(NaturalNews) Several top kingpins behind the global financial collapse of 2008 have reportedly agreed to plead guilty for their sinister crimes, but under one major condition: that they won't actually be held legally culpable. Five of the world's largest banks -- Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Barclays PLC, the Royal Bank of Scotland and UBS -- have all confessed to deliberately manipulating the global foreign exchange markets for illicit gain, but all of them are getting off the hook with petty fines rather than jail time and tangible operations penalties.

The collective sum of these fines clocks in at around $9 billion, a sizable amount in the eyes of the average person. But for the international banking cartel, this is just a drop in the bucket -- a proverbial slap on the wrist when a heavy "whoopin'" would have been a far more appropriate penalty. These are the same corrupt banks, of course, that ripped off the public for trillions of dollars by rigging the financial markets and peddling bad loans and fake foreclosure papers.

Nevertheless, not a single guilty bank is really being penalized in any substantial way that will actually affect business as usual. According to Fox Business, the $9 billion worth of settlements reached between these banks and the U.S. Justice Department represents a mere fraction of the trillions of dollars that they stole from average folks like you and I who, if we did anything even remotely close to what these banks did, would probably face life in prison.

"The effect of the guilty pleas will be essentially zero, beyond the immediate costs of the fines levied on the institutions," wrote Andre Damon for WSWS.org. "As the Times put it, 'life will go on, probably without much of a hiccup.'"

Obama Administration: We can't punish criminal banking cartel because it's "too big to jail"

Besides the fact that none of the banking executives involved in the racket face any criminal penalties, the banking entities themselves made sure to establish special "deferred-prosecution agreements" with the federal government allowing them to continue operating as they normally would. In other words, the actual impact of these fines, which are petty to large banks like JPMorgan Chase, is next to nil.

"In exchange for pleading guilty and paying these hefty fines, the banks demanded that regulators not ban them from certain business practices," said Andrew Stoltmann, a Chicago securities attorney, about the corruption behind these "penalties."

"These accommodations render the plea deals effectively useless. The pain of an indictment comes from banks not being able to, as a felon, engage in certain lucrative business practices. By getting the SEC and Labor department to OK the continuation of these business practices, the pleas are not very meaningful."

It's similar to what the vaccine industry achieved when it convinced the American Congress and the U.S. Supreme Court to shield it from all liability for harm caused by vaccines. Vaccine corporations are now free to poison and kill children with deadly jabs, and there's absolutely nothing the public can do to attain justice, aside from submitting a claim to kangaroo vaccine "courts" that pay out taxpayer dollars to some vaccine-injured families.

"The guiding principle of the Obama administration, in the words of former Attorney General Eric Holder, is that the giant banks are 'too big to jail,'" added Damon. "As the Times article explained, prosecutors are 'mindful that too harsh a penalty could imperil banks that are at the heart of the global economy.'"

Sources for this article include:

http://www.foxbusiness.com

http://www.globalresearch.ca

http://www.nvic.org