Re: Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail?

Ah, you beat me to it.  He was on Imus the other morning.  




________________________________
From: Lance McLain <[email protected]>
To: DADL topic) (off <[email protected]>
Sent: Thu, February 17, 2011 4:21:40 PM
Subject: [DADL-OT] Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail?

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/why-isnt-wall-street-in-jail-20110216

Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail?
Financial crooks brought down the world's economy — but the feds are doing more 
to protect them than to prosecute them

By Matt Taibbi
FEBRUARY 16, 2011 9:00 AM ET
Over drinks at a bar on a dreary, snowy night in Washington this past month, a 
former Senate investigator laughed as he polished off his beer.

"Everything's fucked up, and nobody goes to jail," he said. "That's your whole 
story right there. Hell, you don't even have to write the rest of it. Just write 
that."

I put down my notebook. "Just that?"

"That's right," he said, signaling to the waitress for the check. "Everything's 
fucked up, and nobody goes to jail. You can end the piece right there."

Nobody goes to jail. This is the mantra of the financial-crisis era, one that 
saw virtually every major bank and financial company on Wall Street embroiled in 
obscene criminal scandals that impoverished millions and collectively destroyed 
hundreds of billions, in fact, trillions of dollars of the world's wealth — and 
nobody went to jail. Nobody, that is, except Bernie Madoff, a flamboyant and 
pathological celebrity con artist, whose victims happened to be other rich and 
famous people.

This article appears in the March 3, 2011 issue of Rolling Stone. The issue is 
available now on newsstands and will appear in the online archive February 18.

The rest of them, all of them, got off. Not a single executive who ran the 
companies that cooked up and cashed in on the phony financial boom — an 
industrywide scam that involved the mass sale of mismarked, fraudulent 
mortgage-backed securities — has ever been convicted. Their names by now are 
familiar to even the most casual Middle American news consumer: companies like 
AIG, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and Morgan 
Stanley. Most of these firms were directly involved in elaborate fraud and 
theft. Lehman Brothers hid billions in loans from its investors. Bank of America 
lied about billions in bonuses. Goldman Sachs failed to tell clients how it put 
together the born-to-lose toxic mortgage deals it was selling. What's more, many 
of these companies had corporate chieftains whose actions cost investors 
billions — from AIG derivatives chief Joe Cassano, who assured investors they 
would not lose even "one dollar" just months before his unit imploded, to the 
$263 million in compensation that former Lehman chief Dick "The Gorilla" Fuld 
conveniently failed to disclose. Yet not one of them has faced time behind bars.

Invasion of the Home Snatchers

Instead, federal regulators and prosecutors have let the banks and finance 
companies that tried to burn the world economy to the ground get off with 
carefully orchestrated settlements — whitewash jobs that involve the firms 
paying pathetically small fines without even being required to admit wrongdoing. 
To add insult to injury, the people who actually committed the crimes almost 
never pay the fines themselves; banks caught defrauding their shareholders often 
use shareholder money to foot the tab of justice. "If the allegations in these 
settlements are true," says Jed Rakoff, a federal judge in the Southern District 
of New York, "it's management buying its way off cheap, from the pockets of 
their victims."

Taibblog: Commentary on politics and the economy by Matt Taibbi

To understand the significance of this, one has to think carefully about the 
efficacy of fines as a punishment for a defendant pool that includes the richest 
people on earth — people who simply get their companies to pay their fines for 
them. Conversely, one has to consider the powerful deterrent to further 
wrongdoing that the state is missing by not introducing this particular class of 
people to the experience of incarceration. "You put Lloyd Blankfein in 
pound-me-in-the-ass prison for one six-month term, and all this bullshit would 
stop, all over Wall Street," says a former congressional aide. "That's all it 
would take. Just once."

But that hasn't happened. Because the entire system set up to monitor and 
regulate Wall Street is fucked up.

Just ask the people who tried to do the right thing.

<Lance: read the rest at the link above>
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