And this is what they meant when they said “too big to fail.”
Eric Holder, Attorney General and overall optimist stated at one point or another his intentions to go after the banking industry; repeating from a WaPo article he said the DOJ would Investigate, prosecute, and incarcerate them bad, bad bankers. Grr, Tim.
And why not? The results, the public is led to believe, of banker's actions over the last decade or so has been linked on more than one occasion to the current financial crisis, so much one might think DOJ could go after them for reckless endagerment at the very least. Open, shut.
Nope. Can't. Why? "...In part because they would essentially criminalize an entire business model in the financial industry."
Turns out DOJ also feels all-the-sudden-like the banks didn't do anything wrong, meaning illegal. According to former official Tim Coleman “this was a case, in general, of people making business judgments and taking risks and having them go badly. That's not criminal misconduct."
And all the talk about illegal activity, there were executives who know what was happening and taking no action or planning to capitalize form it? Nah. Didn't happen.
Too big to fail has a new meaning: too big to attack later. It's as if these massive organizations have become completely invisible. Can't fight what you can't (or fail) fail to see, huh Mr. Holder?
Source: WaPo
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Time for bigger handcuffs?
ReplyDeleteI've heard that this whole crooked process started with Reagan and kept on going with every administration, Repub. and Dems, we've had since. They all shared in the process of dismantling regulations put in place during the Great Depression to avoid a repeat. It seems it has to do with short term historical (hysterical?)memory !
It seems that the financiers and the economic elite in general have and are syphoning the wealth that had been accumulated by the middle class, and in effect that created the large middle class we have come to know, basically starting after WWII.
"The rich are getting richer and the poor poorer" but the historian Fernand Braudel remarked (about the trend in Europe from the middle of the fifteenth century to the middle of the sixteenth) that the rich didn't really get richer off the back of the poor (besides exploiting their labor) but they got substantially richer off the back of the middle class...
Well we do have this mythical "market" to which we actually attribute human traits (you know, the Market is scared, tired, excited, happy, etc). If we have to believe in myths, I find the avatars of Zeus and his acolytes so much more entertaining!
You are so right, Kati - Complicity is required when you hijack a country's entire financial caste system and refine - then replace - it with this current day tribute to slavery. It's not scientific, but the proof is in the pudding: when "the markets" (I picture Scrooge McDuck, but Zeus is good too) made a loud enough whining noise after they drained the well they dug through the spines of the middle class, it was milliseconds before a flood of dems and republicans fell to their knees in penitence to create what used to be called Bush's bailout with derision from the left, and is now called Obama's bailout with derision from the right.
ReplyDeleteMost do not recall Obama and McCain ceasing campaign activities to sit at the sides of Bush's big table, hammering out the deal to pay these remarkable failures to fail in such grand fashion.
And the complicity of government and banking could not have been more evident when news outlets broke the stories of TARP money being used for multi-billion dollar bonus payouts just a short while later.
Partying in the graveyard just weeks after the funeral.
Debt slavery. It's a fact, and when they foreclose on my house this August I will, in effect, be set free.