Left Side of the Aisle #73 - Part 4

Outrage of the Week: Wall Street crooks walk - again

Last week, one of my 10 reasons why Barack Obama does not deserve your vote was that he had utterly failed to prosecute Wall Street crooks; in fact he had refused to do so even when presented of clear evidence of outright fraud. So I guess this shouldn't be a surprise:

Back in January, Obama formed the Residential Mortgage-Backed Securities Working Group to “hold accountable” those financial institutions who crashed the economy through their arrogance, their conceit, their greed, and their multiple crimes. Now, a source close to the group says that, barring a “Hail Mary pass,” there will be no criminal charges arising from the panel.

Instead, the working group will focus on civil charges, which might - I choose to emphasize might - produce some kind of financial penalty, but no actual jail time for anyone.

Now, these settlements are almost never big enough; they are almost never as large as what the corporation gained from its criminality. But leave that aside. The fact is the money to pay these penalties will come from corporate accounts, from stockholders, from fees on investors. It will not come from the pockets of the corporate executives and CEOs.

So the people who actually made the decisions, who ripped off their clients and nearly brought down the entire economy, the people who actually committed the fraud, will pay absolutely no penalty. In fact, if you think this would even will hurt their careers, you haven't been paying attention.

So we not only have banks too big to fail, we have corporate executives too big to jail.

Again, this latest case probably shouldn't be a surprise - but it is still an outrage.