> Board executives at JPMorgan Chase, PNC and the other banks that caused so much destruction in 2008 should have been thrown in jail next to rapists, paedophiles and murders.

What strange ideas of justice the world has!

In an ostensibly advanced country, America, one side of the political spectrum would be have us remain willfully oblivious to police abuses, corrupt prosecutors withholding or fabricating evidence, and the systematic dehumanization not simply of prisoners, but of any peripherally involved with the machinery criminal justice system, especially for the purpose of deporting undesirables.

(The prison guards who put an inmate in the shower and turned on the hot water until the skin was peeling off his corpse? Normal. The immigrant detained by ICE for months and months, given aspirin for his developing penis cancer despite agency doctors' recommendation to get him to a proper examination until it was far, far too late? Incredibly normal. Predates Trump.)

The other side of this political spectrum skims over meaningful questions of actual fraudulent or unethical business practices, issuing instead a blanket equation of the practice of making loans to people who assumed their house would apprecuate in value with crimes such as murder and child abuse.

And these aren't even extremes. Both positions are pretty mainstream, real crowd-pleasers.

What the hell is wrong with us? Can we not aspire to build a world where there is actual justice, and not mere retribution against our political foes and other un-persons?

What you're implicitly arguing is that since we don't prosecute injustice evenly, we shouldn't prosecute injustice at all. There's always going to be something worse happening, it shouldn't distract us from doing what is right. You could easily make the argument that since we allow North Korea to have prison camps, we can't throw murderers into prison because actual justice doesn't exist evenly around the world.

Also finish the food on your plate, there are starving kids in Africa.

The bankers did more than make shaky loans. In some cases they committed actual fraud, amounting to billions of dollars, which had effects like wiping out people's retirement accounts.

I think you're right that they deserve less punishment than murderers. But what they got is less punishment than some people get for standing on the wrong street corner.

For details, on both the bankers and the people on street corners, see The Divide by Matt Taibbi.

A murder destroys a single life, or handful of lives, directly. Is a bank executive who wilfully commits fraud that damages million of lives better or far worse?

Regardless of how bad it is (and I do think there are arguments to be made both ways), being allowed to effectively escape punishment because the distributed nature of the crime makes it hard to comprehend its real impact is both wrong and damaging to society in the long run.

>Basically it's called using money as a means to make money, and this was frowned upon in many civilisations.

I was watching the history of York castle on Netflix. In England the Christian people wouldn't charge interest on loans but the small Jewish community did, I assume it meant a person could borrow more?

Anyway there was a huge riot by the Christian townsfolk they wanted to kill the Jewish men, women and children. Which also meant all debts held in Jewish books were wiped out.

All the Jewish people of York took refuge in the York castle keep but in the end were going to be killed by the people of York. The men slit the throats of their wives and children then the mend committed suicide.

http://www.historyofyork.org.uk/themes/norman/the-1190-massa...

> I assume it meant a person could borrow more?

It meant the lender was more willing to lend. The lender could make a business of lending if he charged interest, and not if he did not.