The Obama Administration Could Repeat Its Biggest Mistake Of The Financial Crisis

The Obama Administration Could Repeat Its Biggest Mistake Of The Financial Crisis

I FINALLY get to complain about Obama for real again. Check this nonsense out:

In the years since it failed to prosecute a single Wall Street executive involved in the global financial crisis, the U.S. Department of Justice has repeatedly promised to hold corporate executives liable for wrongdoing. But on Monday, when it sued Volkwagen over the automaker's scheme to disguise the illegally high amounts of poisonous gases its cars were spewing into the air, the DOJ brought no criminal charges against the company or its employees.

The German automaker, one of the largest in the world, admitted on Sept. 22 to installing software meant to cheat on emissions tests in 11 million of its diesel vehicles. Prosecutors allege the company attempted to scam the public and deliberately hid this fact from regulators, obstructed investigators, and lied to federal authorities.

By suing Volkswagen but not pursuing criminal cases against the company or its employees, the Justice Department is repeating the mistakes it made in the wake of the financial crisis, consumer advocates argue. In the years after the meltdown, several big banks effectively bought their way out of criminal charges by agreeing to pay billions of dollars to government agencies and aggrieved households. And despite widespread fraud, no top bankers were prosecuted.

Obama administration officials have repeatedly promised that kind of impunity won't continue.

Hey Obama! Stop letting rich people buy their way out of trouble!

The case against Volkswagen "is a perfect opportunity for the Justice Department to live up to its word," said Mike Litt, who works on consumer issues for U.S. PIRG, the Federation of State Public Interest Research Groups.

The allegations against Volkwagen are "truly heinous," said Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen, a Washington-based advocacy group. In its civil complaint against Volkswagen, the Justice Department accused the company of "knowingly" concealing from federal regulators that it had installed software designed to cheat emissions tests in about 580,000 of its diesel cars sold in the U.S. The automaker also "impeded and obstructed" regulators' efforts for about a year to learn about the "defeat device" that allowed the company to cheat the emissions tests, according to the complaint.

Seriously, get to work! Stop worrying about guns for a second and prosecute some damn criminals for once! I'm tired of "Too Big to Fail". More like "Too Rich to Jail". Corruption at its finest. Sometimes it would just be nice if they wouldn't make it so damn obvious. It's like they are mocking us or something.

a reply to: Krazysh0t

I have to say, you are spot on with your thoughts on this issue.

It was never good enough that banks paid fines to pay off the crimes they committed, and it is not good enough that a car manufacturer can go down the same route. The law was broken, and those who broke it should be taken to task.

Some say that for those things to happen economies would have had to have been totally decimated, which they were anyway, and people would have found themselves penniless and on the streets, which they did anyway. But here's the rub. Justice does not, and should not care about the difference between two crimes, only the similarities between them. A man who robs a liquor store is surely deserving of a trip to jail, and so if one robs MILLIONS AND MILLIONS of people, from all over the world, one must be deserving of the same fate.

Failure to address corporate crime properly, will result in an even greater loss of respect for the law, than has already occurred over the last couple of decades.

originally posted by: TrueBrit
a reply to: Krazysh0t
Failure to address corporate crime properly, will result in an even greater loss of respect for the law, than has already occurred over the last couple of decades.

I had to requote this part of your post because I couldn't agree any more with what you are saying here. Especially this part. One of the most taboo conversations in this country is "class warfare". Start bringing that up and watch the movers and shakers start squirming REAL quick. Suddenly you become the enemy and everyone tells you that you are a horrible person for suggesting that classes exist in this country.

The idea of blind justice (regardless of status) is just that...... only a idea, that is fed to the masses. Certainly not a reality in most parts of the world.

a reply to: Krazysh0t

Anyone who suggests classes do not exist in this country are obviously not at the bottom or middle.

It's always been about the money. When couldn't a big corp not buy its way out of justice being served?

a reply to: NewzNose

Well there at least USED to be a time where we'd send them to "jail". I put jail in quotes because it was more like a resort with prison bars, but hey at LEAST they were locked away for their time.

a reply to: Krazysh0t

Well, that is precisely the trouble isn't it? You see, my attitude to this, is that you can be poor as a doormouse, and still have class, because class is nothing to do with money. Class is about decorum, etiquette, comportment and the refinement and complexity of ones moral, ethical, and emotional state.

However, it must be said, in the very same breath, that the western world seems to have moved on from the awful divisions of financial class separation in only the most superficial of ways. This false evolution, this lie has spawned generations of people who are genuinely confused about the way things work, why they work that way, and what can be done, if anything, to correct these issues.

The trouble is that there IS still a separation of the classes in the West. The rich are still given greater leeway than the poor to commit crimes and escape due chastisement. The poor are still held to a sterner account than the rich, for relatively minor offences. A fantastically wealthy man getting caught speeding, even repeatedly, will likely as not avoid jail. A poor man speeding to the hospital to be there for his wife in time for the birth of his child however, must rely on the good heart and proper moral construction of a traffic officer to avoid jail.

Freedom, liberty, justice... These things must not be purchasable commodities, but be equal rights, distributed amongst all peoples without favour or fear, and that is simply not the case, despite all our alleged evolution as a civilisation. I find it difficult to live with, given how many of my forebares sweated and bled for the right of my generation to live free of class distinction. It offends me, because it is an offence to my ancestors, and an affront to their life's work down the ages.

