A thoughtful Sloper sent me the latest Rolling Stone article Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail? by Matt Taibbi which is going to be on the Rolling Stone web site next month. It's the sort of maddening article which shows – yet again – how Wall Street is nothing but a gigantic cabal of rich, sophisticated criminals who can break any laws with utter impunity.
Reading such an article doesn't do anyone any good, unless you like to have your blood pressure soar, since these scumbags are going to continue to get away with it in perpetuity (even the "liberal" Obama has done nothing but grease the skids for these guys). But the closing paragraph of the article sums it up nicely:
The mental stumbling block, for most Americans, is that financial crimes don't feel real; you don't see the culpritswaving guns in liquor stores or dragging coeds into bushes. But these frauds are worse than common robberies. They'recrimes of intellectual choice, made by people who are already rich and who have every conceivable social advantage,acting on a simple, cynical calculation: Let's steal whatever we can, then dare the victims to find the juice to reclaim their money through a captive bureaucracy. They're attacking the very definition of property — which, after all,depends in part on a legal system that defends everyone's claims of ownership equally. When that definition becomestenuous or conditional — when the state simply gives up on the notion of justice — this whole American Dream thing recedes even further from reality.
