Sunday, October 5, 2008

No one is guilty.... Again....

Everytime in every American election I cringed and was very uncomfortable when the phrase "the blame game" was uttered by one of the TV propaganda people.

Every time a politician or a pundit (usually centrist - remember, there is no left wing in America either on TV nor in Washington) called for some accountability, some admission of guilt, the media types invariably pooh pooh'ed that, rolled their eyes and muttered "blame game!".

You see, these higher class of people is immune from accountability.

That is why, for example, you cannot go after George 'W' Bush for lying - "blame game".
You cannot go after the FED and SEC for not doing their jobs - "blame game".

And now, the greedy fucks who created gigantic Washington lobbies to push for deregulation (read - "paid politicians to twist the law so that there would be virtually no oversight, allowing for lying and cheating on a massive scale by banks and investment "banks") are getting away scot free also.

Washington Post, Friday, October 3, 2008; Page D01:

Justice Department officials yesterday vowed to unravel the complex financial deals that helped prompt a market crisis in an effort that will generally seek criminal charges against individual brokers and bankers, rather than companies themselves, according to interviews with lawyers involved in the cases.


Mindful of the fallout from the last wave of business fraud cases six years ago, authorities are leaning against seeking indictments of major banks and insurers that may have inflated the value of their mortgage-related investments. Instead, prosecutors will look for such garden-variety crimes as false statements and insider trading by executives who tried to disguise financial problems or pad their wallets.


This is simple to explain.

If you walk over to your neighbor's house, shoot him in the face with a gun and rape his wife. The police will show up, arrest you, and the prosecutor... will charge you with trespassing on private property.

Exhibit A is Bear Stearns, the investment bank that collapsed in March and was bought by J.P. Morgan Chase during a cash squeeze that ultimately gripped Wall Street. Two former fund managers there are fighting criminal charges for allegedly misleading investors about the financial health of their unit. The company will avoid indictment, according to two sources familiar with the case who spoke on condition of anonymity


At an American Bar Association conference yesterday, Deputy Attorney General Mark R. Filip vowed that prosecutors would press ahead to decode the obscure financial products at the heart of the market's troubles. He said there would be "no unwillingness to take the facts and the law where they lead."


Cool... wait, what's this?

Yet the tenor is markedly different from the last wave of financial scandals, which began with the indictment of accounting firm Arthur Andersen six years ago. (...) In August, Filip issued guidance that reminds prosecutors to consider the rights of corporate employees.


And here is the kicker, the gold, the one sentence that clarifies everything from this article:

Among other factors, the guidelines require government lawyers to take into account the health of a business when they make decisions about whether to file criminal charges.


"It would be a very rare company that would ever be prosecuted," said Joshua Hochberg, former chief of the Justice Department's fraud section. "These are all negotiated settlements. . . . A criminal conviction brings mandatory debarment and effectively puts a corporation out of business."


Right, and we can't have that.

We have to let the criminals stay in business.

To fleece us all even more; they are not done yet.

I am glad that I live in a country in which justice is blind and does not play favorites.

2 comments:

ThePoliticalCat said...

Not to pick nits or anything, but there's a reason prosecutors are making such statements. First, the DoJ has been thoroughly disemboweled by eight years of Bush misrule and it's doubtful that they even COULD prosecute such cases; Second, prosecutors only take cases where they're certain they can get a conviction. Just like you and me, they get performance reviews and too many flubbed cases means a bad review, no promotion, no wage increase, no bonus (where applicable). These financial shenanigans in which Wall Street has been engaging are so complex that even the experts don't quite know how to unravel them. The government simply cannot afford to hire experts and spend years unraveling the evidence only to find that one out of two cases is not covered by existing law, or some such; Third, the market is extremely shaky right now, and the treasury is empty. While the course of justice might be best served by hanging each of the offenders by the neck till dead, the course of the economy might not. Better for the treasury, the taxpayer, and the current business climate to negotiate a settlement that will put dollars in the treasury, and if that means these fuckers don't get strung up, well, them's the breaks. Also, the offenders are more likely to cooperate in revealing these complex financial shenanigans if they're guaranteed not to be crushed like bugs, yaknow?

Anonymous said...

AG,

This is kinda unrelated, but James Cramer is saying stocks could lose 20 percent of their value.

Man what do you want to be that he is selling stocks short right now, hoping to make a mint off of this?


I bet MANY of the elite wealthy are doing the same thing. They will MAKE money off this garbage as sure as Im sitting here typing........


Our social-economic arrangements need some common sense reforms. If we could bring G. Washington, Ben Franklin, Andy Jackson back from the past, they'd be aghast at what we have become. This isn't it.