In July, the Canadian corporation Enbridge, Inc. announced that one of its pipelines had leaked and spilled an estimated 1,200 barrels of crude oil in a field in Wisconsin. Two years ago, an Enbridge pipeline spilled more than 19,000 barrels in Michigan.

The Michigan spill affected more than 50 kilometers of waterways and wetlands and about 320 people reported medical symptoms from crude oil exposure. The US National Transportation Safety Board said that at $800 million it was the costliest onshore spill cleanup in the nation's history. The NTSB found that Enbridge knew of a defect in the pipeline five years before it burst. According to Enbridge's own reports, the company had 800 spills between 1999 and 2010, releasing close to 7 million gallons of crude oil. 4

No executive or other employee of Enbridge has been charged with any kind of crime. How many environmental murderers of modern times have been punished?

During a period of a few years beginning around 2007, several thousand employees of stock brokers, banks, mortgage companies, insurance companies, credit-rating agencies, and other financial institutions, mainly in New York, had great fun getting obscenely rich while creating and playing with pieces of paper known by names like derivatives, collateralized debt obligations, index funds, credit default swaps, structured investment vehicles, subprime mortgages, and other exotic terms, for which, it must be kept in mind, there had been no public need or demand. The result has been a severe depression, seriously hurting hundreds of millions of lives in the United States and abroad.

No employee of any of these companies has seen the inside of a prison cell for playing such games with our happiness.

For more than half a century members of the United States foreign policy and military establishments have compiled a record of war crimes and crimes against humanity that the infamous beasts and butchers of history could only envy.

Not a single one of these American officials has come any closer to a proper judgment than going to see the movie "Judgment at Nuremberg".

Yet, we live in the United States of Punishment for countless other criminal types; more than two million presently rotting their lives away. No other society comes even close to this, no matter how the statistics are calculated. And many of those in American prisons are there for victimless crimes.

On the other hand, we see the Chinese sentencing their citizens to lengthy prison terms, even execution, for environmental crimes.

We have an Iranian court recently trying 39 people for a $2.6 billion bank loan embezzlement carried out by individuals close to the political elite or with their assent. Of the 39 people tried, four were sentenced to hang, two to life in prison, and others received terms of up to 25 years; in addition to prison time, some were sentenced to flogging, ordered to pay fines, and banned from government jobs. 5

And in Argentina in early July, in the latest of a long series of trials of former Argentine officials, former dictator Jorge Rafael Videla was convicted and sentenced to 50 years for a systematic plan to steal babies from women prisoners who were kidnapped, tortured and killed during the military junta's war on leftist dissenters — the "dirty war" of 1976-83 that claimed 13,000 victims. Many of the women had "disappeared" shortly after giving birth. Argentina's last dictator, Reynaldo Bignone, was also convicted and got 15 years. Outside the courthouse a jubilant crowd watched on a big screen and cheered each sentence. 6

As an American, how I envy the Argentines. Get the big screen ready for The Mall in Washington. We'll have showings of the trials of the Bushes and Cheney and Rumsfeld and Obama. And Henry Kissinger, a strong supporter of the Argentine junta among his many contributions to making the world a better place. And let's not forget the executives of Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Bank of America, and Enbridge, Inc. Fining them just money is pointless. We have to fine them years, lots of them.

Without imprisoning these people, nothing will change. That's become a cliché, but we very well see what continues to happen without imprisonment. And it's steadily getting worse, financially and imperially.

Bring Back The Guillotine

The US Justice Department announced Thursday evening it was ending a one-year criminal investigation and would not file charges against the giant Wall Street investment bank Goldman Sachs or any of its employees.

In April 2011, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations released a voluminous report on the role of major banks, federal regulators and credit rating firms in the collapse of the subprime mortgage market and ensuing financial crash of September 2008.

Of the report’s 640 pages, 240 pages, or 40 percent, were devoted to a detailed examination of Goldman Sach’s deceptive practices in marketing mortgage-backed securities and collateralized debt obligations. The report alleged that Goldman bilked clients by selling them mortgage-backed securities without informing them that the bank itself was betting the investments would fail.

The Senate report concluded by listing federal securities laws the committee believed had likely been violated by Goldman and other banks. The committee referred its findings to the Justice Department and federal prosecutors for a criminal investigation of Goldman and its executives. It also called for an investigation into whether Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein had perjured himself in his public testimony before the panel.

In releasing the report, the chairman of the committee, Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, said the panel’s two-year probe had found “a financial snake pit rife with greed, conflicts of interest and wrongdoing.” He recommended that charges be brought and said, “In my judgment, Goldman clearly misled their clients and they misled Congress.”

In its statement released Thursday, the Justice Department said it had conducted “an exhaustive review of the report,” but concluded that “based on the law and evidence as they exist at this time, there is not a viable basis to bring a criminal prosecution with respect to Goldman Sachs or its employees in regard to the allegations set forth in the report.”

There is not a shred of credibility in this assertion. In the course of its investigation, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations amassed 56 million pages of memos, documents, prospectuses and emails. The section of its report on Goldman Sachs gave chapter and verse, provided dates and named names, to meticulously document how the bank defrauded its clients by selling them mortgage securities while betting against the same investments, without telling them it was doing so.

“We are pleased that this matter is behind us,” a bank spokesman said Thursday of the Justice Department decision.

Also on Thursday, Goldman revealed in a regulatory filing that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) had informed the bank it had ended a separate probe of a $1.3 billion subprime mortgage deal stemming from 2006, and had decided to take no action. This was an about-face by the SEC, which had notified the bank last February that it planned to pursue a civil action in relation to the Goldman security.

The SEC decision to drop the investigation comes as regulators are approaching a statute of limitations deadline for mortgage securities issued before 2007.

