Hey little sister who's your Superman?
“Incomes rose more than 11 percent for the top 1 percent of earners during the economic recovery, but not at all for everybody else, according to new data.”
This grotesquerie of loathsome criminals will not be getting ass raped in prison any time soon. Mores the pity.
These are some of the guys whom the government of the United States has said are responsible for setting up and managing an ongoing criminal enterprise and who knowingly funneled laundered drug money through their bank — HSBC the third largest bank in the world — and to Iranian backed terrorist organizations.
But the DOJ has, in its wisdom, determined that HSBC should simply pay a fine and that the criminals pictured above will not be subject to prosecution and will thus be able to collect their multi-million dollar year end bonuses.
So the lesson here is that if you’re a guy growing a little weed in your home to sell to the nice lady with glaucoma down the street, you will get your door kicked in and have the full weight of the law brought down upon your head and shoulders.
But if you’re a financial parasite who launders Mexican drug cartel money and funnels it through to middle eastern terror organizations – hey! No harm no foul.
And if that weren’t bad enough, the guys responsible aren’t even the ones paying the fine that HSBC agreed to pay as part of the deal to keep them from being criminally prosecuted.
That falls to HSBC’s shareholders.
Who did nothing wrong except, of course, to unknowingly invest their money in a criminal enterprise.
There really are two systems of justice in this country.
Here’s Glenn Greenwald on the harshness of the criminal justice system that the rest of us are subjected to:
“Not everyone is subjected to that system of penal harshness. It all changes radically when the nation’s most powerful actors are caught breaking the law. With few exceptions, they are gifted not merely with leniency, but full-scale immunity from criminal punishment. Thus have the most egregious crimes of the last decade been fully shielded from prosecution when committed by those with the greatest political and economic power: the construction of a worldwide torture regime, spying on Americans’ communications without the warrants required by criminal law by government agencies and the telecom industry, an aggressive war launched on false pretenses, and massive, systemic financial fraud in the banking and credit industry that triggered the 2008 financial crisis.
The US government is expressly saying that banking giants reside outside of – above – the rule of law, that they will not be punished when they get caught red-handed committing criminal offenses for which ordinary people are imprisoned for decades. Aside from the grotesque injustice, the signal it sends is as clear as it is destructive: you are free to commit whatever crimes you want without fear of prosecution.”
Sooooooo after eleven years together I’m now apparently single again. Very much so.
Richard and I split up last week — basically in the middle of the weekend of the grand opening of the club.
Could my timing on these things be any fucking worse?
I’d like to say it was totally amicable and that there was the possibility of reconciliation, but. . . . .
There’s not and it wasn’t.
Anyway, the best advice I got all week was when I jokingly said to someone that I needed to get a replacement BF and he said,
“No, you don’t. What you need is a dog.”
Truer words were never spoken.
Here’s Mitt Romney during his acceptance speech at the GOP convention — a speech in which he never once mentioned the war being fought by American troops who are still being maimed and killed every day in Afghanistan.
I’d like to go n record right here and right now and personally thank the nation of Russia for all of the really amazing sunsets we’ve been having here in the Pacific Northwest this simmer.
Of course, those sunsets do come with a price. Namely the fact that in order for Russia to provide them to us, half their country had to catch on fire and burn out of control.
“Celebrating rich people getting richer as though it had anything to do with the rest of us marks us as suckers of the highest order. Cheering a stock as though it were a living entity worthy of praise marks us as the worst kind of primitive economic bone-worshippers.”
Charles Pierce commenting on the absolutely ludicrous spectacle on Friday of people around the country — including crowds standing in Times Square — cheering on the Facebook IPO as if it were some sort of national triumph along the lines of the Apollo 11 moon landing or winning World War II.
Go read Charlie’s entire blog post because it perfectly sums up how well and truly fucked in the head we are as a nation.
