smith looks at how Obama has driven federal prosecutions of financial crimes down to a two-decade low. It also documents the rampant and calculated mortgage securities fraud perpetrated by the major Wall Street banks, who, not coincidentally, were using some of the profits they made to become among President Obama’s biggest campaign donors.

As we see, that campaign money didn’t just buy massive government bailouts of the banks, a pathetically weak Wall Street “reform” bill or explicit reassurances from Obama’s campaign that the president would refrain from criticizing bankers. Frontline shows it also bought a Too Big to Jail ideology publicly championed by the white-collar defense lawyer turned Obama prosecutor Lanny Breuer.

I recommend watching Frontline’s The Untouchables. It’s nearly 54-minutes long. Here’s the link:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/untouchables/

SOURCES & FURTHER READING

Gangster Bankers: Too Big to Jail
 How HSBC hooked up with drug traffickers and terrorists. And got away with it (Rolling Stone)

Justice Department’s New Get-Tough Policy Is, Well, Not (Rolling Stone)

Choice of Mary Jo White to Head SEC Puts Fox In Charge of Hen House (Rolling Stone)

Are banks too big to jail?: PBS Frontline’s stunning report shows how the Obama administration undermined the rule of law (Salon)

Why Mary Jo White is the wrong pick for the SEC (CNN Money)

Jack Lew and the Obama Administration’s Finance-Friendly Status Quo (The Daily Beast)

Assistant Attorney General Lanny A. Breuer Speaks at the New York City Bar Association–Thursday, September 13, 2012 (The United States Justice Department)

109 thoughts on “Just Fine: Don’t Bank on the Justice Department to Prosecute Big Banks”

  1. Many stocks have tripled, quadrupled or more. Time to sell some but not all stocks and bonds.

  2. I will sell just like I did in 2008 before the crash. Actually have been selling some lately that I bought in 2009. Buy low sell high. lol

  3. SWM,

    Inflation at under 2.5% a year? Do you know what is meant by a black swan event? You will get to keep your stocks and bonds.

    Do you know that banks are legally allowed to use money in your checking and savings accounts to cover their losses? The FDIC? How much money do they have?

  4. A lot of opportunities have been lost waiting for hyper-inflation to occur. Inflation is running under 2.5% a year. I would rather ride the wave up with stocks and bonds and switch to interest bearing accounts if inflation does occur at a later date.

  5. Swarthmore mom
    1, March 5, 2013 at 11:11 am
    But it sure helps the 401k.
    ==========================
    Not when the stock and bond markets both crash. Or there’s hyperinflation and the purchasing power of your retirement plans is only about 10% of what you expect it to be worth.

  6. “And even if the Dow were a better index — if it were more like the S&P 500, say — the stock market generally has been disconnected from the broader economy for quite a while.

    Nothing illustrates this quite as well as the yawning gap between the job market’s recovery and the stock market’s recovery. The Dow has recovered all of its recession losses, gaining 119 percent from its low in March 2009. That makes this the third-strongest bull market for the Dow since World War II. In contrast, the job market is still in a deep hole, recovering only 5.5 million of the 8.7 million jobs lost during the recession.

    In other words, the third-best stock-market rebound since World War II has been accompanied by the worst labor-market recovery since World War II.

    With the job market weak, worker wages have stagnated. Inflation-adjusted average income is 8 percent lower than in 2007, when the Dow was at its previous high, notes Quartz’s Matt Phillips. Nothing illustrates the disconnect between regular people and the stock market than the chart above, showing how profits and stocks have skyrocketed together, leaving hourly earnings in the dust.

    Higher stock prices do benefit the wealthy and wage-earners who own stock in their retirement plans. That could bolster the mood of consumers, which could benefit the economy. But after two stock-market crashes in the past 13 years and technological glitches like the Flash Crash of 2010 and the botched Facebook IPO, investors could be skeptical that the good times will last. That makes them less likely to run out and spend a bunch of money at the first sign of a stock-market high. If they have any extra money to spend, that is.” Huffington Post

  8. ap, Not everyone with a 401k is comfortable. -Swarthmore mom

    True, I wasn’t clear,…, but those with 401(k) accounts are often in better shape than those without.

