Wednesday, May 9, 2012

Why Can't Obama Bring Wall Street to Justice? - The Daily Beast

Despite his populist posturing, the president has failed to pin a single top finance exec on criminal charges since the economic collapse. Are the banks too big to jail—or is Washington’s revolving door at to blame? Peter J. Boyer and Peter Schweizer investigate:



With the Occupy protesters resuming battle stations, and Mitt Romney in place as the presumptive Republican nominee, President Obama has begun to fashion his campaign as a crusade for the 99 percent--a fight against, as one Obama ad puts it, "a guy who had a Swiss bank account." Casting Romney as a plutocrat will be easy enough. But the president's claim as avenging populist may prove trickier, given his own deeply complicated, even conflicted, relationship with Big Finance.

  • Obama’s 2009 White House summit with finance titans, in which the president warned that only he was standing "between you and the pitchforks"

  • Why, despite widespread outrage, financial-fraud prosecutions by the Department of Justice are at 20-year lows
  • Attorney General Eric Holder’s lucrative ties to a top-tier law firm whose marquee clients include some of finance’s worst offenders
  • How Obama’s trumpeted “task force” for investigating risky mortgage lenders—announced in this year’s State of the Union speech—is badly understaffed and has yet to produce any discernible progress
read full article here Why Can't Obama Bring Wall Street to Justice? - The Daily Beast

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