"Revolving Door" Between Wall Street & Government Regulators; Are Suit Settlements Management's Way Of Buying Its Way Off Cheap From Victims' Pockets?

Columnist Matt Taibbi writes in Rolling Stone:

• Over drinks at a bar on a dreary, snowy night in Washington this past month, a former Senate investigator laughed as he polished off his beer. "Everything's [*]ucked up, and nobody goes to jail," he said. "That's your whole story right there. Hell, you don't even have to write the rest of it. Just write that."

• I put down my notebook. "Just that?" "That's right," he said, signaling to the waitress for the check. "Everything's [*]ucked up, and nobody goes to jail. You can end the piece right there."

• Nobody goes to jail. This is the mantra of the financial-crisis era, one that saw virtually every major bank and financial company on Wall Street embroiled in obscene criminal scandals that impoverished millions and collectively destroyed hundreds of billions, in fact, trillions of dollars of the world's wealth — and nobody went to jail. Nobody, that is, except Bernie Madoff, a flamboyant and pathological celebrity con artist, whose victims happened to be other rich and famous people.

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• [F]ederal regulators and prosecutors have let the banks and finance companies that tried to burn the world economy to the ground get off with carefully orchestrated settlements — whitewash jobs that involve the firms paying pathetically small fines without even being required to admit wrongdoing.

• To add insult to injury, the people who actually committed the crimes almost never pay the fines themselves; banks caught defrauding their shareholders often use shareholder money to foot the tab of justice. "If the allegations in these settlements are true," says Jed Rakoff, a federal judge in the Southern District of New York, "it's management buying its way off cheap, from the pockets of their victims."(1)

For more, see Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail? (Financial crooks brought down the world's economy — but the feds are doing more to protect them than to prosecute them) (go here for the entire story on one web page).

Go here for a recent MSNBC interview with Matt Taibbi about his recent column.

Thanks to Harold for the heads-up on this story.

(1) One notable excerpt from the column:

• "You put Lloyd Blankfein in pound-me-in-the-ass prison for one six-month term, and all this bull[*]hit would stop, all over Wall Street," says a former congressional aide. "That's all it would take. Just once." But that hasn't happened. Because the entire system set up to monitor and regulate Wall Street is [*]ucked up.