What We Lost Because Obama Didn’t Prosecute Banksters - FDL

[WillyT]

What We Lost Because Obama Didn’t Prosecute Banksters
By: masaccio
Sunday January 2, 2011 10:45 am

<snip>

Imagine that you don’t know much about high finance except what you occasionally read in the paper. You would know that we have the greatest finance business in the world, and that the smartest people make the most money. If you have a lot of money, it’s a sign of merit, so you know those Wall Street guys earned it. You know that the SEC is the cop on the beat and they are doing a great job: why, they locked up Martha Stewart to make the trading on Wall Street fair.

From the time you were a kid, you learned that the US stock market was the envy of other nations for its fairness and accessibility. You were taught that the US had come to dominate the finance business because it brought in great brains from physics and math, and the best business minds rapidly move up in the hierarchy by innovation and invention. You wanted to move your money into mutual funds, so you could share in the profits generated through wise investments, and you knew that you could manage your own retirement by careful investments. Those are the fundamental building blocks of your perception of the Way Things Work.

Even in the teeth of the Great Crash, your first thought would not be that the Wall Streeters were responsible. It was those irresponsible people who bought houses they couldn’t afford, or minorities using the government to buy houses they couldn’t afford, or whatever other nonsense you heard from your friends or the TV. It would be easy to distract you from looking at the real causes.

That is why the failure of the Obama administration to prosecute a single bankster is so depressing. Prosecutions would have proved that the Great Crash wasn’t the fault of people who bought houses they couldn’t afford, or the result of government efforts to counter discrimination against minorities trying to buy houses. Prosecutions would have placed the blame squarely on the financial elites, where it belongs. Financiers would not have been able to blame the usual suspects, and use their tools in the press and their politicians to divert attention from their responsibility for plunging the nation into economic disaster.

<snip>

More: http://firedoglake.com/2011/01/02/what-we-lost-because-obama-didn%E2%80%99t-prosecute-banksters/

:shrug:

[whatchamacallit]

1. So true. Another illustration of a captured presidency n/t

[OregonBlue]

11. It's FDL. so I would take it with a grain of salt. Jane has an agenda of her own. It's called make

Jane famous. Make Jane money.

[DeSwiss]

13. Ah.

So it's Jane that is the reason not a single bankster has even been indicted. I had no idea she was so powerful!

- Maybe she should be President......

[OregonBlue]

15. I'm sure she thinks so. She seems to have a very high opinion of herself.

[Javaman]

17. Um, okay then...

:shrug:

[Stinky The Clown]

20. Yes, we heard you. But back to the actual issue: Why are all the banksters still free men?

How did Jane cause that? <----actual question/not rhetorical

[gratuitous]

16. And Jane Hamsher's so devious, she even signed this piece "masaccio"

An honest, but failed effort to misdirect us!

[earth mom]

2. Wall Street is nothing but a giant ponzi scheme that Enroned-STOLE-TRILLIONS of Taxpayer dollars!

:grr:

[Ichingcarpenter]

3. Europe is doing it ...... But the US is silent.

The news demands it even though its not 1/10 of what's needed.

The US is doing 1/20 of nothing and Europe is complaining
They have seen revolutions and what caused them and they worry
enough to give a little piece of meat to the populace.




Aware citizens know.

[Octafish]

4. William K. Black on Wall Street, corruption and the current crisis

William K. Black on Wall Street, corruption and the current crisis

EXCERPT...

BLACK: That's right. So what bankers figured out was, oh my God, other bankers are lying about their asset values, and they're lying not a little bit but massively. And, of course, the bankers figured that out because they knew they were lying themselves, and they rightly suspected that their counterparties were doing the same thing. And as soon as that happens, then the markets start freezing up. That really will cause very severe economic problems. The answer to that is either honesty or a bigger lie. So my policy would have been honesty. The central bank's policy was a bigger lie, that they would hide the losses, secretly subsidize the richest people in the world, the absolute one thousandth of 1--top 1 percent. The wealthiest people in the world who had caused the crisis the Fed would bail out, and it would do so even if those people were in other countries, and even if, say, the Germans were late in bailing out their folks. So the alternative for insolvent places is to assure liquidity from the central banks by lending and by checking the asset quality to see whether they're good assets. What we know is that the Fed stopped looking at asset quality and took, deliberately, junk and valued it as if it were good stuff. There was no reason to do that, and doing so exposed all of us to tremendous losses and, again, created this subsidy for the worst, most fraudulent institutions.

[progressoid]

5. Correct me if I'm wrong but I thought one of the major problems with prosecution is that

credit default swaps etc aren't technically illegal.

[MilesColtrane]

7. Yes, and prosecuting for fraud requires proving criminal intent.

Conclusive evidence of deliberate misrepresentation is hard to come by, unless the suspect kept records of himself discussing what a ripoff he was foisting on someone.

Bear Sterns Hedge Fund Managers Acquitted

[mmonk]

6. Recommended. But what does one expect from an administration

with Geithner and Summers?

[xchrom]

8. Recommend

[naaman fletcher]

9. Even Greenspan has said it was fraud.

Where are the prosecutions?

[bvar22]

10. Absolutely Agree!

K&R

[Uncle Joe]

12. Kicked and recommended.

Thanks for the thread, WillyT.

[DeSwiss]

14. K&R n/t

[Jackpine Radical]

18. It's threads like this that make DU worthwhile.

[datasuspect]

19. the rich people who control finance (to oversimplify) in this country

profited from the front, back, and middle of the fraud they perpetrated.

a workaday schlub who signed an agreement with whatever mortgage huckster gets the blame because "they bought more house than they could afford."