This is one example, in one nation, but mark my words, things are exactly as skewed here. The poorer have no defence against a lie, but the rich have a defence against even the most obvious truth, and that galls me to my core. It makes one wish to throw up ones hands, cast a pox upon it all, and loose oneself entirely in vice, or worse.

If you would like to prosecute somebody for the financial predicament we are in, you need to look no further than the Clinton administration in the 90's when Glass-Steagall legislation was rescinded.

Obama didn't really have so much to do with it. Wall street simply took advantage of it. Everybody but you and me got rich because of it......

Keep blaming the wrong people and nothing will ever change for the better.

a reply to: TrueBrit

Well said and very poetic.

Though to be honest there will never be perfect synergy between the various economic classes. Corruption is just a fact of life. Everyone wants to try to get out of trouble, and money is the easiest way to accomplish that goal. But we can certainly strive for more equality between the economic classes. We've achieved this in the past too. There have been times in our country where a good attempt was made to limit the power of money, but we've abandoned such ideals. Greed is good, and in such a society, corruption can only flourish.

a reply to: MyHappyDogShiner

Well if you are going to talk historically, you haven't gone back far enough. It was the Reagen administration that deregulated the banks. It was even heralded as landmark policy at the time.

a reply to: Krazysh0t

Indeed.

Corruption is inevitable, but all the more so in a nation run by a succession of people who essentially got voted in, because out of all the contenders in a given year, they lied the best.

Its a hard pill to swallow, but I believe an answer would be to ban anyone who has owned a business worth more than a million dollars, from ever running for office, anywhere, for any reason. Getting the middle into power would be a start, and would lead to more solidarity between leaders and those they govern.

a reply to: Krazysh0t

Who and when? I am sure you are correct but I cannot honestly recall any big corp. CEOs being criminally charged and jailed.

a reply to: TrueBrit

Well I'd start by overturning the Citizen's United rulings. Reregulate the banks like in the 1970's, create a progressive tax plan that forces companies to reinvest into their company instead of squirrel away profits for themselves. Then I'd put a cap on how much can be spent by someone running for office. Allow him to receive donations up to a point. Also, the government should fund candidates that cannot raise the money to that threshold.

In both cases the perpetrators put into place a method that bypassed good common practice.
There were short term situations where for example someone might temporarily not qualify for a standard mortgage but could profit from a subprime mortgage.
There was also transparent knowledge in 2005 that a price bubble was forming which would dictate purchases would only be profitable for primarily long term ownership/rental.
In the case of the diesel emission bypass, this was designed as a diagnostic tool to quickly eliminate a complex system from expensive diagnostic consideration.

So perhaps the culpability lies with the parties who misused the temporary bypass expecting personal gain?

If you want to make change, you must first make full commitment to making change and risk losing everything.

Where people are not willing to take risk, nothing meaningful ever happens.

Just go buy more insurance......Feed the problem and protect you and your loved one's and # everyone else.

The American Way.

Oh, and by the way, Hillary came up with this thing we call "Obamacare" too.

the West Wing Mantra that's chanted every day...

~there are no Radical Islamists....Rich Elites are not Criminals~

as a result....the topsy-turvy, rudderless Ship of State, captained by another man named Hussein

Unfortunately party has no meaning when it comes to the rich being in control.

But the banking issue was a bit more disingenuous. The fines did not come until after the interest free loans that were meant to get the money in the economy flowing again. Because the seize up was that banks stopped making short term loans to customers. One field in particular relied on such loans to handle payroll until their very large product sold, the locomotive manufacturing industry of which there are only two manufacturers in the US. GE (which is larger than EMD) could weather the storm better because of their diverse corporate structure.

But the money that was intended to keep the economy flowing was instead invested into Wall St. The banks saw around 450% profit (far more than short term loans would have yielded) and actually had to be forced to stop foreclosing on homeowners who's "crime" was being laid off from going paying jobs that could not be floated loans to make payroll.

For the record, there were orders for more locomotives to be built in 2009 than any single year in the 20th century due to the steep cost of diesel to alleviate the transportation costs by trucking. Those orders were cancelled December 2008. It was a shame too because CSX was going to spend millions to add additional tracks to handle the extra rail traffic. There would have been an explosion of "shovel ready jobs" that year that went on for some years to come, but the banks screwed it up for everyone.

As for those fines, if you made free money to the tune of billions then paying a small penalty is no big deal. I would not be surprised that many bankers (as well as Congress Critters) are heavily invested in insurance companies right now. Mandatory purchases of a product tend to yield profits after all.

So yeah, thanks Obama. Which reminds me of another banking scam. Remember Cash for Clunkers? All those perfectly good cars destroyed? Can you regularly find good used cars for $1000 or less? They tend to be in the $4-5000 range which require most people to obtain a car loan to purchase. Or go to a buy here pay here dealer, and higher interest rates with repossession for a single late payment as a factor regardless of circumstances like being in the hospital (or covering that $5000 Obamacare deductible).

Again, thanks Obama.

a reply to: Krazysh0t

Quite.

The idea of a company attaining personhood is frankly absurd, and reregulating the banks would be an absolutely fantastic idea. The amount of fiddling that the banks have done between them to make hideous sums of money for themselves, is staggering, and has only gotten worse since Tatcher and Reagan combined their powers to hate bang the entire worlds economy into submission.

a reply to: NewzNose

I'd have to look up cases and such. I'm pretty sure Bernie Madoff is in prison actually.