MARK KARLIN, EDITOR OF BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT



No less than the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) posted a column on the history of putting to death those who engage in financial malfeasance.

Jason Zweig, who wrote the WSJ essay, notes, "The history of drastic punishment for financial crimes may be nearly as old as wealth itself."

Zweig takes the reader on a quick sweep of history concerning punishment for financial misdeeds, of which the following is an excerpt:

In Florence during the Renaissance, the Arte del Cambio – the guild of mercantile money-changers who facilitated the city's international trade – made the cheating of clients punishable by torture. Rule 70 of the guild's statutes stipulated that any member caught in unethical conduct could be disciplined on the rack "or other corrective instruments" at the headquarters of the guild.

But financial crimes weren't merely punished; they were stigmatized. Dante's Inferno is populated largely with financial sinners, each category with its own distinctive punishment: misers who roll giant weights pointlessly back and forth with their chests, thieves festooned with snakes and lizards, usurers draped with purses they can't reach, even forecasters whose heads are wrenched around backward to symbolize their inability to see what is in front of them.

Counterfeiting and forgery, as the historian Marvin Becker noted in 1976, "were much less prevalent in Florence during the second half of the fourteenth century than in Tuscany during the twentieth century" and "the bankruptcy rate stood at approximately one-half [the modern rate]."

And in England, "The British government was so determined to stamp out these financial crimes that it put Sir Isaac Newton on the case. Appointed as warden of the Royal Mint in 1696, Newton promptly began uncovering those who violated the financial laws of the nation with the same passion he brought to discovering the physical laws of the universe."

But we are a civilized society for those of the top 1% who defraud customers, the nation, and engage in risk taking for profit that undermines the world economy. Perish the thought of capital punishment, we don't even put those who oversee Wall Street financial malfeasance in jail; heck, we don't even charge them.

Yes, a few underlings, "guppies," are arrested now and then, but that is because their fraud was not large enough and was strictly personal (such as embezzlement). But if it is illegal activity on a massive firm-wide scale, then no one is held accountable. The financial giants just get a fine (if that even happens) that is less than the amount that they profited from their violation of regulations and the law, so they end up with a net revenue gain as a reward for their felonious behavior.

Zweig concludes, "Wall Street offers its risk-takers the potential to earn tens of millions, even hundreds of millions of dollars, when bets pay off, with no real penalties when bets go bad. Until – or unless – that culture changes, nothing fundamental will change." But he remains skeptical that holding individuals responsible for "too big to fail" illegal behavior will work.

That's his opinion.

In our book, it's still worth a try. Enabling the current double standard of putting a person in jail for kiting a few checks, but not even charging anybody for pre-meditated actions that lead to billions of dollars in fraudulent activity, well that's not only unfair; it results in a nation committing financial suicide.