> terrorists, pedophiles, drug dealers, and money launderers
At some point, unless you want everyone making their own personal moral judgements (including people who e.g. don't think women should have rights?), it should be permissible to deal neutrally with everyone who wants to do business with you. Let the law enforcers enforce the law, let the bankers bank.
The Mexican drug cartels could not fit cash through the teller stations quickly enough, so HSBC had special teller boxes so that it was far more efficient.
> U.S. agencies responsible for enforcing money laundering laws rarely prosecute megabanks that break the law, and the actions authorities do take barely ripple the flood of plundered money that washes through the international financial system.
From your first link. It sounds like the law enforcers need to do better at enforcing the law. If they can't enforce it against the banks, how can we expect the banks to enforce the law against themselves?
"It sounds like the law enforcers need to do better at enforcing the law"
While true, it's a non-sequitur.
OP made the point that banks serve criminals and asked then who are the "real crooks". You asked if bankers can serve everyone neutrally rather than be expected to exercise "personal morality". Which is a fair question in my opinion
Questions of individual moral duty aside, however, banks are not merely neutral when the law forbids them from specific activity and they decide to do it anyway.
Now your goalpost appears to be that banks should be able to do whatever they want if law enforcement cannot do anything about it, which is a very strange stance, to be honest
This doesn't make much sense when you think about the context of the original work you're quoting.
Niemoller was writing about a fascist government. Fascism is inherently built on an "us-vs-them" conflict. The details may change, but a key point is there's always an enemy who is responsible for everything that's wrong with the world. When fascists take power, they set out to get rid of the enemy. Then they find that didn't actually fix anything, so they splinter away some of their former in-group and make them the new enemy.
That is what fascists groups in power must do, because of course everything is much more complex than they claim. Nothing is ever as simple as "if we get rid of that group of undesirables, everything will be great", no matter who those undesirables are. Socialists? Capitalists? People who post on HN? Any other group you might name? The answer is never as easy as "those people are bad."
There doesn't need to be a slippery slope from whatever the government wants to outlaw to everyone being a criminal. It depends on the structure and goals of the government. In a fascist state, yeah it's pretty much guaranteed. In the US? Well, we're a muddled mix of everything with a very mixed record and uncertain future, but at least we're not a fascist state. There isn't a guarantee that any step leads to a next step.
So it really isn't analogous to the situation the original work was describing. And it's not really constructive to weaken its point by making jokes applying it to this situation, given the point it's trying to make. But maybe the fact that so many people don't understand the context means it's already too late.
> But maybe the fact that so many people don't understand the context means it's already too late.
final answer?
so. yes, it is a joke. its funny because its Europe and has an unrelatable but likely more relevant 21st century approach to regulating unhelpful industries. I like that they made regulations against the data brokers, who are the enemy even though the data broker's individual actions are fairly benign.
The real key here is knowingly. Large banks have had a slew of "scandals" whereby they've been caught moving many billions of dollars for evil organizations the rest of us would go to prison for donating to. How many times do these organizations have to get caught for it to be handled in a fashion comparable to mere mortals?
I say "scandals" because by some miracle it never seems to be a particularly big deal in the media.
> Aguably, the news is shadowed by other, more immediate topics - it would be interesting to see how it would have been received in a non-2020-ish year.
This is what frustrates me. You can find these scandals happening way before 2020. The fact that it isn't common knowledge is distressing.
If the banks' involvement in such activities was promoted to the same extent as the political noise that currently dominates, we might have actually have made some improvement in human and drug trafficking between the 80s and now.
