US to allow spy agencies to monitor citizens' finances

RT: March 14, 2013

Washington is reportedly considering opening all US financial records to national intelligence agencies in order to prevent future crimes. Only the FBI has had unlimited access to such databases; other agencies had to file case-by-case requests.

The Obama administration is preparing legislation to enable the country’s numerous security and intelligence agencies to spy on the accounts of US citizens, Reuters has revealed. The scheme’s stated aim is to help to identify and track terrorist cells, expose money-laundering schemes, trace criminal syndicates and curb corruption.

"It's a war on money, war on corruption, on politically exposed persons, anti-money laundering, organized crime," Amit Kumar, the UN advisor on Taliban and a fellow at the Democrat-established Center for National Policy think tank told Reuters.

The plan, dated March 4, is in its early stages but appears to have no judicial obstacles, as US legislation does not prohibit the exchange of information between government bodies. However, human rights activists have already criticized the plan

The planning document obtained by Reuters that the US Treasury’s financial database, which previously was only fully accessible by the FBI, will soon be integrated with national criminal, intelligence and other databases to become accessible to “law enforcement, counter-terrorism agencies, financial regulators and the intelligence community.”

Today, the US Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) does not only collect data on clients of financial institutions, it also gathers reports of so-called ‘suspicious client activity’.

An estimated 25,000 financial institutions operating inside US territory – like banks, money transfer agencies, securities dealers and casinos – are obliged to report any activity considered suspicious, such as large (over $10,000) cash transfers, strangely account structures, computer hacking, counterfeiting and suspected money laundering.

The system is arranged so that if a bank is revealed to have not reported its clients’ suspicious activities, it risks of paying severe fines. Many banks err on the side of caution, and file reports on any activity deemed even slightly unusual: Every year, 15 million ‘suspicious activity reports’ are filed to the US Treasury, which allocates considerable resources to deal with them all.


If the Obama administration’s financial spy plan is enacted, US government agencies will have access to virtually all financial information on citizens or foreigners doing business in the US.

Currently, investigating a financial crime involves unraveling a tangle of evidence that could lead to a certain person, such as demanding a specific financial dossier from FinCEN. Once agencies like CIA, NSA or Counter Terrorism Center are allowed unrestricted access to FinCEN data, it would become possible for them to target an individual and arrest them for a crime for which they are not currently under investigation.

A US Treasury spokesperson vowed the agencies will adhere to safeguards outlined in both the Bank Secrecy Act and the US PATRIOT Act: “Law enforcement and intelligence community members with access to this information are bound by these safeguards.”

But Michael German, the senior policy counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, told Reuters that “the intelligence community simply ignores the rules” when it comes to how sensitive information is used.

German recalled Congress had refused to approve a similar plan a decade ago, but now “the guidelines were subsequently loosened… It’s in a black hole.”

‘Citizens caught up in financial crosshairs’


The new plan will do little in increasing the efficacy of “keeping America safe,” while potentially increasing, at least partially, the risk of an innocent or “wrongly-profiled” individual being caught through a misreading of banking information, Margaret Bogenrief, a founding partner of ACM Partners financial advisory firm told RT.

“The continued efforts to 'keep its citizens safe,' the US government seems be to struggling to walk that line between protection and invasion of American citizens’ privacy,” Bogenrief said. “More citizens could end up being caught up in the financial crosshairs.”

Considering that financial institution are already over-reporting on questionable activity this new plan of enforcement and power “almost guarantees an abuse, whether intentional or not,” she added.

The true unintended tragedy of this plan is that it won’t bring a significant increase in arrests of high-profile criminals, Bogenrief believes.

“Truly sophisticated criminals – whether they be members of organized crime, gangs, or terrorist groups – will already have the structures and teams in place that will assist these criminal groups in both skirting these rules and avoiding prosecution.”

The Obama administration’s financial spying plan is a shocking attack on personal freedom, independent journalist and founder of Wide Awake News, Charlie McGrath says.“Sold as an effort to stop international terror groups, the proposed measure pushes us ever closer to a complete Orwellian Police State where you are guilty without cause, evidence, or even accusation,” McGrath told RT.

Private Prison Corporations Are Modern Day Slave Traders

Wednesday, April 25, 2012 by Black Agenda Reportby Glen Ford


The nation’s largest private prison company, the Corrections Corporation of America, is on a buying spree. With a war chest of $250 million, the corporation, which is listed on the New York Stock Exchange, earlier this year sent letters to 48 states, offering to buy their prisons outright. 

