The Obama Administration’s Financial-Fraud Stunt Backfires
The press shows the feds’ numbers are phony and asks where the whales are.
By Ryan Chittum, The Columbia Journalism Review
December 9, 2010 10:20 AM
Boy, the Obama administration’s slapdash PR effort to show it’s cracking down on financial fraud sure looks to be failing-and getting some serious blowback.
Jesse Eisinger has a column in today’s New York Times noting that the feds’ insider-trading investigation, while important, misses the bigger issue: prosecuting those who caused the crisis.
The New York Times’s Andrew Ross Sorkin called out Eric Holder’s Justice Department on Monday, noting that the 343 criminal defendants it said it’s prosecuting in a sweep it lamely calls Operation Broken Trust are small fry. No executive from the major corporations (like, oh, AIG, Lehman Brothers, Washington Mutual, Countrywide, Ameriquest, etc.) has yet been charged.
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I suppose if there’s one good thing that comes out of this headslapper, it’s that maybe the Obama administration’s laughable attempt to show it’s tough on financial fraud will cause enough of a backlash in the press that it forces them to actually do something about the people who took down the financial system in order to make tens or hundreds of millions of dollars.
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I encourage you to click through and read the whole thing. Lots of excellent links.
one of the most pathetic and ineffective presidencies. I turned on the TV when I got home this afternoon to, low and behold, William Jefferson Clinton praising Barack Hussein Obama’s tax giveaway to the rich at the expense of the deficit, the long term unemployed and the middle class.
For a man who during his campaign dismissed and distanced himself from the Clinton era, he has certainly embraced him, his policies and advisors who helped create a good part of our current economic mess.
For those who trashed Hillary because they didn’t want a Clinton “dynasty” or his policies, this had to be a huge “f**ck you”. But, no, to the Obama loyalists, who have wrapped themselves in the “cult of personality”, this was a validation of this right wing president.
I see it as another failure on the part of Obama to lead and stand up for the campaign promises he made and the principles of the REAL Democratic Party.
If I could stand on the Senate floor and help Sen Sanders to filibuster to stop this bill from being passed, I would. Thank you, Sen Gillibrand and Sen Sherrod Brown, for helping him today.
To President Obama, you, sir, are a disgrace and no friend of the American people who put so much faith and hope in your presidency.