Where's the cop on the Wall Street beat?

Jim Hightower's Radio Lowdown

Where's the cop on the Wall Street beat?

Play Episode Pause Episode

Mute/Unmute Episode Rewind 10 Seconds 1x Fast Forward 30 seconds

00:00 / 2:00

Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts RSS Spotify Stitcher

RSS Feed

Share

Link

Embed

Let’s tally the bank robberies:

JPMorgan Chase engaged in massive fraud to foreclose without cause or due process on innocent homeowners, tossing thousands of families into the streets. Goldman Sachs profited by marketing an investment package that was designed to fail, collecting millions from a side bet it made that, sure enough, its investors would lose money. HSBC has been butt deep in a swamp of illegal money-laundering schemes, willingly processing billions of dirty dollars for vicious drug cartels and peddlers of arms to terrorist forces at war with America.

Many more examples abound. These are not poor saps desperately robbing a branch bank for a few hundred dollars, but criminal enterprises run by multimillionaire Wall Streeters who run in the finest social circles and hobnob with the nation’s political elite. Their corruption is complete, their crimes are documented. Yet, unlike sad sack bank robbers, not a single one of these Robber Barons has even been prosecuted much less jailed. In fact, frustrated prosecutors in the Justice Department’s criminal division report that, “when it came to Wall Street, there were no investigations going on. There were no subpoenas, no document reviews, no wiretaps.”

Where are the cops on the Wall Street beat?

Up in the suites, coddling the culprits. That’s because Attorney General Eric Holder and the chief of his criminal division, Lanny Breuer, have previously enjoyed lucrative careers as lawyers defending the very barons they’re now supposed to be prosecuting – they know many of them on a first-name basis. Holder and Breuer both hail from the same Washington law firm, Covington & Burling, that specializes in representing corporate clients with legal issues at the Justice Department.

See? When engaged in high crimes, it literally pays to have friends in the very highest of places.