People are so outraged that I predict they'll do nothing.

jail time for all the executives ... like federal prison jail ... not country club jail

No jail terms.

No large fine.

Meanwhile jails are filled with people who, all together, never stole a fraction of that amount.

thus it has always been, thus it shall ever be.

"Too big to jail" is a silly statement. When a corporation commits a crime, that by itself is not a basis to jail directors or officers, who must be charged separately.

It seems to me that a logical consequence of "corporate personhood" is that if this "person" commits a crime, then all the executives should serve the time.

All you actually have to do is decharter the company, stick the top listed execs and top three shareowners in jail for a year or two, say in GITMO, and seize all the "profit" in the deal and you'd be surprised how fast they'd stop doing stuff like this.

But that would take guts.

Pwease be vewy qwiet. Yew'll fwighten the job kweators!

@7 or make it so the corporation can't operate for however long the individual person's sentence would be (ie 20 years in jail means no banking for HSBC for 20 years)

These folks got up to 65 years for sending money to Gazan charities! "In the Holy Land Five case, the defendants were convicted of sending aid to zakat committees who operated in occupied Palestine. Zakat is the Islamic principle of giving a portion of your money to the poor. The government successfully claimed that the zakat committees were linked to Hamas, a designated U.S. terrorist organization--despite the fact that, as Allison Deger pointed out on this site, “the Holy Land Foundation was donating to the same zakat charities that the U.S. government supported via USAID.” The “material support” the five men were convicted of was the sending of aid to committees that distribute relief to poor Palestinians."

http://mondoweiss.net/2012/11/material-s…

But bankers supporting illegal drug activity get no jail time and probably huge holiday bonuses for dodging the crime.

Maybe they can just rebrand themselves like Blackwater did....

WADR to the tragedy in CT, I find it, in media terms, a sideshow. The real story is the HSBC. Both the US & the UK have publicly admitted that there are entities which are more powerful than they are. The entire drug war, war on terrorism, is a complete sham, and these governments no longer have any legitimacy.

What we really need is a Financial Nuremberg Trial for all the world to bring the culprits of the last 30 years to justice before an international council.

http://via.lib.harvard.edu/via/deliver/c…

perhaps our forefathers would argue this as an example of why they created the 2nd amendment.

@1 - What do you know? I put something on my Facebook page! It was scathing, yet ironically humorous.

Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That's how it goes
Everybody knows.

Nothing like a few armed drones over America to scare away the job exporters.

Further proof that the "drug war" is really a war on the civilian population, and has little to do with actually stopping drugs from being bought and sold.

"Gotta keep those unruly urban populations under control, otherwise they'll start to actually band together and stand up for their rights! Like the Blacks did in the 60s and 70s. Can't have that; gets in the way of wealth creation (for us)."

i was laughed off this site some months ago for saying the rule of law was no longer in effect in this country. the rule of law is no longer in effect in this country.

Unfortunately poor people are not necessary for the economy, while banks are -- and not just to drug cartels. So HBSC will continue -- hell, they'll probably continue laundering the same money, just more carefully.

What needs to happen is not "no banks", it's a restoration of the Glass-Steagall Act separation between commercial and investment banking. Our good friend Bill Clinton killed that one, alas, back in 1999. I'm sure it's a coincidence that banks and other high-finance institutions have been totally out of control and wrecking the global economy since then.

@21,

Banks in general are necessary for the economy, but not this bank specifically.

Equal Justice Under Rug.

@16,

NOT FACEBOOK!

*gasps audibly... faints dead away*

Like the bumper-sticker says "I will believe that corporations are people the day that Texas executes one of them."

The solution, of course, is not a fine but to cancel their corporate charter and prohibit them - or their successors - from operating in this country for 15 years. They should be allowed about ninety days to suspend business activity and about 180 days to divest all of their assets. Anything they can't sell in that time should be seized by the feds.

That is jail for corporations: they are not allowed to freely conduct their business.

@21 banks having 20 percent of the GDP share are not necessary. Banks with outrageous CEO pay are not necessary.

We did perfectly fine in the US with 5 percent of GDP going to all finance, and CEOs making 20 times base worker pay.

@25 for the win, followed by drone strikes.

@22 I'll actually push back on this assertion. The justification for banks is that they decide who are "good" and "bad" risks are for capital allocation. I have a few issues with this. The first is that the major banks are fairly homogeneous in WHO actually makes these decisions :cough old white guys cough:. This means that they're likely to interpret good investments in a culturally biased and discriminatory way.

Beyond that, we've seen that the major banks couldn't even perform their culturally biased role of picking good risks. My dream is to see a sort of societal Kickstarter. Any citizen could bring forward their ideas for an enterprise, and citizens would be free to vote for funding allocations, or even volunteer their labor. When you think about it, that could more equitably replace a fair chunk of what the banking sector does.

Turns out in a society built on the credo "anything for a buck" people will do anything for a buck.