Re: Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail?

There is a lot of meat in that article.  Very damning and confirms  
everything I've posted here the past 2 years about the financial fraud  
going all the way to the top.
We should be the one's protesting, moreso than the Egyptians!

regards,
-Lance

On Feb 17, 2011, at 4:24 PM, Mike Findlay wrote:

> Ah, you beat me to it.  He was on Imus the other morning.
>
> From: Lance McLain <lance-X3DuywwxauBWk0Htik3J/[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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