    I still contend, quoting Mother Mary Jones, that the comfortable need to be afflicted. Maybe then, we’ll have a fighting chance…

    Many people are much too comfortable.

  9. ap, Not everyone with a 401k is comfortable. Some only have a couple thousand dollars in it. Won’t go too far in retirement…..

  10. Swarthmore mom,

    Yep, and that’s one of the problems, IMO. The comfortable are not sufficiently afflicted (using the words of another).

  14. Forgot to note that that’s Matt Taibbi’s column. His words, of course, not mine.

  15. Fallout from ‘Untouchables’ Documentary: Another Wall Street Whistleblower Gets Reamed

    by Matt Taibbi

    March 4, 2:31 PM ET

    http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/fallout-from-untouchables-documentary-another-wall-street-whistleblower-gets-reamed-20130304

    A great many people around the county were rightfully shocked and horrified by the recent excellent and hard-hitting PBS documentary, The Untouchables, which looked at the problem of high-ranking Wall Street crooks going unpunished in the wake of the financial crisis. The PBS piece certainly rattled some cages, particularly in Washington, in a way that few media efforts succeed in doing. (Scroll to the end of this post to watch the full documentary.)

    Now, two very interesting and upsetting footnotes to that groundbreaking documentary have emerged in the last weeks.

    The first involves one of the people interviewed for the story, a former high-ranking executive from Countrywide financial who turned whistleblower named Michael Winston. You can see Michael’s segment of The Untouchables at around the 4:20 mark of the piece. The story Winston told during the documentary is essentially an eyewitness account of the beginning of the financial crisis.

    When I spoke to him last week, Winston was still as amazed and repulsed by what he saw at Angelo Mozilo’s crooked subprime mortgage company as he was when he worked there. Winston, who had worked for years at high-level positions at companies like Motorola and Lockheed before joining Countrywide in the 2000s, described a moment in his first months at the company, when he rolled into the parking lot at the company headquarters.

    “There was a guy there, a well-dressed guy, standing next to a car that had a vanity plate,” he said. “And the plate read, ‘FUND’EM.'”

    Winston, curious, asked the guy what the plate meant. The man laughed and said, “That’s Angelo Mozilo’s growth strategy for 2006.” Here’s how Winston described the rest of the story to PBS – i.e. what happened when he asked the man to elaborate:

    “What if the person doesn’t have a job?”

    “Fund ’em,” the – the guy said.

    And I said, “What if he has no income?”

    “Fund ’em.”

    “What if he has no assets?” And he said, “Fund ’em.”

    Later on, Winston would hear that the company’s unofficial policy was that if a loan applicant could “fog a mirror,” he would be given a loan.

    This kind of information is absolutely crucial to understanding what caused the subprime crisis. There are people out there still willing to argue that the government somehow “forced the banks to lend” to unworthy applicants. In reality, it was unscrupulous companies like Countrywide that were cranking out loans en masse, knowing that these loans would be unloaded down the line, first to banks and then to sucker investors like pension funds and foreign trade unions, almost as soon as they were created.

    Winston was a witness to all of this. Eventually, he would be asked by the firm to present false information to the Moody’s ratings agency, which was about to give Countrywide a negative rating because of some trouble the company was having in working a smooth succession from one set of company leaders to another.

    When Winston refused, he was essentially stripped of his normal responsibilities and had his corporate budget slashed. When Bank of America took over the company, Winston’s job was terminated. He sued, and in one of the few positive outcomes for any white-collar whistleblower anywhere in the post-financial-crisis universe, won a $3.8 million wrongful termination suit against Bank of America last February.

    Well, just weeks after the PBS documentary aired, the Court of Appeals in the state of California suddenly took an interest in Winston’s case. Normally, a court of appeals can only overturn a jury verdict in a case like this if there is a legal error. It’s not supposed to relitigate the factual evidence.

    Yet this is exactly what happened: The court decided that the evidence that Winston was wrongfully terminated was insufficient, and then from there determined that the “legal error” in the original Winston suit against Bank of America and Countrywide was that the judge in the case failed to throw out the jury’s verdict:

    In short, having scoured the record for evidence supporting the jury’s verdict on the issue of causation, we have found none. It follows that the trial court erred in denying defendants’ motion for judgment notwithstanding the verdict.

