Too Big To Jail
 It is cunning to steal a purse, daring to steal a fortune, a mark of greatness to steal a crown. The blame diminishes as the guilt increases---attributed to Schiller  
    Boy, do I have a bank deal for you. Guaranteed, too. You scam some mark out of a hundred grand. In the unlikely event you get caught, you’re allowed to negotiate the fine you’ll pay. It’s more like a tip. Ten large should do it. Jail? Don’t worry, it’ll never happen--even if you keep running the same scam over and over.
    Neither will your reputation suffer. The media have been trained to soft pedal offenses like this not as the crimes they are, but rather as “mistakes,” “lapses,” and “inadvertencies” that can be rectified by tightening book-keeping procedures:  “Oh, did we misplace a billion or so? I’ll check with accounting.”
   In short, instead of suffering punishment and shame, you’re more likely to end up playing golf with President Obama at Mink Meadows on Martha’s Vineyard.
    To be honest, there has to be a lot more zeros behind that hundred thousand to qualify for such de luxe treatment.  So if you’ve cooked the books at Hoopleville Bank & Trust--get lost, this is not in your league! This is available only to masters of the universe from UBS (The president's pet), Barclay’s, HSBC, Citibank, Bank of America and the like.
    This week brought us another example of this scam in action. The Obama administration and HSBC, one of the world’s biggest and baddest banks, reached a deal by which the bank would escape justice for, among other crimes, laundering money for Mexican drug cartels, by paying Uncle Sam a fine equal to a fraction of its yearly profits (By the by, these fines are rarely paid in full, but negotiated even further down after the publicity dies down.
    The stink was so bad that in a lead editorial the NY Times called the deal “a dark day for the rule of law.” “Clearly, added the editorial, 'the government has bought into the notion that too big to fail is too big to jail.”
    This is the latest of the extra-constitutional precedents being set by our president, who was once a professor of constitutional law.  Among other prominent ones was his declaration that he could kill anyone anywhere just on his own say-so--and the hell with the Constitution and even the Magna Carta. Then there was his novel reasoning that war crimes didn’t have to be prosecuted since they happened in the past. (I guess we should only try future crimes or those happening right now. That would certainly relieve jail crowding.) And, of course, his Libya claim that not only could he declare war on his own in direct violation of Section 8 of the Constitution, but that he didn’t even have to inform Congress.
    Welcome to Obamaland, where you can get away with murder and money and still be loved by liberals.