By Henry McRandall
WRISEUP.COM
United States President Barack Obama has made it amply clear that his administration has no intention of ever sending a wealthy white man to prison no matter how heinous his crimes – unless those crimes are committed against other wealthy white people.
But there is still an action his Department of Justice can undertake that would otherwise punish the thousands of Amerikkkan banksters whose massive frauds caused the global economic meltdown of 2008:
He could charge the major banks under the RICO Act (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Corporations Act), which has been on the books since 1970.
Although originally intended as a device for combatting the Mafia, the RICO Act has been used successfully to prosecute other corporations, and even financial institutions, that are not controlled by organized crime.
It is generally acknowledged that it was millions of individual acts of fraud – primarily in the area of home mortgages – by thousands of Amerikkkan bank executives – and consented to, if not actually ordered, by the highest-ranking executives of those banks – that led to millions of Americans being thrown out of work, millions of American families losing their homes to foreclosure and hundreds of thousands of individual American victims going bankrupt.
Meanwhile, these thousands of criminal bankster executives have not only not been prosecuted and imprisoned, they have continued to receive multi-million-dollar annual bonuses as a reward for their corruption and criminality.
Meanwhile, Obama clucks that he wants to “look forward, not backward,” as he cruelly applies harsh criminal prosecutions against African-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, American Indians and poor whites for much more minor crimes while steadfastly refusing to prosecute any of the rich, old, fat, white men responsible not only for the global economic crisis but also for the BP Gulf of Mexico oil spill that killed eleven workers and ravaged the lives of thousands and also for the hundreds of war crimes committed by high-ranking members of the George W. Bush regime.
But it need not be that way.
By charging the banks rather than the individual banksters only under RICO, Obama might simultaneously spare his rich white heroes from doing prison time and also enable their millions of victims to sue the banks and the banksters civilly and recover three times their losses from the multi-million-dollar bonuses already paid to these thugs and from the financial institutions themselves.
As G. Robert Blakey, the man who wrote the RICO Act, once told Time magazine: “We don’t want one set of rules for people whose collars are blue or whose names end in vowels; and another set for those whose collars are white and have Ivy League diplomas.”
All Obama has to do is invoke the RICO Act against the criminal banks. It would open the door to a flood of lawsuits by the bankster victims against the bankster perps.
Under RICO, according to WikiPedia, “a person who is a member of an enterprise that has committed any two of 35 crimes within a 10year period can be charged with racketeering.”
Fraud and swindling are both included on that list and those mortgage frauds were both.