I’m catching up on my Ian Walsh and he’s completely right on this one. By coming in and refusing to even investigate the criminal actions of BushCo, and then the bankers, the Obama administration gave the go-ahead signal to the corporate criminals that the law was only for the lower classes.
A friend of mine notes the wave of fraudulent foreclosures, foreclosures where firms simply faked the paperwork needed to prove they have standing to foreclose (that they actually own the mortgage.) There have been some moves to stem the fraud, not the least of which is by Florida’s Attorney General Bill McCollum, but those who appear to be the worst offenders are firing back, going after him and other judges who have thrown out cases.
This is a logical consequence of refusing to go after banksters for fraud. The fraud was so systemic (the majority of CDOs based on housing) that virtually every major executive was involved. The DOJ and others chose not to prosecute criminally, and as a result the message was sent that the executive class, as a group, will not be prosecuted for fraud.
So, of course, they doubled down.
This is illness creep from the refusal to go after Bush era crimes. Political elites made themselves immune from prosecution for any crime that a lot of them are involved in, then corporate elites.
America isn’t a nation of laws, it is a nation of men. Has been since at least 2007, when Nancy made her choice not to go after wrongdoers. Obama confirmed this in 2009, when he refused to use the DOJ to go after either Bush era crimes or really go after mortgage and security fraud.
I hope it can be firebreaked here. Maybe it can. But when you exempt entire classes of important people from the law, every other group of important people sees no reason why they should be subject to it either.
If it is to be firebreaked here it must be done with criminal prosecution. Corporate elites won’t be deterred by fines, they consider them only a cost of doing business.
There is only One Party, speaking ’round a folked tongue & out of both sides of its’ mouth.
This is the kind of crap that has turned me off of President Obama and his administration, not politics and compromised bills in congress, but outright violations of the constitution, US and international law.
You know, throwing some people in jail, allowing others to escape and profit, torture, imprisonment without trial or even charges, assassinations by drone strikes, wiretapping, FBI raids and so on. In matters of actual life and death he has come down on the side of death.
This is some serious sh*t, and all the charm and charisma in the world cannot get me to forgive him for it. I would almost rather have the outright crazies in office than to have this kind of creepy betrayal. Honesty counts for something.
Yup, I agree completely. If the teabaggers actually *read* the Constitution, and bookmarked the part about how “the President shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed,” then they might have a point about Obama’s defalcations. As it stands now, my long-suffering girlfriend is really tired of hearing me scream, “Where are the indictments?!”
Obama’s prosecution of whistleblowers certainly shows he has no problems going after that type of “criminal”….