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

[hippifried]

Capitalism = exclusionary Socialism

Pooling resources is pooling resources, irrespective of the designer label that's supposed to make specific thoughts on methodology into the work of the deified or the damned. The whole argument is over who gets to bark orders at everybody else. You don't have to do that if you have a better (or just good) idea to start with.

We need a complete rethink!

[fivekatz]

While we wait for that complete rethink of how we organize as societies, we still should hold corporations as accountable as we do individuals in society when they break laws and game the system to detriment of society.

Take JP Morgan for those that think HSBC's laundering of drug money is not worthy of prosecution rather than a fine, that for this bank was a speeding ticket.

JP Morgan's recent history of deception and fraud is a decade long. JP Morgan was responsible for helping Enron as far back as 2000 in defrauding Enron shareholders and most recently their CEO LIED to shareholders about the Whale transactions to keep his stock price pumped. And the Whale transactions took place after the great meltdown, removing any doubt that the bank knew that these were super risky transactions.

Why take such risk? Because there is virtually no recourse when you do. Your too big to fail, too big jail and it seems in Jamie Dimon's case, too big to fire no matter how badly you mismanage risk. And if Dimon did get fired he'd likely get a $30M parachute.

The system is broken and for all Timothy Geithner wanted no part of what he called Old Testament Justice, until some of these banksters and their institutions are held legally accountable for breaking laws they will continue to do so because there is virtually no risk and incredible reward.

[an8150]

[quote=Stavros;1298418]

a) I am not a Communist;
b) blame by association is a difficult one, you disavow a connection to the worst excesses of capitalism, yet you think you can attach blame to me for the excesses of the Russian Revolution, the mass murder in the Ukraine in the 1930s, Pol Pot, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and presumably the 'Troubles' in Northern Ireland; name your atrocity. To the extent that we did not completely detach ourselves from the UK in the last 50 years or so, how innocent and guilty are we of the deaths that occurred -in Northern Ireland, in Iraq, Afghanistan? I didn't vote for Thatcher, so am I free of blame for the atrocities committed by British soldiers against Argentinians captured in the Falklands in 1982? There were many Germans who fought against the Nazis throughout the Third Reich, yet German responsibility cannot be undone by the heroics of a few, it is the fact that Germans have had to reconcile themselves to; otherwise an adherence to Adorno's judgement would be collective and permanent silence:
After Auschwitz, all European culture is garbage.
c) Truth and Reconciliation -the painful process of admitting the facts that hurt, in the hope of moving on. I supported some causes in the 1980s I regret now, but I did it and I am the one who has to live with that memory.
d) your indifference to the impact of poverty on those who fail is frankly unworthy of a civilised society.
e) and there was an extreme nationalism in the ideology of both the USSR and the People's Republic of China, incompatible with international socialism -you surely must have heard of the risible concept of 'Socialism in one country'??

Just out of curiosity, how, then, do you define yourself (assuming you do so at all)?

And where have I expressed indifference to poverty? Did I not say, in one of my earliest posts that I was not dismissing such concerns, rather that I was arguing that the statist and collectivist cure is worse than the disease?

[an8150]

[quote=Stavros;1298418]

a) I am not a Communist;
b) blame by association is a difficult one, you disavow a connection to the worst excesses of capitalism, yet you think you can attach blame to me for the excesses of the Russian Revolution, the mass murder in the Ukraine in the 1930s, Pol Pot, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and presumably the 'Troubles' in Northern Ireland; name your atrocity. To the extent that we did not completely detach ourselves from the UK in the last 50 years or so, how innocent and guilty are we of the deaths that occurred -in Northern Ireland, in Iraq, Afghanistan? I didn't vote for Thatcher, so am I free of blame for the atrocities committed by British soldiers against Argentinians captured in the Falklands in 1982? There were many Germans who fought against the Nazis throughout the Third Reich, yet German responsibility cannot be undone by the heroics of a few, it is the fact that Germans have had to reconcile themselves to; otherwise an adherence to Adorno's judgement would be collective and permanent silence:
After Auschwitz, all European culture is garbage.
c) Truth and Reconciliation -the painful process of admitting the facts that hurt, in the hope of moving on. I supported some causes in the 1980s I regret now, but I did it and I am the one who has to live with that memory.
d) your indifference to the impact of poverty on those who fail is frankly unworthy of a civilised society.
e) and there was an extreme nationalism in the ideology of both the USSR and the People's Republic of China, incompatible with international socialism -you surely must have heard of the risible concept of 'Socialism in one country'??

