The DOJ Has Corrupted the Rule of Law by Not Prosecuting Wall Street Financial Looters

[Purveyor]

Journalist and scholarly muse Thomas Frank noted in a recent e-mail to colleagues,

September 15 will mark five years since the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the official beginning of the slump that never ends. It was a moment that smashed the faith of millions of people. And so it’s time for a look back: What did the nation learn from that moment of complete disillusionment?

Well, basically nothing. We came to the turning point and didn’t turn.

Frank was referring to his September dateline Harper's Magazine article (only available in the print edition and behind an online paywall), in which he concluded:

But a society that believes good government to be an impossibility is unlikely to do what is necessary to keep industry honest. Instead, its regulators will come to see the regulated, rather than the public, as their main clients. They will imagine that industry can police itself. They will party with their private-sector pals and spin happily through the revolving door. And the rest of us will resign ourselves to scandal after scandal, as a new generation of looters rises up to claim positions at the trough when the old looters retire. Indeed—to repurpose an immortal statement by a certain Bush Administration economist—given what we now think we know about the system, it would be irrational for them not to loot....

There is one way, however, in which the changes brought about by 2008 have been permanent—one way in which the center will probably never hold again. We are a society that watched as those who obeyed the rules got played by Wall Street and Washington. And it has not only hardened us, made us more blasé about corruption; it has corrupted us. We be held our powerlessness at the hands of the mighty, and we decided that the thing to do was to make Wall Street even stronger. We accepted our powerlessness and then magnified it. Today we all know that another bubble will soon inflate and burst, but we have chosen to live with that— five years from the last, five years to the next! Just grab your cash and hang on.

MORE...

http://www.truth-out.org/buzzflash/commentary/item/18158-the-doj-has-corrupted-the-rule-of-law-by-not-prosecuting-wall-street-financial-looters

[Cooley Hurd]

1. Kicking and recommending this to the moon!!!

[MotherPetrie]

2. K&R

[Squinch]

3. Me too!!! Kicking this all over the place.

[Mnemosyne]

4. K&R! nt

[johnnyreb]

5. Everything's ok!

... as long as the music keeps playing.

[fascisthunter]

6. Wall Street feed their pets

the DOJ swims in circles like braindead goldfish.

[russspeakeasy]

7. Yes. We had our chance at bat and didn't even take a swing.

[JoeyT]

8. No one believes in the rule of law anymore, anyway.

It's basically a talking point now. "But we HAVE to prosecute whistleblowers! They broke THE LAW!".

Given that we don't prosecute CEOs, banksters, or war criminals, one would be forgiven for thinking the only "law" we actually enforce is "Don't embarrass the government without offering a sufficient bribe".

[Supersedeas]

19. sadly, i think you have a point

As Eric Holder suggested, we are a Nation of Cowards

[davidn3600]

9. Yet they will chase Snowden around the world

[Fire Walk With Me]

10. Government will not bite the hand which feeds it. n/t

[mick063]

11. Democrats own this issue. Sorry for telling the truth.

Holder has held his office for over five years.

If he does nothing about it, the argument that Democrats can help the middle class goes out the window. As for now, the middle class is simply a crop to periodically harvest with 401k the perfect seed to plant.


The only thing the Democratic Party has going for it is that the Republicans would be worse.

[liberal_at_heart]

12. They have also corrupted the rule of law by not prosecuting Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz.

[Corruption Inc]

13. +1

We're a corrupt nation until torturers and war criminals are prosecuted.

[Supersedeas]

14. combine that with the failure to prosecute members of the prior administration

But, Eric Holder thinks we are a nation of cowards

[indepat]

15. Who the DOJ chooses to prosecute and who it chooses not to prosecute tell us a lot about:

the DOJ's politics, equal justice under the law, the rule of law, the land of the free and home of the brave, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, who the government of the people, by the people, and for the people represent rather than we the people, whose welfare is represented rather than the general welfare.

[Initech]

16. Is the DOJ still stacked with Bush picked Regent University graduates?

[RainDog]

17. k&r n/t

[forestpath]

18. They're all in it together.