In November 2009, Attorney General Eric Holder vowed before television cameras to prosecute those responsible for the market collapse a year earlier, saying the U.S. would be “relentless” in pursuing corporate criminals.
In the 18 months since, no senior Wall Street executive has been criminally charged, and some lawmakers are questioning whether the U.S. Justice Department has been aggressive enough after declining to bring cases against officials at American International Group Inc. (AIG) and Countrywide Financial Corp.
Prosecutions of three categories of crime that could be linked to the causes of the crisis -- corporate, securities and bank fraud -- declined last fiscal year by 39 percent from 2003, the period after the accounting scandals at Enron Corp. and WorldCom Inc., Justice Department records show.
-Bloomberg
Some of the biggest Wall Street gangs have benefitted from the crisis quite substantially. Goldman Sachs’ 2009 profits were a record for the firm and JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM)’s earnings have been at an all-time high as well. But that isn't stopping the Justice Dept. from acting as a lap dog for these and other corporate crooks.
Back in March, Holder’s DoJ was actually caught conspiring with Bank of America (whom DoJ should have been investigating for fraudulent foreclosure and debt collection practices) to try to silence Wikileaks.
Not only has the DoJ been helping silence whistleblowers, they’ve been trying to divert America’s attention away from the real problems. Representative Zoe Lofgren of California, at a May 3 Congressional hearing, pointed out that Federal prosecutors have been more focused on immigration offenses than the financial crisis.
“The department is spending its resources prosecuting nannies and busboys who are trying to get back to their families,” she said. “And yet we have not brought any prosecutions on the bandits on Wall Street who brought the nation and the world to the brink of financial disaster.”
-Bloomberg
The Justice Dept. claims that they are pursuing corporate fraud, but the reality is, they aren’t pursuing fraudulent corporations.
Using government data compiled by Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a nonprofit research center, Bloomberg News identified cases coded as corporate fraud by the Justice Department last year. Most involve people accused of stealing from companies, not wrongdoing by firms themselves.
-Bloomberg
Once again, we see that the Justice Dept. is protecting corporate criminals, not prosecuting them.
The FBI claims that after 911, they had to reassign agents away from criminal cases in favor of “national security” cases. Ummm, the FBI doesn’t consider the fleecing of our government to be an issue of “national security?”
Apparently not. And apparently, putting black men in both the White House and the DoJ has done nothing to bring white collar criminals to justice.
I plea Da Fif
