Scofflaws, Elected or Otherwise

[Donnachaidh]

http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/7358/scofflaws_elected_or_otherwise/

In the long-ago epoch when Bill Clinton made a credible-sounding populist run at the presidency, he hymned the American dream as a compact securing a better future for those who “worked hard and played by the rules.” Here at the shank end of the great financial collapse of 2008, however, the national credo is pretty much “what work?”—and “screw the rules.”

One hears many sober orations on the importance of personal accountability for the comparatively powerless. Undocumented immigrants are lawbreakers, by definition. Unionized teachers and government workers are coddled pencil-pushers, irresponsibly jeopardizing public austerity for the sake of their bloated pensions and their perverse desire to bargain collectively with their employers, etc.

However, when it comes to the leading issue of our age—the deeply imbalanced structure of economic reward and punishment—no one is responsible for anything. In terms of the law, the 2008 meltdown may as well have been a natural disaster.

That was pretty much the scene laid out in an April 14 front-page dispatch by New York Times financial columnist Gretchen Morgenson, noting just how far we’ve come since the 1,000-plus federal prosecutions in the aftermath of the 1980s S&L debacle. Morgenson explains that back in the dismal autumn of 2008 Timothy Geithner, then the head of the New York branch of the Federal Reserve, met Andrew Cuomo, then the attorney general of New York and a self-styled crusader against Wall Street impunity. The two agreed, in essence, that the fix was in: Geithner was arranging the massive federal bailout of the flailing AIG, which was holding billions in toxic debt the company could never hope to repay. According to three Morgenson sources, Geithner told Cuomo that criminal prosecutions would be ill-advised at this delicate moment; the shaky financial markets would only freak out further over the prospect that their masters could be delivered into the hoosegow. (Cuomo denies that Geithner urged him to retire his prosecutorial authority and Geithner primly insists that he was seeking “to protect taxpayers” in streamlining the AIG bailout—a rationale that’s a bit like Kim Kardashian holding herself forth as a crusader against public indecency.)

More at the link --