To ensure their profitability, the corporation insists that it be guaranteed that the prisons be kept at least 90 percent full. Plus, the corporate jailers demand a 20-year management contract, on top of the profits they expect to extract by spending less money per prisoner.For the last two years, the number of inmates held in state prisons has declined slightly, largely because the states are short on money. 

Crime, of course, has declined dramatically in the last 20 years, but that has never dampened the states’ appetites for warehousing ever more Black and brown bodies, and the federal prison system is still growing. However, the Corrections Corporation of America believes the economic crisis has created an historic opportunity to become the landlord, as well as the manager, of a big chunk of the American prison gulag.

The attempted prison grab is also defensive in nature. If private companies can gain both ownership and management of enough prisons, they can set the prices without open-bid competition for prison services, creating a guaranteed cost-plus monopoly like that which exists between the Pentagon and the military-industrial complex.

But, for a better analogy, we must go back to the American slave system, a thoroughly capitalist enterprise that reduced human beings to units of labor and sale. The Corrections Corporation of America’s filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission read very much like the documents of a slave-trader. Investors are warned that profits would go down if the demand for prisoners declines. That is, if the world’s largest police state shrinks, so does the corporate bottom line. 

Dangers to profitability include “relaxation of enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction or parole standards and sentencing practices or through the decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed by our criminal laws." 

The corporation spells it out: “any changes with respect to drugs and controlled substances or illegal immigration could affect the number of persons arrested, convicted, and sentenced, thereby potentially reducing demand for correctional facilities to house them." At the Corrections Corporation of America, human freedom is a dirty word.

But, there is something even more horrifying than the moral turpitude of the prison capitalists. If private companies are allowed to own the deeds to prisons, they are a big step closer to owning the people inside them. Many of the same politicians that created the system of mass Black incarceration over the past 40 years, would gladly hand over to private parties all responsibility for the human rights of inmates. 

The question of inmates' rights is hardly raised in the debate over prison privatization. This is a dialogue steeped in slavery and racial oppression. Just as the old slave markets were abolished, so must the Black American Gulag be dismantled – with no compensation to those who traffic in human beings.

(Obviously, this is a worst-case scenario, but not only is it possible, it is the probable result if things keep going the way they've gone since the late 1970s. I'm holding out a tiny bit of hope that sane minds will prevail over the religious nuts, the corrupt greedy wealthy and their servant politicians, and those who either are so apathetic they don't care or so falsely optimistic, they think it can't get that bad. I'm hopeful, but I'm a realist and I believe it will get much worse before it gets any better. And any talk of a recovery is bullshit. We are in for a decade or more of darkness. I believe the forces of sanity and peace can prevail, but the path to propserity for all of us, winds through bitter darkness and despair. All of us won't make it to the other side, either, sadly. So, we shiver in expectation for what we must endure.--jef)

How will America look after the Collapse?
~ Gerald Celente

How will America look after the Collapse? America is going to collapse, not just financially, but also politically and societally. This is a mathematical certainty. In this video I outline the basic facts that make the utter collapse of the dollar inevitable. My purpose is not to scare you, but to motivate you to prepare. Are you prepared for the economic collapse of America? The unprecedented economic prosperity that we have enjoyed for decades is coming to an end. The world is becoming a very unstable place. The greatest debt bubble in the history of the world is about to burst. I hope that you are getting prepared for what is ahead.

The Crime of Punishment

The late Bill Stuntz was America’s leading thinker on criminal justice—and its hardest to categorize.
Lincoln Caplan

The Collapse of American Criminal Justice 

By William Stuntz • Harvard University Press • 2011 • 408 pages

Crime began to plummet in the United States more than 15 years ago, defying all predictions. It did so for nearly a decade. It happened in every part of the country and in every category of crime. While the rate of decline has leveled off in recent years, to many this social achievement has meant that the country need not worry about crime anymore: The problem has been solved. That view is wrong. In reality, the problem simply exists in two places most Americans (and the media) don’t often bother to look: in crime-ridden sections of cities where minorities live, and in the overcrowded prison system that gives America the world’s highest rate of incarceration. The good news masks an ever-worsening tragedy in criminal justice.

The black homicide rate across the nation is six times that of the white rate. Chicago’s Washington Square neighborhood is poor and close to 100 percent black. The city’s Hyde Park neighborhood is affluent and mostly white. The homicide rate in the first is 26 times that of the second.

