You don’t have to be a soccer fan to know about the recent FIFA scandal. FIFA is the governing body for soccer, the world’s most popular sport. Leaders in the organization have been charged with corruption, graft, extortion, and stunning disregard for the human costs of their success. But FIFA is just one in a long tradition of giant, arrogant members of the corporatocracy who seem to think they are above the law.
While this scandal is certainly newsworthy, the real outrage is the criminal bankers who have been making untold billions by illegally manipulating exchange rates for years. The world of sports is acting as a smoke screen, shielding the Justice Department from blame for irresponsibly ignoring the banking world. Instead of indicting individual bankers, the true masterminds behind this “breathtaking conspiracy,” as US Attorney General Loretta Lynch has called it, all the attention has been directed at the banks as entities. There are individual men and women behind the crimes of these international banks, people who should be brought to justice instead of protected by an armor of wealth and power. After the 2012 banking scandal around Libor – the “London Interbank Offered Rate” – there is no excuse for letting this travesty get swept under the rug.
International banking and the interest and exchange rates it controls are much more significant to all our lives than soccer. There is a bigger scandal brewing there, major banks have admitted to criminal activities, agreed to pay fines of about $10 billion, and yet not a single banker has been indicted. Why, we should all be asking ourselves, are banking executives above the law while those at FIFA are not? Clues: which group belongs to the corporatocracy? Who hires tens of thousands of Washington deal-makers and lobbyists? Who owns US Congress people?
Calling themselves the “Cartel,” a conglomerate of international banks has come under fire for manipulating foreign exchange rates, among other charges, to illegally increase the banks’ profits exponentially. These once-respected financial institutions, including Barclays, the Royal Bank of Scotland, UBS, and JP Morgan Chase, acted as if they were untouchable and pursued wealth at all costs. The punishments for this long standing betrayal of the world’s trust are fines and penalties, with the occasional firing of bankers. The amount of these fines is hardly a punishment that fits the crime. The Justice Department needs to indict the ringleaders, the human beings behind these criminal acts. They cannot be allowed to hide behind shadowy and impersonal corporate logos.
Even while turning a blind eye to the crimes of the banking empire in favor of the sports arena, indicting a few members of FIFA is too little too late. Arresting members of a multinational sports corporation will not change the way the corporatocracy exploits the people of the world and damages the future for all of us. And the fact that corporations like Nike that are partners of FIFA seem to escape the net in this case, illustrates the selective immunity of money and power.
While it is good that the Justice Department is going after individual executives at FIFA for criminal activities, it is hard to ignore the blatant double standard. Individual bankers and other members of the corporatocracy are committing much more serious crimes, ones that impact the global economy and the lives of all of us. Yet those people whose job it is to bring justice to the US and the world are focusing on sports, hoping to distract us from the more egregious issues by other multinational corporations and organizations. We must hold them to a higher standard and demand that they pursue not just the company as a whole but the men and women who think they are above the law.
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