RANTS: SPARE THE ROPE, SPOIL THE BANKER!

THERE IS RECENTLY IN THE NEWS SOME DISCUSSION on what are clumsily called “Deferred Prosecution Agreements” or “DPAs” (also known as Get Out Of Jail Free Cards). These are agreements, that have been in place for some time in the United States and Great Britain, are apparently migrating into Canada in recent years. Their purpose is as:

a voluntary alternative to adjudication in which a prosecutor agrees to grant amnesty in exchange for the defendant agreeing to fulfill certain requirements. A case of corporate fraud, for instance, might be settled by means of a deferred-prosecution agreement in which the defendant agrees to pay fines, implement corporate reforms, and fully cooperate with the investigation. Fulfillment of the specified requirements will then result in dismissal of the charges.

So, beyond the gobblity-gook of the definition, what these legal agreements do is to let rich bankers, lawyers, fund managers and other shysters, con-artists and crooks, get away with the kind of financial malfeasance not seen since the days of the Robber Barons; things that would land normal folk like you and me in the clink. All these rich mucky-mucks have to do is pay a fine for their years of financial misdealing, illegal trading and lending practices, corrupt banking, real estate and stock market scheming, and just promise to be good boys and girls in the future. Man! Where do I sign up? I’d sell my soul for a job like that if it wasn’t already in hock to the defraudsters!

Tut, tut you say. Better a stiff fine and a list of ‘to-do’s for the future than long drawn out court cases that will only net some small fry or other. Hit them where it hurts, in their pocket book. I might agree if those folk didn’t have such deft fingers picking the pockets of everyone else to pay for their fines. It’s like we’ve created a money carousel and these clowns just stand around hoovering up all the payola as it goes by.

So, no. I’m not convinced that DPAs are the way to go. It sounds nice and neat but it really stands for Deeply Ploughed Ass (namely, yours and mine). Oops. My bad. Where do I pay my fine?

In the United States, deregulation by the Clinton regime in the late 1990s broke the back of the besieged Glass-Stegal Act which had  fire-walled standard banking practices from speculative ones; its elimination was a major factor resulting in the 2008 financial meltdown that nearly torpedoed the international financial system. 
Canada has a more robust firewall, but it is far from secure, and is under constant fire for deregulation, just as earlier happened down south. Where these DPAs do harm is by letting criminal actions on the part of corporate executives and their ilk (so called “white collar crime”) essentially be ignored and washed away with chump-change fines. If real actors, real human beings who act deliberately in a criminal fashion were brought to justice and had to  serve real jail time for their crimes; we might see a change in corporate mission statements all over the country: “WE ARE REALLY, REALLY SORRY! WON’T FUK YOU ANYMORE! PROMISE!”

There is much discussion recently as to whether the former Attorney General of Canada received undue influence from the Prime Minister’s Office to provide DPAs to a large multi-national in order for them to avoid criminal prosecution for what seems to me like genuine criminal activities, with the suggestion that her legal decision was influenced by political considerations.

I think the more important question is why are these deferments being offered in the first place? If you do the crime, you do the time. It has a nice ring to it, don’t it? If the laws were more stringently enforced, corporate practices would change so fast, you’d get whip-lash watching them run around picking up all their dirty laundry. What does it take—bankers hanging by lampposts again? Jeeeze!