Of course the owners of the bank take the hit when fines are levied. Who else would?

How about the individuals that committed the crimes?

Do you know how corporate boards work? They're designed to shield the management level executives from any such governance by the shareholders. And since most of the shareholders are institutional (or other corporations) it becomes one big consequence-avoidance scam.

Plus, the fines paid by the shareholders are only a tiny fraction of the money the corporation made from these illegal activities. So, if you're a shareholder and you get a letter saying, "We paid $5 billion in fines, and here's your cut of the profits from the heist" what are you gonna do?

It's like stealing a truckload of cases of beer and the penalty being you have to give back one bottle.

Destroying the west via deficits will ultimately have taken a long time, but it's happening.

Yeah, looking out my window it totally looks like Mad Max right now.

And it started with Ronald Reagan.

Remember, the fuller Dick Cheney quote was, "Ronald Reagan proved deficits don't matter."

That trader did not make hundreds of billions. He will not be allowed near any bank ever again. He won't be keeping his bonus.

I didn't say a single trader made hundreds of billions. And he won't be getting this year's bonus. The Cartel has been operating for years. He'll keep all the previous bonuses.

And he won't be prosecuted for a crime. And his bosses won't be prosecuted for a crime. They'll spend $5 billion of the shareholders' money paying the fines and they won't be convicted of a goddamn crime.

"Soverign debt is not like personal debt!"

As Dick Cheney famously said on the eve of the Iraq War, "Deficits don't matter".

He said that because sovereign debt really isn't like personal debt when the sovereign debt is in a convertible fiat currency. Because the difference between you and a nation is the power to issue currency. Do you know how many countries have ever actually paid off their debt? Take a guess.

The IMF is like a loan shark. They don't want countries to pay off their debts. They want countries to service their debts until such time as they can burn it down for the insurance (CDO) money.

One more thing: The colluding traders making these outsized profits for the banks actually named their online chat rooms, "The Cartel", "The Cabal" and "Mafia".

Here's the link to the "Cabal" story:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05...

Remember, it's the shareholders that pay these fines. And no one in the bank corporation is held accountable.

I just learned that the fines for illegal activity paid by banks since the economic collapse have totaled more than a quarter trillion dollars which is more than the entire economy of Greece. And that number is from 2014, before the $13 billion from Citi and the recent $5 billion for the banks involved in the price-fixing scandal.

Coincidence?

One of the traders for those banks, who was part of a collusion group that called itself (I'm not making this up), "The Cabal", said, in an email to the group, "If you're not cheating, you're not trying." That's $5 billion in fines for activity that made them hundreds of billions of dollars and bonuses.

And so far, not one of the members of "The Cabal" have been charged with a crime, and they'll be keeping their record bonuses. In fact, no one from those banks will be facing criminal charges of any kind.

So if you want me to be mad at Greece for letting the IMF dangle, I'm sorry. There are much bigger fish to fry.

There's so much more to this Greece story than just, "Oh those lazy Greeks with their big pensions." The IMF and the biggest banks were basically doing what those sketchy "payday loan" places in the strip mall do. They were basically doing what the home-lending institutions were doing in the 2000s. They were giving big bonuses to loan brokers for making loans - any loans - to people because they knew they could flip them on the secondary and CDO market. Investors were chasing yield so the word went out to mortgage lenders to "just get it done" and they basically defrauded as many people as possible. That's what the IMF does in countries like Greece and many South American companies. I think we're going to start seeing more of these countries deciding to just tell the IMF to go eff itself and take their monetary policy medicine and just be done with it. Then you'll start seeing the CIA-backed and German-backed and UK-backed coups start to happen.

"Nasty 1" is my rap name.

This new development will be great for my career, but not so good for my street cred.

What kind of business could have revenue less than or equal to its tax bill but will continue to "pay taxes"?

That's upside down thinking. Corporations pay tax on income which means "profits".

Ergo, all taxes a business will pay must be funded out of revenue.

This is the right-wing brainwashing at work. You can't even imagine taxes being funded out of profits, can you? Please bear in mind that a corporation is simply a legal mechanism by which capital can avoid liability. You have somehow come to believe that a companies costs exactly equal its revenue and that they only exist for the public good.

The first rule of economics is "Businesses do not pay taxes. Businesses collect taxes."

No, the first rule of economics is "don't talk about economics".

Seriously, as long as you have companies in competition in regard to pricing, then yes, businesses do in fact pay taxes. They can not in fact just raise prices to cover taxes, because if they could raise prices, they already would have done so.

There is no law in economics that says "Businesses do not pay taxes. Businesses collect taxes." That's an old conservative trope that gained currency when Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were busy rodgering the working people of their respective countries.

If you had gone to high school, you might have noticed that women make up 84% of the teaching staff

And if you could read your own citation, you'd have noticed that men make up 43% of the high school teachers.

The 84% number includes elementary, pre-school and early child care. As someone who's actually had progeny, I can assure you, there's a good reason men don't go into pre-school and early child care.

But elementary school and high school? Forget about it, that's approaching 100% women.

43% of high school teachers are male. And the number of men in teaching at the pre-school through high school level is growing. And growing is the opposite of "approaching zero", for future reference.

http://www.menteach.org/resour...

and will head up into Rocky Mountain National Park around 7am tomorrow to hike around bear lake with my girlfriend.

Sorry, man, I was just messing. That sounds like a beautiful way to spend a Sunday morning. One of my life goals is to live on the edge of a National Park.

Since these articles get pretty much the same reaction on weekdays

I think you'll find that these stories are most likely to appear on Slashdot Friday and Saturday nights.

I was playing guitar but stopped to check the various feeds before shutting down and heading to bed. Snowshoeing early tomorrow.

Right on, brother. Tomorrow morning I'll be busting some broncos and then base-jumping off the Sears Tower with a parachute of my own design. After that, I'll be having sex with the entire wait staff of Hooters, one of whom is my wife, Morgan Fairchild.