If you were going to write a story about a bank that was inherently evil, what would you have that bank do?

Brazenly and unapologetically launder at least $881 million for those perpetrators of torture and beheadings, the Mexican and Colombian drug cartels? Or how about help Al Qaeda’s “Golden Chain” of financiers and members of Osama bin Laden’s family fund terrorist acts?

Sorry, you’re going to have to get more creative than that. That bank already exists. They’re they second largest bank in the world. They’re HSBC.

This is what they do. They’re not even any good at hiding it. They don’t have to be. Just three years after being caught red-handed aiding and abetting some of the most violent criminal elements in the world, a new US Department of Justice report finds that the bank’s procedures for supposedly preventing such activity are still so unimaginably lax that they can’t even be publicly discussed because they’d invite even more crime.

And this is the state of finance today. HSBC, having been deemed Too Big to Fail, is allowed to make hundreds of millions of dollars laundering drug and terror money. Because prosecuting them in a meaningful way might destabilize the global economy.

Which means what, exactly? If you can charge any fee you want to criminals in exchange for laundering their money and know that as punishment all you’ll have to do is share some of your profits with the occasional world government that fines you, why wouldn’t you? Remember, this is a big bank, so ethical arguments do not factor. “Because it’s wrong” is a non-starter.

Nobody goes to jail. There are no meaningful consequences for anyone involved. And the big banks get the message, loud and clear: “You are untouchable. You are at the top of the food chain. Nobody can do anything to stop you.” Further, if your enterprises, criminal or otherwise, do not pan out, the US government will be there to bail you out, wipe the slate clean, fix nothing systemic, and wait until the next inevitable “How could this have happened?!?!” catastrophe.

Make no mistake: so long as there are banks that are Too Big to Fail, the next crisis is inevitable. A “capitalist” system in which success is rewarded and failure is rewarded is not a capitalist system. It’s a rigged and unsustainable game in which the very real consequences of failure are simply forestalled, looming larger and more disastrous the longer they are delayed.

So banks engage in unsustainably risky and outright criminal behavior. Because they know they will not have to pay for their own bad bets and illegal activity. They know we will have to pay.

Until we realize we don’t have to. We are not powerless. Elect legislators with the common sense, independence, and courage to break up the big banks and end their repugnant, nauseatingly contemptuous treatment of decent human beings everywhere.