CRIME AND PUNISHMENT: 2013 AND BEYOND

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“Thus under the current scenario each one ($1) dollar spent on criminalizing certain acts, prosecuting them and punishing them is met by a comparative figure of seventeen thousand ($17,000) dollars in damages caused solely by the Wall Street mortgage meltdown alone. It’s impossible to graph on a single piece of paper — it would take 12 reams of paper for economic crimes versus 1/4 inch on a single piece of paper for all other crimes.

‘If the current societal cost of all crimes including nonviolent drug related offenses was plotted at 1/4 inches, the next line down for economic crimes would be 68,000 inches long or 6,181 pages. Yet the number of people prosecuted and incarcerated for economic crimes is, thus far, less than 1% of the number of people snared in the 1980’s savings and loan scandal which all admit to have had far less reaching consequences than the PONZI “derivative” scheme of 1996-2012. ” Neil F Garfield, Esq., www.livinglies.me

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

Do you think that a person who possesses marijuana should be given a state or federal pension? What would you do if you found out that this is exactly what is happening for 1,000,000 U.S. Citizens every year? What would you think if you were told that they were each getting a pension of $40,000 year, free medical care, plus the initial cost of processing their pension applications to the state or federal government which adds another $40,000 for each pensioner?  The cost is $40 Billion per year plus the cost of initial processing of another $15 Billion per year.

$55 Billion per year is spent on pensioning possessors of marijuana and other drugs, plus the cost of socialized medicine and care for all pensioners, which includes those who commit violent crimes when they are young who are now senior citizens posing no threat to society but nonetheless retain their room, board, and medical care. The total cost of this system exceeds $80 Billion per year, which using the ten year budgets that are being hotly debated in Washington, would reduce the deficit by about $1 TRILLION dollars.

Most of the pensioners would be forced to work if they were not on the pension system. The loss from taking these people out of the workforce is another $6 Billion per year, which over ten years is another $6 Billion and the loss to economic activity is at least another $25 Billion per year or over a ten year period $250 Billion to the federal and state government on income and sales taxes is another

There are 1,500,000 people incarcerated in the United States at any one time — more per capita than any other country in the world, most of whom have far lower violent crime rates than those in the U.S. which admittedly are declining due to factors not well understood (economic, abortion, lead in gasoline and other products etc. – nobody knows).

If you were to draw out a simple three stage pyramid of incarcerated people in this country the vast base of nearly 1 million people would be comprised of those committed non-violent acts which means by definition that nobody got hurt. The vast majority of those were given sentences of “pension” for minimum mandatory periods for possession of controlled substances, mostly, marijuana. Hence, these people committed acts that posed no threat to anyone in society, or to put it simply, posed no threat to society. We spend $40 billion per year, which with inflation and other factors will cost nearly a Trillion dollars over the next ten years on these people.

The next level comprising just half the size of the foundation of the pyramid consist of people who committed violent crimes. And the last level is composed of a tiny fraction of people who committed “economic” crimes that are presumed to be non-violent. The fact that these economic criminals altered the landscape of the finance and economies all over the world in whole or in part, resulting in inevitable suicides, mass shootings, riots, wars and billions of dollars in mental health costs which leads to tens of billions of dollars in physical ailments brought on stress does not get any consideration as to whether their crimes hurt society more than say, a murderer, who shoots his partner for stealing.

Up until thirty years ago the pyramid didn’t look anything like the pyramid today. Costs for incarcerated “pensioners” and other people held in prisons and jails were far less than 1/3 of what they are today. The reason that the cost of and size of the prison system has quadrupled in 3 decades is MONEY. The prison system was privatized and this is what happens when you privatize a societal function like police, fire, and prisons. After years of lobbying big business managed to support or convince legislators that privatizing the prison system was a good idea.

This was a great idea for business — but only if they kept the jails full, using the same business model as the hotels. If you have no guests staying there you lose money. The more you can count on a full prison or jail the more you can spend on new jails and prisons, using the Wall Street markets to bankroll you. The trick is to make sure that people are convicted of something and sent to prison. And if the prison industry had their way they would make breathing a criminal event because that would give them an unlimited number of people to choose from in filling their ever growing prison system.

The closest thing they could come to criminalized breathing is taking a puff of a cigarette and since there were many types of cigarettes — tobacco and other substances, they supported anyone who was “afraid” of marijuana and managed to pass a new era of prohibition where we all know is where organized crime got its start.