The most compelling explanation for the different crime patterns for blacks and whites is the effect of the criminal justice system’s breakdown on poor young black men, who have continued to commit crimes at a high rate, including violent ones, especially against blacks, and who regard the system as dramatically unfair and unworthy of their respect. The rate of imprisonment among white men is the highest it has been in American history, yet the rate is seven times higher among black men.

America’s prison system is now studied largely because of its failure. The prison population is unsustainably high—petty offenders are locked away with hard cases, overcrowding makes conditions dangerous and unhealthy, and financial costs to states are through the roof. The last time the country significantly reduced them, however, in the 1960s and early 1970s, the rate of crime skyrocketed. Neither option is acceptable. So what do we do?

In his posthumously published book, The Collapse of American Criminal Justice, William Stuntz argues that reform today should involve putting more control over decisions about what and who should be punished—and for how long—in the hands of neighborhoods most hurt by crime and decimated by punishment. It should, he writes, involve many more cops on the street and many fewer convicts in prison.

But the book is less a blueprint for how to make things right than an explanation of what went wrong over the past century. Its value comes from seeing American criminal justice whole, in an elaborate analysis of a complex system, and challenging the theories of retribution and deterrence that lead to an emphasis on punishment and that have dominated thinking about the field for the past generation.

“Today,” Stuntz explains, “our cities are considerably more violent than before the great crime wave of the twentieth century’s second half, yet the nation’s imprisonment rate is quintuple the rate before that crime wave began. If punishment deters crime, we seem to be getting much less deterrent bang for the imprisonment buck than we once did. Add it all up, and the picture is quite different than the conventional wisdom allows.”

Stuntz’s thesis is that the misrule of politics has replaced the rule of law, with a ratchet of ever-expanding criminal laws giving boundless discretion to police and prosecutors, leading to a system that wrongly punishes too many poor young black men. When the law gives that much discretion, he writes, it stops functioning as law and instead becomes an assertion of power. The recent decline in crime is less a sign of success than of pathology. The encouraging numbers are misleading. They conceal devastating failure.

William Stuntz was one of the most influential and revered legal scholars of his generation, by acclamation the country’s leading thinker about criminal justice. His 25 years as a scholar, first as a law professor at the University of Virginia, then at Harvard, began when crime was a highly politicized issue and ended (tragically early—he died of cancer at the age of 52 in March) when crime had seemingly ceased to be an issue at all.

He developed an original, sweeping, and brilliant understanding of his field, which he sought to synthesize in this work. Three highly respected legal scholars to whom his book is dedicated—Carol Steiker and Michael Klarman of Harvard Law School and Daniel Richman of Columbia Law School—shepherded the essentially finished volume through production and into print after his death. While he co-authored a shelf full of respected textbooks about criminal law and criminal procedure, this is his only book for a general readership. It is his masterwork. The book is written in direct, energetic, and forceful prose, without stinting on nuance. It is a form of purposeful history, with close analyses of Supreme Court cases and doctrine; crime data by race, class, and geography; the workings of American politics at the national, state, and local levels; the interplay of legal, political, economic, and social forces; and attention to seminal documents of law and governance, especially the Constitution and its Bill of Rights.

The Collapse of American Criminal Justice is at once a far-reaching indictment and a vision tinged with hope. Stuntz was concerned with how to make sure that the criminal justice system charges and convicts those who deserve punishment while reducing the share of people caught in it who are innocent. He was convinced that “criminal punishment is both too severe and too frequent” and that “legal condemnation is a necessary but terrible thing—to be used sparingly, not promiscuously.” His biggest idea is that criminal justice can only be understood—by non-experts as well as experts—through a grasp of the interactions among its major elements. By showing that the division between criminal law (the elements of crime the government must prove to convict a defendant) and criminal procedure (the steps a police officer must follow to interrogate a suspect) that is respected by most scholars is in fact artificial and misleading, he demonstrated the benefits of approaching the field as a whole.

The history of criminal procedure, he showed, was “not really about procedure at all but about substantive issues, about what conduct the government should and should not be able to punish.” The most important change in this area came in Miranda v. Arizona, the landmark 1966 ruling requiring police, under the Constitution’s guarantee against self-incrimination, to give suspects taken into custody warnings about their right to remain silent and to call a lawyer, because that intimidating situation is likely to make a suspect feel he must talk. The purpose of Miranda was to give every defendant the opportunity to protect himself in the criminal justice system, not just wealthy suspects with access to skilled lawyers who could help make a case that a confession was coerced and therefore involuntary.

