Prudential took in the lifetime investments of a New York couple in an amount of $23 million dollars. Part inheritance, part investment, and part just hard work on the part of the soon-to-be retired pair. In a series of hustles and churning scams, Prudential lost $22 million of that $23 million. But in the process, Prudential made astronomical investment management fees off the millions of dollars they squandered. No risk to Prudential – roll the dice, money for nothing.
As if that is not ugly enough, Prudential had the couple sign an arbitration clause when they handed over their $23 million dollars to Prudential to squander away. The arbitration clause is in such tiny fine print that you need a magnifying glass to read it. And it is as long as the work War & Peace.
But most people shouldn’t need a lawyer to read routine investment documents with companies like Prudential, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and all the other Wall Street hustlers. At least we didn’t need that 10 years ago.
Let me tell you what the fine print of that arbitration clause said in effect: Prudential could assign a doped-up crack addict to steal money from the retiring couple and no jury would ever be permitted to hear about those facts. Prudential could throw their annual Christmas bash with the retirees’ $23 million dollars and that couple would never be permitted to even present their case to a jury. Hell, the arbitration scam was so complete that top management could devise a way to steal the couple’s #23 million dollars and still they could not present their case to a neutral, unbiased jury of their peers.
The $23 million dollars was not all the couple lost when they signed that arbitration clause. They also lost their right to do anything meaningful about it. The arbitration clause they signed with the soulless villains in this story required that the couple allow Prudential’s hand-picked arbitrator panel to decide if they should get their money back.
In other words, Wall Street scammers who work right down the road in the same business, sometimes past and future employees of Prudential, get to decide what caliber of incompetent boobs or what caliber of crooks even that Prudential was when Prudential squandered $22 million dollars worth of the couple’s money. And you never know who is trying to have all of you sign an arbitration clause just like the one that ended up disastrously for this couple.
Well, that would be the US Chamber of Commerce, Leadership in the Republican Party and leadership in the Democratic Party.
This is the Wall Street, Big Business, get out of jail free scam:
– Already, 60% of financial institutions force their customers to sign arbitration clauses.
– 95% of all credit card disputes are required to be settled with the card company’s hand-picked arbitrators, no matter how much they steal from you with hidden charges, usury interest rates, or just plain thievery and incompetence.
But Democratic and Republican leadership seem unwilling to get in the way of the new transfer of wealth from you to Wall Street.
Put in the most basic way I can think of, arbitration is a sick joke where the wicked company wins about 85% of the time. There rarely is ever a happy ending for the consumer.
But hey, imagine all that campaign money moving into the pockets of Democrats and Republicans who support such a Wall Street bonanza!
The $2 trillion taxpayers already paid to incompetent, criminal Wall Street operators the last time they burned down the economy is nothing compared to what they will steal from one consumer at a time, knowing that there will never be any accountability.
Goldman Sachs, Fed EX, Nationwide, American Express, JP Morgan, and virtually every major Wall Street operative that has ever stuffed cash into a politician’s campaign coffers is high-fiving every day because they know that corruption will pay one customer at a time. And you know what the real bonus is? When they do get caught committing crime, no one goes to jail. There is no Department of Justice that will prosecute these days. Life is good on Wall Street.
Just ask Jamie Dimon, who should be in handcuffs for some types of fraud that they don’t even have names for. But poor pitiful Jamie had to pay $13 billion dollars, which will be absorbed by his shareholders and handled as a tax benefit by the IRS.
Jamie and none of his management hustlers go to prison. And all those consumers they hustled, well for the next 10 years they will be pleading in front of Jamie’s hand-picked arbitrators to get their money back, knowing that no jury will ever hear how corrupt Jamie and JP Morgan really are. And also knowing that in the world of arbitration, they have about a 15% chance of ever getting all their money back.
