Robert Benmosche, the CEO of American International Group (AIG) had some blunt advice to college graduates searching for work.
“You have to accept the hand that’s been dealt you in life,” Benmosche said in a 2013 interview on Bloomberg Television. “Don’t cry about it. Deal with it.”
As is typical of one-percenters, Benmosche blamed willing-to-work college graduates for the refusal of rich employers to offer jobs instead of excuses.
AIG’s way of “accepting the hand that’s been dealt you in life” was to go crying to the Federal Government for a bailout loan—which eventually ballooned to $182 billion.
If college graduates should “deal with” the hardships of finding a responsible, hiring-inclined employer with a stiff upper lip, as Benmosche advised, the same advice should work wonders on greed-fueled CEOs.
Greed-test CEOs for future government loans.
After all, drug-testing welfare recipients has become the new mantra for Republicans.
Some bills have even targeted people who seek unemployment insurance and food stamps, despite scanty evidence that the poor and jobless are disproportionately on drugs.
The concept of background screening is actually sound. But Republicans are aiming it at the wrong end of the economic spectrum.
Since 2008, the government has handed out billions of dollars in bailouts to CEOs of the wealthiest corporations in the country.
The reason: To rescue the economy from the calamity produced by the criminal greed and recklessness of those same corporations.
In 2008, Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, testified before Congress about the origins of the Wall Street “meltdown.”
He admitted that he was “shocked” at the breakdown in U.S. credit markets and said he was “partially” wrong to resist regulation of some securities.
“Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholder’s equity—myself especially—are in a state of shocked disbelief,” said Greenspan, who had ruled the Fed from 1987 to 2006.
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Alan Greenspan
As a disciple of the right-wing philosopher, Ayan Rand, Greenspan had fiercely held to her belief that “The Market” was a divine institution. As such, “it” alone knew what was best for the nation’s economic prosperity.
“Enlightened self-interest,” he believed, would guarantee that those who dedicated their lives to making money would not allow mere greed to steer them—and the country—into disaster.
As he saw it, any attempt to regulate greed-based appetites could only harm that divine institution.
This had been the prevailing attitude among businessmen prior to the 1929 Wall Street crash that brought on the Great Depression. It proved wrong then.
And it proved wrong for Greenspan—and the country—in 2008. And the nation will be literally paying for such misguided confidence in profit-addicted men for decades to come.
So if Republicans want to protect the “poor, oppressed taxpayer,” they should demand background investigations for those whose addiction truly threatens the economic future of this country.
That is: The men (and occasionally women) who run the nation’s most important financial institutions, such as banks, insurance and mortgage companies.
Thus, in the future, all CEOs—and their families and topmost executives—of financial institutions seeking Federal bailouts should be required to:
- Undergo “full field investigations” by the FBI and IRS.
- Submit full financial disclosure forms concerning not only themselves but all members of their immediate families.
- Be subject to Federal prosecution for perjury if they provide false information or conceal evidence of criminal violations.
- Periodically submit themselves for additional background investigation.
- Be subject to arrest, indictment and prosecution if the background investigation turns up evidence of criminal activity.
In addition:
- If a bailout-seeking financial institution refuses to comply with these criteria, it should be refused the loan.
- If a CEO and/or other top officials are judged ineligible for a loan, the company should be asked to replace those executives with others who might qualify.
- Those alternative executives should be subject to the same background investigation requirements as just outlined.
- If the institution refuses to replace those executives found ineligible, the Government should refuse the loan.
- If the Government is forced to take over a troubled financial institution, its CEO and top executives should be replaced with applicants who have passed the required security screening.
The United States has a long and embarrassing history in worshiping wealth for its own sake. Part of this can be traced to the old Calvinistic doctrine that wealth is a proof of salvation, since it shows evidence of God’s favor.
“The man who builds a factory,” eulogized President Calvin Coolidge, “builds a temple. And the man who works there, worships there.”
Another reason for this worship of mammon is the belief that someone who is wealthy is automatically endowed with wisdom and integrity. If that were true, Mafia bosses would be the moral equivalent of Saint Augustine.
Following these beliefs to their ultimate conclusion will transform the United States into a plutocracy—a government of the wealthy, by the wealthy, for the wealthy.
Every day—from President Donald Trump on down—we see fresh evidence of the destruction wrought by the unchecked greed of wealthy, powerful men.
When they—and their paid shills in Congress—demand, “De-regulate business,” it’s essential to remember what this really means.
It means: “Let criminals be criminals.”