And as to your response on blame by association, you're comparing apples and oranges. A blood libel (as David Irving [sometimes I like being provocative; attaboy!] would call it) is different from an allegation against co-believers, for the obvious reason that we can choose our beliefs but we cannot choose our relatives: you can dissociate yourself from the communism that killed tens of millions, you are, however, in some way related to those Britons whose acts you disapprove of.

[an8150]

In my view the catastrophe of communism, which you rightly say led to the death of millions was inspired by a desire and impulse to make the world a better place. That it failed was a disaster - in part one whose integuments reach into our modern age. The death of a profound form of idealism and hope.

The free market's victims, and those of capitalism, are less visible or easily numbered. They suffer not in labour camps or behind barbed wire, but in sweat shops and factories around the world where capital finds way to employ children and others on poverty wages. They suffer where those in need, the old, the sick and the unemployed, are forced out of any social safety nets because free market capitalism demands all social services and things such as the NHS come under the sway of business rather than the state.

So lots of people being killed is, indeed, a good reason to reject a system, but so too should we reject a philosophy that leads to an increase in the poor and wretched of the world, and a callous creed that makes profit and money the prime and central totem of its vision - along with the so-called freedoms of the free market philosophy.

If your concern is for the poor and wretched of the world, then deprecating the best system yet devised for lifting them out of their benighted condition seems, to me at least, an odd thing to do. Bleed all you like about children on poverty wages (whatever that may mean), but take away those wages and you have... starvation.

[an8150]

It is like one of those doctrinal disputes that split the Communist movement in the USA about whether not Cuba is communist (hence the emergence of the Sparts), or whether or not America is capitalist. My past associations with the 'left' makes me culpable for every death since the Russian Revolution, if not before that; and it doesn't matter what I say. For his part, an8150 wants to be recognised as a 'free market capitalist' which means being of such an elite band of misunderstood visionaries, he is thereby exempt from all the associations with mass murder linked to the spread of capitalism since 1400 -which is why with such intrusive government and taxes, the USA, with or without Reagan, is not a capitalist country....

A neat reply, up till the point (not for the first time) you subtly exchange 'free market capitalist' for 'capitalist'.

I wish to be recognised as a free market capitalist. Nothing else (at least, not in the present debate).

And in our simplicity, we're not nearly as interesting all those spartacists and mensheviks and anarcho-syndicalist and wotnot. Sure, we have differences of opinion, and some are significant, but once you get on board with the non-aggression principle everything else pretty much falls into place.

[fivekatz]

"Free markets" have created some of the worst scams and economic destruction of the many for the benefit of the few through out modern history.

"Free markets" allowed Goldman-Sachs to sell toxic bundles of debt to their customers as though they were AAA bonds and then bet against those same bundles. Because it was "free" / unregulated, opaque activity investors had no idea that investment was shit, that AIG had insured so much of the shit that if it failed they could not payoff and that Goldman has invested in SCDOs that bet that the product they sold to that investor was shit.

That is typical of dark, unregulated markets. Unregulated markets will sell rancid meat as fresh, employ 10 year olds, manipulate markets and do anything they can to make a buck with as much concern for the victims as a serial killer has for his victims.

Private enterprise is good but in absence of rules it can and has historical done great harm to the masses. And few examples are greater than what the financial industry has done to the world economy through credit default swaps in an opaque unregulated market. They have injured millions of people and even nation states. They are far more dangerous and criminal than the pot smokers incarcerated through out America in privatized prisons.

[Stavros]

[quote=an8150;1308503]

Just out of curiosity, how, then, do you define yourself (assuming you do so at all)?

And where have I expressed indifference to poverty? Did I not say, in one of my earliest posts that I was not dismissing such concerns, rather that I was arguing that the statist and collectivist cure is worse than the disease?

I am not like you: I am not comfortable in slots; and I don't wear badges.

[Prospero]

I find myself in firm agreement with Stavros regarding self definition.

[an8150]

[quote=Stavros;1308691]

I am not like you: I am not comfortable in slots; and I don't wear badges.

I see. You're a moving target.