[Cross-posted at The Left Coaster.]
I was very hard on the President Friday morning about his email for haranguing Congress to pass financial "industry" regulation, I believe in precise words and I was not impressed regulation was not implemented in the diction. Furthermore, I have been vastly un-impressed with the Bushian Angelides Commission, the classically farcial pro-business "investigatory" panel tasked to reveal the truth about how the big casino blew up and turned the Fed into an endless cash machine for crooks. If a government can’t discover the truth about an industry I have little faith they can regulate it well, America wired me that way.
Acid anger at the finance industry seeps throughout the land not at the usual if exasperating classic bullshit mill of a federal commission, but at the sight of total criminals who bungled so badly it’s surprising they can tie their shoes waltzing completely away free while any little person instantly knows they’d be fired and soon see what executives of Goldman Sachs surely deserve, slanted light from inside the god damn slammer.
John Cole of Balloon Juice has a very worthy personal grudge element in this flaming fiasco, the way ratings agencies have not escaped any prosecution for earning fortunes that did nothing but blow a trillion dollar hole in the federal deficit. Their reputations are virtually intact, their leadership incredibly rich, our ability to stop another raid on the Treasury nil.
Mine is one Lawrence Summers, the impetuous, childish Obama economic advisor who demanded and got cabinet rank to keep his massively flabby ego tumescent. This is the idiot who somehow managed to lose $500 million of Harvard endowment money with another $500 million—those are not typos—lost over 40 years in the credit-default-swap floor of the casino. This isn’t criminal, but it’s just unbelievable any financial manager loses money on endowment investments, it’s as if a person is broke because they can’t cash checks. Not only did Summers so blow it, he walked on to more status and buttloads of cash and status. Any chance I can get outcomes like that for any possible future flaming fuckup I might perform in this life?
There is indeed a line to be crossed in asking the American people to accept all this or it’s time for a desperate ploy of appearance, it’s hard to tell what it is, but on Friday the SEC filed civil suit against Goldman Sachs for it’s "synthetic collateralized debt obligation" machines in the casino.
The Commission seeks injunctive relief, disgorgement of profits, prejudgment interest, and financial penalties.
Doesn’t look like the inside of the slammer to me. Looks like something Goldman Sachs executives could pay off like we pay a parking ticket, in fact.
Encouraging, it is indeed one way to look at it. So are the confident signs of financial reform success coming out of the White House and the Senate late last week as the bill is worked up in Congress, but there is a long way to go. If anything can be said of the process it’s that there’s no need for Americans to inform their representatives on the need for reform, every citizen knows we’ve been jacked by crooks who’ve totally gotten away with it. It’s up to Congress and the Obama administration to show the American people they have a sense of justice in not only making sure we never go through this again, but that they’re capable of implementing criminal prosecution to the felon financial industry leadership that got us here.
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A little housekeeping, please excuse me.
Glenzilla is asking for donations and I can’t think of a better way to support a change agent than slinging a few bucks with PayPal to this fine man. Blogtopia and the country owes him a great deal for his service, I’m eternally grateful.
Balloon Juice has an excellent fundraising mechanism for an animal shelter by purchasing "swag" at the site store. I’ll be ordering something Tunch today.
I was remiss in not passing on the latest Hullabaloo fundraising drive when it occurred, although I did contribute. I do not like to think where we’d be without Digby, her donation slot is at the top of her blog, if one needs ironclad knowledge that progress was contributed to this day in America, well, donate to Hullaballoo.