Do yourself a favor...

...and read this. Just don't read it while you're operating heavy machinery, standing up, or in the vicinity of any children or small animals--because I don't want to be held responsible for your actions when your anger boils over, like mine already did.

Matt Taibbi has already received a lot of attention for his insightful investigative articles on Goldman Sachs, the Tea Party, and the Arizona shootings (a story which really dropped off the news radar quickly, didn't it?). Yesterday he published his latest piece, entitled simply "Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail?"--I thought it followed up fairly nicely after my Bernie Madoff Quote of the Week yesterday. Here's a teaser:

Over drinks at a bar on a dreary, snowy night in Washington this past month, a former Senate investigator laughed as he polished off his beer.

"Everything's fucked up, and nobody goes to jail," he said. "That's your whole story right there. Hell, you don't even have to write the rest of it. Just write that."

I put down my notebook. "Just that?"

"That's right," he said, signaling to the waitress for the check. "Everything's fucked up, and nobody goes to jail. You can end the piece right there."

That's a hell of a lead, but of course Taibbi doesn't stop there. It only gets better (or worse).

Nobody goes to jail. This is the mantra of the financial-crisis era, one that saw virtually every major bank and financial company on Wall Street embroiled in obscene criminal scandals that impoverished millions and collectively destroyed hundreds of billions, in fact, trillions of dollars of the world's wealth — and nobody went to jail. Nobody, that is, except Bernie Madoff, a flamboyant and pathological celebrity con artist, whose victims happened to be other rich and famous people...

Here's how regulation of Wall Street is supposed to work. To begin with, there's a semigigantic list of public and quasi-public agencies ostensibly keeping their eyes on the economy, a dense alphabet soup of banking, insurance, S&L, securities and commodities regulators like the Federal Reserve, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC), the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), as well as supposedly "self-regulating organizations" like the New York Stock Exchange. All of these outfits, by law, can at least begin the process of catching and investigating financial criminals, though none of them has prosecutorial power...

But a veritable mountain of evidence indicates that when it comes to Wall Street, the justice system not only sucks at punishing financial criminals, it has actually evolved into a highly effective mechanism for protecting financial criminals. This institutional reality has absolutely nothing to do with politics or ideology — it takes place no matter who's in office or which party's in power.

Yup. In my opinion, the biggest problem with the global response to the economic crisis (especially here in the U.S.) is that every policy has, at its roots, been devised in a way that won't "spook" the markets. We don't prosecute the banks or their officials because we fear that doing so will cause a panic in the markets and send us right back to square one of this whole financial mess.

That's as back-asswards as government policy can get, and it should have individual workers and voters furious. It's exactly why prosecutors across the country have dragged their feet in the prosecution of foreclosure fraud cases, and why Congress actually passed--only to be trumped by a Presidential veto--a bill that would have made it easier for banks to process and enforce fraudulent foreclosure documents. All of that in the name of "promoting market stability".

As far as I'm concerned, if I have to overlook criminal activity in order for the Dow to clear 12,000, I'd rather have the Dow at 8,000 and preserve the rule of law. Market activity that is built on fraud and overlooking bad behavior is always a house of cards--a lesson we should have already learned in 2008-2009. Clearly, Matt Taibbi agrees with me.

[Rolling Stone]