This is exactly wrong mindset:
Time and again, the credit card industry has demonstrated its disdain for its customers. The Fed needs to press these companies to live up to the law.
No, they need to FORCE them. And if they don’t, it needs to PUNISH them enough that it’s not worth their while.
Which comes down to this: in most cases, paying fines is fine by such businesses, it’s worth it, they make more money breaking the law than the price of the fines. So you either have to change the law to allow for executive prison time, or you need to get passive-aggressive, which is to say the Fed starts making their lives really unpleasant in other ways and so does the DOJ. The Fed can make any financial firm buckle.
If it wants to.
Suspenders
We could really use an Andrew Jackson right about now…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_War
Calvin Jones and the 13th Apostle
Suspenders:
Yeah, but without the racism. Or Huey Long.
PurpleGirl
Now that Supremes have affirmed the personhood of corporations there should be no bar to the imprisonment of a corporate CEO, in either civil or criminal cases.
(Yes, I realize how unlikely this is but one can dream can’t one.)
Suspenders
Calvin Jones..:
Sure, someone updated for modern times. Unfortunately, it seems that America will be stuck with corporate lackeys of one stripe or another for a good long while yet.
re: Huey Long, I was just thinking how at least in his day powerful monied interests had strong potential resistance, someone to fear even. Whereas Americans today are getting walked all over by their elites, and crapped on breathtakingly by things like bankers bonuses, and the political resistance to this is meek to nonexistant. Ian mentioned in one of his pieces how the average person has lost this round of the class war, and it’s looking like he was totally right on that one. Maybe destroyed might have been a better word…