Matt Taibbi: "Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail?"

[Andy Nguyen]

Matt Taibbi writes the following in Rolling Stone Magazine: Financial crooks brought down the world's economy but the feds are doing more to protect them than to prosecute them

Here's how regulation of Wall Street is supposed to work. To begin with, there's a semigigantic list of public and quasi-public agencies ostensibly keeping their eyes on the economy, a dense alphabet soup of banking, insurance, S&L, securities and commodities regulators like the Federal Reserve, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC), the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), as well as supposedly "self-regulating organizations" like the New York Stock Exchange. All of these outfits, by law, can at least begin the process of catching and investigating financial criminals, though none of them has prosecutorial power.
Continue reading...

 

[bigbadwolf]

It goes deeper than the "revolving door," unfortunately. That's just a symptom of a deeper malaise: financial interests constitute the state. The state is not some neutral player that's been subverted by some greedy officials hoping to cash in by taking on lucrative positions in the very sectors they're supposed to be policing. Rather, the state has merged with those financial interests -- and that happens to be the technical definition of fascism. Exposes by the likes of Taibbi and expressions of outrage and indignation by TV presenters are not going to change this ground reality. This is part of the reason the political process is so ossified: regardless of which (interchangeable) party is elected into office by a confused, ignorant, and increasingly apathetic population, nothing changes as the strings are pulled by the same people.