New Orleans    You probably haven’t heard about this yet, but in many public high schools in the “red” states like those in the USA where I have long lived and worked, business has managed to force students to take a course or half-course in “free enterprise” in hopes of moving their young minds in the “right” direction as early as possible. A standard feature that is going to have to be mandatory at the insistence of mothers and fathers of such students everywhere is that in the same way they had to learn to “just say no” to drugs, part of this curriculum will counsel the youngsters to never, never ever join a criminal enterprise and become bankers.

Every day there are more reports of criminality or of things that should at the very least be considered criminal.

Citi cut its profit estimates because of new investigations that it was involved in currency manipulation. Deutsche Bank said it lost money on the quarter because of legal costs. Bank of America continues to be implicated in yet more mortgage mess. And on top of that, various attorney generals and the Justice Department are now saying they’re going to reopen some of the earlier settlements with banks and jack up the fines because the banks continued doing the same ol’ same ol’ even after they swore on a stack of millions of dollars that they would change their ways.

They just can’t do right. Period.

It’s getting so bad that a professor from NYU in an op-ed came out in favor of using check cashing and pay day lending outfits on the street corners, essentially because they steal from you to your face rather than having bank accounts where they sneak the money away from you at every turn with an average check bouncing charge of over $32 a pop now, excessive monthly service charges even on savings accounts where you are only be paid a quarter of one-percent for letting them invest your money, and generally nickel-and-dime you at every turn.

Yet somehow they were able to still muscle up on the Federal Home Finance folks in exchange for being willing to offer housing loans again and convince them that they would be OK lending some money for home purchase again, but only on the condition that they could pretty much off-load all of the mortgages to the government and others rather than keeping any of the risk on their books. Former Congressman Barney Frank of the Dodd-Frank so-called banking reforms said that “risk retention” was the key to making the Dodd-Frank overhaul work, and that’s now long gone, pecan, cher! More recently he has been quoted colorfully saying essentially that the bill is a dead letter now given the deal the banks have cut.

Seems when they are not engaged in predatory and criminal behavior at home and abroad, they are fast dealing and scamming the rest of us right and left.

So, American mothers have almost universally changed their minds and the words to the old Willie Nelson song, and have decided it’s ok for their boys to now be cowboys, as long as they never become bankers and lawyers and such.