Congress joins Eric Holder in coddling banks

While Attorney General Eric Holder maintains that the nation’s top banks are too big to target for fraud prosecutions and other criminal behavior – “too big to jail,” as some critics call it – the Wall Street titans are taking no chances, choosing to dish out millions of dollars in campaign cash to Congress over the last several years.

Holder asserted recently that the size of big banks has “an inhibiting influence” on the Justice Department’s ability to prosecute the criminal activity of the bank executives during the 2008-09 financial crisis.

 

“I am concerned that the size of some of these institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them when we are hit with indications that if you do prosecute, if you do bring a criminal charge, it will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy," Holder told the Senate Judiciary Committee.

In other words, too big to fail, too big to prosecute.

The folks at Maplight.org, a government watchdog group, point out that it’s unclear just how big a bank has to be to be considered un-prosecutable, but HSBC’s recent settlement for enabling drug cartels and rogue states to launder money suggests that even they -- the ninth largest U.S. bank by assets and many times smaller than the biggest banks -- are too big to prosecute. By facilitating deregulation, bailing out insolvent institutions (TARP) and voting against limits on bank size, Congress has allowed these banks to grow as big as they currently are, according to MapLight.
Inspired by Holder’s weak-kneed approach toward the banks’ criminal activities, MapLight has analyzed campaign contributions from the political action commitees (PACs) of the nine largest banks to members of Congress since Jan. 1, 2003.

Here’s what they found:

• In total, the PACs of the top 9 banks have given $17,019,505 to current members of the 113th Congress.
• Bank of America has given the most, at $3,381,157.
• HSBC has given $1,141,211.
• House member Spencer Bachus, chairman emeritus of the House Committee on Financial Services , received $399,500 from the PACs of the top 9 banks, more than any other current member of Congress. Bachus is also the top recipient of money from HSBC, with $34,000 in contributions.

To download a spreadsheet of this data, click here.
A link to this report can be found here.