    “I was flabbergasted,” Winston says now. “Think of all the hard work the jury did, and [the court] overturns it just like that.”

    While it’s impossible to say just exactly what a fair financial award should be for a person who reports bad corporate activity to the public, it’s certainly true that when these whistleblower suits end in failure, it has a chilling effect on other people thinking about coming forward. Not many people are willing to risk their jobs if they think it will cost them every last dime in the end. This is just one more example of how hard it is for whistleblowers to come out even, even if they win jury trials.

    That decision came down on February 19th, and is the first of the two interesting post-Untouchables footnotes.

    The other involves some of the comments made by the head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, Lanny Breuer, who said (as he has on other occasions, including after the recent non-prosecutions of HSBC and UBS for major scandals) that his Justice Department has to weigh the financial consequences of bringing prosecutions. Quoting from the PBS show, Breuer explained:

    But in any given case, I think I and prosecutors around the country, being responsible, should speak to regulators, should speak to experts, because if I bring a case against institution A, and as a result of bringing that case, there’s some huge economic effect — if it creates a ripple effect so that suddenly, counterparties and other financial institutions or other companies that had nothing to do with this are affected badly — it’s a factor we need to know and understand.

    When Breuer said that, it raised a serious red flag on the Hill. A number of people in positions of power wanted to know just what “experts” people like Breuer had consulted with before deciding not to press charges in certain cases. Iowa Republican Senator Chuck Grassley and Ohio Democrat Sherrod Brown, specifically, sent Attorney General Eric Holder a letter asking a number of questions.

    Among other things, the two Senators wanted to know if certain companies had been designated “Too Big to Jail.” Then they had a series of very obvious and reasonable questions about those “experts”:

    4. Please provide the names of all outside experts consulted by the Justice Department in making prosecutorial decisions regarding financial institutions with over $1 billion in assets.

    5. Please provide any compensation contracts for these individuals.

    6. How did DOJ ensure that these experts provided unconflicted and unbiased advice to DOJ?

    Well, at the end of last week, on February 27th, the Department of Justice sent Brown and Grassley a letter in return. The letter is, to describe it very generously, not terribly informative.

    Most of the letter is just a long list of the many wondrous accomplishments the DOJ has secured under Eric Holder’s watch, including felony manslaughter convictions against BP, or “fraud convictions for a board member of Goldman, Sachs,” or the ongoing LIBOR investigation, or the prosecution in the Stanford Ponzi case. But the rest of the letter totally ignores the Brown/Grassley questions, particularly on the matter of which experts were and are being consulted.

    On those questions, the DOJ would say only that “it is entirely appropriate for prosecutors to hear from subject matter experts at relevant regulatory authorities” and that . . .

    When the Department consults with relevant regulatory authorities, or hears from companies who are targets of the Department’s investigations and their counsel regarding potential collateral consequences of enforcement actions, neither those agencies nor the target companies receive any compensation from the Department.

    That is one hell of a slippery piece of language. It’s great that the Department of Justice is not paying, say, HSBC to consult with them on the question of whether or not HSBC should be prosecuted. What a relief! But that doesn’t mean they’re not paying someone else for that kind of advice.

    The DOJ similarly blew off naming any individual experts and they refused absolutely to turn over information about any compensation they may have paid out to whomever it is who is whispering in their prosecutorial ears.

    The two Senators late last week issued a blistering answer to the DOJ letter, saying, “the Justice Department’s response is aggressively evasive,” and that “the Department’s only clear response was that it speaks to regulators and the banks themselves.”

    The Department of Justice is now saying that it misunderstood the two Senators, that it didn’t know that they were asking for the actual names of those experts. Moreover, the Department claims it is working on answers to those queries.

    In the meantime, Eric Holder is appearing before the Judiciary Committee this Wednesday, and it will be interesting to see how he handles questioning from Senator Grassley. It may get ugly before the answers actually come out, but it seems that someone is finally determined to get some real information.

