Accountability And Justice Are Not Bloodlust But Billionaires Should Be Treated Like Everyone Else

[TexasTowelie]

Recently 48 Hours tried to persuade me to do a live interview about a friend of mine who was murdered. I've been resisting for a simple reason. Although the murderer, from one of the wealthiest families in New York, has killed several times and is demonstrably psychotic and was even caught with body parts of one of his victims, he was rich enough to get off. He's happily, walking the streets today, a free man. I'm going to go on national TV and talk about someone who murders with impunity and gets off because he's from a billionaire family? Nah… I don't think so.

A billionaire in America would have to be uncannily unlucky to get punished for his crimes, although its pretty much impossible to become a billionaire-- an existentially dangerous anti-social construct-- without a very serious criminal career. The entire ethos of greed, avarice and egoism that defines American capitalistic excess made it entirely predictable that none of the culprits in the on-going destruction of the American economy and middle class-- not the banksters and not the bribed and cowed political elites who enable them-- would ever face justice. The wasn't the kind of "change" Obama was talking about. Nor the kind of "hope."

Damon Silvers is Special Counnsel for the AFL-CIO and their Director of Policy. He served with Elizabeth Warren on COP, the Congressional Oversight Panel for TARP. Yesterday, as part of a conversation about Tim Geithner's Stress Test, he told me that "the issue is not pragmatism versus punishment. Its about bad economic decisions in the service of plutocracy." Generously, he continued:

The program of forcing households into debt peonage to keep the banks solvent with their bubble level balance sheets largely intact was crackpot realism. The legacy of that approach to the financial crisis, combined with the underpowered stimulus and the turn toward fiscal austerity Geithner says he supported, is a foreclosure crisis in its 7th year, unemployment at levels previously only reached in the depths of recessions, a continued credit crunch for small and medium sized business, seriously compromised regulators and Justice Department, and a Democratic Party that lost the ability to govern in 2010 just in time for redistricting. The long term consequences could well be a 10 year delay in any serious effort to address climate change, our infrastructure deficit or runaway inequality--all of which should have been on the agenda in 2011?.

Geithner should have to address this economic catastrophe and its disastrous political consequences? for the President he advised and the country he served before the discussion of morality begins. Instead he stands amid the ruins hawking books saying there was no alternative. Of course the alternative of restructuring both the banks and the mortgage loans was what everyone from Paul Krugman to the IMF to the American Enterprise Institute was urging at the time, because that was what had been done in every other modern US banking crisis, and done successfully.

- See more at: http://downwithtyranny.blogspot.com/2014/05/accountability-and-justice-are-not.html

[yurbud]

1. it is so foreign to them that it SEEMS like bloodlust

if you have never been held accountable in your life and have been insulated from even mild criticism (apart from maybe your parents), and never had to pay a penalty that actually HURT, that would be quite disturbing to the croquet and bidet set.