But the effect of Miranda was the opposite, Stuntz contended: The new rules gave suspects who could afford a skilled lawyer a “right to avoid police questioning altogether.” That was about one-fourth of criminal suspects. As for the other three-quarters, the warnings afforded few of them protection, because they didn’t understand what the warnings meant or, if they did, had no access to anyone who could enforce them. As long as the police could show they gave the warnings to the other three-quarters, they easily induced most suspects to waive their rights. Stuntz’s criticism underscored that, without provision of criminal defense lawyers for the poor, Miranda had much less beneficial impact than it promised.

Stuntz was a registered Republican and considered himself a conservative, and his reputation as such was buttressed by some truly conservative positions (for instance, he favored forms of profiling after the September 11 attacks). But it was more important to Stuntz that he appeal to both liberals and conservatives than that he be identified as either. The distinctiveness of his outlook was reinforced by his keenness to make his evangelical Christian faith part of his identity as a scholar. His best-known article about the role of Christian ideas in law suggests that Christianity’s most significant lesson in the face of the “arrogance” of contemporary legal theory is the faith’s “humility” about how hard it is to find definite answers to fundamental questions. His humility sometimes gave his writing the tone of an elegy.

Stuntz writes, “Discretion and discrimination travel together.” The percentage of adults who are black, white, and Latino using illegal drugs is roughly the same (10 percent, 9 percent, and 8 percent, respectively), but blacks are three times more likely than Latinos to do prison time for drug crimes and nine times more likely than whites. Why? The misrule of politics, according to Stuntz. Specifically, the misrule results from suburban voters in counties having a lot of say in who gets elected as prosecutors in the urban areas where serious crime is concentrated. As Stuntz writes, prosecutors “are usually elected at the county level” and “counties that include major cities have a much higher percentage of suburban voters than in the past.” Think here, for example, of Fulton County, Georgia, or of Wayne County, Michigan, both so much larger than Atlanta and Detroit, respectively, that they even include some rural stretches. In other words, it is voters for whom crime is largely an abstract problem who exercise sway, while residents for whom the problem is real have less power.

The disappearance of the jury trial symbolizes this shift. Almost all felony criminal convictions today—96 percent—come from guilty pleas obtained by prosecutors elected with the support of suburban voters, not from verdicts reached by juries drawn from residents in areas where crime is concentrated. The system, in Stuntz’s words, has become an “arbitrary, discriminatory, and punitive beast,” which is undemocratic in vesting decisions about punishment in those who aren’t part of the community where those being punished live. Stuntz’s main remedies for this include putting more cops on the street, making more lawyers available to represent criminal defendants, letting local rules about sentencing prevail, and shifting responsibility between local and state governments for who pays for local police and state prisons.

More cops would mean fewer prisoners and more robust local democracy. More lawyers for criminal defendants would mean better-prepared cases, fewer coerced pleas, and more reliable outcomes. Letting local rules about sentencing prevail would reduce the severity and the racial disparity in sentencing, and, with judges presiding over this phase, reduce the power of prosecutors. Shifting responsibility for payment, by having local governments pay a larger share of prison costs and a smaller share of local police costs, would give them an incentive to sentence fewer prisoners—and remove a disincentive from hiring more cops.
 
Stuntz was troubled by “institutional design and incentives” in criminal law and politics that push toward ever harsher rules and sentences. Power over criminal law is allocated to the three branches of government—the legislature makes it, the executive branch enforces it, and the judiciary interprets it—but they are not checks on one another in this sphere. In fact, legislators and the executive branch’s prosecutors both benefit from “more and broader crimes”: Legislators get more power when they define crimes more broadly because they reduce the role of judges in deciding who is guilty; and prosecutors have more power because they have more discretion about what and how to prosecute. As a result, legislators and prosecutors tacitly cooperate with each other, leading to both more law and less: more on the books, and less on the street, in the sense that the laws are so broad the police and prosecutors get to decide whom to go after and find guilty. Those decisions are about power. In the “rule of too much law,” Stuntz advises, “too much law amounts to no law at all.”

His solution to this set of problems is to replace the vicious cycle that creates them with a virtuous cycle based on cultivating a relationship between those who break the law (or are tempted to) and those who enforce it. For most of the twentieth century in the Northeast and Midwest, the ratio of police officers to prison inmates was two to one. Today, it is less than one to two. “More than any other statistic,” Stuntz writes, “that one captures what is most wrong with American criminal justice.” More cops mean more deterrence. More deterrence means fewer arrests and fewer convictions. In the 1990s, New York City had the biggest drop in urban crime during the decade. It also had the biggest increase in its police force.

