What We Lost Because Obama Didn’t Prosecute Banksters - FDL [View All]

[WillyT]

What We Lost Because Obama Didn’t Prosecute Banksters
By: masaccio
Sunday January 2, 2011 10:45 am

<snip>

Imagine that you don’t know much about high finance except what you occasionally read in the paper. You would know that we have the greatest finance business in the world, and that the smartest people make the most money. If you have a lot of money, it’s a sign of merit, so you know those Wall Street guys earned it. You know that the SEC is the cop on the beat and they are doing a great job: why, they locked up Martha Stewart to make the trading on Wall Street fair.

From the time you were a kid, you learned that the US stock market was the envy of other nations for its fairness and accessibility. You were taught that the US had come to dominate the finance business because it brought in great brains from physics and math, and the best business minds rapidly move up in the hierarchy by innovation and invention. You wanted to move your money into mutual funds, so you could share in the profits generated through wise investments, and you knew that you could manage your own retirement by careful investments. Those are the fundamental building blocks of your perception of the Way Things Work.

Even in the teeth of the Great Crash, your first thought would not be that the Wall Streeters were responsible. It was those irresponsible people who bought houses they couldn’t afford, or minorities using the government to buy houses they couldn’t afford, or whatever other nonsense you heard from your friends or the TV. It would be easy to distract you from looking at the real causes.

That is why the failure of the Obama administration to prosecute a single bankster is so depressing. Prosecutions would have proved that the Great Crash wasn’t the fault of people who bought houses they couldn’t afford, or the result of government efforts to counter discrimination against minorities trying to buy houses. Prosecutions would have placed the blame squarely on the financial elites, where it belongs. Financiers would not have been able to blame the usual suspects, and use their tools in the press and their politicians to divert attention from their responsibility for plunging the nation into economic disaster.

<snip>

More: http://firedoglake.com/2011/01/02/what-we-lost-because-obama-didn%E2%80%99t-prosecute-banksters/

:shrug: