http://www.rollingstone.com/politics...-jail-20110216

Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail? | Matt Taibbi | Rolling Stone | Feb. 16, 2011 |
25 minutes (6,189 words)

A former Senate investigator sums up: "Everything's ****ed up, and nobody goes
to jail. That's your whole story right there." Taibbi's latest investigation
dissects the relationships between the SEC and Justice Department and the
financial institutions, to find out why prosecutors have not pursued criminal
charges against executives:

"In the end, of course, it wasn't just the executives of Lehman and AIGFP who
got passes. Virtually every one of the major players on Wall Street was
similarly embroiled in scandal, yet their executives skated off into the sunset,
uncharged and unfined. Goldman Sachs paid $550 million last year when it was
caught defrauding investors with crappy mortgages, but no executive has been
fined or jailed — not even Fabrice 'Fabulous Fab' Tourre, Goldman's outrageous
Euro-douche who gleefully e-mailed a pal about the 'surreal' transactions in the
middle of a meeting with the firm's victims. In a similar case, a sales
executive at the German powerhouse Deutsche Bank got off on charges of insider
trading; its general counsel at the time of the questionable deals, Robert
Khuzami, now serves as director of enforcement for the SEC."




Also...


http://www.rollingstone.com/politics...chine-20100405

The Great American Bubble Machine
From tech stocks to high gas prices, Goldman Sachs has engineered every major
market manipulation since the Great Depression -- and they're about to do it again


By now, most of us know the major players. As George Bush's last Treasury
secretary, former Goldman CEO Henry Paulson was the architect of the bailout, a
suspiciously self-serving plan to funnel trillions of Your Dollars to a handful
of his old friends on Wall Street. Robert Rubin, Bill Clinton's former Treasury
secretary, spent 26 years at Goldman before becoming chairman of Citigroup —
which in turn got a $300 billion taxpayer bailout from Paulson. There's John
Thain, the asshole chief of Merrill Lynch who bought an $87,000 area rug for his
office as his company was imploding; a former Goldman banker, Thain enjoyed a
multi-billion-dollar handout from Paulson, who used billions in taxpayer funds
to help Bank of America rescue Thain's sorry company. And Robert Steel, the
former Goldmanite head of Wachovia, scored himself and his fellow executives
$225 million in golden-parachute payments as his bank was self-destructing.
There's Joshua Bolten, Bush's chief of staff during the bailout, and Mark
Patterson, the current Treasury chief of staff, who was a Goldman lobbyist just
a year ago, and Ed Liddy, the former Goldman director whom Paulson put in charge
of bailed-out insurance giant AIG, which forked over $13 billion to Goldman
after Liddy came on board. The heads of the Canadian and Italian national banks
are Goldman alums, as is the head of the World Bank, the head of the New York
Stock Exchange, the last two heads of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York —
which, incidentally, is now in charge of overseeing Goldman — not to mention …

But then, any attempt to construct a narrative around all the former Goldmanites
in influential positions quickly becomes an absurd and pointless exercise, like
trying to make a list of everything. What you need to know is the big pictu
If America is circling the drain, Goldman Sachs has found a way to be that drain
— an extremely unfortunate loophole in the system of Western democratic
capitalism, which never foresaw that in a society governed passively by free
markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.