Another important component would be fewer prisoners. This would require reducing the severity of sentencing, which is now “more punitive than Russia’s,” reducing the discrimination that contributes to blacks outnumbering whites among prisoners, and reducing “excessive prosecutorial power”—which is “unchecked by law and, given its invisibility, barely checked by politics.” And too much power for prosecutors doesn’t mean there are enough of them: Stuntz calls for many more, so there are more lawyers to litigate cases and the pressure on them to obtain plea bargains is alleviated. That would also require more money for public defenders to represent defendants in court.

A more drastic aspect of his reform vision would be sweeping changes in criminal laws—defining more crimes vaguely so courts would need to resort to jury trials to decide who was guilty. This would excuse from liability for the most serious offenses the least guilty members of a group of criminals and would even allow some guilty defendants to claim that, though their conduct fit the definition of a crime, it wasn’t so “wrongful” that it merited punishment. This would mean “constitutionaliz[ing]” much of basic criminal law, by asking courts to define its boundaries instead of legislators and prosecutors—and giving courts more power when many perceive them to have too much power already.

This unlikely element of his vision is also the most inventive. Stuntz contends that the Warren Court, instead of fixating on procedures addressed in the Bill of Rights, could have focused on equality as called for in the Fourteenth Amendment. In case after case where it settled on a procedural solution, the Court could have insisted that a black defendant who was plainly treated differently and less respectfully than a white defendant be guaranteed the equal protection of the laws. He called for the Warren Court to do what its conservative critics have usually attacked it for: to take an approach to constitutional reform that was “less legally grounded, more intuitive than lawlike.” This would surely have been lambasted as extreme judicial activism. But Stuntz believed that the Warren Court did not go far enough. He was a conservative who criticized the liberal Warren Court for its conservatism because he was convinced it would have been better for the justices to take a radical path.

The United States of the years right after World War II is unrecognizable in major ways because of changes wrought by the Warren Court. Landmark decisions it rendered about racial equality, school prayer, voting rights, and freedom of the press, as well as criminal justice, made our democracy more inclusive, more representative, more tolerant, and better informed, not to mention fairer to people accused of crimes.

But Stuntz wanted more. His hunger for more justice and mercy and, as a result, less crime and punishment made his work great. In this brave book, as contrarian as it is utopian, he constructs a powerful explanation about the vast and costly failure of the American criminal justice system and why the quest to reform it must be a high priority. He left an inspiring model of how.

Will the Banksters Walk Away from Their Crimes?

Although the financial crisis that swept the world may have started on Wall Street, it has brought down governments and shredded economic security worldwide.
By Danny Schechter, AlterNet
Posted on January 26, 2011

All over Europe and in much of the rest of the world, a new fictional hero has engaged the fascination of millions of readers. His name is Mikael Blomkvist, and he’s the protagonist of the late Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy.

These thrillers, set against the background of high financial crimes and misdemeanors, have become global best-sellers, doubtless in part owing to their gripping plots, elaborate mysteries and engaging characters. But their success is also indisputably a by-product of the macroeconomic chicaneries of our era and the human catastrophes they have wrought.

Larsson understood that financial crimes are far from victimless. They have upended millions of people’s lives, even if most of the victims don’t understand how they’ve been shortchanged and who is responsible.

Although the financial crisis that swept the world may have started on Wall Street, it has brought down governments and shredded economic security worldwide, resulting in the loss of millions of jobs and homes as businesses collapse, foreclosures grow, credit tightens and communities are devastated.

Estimates of the damage run into the trillions.

The Pew Economic Policy Group reports the average U.S. household lost $66,000 in stock holdings and $30,000 in real estate values from June 2008 through March 2009 due to the upheaval in world markets. This brings us close to $100,000 per family.

Against that backdrop, it’s not hard to see the appeal of Larsson’s hero Blomkvist, whose “contempt for his fellow financial journalists” the author encapsulates with stinging clarity:

“A bank director who blows millions on foolhardy speculations should not keep his job. A managing director who plays shell company games should do time…. The job of the financial journalist was to examine the sharks who created interest crises and speculated away the savings of small investors, to scrutinize company boards with the same merciless zeal with which political reporters pursue the tiniest steps out of line of ministers and members of Parliament.”

