It amazes me constantly, the judgment that our government, and other westernized governments, apply to countries that aid and abet corruption. We demonize them, we publicly eviscerate them for their behavior, we have applied sanctions on the occasional country that has been an accomplice to crime.
It amazes me, because our government, and many like us, are the most hypocritical on the planet when it comes to policing our own house. Just last week, HSBC Bank was found to have laundered money for terrorists, banks with connections to terrorists (Saudi Arabia's Al Rajhi Bank), and drug cartels. So prolific and long standing were the laundering habits, that the Mexican cartels had long ago created specially designed boxes, whose dimensions were EXACTLY the measurement needed to pass the boxes through the teller windows without having to open them, allowing the cartel to pass hundreds of thousands of dollars a day quickly, and without inspection. The heads of HSBC are now known to have been complicit in these corrupt functions, sometimes facilitating the functions themselves.
If I had laundered so much as $100 for a friend, I would have the book thrown at me in our justice system. But HSBC criminals - and let's say it way out loud, leaving no doubt - THEY ARE CRIMINALS, in every sense of the word, are being slapped with a $1.9 billion fine, and no prosecution, in any capacity. They have been deemed "too important" to be disrupted in their management of the bank with criminal prosecution. I did not just make that up - the word "disrupted" was particularly galling to me. They claimed that criminal prosecution would have dire repercussions on the stability of the bank:
"Had the US authorities decided to press criminal charges, HSBC would almost certainly have lost its banking license in the US, the future of the institution would have been under threat and the entire banking system would have been destabilized."
Uh... what? Better put the hip-boots on, it's getting deep up in here. No one ever prosecutes the BANK when someone launders money, because it's not the bank that launders it. It's the people. Let's be clear about that. PEOPLE launder money. Banks are simply the mechanism. A bank has no way of knowing when money is illegal, it's simply an institution. We've never prosecuted a bank for laundering, we go after the guy who did the laundering. So when we say we are not prosecuting the bank, what we really mean is we're not prosecuting the people. No bank would destabilize because of a prosecution of criminals within the bank. Banks change CEOs, CFOs, CIOs, and upper management people all the time, without the banks crashing. That's all that would happen here. Prosecute the people involved, they lose their job, new people are brought in to replace them. Really not that complicated. But not for us - we make decisions in legalese that make it sound like we put a great deal of thought into this, when the simple reality is that these bankers are rich and connected. And our government doesn't put it's friends in prison, no matter what they do. We already know this to be true, with the obvious looking of the other way with the Wall Street bank brokers and managers who willfully broke the law in deceiving their own customers about the stability of funds they sold, while secretly executing credit default swaps, hedging their bets against the failure of those same funds. What did we do? Nothing. Spewed a lot of rhetoric, but ultimately, we bailed them all out with billions of dollars - that they kept and invested on their own, bolstering nice profits - and the subsequent bonuses that come with them - but not repaying any losses to the customers they swindled. Just the cost of doing business...
Our government has become one of the largest accomplices to white collar criminal conduct, yet no one holds anyone accountable for it. This is largely due to the fact that many of the people connected with these institutions transition into high level government positions. It's no coincidence that Goldman Sachs got away with a paltry fine for some of it's fraud - their former CEO, Henry Paulson, was Bush's Treasury Secretary. If you prosecute anyone, Paulson would have to be at the top of the list, since he was running things when all this began and, for what it's worth, Paulson's Goldman Sachs stock was valued at over $600 million when he became the Secretary. There's no way a Treasury Secretary is being prosecuted, if for no other reason than it indicts the federal government for their hiring of criminals for top tier positions - that will NEVER happen.
HSBC is just the latest in a long string of corruption that our government pats on the back and allows to operate unscathed. The $1.9 billion fine is about one month's revenue. The bank barely blinked at it, nor did their stock price. Just the cost of doing business. And so it continues...
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