In 2008, the Bush and Obama administrations both argued that they had a duty to transfer more than $700,000,000,000 of American taxpayers’ money to the largest banks in the country, because these banks were “too big to fail” and allowing them to collapse would do much more harm than a mere $0.7 trillion subsidy.
Continue reading “New Sanders bill: If a bank is too big to fail, it’s too big to exist”
Tag: the divide
Obama’s legacy: eight years of not holding executives criminally responsible for their companies’ misdeeds
The most remarkable criminal justice story of 2017 is that the FBI has arrested a real corporate criminal, a VW executive who tried to engineer a coverup of the Dieselgate scandal, and that he might go to jail — it’s remarkable because the Obama administration spent eight years resolutely not sending criminal executives to jail, preferring instead to let their corporations buy their way out of criminal sanctions with huge fines, a doctrine pioneered by Obama Attorney General Eric Holder back when he worked for Bill Clinton’s administration. But while Clinton rejected this idea, Obama put it into practice.
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Goldman Sachs will pay $5B for fraudulent sales of toxic debt, no one will go to jail
No one at Goldman Sachs will go to jail despite the company’s world-destroying, multi-billion-dollar frauds that culminated in its unloading billions’ worth of worthless mortgage-backed securities on its customers just before the crash.
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Captured: a book of prison inmate drawings of CEOs and other too-big-to-jail criminals
Jeff Greenspan and Andrew Tider are two artists who spent more than a year working with prisoners to identify CEOs who presided over terrible crimes without any personal penalties, and paired convicts with CEOs, commissioning portraits of the rich people whose impunity protected them from the inmates’ fate.
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Fellowships for “Robin Hood” hackers to help poor people get access to the law
New York City’s Robin Hood Labs at Blue Ridge Laboratories have opening for paid fellowships to develop apps and technologies to give low-income people legal assistance in civil proceedings, like evictions, debt collection, and immigration procedures.
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Elizabeth Warren’s new 1%: the percentage of fraudulent profits companies pay in fines
In Rigged Justice: 2016
How Weak Enforcement Lets
Corporate Offenders Off Easy, a 12-page booklet, Senator Elizabeth Warren documents corporations that were caught undertaking grossly fraudulent, highly profitable actions, and were made to pay a trivial fraction of those profits in fines — fines become a part of the cost of doing business, not a deterrent to criminal behavior.
Continue reading “Elizabeth Warren’s new 1%: the percentage of fraudulent profits companies pay in fines”
Small town sheriff buys tank: “the United States of America has become a war zone”
Rural counties across Indiana have been purchasing Afghanistan-surplus tanks with gunner turrets and heavy armour; most recently, it was Johnson County, whose Sheriff, Doug Cox, justified the purchase by saying, “The United States of America has become a war zone.”
The 55,000lb “mine resistant ambush protected” tank (MRAP) was a steal at $5,000 (original price: $733,000), part of a bizarro-world peace dividend from the Afghanistan and Iraq drawdown, which sees the toolsuite of a military occupying force being flogged at knock-down rates to macho shithead sheriffs across the American heartland for deployment against American civilians.
For example, Johnson County SWAT used their MRAP to break up a fight between two drunks, and in Morgan County, the requisition for their MRAP said it was to be used for a variety of purposes, including “drug search warrants and felony arrest warrants.” By and large, counties acquiring these tanks have no formal policy about when and how they can be used.