NOTE: I have embellished this article with a few pictures from my file.
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| That's what I'm talking about! |
NOTE:
I have embellished this article with a few pictures from my files.
It has been thirteen years since our Nation’s financiers brought us to our knees by concocting a plan to get rich with a “sub-prime” mortgage scheme. Collectively, they stole Billions from us and our economy. They came very close to tipping the entire world upside down financially to the tune of Trillions of dollars. Companies like AIG, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley turned out to be the bad actors involved in the sub-prime mortgage-backed securities.
Only one of the top executives
in these, and other, companies that cooked up and cashed in on the phony
financial boom has ever been convicted…ever! And, he was simply the low-hanging
fruit. All these years, and no one except Bernie
Madoff, 17.179 billion, has been indicted, tried,
and marched off to the slammer. $14.418 billion was
recovered leaving almost 3 billion just floating around the universe. On April 14, 2021 Has
anyone ever questioned why this happened?
“Why Isn't Wall
Street in Jail?“(1)
A good question............
Matt Taibbi, author of the book "Griftopia” (which
I recommend) and Rolling Stone reporter writes:
Financial crooks brought down the world's economy — but the feds are doing more to protect them than to prosecute them. 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 f@#ked 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 f@#ked 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. 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 industry-wide 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. 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, "its management buying its way
off cheap, from the pockets of their victims. 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 f@#ked up. Just ask the people who tried
to do the right thing. Taibbi concludes his article: All of this paints a
disturbing picture of a closed and corrupt system, a timeless circle of friends
that virtually guarantees a collegial approach to the policing of high finance.
Even before the corruption starts, the state is crippled by economic reality:
Since law enforcement on Wall Street requires serious intellectual firepower,
the banks seize a huge advantage from the start by hiring away the top talent.
Budde, the former Lehman lawyer, says it's well known that all the best legal
minds go to the big corporate law firms, while the "bottom 20 percent go
to the SEC." Which makes it tough for the agency to track devious legal
machinations, like the scheme to hide $263 million of Dick Fuld's compensation.
‘It’s such a mismatch, it's not even funny," Budde says. But even beyond
that, the system is skewed by the irrepressible pull of riches and power. If
talent rises in the SEC or the Justice Department, it sooner, or later, jumps
ship for those fat NBA contracts. Or, conversely, graduates of the big
corporate firms take sabbaticals from their rich lifestyles to slum it in
government service for a year or two.
Many
of those appointments are inevitably handpicked by lifelong stooges for Wall
Street like Chuck Schumer, who has accepted $14.6 million in campaign
contributions from Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and other major players in the
finance industry, along with their corporate lawyers.
As for President Obama, what is there to be said? Goldman Sachs was his number-one private campaign contributor. He put a Citigroup executive in charge of his economic transition team, and he just named an executive of JP Morgan Chase, the proud owner of $7.7 million in Chase stock, his new chief of staff. "The betrayal that this represents by Obama to everybody is just — we're not ready to believe it," says Budde, a classmate of the president from their Columbia days. "He's really fuc@#king us over like that? Really? That's really a JP Morgan guy, really? Which is not to say that the Obama era has meant an end to law enforcement.
On the contrary: In the past few years, the
administration has allocated massive amounts of federal resources to catching wrongdoers
— of a certain type. Last year, the government deported 393,000 people, at a
cost of $5 billion. Since 2007, felony immigration prosecutions along the
Mexican border have surged 77 percent; non-felony prosecutions by 259 percent.
In Ohio last month, a single mother was caught lying about where she lived to
put her kids into a better school district; the judge in the case tried to
sentence her to 10 days in jail for fraud, declaring that letting her go free
would "demean the seriousness" of the offenses.
So, there you have it. Illegal immigrants: 393,000.
Lying moms: one. Bankers: zero. The math makes sense only because the politics
are so obvious. You want to win elections; you bang on the jail-able class. You
build prisons and fill them with people for selling dime bags and stealing CD
players. But for stealing a billion dollars? For fraud that puts a million
people into foreclosure? Pass. It's not a crime. Prison is too harsh. Get them
to say they're sorry, and move on. Oh,
wait — let's not even make them say they're sorry. That's too mean; let's just
give them a piece of paper with a government stamp on it, officially clearing
them of the need to apologize, and make them pay a fine instead. But don't make
them pay it out of their own pockets, and don't ask them to give back the money
they stole. In fact, let them profit from their collective crimes, to the tune
of a record $135 billion in pay and benefits last year. What's next?
Taxpayer-funded massages for every Wall Street executive guilty of fraud? The
mental stumbling block, for most Americans, is that financial crimes don't feel
real; you don't see the culprits waving guns in Liquor stores or dragging coeds
into bushes. But these frauds are worse than common robberies. 
They're crimes
of intellectual choice, made by
people who are already rich and who have every conceivable social advantage, acting on a simple, cynical
calculation: Let's steal whatever we can, then dare the victims to find the
juice to reclaim their money through a captive bureaucracy.
They're attacking the very definition of properly —
which, after all, depends in part on a legal system that defends everyone's
claims of ownership equally. When that definition becomes tenuous or
conditional — when the state simply gives up on the notion of justice — this
whole American Dream thing recedes even further from reality. You can read the
rest of Taibbi's article in the latest Rolling Stone magazine.
When I read articles and e-mails like the
following, I get truly worried about the direction this Nation is going in. Our
Economy refuses to cooperate with our hopes and dreams: food costs are on the
rise, fuel costs are set to go through the roof, "real" unemployment
still hovers around 18%, State Governments are trying to tackle their fiscal
shortfalls, people we elect to represent us don't, and I get the distinct
feeling that apathy is giving way to rage all across this Country. Unlike the
Nations in Northern Africa and the Middle East, the United States has an
"armed" populace, and a Constitution that allows for that. With the
"Dog Days of Summer" fast approaching, I sincerely hope my prediction
of civil unrest does not come to fruition.
Blog Comment: And, none of these
robber barons get more than a slap on the wrist. I have to ask the same question Matt Taibi
does; “Why hasn’t anyone gone to jail?”
This article appears in the March 3, 2011 issue
of Rolling Stone.
Why
Isn't Wall Street in Jail? - Rolling Stone – BY: Matt Taibbi, Contributing Editor, Rolling Stone
