JPMorgan Chase | PROBABLE CAUSE

There were 16 school shootings that claimed 88 lives in the US in 2012, including the horrific massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut on December 14, 2012. According to a recent Daily Beast investigation, 25 school shootings that claimed 18 lives have occurred since Newtown, including the most recent on December 12, 2013 at Arapahoe High School in Centennial, Colorado, which means the U.S. is experiencing about one school shooting every two weeks.

Thank goodness schools are closed for the year, and students are on vacation.

Still, the number of school shootings––and the country’s failure to address the issue with any meaningful legislation––ranks as one of my Top Ten Crime Stories of 2013.

My other top crime stores of 2013 are listed below in no particular order.

On April 15, two pressure-cooker bombs exploded at the crowded finish line of the Boston Marathon, killing three people and injuring 183 others. Twenty-six-year-old Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his 20-year-old brother, Dzhokhar, were accused of carrying out the bombing. Tamerlan died during a shootout with police days after the incident. Dzhokar was caught and faces the death penalty if convicted.

Former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden leaked secret documents indicating that NSA surveillance extends into some of the personal communications of Americans and our overseas allies. The 30-year-old computer specialist fled the U.S. and now resides in Russia.

Ariel Castro was sentenced to life plus more than 1,000 years after pleading guilty to 937 counts including the kidnapping and rape of three women who he held captive for a decade. He committed suicide months after the conviction by hanging himself in his jail cell.

George Zimmerman was acquitted of second-degree murder and manslaughter in the death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. Martin was shot while walking home late at night from his father’s house in a gated community in Sanford FL. Under Florida’s Stand Your Ground law, Zimmerman argued, he was justified in using lethal force to save his life.

Jody Arias was convicted of first-degree murder for the 2008 killing her ex-boyfriend, Travis Alexander. He had been stabbed multiple times, had his throat slashed, and was shot in the face. But jurors deadlocked on whether Arias should be executed or face life in prison.

John Beale, the EPA’s highest-paid employee and a leading expert on climate change was sentenced to 32 months in prison for defrauding the agency out of nearly $900,000 in unearned pay and bonuses. Beale, who convinced his bosses, friends, and even his wife that he was a spy, admitted to missing more than 2½ years of work at the EPA over the last decade, during which time he claimed to work for the CIA on missions that kept him away from his job as a senior adviser in EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation.

In August, Aaron Hernandez, tight end for the New England Patriots, was indicted by a grand jury for the June murder of Odin Lloyd and five weapons charges. Hernandez is also under investigation for murders in both Florida and Massachusetts. In September, Hernandez was arraigned and pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder. If convicted, he faces life in jail without parole.

Former LAPD officer Christopher Dorner killed four people, including three police officers, in a shooting spree before fleeing. The search for Dorner spanned a week and two borders.
He was found dead by a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head when authorities finally hunted him down and surrounded the cabin near Big Bear Lake, California, where he had taken refuge.

JPMorgan Chase, the poster child for Wall Street corruption and the two-tiered justice system, is under eight separate investigations by the U.S. Department of Justice. Investigations involve potentially criminal matters ranging from allegations of hiring well-connected family members to get business in Asia; turning a blind eye to fraudulent transactions that Bernard Madoff ran through his business bank account; rigging the Libor interest rate index; manipulating energy trading markets; gambling in London with insured deposits (London Whale episode); to improper credit derivatives and mortgage bond sales. Having paid out $13 billion in fines, it is still an open question as to whether any of the top executives at the bank, including CEO Jamie Dimon, will ever be tried for fraud and convicted.

The six largest banks in the country, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, are fighting Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown’s SAFE legislation that would finally place limits on the amount of debt that a single financial institution could have relative to GDP.

The long overdue legislation comes on the heels of the financial meltdown and numerous continuing bank scandals, including LIBOR manipulation, money laundering, robo-signing, and the “London Whale.” It’s clear that the megabanks are continuing to gamble recklessly with investor’s money and lying to Congress about it. To compound the problem, the big six have little reason to fear prosecution after Attorney General Eric Holder admitted last week that they were too big to prosecute.

Under Senator Brown’s proposed legislation, no bank could have non-deposit liabilities valued greater than two percent of U.S. GDP, and no investment bank could have non-deposit liabilities exceeding three percent of GDP. Only the six largest megabanks would be affected, and they would be given three years to comply by drawing up their own proposals to meet the goal.

The six megabanks would be reduced from their current size of about 64 percent of U.S. GDP to about 34 percent of GDP, as they were in 2001. Finally, their funding would come from more stable sources, with about $3 of deposits for every $1 in volatile non-deposit funding.

The megabanks are giving millions of lobbying dollars to Congress to defeat the legislation, as they did in trying to defeat President Obama and Senators Elizabeth Warren and Sherrod Brown. That didn’t work out so well. And now, Brown has some Republican allies, including Senator David Vitter of Louisiana. Given their dysfunction and campaign contributions from Wall Street bankers, it’s hard to believe that Brown can get his legislation past a filibuster, let alone enough votes for senate passage. Good luck getting Boehner to bring it up for a vote in the House.

But if the megabanks are allowed to continue with their reckless, unsupervised gambling and Ponzi schemes, the next inevitable banking crash could take down the world economy and plunge this nation into a depression that would take years––if not decades––to recover from. A crash of that magnitude would most certainly end Boehner’s political career and send him weeping to the exits.

I know it’s a lot to ask, but let’s hope for once that common sense prevails in Congress, and that Sherrod Brown’s sensible legislation soon becomes law.