Laundering $800 Mil in Drug $, How Did HSBC Execs Avoid Jail?

[trish]

It certainly seems these days that corporations are capable of attaining longer term goals than politicians who survive one campaign only to immediately glad hand for the next. Unfortunately for us, neither corporations nor politicians seem to be planning for our benefit.

That aside, suppose once again we could achieve a government that is capable of initiating and persuing long term projects with aims to improve and sustain quality of life, health care, transportation, clean air, viable energy. What projects and policies should we pursue? Can we know the road we choose to follow is the right one? How do we know too late that we chose the wrong road? Specifics are hard? But waiting and doing nothing is also chosing a road that may also become one-way.

Specifics are hard. In science there are calculable margins of error, but there is no absolute certainty. In policy matters, however, it is absolutely certain that you will have to tack and adjust your course as you go along. Yet, I think some general goals are easy to choose. If in some future U.S. the citizens enjoy clean air, have sufficient food and energy for their needs, have cheap and expert medical care for everyone who needs it, still thrive within a world that’s alive and teaming with biodiversity and not dying etc. etc., only future assholes will complain, “There’s not enough filth in the air and there’s too much food on my table!” I’m hoping our children, grandchildren and great grandchildren have reason to say, “Thank heavens they finally got it together to do something before civilization went over the edge! Let’s drink to our ancestors (clink).”

Informed legislation. Science. A little less greed and a little more empathy. A little less animosity and a little more goodwill. A lot less paranoia and a lot more reason. These are the things the U.S. (and I suspect the world) chiefly needs.

[fivekatz]

Trish, while corporations are able to survive longer than politicians most corporations and their leaders have incredibly short goals, they are committed to the next quarterly report and what that means to shareholder equity. If corporations had longer term goals, the largest financial corporations would have approached CDO and Synthetic CDO with far greater caution. The corporations that fed them shit mortgage paper never would have done it if they truly had 5 year - 10 year plans. But the shit paper made Countrywide and the like a lot of money every quarter. In the US shareholders expect not only consistent return but want it to double digit and have little interest in 5 year plans. It is capitalism's achilles heel and the core of what creates the boom - bust continuum that has marked the history of free market economies.

Our government is built upon a system of checks and balances and as it has grown it became a two party system.

At this point one party tries to create policy which balances the needs of business with the needs of the people and progressive thinking.

And one that focuses on the needs of business up to and including their quarterly results and builds policy that will gain them enough support to get elected to pursue that goal.

Both parties at the end of the day need a lot of corporate money to relevant and nothing the SCOTUS has done recently has made that issue less problematic, Citizens United may have failed to unseat Obama but there is no greater risk to republic as we have known it than the dual assumptions that money is speech and corporations are persons.

So while many of things that the current POTUS talks about like improving infrastructure, power grids and moving away from oil are in the long term interest of business as well as the nation, most of business stands against it because it will f'up next quarters report to the street. Even though their paying slightly higher taxes businesses would likely gain in the long run from the increased consumer spending that government jobs and government stimulus create, they stand against because it would f'up next quarters earnings report after tax.

So while it may appear that corporations have clear long term goals, the only goals that are really long term are those of influencing public policy so that their actions fro quarter to quarter will remain unfettered by any barriers even if those happen to be crash barriers on a windy road at the edge of a cliff.

[Stavros]