To make certain they were reaching the huge population of people who used marijuana they even made it a crime just to possess it. This coup enabled the prison industry to grow into one of the largest industries in our economy (over $60 Billion per year) and create one of the largest lobbying systems to make certain that as many thing could be criminalized as possible, so long as it was directed to large numbers of potential “guests.” Violent crimes were not as much fun as non-violent crimes because costs of insurance and other measures goes up exponentially as the risk goes up, guards demand more pay for assuming the risk of dealing with violent individuals and the list goes on. Hence the lower sentences on violent crimes than possession of pot.

As for the economic crimes, the pickings are slim. The prison business model views it as a loser. There are just not enough people committing them as those who commit drug offenses and violent crimes. So prosecutions are sparse and the number of guests is very limited — really of no consequence in the business model of the prison industry. Besides it was the kingpins of Wall Street that financed the privatization of prison systems with new bonds, stock offerings and hedge products like credit default swaps. The last thing the prison lobby wants are prosecutions of Wall Street titans who are supporting the prison industry. And the last thing a politician wants is to to decriminalize non-violent drug crimes if he or she is dependent upon Wall Street or direct donations to their campaigns from the prison industry. The two lobbies combined probably exceed the total of all other lobbying.

I submit that the pyramid is inverted and that any politician  who lacks the nerve to do what is best for society should be removed from office and replaced with someone who will vote with an eye towards what will most benefit his or her constituents and the country as a whole, as is stated in their oath of office. I submit that the reason why Wall Street criminals were not prosecuted is that they are indirectly in charge of criminal prosecution system and the departments of corrections in each state and federal prison or jail.

If you analyze the pyramid in terms of damage to society, the base would be economic crimes costing some 1/3 of the world’s wealth — $17 trillion — through an obvious PONZI scheme that was named “securitization.” The principal flag for recognizing a PONZI scheme is that it collapses when people stop buying in because the venture is using incoming investments to pay the old investors. That is exactly what happened.

Compounding the crime, the Wall Street Bankers took money from investors under false pretenses, intentionally diverted a large part of that money into their own pockets, and then funded mortgages from remote thinly capitalized entities of dubious or impossibility viability by manipulating property values, rating systems, mortgage brokers and nominees that became called “originators, as if that term means anything.

The Wall Street Banks diverted investor money into their own pockets, then compounded that with  making themselves (instead of the investors they were required to protect) beneficiaries of insurance, federal bailouts and proceeds from “hedge” products like credit default swaps.

Instead of protecting the investors by having them named as payee on the funded loans, they created plainly defective notes and mortgages that were patently wrong as potential liens on the homeowner’s property.

Instead of having the money that funded the loans come from REMIC trusts that issued the bogus mortgage backed bond, they funded the loans from other entities leaving the REMIC and the investor with nothing.

They had simply diverted the paperwork from the investors for whom they were supposedly acting as agents, and created the illusion that the Wall Street Banks owned the mortgage backed bonds that contained no mortgages, no notes, were not backed and therefore bogus bonds  with no capacity to pay the expected interest and principal back to the investor.

So the foundation of pyramid based upon societal damage would be $17 trillion, with a continuing cost of trillions of dollars per year caused by squeezing values of currency on which the banks made even more money, minimum, whereas the cost to society of even the most violent crimes would be under $10 billion using the most liberal formulas. The cost to society of non-violent drug crimes could be computed as high as $3 Billion per year depending upon whose analysis you look at.

Thus under the current scenario each one ($1) dollar spent on criminalizing certain acts, prosecuting them and punishing them is met by a comparative figure of seventeen thousand ($17,000) dollars in damages caused solely by the Wall Street mortgage meltdown alone. It’s impossible to graph on a single piece of paper. If the current societal cost of all crimes including nonviolent drug related offenses was plotted at 1/4 inches, the next line down for economic crimes would be 68,000 inches long or 6,181 pages.

The outcome is clear — the bigger the economic crime the less likely the punishment regardless of the damage to society. And, as we all know, criminals who are successful tend to escalate their criminality rather than say “‘enough.”

Unless the State and Federal and Local governments understand and act on these self-evident truths, it is virtually certain that whatever is left in world wealth will be taken on the next round of Wall Street exotic securities that only robotic supercomputers can properly value — on chips containing programs created on Wall Street and never reviewed by any regulatory agency.

I submit that like the FDA, an agency I have no love for, the labeling of products from Wall Street should await approval from a newly created division of the SEC that can review —- and understand — the tricks and tools of the new “securities” being offered and that the U.S. attorneys and Attorneys General get together a task force and claw back what they can to cure or assist their deficits.

Until that happens Wall Street will continue its 4 decades long pursuit of selling crap instead of investments.

Tags: 2013, economic crimes, investors, mortgage backed bonds, Ponzi scheme, prison system, private prisons, privatizing prisons, U.S. INcarceration, Wall Street
Posted in bubble, Corruption, Eviction, securities fraud |