These two actions are part of an ongoing government cover-up of financial fraud and criminality on a massive scale, both before and after the 2008 crash. They underscore the duplicity behind President Barack Obama’s announcement last January of the formation of a Justice Department task force to investigate banking practices in the mortgage industry.

The Obama administration, like its Republican predecessor, is at the center of a corrupt nexus between Wall Street and all of the branches of the government—the presidency, Congress and the courts. The financial oligarchy operates with impunity, standing above the law as it manipulates and swindles to capture an ever greater share of the social wealth. Every government agency, from the White House on down, is directly or indirectly on the bankers’ payroll.

Four years after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, not a single major bank or top bank executive has been prosecuted, even though their crimes have been amply documented and new bank scandals continue to break out on a weekly basis.

Just last month, Neil Barofsky, the former special inspector general for the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), gave an interview on the occasion of the publication of his new book on the bank bailout in which he complained of the failure to hold to account any of the bankers responsible for the financial disaster. “It was shocking how much control the big banks had over their own bailout,” he said.

He went on to accuse Obama’s treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, of a cover-up while president of the New York Federal Reserve of the banks’ manipulation of Libor, the most important global benchmark interest rate. “Geithner and other regulators should be held accountable,” he said. “They should be fired across the board… I hope to see people in handcuffs.”

Last March, Greg Smith, an executive director at Goldman, announced his resignation in an op-ed piece in the New York Times, in which he denounced the bank’s “toxic” culture of avarice and fraud. “It makes me ill how callously people talk about ripping their clients off,” he wrote.

Goldman Sachs was at the center of a scandal that erupted in late 2009 over the collusion of top federal officials in secretly using public funds as part of the 2008 bailout of American International Group (AIG) to cover billions of dollars in mortgage securities held by the banks and insured by the bankrupt insurance firm. Then-Treasury Secretary (and former Goldman CEO) Henry Paulson, then-New York Federal Reserve President Geithner and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke funneled $62 billion to the big Wall Street firms, with Goldman getting the biggest share—$12.9 billion.

Part of the incestuous relationship between Wall Street and the government is the revolving door between Washington and Wall Street. Bank regulators build up their résumés for advancement to seven-figure-salary posts at financial firms by running interference for the banks.

This was exemplified last June in JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon’s appearance before the House and Senate banking committees. Dimon was summoned to explain the bank’s sudden announcement the previous month of a multi-billion-dollar trading loss, which the bank failed to report in its first quarter financial disclosure.

The Wall Street Journal noted in passing, evidently not considering it worth further comment, that sitting directly behind Dimon was JPMorgan’s general counsel, Stephen Cutler, who had joined the firm after serving as the enforcement chief of the SEC.

In April of 2010, the SEC brought a civil suit against Goldman for fraudulently marketing a subprime mortgage-based collateralized debt obligation (CDO) in 2007 called Abacus. Goldman sold the security without telling its clients that hedge fund billionaire John Paulson had asked the bank to set up the investment so that he could make a killing by betting the underlying mortgages would go bad and the security would lose money. The bank concealed the fact that Paulson had selected the mortgages and was “shorting” the CDO.

Rather than bring the case to trial, the SEC settled with the bank in July 2010, agreeing to a sweetheart deal in which the bank admitted no wrongdoing and paid a relatively minor fine of $550 million. The SEC has similarly settled cases with Countrywide Financial, the subprime giant that was saved from collapse by being sold to Bank of America, and major banks such as JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Citigroup.

The Obama administration and federal regulators have avoided public trials of the banks because the ruling class senses they would rapidly expose the criminality of the entire system. It would mean putting the capitalist system itself on trial.

The author also recommends:

Ex-TARP overseer denounces US government cover-up of Wall Street crimes
[31 July 2012]

JPMorgan scandal: The tip of the iceberg
[17 July 2012]

An insider’s view of Wall Street criminality
[15 March 2012]

This article was originally published at WSWS

and the official response from the Potomac?

Financial Holocaust: Bankster Fraud Has Driven 100 Million Into Poverty, Killing Many

Fraud caused the Great Depression and the current financial crisis, and the economy will never recover until fraud is prosecuted.

Fraud is the business model adopted by the giant banks. See this.

The Obama administration has made it official policy not to prosecute fraud.  Indeed, the “watchdogs” in D.C. are so corrupt that they are as easily bribed as a policeman in a third world banana republic.

The mouthpieces in Wall Street and D.C.  pretend that financial  fraud (like Libor) is a “victimless crime“.

But the World Bank notes that the financial crisis  – you know, the one caused by financial fraud – has driven between 64 and  100 million people into destitution.

Some estimate the figure to be much higher. For example, one 2009 study estimated that 140 million people would be driven into poverty in Asia alone.

This is not just a matter of having less money for entertainment or luxury goods.  Increased poverty leads to earlier deaths.

As the Los Angeles times notes:

Poverty appears to trump smoking, obesity and education as a health burden, potentially causing a loss of 8.2 years of perfect health.

This is not an abstract concept. A lot of kids will die due to Wall Street fraud:

The global financial crisis sweeping through Wall Street and the European banking sector will touch the lives of the world’s most vulnerable, pushing millions into deeper poverty and leading to the deaths of thousands of children, according to a new United Nations study.

The report highlighted the prospect of an increase of between 200,000 and 400,000 in infant mortality and that child malnutrition, already rising, will be one of the main drivers of higher child death rates.

While developing countries will be hardest hit, increased poverty and hunger are hitting the U.S., Britain and other first world countries are as well.

Paul Moore – former Head of Risk at HBOS – says:

The financial crisis has resulted in the greatest humanitarian crisis since WWII … We are witnessing a financial holocaust brought on by the banksters with millions of deaths in the offering.

This article was originally published at WashingtonsBlog