By Henry McRandall
WRISEUP.COM
Republican Teabaggers were almost giddy in their triumphalism a few days ago, after they conned the rest of the United States House of Representatives into citing Attorney-General Eric Holder for “contempt of Congress.” It was, of course, just political theater. What displeased the Teabaggers was that Holder refused to release a number of files to a congressional committee concerning the so-called “Fast and Furious” scandal.
Holder was right to refuse to share those documents. A number of criminal investigations were still ongoing and sharing top-secret information on those investigations would almost certainly have resulted in some of those puppet political prostitutes sharing this crucial information with their financial masters — the Top One Percent — and jeopardizing the investigations.
That is not to say, however, that Attorney-General Holder does not deserve to face justice for his actual wrongdoings. In essence, both Holder and United States President Barack Obama should both be facing felony criminal charges for steadfastly refusing to prosecute thousands of Amerikkkan mega-millionaire and billionaire serial felons in the banking industry — as should their counterparts in Canada, the United Kingdom and several other European countries.
The problem is that when so-called “democratic” governments become “captured” by the banks and the corporations and the socioeconomic elite, the “justice” system is part and parcel of what they have usurped.
Within the past week, the CEO and the COO (chief operating officer) of the U.K.’s third-largest bank, Barclay’s, were forced to resign after the bank was fined $500 million for rigging interest rates between 2007 and 2009, at the height of the global economic meltdown. No doubt, both will receive tens of millions of dollars in “severance” pay. And neither will ever face criminal charges or be imprisoned.
Also, pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline was fined $3 billion for a crime wave that put the lives of thousands of American children at risk. They took a drug that had been reviewed and approved by the FDA solely for use by adults and solely for the treatment of two specific ailments. But then GlaxoSmithKline covertly repackaged that drug under another name and, without either testing or FDA approval, bribed thousands of Amerikkkan doctors — each already earning hundreds of thousands of dollars a year just as physicians — to illegally prescribe this illegal drug for children.
As in the Barclay’s matter, the GlaxoSmithKline fine sounds extremely punitive. But neither fine was at all punitive. Both fines represented only a tiny fraction of the illegal profits these two corporations made off of these scams. As well, as with Barclay’s, neither any of the executives at GlaxoSmithKline nor any of the wealthy doctors who gladly took the illegal kickbacks and willingly put the lives of young children in danger, have been charged with any crimes, despite the fact that every one of these crimes was a felony.
Over the past five years, more than 5 million American families have been turfed out of their homes by mortgage foreclosure after the fraudulent loans foist upon them by the gangster banksters went sour.
More than five million major frauds — just in mortgages, and not including fraudulent derivatives — each over $100,000 — have been committed by the Amerikkkan gangster banksters. Assuming, just to use a round number, that 10,000 bank executives participated in this massive five-year-long crime wave. Their criminal lives brought the global economy to its knees and destroyed the lives of millions just in the U.S. On average, every one of 10,000 these gangster bank executives committed at least 500 major frauds — over $100,000 per fraud — for a total of more than $50 million worth of fraud per gangster bankster.
Yet not one of these white-collar, millionaire and billionaire felons has been charged with a single thing. On the contrary, the Republican Teabaggers and the Democrats have conspired together to repeatedly bail out these criminal banks and protect the unearned multi-million-dollar annual bonuses these thugs would have lost without the bailouts — at a total cost thus far — and still climbing — to American taxpayers of more than $25 TRILLIONS, a humungous sum that will have to be repaid over many, many years by everyone in Amerikkka except the Top One Percent who, based on current trends, will soon be paying to taxes at all. Not including the interest that will have to be paid on this money, every man, woman and child in the Other 99 Percent of Americans will have to fork over to the government at least $73,500 over the next 25 years, so that the criminal Top One Percent never miss a single, grossly-undertaxed multi-million-dollar annual bonus.
But an American kid caught with two joints for the third time goes to prison for life.
In fact, the only significant white-collar criminal even prosecuted in the U.S. in the past five years was Bernie Madoff who went to prison not for running a ponzi scheme but because millionaires and billionaires were among his victims.
Shortly after being elected president, Obama defended the gangster bankster bailouts on national television with the lame proclamation” “This is Amerikkka, after all. We don’t begrudge people the fruits of their success.” Nor seemingly of the illicit fruits of their failure. Nor of the fruits illicitly stolen from the labour of their own grossly underpaid workers or of the fruits illicitly stolen from the labour of the grossly underpaid employees of their suppliers.
Even when Ronald Reagan — the father of the biggest and most obscene redistribution of wealth from the Other 99 Percent to the Top One Percent in the entire criminal history of corporate capitalism — was president, more than 2,000 executives went to jail following the Savings & Loans debacle of the early Eighties.
And it’s not just Holder and Obama who are responsible for this travesty of justice. Nor is it the case only in the U.S., where there is not leftist political party to challenges the criminal excesses or the law-enforcement laxity of whatever puppet political prostitutes happen to be in power. And no, Virginia, the Democratic Party is not now and never has been a “leftist” or even a “liberal” party.
The greatest tragedy is that the Top One Percent’s capture of supposedly “democratic” governments and their “justice” systems has been just as catastrophic in other countries. Even the supposedly “leftist” parties — the NDP (New Democratic Party) and the Bloc Quebecois in Canada; the Labour Party in the U.K.; and the so-called Socialist Party in Greece, France, Italy, Spain and several other European countries — have been silent as a mute in the face of perhaps the most deadly and destructive crime wave in history.
And there is no reason to expect this shameful state of affairs to ever change — until there is a massive global revolution against corporate capitalism.