<html><head></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; ">California’s Santa Cruz County: Punishing Felonious Banks<br><br>July 4, 2015<br>By Robert Reich<br><a href="http://robertreich.org" target="_blank">robertreich.org</a> (June 20, 2015)<br><br>Santa
Cruz County’s Board of Supervisors recently suspended all business with
the five giant banks, including JPMorgan Chase and Citicorp, who
recently pleaded guilty to felony charges of criminal collusion. While
the small California county’s portfolio is only valued at $650 million,
Santa Cruz County Supervisor Ryan Coonerty says he’ll be contacting
other local jurisdictions to urge them to follow Santa Cruz County’s
lead.<br><br>What exactly does it mean for a big Wall Street bank to plead guilty to a serious crime? Right now, practically nothing.<br>But it will if California’s Santa Cruz County has any say. <br>First, some background.<br>Five
giant banks – including Wall Street behemoths JPMorgan Chase and
Citicorp – recently pleaded guilty to criminal felony charges that they
rigged the world’s foreign-currency market for their own profit.<br>This wasn’t a small heist. We’re talking hundreds of billions of dollars worth of transactions every day.<br>The
banks altered currency prices long enough for the banks to make winning
bets before the prices snapped back to what they should have been. <br>Attorney
General Loretta Lynch called it a “brazen display of collusion” that
harmed “countless consumers, investors and institutions around the globe
— from pension funds to major corporations, and including the banks’
own customers.”<br>The penalty? The banks have agreed to pay $5.5
billion. That may sound like a big chunk of change, but for a giant bank
it’s the cost of doing business. In fact, the banks are likely to
deduct the fines from their taxes as business costs.<br>The banks sound contrite. After all, they can’t have the public believe they’re outright crooks.<br>It’s “an embarrassment to our firm, and stands in stark contrast to Citi’s values,“ says Citigroup CEO Michael Corbat.<br>Values? Citigroup’s main value is to make as much money as possible. Corbat himself raked in $13 million last year.<br>JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon calls it "a great disappointment to us,” and says “we demand and expect better of our people.”<br>Expect
better? If recent history is any guide – think of the bank’s notorious
“London Whale” a few years ago, and, before that, the wild bets leading
to the 2008 bailout – JPMorgan expects exactly this kind of behavior
from its people.<br>Which helped Dimon rake in $20 million last year, as well as a $7.4 million cash bonus.<br>When
real people plead guilty to felonies, they go to jail. But big banks
aren’t people despite what the five Republican appointees to the Supreme
Court say.<br>The executives who run these banks aren’t going to jail,
either. Apologists say it’s not fair to jail bank executives because
they don’t know what their rogue traders are up to.<br>Yet ex-convicts often suffer consequences beyond jail terms. <br>In many states they lose their right to vote. They can’t run for office or otherwise participate in the political process.<br>So
why not take away the right of these convicted banks to participate in
the political process, at least for some years? That would stop
JPMorgan’s Dimon from lobbying Congress to roll back the Dodd-Frank act,
as he’s been doing almost non-stop. <br>Why not also take away their
right to pour money into politics? Wall Street banks have been among the
biggest contributors to political campaigns. If they’re convicted of a
felony, they should be barred from making any political contributions
for at least ten years.<br>Real ex-convicts also have difficulty finding jobs. That’s because, rightly or wrongly, many people don’t want to hire them. <br>A
strong case can be made that employers shouldn’t pay attention to
criminal convictions of real people who need a fresh start, especially a
job.<br>But giant banks that have committed felonies are something
different. Why shouldn’t depositors and investors consider their past
convictions?<br>Which brings us to Santa Cruz County.<br>The county’s board of supervisors just voted not to do business for five years with any of the five banks felons.<br>The
county won’t use the banks’ investment services or buy their commercial
paper, and will pull its money out of the banks to the extent it can.<br>“We
have a sacred obligation to protect the public’s tax dollars and these
banks can’t be trusted. Santa Cruz County should not be involved with
those who rigged the world’s biggest financial markets,” says supervisor
Ryan Coonerty.<br>The banks will hardly notice. Santa Cruz County’s portfolio is valued at about $650 million.<br>But
what if every county, city, and state in America followed Santa Cruz
County’s example, and held the big banks accountable for their felonies?<br>What
if all of us taxpayers said, in effect, we’re not going to hire these
convicted felons to handle our public finances? We don’t trust them.<br>That would hit these banks directly. They’d lose our business. Which might even cause them to clean up their acts.<br>There’s
hope. Supervisor Coonerty says he’ll be contacting other local
jurisdictions across the country, urging them to do what Santa Cruz
County is doing.<br>[Robert B. Reich, Chancellor’s Professor of Public
Policy at the University of California at Berkeley and Senior Fellow at
the Blum Center for Developing Economies, was Secretary of Labor in the
Clinton Administration.]<br></body></html>