  16. Inequality, Capitalism and a Nation of Men
    02/26/2013
    Bruce Judson (Author, “It Could Happen Here”; Former Senior Faculty Fellow, Yale School of Management)
    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bruce-judson/inequality-capitalism-and_b_2761207.html

    Excerpt:

    John Adams famously sought to create “a government of laws and not of men.” Sadly, I suspect John Adams would be disappointed in the nation today. Increasingly, the application of the law reflects what Adams feared: It depends on who the men or women are rather than what they have, or have not, done.

    A central principle that is necessary for the rule of law, as well as a successful capitalist economy, is embodied in the statues that stand outside many courthouses. They portray Lady Justice with a blindfold. Justice is blind, and every person–rich or poor, mighty or not– stands before the court on an equal basis.

    Within this framework, the court applies the law without regard to the status of the defendant. The ideal of blind justice is a prerequisite for both a fair society and a vibrant capitalist economy. With all treated equally, buyers and sellers can rely on the courts to enforce their agreements: small businesses know that their agreements with large corporations and institutions of any size will ultimately be protected by the legal system. Contracts, declared immutable in the early days of the Republic under the Dartmouth College case, will be enforced. As a consequence, trade and production occur, while markets and commerce have the opportunity to flourish…

    Let’s not kid ourselves: the portrait painted above is, in many ways, a charitable portrait of the nation today. We now live in a society where the rule of law, confidence in the judicial system, a fair capitalist economy, and an essential public respect for the law is rapidly disappearing. Indeed, our largest financial institutions seem to break the criminal laws with impunity, and a two tiered system of justice has evolved. I believe John Adams would say he fought a revolution to prevent the type of society that is now evolving.

    Here are two examples. Unfortunately, my files contain dozens more:

    In the HSBC case, as Matt Taibbi recently wrote,

    “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.”
    Taibbi further notes:

    “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 …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.”

    There seems to be little question that the executives involved knew they were breaking the law. These executives assisted in the system that distributes massive quantities of prohibited drugs, which is also inevitably accompanied by violence and murders. The harm to our society was inestimable.

    Yet, no criminal prosecutions arose. No accountability (which is fundamental to a fair society and a capitalist system) was demanded. Instead, prosecutors used their discretion to settle for a fine.
    For our largest financial institutions, a new tier of justice has arisen: They break the law and pay a fine–which is typically a small cost of doing business as compared to the profits their otherwise prohibited activities generate.

    In contrast, how many people are now languishing in jail for drug related crimes that caused far less harm to our society? How much money could you or I launder without facing criminal prosecution?

  17. Senate Could Question HSBC ‘Too Big To Jail’ Case
    By MATTHEW MOSK
    Feb. 28, 2013
    http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/senate-question-hsbc-big-jail-case/story?id=18619660

    Excerpt:
    Months after Europe’s largest bank dodged a potentially crippling criminal prosecution for alleged money laundering, members of the U.S. Senate will have a chance to ask banking regulators whether some financial institutions really are too big to jail.

    Congressional sources told ABC News they expect treasury and banking regulators will be among those called to testify before the Senate Banking Committee next week for a hearing that could get at questions that have been swirling since December, when the Justice Department announced it would not prosecute London-based HSBC for allegedly helping Mexican drug gangs launder money.

    The decision not to prosecute HSBC came despite what attorneys there said was compelling evidence that the bank for years helped Mexican drug cartels move cash, concealed transactions involving rogue states such as Iran, and catered to clients alleged to have been involved in financing terrorist operations even after they had been warned to stop…

    Sen. Jeff Merkley, an Oregon Democrat, wrote to Attorney General Eric Holder to express his dismay at the decision, saying it “deeply offends the public’s sense of justice.”

    “I am deeply concerned that four years after the financial crisis, the department appears to have set the precedent that no bank, bank employee, or bank executive can be prosecuted even for serious criminal actions if that bank is a large, systemically-important financial institution,” Merkley wrote in the pointed, three-page letter.

    While the Banking Committee’s agenda for the hearing has not been released, advocates for banking reform said they are hoping the senators can begin to piece together how the Department of Justice reached the conclusion that the consequences of prosecuting the bank would damage the economy. One key question, they said, was whether officials from the Treasury Department put pressure on the Justice Department to settle the HSBC case.

    “I hope they demand all the memos, all the meeting minutes, open up the process,” said Jack Blum, a Washington banking expert. “The case is over now. There is nothing to be gained by keeping it secret. Let’s see what happened. The public has the right to now.”