I agree with some but not all of the posts by Trish and fivekatz. I don't know about financial corporations, but in the extractive industries -petroleum, diamonds, gold, timber, base metals, phosphates, uranium etc, the need to maintan a healthy resources to reserves ratio means these businesses plan 50-100 years ahead and develop the technology to make exploration and production more efficient, but they still need a 'licence to operate' in foreign countries, which is where political obstacles can obstruct their progress; while reputation issues, particularly after accidents, can affect the share price. But if you look at the wave of mergers in the oil industry in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the targets were firms who had not planned well enough for the forthcoming decades, undermining the share price.
In the chemicals industry, forward planning is based in part on finding a new generation of drugs for known illnesses and diseases like cancer, and on copyright issues that aim to prevent the creation of 'generic' drugs at cheaper prices. These days, with advanced health care practitioners and health systems outside Europe and North America, the market for drugs has become fantastically lucrative given the relatively few firms that dominate the market.
In computing, where the pace of change seems to be at its fastest, cloud computing storage and the internet are planning for an entirely individualistic world in which you access your data and purchase products online -the collapse of HMV was due in part to it opening too many shops in the UK, but that is because a generation of people are not using shops to buy things -town planning in this context could become meaningless in the sense that Main St/the High St could be transformed into merely a string of restaurants and coffee shops. I don't know much about computing really, but I wonder how far the forward thinking of computing giants is away from what used to be sci-fi.

I was told the other day that within 50 years people will not own cars, but have 'users rights' and if they need a car go to a pick-up point to find a car for their journey and then return it afterwards, like the bicycles you can rent in London and other cities for a single journey.

In these instances, long-term planning for survival is more important than quarterly reports if the investors can see where the latest figures relate to the long term strategy; it is the reason they invest. On the other side of the coin, as I suggested, legislators are capable of wise long term decision making on those issues with long term significance, like the environment, but are more obsessed with short term opportunity than some in business.

I would feel more confident about the future if the contemporary class of elected politicians inspired me; they don't; in fact I think in the UK we have, intellectually, the weakest crop of politicians in my lifetime, and the weakest at the leadership level. I don't think any of them have a clue what science even does other than make the car and the fridge and the internet work. That may sound cynical but I think there is an absence of vision, although it is always true that the issues we face are urgent, and will always be urgent. But here we are with virtually no tigers and Rhinos left as naturalists warned decades ago; the mismanagement of water resources in parts of the world where reports were written on precisely this issue in the 1930s; and so on. But I agree also that sometimes the road taken leads nowhere. Perhaps we are doomed.

[Prospero]

Sadly I find myself wholeheartedly in agreement with the statement below by Stavros.

Gloomy for first thing on a Sunday morning.

"I would feel more confident about the future if the contemporary class of elected politicians inspired me; they don't; in fact I think in the UK we have, intellectually, the weakest crop of politicians in my lifetime, and the weakest at the leadership level. I don't think any of them have a clue what science even does other than make the car and the fridge and the internet work. That may sound cynical but I think there is an absence of vision, although it is always true that the issues we face are urgent, and will always be urgent. But here we are with virtually no tigers and Rhinos left as naturalists warned decades ago; the mismanagement of water resources in parts of the world where reports were written on precisely this issue in the 1930s; and so on. But I agree also that sometimes the road taken leads nowhere. Perhaps we are doomed."

[fivekatz]

The corporations have long term sketches but not plans.

The culture in the last quarter of the 20th Century literally created a culture within Western corporations openly called "pump and dump". The goal of CEOs and their fellows stakeholders is to pump the stocks value up as high as they can with short term positive financial indicators and then dump the stock at its peak.

The compensation paradigms of base salary plus large chunks of stock options sounds so theoretical appealing but in reality it creates pump and dump, whether it is Enron, Lehman Bros or BP we are talking about.

The politicians who have so little command of science and ask yourself how does a person achieve power in a capitalist system? If your entire business model was based on a non-renewable product that will cost more and more in the coming years and destroy the planet as we know it after you are dead, would you support an idiot who thought there really was something called clean coal and that trees made air pollution?

While Obama in the US is an outlier because he was able to raise so much money on his own, he is still very much in the pockets of the ruling elite and the ruling elite will tell their government sponsors when and if they are ready to stop selling technologies as futures (while we pollute in the meantime) and when to talk about more than cars and refrigerators.

