Finally, with about a two year delay, popular opinion has finally caught up with the fact that America has an Attorney General, and that Attorney General is not getting paid $186,600 a year merely to conduct medical research on the dangers of carbonite freezing. In its headline article "Prosecutors Faulted for Not Catching Credit-Crunch ‘Bandits’" Bloomberg has done what every other media was supposed to do years ago, namely ask the well-rested Eric Holder what the hell is the reason that not a single criminal investigation being launched against an entire generation of criminal and corrupt bankers (granted, not all of them....just the multi-millionaires). "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." It is stunning that this is only the first time someone in the mainstream media has had the temerity to actually wonder why nobody had previously thawed Holder from his resting place deep in the nether regions of Jaba's barge where his carbonite statue is publicly presented for all to enjoy.
Some observations on why America can just do away with its ranks of public prosecutorial muppets:
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.And some more:
“You need a massive prosecutorial effort,” said Solomon Wisenberg, a white-collar defense attorney at Barnes & Thornburg LLP in Washington and a former federal prosecutor. “I don’t see evidence that it’s happening. If we were talking baseball, it would be at the AAA level.”
The Justice Department and Federal Bureau of Investigation dispute that, saying they are continuing to investigate potential wrongdoing connected to the emergency, and some probes didn’t find criminal behavior. They say they stepped up mortgage-fraud prosecutions, which more than doubled in fiscal 2010 from 2009, the first full year for which there is data.
To prosecute fraud, the government generally must show executives knowingly made false statements or omitted the truth about a company’s financial health. Bankers have argued that they broke no laws and can’t be blamed for an industry-wide breakdown in risk controls.Well, for those who have read Levin's paperweight, so aptly summarized by Matt Taibbi, this is not the case, so if only Holder would be so kind to stop accepting indulgences from his Wall Street amigos, he may be better served (and serve the public) to actually do his damn job. For once in his life.
Luckily, the anger is building:
Read More:
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/attention-shifts-rip-van-eric-holder-who-contrary-conventional-wisdom-not-frozen-carbonite?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+zerohedge%2Ffeed+%28zero+hedge+-+on+a+long+enough+timeline%2C+the+surviv
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