Will White Collar Crime Be A Campaign Issue In 2020?

"Trump," Samantha Bee explained on her most recent show, "is a sleazy con man who's been specializing in rich guy crime since the disco era. But law enforcement has always backed off or let him go with a slam on the wrist. There were his acts of racial discrimination, his fishy real estate deals, his bullshit university, his swindling of people who worked for him, and his violations of labor law, anti-trust law, gaming law, self-dealing law, anti-money laundering regulations of the Cuban Embargo... Those laws don't mean anything unless criminals who launder money, drain peoples' life savings and kill motorists are... afraid of jail time." Bernie would agree. In fact, what we need in the White House is someone who takes a hard line of criminals, not a criminal.

Bernie Sanders agreed with former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke that corporate executives should have gone to jail for the illegal behavior which caused the financial crisis in 2008.

Bernanke: "Everything that went wrong or was illegal was done by some individual, not by an abstract firm...There should have been more accountability at the individual level."

Bernie couldn't have agreed more: "It is an outrage that not one major Wall Street executive has gone to jail for causing the near collapse of the economy. The failure to prosecute the crooks on Wall Street for their illegal and reckless behavior is a clear indictment of our broken criminal justice system. It is an obscenity that people in this country are getting arrested at near record rates for smoking marijuana, but not one Wall Street CEO has been prosecuted for triggering the Great Recession in 2008. Millions of Americans lost their jobs, homes, life savings and ability to send their kids to college because of the greed on Wall Street. We can no longer tolerate a criminal justice system that treats Wall Street executives as too big to jail when their actions have ruined the lives of so many Americans. I wish Ben Bernanke would have understood that when he was chairman of the Federal Reserve."

Bernie 2020 by Nancy Ohanian

A few days ago, Bob Sheer, in a piece on Carmen Segarra's new book, Noncompliant: A Lone Whistleblower Exposes the Giants of Wall Street, wrote that few consequential policy decisions "have proven as consequential as the demise of Glass-Steagall. Signed into law as the U.S.A. Banking Act of 1933, the legislation had been crucial to safeguarding the financial industry in the wake of the Great Depression. But with its repeal in 1999, the barriers separating commercial and investment banking collapsed, creating the preconditions for an economic crisis from whose shadow we have yet to emerge." Segarra," he wrote, "chronicles the recklessness of institutions like Goldman Sachs and the stunning lengths the United States government went to to accommodate them, even as they authored one of the worst crashes in our nation’s history."

“Noncompliant” explores one of the darkest chapters in modern American history, but with a crook and unabashed narcissist occupying the Oval Office, its lessons are proving remarkably timely. “We live in a culture where we reward bad behavior, we worship bad behavior, and it’s something that needs to stop,” she cautions. “Changing the regulatory culture on [a] U.S. governmental level is something that’s going to take a decade, maybe two. And we need to start now, before things get worse.”

...[I]f a system can be corrupted, people that are allowed to grab hold of power will corrupt it–insofar and only for so long as we allow those people to have the ability and the power to corrupt it. So ultimately, talking about more or less rules, or different rules, is productive only to a point. Because ultimately what we’re talking about here is the haphazard, slap on the wrist, failure to truly enforce the rules and regulations equitably across the system. And that creates the imbalances that you see, for example, in Goldman Sachs, and that you see in the system in general. One of the things that happened as a result of Glass-Steagall coming down was that a lot of the investment bankers were allowed to take over the commercial banks. And those investment bankers knew nothing about banking, and Goldman is a great example of that. I mean, when I arrived three years in after the financial crisis, what was one of the things that was very shocking to me was going into meeting after meeting with Goldman senior management and hearing them lie, doublespeak, and most shockingly of all, insist that they didn’t have to comply with the law. And that is a problem. Because a bank that doesn’t believe, or management at a bank that doesn’t believe they have to comply with the law-- you bet they are not supervising their employees correctly, and they’re not incentivizing employees correctly in terms of how to do their job. So their behavior is injecting enormous risk into the system.

...The world depends in large part on the American banking system to work. And for it to work, there are these rules, and these rules are there to create trust in the system and to create smooth processes in the system, so that money can be moved and the economy can continue to grow. If the world can no longer trust the American banking system because Americans cannot be trusted to regulate it, they are going to move away from the American banking system. They are going to move away from the U.S. dollar as a reserve currency. And then we are going to find ourselves in the situation that a lot of countries that are not governed by reserve currencies find themselves occasionally, from time to time, whenever they have a crisis. You know, we’re talking about countries in Latin America; we’re talking about countries in Africa; we’re talking about countries in Asia. I hope the book will inspire people to really take a look around and realize, you know, the American consumer, the American worker, is incredibly powerful. You know, these banks cannot survive without our money. We don’t have to wait for the government to keep failing us; we don’t have to wait for the judiciary to keep failing us; we don’t have to wait for lawyers to keep failing us. We choose who we work for. We choose where we keep our money. We can choose to protest. We can choose to call our pension funds and tell them, I want you to stop doing business with Goldman Sachs. It’s what we do on a daily basis. When we stand up and we say, I am not going to be banking with these people-- they will listen. It’s like, they control all of these other checks and balances that were put in place in terms of the government to stop them. So now it’s up to us as a people to actually do something about this.

...[W]e have to stop rewarding bad behavior, that’s an example of what I’m talking about. It’s like, we have a culture where we reward people for their bad behavior. And in the Fed it is a systemic problem. And it is a problem that comes from the top down. And when I was at the Fed, Ben Bernanke was head of the Fed; Bill Dudley, as you pointed out, was the head of the New York Fed; and Sarah Dahlgren was his head of supervision. This is a very small world. We’re not talking about a lot of people; the culture is top-down, and everybody there just does what these people say, because if they don’t they’re afraid they’re going to lose their jobs. So from their perspective, they have nothing to lose, because they have a bunch of workers that are going to do as they say. And they will do what is in their best corporate interests. I mean, you have Bill Dudley, who was allowed to hold on to a lot of his investments that predated his arrival at the Fed and were held at Goldman Sachs. And you know, when you have somebody who’s not forced to really work for the government–as in divesting themselves of their own conflicts and truly taking taxpayer money and doing their job–then you can’t expect a good result to come from that. Again, we rewarded bad behavior. And that’s why I think, you know, the key here is really about taking a really good look at our daily lives and seeing, who are we rewarding on a regular basis? And we need to stop rewarding that bad behavior.