Why isn't Wall Street in jail?

[Edward theurj Berge]

Building on the Alan Grayson thread, the brilliant Rolling Stone investigative reporter Matt Taibbi has done it again with an article by the above name. The US government is complicit in Wall Street's crimes. The worst financial crimes in the history of the world and not one prosecution. Well, Bernie Madoff was prosecuted but he had nothing to do with creating the crisis; he was just a bit player in doing what was created for him by the banks and government. Those banks “were directly involved in elaborate fraud and theft.”

 

So what punishment did they get? Ridiculously small fines by comparison to the devastation they wrought and the money they made from it. It's like if I rob a bank for $1,000,000 and for punishment they say I have to give back $1,000. Great deal, I'm going to rob more banks. Only this time the banks are robbing the US citizens, since we bail them out for robbing us. Something is seriously wrong with this picture.

 

Taibbi explores the Fed agencies set up to police the financial industry. The agencies however do not have prosecutorial power so they must refer any wrongdoing to the Justice Department. The JD does not have the financial acumen to understand these white collar crimes so relies heavily on the Fed agencies for expertise and recommendations. But the regulators are in bed with the criminals so they bury the investigations in an isolated file somewhere in Area 51 so that the case goes nowhere. Or if the case is so egregious that it can't be buried they present it in such a way as to minimize the crime and the perp gets off with the relatively minor fines referenced above.

 

When an ethical yet obviously naive agency employee does try to do their job by properly investigating a financial crime they are thwarted by their superiors. If they press on they are fired. Why does this happen. The top regulators look the other way and are rewarded with cush, lucrative jobs with the industry they are supposed to regulate upon leaving those positions. They get to witness first-hand the crimes and are lured into the criminal world by being bought off. Not to mention the graft they get under the table while still regulating.

 

So the criminal banks and insurance companies pay miniscule settlements from shareholder money, the individual executives-perpetrators face no criminal charges, the terms of said settlements require no admission of guilt, and the laws do not change to prevent future crimes of the same kind from happening again. So we really think we've seen the end of this? And will the next time finally destroy the entire financial system to the point of a world-wide depression for most of us? Who cares, the Kings of Wall Street and their government cronies will be living it up in the Bahamas when the time comes.

 

I fucking care! Read Taibbi's story for the full details. And get on the computer and write to your representatives. And perhaps we should even start to march in the streets to get some justice for these criminals? Just look at the public protests in Madison right now over an insane Republican governor trying to neuter union negotiating power. It seems Americans are finally learning from the middle east that us poor people have power in numbers and that we need to exercise it by active protest to gain world-wide attention. Otherwise we can sit at home and let the criminals destroy our lives.

[Edward theurj Berge]

Yet again you fall for the smokescreen. The name of this thread is "why isn't Wall Street in jail?" and you completely ignore it while falling for the intentional misdirection of your conservative puppet masters.

[Edward theurj Berge]

The premise of Integral is that both conservative and liberal values need to be integrated for effective solutions to prevail. All too often the first tier political discourse resorts to caricature… [ in Frankenstein’s voice] Liberal good! Conservative bad! (vice versa).

You're welcome to this wrong view of what integral is supposed to be. Which of course ends up defending wrong aspects of conservative and capitalistic ideology is some sort of bullshit integration. Some aspects of conservatism (and liberalism) are just plain wrong.

So if public teacher's pay and benefits is too exorbitant is a few select districts then by all means let's negotiate them to within reason. But what about Wall Street compensation? Because it is private business should the public have no say in that? Especially when it is taxpayer money that bailed them out? And which cost more, the bailout or teacher pension?

[Edward theurj Berge]

As for stats on public employee pay and benefits compared to the private section I choose the Economy Policy Institute, which disputes your numbers. Of course there are individual exceptions but averages are accurate "orienting generalizations."

[e]

Here is the only number that matters. -$Trillions WE ARE BEYOND FREAKING BROKE IN DEBT UP TO OUR GRANDKIDS EARS!! You can raise taxes or cut spending or both ...or neither and have your kids pay for it as they work for their Chinese handlers. Or you can debase the dollar and cause inflation. Have you seen the price of commodities rising? Yeah those liberals are on it! Everything is under control...look 366,000 jobs were just created last month at Walmart!

Here is another set of numbers worth looking at.

http://www.pewcenteronthestates.org/report_detail.aspx?id=57264

(For the state of Illinois) "The total underfunded pension liability $54.4 billion is more than three times as large as the payroll for members of the state's pension plans."

You really think negotiating some salaries is going to fix that?! The pensions are UNSUSTAINABLE in the real world.

PS I am not advocating a "conservative approach". As being broke affects us all.
PPS Yes some fraud street banksters deserve to be in jail. (sorry for the aside).

[Edward theurj Berge]

Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone is on to a new Wall Street investigation that appears to have some teeth. The NY AG is looking into the banks’ mortgage securitization process. I hope this is legitimate and results in some convictions for the crime of the century. From the article:

This investigation has the potential to be a Mother of All Nightmares situation for the banks for a couple of reasons. For one thing, the decision to go after the securitization process is a total prosecutorial bullseye. This is the ugly heart of the wide-scale fraud scheme of the bubble era. Again, the business model during this time was a giant bait-and-switch scam. Sleazy lenders like Countrywide and New Century first created huge masses of bad loans, committing every conceivable kind of fraud to get people into loans (from doctoring income statements with white-out to phonying FICO scores to engineering fake appraisals). They then moved the bad loans quickly to the big banks, which pooled them and chopped them up (this is the “securitization” process), sprinkled hocus-pocus math on them, and them sold them to suckers around the world as AAA-rated securities.

The reason this is such a potentially deadly investigation for the banks is that they seemed to be so close to getting away scot free. There is another investigation into the banks’ mortgage abuses by the states’ Attorneys General, led by Iowa AG Tom Miller, that was rumored to be headed toward a settlement, despite the fact that nothing like a complete investigation has been done.... But if the AGs were to sign off on a friendly global settlement for mortgage abuses prematurely, it would be like a DA offering a millionaire murderer a 2-year plea bargain before the cops even had a chance to interview all the eyewitnesses. It would be a blatantly political arrangement.

Schneiderman’s investigation throws a monkey wrench into all of this. The banks cannot enter into a settlement with 49 states. They need all 50 at the table. But if Schneiderman breaks ranks and goes off on an end-run investigation that plunges right into the rotten core of the fraud era, then the whole pipe dream of an easy settlement vanishes in an instant. This is particularly true since Schneiderman is the most important AG, being from the state of New York, where most of the crime was probably committed.

Everything I’ve heard so far indicates that Schneiderman’s investigation is not a publicity stunt and is an in-earnest attempt to get to the bottom of things.