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Tldr..
is there a specific bank that needs to go to jail?
Are banks too big to jail?
PBS Frontline's stunning report shows how the Obama administration undermined the rule of law
By David Sirota
PBS Frontline’s stunning report last night on why the Obama administration has refused to prosecute any Wall Streeter involved in the financial meltdown doesn’t just implicitly indict a political and financial press that utterly abdicated its responsibility to cover such questions. It also — and as importantly — exposes the genuinely radical jurisprudential ideology that Wall Street campaign contributors have baked into America’s “justice” system. Indeed, after watching the piece, you will understand that the word “justice” belongs in quotes thanks to an Obama administration that has made a mockery of the name of a once hallowed executive department.
The Frontline report is led “The Untouchables,” a tongue-in-cheek salute to how that term once referred to those heroes who fought organized crime and yet now appropriately describes those doing the criminal organizing. Rooted in historical comparison, it contrasts how the Reagan administration prosecuted thousands of bankers after the now-quaint-looking S&L scandal with how the Obama administration betrayed the president’s explicit promise to “hold Wall Street accountable” and refused to prosecute a single banker connected to 2008′s apocalyptic financial meltdown.
The piece by PBS reporter Martin Smith looks at how Obama has driven federal prosecutions of financial crimes down to a two-decade low. It also do ents the rampant and calculated mortgage securities fraud perpetrated by the major Wall Street banks, who, not coincidentally, were using some of the profits they made to become among President Obama’s biggest campaign donors.
As we see, that campaign money didn’t just buy massive government bailouts of the banks, a pathetically weak Wall Street “reform” bill or explicit reassurances from Obama’s campaign that the president would refrain from criticizing bankers. Frontline shows it also bought a Too Big to Jail ideology publicly championed by the white-collar defense lawyer turned Obama prosecutor Lanny Breuer.
In the single most damning part of the PBS report, we learn that Breuer, fresh off a lucrative stint defending Moody’s and Halliburton, was appointed by President Obama to head the Justice Department’s criminal enforcement division and was soon sculpting this unprecedented ideology and embedding it into the department’s mission. As Frontline shows, he bragged to his colleagues in the legal profession that as the United States government’s chief criminal prosecutor, he is not primarily worried about lawbreaking in the financial world, but about whether prosecuting financial crime will harm the criminals, their accomplices and their industry.
As this excerpt from Breuer’s 2012 speech to the New York City Bar Association shows, that characterization of Breuer’s declarations is not an overstatement (emphasis added):
To be clear, the decision of whether to indict a corporation, defer prosecution, or decline altogether is not one that I, or anyone in the Criminal Division, take lightly. We are frequently on the receiving end of presentations from defense counsel, CEOs, and economists who argue that the collateral consequences of an indictment would be devastating for their client. In my conference room, over the years, I have heard sober predictions that a company or bank might fail if we indict, that innocent employees could lose their jobs, that entire industries may be affected, and even that global markets will feel the effects.…Save for the intrepid Marcy Wheeler and now Frontline, this speech received almost no news media attention despite being arguably one of the most important statements to come from a top law enforcement official in recent history.
In reaching every charging decision, we must take into account the effect of an indictment on innocent employees and shareholders, just as we must take into account the nature of the crimes committed and the pervasiveness of the misconduct.
I personally feel that it’s my duty to consider whether individual employees with no responsibility for, or knowledge of, misconduct committed by others in the same company are going to lose their livelihood if we indict the corporation. In large multi-national companies, the jobs of tens of thousands of employees can be at stake. And, in some cases, the health of an industry or the markets are a real factor. Those are the kinds of considerations in white collar crime cases that literally keep me up at night, and which must play a role in responsible enforcement.
The highlighted parts of that speech are what is so significant. In them, Breuer is saying that enforcing the law should not be — and no longer is, in the Department of Justice — prosecutors’ chief priority. Rather, he says listening to Wall Street’s economic arguments about the alleged cost of stopping and/or punishing lawbreaking should be.
Before you say that Breuer is just being a kind, compassionate guy, remember that the foundational notion of equal justice under the law is not supposed to be kindness or compassion. It is supposed to be blindness — specifically, blindness to a person’s stature and station, regardless of whether that person is a single human or a corporation. Even though that principle has never been applied perfectly (to say the least), the government is supposed to at minimum rhetorically honor its ethos.
Yet, here you have the Obama administration via its chief prosecutor setting the precedent for exactly the opposite: namely, a government that brags that when it comes to Wall Street, justice is not — and should not — be blind. Instead, as Breuer demands, prosecutors should be “kept up at night” worrying primarily about how an enforcement action will affect bankers who break laws and harm millions of Americans.
That’s not nice or compassionate, that’s a corporate defense attorney paying back the banking industry whose campaign contributions installed his boss in the White House and, consequently, him at the top of the Justice Department.
