Matt Taibbi

Mr. Madoff, who is serving a 150-year sentence, seemed frail and a bit agitated compared with the stoic calm he maintained before his incarceration in 2009, perhaps burdened by sadness over the suicide of his son Mark in December…

 “They had to know,” Mr. Madoff said. “But the attitude was sort of, ‘If you’re doing something wrong, we don’t want to know.’ ”

While he acknowledged his guilt in the interview and said nothing could excuse his crimes, he focused his comments laserlike on the big investors and giant institutions he dealt with, not on the financial pain he caused thousands of his more modest investors. In an e-mail written on Jan. 13, he observed that many long-term clients made more in legitimate profits from him in the years before the fraud than they could have elsewhere. “I would have loved for them to not lose anything, but that was a risk they were well aware of by investing in the market,” he wrote.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/16/business/madoff-prison-interview.html?_r=1

Matt Taibbi is back at it again. http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/why-isnt-wall-street-in-jail-20110216

C covers most of the article right here: http://dagblog.com/reader-blogs/how-wall-street-beat-rap-9133

WHY ISN’T WALL STREET IN JAIL? Taibbi asks.

Well, I could posit a number of rhetorical questions.

I mean why is Rummy allowed to write a tome full of lies and preach about the coming caliphate?

Why does Dicky Cheney run free as the Tin Man seeking a heart and preaching foreign policy.

And why does Gonzo and Bolton and Bybee and Feith and a host of other war criminals escape even a deposition inquiring into their past felonies?

So Matt publishes another ten page essay that rocks and this time it concerns Wall Street.

Generally speaking, there is nothing new here.

The people who run our economy are selfish felons who lie, cheat and steal their way through each and every day. They cheat the government, they cheat their shareholders…hell, they cheat each other.

And rarely, oh so rarely, someone is thrown under the bus and ends up in prison for a couple of years.

It is the specifics that Taibbi is good at. He speaks with the right people.

In other words, he finds those who have been screwed over by the powers that be and they cannot wait to speak with him.

Why the people at the DOJ cannot figure out this stratagem is beyond me.

Just find people who were fired for doing the right thing; find people who are holding grudges against the powerful. Then speak with them.

They are willing to tell their stories.

They are wanting to tell their stories.

They are waiting to tell their stories.

As Matt puts it:

Just ask the people who tried to do the right thing. http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/why-isnt-wall-street-in-jail-20110216

Most of them, of course, already told their stories. They prepared long memos sending them to SEC headquarters; sending them to DOJ contacts; sending them to the FBI.

Taibbi gives examples where the DOJ ‘had the goods’ and sat on the case for a year or longer.

And everybody knows that evidence disintegrates over time; like picked vegetables dissolving into putrid masses in some abandoned pantry. Witnesses move or even die. Bank accounts are erased as well as hard drives. Coconspirators get their stories ‘straight’.

And of course top students graduate from top universities, arrive at the SEC and find themselves making millions a few years later with the firms they were appointed to oversee.

Good to have you here Thomkins, I think you are going to like it around here.

Thanks Mr. Andrews. Oh and by the way a corner office would be just fine and dandy.

A corner office? I am not sure I quite understand….

Well there was the matter of the IPO where your company pocketed one hundred mill with you personally seeing ten points on that and then it all went up in one big puff of smoke and…..

A CORNER OFFICE IT IS. They told me you were good Thomkins, but Jesus…

These folks actually take pride in what they do. And getting away with it just increases their adrenaline high.

I mean Johnnie is pinched for mixing up the medicine in the basement and serves ten years in some private prison providing slave labor to some corporation that makes money off of him and the taxpayer.

And ABC corporation processes the numbers and figures that it can take a hit in the form of a fine for a hundred million because it made one billion from the scam that formed the basis for the indictment.

AND NOBODY FROM ABC CORPORATION ENDS UP IN JAIL.

If you are a resident of some godforsaken village in Afghanistan, you have witnessed murder and mayhem for decades. Death and disease become common place and it turns some humans into  rather thick skinned personages without much humanity.

We can read articles on Wall Street graft every single day if we wish. If you look for them hard enough they abound and have abounded for decades.

This graft has become so common place that the electorate just does not give a damn anymore.

Things do not have to be like this.

There are very few money making ventures that involve government.

We used to survive on tariffs and land. These two resources were all the Founding Fathers could rely on to keep the government afloat.

Nowadays we give away our land to rich crooks who end up paying no taxes on its bounty.

We give away our oil to companies like Exxon; and we not only do not tax Exxon, we give them hundreds of millions of dollars in order to help them steal our oil.

But the SEC and the DOJ could be real money makers.

If the staffs of these two agencies were increased a hundred fold, money would be pouring into our governmental coffers. Hundreds of billions of dollars in fines could be filling our governmental coffers even if we seem to have problems collecting taxes from these pricks.

Find the culprits and indict them and convict them and repossess all of their properties.

Sentence them to twenty years at hard labor. After five years of incarceration give them an early out with the institution of 10,000 hours of community service.

None of this will ever happen of course.

Taibbi concludes:

The mental stumbling block, for most Americans, is that financial crimes don't feel real; you don't see the culprits waving guns in liquor stores or dragging coeds into bushes. But these frauds are worse than common robberies. They're crimes of intellectual choice, made by people who are already rich and who have every conceivable social advantage, acting on a simple, cynical calculation: Let's steal whatever we can, then dare the victims to find the juice to reclaim their money through a captive bureaucracy. They're attacking the very definition of property — which, after all, depends in part on a legal system that defends everyone's claims of ownership equally. When that definition becomes tenuous or conditional — when the state simply gives up on the notion of justice — this whole American Dream thing recedes even further from reality   http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/why-isnt-wall-street-in-jail-20110216?page=6