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NY Times Op-Ed, November 18, 2018
Too Rich to Jail
By Maureen Dowd
WASHINGTON — When I was in Reykjavik in August, Icelanders were bragging
about putting the corrupt bankers who ravaged their economy in prison.
In America, it works somewhat differently.
We let the corrupt bankers who ravaged our economy roam free with bigger
bonuses, more lavish Hamptons houses and fresh risky schemes. The big
banks are bigger than ever and prosecution of white-collar crimes is at
a 20-year low. And, cherry on the gilded cake, we put white-collar
criminals in charge of the country — elevating epic grifters to the
presidency and powerful cabinet posts.
Reading all the recent stories about the 10th anniversary of the
financial crisis, it’s easy to see the neon line leading from Barack
Obama’s failure to punish Wall Street scammers to the fact that
Republican scammers are now infecting the entire infrastructure of
government.
“The Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street rose up as opposite expressions of
anti-establishment rage, nourished by the sense that colluding elites in
government and business had got away with a crime,” George Packer wrote
in The New Yorker. “The game was rigged — that became the consensus of
the alienated.”
President Obama and his Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. made a terrible
mistake by letting the miscreant bankers off the hook rather than
saying, as F.D.R. did, “I welcome their hatred.”
Some saw it as the end of the Democratic Party. Democrats were the party
of workers, charged with protecting people from big money, big banks and
big fraud. Obama, the great hope to revitalize the left, immediately
folded. Some analogized that the failure to send bankers to jail or even
on perp walks made the party’s white blood cell count drop to the point
that G.O.P. infections could run wild.
In his 2016 book, “Listen, Liberal,” Thomas Frank wrote that “the hope
drained out of the Obama movement” at the meeting between the fledgling
president and Wall Street C.E.O.s in March 2009: “After warning them
about ‘the pitchforks’ of an angry public, Obama reassured the
frightened bankers that they could count on him to protect them; that he
had no intention of restructuring their industry or changing the
economic direction of the nation.” (After he left the White House, Obama
followed Hillary’s lead, buckraking on Wall Street.)
David Axelrod, the Obama counselor who fought during the crisis to “kick
the offenders harder,” as he puts it, says he still feels “very
conflicted.” “We feared that if you took a brick out of the wall then
the whole damn wall might fall down,” he said. “But it wasn’t helpful,
as far as Trump. To the extent that people felt the deal was rigged
against them and in favor of the powerful, it gave him fodder.”
Donald Trump scooped up “the forgotten,” promising to punish Wall Street
for “getting away with murder,” and pledging to break up the big banks
and force bankers to pay higher taxes.
But it was just another Trump con. His administration, The Times
reported, “has presided over a sharp decline in financial penalties
against banks and big companies accused of malfeasance,” sparing
corporate wrongdoers billions in fines.
Asked about The Times’s scorching investigation last month on how
“self-made” Trump received at least $413 million in today’s dollars from
his father’s real estate empire, much of it through tax dodges,
Kellyanne Conway shrugged it off, saying, “Haven’t they learned that the
president always gets the last laugh?”
Trump’s White House started off like a branch office of Goldman Sachs,
as Elizabeth Warren noted. Gary Cohn, Trump’s former economic adviser
from Goldman, showed that Wall Street’s arrogance shines bright when he
recently told Reuters that borrowers were just as responsible for the
2008 crisis as lenders.
“Who broke the law?” Cohn asked, adding: “Was the waitress in Las Vegas
who had six houses leveraged at 100 percent with no income, was she
reckless and stupid? Or was the banker reckless and stupid?”
Binyamin Appelbaum, The Times’s economics wiz, riposted on Twitter: “A
more accurate characterization of the housing bubble is that it was one
of the largest orgies of white collar criminality in American history.”
Speaking of orgies, Tim Leissner, the former Goldman Sachs banker whose
guilty plea in the company’s $600 million international fraud case was
unsealed this month, told the judge that his conspiracy was “very much
in line” with the culture of Goldman Sachs “to conceal facts from
certain compliance and legal employees of Goldman Sachs.”
If you thought Trump’s flimflam about his namesake university was bad,
if you cringe that Commerce and Interior are run by men accused of
grifting, check out our acting attorney general. His very appointment
could be illegal.
Like his new boss, Matthew Whitaker has a pattern of thuggishness,
threats, scams and abusing the power of his office to wage partisan
feuds. Our new top cop was on the board of a shady patent company that
has claimed Bigfoot exists and time travel could be coming. It also
touted a “masculine toilet” to give well-endowed men “peace of mind” by
ensuring that their genitals would not touch porcelain.
Now, after trashing the idea of the Mueller investigation in 2017,
Whitaker — flush with power — is the oddball sycophant charged with
ensuring that Robert Mueller can finish his report.
I’m sure we have nothing to worry about, though. As Sarah Huckabee
Sanders noted Friday, “There must be decorum at the White House.”
I invite you to follow me on Twitter (@MaureenDowd) and join me on Facebook.
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