The funny thing about Wall Street banksters is that they make a killing by defrauding millions of homeowners, customers, investors, and taxpayers – then, when caught, they wonder why we don’t love them.
That’s “funny” as in bizarre, not as in ha-ha.
Still, it’s hard not to laugh at Jamie Dimon, the vainglorious, silver-haired boss of the JPMorgan Chase house of banksters. Last year alone the bank racked up a record level of regulatory fines for the recidivist criminal operation overseen by the boss. A little self-reproachment might have done him some good, but Dimon chose a funny way (again meaning bizarre) to express remorse: He’s been running a feel-sorry-for-me campaign, claiming that he’s the victim of this sordid story!
Never mind his long rap sheet of malfeasance and incompetence, which cost so many so much, Jamie wails that everything from Wall Street’s bailout to the pay of top bank executives have made people envious of bankers’ success. Thus, he moans, an anti-Wall Street sentiment has spread through the public, prompting politicians and regulators to pander to this populist anger by persecuting enterprising bankers like him. He called the whole thing “unfair.”
Good grief. This guy builds bank profits through rip-offs, piles billions of dollars in fines on the backs of shareholders, pockets $20 million in personal pay for one year’s work – and he wants us to weep for him? Being a Wall Street boss, you see, means never having to say you’re sorry, for it’s always someone else’s fault.
Only 25 years ago, more than a thousand bankers were prosecuted for this sort of malfeasance during the savings & loan scandal. Let’s return to the ethical accountability of those days. Or maybe We the People should send our own message to today’s banksters by rolling a guillotine down the center of Wall Street.

“Fined Billions, Bank Approves Raise for Chief,” The New York Times, January 24, 2014.
“With Dimon Raise, JPMorgan Chase’s Board Confirms That Crime DOES pay,” www.ourfuture.org, January 24, 2014.
“Dimon pockets $20 million in pay after prior cut,” www.cnbc.com, January 24, 2014.
“Two Financial Crises Compared: The Savings and Loan Debacle and the Mortgage Mess,” www.nytimes.com, April 13, 2011.


Why keep an expensive, illegal, invasive, spy program that doesn’t even work?

President Obama’s support for NSA’s domestic spying program prompted a critic to say: “Given the unique power of the state, it is not enough for leaders to say: ‘trust us, we won’t abuse the data we collect.’”
Oh wait, that wasn’t a critic speaking – it was Obama himself! He was trying to shush critics by insisting that the threadbare slipcover of reforms he was throwing over the massive spy machine should satisfy us that all is well, so please, people, just go back to sleep.
Less than a week later, however, a blaring alarm went off in Washington, shattering any drowsiness that Obama had hoped to induce. The alert came from a small, little-known federal agency called the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, set up by Congress back in 2007 to be an independent monitor of the spook establishment’s privacy infringements. In a stunningly-blunt, 238-page report, the five-member panel of legal experts concluded that NSA’s bulk data collection is illegal, probably unconstitutional under the First and Fourth Amendments, a serious, ongoing threat to Americans’ privacy and liberties – and essentially useless at stopping terrorist acts.
“As a result,” wrote the board’s majority, “the board recommends that the government end the program.”
Especially telling is the finding that NSA’s invasive phone sweeps is an ineffectual anti-terrorism tool. The agency and its apologists keep claiming – without any proof – that total vacuuming of domestic communications is necessary to prevent the next 9-11 attack. But the privacy panel did an in-depth analysis of this repeated assertion, and wrote: “We have not identified a single instance involving a threat to the United States in which the telephone records program made a concrete difference.”

To get the whole report go to www.pclob.gov.
“PRIVACY AND CIVIL LIBERTIES OVERSIGHT BOARD: Report on the Telephone Records Program,”
www.pclob.gov, January 23, 2014.
“End the Phone Data Sweeps,” The New York Times, January 24, 2014.
“Watchdog Report Says N.S.A. Program Is Illegal and Should End,” The New York Times, January 23, 2014.