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| "Thanks, HSBC! I couldn't have done it without you." |
Well as it turns out they do not even give one single solitary fuck and we really enjoy being asleep.I suppose it's already "old" news by today's standards, however, the cultural ramifications of the HSBC scandal are worth at least documenting, if for no other reason than for the aliens who will one day visit the ruins of this planet to wonder at how mind-boggling insane we were. The "scandal" I'm referring to is the laundering of billions of dollars for drug cartels and known terrorist organizations and generally all around not nice people by the good folks at one of the world's largest (read: richest) banks.
"Well, that's bullshit," you might say. "I'm sure the people and governments of the world will unite, rise up and proclaim, in all caps, 'NO MORE.'" Surely if anybody deserved the same special kind of justice that made the Spanish Inquisition so popular, it would be these arrogant bastards, sitting all smug in their ivory towers, their pasty white bodies pulsating with the power of an evil chuckle. Surely in America, the country that has been waging war against terror for over a decade, and an even more ridiculous war against drugs for the better part of a century would brand anyone who betrayed them to these Wicked Forces as traitors to The Cause, and punish them beyond the full extent of the law. Surely, aiding and abetting terrorist organizations and drug dealers would be considered tantamount to treason, and the ensuing (and, in this case, totally justified) witch hunt would land countless banking executives an extended stay at Guantanamo Bay or a firing squad or at least a Justin Bieber concert. You'd at least expect that these pasty fucks would at least be fired and fined billions of dollars to compensate for the shittiness that they'd help cultivate the world over.
Well, as it turns out, just like in the world of dating, the key to avoiding disappointment is to set your expectations really, really low.
Not only did nobody end up going to jail for any of the illegal things that they openly admit to doing, they probably won't even see much of a dent in their annual bonuses. One dude from HSBC quit as the sacrificial lamb, but can almost guarantee you that his fall will be broken by his own personal golden parachute. And the American government with all of its talk of taking a hard line against the the various Axis's of Evil doled out a fine of a couple billion dollars, which amounted to little more than a slap on the wrist. I guess they were two focused dealing on the larger threat of anybody with brown skin or wearing a turban who was standing in/leaving in the vicinity of/thinking about going near an airport.
So what, though, right? It's the just the latest in a long line of corporate institutions fucking over the little guy akin to all the bullshit going on in shady offices in Wall Street before the financial collapse a couple of years ago. Well it's a little bit different insofar as the Wall Street cronies were ripping people off with no regard for moral decency and (I assume) personal hygiene whereas the blokes over at HSBC were ripping people off with no regard for moral decency and (I assume) personal hygiene while simultaneously facilitating the operations and activities of people and organizations who are, in turn, responsible for even more heinous shit. In legal terms, I believe the technical term is "accessory." And it's not like it was a mistake like, "Oops! I just accidentally laundered a couple billion dollars for that Mexican drug cartel. You know, like the kind of cartel that's been shooting innocent civilians, decapitating police chiefs, and that the military has been called in to fight. My bad." It wasn't like it was a one time thing by one guy who made a mistake because he couldn't find the ANY key on the keyboard. This was a long-term, systematic, deliberate effort that required explicit consent on the part of dozens if not hundreds of people.
I'll bet the executives over at HSBC were collectively holding their breath when word got out and the swift arm of Justice was preparing to strike. I mean, they already knew that their fat stacks of cash would absorb most any legal blow that could be landed against them, but even they must have been at least a little bit surprised by the degree and scope. When they realized that they literally had a licence to kill that would put James Bond to shame, the sheer amount of mutual dick-sucking going on must have made those ancient Roman orgies seem like a five-year-old's birthday party.
According to conventional logic and the wisdom inherent in Internet memes, the execs over at HSBC were "too big to jail," meaning that because the corporation was so big and so interwoven with so many global economic threads that any disruption in the sordid little web would have caused a domino effect in the world economy more disastrous to economic markets than the mixed metaphors were to this sentence. In essence, these greedy bankers had made themselves "so important" to global economic matters that without them at the helm of this massively bloated company we would all suffer as a result. This is, of course, complete bullshit, but like most bullshit politicians either eat it up by the barrelful, or spew it out in waves. The truth is that you or me or the vast majority of the seven billion people living on this god-forsaken planet run that bank better than those soulless fucks. It's actually pretty simple. There are basically two important rules -guidelines if you will- to follow in order to maintain a profitable business model for an international corporation:
1) Don't spend more than you make
2) Don't fund drug cartels and international terrorists
The real bitch of it isn't that yet another bunch of rich white guys got off scott free with their hands caught in the cookie jar. It's been pretty common knowledge to most free-thinking citizens of the world for the past couple thousand years that justice for the rich is not the same as justice for the rest of us. In Western civilization at least we have a two-tier justice system in everything but name only. No, the real bitch of it that now we know beyond any reasonable doubt that if you're rich enough you can become exempt from justice altogether. I can't help but be reminded of Senator Roark's comments from SIN CITY:
"Power don't come from a badge or a gun. Power comes from lying. Lying big, and gettin' the whole damn world to play along with you. Once you got everybody agreeing with what they know in their hearts ain't true, you've got 'em by the balls."
Whatever excuse it is, whether it's "too big to fail" or "too big to jail" it's all just bullshit. The simple fact is that the US government -and every other government in every first world nation- have not only implicitly endorsed the fact that if you're rich enough that you can both figuratively and literally do whatever you want
but have also become complicit in the actions of HSBC and assumed their guilt in these crimes as well, or at least they would have if guilt stuck any better to rich, corrupt politicians than it did to rich, corrupt bankers.
However, there is a larger philosophical issue at stake here: if we won't hold people accountable for being directly responsible for the death and exploitation of thousands of people the world over, then what should we hold them accountable for? I mean, now that we know for a fact that the justice system is complete and utter bullshit without any pretense of seeming otherwise, what's the point? If our governments won't convict people that they know for certain have broken the laws of the land, and committed egregious crimes against his fellow citizens, then how can they bother to convict anybody of anything? After seeing what HSBC is guilty of, most other crimes seem inconsequential by comparison. What's the point of locking anybody up for trivial offences like drug possession, DUIs, money-laundering, sexual abuse, theft, extortion, assault, or any of the other thousands of crimes perpetrated by low-lives, drug-dealers, and elected officials on a daily basis? If we won't even convict people who have openly admitted to funding terrorist organizations and drug cartels, then how can we, with a straight face, go into a courtroom and convict some poor schlub who was found with a ziplock bag full of weed in his car? The crimes committed by HSBC and their ilk trivialize most other crimes by comparison, and their exemption from justice trivializes every other conviction for most any other crime from this point forward.
So for all you kids reading at home, if you want to break into the international atrocities market, you better start saving today. I mean, if you really want to fuck people over with impunity, you have to account for inflation.
