QUOTE OF THE DAY
“I’ve been on deadline in the past week or so, so I haven’t had a chance to weigh in on Eric Holder’s predictable decision to not pursue criminal charges against Goldman, Sachs for any of the activities in the report prepared by Senators Carl Levin and Tom Coburn two years ago.
Last year I spent a lot of time and energy jabbering and gesticulating in public about what seemed to me the most obviously prosecutable offenses detailed in the report – the seemingly blatant perjury before congress of Lloyd Blankfein and other Goldman executives, and the almost comically long list of frauds committed by the company in its desperate effort to unload its crappy “cats and dogs” mortgage-backed inventory.
In the notorious Hudson transaction, for instance, Goldman claimed, in writing, that it was fully “aligned” with the interests of its client, Morgan Stanley, because it owned a $6 million slice of the deal. What Goldman left out is that it had a $2 billion short position against the same deal.
If that isn’t fraud, Mr. Holder, just what exactly is fraud?
Still, it wasn’t surprising that Holder didn’t pursue criminal charges against Goldman. And that’s not just because Holder has repeatedly proven himself to be a spineless bureaucrat and obsequious political creature masquerading as a cop, and not just because rumors continue to circulate that the Obama administration – supposedly in the interests of staving off market panic – made a conscious decision sometime in early 2009 to give all of Wall Street a pass on pre-crisis offenses.
{snip}
Holder’s non-decision on Goldman is more than unsurprising. It amounts to an official announcement that the government is no longer in the business or prosecuting smart criminals. It’s pathetic. The one thing you pay any lawyer to have is balls, and our nation’s top attorney has none.”
Matt Taibbi on the DOJ’s decision to not prosecute anyone on Wall Street for their criminal behavior.
This is what we’ve become America — if you steal a loaf of bread to feed your family you have the full weight of the law come crashing down on your head.
If you exercise your constitutional right to freely and peacefully assemble in protest of what we’ve become a militarized police force will use deadly force against you to force you to stop your peaceful and entirely lawful activity.
And if you’re a Wall Street banker and you commit perjury in front of Congress as Lloyd Blankfein clearly did and you steal billions of dollars through the use of fraud as Lloyd Blankfein’s company clearly did . . . well, you get a free pass.
August 15th, 2012 at 10:14 am
Unfortunately, both parties would not prosecute. And I doubt even Perot, the only 3rd party candidate in recent history to win a significant percentage of the vote, would have prosecuted him
Money is the 21st century god. Accept it
August 15th, 2012 at 1:59 pm
YES, BUT
These people are very clever, and have better lawyers and accountants than the Government could ever afford.
Knowing they did crooked stuff and proving it are not the same.
OR– Obama does not want an extra billion or two to go to republicans before the elections
OR BOTH — it sucks
August 15th, 2012 at 4:27 pm
A sad, but nonetheless absolutely true, commentary on the pathetic state of our Union. Is it going to take an uprising of French Revolution proportions in order to oust the corporate regime and get our beloved nation back on track?
August 15th, 2012 at 5:46 pm
Money talks…
August 15th, 2012 at 9:06 pm
And this is why I don’t get my panties in a bunch when I hear about people in Seattle and elsewhere strategically defaulting on their mortgages. Not after the Mortgage Bankers Assn defaulted on their Washington DC headquarters mortgage.
A culture of absolutely no trust has been created in society. If we are actually going to choose between a Demi-Billionaire and his Ayn Rand worshiping puppy boy vs. status quo, I begrudgingly choose “Quo”.