STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
Root For Wall Street to Go to Jail
By Staff News & Analysis - January 22, 2013

More than four years since the financial crisis, not one senior Wall Street executive has faced criminal prosecution for fraud. Are Wall Street executives "too big to jail"? In The Untouchables, premiering Jan. 22, 2013, at 10 P.M. on PBS (check local listings), FRONTLINE producer and correspondent Martin Smith investigates why the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has failed to act on credible evidence that Wall Street knowingly packaged and sold toxic mortgage loans to investors, loans that brought the U.S. and world economies to the brink of collapse. Through interviews with top prosecutors, government officials and industry whistleblowers, FRONTLINE reports allegations that Wall Street bankers ignored pervasive fraud when buying pools of mortgage loans. Tom Leonard, a supervisor who examined the quality of loans for major investment banks like Bear Stearns, said bankers instructed him to disregard clear evidence of fraud. "Fraud was the F-word, or the F-bomb. You didn't use that word," says Leonard. "By your terms and my terms, yes, it was fraud. By the [industry's] terms, it was something else." – PBS

Dominant Social Theme: Everyone on Wall Street deserves to go to jail – or at least a lot of them, and it's an injustice that they are not there yet.

Free-Market Analysis: PBS executives apparently want people to go to jail. Or some people anyway.

Wall Street people.

But here are some people they seem to be leaving out.

They don't seem to want company execs of failing "green" companies that have borrowed hundreds of millions from the US federal government (that will never be returned) to go to jail.

They don't seem to want people who evidently and obviously tampered with the voting in Illinois and elsewhere during the presidential election to go to jail.

They don't seem to want politicians responsible for sending NATO soldiers into harm's way in pursuit of weapons of mass destruction that didn't exist to go to jail

They don't seem to want generals who have given false assurances about depleted uranium weapons and thus poisoned large parts of Iraq and Afghanistan (and US soldiers as well) to go to jail.

They don't seem to want doctors who continue to mandate vaccine cocktails for infants and thus potentially cause autism and other life-changing infantile syndromes to go to jail.

They don't seem to want judges and prosecutors who enforce the most senseless and bureaucratic laws – thus ruining the lives of families and destroying childhood for tens of thousands – to go to jail.

They don't seem to want central bankers who have destroyed the savings and retirements of tens of millions by constantly debasing the currency to go to jail.

They don't seem to want those responsible for 9/11 and other false-flag violence – whoever they are – to go to jail.

… Well, we could go on.

The sense of "justice" exhibited by PBS execs seems fairly selective if you ask us. Sure, Wall Street is corrupt – beyond measure, in fact.

But what PBS is doing, in our humble view, is promoting an elite dominant social theme not a rational perspective.

A rational perspective would devote time and energy to explaining how the SYSTEM could be changed. Putting some people in jail – no matter how wealthy or important – pales in comparison to shutting down what's actually rotted the core of US exceptionalism.

And that rot starts with central banking (and the graduated income tax as well). The ability of a tiny handful of men to print as much money as they wish any time they wish is impossibly corrosive and corrupting. It's far worse than ANYTHING Wall Street could ever do in its serial greed.

But we look in vain – year after year – for PBS to run an expose about central banking (or the abolishment of income taxes). We watch in vain, waiting for ONE program that explains it is impossible for human beings to regularly "fix" the price and volume of money. It leads to the Misery of Ages. Over and over.

Here's some more from the release:

Former Sen. Ted Kaufman (D-Del.), who was appointed to fill Joe Biden's long-held Senate seat when he was sworn in as vice president in January 2009, was determined to see bankers in handcuffs. "I was really upset about what went on on Wall Street that brought about the financial crisis," Kaufman recalls. "That doesn't happen if there isn't something bad going on."

Yet Kaufman left office in late 2010 frustrated by the lack of criminal prosecutions. Jeff Connaughton, Kaufman's chief of staff, remains convinced that the DOJ failed to make prosecuting Wall Street a top priority. "You're telling me that not one banker, not one executive on Wall Street, not one player in this entire financial crisis committed provable fraud?" asks Connaughton. "I mean, I just don't believe that."

Smith asks Lanny Breuer, assistant attorney general for the DOJ's Criminal Division, about his failure to criminally indict Wall Street executives. "I think there was a level of greed, a level of excessive risk taking in this situation that I find abominable and very upsetting," says Breuer.

You see how upset people are that Wall Street tycoons are not in jail? We would bet that not a single line of the current PBS program deals with the prison system itself.

No mention of the six million incarcerated in miserable conditions (perhaps half the world's total penal population), often in torturous solitary confinement.

No mention of the privatization of prisons that forces increasing multitudes of inmates to work as virtual slaves.

No mention of the beatings, rapes and variable formal and informal tortures that increasingly take place in the expanding US Gulag.

Nope, not on PBS – the "soul and conscience" of the US progressive movement.

Those "bleeding hearts" are only concerned that the system has failed to put away enough Wall Streeters. The "crime" is the lack of punishment.

In fact, this is merely another elite dominant social theme. The top elites will move heaven and Earth to keep the focus on their minions – the private bankers, traders and brokers that work in the financial industry.

Throw them in jail by the thousands but leave the quasi-public central banking system – the system that constantly creates the booms and busts that ruin people's lives and businesses – alone. Leave it be. Don't even mention it.

After Thoughts

Throw everyone else in jail. That will make it better. Won't it?

Posted in STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
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