  18. Sherrod Brown Teams Up With David Vitter To Break Up Big Banks
    By Amanda Terkel
    2/28/2013
    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/28/sherrod-brown-banks-david-vitter_n_2782665.html

    Excerpt:
    WASHINGTON — Multi-trillion dollar financial institutions continue to get richer, exerting more and more control over both America’s economy and its political system. The top 20 largest banks’ assets are nearly equal to the nation’s gross domestic product.

    Now, Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), along with unlikely ally Sen. David Vitter (R-La.), is launching an effort to break up the taxpayer-funded party on Wall Street.

    “The best example is that 18 years ago, the largest six banks’ combined assets were 16 percent of GDP. Today they’re 64-65 percent of GDP,” Brown said. “So the large banks are getting bigger and bigger, partly because of the financial crisis, partly because of the advantages they have.”

    The progressive Ohio senator sat down with The Huffington Post in advance of his Thursday speech on the Senate floor to discuss the need to address the “too big to fail” problem and the bipartisan support his work is attracting.

    “The system is such that the big banks have far too many advantages, bestowed in part by the marketplace, because investors understand and the market understands that government might in fact bail them out, so there is lower risk for investors, and that means that they can borrow money at a lower cost than anybody else can,” Brown said, explaining why small- and mid-sized banks are at a disadvantage.

    Brown and Vitter announced on Thursday that they were working together on bipartisan legislation to address this problem.

  19. GMason,

    I apologize. I was wrong. After reading all of Elaine’s articles and other bloggers’ views, I have come to the conclusion that “A Revolution without violence” is a great idea! Let me explain how it can be done:

    I was watching CNBC’s ‘Squawk on the Street’ and an economist had made 2 interesting points:

    1. He stated: “70% of our economy is dependent upon consumer spending: the more consumers (Main Street) go into their wallets or pursues, the more profits and bonuses Wall Street receives, and the more our economy continues to prosper”
    2. He stated: “Wall Street (Financial Institutions, in particular) make their ‘longest green” (most of their funds or money) off of interest: Interest from Main Street’s loans (home, auto, personal or private, student, payday, etc.) and credit cards.” In other words, Main Streets’ indebtedness provides for Wall Street richness.

    By we-the-people calling for Wall Street executives and board members (along with the Feds) to be punished, and then, we continue to maintain our indebtness to Wall Street, it is like the drug user blaming the drug dealer for selling the drugs to him. Just say NO!

    When I was a probation & parole officer, I used to tell drug users to stop blaming the drug dealer, and just say no (Before I tell them this, I would ask the drug user a series of questions: Did the drug dealer put a gun or use any type of force toward you, your family, or your friends to make you purchase these drugs? Drug User response: No; Did the drug dealer promise you a $1million if you purchase these drugs: Drug User response: No-some even laughed at this question, but you get the point. Finally, I would ask them: if you told the drug dealer no, what did he do. Drug User response: He would leave, and some would never come back). This scenario is same type of relationship, involving loans and credit cards, with Drug Dealer Wall Street (with the help of the Feds) and Drug User Main Street.

    If the we-the-people would ‘just say no’ to loans and credit cards, then we can change this country overnight. If we can make a 5-7 year plan to be debt free (and to stay debt free), and pass this message down to our children, and grandchildren, etc., then Wall Street and the Feds would have to change. What would happen to the housing market if no one wanted a home loan? What would happen to the automobile industry if no one wanted an auto loan? Colleges and Universities (and certain vocational schools) have huge endowments thanks, in part, to student indebtness. If students said no to student loans, colleges and universities would have to change their way of doing business (Free Higher Education, like a few European Countries?). You can use the same scenario for personal and payday loans and credit cards.

    If the we-the-people would stop trying to “Keep up with the Joneses” (some people are using loans to do so), ‘live within our means’, or however-you-like-to-say-it, and just say NO! to passenger, Drug Dealer Wall Street and his buddy (Feds), driving the stolen vehicle, as we are walking to get on the Metro Bus and/or Metro Link or starting up our $5k car (used our tax refund to buy it or money we saved up) while we are pulling off our driveway from our home (that we purchased for $5k at a housing auction).

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