Peter Schweitzer
Forbes, OpEd
May 7, 2012
EXCERPT...
In November 2009, President Obama established the Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force to deal with financial crimes related to the 2008 financial crisis. As Attorney General Eric Holder, chairman of the Task Force, explained at the time: “This Task Force’s mission is not just to hold accountable those who helped bring about the last financial meltdown, but to prevent another meltdown from happening. We will be relentless in our investigation of corporate and financial wrongdoing, and will not hesitate to bring charges, where appropriate, for criminal misconduct on the part of businesses and business executives.”
None of that happened. The Task Force is still humming along almost three years later, but its highlighted successes are less “business executives” than ordinary Americans who have had the book thrown at them. From their website:
SNIP...
Why these two levels of justice? Could this disparity simply be a case that the big banks will fight charges more aggressively, thus making criminal prosecutions more difficult? Maybe. But it also undoubtedly has something to do with the fact that the top leadership at DOJ is drawn almost exclusively from White Collar Criminal Defense Practices at large firms that represent the very firms that Justice is supposed to be investigating. Covington and Burling, the firm from which both Attorney General Eric Holder and Associate Attorney General andu head of the criminal division Lanny Breuer hail, has as its current clients Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, JP Morgan, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, ING, Morgan Stanley, UBS, and MF Global among others. Other top Justice officials have similar connections through their firms.
White Collar Criminal Defense work has become one of the few revenue bright spots for large firms. According to a detailed analysis by the Professor Charles D. Weisselberg of UC-Berkeley in the Arizona Law Review, there is big money to be made because “this area of practice is not susceptible to the same types of cost controls” that apply to other legal work. In short, white collar criminal defense work is “enormously lucrative.”
CONTINUED...
http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2012/05/07/obamas-doj-and-wall-street-too-big-for-jail/
= new reply since forum marked as read