This is why I identified with Blomkvists’s fictional mission; in some ways it captured my own frustrations in a media world for which “the c-word” — as in financial crime— seems must never be spoken.

The media failed us on the most crucial story of our era.

Our newspapers and TV sources contributed to an economic disaster so cynically engineered even billionaire investor Jim Chanos was prompted to ask, “So where are the perp walks? How long does it take before we see any investigations? It boggles the mind that $150 billion is vaporized…there haven’t been any arrests, any indictments, nor any convictions at any major bank or at any of the government-owned financial institutions Fannie, Freddie and AIG.”

I know how hard it is to alarm the public with mere facts. They don’t have the context within which to interpret complicated stories. In 2006, I released the film In Debt We Trust, exposing illegal subprime scams and warning of the coming meltdown. It was well reviewed, but no mainstream TV outlet would air it.

I was dismissed as an alarmist and a “doom and gloomer.” A mass denial of the dangers ahead seemed to be embedded in the euphoria of the very bubble that was bringing in billions for Wall Street’s financial alchemists, who themselves seemed oblivious to the risks and indifferent to the social impact their practices courted.

The media coverage has made a complex reality deliberately complicated, even incomprehensible. The satirical paper The Onion put the financial press in its place regarding the totally obtuse reporting for which financial journalists were justly infamous even before the biggest scoop since 1929 fell into their laps:

“JPMORGAN CHASE ACQUIRES BEAR STEARNS IN TEDIOUS-TO-READ NEWS ARTICLE.”

The Onion witheringly characterized the coverage as “bogging down the news for anyone who might be remotely interested in grasping what the fuck is going on.”

Yet there were truth-tellers out there who were largely ignored. Investors like Warren Buffett compared the new exotic financial instruments to weapons of mass destruction — financial nuclear bombs.

Even guru of the right Ayn Rand had warned in Atlas Shrugged about greed destroying her beloved free market: “When you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you — when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice — you may know that your society is doomed.”

Doomed or not, in the second year of the Age of Obama the hoped-for economic turnaround has yet to occur. Even as the stock market goes up again, benefitting institutional investors with the capabilities to exploit it, unemployment remains high and loan defaults continue to rise.

The best projections forecast a “jobless recovery,” which for millions is no recovery at all. How did we get into this mess?

Put ten economists in a room, and you get 20 explanations. Most of them revolve around business mistakes, poor risk models or even psychological problems like delusion and market madness. Few will concede that Sen. Ted Kaufman, D-Delaware, is right in charging that “fraud and potential criminal conduct were at the heart of the financial crisis.”

Missing has been a hard-nosed look at the crisis as a crime story.

Former bank examiner William Black understands this. Focusing on looting and CEO fraud, he helped send over 1,000 bankers to prison during the S&L crisis in the 1980s. This time there were neither dogged sleuths nor crime-busting newshounds on the beat.

Even Alan Greenspan has finally admitted in his all-too-polite exchange with a government inquiry that has come to resemble a Princeton seminar, “If you don’t have enforcement, and a lot of that stuff was just plain fraud, you’re not coming to grips with the issue.”

Of course, this “maestro” didn’t go into detail on “a lot of that stuff.”

What we are watching is an abstruse debate about banks that are “too big to fail,” not too big to jail.

Very little of the discourse speaks in terms of the victims — the millions of families now without breadwinners or homes. Most of the commentary still looks up at CEOs, not down at the people whom they robbed by design, as folk singer Woody Guthrie put it, not with a six-gun but “with a fountain pen.”

When most of us think of crime, we think of gangsters with guns, not banksters with elaborate schemes designed to transfer your wealth to their accounts.

Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair — a publication more at home with Groucho Marx than Karl — said of the meltdown:

“[This] may well turn out to be the greatest nonviolent crime against humanity in history…never before have so few done so much to so many.

Yet economists, even progressive ones like James Kwak, deeply mired in the labyrinthian world of financial transactions, still don’t believe it.

The day the SEC filed a complaint against Goldman Sachs, he wrote on BaselineScenario.com, one of the more critical Web sites covering the collapse of this vast swindle:

“One of the things I say now and then that most annoys people is that the financial crisis was not caused by criminal behavior….

“My general line is that I’m sure there was some bad behavior that rose to the level of criminal liability — like lying in disclosure documents — but that it wasn’t necessary for the crisis, and we could have had the crisis without any criminal activity at all.”

The problem with this thinking is that it defines financial crime too narrowly, only in terms of securities laws concerned primarily with protecting investors.

