After hitting a record low in President Biden’s first year in office, white collar prosecutions from the Department of Justice have slowly started to increase. The only problem is that the worst offenders keep getting away with the worst kinds of behavior. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.
Transcript:
*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.
Mike Papantonio: After hitting a record low in President Biden’s first year in office, while white collar prosecutions from the Department of Justice have slowly started to increase, the only problem is the worst offenders keep getting away with it. Isn’t that, that’s the story, right?
Farron Cousins: It is.
Mike Papantonio: Pick up the story. Yeah. Do you remember after the burndown, financial burndown, Wall Street stole eight, what $8 trillion from mom and pop? And then we had Obama comes in, oh, I’m gonna do something about this. This is gonna stop, and some people are gonna be prosecuted. Do you remember that?
Farron Cousins: Yep.
Mike Papantonio: It’s one reason I jump, do you remember me getting up first thing in the morning going on Fox News of all places to defend Obama because I was so convinced that he was gonna do something meaningful about all this? I mean, that was my talking point. How do we not do something about this? Time after time we heard, that was his point. Not just him, but virtually every president that runs, we’re gonna do something. We’re gonna clean up the white collar criminal problem in this country. Well, do you know what? After that was done, he let virtually everybody go. Nobody, none of those bankers, not one single banker went to prison. The documents and the conduct was overwhelming. It was criminality from top to bottom. Everybody walked free. It’s just the new norm, isn’t it?
Farron Cousins: It is. And on top of that, a couple years into Obama’s administration, we had the BP Deepwater horizon.
Mike Papantonio: Good. I forgot about that.
Farron Cousins: Obama came out and said, you just tell me who’s to kick. Those were his exact words, tell me who’s to kick.
Mike Papantonio: Right. Right. As if he.
Farron Cousins: Well, nobody got their kicked. Everybody got off scot free, even with all of the horrible things we learned. And this cycle just continues itself. And so this story comes out and says, hey, look, we’ve actually had an uptick in white collar prosecutions. The DOJ actually prosecuted nine more people.
Mike Papantonio: Nine.
Farron Cousins: Nine.
Mike Papantonio: Not 90, but nine.
Farron Cousins: Nine more than we did the year before. So, hey, we’re winning. But then as Public Citizen points out, you look at the numbers and you realize, wait a minute, wait a minute. Whoa. You’re not actually prosecuting the big corporate people. You’re prosecuting small business owners.
Mike Papantonio: Put that in perspective.
Farron Cousins: People with less than 50 employees, you’re going after the little local pizza joint on the corner. But you call that a corporate prosecution. Meanwhile, you’ve got the bankers, you’ve got the Boeing CEOs, you’ve got the pharma CEOs, they’re killing people. And oh, well, we like them, but yeah, we’re gonna get the little clothing shop around the corner.
Mike Papantonio: 76% of the prosecutions were for corporations that had fewer than 50 employees. Okay. The rest of the prosecutions, there weren’t any. If you had a thousand employees, you weren’t, you got something called deferred prosecution. Explain to the viewers what that means.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. This is basically the slap on the wrist. That is the DOJ coming to you and saying, listen, we know deep down you’re good people, so we’re not gonna hold you accountable. There’s gonna be a fine, so give us some money and that’s what they, the DOJ loves their fun money. And they get to spend that money that they bring in, that is essentially their big piggy bank. And so they would rather get the money by themselves new offices, new company cars, new computers.
Mike Papantonio: Cool SUVs.
Farron Cousins: Exactly. And that is what they do because we’ve done that story too. But then these companies say, okay, well we won’t do it again. Two years later, they’ll be back in front of those DOJ lawyers saying, okay, we did it again. Well, don’t worry, because I know you’ve got those big government contracts. So once again, here’s your other fine. And don’t do it again that we can see.
Mike Papantonio: Because they look like exactly the guy, the sociopath sitting across the table from ’em. Okay. The sociopath who makes decisions, we’re gonna kill 150 people a day with opioids, knowing it’s gonna kill 150 a day. That we’re gonna allow Roundup to kill thousands of people all over the country. We’re gonna allow talcum powder that’s infected with asbestos to kill thousands of people all over. These people get away genuinely with murder. But they look like the folks at the DOJ. They’re dressed up in suits, they have white shirts on. They went to Harvard and Yale, and the guy at the DOJ says, you know, if I play my cards right, maybe I can get a job here. And then the career, the guy working for a career says, I don’t need to spend any time doing this. Hell, I’m gonna make whatever I make by not doing anything.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. And the meanwhile, you’ve got the little pizza joint around the corner. The guy that owns it lets his 13-year-old kid run the cash register for a couple hours and they’ll pop him for child labor violations and prosecute him and say, look at what we’ve done. White collar prosecutions are through the roof because we got nine extra small business owners behind bars.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. Like, that’s a big victory. Until you put ’em in prison, this culture will never change.
Farron Cousins: Yep.
Mike Papantonio: Because if you let ’em, HSBC, I just wrote a book, it’s called Suspicious Activity, where these big banks were washing money for terrorists and drug cartels. Okay. Washing money. HSBC admitted doing it. They signed a document, yes, we did it. We knew what we were doing. We made billions of dollars. We knew soldiers were gonna be killed, contractors were gonna be killed. We did it anyway. You know what Eric Holder did with that? Fined them $1.6 billion. They made a hundred billion dollars. Fined them $1.6 billion, like that was a big victory. Like, oh boy, we really made them pay. Nobody went to prison. And that’s the new norm in this country right now. You just can’t shake that new norm.
Suspicious Activity: That it had helped dirty money flow through its branches around the world, including at least 800. Plaintiffs allege that the defendants provided money and medical goods to terrorist groups, Hezbollah and Jaysh al-Adl. This is a well organized business for these individuals that carry out these attacks. Terrorism is a business and they run it like a business. They knew about what was going on for a decade. They absolutely, absolutely no question about it knew that HSBC was washing money. They had every reason to understand it was for terrorism and it was for drug cartels. Took no action whatsoever.
These banks are involved, their accounts are connected, and they’re using them to mask the transactions. The more complicated they can make the transactions, the more distance they could put between the bad guys and a seemingly legitimate purpose of these funds. They pay $1.9 billion, which is a drop in the bucket compared to what they’ve made. And nobody goes to prison. These CEOs, these bankers that made this decision, they’re safe at home. They know what they’ve done. They know it’s resulted in the death of Americans, contractors and soldiers, not just hundreds but thousands. And we look the other way because they don’t look like criminals. The die cast, the people that are responsible for it, are on Wall Street. And they don’t look like criminals. It’s almost a suspension of disbelief. Sometimes I’ll have people call me and say, is this, is this real? Do they really get away with this? Yeah, they do.
