When it comes to our government’s collective refusal to aggressively investigate — much less prosecute — Wall Street crime, one prevailing line of apologism implies that it’s all about resources. As the general fable goes, Wall Street is so sprawling and so lawyered up that public law enforcement agencies simply don’t have the resources to make sure justice is served, especially at a time of budget deficits. In this story, Wall Street is not simply too big to fail; it’s too big to even police.
The motivation for such myth-making is obvious: It wholly absolves elected officials for their decisions to let their financial-industry campaign contributors off the hook. Yet thanks to recent events, the whole “Too Big to Police” rationale is being exposed for the farce that it is.
At the local level, the same governments that plead poverty when they’re asked to enforce their laws on financial fraud have somehow found plenty of resources to deploy their militarized police forces against Occupy protesters. At the federal level, it’s even more blatant. As we learned in a little-noticed Washington Post piece on Tuesday, the same Obama administration that has refused to spend political capital and federal monies to go after Wall Street is expending new resources to crack down on the supposedly rampant problem of food stamp “fraud.”
To feds, food stamps bigger than Wall St. fraud
A couple of things. First Agribusisness should be investigated. The food stamp program subsidizes Agribusiness in the same way that Medicaid and Medicare subsidizes the Health Care industry. If left alone these programs will turn into illegal rackets that the likes of Al Capone would be proud to control. As for the gutting of Wall Street and EPA regulations, Cass Sunstein is to blame for that. Did Obama hire this punk? You betcha. But does Obama get so far into the weeds that he knows exactly what every one of his appointees is up to? No way. What Eric Holder is doing is anybody’s guess. Why Obama keeeps him or Giethner or Hillary around is a mystery to most thoughtful people. Hopefully they will all be gone in 12 months.
Thats a feature not a bug…much like baracks inability to appoint a head to the cfpb, he doesn’t want his scum sucking donors to be forced to deal with regulations…so he signed a bill he knew would do nothing.
Yeah, Obama is making a big deal about the Repubs refusing to allow his CFPB appointee to even come up for an “up or down vote.”
Yet, what kind of campaigning has he done to get the public involved in even contacting Congress? I think he mentioned something a day or two before the vote.
And I gather the WH asked Reid to push up the CFBP vote….
Looks to me like Obama is using the Repubs as his excuse for not doing anything for the CFPB. And he didn’t do squat because he really doesn’t want it or to have it be effective.
Weasel.
jawbone’s right; what a weasel.
Raids against Occupy protesters, marijuana users, and food stamp cheats are classic misdirection. It’s blindingly obvious that the 0.01 percent do not plan on being held responsible for anything whatsoever. The Obama administration is aiding and abetting these trillion-dollar thieves by focusing attention on the small fish, and making them seem like the real villians.
It’s the same story in every govt agency, and there is truth to it. There are not enough resources to police or prosecute the big boy and their armies of lawyers. And it’s that way on purpose. Going after small fry is easy, not least because the small fry can’t afford good lawyers, and because the legal system is stacked against the poor, the black, the gay, basically the “trash”.
At this point I think all those unemployed and underemployed Occupy movement kids should start going to police academies (a job’s a job) and pack the police force with liberals who might just make the next Officr John Pike or NYPD dago whiteshirt worry he’ll get his brains blown out by his colleagues when he illegally tortures and maims nonviolent protestors.
And they should get guns and start militia’s and exercise their 2nd amendment rights at their demonstrations. Because that’s about the only thing that is going to get taken seriously in this country. That is the only thing they elite respect.
Obama, Reid, Pelosi et al have demonstrated that they will castrate the power of the ballot box (on the rare occassion that they don’t let elections get stolen by Diebold and the R’s). And they’ve wiped their asses with what was left of the constitution after Buscheney got done with it. There are no alternatives left.