Obama's Failure to Punish Banks Should Be Causing Serious Social Unrest

From the Guardian via AlterNet, civil rights lawyer Glenn Greenwald riffs on "The Untouchables," the recent PBS Frontline documentary episode:

Numerous documents prove that executives at leading banks, credit agencies, and mortgage brokers were falsely touting assets as sound that knew were junk: the very definition of fraud. As former Wall Street analyst Yves Smith wrote in her book ECONned: "What went on at Lehman and AIG, as well as the chicanery in the CDO [collateralized debt obligation] business, by any sensible standard is criminal." Even lifelong Wall Street defender Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve Chair, said in Congressional testimony that "a lot of that stuff was just plain fraud."

A New York Times editorial in August explained that the DOJ's excuse for failing to prosecute Wall Street executives - that it was too hard to obtain convictions - "has always defied common sense - and all the more so now that a fuller picture is emerging of the range of banks' reckless and lawless activities, including interest-rate rigging, money laundering, securities fraud and excessive speculation." The Frontline program interviewed former prosecutors, Senate staffers and regulators who unequivocally said the same: it is inconceivable that the DOJ could not have successfully prosecuted at least some high-level Wall Street executives - had they tried.

And

The harms from this refusal to hold Wall Street accountable are the same generated by the general legal immunity the US political culture has vested in its elites. Just as was true for the protection of torturers and illegal eavesdroppers, it ensures that there are no incentives to avoid similar crimes in the future. It is an injustice in its own right to allow those with power and wealth to commit destructive crimes with impunity. It subverts democracy and warps the justice system when a person's treatment under the law is determined not by their acts but by their power, position, and prestige. And it exposes just how shameful is the American penal state by contrasting the immunity given to the nation's most powerful with the merciless and brutal punishment meted out to its most marginalized.

More here.

What's the old adage?  Steal a hundred dollars and they put you in jail.  Steal a million and the give you the key to the city.  Of course, the reality is that these bankers have stolen billions, and the key they were awarded isn't to the city but rather the whole freaking country.  Making matters worse, this key isn't symbolic; it actually works.  They do whatever they want.  And our political establishment, like the syphilitic whores they are, flocks to them offering sick and depraved sexual favors in exchange for cold hard campaign cash.

Our President is the biggest whore of all, so wanton and deviant and twisted that he makes legitimate whores, you know, the kind you find on the wrong street corners in Cracktown, look like nuns.

I have nothing but total contempt for our leaders in Washington.  All of them.  They make me sick to my stomach.  They make a total mockery of justice.  They make America a joke.  They piss on democracy.  They piss on our faces.  All we can do is sit here and take it while they eat caviar and drink champagne and laugh at the people they pretend to represent.  Did you vote Republican or Democrat in the last election?  It doesn't matter.  A whore is a whore.  The pimps are the ones who are really in charge.  And we don't get to choose them.

But we do have to bend over when they order us to.

Here's what I'm watching tonight.

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