Banks have paid huge fines to stay out of court and stop the rest of us finding out about their actions.
A Canadian woman, Alayne Fleischmann, gave an exclusive interview on DemocracyNow.com. She is the whistleblower who helped the Justice Department of the US make JPMorgan Chase pay one of the largest fines in U.S. history for its role in the world economic financial crisis.
http://www.democracynow.org/
The Rolling Stone article they refer to is at:
http://www.rollingstone.com/
http://www.rollingstone.com/
No-one at any of the banks has been prosecuted. We could conclude that the Department of Justice never really went after the people who practically wrecked the world economy.
Eric Holder, as head of the US Justice Department, justified his forgiving attitude towards banks when testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2013, by suggesting some banks are "too big to jail."
The bank that Alayne Fleischmann worked for seems unchanged. The board of JPMorgan Chase gave their CEO a 75% salary increase after the collapse.
After so many people lost their homes, powerful people in government felt the need to help banks keep news and evidence of vast banking fraud away from the public. In the DemocracyNow,com interview we hear that Eric Holder used to work for a legal firm which had JPMorgan Chase as a client. He worked his way up from being a corporate lawyer defending companies like JPMorgan Chase before becoming head of the Justice Department.
We now know that the main message Occupy Wall Street had to offer us, about the way the world is run, has proven correct. In the DemocracyNow,com interview we hear that a Wall Street CEO can phone the head of the Justice Department and ask for favours, like not prosecuting, and negotiating getting help with hushing things up if there were massive fraud.
Should we be thankful that the government did not aggravate a bad situation? In the DemocracyNow.com interview, reporter Matt Taibbi goes through reasonable courses of action the Justice Department could have taken but decided not to.
Eric Holder was severely criticized for his statement on "too big" to even prosecute let alone jail.
He resigned from the US Justice Department in September 2014. Obama said that Holder served the people well.
So how do we begin to live with this news? Do we resolve this within ourselves by looking for whose naughty and whose nice?
Mainstream media work are a big part of this story. In a big media company we work together at a similar steady and reliable pace as the rest of business and governance as we have known it. A lot of emphasis is put on 'naughty and nice'.
Naughty is coming to mean the same thing as 'disruptive'. Some of us operate at a pace that the rest of us find disruptive. Yet the future of our economies has depended on disrupting what went before.
So naughty has become an issue of pace of operation. In some parts of society pace of operation or functioning is called 'frequency'.
Creation exists as a long series of stages within a larger evolutionary
progression. Specific people and animals are
representative of each stage.
Collectively
the entire range of stages has introduced and extended higher functioning into the
material dimension including worldly events.
Each stage works, much like an electrical transformer, to
reduce the frequency of vibrations. The
frequency at which each creature functions and operates
is either suited to that creature or the creature cannot be sustained within the larger being we call Life.
A person will get ill and die relatively early if they operate at a frequency that disagrees with them.
No-one can make a person that is able to thrive wrong. We learn to live with what others do without denying the reality of the situation.
People used to learn to live by imposing fear and intimidation on one another. As a way of daily functioning this caveman or clan-like mentality is very low on the scale.
The vast majority of us are happy to live beyond that level of functioning. It is a familiar reaction to rationalize wanting to lash out at others in the face of overwhelming emotions. Today we recognize this is only a defense mechanism that buffers the immediate shock.
Then there is the stage of negotiating when the reality and the pain that goes with it re-emerge. We use some form of logic to justify what we do. The intense emotion is deflected from our vulnerable core. We redirect or 'project' the emotion of anger on to others even complete strangers when we have no idea what motivates their actions.
Many in the Occupy movement were concerned citizens. They wanted us all to stop for a while and learn a more functional way of living with one another.
