Imagine you had bribed public officials in order to steal public funds by selling a local government an overpriced fraudulently produced product? You'd go to jail, right? Fortunately, in our America, if you are a mega Investment Bank, like say J.P. Morgan you only have to pay the equivalent of a traffic ticket. Ain't that sweet?

J. P. Morgan Securities will forfeit hundreds of millions of dollars in fees on derivatives contracts that it sold an Alabama county, under a settlement announced Wednesday that could offer hope to other governments staggering under similar deals. [...]

To settle the lawsuit, J. P. Morgan will drop its claims for $647 million in termination fees it had been trying to make Jefferson County pay on the derivatives. The settlement also calls for J. P. Morgan to pay a $25 million penalty to the commission and $50 million to the county.

All they have to do is surrender their claim to "termination fees" they haven't yet collected on the con job they pulled from their deal with Jefferson County. That and pay $75 million dollars in fines. That might seem like a lot of moola to you and I, but in reality? That's just a tiny drop in the very large pond of JP Morgan's balance sheet, not to mention their yearly income statement.

Well, I guess if you're too big to fail, you're also too big to get hit with a real punishment, like being dismantled as a criminal enterprise and having your senior executives do some jail time. Which is lucky for them, especially since there seems to have been a pattern of "misbehavior" by JP Morgan's employees, a pattern one would assume the CEO should have known about (though I imagine they operated under their own version of "Don't ask, Don't tell" in order to retain "plausible deniability"):

The lawsuit also named two former J. P. Morgan employees. One of those men has already served a short prison term for manipulating similar bond deals in Philadelphia.

Makes you long for the good old days doesn't it?

ln Roman times, when a fellow tried to bribe a public official, they would cut off his nose, sew him in a bag with a wild animal and throw that bag in the river.

Now that might actually be an appropriate punishment for our Wall Street Banksters. Technically it isn't the death penalty, so I think I can support it with more than a little enthusiasm. Especially since Jefferson County really isn't doing all that well out of this settlement:

In Jefferson County, word of nearly $650 million worth of debt forgiveness was not met with universal rejoicing. One former financial adviser to the county, Jim White, said the bank’s forfeiture was not nearly enough to end the county’s financial troubles.

Dropping the fees “has no practical consequence to Jefferson County, as there was no possible way the county could pay them,” he said. As to J. P. Morgan, “I am morally certain that they wrote those termination fees off 18 months ago, since the claim is subordinate to $3.2 billion of debt.”

So what animal would you like to see sewn into a bag with JP Morgan's senior officials before tossing them into the East River? Personally , I'd suggest New York City sewer rats, since they and the Banksters clearly share a common ancestor.