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Why
Isn't Wall Street in Jail?
They killed our economy, but Obama is
protecting them
instead of jailing them.
rollingstone.com Who helped Obama get elected
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.
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.
but God help you if Eric Holder thinks you might be getting medical marijuana.
If that happens, the feds turn into vicious tigers and maul the cancer patient to death.