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BANKSTERS AND DRUGGIES
In Bureaucracy, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Politics, Social commentary on April 16, 2020 at 3:50 amIt’s a scene familiar to anyone who’s seen Scarface, the 1983 classic starring Al Pacino as a Cuban drug dealer who makes it big in the cocaine business.
Tony Montana (Pacino) is holding court in his Florida estate. His visitor is a WASPish banker.
Bankers as a rule don’t make house calls. But Tony is no ordinary customer—his men literally haul bags full of bills into the bank when making deposits.
Except that now the banker has some unpleasant news for Tony: “We’re not a wholesale operation. We’re a legitimate bank. The more cash you give me……the harder it is for me to rinse. The fact is I can’t take any more of your money unless I raise the rates on you.”
Then follows this exchange:
TONY: You gonna raise…
BANKER: I gotta do it.
BANKER: The IRS is coming….
TONY: Don’t give me that shit! Let’s talk. I’m talking. I go low, you go high. I know the game. This is business talk.
BANKER: Let me explain something. The IRS is coming down heavy on South Florida. There was a Time magazine story that didn’t help. There’s a recession. I got stockholders I got to be responsible for. I got to do it, Tony.
TONY: We’ll go somewhere else. That’s it.
BANKER: There’s no place else to go.
TONY: Fuck you, man! Fuck you! I’ll fly the cash myself to the Bahamas.
BANKER: Once maybe. Then what? You’ll trust some monkey in a Bahamian bank with millions of your hard-earned dollars? Come on, Tony. Don’t be a schmuck. Who else can you trust? That’s why you pay us what you do. You trust us.
Stay with us. You’re a well-liked customer. You’re in good hands with us.
(At this point, movie audiences burst into laughter. The line, “You’re in good hands with us” seemed directly lifted from the slogan used by Allstate Insurance: “You’re in good hands with Allstate.”)
Now, fast forward to 2014.
A Reuters news story dated May 21, 2014 noted that investigators from the Federal Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) were probing Charles Schwab and Bank of America Corporations Merrill Lynch brokerage.
The SEC wants to determine if these brokerages violated anti-money laundering rules that require financial institutions to know their customers.
Broker-dealers are required to establish, document and identify customers and verify their identities in compliance with the Bank Secrecy Act.
In 2012, David Cohen, the U.S. Treasury Undersecretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence David Cohen, ordered regulators to guarantee that financial institutions are identifying the true beneficial owners of their accounts.
The reason: Drug cartels and terrorist groups have become highly creative in hiding and transferring their illegal funds.
According to sources close to the investigation, Charles Schwab and Merrill accepted shell companies and persons with phony addresses as clients.
In both cases, some of the accounts were eventually linked to drug cartels. Some of those accounts held hundreds of thousands of dollars; others held millions.
A Texas rancher and Charles Schwab client transferred money to a holding company that was actually a shell company.
Most of the Schwab clients being investigated lived near the Mexican border. Some were linked to Mexican drug cartels.
Click here: Exclusive: SEC probes Schwab, Merrill, for anti-money laundering violations – sources | Reuters
In December, 2017, the the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority fined Merrill Lynch $26 million for failing to identify suspicious money-transfer activities in customer accounts for years.
In fact, the government should have assumed long ago that brokerage companies were engaging in such behavior.
As Niccolo Machiavelli warned in The Discourses, his landmark book on how to preserve freedom within a republic:
All those who have written upon civil institutions demonstrate…that whoever desires to found a state and give it laws, must start with assuming that all men are bad and ever ready to display their vicious nature, whenever they may find occasion for it.
Niccolo Machiavelli
If their evil disposition remains concealed for a time, it must be attributed to some unknown reason; and we must assume that it lacked occasion to show itself.
But time, which has been said to be the father of all truth, does not fail to bring it to light.
Whenever the creating of wealth becomes an end in itself, all other ends are sacrificed to this.
Greed begins in the neurochemistry of the brain. A neurotransmitter called dopamine fuels our greed. The higher the dopamine levels in the brain, the greater the pleasure we experience.
Harvard researcher Hans Breiter has found, via magnetic resonance imaging studies, that the craving for money activates the same regions of the brain as the lust for sex, cocaine or any other pleasure-inducer.
But snorting the same amount of cocaine, or earning the same sum of money, does not cause dopamine levels to increase. So the pleasure-seeker must increase the amount of stimuli to keep enjoying the euphoria.
Federal investigators need to view large concentrations of wealth as sources for at least potential corruption.
And they should ruthlessly—and routinely—investigate those sources, whether in the vaults of the Mafia or of major financial institutions.
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