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Dennis Hastert is about the least sympathetic figure one can imagine. The former House Speaker got filthy rich as a lobbyist trading on contacts he gained in office, his leadership coincided with Congress's abject failure to exercise oversight or protect civil liberties after the September 11 terrorist attacks, and now Hastert stands accused of improper sexual contact with a boy he knew years ago while teaching high school and trying to hide that sordid history by paying the young man to keep quiet. If federal prosecutors could meet the legal thresholds for charging and convicting Hastert of a sex crime, they would be fully justified in aggressively pursuing the matter.
Yet, as Conor Friedersdorf writes in The Atlantic, the Hastert indictment doesn’t charge him for, or even accuse him of, sexual misconduct. Rather, as Glenn Greenwald notes, “Hastert was indicted for two alleged felonies: 1) withdrawing cash from his bank accounts in amounts and patterns designed to hide the payments; and 2) lying to the FBI about the purpose of those withdrawals once they detected them and then inquired with him.” It isn’t illegal to withdraw money from the bank, nor to compensate someone in recognition of past harms, nor to be the victim of a blackmail scheme. So why should it be a crime to hide those actions from the U.S. government? The current charges could be motivated by a desire to prosecute Hastert for sex crimes. But that dodges the issue. “In order to punish him for that crime, the government should charge him with it, then prosecute him with due process and convict him in front of a jury of his peers,” says Greenwald. “What over-criminalization does is allow the government to turn anyone it wants into a felon, and thus punish them without having to overcome those vital burdens. Regardless of one’s views of Hastert or his alleged misconduct here, it should take little effort to see why nobody should want that.”
Original Submission
(Score: 2) by pnkwarhall on Wednesday June 03 2015, @10:59PM
Honestly the banking sector as a whole has morphed into something else.
This was a curiosity-piquing statement. Care to explain more?
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(Score: 4, Insightful) by deimtee on Thursday June 04 2015, @12:21AM
Banks used to be a safe place to keep your money for later use. One of the meanings of the word "bank" is exactly that - to put away for future use.
They have changed into transaction facilitators who collect fees on each transaction.
Keeping a large amount of money in a bank is now suspicious behaviour, exactly the opposite of what it used to be.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Dunbal on Thursday June 04 2015, @12:56AM
Couldn't have put it better myself. Banks used to collect capital and keep it safe, or at least safer than under your mattress. They paid you interest for the privilege of holding your capital, and they invested part of it judiciously in loans and other investments, keeping the profit after paying out your interest for themselves. It was a win win. Win for you because you got an interest "reward" for lending them your money, and a win for them if they were smart enough to make even more money with your money. Now it's a win lose, where the bank makes money regardless, be it a service fee, or a transaction charge, or an account use fee, or a fee for not using your account, or a fee for not having enough money, or a fee for having too much money, or a fee for making too many transactions, etc. Once they've collected their fees from you (which always exceed any interest you might hope to get in a given year because let's be honest, if you have any real amount of money the last place you will put it is in a bank), it's a clear "fuck off" from the bank because oops they lost your money on bad bets on the derivatives markets so let's make the government force you to pay for them on top of that.
(Score: 2) by pnkwarhall on Monday June 15 2015, @10:02PM
thank you both for your insight.
Lift Yr Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven