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How Obamas Failure To Prosecute Wall Street Set The Stage For Trumps Win
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of Huffington Post
Posted: July 30th, 2017
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/chickenshit-club_us_5963...
As president, Barack Obama oversaw a civil rights renaissance. But his failure to prosecute Wall Street executives for causing the collapse of the housing market ushered in an era of populist rage ... according to Jesse Eisingers new book, The Chickenshit Club. If they had, the history of the country would be different, Eisinger, a veteran financial reporter at ProPublica whose investigation on shady crisis-era Wall Street practices won a Pulitzer Prize, [said]. There would be a sense of accountability after the crisis, the reforms would be tougher. The book traces Department of Justice impotence on corporate crime back two decades. Changes to the way the Justice Department treated white collar crime came into sharp relief after the 2007 financial crisis. [A] Corporate Fraud Task Force [created in] 2002 boasted nearly 1,300 fraud convictions by the time Obama replaced it in 2009 with the Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force. The new entity [lacked] the focus or prosecutorial muscle of its predecessor. The first stages of a corporate criminal probe are typically carried out by a law firm hired by the company under investigation. The great secret to corporate criminal prosecution is that we have privatized and outsourced it to the companies themselves, Eisinger said. The company is going to be studiously incurious about following investigative threads that might lead to the CEO or board rooms. Instead, they point the finger at a middle manager or someone expendable, and thats the person who gets indicted by the general government.
Note: The revolving door between Washington and Wall Street leads to corruption in government and in the financial industry.
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