It doesn’t acknowledge that financial institutions spent nearly a billion dollars underwriting efforts to erode government controls and change rules, regulations and even laws to allow them to get away with whatever enhanced their bottom lines, no matter who got hurt.

Their well-documented history of aggressive lobbying and buying up politicians qualifies them as avaricious manipulators, not law-abiding companies. Their legal and moral defenses for this conduct are entirely bogus.

Let’s look at Goldman Sachs. In my film I report that Goldman was accused by Massachusetts authorities of deliberately designing mortgages to fail. They settled the complaint by paying a $60 million fine and wrote it off as a cost of doing business.

The SEC later filed civil fraud charges on similar grounds. This was followed by turbulent hearings on the Hill during which Sen. Carl Levin, D-Michigan, repeatedly cited an internal correspondence reference to “shitty” deals that Goldman Sachs peddled only to bet against them.

The Justice Department, in a separate action, was asked to open a criminal file. Among the allegations: shady accounting schemes. The giant firm has certainly come in for excoriation and ridicule, but none of Goldman’s officers has been convicted of wrongdoing, and they are “lawyered up” to the gills.

Leslie Griffith on Reader Supported News writes: “A modern-day financial monarchy, Goldman acts with the impunity once reserved for kings. Controlling legislators. Electing Presidents. Filling the Executive Branch with well-heeled lackeys, manipulating world markets and betting against the welfare of its own clients…the American people. When their equivalent of ‘tax time’ came, they squeezed the peasants for billions of bail-out bucks.”

In their testimony before Congress, Goldman bankers defended themselves by saying all big banks did what they did. A weak alibi at best, it nonetheless seems to be working for them.

The assignment of criminal liability is hardly underway. As one lawyer said to Bloomberg News, “In order to proceed criminally in a case, you need to have very clear evidence of lying, cheating and stealing.”

In plain English: Don’t get your hopes up.

The government has not declared war on Wall Street even after Wall Street declared war on Main Street. The housing bubble was built on a bedrock of fraud linking shady subprime brokers and appraisers to an industry of financial products that were then resold with misrepresented values thanks to the connivance of unethical ratings agencies.

The selling and reselling of assetless asset-backed securities is a central element of the vast fraud, as is the practice of insuring while simultaneously betting against these investments through companies like AIG.

We are talking about a criminal enterprise involving tens of thousands of people working in the financial services industry. Martin Wolf of The Financial Times explained that three industries worked together almost like a cabal to perpetuate these schemes.

The architects of the FIRE economy (structured around Finance, Insurance and Real Estate), operated in the shadow of bent rules and apathetic regulators. They built a huge infrastructure of collaborators and henchmen called “financial service professionals.”

Writes Wolf:

“In between the ultimate borrowers and the risk-takers were loan-originators, designers and packagers of securitized assets, ratings agencies, sales staff, managers of banks and SIVs [Structured Investment Vehicles] and managers of pension — and other — funds.”

What chance did some poor homeowner or credit card customer have against this savvy and well-funded phalanx of operatives whose one mission was to separate them from their property and money?

Many knew the people they were selling to could not afford to buy their products. They didn’t care. It was all done deceptively and by design. It was deliberate, engineered in public and hidden in plain sight.

At the local level, mortgage companies said they were under pressure from Wall Street to keep selling homes to the poor so the paper could be resold in an atmosphere of trickle-down corruption.

My own investigation led me to produce a new film, Plunder: The Crime of Our Time, out on DVD from Disinfo. (PlunderTheCrimeOfOurTime.com). I also wrote a companion book, The Crime of Our Time (Disinformation Books) with more documentation than you can get into any film of reasonable length.

I was surprised when the Wall Street Journal characterized it as an “anti-Wall Street film [that] isn’t just for Michael Moore fans.” The Hollywood Interview blog called it “fascinating and nailbiting, much like All the President’s Men.”

Movie City News elaborated: "Plunder: The Crime of Our Time describes how Wall Street interests greased the skids for just such a collapse, consciously breaking laws they knew government regulators were unlikely to defend. Michael Moore has trod similar ground, but in a more overtly entertaining style…. It’s a sobering documentary, but one that’s too important to ignore…in Schechter’s case, again.”

This crisis can be explained in a way most people will understand, and when the public “gets it” they will get angry and act. It’s the oldest truism: Where there is a will, there’s a way.

