Simon Johnson asks Does The Obama Administration Even Want To Win In November? "But ever so quietly, you get the impression the Obama team itself is not so very unhappy – they know the jobs will come back by 2012, they feel that Republican control of the House will just energize the Democratic base, and no one will be able to blame the White House for getting nothing done from 2010 on."
"There’s no story in the culture about what the big banks did and why. There is no attempt from the top to push through the key message for the day – financial reform – and to explain what this can do and how. The adminstration, in effect, is not even trying. The inner team apparently thinks that 2012 will go just fine – as long as unemployment is down around 6 percent. And, they reason, the people who lose their seats this November won’t be around to complain."
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Johnson writes - "There’s no story in the culture about what the big banks did and why. There is no attempt from the top to push through the key message for the day – financial reform – and to explain what this can do and how. The adminstration, in effect, is not even trying."
The reason they (the Obama administration) are not trying, the reason Congress is not trying is because the truth is too dangerous to become widely known.
There is no story in the culture because, to paraphrase Colonel Jessup, "We can't handle the truth."
It is the experienced and educated position of many from both within and outside the financial industry, and government regulators, that frauds, violations of SEC law, and violations of insurance law were perpetrated on a massive scale by the Big Banks on Wall Street over the last 5-10 years, ultimately resulting in the massive financial meltdown of 2008-2009.
If the American people were to be told the truth about what really happened, then they would rightly expect that our jails would be filled with convicted felons from the financial industry. The federal government itself would be also "implicated" for their massive failure to prevent this since they knew full well it was taking place (see FBI 2004 alert on massive mortgage fraud across USA). For the current Wall Street/Capital Hill Oligarchy that "runs" the USA, that is an untenable outcome.
Were the rich and powerful to avoid prosecution after such revelations were made public, civil unrest would be a real possibility, especially given the current state of the economy and the large numbers of unemployed. So the truth can't be revealed and we are told that it was just mass delusion on the part of greedy, stupid bankers. Well, one of three ain't bad. Greedy - absolutely, delusional - sometimes, but not when it comes to money in their pockets, stupid - c'mon, these are the smartest cats on the planet.
In the aftermath of the Savings and Loan circa 1989, over 1,000 S&L executives were found guilty of various crimes and went to jail.....ONE THOUSAND FELONS IN JAIL for financial crimes that were, in essense, misrepresentations of financial instruments' underlying values.
Sound familiar?
Yet we don't have a single indictment since the meltdown of Sept. 2008. According to one of the principal Government Prosecutors from the S&L era, William Black, the exact same activities which were prosecuted 20 years ago are being ignored today.
Why?
Please see Lessig's article on Castro's Favorite Color for additional commentary and explanation.
The poster boy of the S&L scandal was Charles Keating (remember the Keating five?). He almost got away with his crimes by buying five senators to help him. Apparently five Senators wasn't enough and Keating went to jail and only one of the five Senators survived politically - John McCain.
Wall Street's takaway from the S&L crisis was to recreate the Control Frauds, after all, they worked fine 20 years ago. However, learning from history, they bought additional "get out of jail free cards", by purchasing the goodwill (or lack of will) of as many Senators and Representatives as they could. They also made some big early bets on a long-shot pick for the 2008 Presidential election named Barack Obama.
By far and away, that's probably the best money Wall Street ever spent.
After all, most reasonable people would agree that Obama had no choice but to save the banks.
However, he didn't have to save the bankers.
We don't need more financial reform. What we need to do is to:
1. Prosecute the greedy SOBs who committed criminal acts.
2. Use the RICO statute to clawback monies earned from criminal activities.
3. Enforce the current laws on the books.
4. Using anti-trust laws, break up the big banks.
But we all now know that none of these things will happen.
So it goes.
TT
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