"Angelo Mozilo, the former Countrywide Financial Corp. CEO, ... walked off center stage with a net worth of about $600 million."
Those are just a few.
Of course, none of them has been prosecuted, even though they all masterminded their respective organization's role in the mega-crime, and benefited enormously from doing that. Things have been a bit worse for a few of their employees, however.
"The lone civil case that occasioned a victory lap for the Securities and Exchange Commission was against Fabrice Tourre, the former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. vice president who was guilty of nothing more than following orders as a foot soldier in the Wall Street army. Tourre is currently appealing his 2013 conviction in this ridiculous case; I hope he wins."
It was for reasons like these that on 12 November 2013, Reuters headlined "Judge Criticizes Lack of Prosecution Against Wall Street Executives for Fraud," and reported that:
"The federal judge who oversaw the recent civil fraud trial against Bank of America Corp criticized the U.S. Department of Justice on Tuesday for failing to prosecute high-level executives over the financial crisis. U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff of Manhattan said while companies have been prosecuted for causing the 2007-2009 financial meltdown, Wall Street executives have escaped justice. "The failure of the government to bring to justice those responsible for such a massive fraud speaks greatly to weaknesses in our prosecutorial system that need to be addressed,' Rakoff said."
The people who attack Obama on this are Democrats, like Rakoff. Republicans can't do it, because their ideology is: greed is good, the "invisible hand" should rule, and not only should the super-rich not be restrained by the criminal law, but they shouldn't even be restrained by regulatory agencies. Government itself is bad, in their view; "private enterprise" is good. Corruption is creed, to the Republican Party; so, you don't see this issue pushed by them against Obama -- just "death panels," birther-gate, etc.
Meanwhile, the people whom Obama had hired, such as the now-recently hired Warburg Pincus President, and recent former U.S. Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner, have either gone off to Wall Street (like Geithner) where they don't need to do anything but lend their name in order to become fabulously wealthy; or else they are planning to do that, in either Wall Street, or Washington D.C.
When Willie Sutton was asked why he robbed banks, he was alleged to have said "because that's where the money is." But when interviewed later about that, he said that, actually, "Why did I rob banks? Because I enjoyed it. I loved it." There are even movies about the fun of today's Wall Street; so, maybe things haven't really changed much except regarding how it's done -- and what the consequences are for the perpetrators.
If times have changed in any basic way, it's because, now, the best way to rob a bank is to own one, and that's no joke, at all. The man who wrote the book on that had actually prosecuted and convicted and sent to prison hundreds of smaller banksters, back in the time before we had a President who wouldn't block that. (The prosecutor, William K. Black, didn't have Reagan's support on that, but this country hadn't yet become so corrupt that the people the President appointed would simply block it from happening; so, during the S&L scandal, it did happen; but during the far bigger mega-bank heists, there is no such prosecution at all.) On 24 January 2014, Eric Holder told Reuters that, "The U.S. Justice Department plans to bring civil mortgage fraud cases against several financial institutions early in 2014," but that would not threaten the bank-CEOs who actually commanded the crimes. Instead, only the bank's current stockholders would be hit, with wrist-slapping fines to the corporation. There still would be no accountability for those elite crimes. Obama would still be holding the Wall Street CEOs harmless, and fulfilling his pledge that, "My administration ... is the only thing between you and the pitchforks."
As to why Obama wants those people to get off scot-free, he very much needs to be asked that, and asked it repeatedly, and with ceaseless follow-up questions about it,* to get him to honesty about it; and anyone in the White House press corps who doesn't do that should simply be fired.
This country can no longer stand a White House press corps that's more concerned to please the President than it's concerned to do its most-basic job.
Corruption in this country has now become institutionalized far too deep. Is the press itself part of it?
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* His first response, of course, will probably be the lie that Eric Holder told on 6 March 2013, when pressed on why he's not criminally charging any of the mega-banks: he said that they're "Too Big To Fail" -- that doing such a thing would collapse the economy. But, as Paula Dwyer of Bloomberg News said the very next day about this lie, it rests upon an assumption that the entity that would be criminally charged would be the mega-bank and not its responsible top executives, and she then went on to note: "Sending top-ranked bankers to jail would be a more powerful deterrent than indicting a faceless corporation." Eric Holder deceived by presuming that the individuals who had conceived and commanded the institution's crimes cannot be criminally charged -- that only the corporation they are working for (its stockholders, in effect) can. Sending executives like Dick Fuld and Angelo Mozillo to life imprisonment wouldn't hurt the economy; it would start to repair it, by enabling not only stockholders, but everyone, to have reason to believe that corporate financial statements and the like aren't fraudulent. It would make America, once again, the world's economic powerhouse. Instead, we have Obama.
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