Where the alternative is political theater.

Never said such a thing. Here's some really thoughtful examples.

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/three...ust-conspiracy

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/five-...l-guilty-pleas

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/swiss...us-tax-charges

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/depar...er-850-million

To add to your last paragraph, at least it's clear to someone in this thread how individual's actions and motivations are different from that of a company.

In reality, there should have been gallows installed on Wall Street and the UBS and people who caused the 2008 crisis should have been swaying in the breeze. Let the masters of the universe be reminded of the cost of causing millions to lose their homes, wealth, and lives.

Of course even if we assume going after bankers would be political theater, political theater has its uses. It allowed the banks to play contrite and pay fees that amounted to nothing while keeping everyone who caused everyone else pain in their employ. It allowed Obama and Holder to say they had done something when, in fact, very little if anything, had changed.

This is basically what many people hear if you say "Glass-Steagall might be a good idea", "CEOs who break the law should be prosecuted", "maybe they could have bailed out borrowers instead of banks", "unearned income should be taxed as much as earned income", "greed is not good", "rent-seeking", etc...

Learn to open your eyes and know one ****ing simple thing about the world.

Not knowing who to hold responsible for suspected wrongdoing is not a very good reason to throw one's hands up and decline to investigate. It's actually a really dumb reason. That's actually the purpose of investigations: to investigate. Try to be less dumb.

Also, please don't play the semantic bull**** game: financial institutions are run by the uber-wealthy. So even your gotcha is a self-own.

I didn't decline to investigate. I pretty much know that wrongdoing was spread over thousands of individuals in hundreds of firms, most of them at the time oblivious to being involved in any fraud. Try to be less of an angry mob.

Uber wealthy are individuals. They could face hard time, but probably cannot be dissolved and enjoy many other constitutional protections. Corporations cannot be imprisoned, but could be essentially killed. They also have few rights. Where is the gotcha?

Bankers don't give a flying **** about fines. They don't pay them anyway. They care about GOING TO ****ING JAIL.

The DOJ could have started such a broad, lengthy and expensive investigation that they could have prosecuted random rich finance people for doing illegal stuff unrelated to the crisis. Basically using the DOJ as an attack dog against people you dont like justified by the classic "if you werent doing anything wrong you dont have anything to worry about" line.

I apologize if English is your fifth language, but please try not to adopt such a supercilious tone when penning such confused dreck.

Obviously, the investigation would concern the actions of the constituent actors within the entity.

It seems more like "someone in this room committed this murder and you all seem guilty as ****, if no one steps forward we're bringing in sherlock and if he nails you for something else while he's investigating the murder that's on you." Like they wouldn't be investigating for no reason, a bunch of people clearly knowingly did a bunch of shady **** that nearly destroyed the economy for their own personal gain.

There was an investigation by the FCIC. They recommended names for the DOJ to investigate. And the DOJ seems to have declined to pursue those names for whatever reason.

I'm not sure you who you are referring to when you say a bunch of people clearly knew what they were doing. The ratings agencies stamped good ratings on hot garbage that was being bought and sold like crack rock. I know people were selling some of this crap off knowing it was a bad investment to people, but that isn't exactly illegal.

There was an investigation by the FCIC. They recommended names for the DOJ to investigate. And the DOJ seems to have declined to pursue those names for whatever reason.

I'm not sure you who you are referring to when you say a bunch of people clearly knew what they were doing. The ratings agencies stamped good ratings on hot garbage that was being bought and sold like crack rock. I know people were selling some of this crap off knowing it was a bad investment to people, but that isn't exactly illegal when the ratings agencies put their stamps on them.

It should be. If you're a car dealer who sells "brand new cars" to people that are actually resprayed old bangers that fall apart after 100 miles you ought to get in serious trouble for it. When it's people's life savings, retirements and the future of the western economy at stake the severity of the punishment should increase accordingly.

It will be illegal, effective June 9th. Thanks Obama.

https://twitter.com/HeerJeet/status/862695468937076737

A good short thread on Democrats and social movements

No. A murder victim means a crime must have been committed. Nobody here can articulate what the criminal action is in this case even is......people just want investigations even though people dont see anyway to prosecute for causing the recession.

That is, as has been repeated multiple times, simply not true. No one's angry just because aggregate demand fell, that's not why people are pissed off. They're pissed off because aggregate demand fell because a whole swath of the economy was built on fraud from top to bottom.

The Holder collateral damage strategy was put in place because there was plenty of evidence of wrong doing. They just didn't want to go hard against well paid meaning well armed and/or important opponents for anything that wasn't a slam dunk.

Im sure the people calling for gallows thought there was plenty of evidence of wrong doing. i should have said competent people dont see anyway to prosecute.

Guess we're back to the "adults in the room" argument again.

The Holder collateral damage doesn't say to not prosecute in light of no evidence, the Holder doctrine said that the "adults in the room" made a choice not to prosecute in light of evidence and seek fines in lue of attempting to prosecute.

In other words the "competent" people gave up before they even tried. Everyone knows not every case is 100% but the Holder doctrine said if the person is important enough and/or the case seems a bit difficult let them off the hook. To turn around and rely on their "competency" is laughable, especially considering where all these competent people end up afterwards, at the trough of the people they were supposed to prosecute or working for them themselves.

Yet resources were marshaled to put a random Russian programmer in jail for "stealing" code he wrote, which was commercially useless, from Goldman Sachs. Disgraceful.

Holders choice was between not prosecuting or doing an Al Capone style "these people are guilty find out how we can get them" investigation. That was the point of my original post.

Given the amount of people y'all are gonna try to blame (of course restricted to people making 7 figs or more....no berniebro is gonna care about getting a loan supervisor constantly falsifying applications while making 120k in Des Moines) you will get some of them. It may be for tax stuff, owning an underground poker room, child porn or whatever. And if the point is just to get them like we did with Capone you'll prosecute on the whatever because it will be way easier to win in court.

If civil forfeitures applied to bankers, do you think they'd be worried then?

Before you guys decide whether anybody should have been arrested, you should probably come to a consensus on whether any bailout should have happened in the first place.

What happened was that Holder and Sylar came to the conclusion that no one should be arrested regardless of whether bailouts should have happened or laws were broken or how much evidence there is. Some people characterize anyone who holds that given evidence of crimes it's possible that high ranking finance executives should possibly face some prison time if convicted as wheeling out guillotines. The bold assertions at the beginning of the discussion are on that side and that's what needs defending. Asking someone who they disagree with to name a particular crime or criminal is a diversion.

I am not arguing Sylar's case nor do I believe that fines are a deterrant to banking crimes.

I think its pretty dumb to have a system in which you can't have a single bank failure. Instead of trying to prevent any bank run, we should drive towards a system in which small shocks occur regularly but catastrophic failures do not. The only way to do this in terms of the causes 2008 crash is to not bail out at all, banks nor homeowners.

For cases like money laundering, obviously you prosecute.