To understand how revolutionary a notion the Obama administration’s Too Big to Jail is, do the mental exercise of switching out the pinstriped Wall Street criminals and replacing them with your mental image of the leaders of drug cartels. They, too, head multinational businesses involving scores of front companies and, thus, thousands of people who may not even know that they are participating in an illegal enterprise. If Breuer applied the very same Too Big to Jail ideology to those cartel leaders, he would be effectively arguing that we shouldn’t prosecute Pablo Escobars because that would result in an unacceptable loss of wages for those kingpins’ secretaries, messengers and secondary workforces.
If such a hideous legal argument about drug cartels was ever even whispered by any official in Washington, you would expect it to be grounds for congressional hearings, if not full-on impeachment proceedings accusing said official of jeopardizing U.S. national security. And in many cases it would be — except, of course, if the drug dealers in question were somehow connected to the financial industry’s profits. After all, it was Breuer who sculpted the Obama administration’s settlement with megabank HSBC after the bank admitted laundering money for drug cartels and terrorist organizations.
In that decision not to criminally prosecute any HSBC executive who had enabled such laundering, Breuer explicitly cited the same radical Too Big to Jail principle aired in the PBS Frontline report. He said: “Our goal here is not to bring HSBC down, it’s not to cause a systemic effect on the economy, it’s not for people to lose thousands of jobs.”
For pure adversarial and investigative journalism horsepower, the PBS Frontline piece rivals Bill Moyers’ epic PBS indictment of those charlatans who enabled the Bush administration’s march into the Iraq War. It is a must-watch in the truest sense of the overused term because it so powerfully explains how Obama’s campaign motto of “change” meant something entirely different than what many thought. In the case of financial crime, it meant the embrace of a radical Too Big to Jail ideology, one that creates a moral hazard, encourages exactly the same kind of crimes and therefore makes it more likely that another financial meltdown will happen.
VIDEO: The Untouchables http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/untouchables/
Tldr..
is there a specific bank that needs to go to jail?
Drones! Dead babies! Sheep! Memes!
Excessive bolding.
A large portion of the prison population is african american, there are some hispanics and caucasions as well as some asians. There is not a single bank in Jail, so I guess the answer is Yes.
See what happens when you spam the board with drone memes and photos of dead babies, then try to post a legitimate topic? No one takes you seriously. You brought this on yourself with your overaggressive spamming. Maybe you should let SA210 die and come back born again with a new screen name and give the whole message board interaction thing another shot.
btw - I watched that frontline last night
I appreciate the advice, but I disagree, respectfully. It's not my fault many people don't care more about more important critical issues simply because of party lines and whatever other reasons. Their childish reactions to critical thinking, real human issues, genocide, murder, etc says more about them than it does about me.See what happens when you spam the board with drone memes and photos of dead babies, then try to post a legitimate topic? No one takes you seriously. You brought this on yourself with your overaggressive spamming. Maybe you should let SA210 die and come back born again with a new screen name and give the whole message board interaction thing another shot.
btw - I watched that frontline last night
But what about his ignore list? He went through great trouble putting half the forum on ignore.See what happens when you spam the board with drone memes and photos of dead babies, then try to post a legitimate topic? No one takes you seriously. You brought this on yourself with your overaggressive spamming. Maybe you should let SA210 die and come back born again with a new screen name and give the whole message board interaction thing another shot.
btw - I watched that frontline last night
Yeah should have posted under another screen name tbh. Good read and hopefully I can find the report online to watch.See what happens when you spam the board with drone memes and photos of dead babies, then try to post a legitimate topic? No one takes you seriously. You brought this on yourself with your overaggressive spamming. Maybe you should let SA210 die and come back born again with a new screen name and give the whole message board interaction thing another shot.
btw - I watched that frontline last night
Sad that Frontline is the only show in our garbage television media asking these questions. It's no wonder Romney wanted to kill their funding.
The real problem is our garbage general public has no interest in seeing these questions asked. If that weren't the case, a for profit television media wouldn't just work but it would be extremely effective.
Basically every major problem in this country is somehow related to the American population being by far the most intellectually disinterest population of any modern country.
Too bad for profit media is basically controlled by politics.
That's ridiculous. NBC isn't going after the banks when they're owned by one. Disney's conservative ass isn't going to try to tear them down. Rupert Murdoch promoting class conciousness among the people of this nation? Yeah, don't see it either. The people cared a lot about these questions for years after the 2008 crash and no one covered it.
Yeah, you know how much of a joke they are because of their special interests and most Americans don't have a clue. If the average American had any idea that NBC was owned by a bank or who Rupert Murdoch is, Fox and NBC would go under.
At this point anyone who thinks they can still get real news by watching TV and not reading is a moron.
