Why Isn't Wall Street In Jail?

If you haven't seen Matt Taibbi's massively important article in Rolling Stone "Why Isn't Wall Street In Jail?" yet, go read it now - it's that important.

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 fucked 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."

. . .

he rest of them, all of them, got off. Not a single executive who ran the companies that cooked up and cashed in on the phony financial boom — an industrywide scam that involved the mass sale of mismarked, fraudulent mortgage-backed securities — has ever been convicted. Their names by now are familiar to even the most casual Middle American news consumer: companies like AIG, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley. Most of these firms were directly involved in elaborate fraud and theft. Lehman Brothers hid billions in loans from its investors. Bank of America lied about billions in bonuses. Goldman Sachs failed to tell clients how it put together the born-to-lose toxic mortgage deals it was selling. What's more, many of these companies had corporate chieftains whose actions cost investors billions — from AIG derivatives chief Joe Cassano, who assured investors they would not lose even "one dollar" just months before his unit imploded, to the $263 million in compensation that former Lehman chief Dick "The Gorilla" Fuld conveniently failed to disclose. Yet not one of them has faced time behind bars.

There's a lot more; go read the rest of the article. Have a couple of stiff drinks handy for when you do.

No, these people didn't go to jail, and that's a measure of how thoroughly and deeply our government--on both the Republican and the Democratic side--really is. And it's a measure of how powerful the deeply corrupt banking sector of our economy is these days that they can blunt any effort to prosecute them.

If there were an ounce of justice in the world, they'd have long ago been lined up along a cinder block wall, blindfolded, and...well, you get the picture. But they bought up justice in this country years ago, and it doesn't see them any more.