[an8150]

[quote=Stavros;1280028]

but I don't see why your descriptions of Bedouin, etc. are any closer to the State of Nature - the natural condition of mankind, as you put it - than are mine. They're just different ways that different societies developed. So when you say that 'communism is the natural condition of mankind', I take you to mean that in the State of Nature everything is held in common. I agree that there are societies where that has happened, but I cannot see why that is any more natural a development upon climbing out of the primordial sludge than Ugg deciding that the frog he found is his. Take another example: studies of very young children suggesting that they sometimes share when there is no obvious gain to them in doing so. On the other hand, any parent of young children has witnessed in them the urge to acquire and to accumulate. I'd suggest that urge is even stronger where fundamentals such as hunger are at stake: if Ugg reckons he'll starve if he shares even a morsel with Grunt, then Grunt is on his own. A little further down the evolutionary tree, Ugg might start to consider the benefit to him of delaying satisfaction of his hunger by giving Grunt some frog, in return for Grunt's assistance slaying a sabre-tooth tiger. A primitive trade, if you will. Or maybe they'll Bedouin it up, who knows? ]

--You don't seem to be following my argument, in which the invention of private property as the foundation of modern socio-economic relations is an historical development. Within that concept are modes of behaviour such as competition, financial transactions, rent, debt and credit and so on. These were not common to human societies universally, and still today there are formal prohibitions on usury in some countries (whether they are held to or not is another matter). It is profoundly wrong to think that either Bedouin societies or South Pacific islanders lived in a 'state of nature' -the Hobbesian concept was derived from his experience of civil war, and the absence of government -there is no evidence that in the absence of government societies collapse into an orgy of violence, which is ironic given that your own dreamland has an absence of government, but you don't call it a 'state of nature'.

In fact, in the absence of government, societies will normally devise rules that seek to maintain peace. Amongst the Bedouin, for example, the practice of 'blood revenge' is viewed as pointless if every time someone from clan A is killed someone from the offending clan or tribe must also be killed -so property, usually in the form of camels, wheat etc are traded instead on the advice of tribal elders, as the property belongs to the tribe in common. You have also not considered the widespread existence in the Middle East and East Africa, of the 'moral economy' where, again in the absence of government, land was farmed for the benefit of the community rather than for markets. It was a way of ensuring that everyone participated in production, and received their fair share of the results. Indeed, the conflict between the moral economy of say, Kenya, was at the core of the Mau Mau conflict, just as both the Ottoman and later the British governments sought to replace the moral economy of Palestine and TransJordan with a market economy, which had already emerged in some parts of Palestine anyway; it was also common in parts of Lebanon and Syria. Critical to the transition are notions of efficiency, which the free marketeers argued was enhanced by market relations, and ownership, in which land farmed in common became private property, enriching some, impoverishing others: not all fields are as productive as others, and what once benefited all now benefited only a few. In Syria and Iraq, the commercialisation of agriculture through the creation of estates impoverished thousands and enriched a few, and was the source of much conflict both before the end of Ottoman rule and after it.

This means that in the absence of government, human societies will find ways of managing their relations to minimise violence and social disorder, which must be part of your Eden to Come; the problematic element has been the introduction of competition and market-led relations: on the one hand a driver of progress and change; on the other the cause of much misery, poverty and alienation -but you yourself admit there will be losers as well as winners; but you won't say what you will do with the losers.

[Oh, but I think it is when you say, 'private property is theft'. As it happens, that's long seemed to me a non-sensical formulation because it recognises the status and attributes of property - that ability to have it stolen - whilst presupposing property held in common, which by definition cannot be stolen. But that's incidental: if you believe private property is theft, then those items you 'value most' are either things you've stolen, in which case there's no moral bar to my taking them, or they're private property, properly meant, and I should get my hands of them.
--Marx's most radical challenge: money is the acme of private property, there can be no freedom until money is abolished -even the Bolsheviks couldn't handle that one.

How will you pay for welfare and other so-called entitlements, if you abolish money?

[an8150]

Obviously the size, wealth and power of the company determines how well it can ride out disasters.

