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{"id":8693,"date":"2011-05-06T04:00:35","date_gmt":"2011-05-06T09:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.occasionalplanet.org\/?p=8693"},"modified":"2013-02-01T15:29:41","modified_gmt":"2013-02-01T21:29:41","slug":"u-s-political-and-financial-elites-enjoy-legal-immunity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occasionalplanet.org\/2011\/05\/06\/u-s-political-and-financial-elites-enjoy-legal-immunity\/","title":{"rendered":"U.S. political and financial elites enjoy legal immunity"},"content":{"rendered":"

Glenn Greenwald, <\/a>in a recent article on Salon, wrote the following:<\/p>\n

In a 1795 letter, George Washington vowed that, \u201cthe executive branch of this government never has, nor will suffer, while I preside, any improper conduct of its officers to escape with impunity.” Thomas Jefferson\u2014in an April 16, 1784, letter to Washington\u2014argued that the foundation on which American justice must rest is “the denial of every preeminence<\/strong>.” It’s literally difficult to imagine how we could be further away from those core principles. That the culprits who caused one of the worst financial crises in modern history have been fully shielded from the consequences of their acts — set along side the torturers and illegal eavesdroppers who have been similarly protected — illustrates that quite compellingly.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

On April 13, 2011, Senator Carl Levin, (D-Mich), and Senator Tom Coburn (R-Okla) released a 635-page final report <\/a><\/span>on their inquiry into key causes of the financial crisis. The report outlines in detail how Wall Street executives cost millions of Americans their jobs and homes, while wiping out investors, and good businesses.<\/p>\n

High risk lending, regulatory failures, inflated credit ratings, and Wall Street firms engaging in massive conflicts of interest, contaminated the U.S. financial system with toxic mortgages and undermined public trust in U.S. markets.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The report describes how bank executives knowingly made loans they knew were tainted by fraud or prone to early default. They then securitized hundreds of billions of dollars in these high risk, poor quality or fraudulent mortgages without full disclosure to investors, which weakened U.S. financial markets. For example, Washington Mutual sold some of its high-risk loans to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and played one off the other to make even more money.<\/p>\n

According to the report, the most immediate cause of the financial crisis was the July 2007 mass ratings downgrades by Moody\u2019s and Standard & Poor\u2019s that exposed the risky nature of mortgage-related investments that, just months before, the same firms had deemed to be as safe as Treasury bills.\u00a0The result was a collapse in the value of mortgage related securities which devastated investors.\u00a0Credit rating agency personnel knew their ratings were bogus and delayed imposing tougher ratings criteria to enrich themselves and their clients. In the end, over 90% of the AAA ratings given to mortgage-backed securities in 2006 and 2007 were downgraded to junk status.<\/p>\n

Investment banks, like Goldman Sachs, sold billions of dollars in mortgage-related investments and flooded financial markets with high-risk assets. When Goldman realized the mortgage market was in decline, it took actions to profit from that decline at the expense of its clients.\u00a0For example, at the same time it was betting against the mortgage market as a whole, it aggressively marketed poor quality Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs) to its clients and then actively bet against them by taking large short positions on those transactions.<\/p>\n

The Senate committee may turn over its findings to the DOJ for possible criminal prosecution. But, according to Glenn Greenwald, it is highly unlikely that any Wall Street executive will be prosecuted for their crimes.<\/p>\n

Political and financial elites now enjoy virtually full-scale legal immunity for even the most egregious lawbreaking, while ordinary Americans, especially the poor and racial and ethnic minorities, are subjected to exactly the opposite treatment: the world’s largest prison state and most merciless justice system.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So far, no high-level culprits have been indicted or even meaningfully investigated, and few have suffered any financial repercussions from regulators or lawsuits.<\/p>\n

According to Greenwald,<\/p>\n

the overarching \u2018principle\u2019 of our justice system is that criminal prosecutions are only for ordinary rabble, not for those who are most politically and financially empowered. We have thus created precisely the two-tiered justice system against which the Founders most stridently warned and which contemporary legal scholars all agree is the hallmark of a lawless political culture.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

He then offers compelling illustrations of facts and events to support his claim:<\/p>\n