Mainstream Media Finally Awakens to the Fact that Big Banks Are Criminal Enterprises!

• Mainstream Media Finally Awakens to the Fact that Big Banks Are Criminal Enterprises! 
  by George Washington, via http://www.zerohedge.com/ 
  Alternative financial media have noted for years that:
  –
  – Fraud caused the Great Depression and the current financial crisis, and the economy will never recover until fraud is prosecuted 
  – Criminal fraud is the main business model adopted by the giant banks. See this 
  – Largely because they are out-of-control criminal enterprises, economy cannot recover unless the big banks are broken up.
  – The Obama administration has made it official policy not to prosecute fraud.  Indeed, the “watchdogs” in D.C. are so corrupt that they are as easily bribed as a policeman in a third world banana republic.
  – Instead of prosecuting, the government throws money at them 
  – As Nobel prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz noted years ago: 
  –
  “The system is set so that even if you’re caught, the penalty is just a small number relative to what you walk home with. The fine is just a cost of doing business. It’s like a parking fine. Sometimes you make a decision to park knowing that you might get a fine because going around the corner to the parking lot takes you too much time.”
  –
  Now – with the slap on the wrist of giant HSBC for laundering huge sums of drug money (the Guardian points out that “the sum represents about four weeks’ earnings given the bank’s pre-tax profits of $21.9bn last year”) – even the mainstream press is starting to catch on. The New York Times notes: 
  –
  Congressional hearings exposed weaknesses at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the national bank regulator. In 2010, the regulator found that HSBC had severe deficiencies in its anti-money laundering controls, including $60 trillion in transactions and 17,000 accounts flagged as potentially suspicious, activities that were not reviewed. Despite the findings, the regulator did not fine the bank. 
  –
  During the hearings this summer, lawmakers assailed the regulator. At one point, Senator Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma, called the comptroller “a lap dog, not a watchdog.”
  –
  read more!

end