So as a libertarian, how do you feel about copyright and patent protections?

I have no fixed views on copyright and patent protections. It's a subject hotly debated among libertarians, and I haven't arrived at a conclusion.

[an8150]

[quote=hippifried;1280344]

And here was my question: "So government can print as much money as it likes, with no ill effects?[?QUOTE]
Yes. I'll explain it one more time, since you & others have such a problem grasping the idea that money is just a barter simplification. Money's an abstract. It ain't real. It's created by whatever powers that be need to keep track of trade values of various merchandise that aren't directly related. For example: How many tons of sand is needed to trade for that cow, so you can swap it for the iron ore you need to make yourself a new knife? I, for one, am glad I don't have to go through that kind of BS anymore instead of just going to the knife store. Money can be anything. It could be gold, if people could be talked into carrying all that excess weight. It can be cigarettes in prison (Yes, money can be a consumable & still be stable.). Currency can be no more than slips of paper scrip & numbers in a ledger, which is what almost all money is today, worldwide. Money is created by debt, destroyed by payoff or charge off, & grows by the interest added. Yup, right out of thin air. The only reason to think that lending institutions don't need regulation is not understanding money in the first place.


Even though I'm not a farmer, I'm sure I could seem boorish to know-nothing upper class wannabes. It's probably just because I find the egoist cult, its demigod, & its followers so extremely stupid.

Actually, my question was whether you had asked yourself why, if as you say governments can just print money with no ill effects, your government doesn't just turn you all into billionaires overnight?

[an8150]

[quote=Stavros;1280285]

We are on the same ship, its called SS Capitalism, a system that has grown to global dominance since evolving along with (perhaps because of) the city states of Europe in the late medieval age. The moral economy tends to produce indifference in advocates of free market solutions precisely because it offers a verifiable alternative -in fact in many cases the option of a moral economy is deployed in a crisis -extended drought, famine, floods, etc, as a means of minimising the impact of such events; it is in fact a rational way of spreading risk and reward, but does require the prior belief that a village/community is such an entity and shares its values. Capitalists who promote individual self-interest enter this arena with a bag of tricks called lending, borrowing, rent, debt and in some cases have lent money to poor farmers in bad times, only to foreclose on the debt before it can be paid back, so that someone who subsisted on his produce must now pay rent on his own land to an absentee landlord. Free marketeers cannot understand how anyone would find this objectionable, regarding it as a transaction that both parties entered into knowing the risk even though one party was exploiting the downside of the other.

Rothbard, Hoppe, von Mises, only discuss morality when it is on their side, justifying rent, debt and credit; their historical interest may be in the value of currency, money supply, interest rates, industrial production and state intervention, but suggest that there is another moral dimension to economics and their eyes glaze over...as you wish, but you don't offer much insight into your brave new world.

Another dimension to economics? Are you coming over all Flat Earth Society on me?

Sure, you can order economic affairs on the primitive model of bedouin, and a variety of others but, and it's a big but, you'll have to do it a) by taking away those things I value most, and b) be willing to condemn humanity to poverty, starvation and the vicissitudes of a barter economy. Not that it hasn't been tried, but the body count racked up over the last century by your fellow travellers acting on the same impulse inspires confidence neither in your prescription nor in your much-vaunted concern for your fellow man.

[an8150]

Great point. Patents and copyright are indeed government intervention in the economy. So is a minimum wage law. And, well, child labor laws. I mean, a libertarian/fully free market paradise would consist of 10 year olds working down the coal mines.
Or we could go back to the 1880s where people worked 7 days a week and 10 to 15 hrs. a day.... I mean, would, say, the Kochs really have a problem with that???
I mean, that's a fully free market.... No restrictions, no government intruding on corporate space, as it were.

History of Child Labor:

http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/a...ry-child-labor

You must then be aghast whenever you hear a politician talk of preparing school children for their role in the 'national economy'. Those good little worker bees.