Let 'Em Walk

Trey Smith

For the sake of argument, let's say that you are a serial litterbug. I don't mean that you drop gum wrappers all over town -- you litter like there's no tomorrow! You dump used appliances and cars into vacant lots. You take drums of vile chemicals and dump them -- sometimes in broad daylight -- in area streams. And you drive around town heaving reams of paper into the air.

The government's been watching and filming you for months. They've amassed so much evidence that a 6 year old prosecutor could easily win a conviction. They make a big splashy announcement in the newspaper that your day of reckoning is coming soon. Just when everyone in town is ready for you to get your comeuppance, the local DA announces that he's had a talk with you and, rather than receive a stiff sentence for your habitual egregious acts, you have agreed to pay a piddly ass fine. Once you pay up, the matter will be dropped completely.

Sounds farfetched, doesn't it?

If you happen to be a peon like the vast majority of people who read this blog -- or a peon like any of the three of us who write here -- this wouldn't happen. No, the DA would throw the book at you. You'd be lucky to be let out of prison before your 80th birthday.

But if you were deemed to be an important person -- a vital cog in the financial wellbeing of your community -- the scenario outlined above ain't farfetched at all. Welcome to the two-tiered American justice system! It's a system in which America abides by the rule of law...except when it's inconvenient or might jeopardize the oligarchy. When that happens, who cares about silly 'ol law?

Over the last year, federal investigators found that one of the world's largest banks, HSBC, spent years committing serious crimes, involving money laundering for terrorists; "facilitat[ing] money laundering by Mexican drug cartels"; and "mov[ing] tainted money for Saudi banks tied to terrorist groups". Those investigations uncovered substantial evidence "that senior bank officials were complicit in the illegal activity." As but one example, "an HSBC executive at one point argued that the bank should continue working with the Saudi Al Rajhi bank, which has supported Al Qaeda."

Needless to say, these are the kinds of crimes for which ordinary and powerless people are prosecuted and imprisoned with the greatest aggression possible. If you're Muslim and your conduct gets anywhere near helping a terrorist group, even by accident, you're going to prison for a long, long time. In fact, powerless, obscure, low-level employees are routinely sentenced to long prison terms for engaging in relatively petty money laundering schemes, unrelated to terrorism, and on a scale that is a tiny fraction of what HSBC and its senior officials are alleged to have done.

But not HSBC. On Tuesday, not only did the US Justice Department announce that HSBC would not be criminally prosecuted, but outright claimed that the reason is that they are too important, too instrumental to subject them to such disruptions. In other words, shielding them from the system of criminal sanction to which the rest of us are subject is not for their good, but for our common good.

~ from HSBC,Too Big to Jail, Is the New Poster Child for US Two-TIered Justice System by Glenn Greenwald ~

If you've ever been arrested on a drug charge, if you've ever spent even a day in jail for having a stem of marijuana in your pocket or "drug paraphernalia" in your gym bag, Assistant Attorney General and longtime Bill Clinton pal Lanny Breuer has a message for you: Bite me.

Breuer this week signed off on a settlement deal with the British banking giant HSBC that is the ultimate insult to every ordinary person who's ever had his life altered by a narcotics charge. Despite the fact that HSBC admitted to laundering billions of dollars for Colombian and Mexican drug cartels (among others) and violating a host of important banking laws (from the Bank Secrecy Act to the Trading With the Enemy Act), Breuer and his Justice Department elected not to pursue criminal prosecutions of the bank, opting instead for a "record" financial settlement of $1.9 billion, which as one analyst noted is about five weeks of income for the bank.

The banks' laundering transactions were so brazen that the NSA probably could have spotted them from space.

~ from Outrageous HSBC Settlement Proves the Drug War is a Joke by Matt Taibbi ~