President Obama fails to go after those responsible for the financial meltdown
By James Lieber,
October 27, 2009,
Miami New Times News
When Barack Obama donned the crusader’s mantle during the 2008 presidential campaign, his web-savvy team created KeatingEconomics.com. The main video showed Charles Keating – the wealthy, politically connected poster child of the ’80s savings-and-loan scandal – in handcuffs.
The video portrayed John McCain as Keating’s stooge and likened the S&L crash to the 2008 Wall Street meltdown. Today’s corporate villains were flashed on the screen, among them AIG, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac. The opening narrator was Bill Black, a Ph.D. criminologist and lead attorney at the government’s Office of Thrift Supervision. Black helped steer the brilliant federal effort that cleaned up the S&L industry, won more than 1,000 felony convictions, and recovered millions of ill-gotten dollars.
Those watching the compelling attack ad had every reason to believe Obama’s approach would be just as hard-edged, and that felon-busting G-men would rout the crooks and recover our money.
This was not to be.
As it stands now, there’s only one federal prosecution related to the credit crash and bailout cycle, and it was begun by the Bush administration in June 2008.
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The nation’s new top prosecutor, Attorney General Eric Holder, has a history of preferring that deviant corporations be held to no more than a “voluntary cooperation” system in which they privately investigate themselves. Under the “Holder Memo,” written in 1999 when he was deputy AG in the Clinton administration, bad-boy executives and their corporations who turn over evidence to the government qualify for lenient sentences and fines; sometimes they simply walk. The consequences of their crimes often amount to only the cost of doing business.