Corporate and Congressional Disasters

by Robert Weissman - Tuesday, December 14, 2010 by CommonDreams.org

Corporate crime and wrongdoing is an everyday fact of life in the United States and around the world. Still, the last year has been remarkable for a series of high-profile, deadly corporate disasters: the BP Deepwater Horizon catastrophe that killed 11 workers and spewed millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, the deadly explosion at Massey's Upper Big Branch mine, and unintended acceleration of Toyota cars.

You might think that these disasters, singly and together, would impel desperately needed legislative reform. You might think that, but if you did, you would be wrong.

Despite blanket TV and newspaper coverage of the corporate wrongdoing in each case, despite deep public outrage and fear, despite public clamor for action to prevent the same things from happening, Congress has done ... exactly nothing.

And the situation is about to get worse.

To be fair, the House of Representatives in each instance took at least some action, and might have done more if things looked better in the Senate. But Senate Republicans -- sometimes with Democratic allies -- acting on behalf of corporate patrons have blocked reform efforts. There's still a small chance of overcoming the corporate blockade, but with the lame duck session winding down, the window of opportunity is closing fast.

• For much of the summer, the nation was transfixed by underwater video feeds of the BP oil gusher. Less visually grabbing was the gusher of evidence of the recklessness of BP and its corporate partners. This was not a disaster that could reasonably be considered an "accident."

The House of Representatives responded by passing legislation that would remove the $75 million liability cap for oil damages -- an invitation to corporate irresponsibility -- remove an exemption from environmental analysis for projects like Deepwater Horizon, and bar companies with poor safety and environmental records from receiving new offshore drilling leases. But oil industry-allied Senators prevented passage of the bill. (Take action: http://www.citizen.org/Page.aspx?pid=3946 )

•  The explosion at the Upper Big Branch mine killed 29 miners, and served as yet another reminder of the failure of existing law to protect America's workers. It also introduced the country to a caricature of a heartless CEO, Massey Energy's Don Blankenship.

If ever there was a moment for forward progress on workplace health and safety, it was in the wake of the Massey tragedy. The Robert C. Byrd Mine Safety and Health Act would modestly increase the size of fines for endangering workers, make it a felony to cause the death of a worker by knowingly violating safety rules, protect whistleblowers who call attention to workplace hazards, and deter employers from delaying resolution of citations for violations of workplace health and safety rules. But the business lobby has prevented the bill from moving ahead. A House committee approved it, but the full House, shamefully, voted down even a stripped down version of the legislation; and the bill never even received a Senate committee vote. (Take action: http://www.citizen.org/Page.aspx?pid=3681 )

• Reports of sudden acceleration in Toyota cars broke through in the major media over a year ago. They were followed by ever more revelations of problems with Toyota vehicles, disclosures that the car giant had suppressed consumer complaints, major vehicle recalls, public apologies from Toyota, and damning indictments of inaction by the National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration (NHTSA).

The Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 2010 would upgrade NHTSA safety standards, make more safety information public, and get more funding to the resource-starved federal auto safety agency. Yet thanks to the auto lobby -- amazingly, including lobbying from the very General Motors in which the U.S. government (i.e., the public) remains the primary shareholder -- Congress has failed to make these common-sense responses to the Toyota debacle into law. (Take action: http://www.citizen.org/motor-vehicle-safety-act )

There's no mystery as to the Congressional failure. It is simply a reflection of the same corporate power that led to the under-regulation and under-enforcement that made each of the corporate disasters possible.

Yet the ability of corporations and industries to block remedial regulatory efforts at the very moment when they are most vulnerable -- due to adverse publicity and an outraged public's call for action -- speaks to the extraordinary political power of Big Business.

That power is certain to be enhanced in the incoming Congress.

Most remarkable of all, with evidence all around of the need for stronger rules to control corporations and protect Americans, the business lobby is gearing up for a campaign to roll back existing regulations.

Led by the Chamber of Commerce, corporations are ramping up a campaign claiming that the way to jumpstart the economy is by rolling back regulations.

Yes, corporations have earned record profits in the past quarter -- U.S. corporations raked in profits at an annual rate of $1.659 trillion in the third quarter of 2010.

Yes, it was the failure to regulate Wall Street that cost 8 million jobs and plunged us into the current recession.

In a world ruled by power not logic, however, facts are not enough to defeat corporate propaganda and destructive policy agendas.

Doing that will require overcoming public disgust with Washington's failures. It will also require moving beyond mere outrage with corporate wrongdoing to organized outrage. As deeply flawed as the policy making process is, an organized citizenry can still make change for good. It's not going to come any other way.