For Once, Maybe Lying Does Not Pay: DoJ’s Lanny Breuer Resignation Leaked After Frontline Appearance
Lanny Breuer, former Covington & Burling partner and more recently head of the criminal division at the Department of Justice, had his resignation leaked today. The proximate cause may be a Frontline show that ran two nights ago, part of a series on the financial crisis. The segment in which Breuer speaks is below and of course on the PBS website (the last of four segments).
Here are is one howler from his Frontline performance (the bold is the Frontline interviewer):
But it has nothing to do with the financial crisis, the meltdown, the packaging of bad mortgages that led to the collapse that led to the recession.
First of all, I think that the financial crisis is multifaceted. But even within that, all we can do is look hard at this multifaceted, multipronged problem. And what we’ve had is a multipronged, multifaceted response.
When a criminal case can be brought, whether it’s from an originator, whether it’s from a bank executive who acted with criminal intent, we’ve brought those cases.
But in those cases where we can’t bring a criminal case — and federal criminal cases are hard to bring — I have to prove that you had the specific intent to defraud. I have to prove that the counterparty, the other side of the transaction, relied on your misrepresentation. If we cannot establish that, then we can’t bring a criminal case.
But we don’t let these ins utions go. We’ve brought civil cases. We’ve brought regulatory cases. And the entire approach here is to have a multipronged, comprehensive approach to what gave rise to the financial crisis.
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/...ppearance.html
Breuer will have a great career, fantastically remunerated, back in private sector.
Last edited by boutons_deux; 01-24-2013 at 05:26 AM.
Obama's Failure to Punish Banks Should Be Causing Serious Social Unrest
What Obama justice officials did instead is exactly what they did in the face of high-level Bush era crimes of torture and warrantless eavesdropping: namely, acted to protect the most powerful factions in the society in the face of overwhelming evidence of serious criminality. Indeed, financial elites were not only vested with impunity for their fraud, but thrived as a result of it, even as ordinary Americans continue to suffer the effects of that crisis.
Worst of all, Obama justice officials both shielded and feted these Wall Street oligarchs (who, just by the way, overwhelmingly supported Obama's 2008 presidential campaign) as they simultaneously prosecuted and imprisoned powerless Americans for far more trivial transgressions.
http://www.alternet.org/economy/obam...tter782060&t=5
fat ass, decrepit American's don't do "social unrest", and if they did it seriously, it would be crushed by police/FBI/CIA/military/corporations, with the right-wingers and their less armed bubbas SUPPORTING the establishment against OWS/hippies.
One of the HUGE LIES of Barry is his campaign statement about not aggressively pursuing mj offenders
http://www.nationalmemo.com/marijuan...violent-crime/
but financial criminals stealing $Ts? LET IT SLIDE!
there are a number of good threads on this. this, sadly, isn't one of them.
fish rots from the head down?
America's rot starts with the root of all evil, which is America's most treasured value.
Govt doesn't cause the financial sector to be criminals and frauds, no more than CRA forced lenders to sell sub-prime/toxic mortgages.
Nah, but its your fault when your poor communication skills turn them off to your message. Not meant as an insult, BTW. My honest perception of what has happened here. I started to watch the Frontline off my DVR but fell asleep so I'll have to start again. Frontline has been their usual awesome self this season though. This will be the third time they've grilled Obama on his failure regarding the financial crisis with the most recent previous shot at him being the previous weeks episode. Its good someone isn't letting it fall by the wayside.I appreciate the advice, but I disagree, respectfully. It's not my fault many people don't care more about more important critical issues simply because of party lines and whatever other reasons. Their childish reactions to critical thinking, real human issues, genocide, murder, etc says more about them than it does about me.
Frontline is ing amazing. Sad that it's basically the only serious investigative show on American television anymore.
Very interesting podcast about the subject, KCRW's To The Point with Warren Olney:
Interesting to hear the guy from the Federal Reserve say the banks need to broken up...The Legacy of Too Big to Fail
featuring:
Matt Taibbi: Rolling Stone
Harvey Rosenblum: Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas
Four years after the Toxic Asset Relief Program, America's twelve biggest banks are bigger than ever — and still protected by the guarantee of taxpayer money. Even a member of the Federal Reserve says they need to be broken up before increasingly risky investments provoke another financial crisis. TARP, supported by both the Bush and Obama Administrations, was supposed to provide foreclosure relief for abused homeowners, but a pending settlement is now being described as "another gift to the banks." We hear about the consequences, intended and otherwise, of government action to "save the economy."
Hope/Change/Transparency, "the touchstones of his Presidency"
UPDATE: A mere hours after the PBS Frontline piece aired, Lanny Breuer just announced he is resigning his post at the Justice Department. Meanwhile, PBS reporter Martin Smith just reported that in response to his report, the Obama White House has decided to block access to Frontline reporters in their future reporting.
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