If State’s Attorney Jerry Brady was U.S. Attorney General, common sense might prevail in the Justice Department and more banking gangsters – “banksters” – would be prosecuted for their crimes.
May 1 is Law Day, and this month is a great time to consider common sense and law enforcement.
Brady exhibited an appreciation for both late last month when he declined to prosecute the people accused of creating a short-lived Twitter account that purported to be Peoria Mayor Jim Ardis through satirical, even stupid, comments seen by a few dozen followers.
The account– @peoriamayor, shut down by Twitter – didn’t violate the “false personation of a public official” law, said Brady, whose decision came the day after dozens of people attended the City Council meeting to join council members in criticizing Ardis and city police for overstepping common sense.
Ardis defended his getting judges to OK warrants for information from Twitter and Comcast and for a police raid on the satirist’s home, where electronic devices were seized and the only arrest was for a 36-year-old resident who allegedly possessed a small amount of marijuana.
“This guy took away my freedom of speech,” Ardis told the Journal Star.
Actually: No.
Nothing impeded Ardis’ First Amendment rights. It was the mayor who did that, stopping someone from creating a parody of a public figure.
That leads to a second point. Ardis wasn’t “drafted” to serve as an elected official. He volunteered. And that has consequences, such as giving up some privacy – like public school employees’ pay being disclosed, like government at all levels taking action in public, and making available to citizens various records, from raising revenues to spending tax dollars.
Then, there’s the overreaction by Ardis, city legal advisers and police. The mayor could have confronted the satirist/smart aleck and asked him to tone it down; he could have laughed it off as the foolishness it was; or he could have ignored it.
Ignoring REAL crimes, on a federal level, has become ridiculous for white-collar offenses in general and Wall Street movers and shakers in particular.
Unlike the Ardis episode, this is serious.
In 1958, when Republican President Dwight Eisenhower established Law Day, he said, “The world no longer has a choice between force and law. If civilization is to survive it must choose the rule of law.”
But Wall Street and its banksters are choosing force – the force of influence, intimidation and economic power that has both Democratic and Republican regulators and law enforcement officials cowering or biding their time until they can be hired by the companies they should be investigating now.
While people accused of nonviolent drug offenses, shoplifting etc. face incarceration, most white-collar criminals since 2008’s financial meltdown have avoided prosecution for their destructive, if complicated, acts –much less prison.
Investigative reporter Matt Taibbi wrote the new book “The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap” and said, “If you’re going to put people in jail for having a joint in their pocket or for slinging dime bags on the corner in a city street, you cannot let people who laundered $800 million for the worst drug offenders in the world walk.”
According to a recent report from the American Civil Liberties Union, 3,278 U.S. inmates face dying in prison for minor, nonviolent offenses. Meanwhile affluent and influential banksters provoke memories of the Woody Guthrie lyric, “Some will rob you with a six-gun, and some with a fountain pen.”
These greedheads got rich(er) while gutting the life savings of the innocent and wrecking the economy.
Yes, there were real victims of the financial crash, and they were hurt not just by “bad business” decisions. Crimes like fraud were committed.
“Issuing a mortgage that is known to be based on false information and then selling it in the secondary market is fraud and punishable by time in jail,” said economist Dean Baker. “Packaging loans into mortgage-backed securities that an investment bank has good reason to believe are based on false information is also fraud.”
But such fraud allegedly was committed by the powerful. The six largest banks (Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo) dominate the financial sector, accounting for more than two-thirds of the sector’s assets, according to Fortune magazine.
“The financial sector still wields excessive control over the economy, the big players have grown even bigger, and the regulators have been systemically emasculated,” wrote journalist Michael Hiltzik in the Los Angeles Times, adding that merely fining the perpetrators “leaves the wrongdoers in place, primed to find new markets to game.”
But Attorney General Eric Holder came from New York’s Covington & Burling law firm, which has represented most of the big banks. That’s probably the origin of the Justice Department’s business-
oriented mindset to negotiate and reach a settlement instead of nabbing and trying suspects in courts of law.
So: JP Morgan was fined $2 billion for its involvement with Ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff. And for the incident Taibbi alluded to, HSBC admitted laundering $850 million for two drug cartels, in Mexico and South America, with links to Russian gangs and even Al Qaeda, and was fined $1.9 billion. Sure, some of its executives had to defer bonuses for five years (“not give them up, DEFER them,” Taibbi said), but no one faced a trial or jail time.
Last May Holder suggested to the Senate Judiciary Committee that some banks are too big to control.
“I am concerned that the size of some of these institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult for us to – to prosecute them,” he said. “If you do bring a criminal charge, it will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy.”
But slowly, common sense may be inching into the arena of banksters and regulators.
In January, New York federal Judge Jed S. Rakoff in an essay for the New York Review of Books dismissed federal prosecutors’ excuses. The public rationalization, Rakoff wrote, is that such cases are difficult overall, hard to prove that victims relied on the claims the banksters made, and could hurt the economy
“To a federal judge, who takes an oath to apply the law equally to rich and to poor, this excuse –sometimes labeled the ‘too big to jail’ excuse – is disturbing, frankly, in what it says about the department’s apparent disregard for equality under the law,” Judge Rakoff wrote.
Instead, he added, it’s not unreasonable to speculate that the government itself was involved – complicit, if not responsible.
Elsewhere, the Bank of America’s mortgage-serving unit lied to homeowners, according to six former employees and a contractor, who gave sworn statements in a federal lawsuit filed in Massachusetts. Also, James Kidney, as he retired from the Securities & Exchange Commission, said regulators are afraid to hold Wall Street accountable. And in Detroit, federal Judge Miriam Cedarbaum in March denied Goldman Sachs’ request for the dismissal of a civil suit accusing the bank of misleading a pension fund about mortgage-backed securities.
The government’s failure to prosecute was not common sense; it sent a signal that it’s taking a “hands off” approach, which doesn’t remove the incentive to do it again.
Who should be held accountable?
If a law’s broken, someone should face the legal consequences. Responsible people – those in charge – profited from a criminal enterprise and they should be treated at least as harshly as a wise-ass with Internet access.