“Finance sector so politically powerful it’s inhibiting the normal course of justice and law enforcement”

March 1st, 2011

Washington’s Blog aims to provide real-time, well-researched and actionable information.  George, the head writer, is a busy professional and a former adjunct professor. I came across this via twitter and Barry Ritholtz’s Big Picture. Even though the blog post relates to the US, what he says is increasingly true of the UK as well

In his acceptance speech for winner for best documentary at the Oscars, ‘Inside Job’ director Charles Ferguson said:

Three years after our horrific financial crisis caused by financial fraud, not a single financial executive has gone to jail, and that’s wrong.

But none of the mainstream, corporate networks covered it. Not CBS, ABC, NBC or MSNBC. The BBC also largely ignored this important success. Charles Ferguson told Reuters:

“The biggest surprise to me personally and biggest disappointment was that nobody in the Obama administration would speak with me even off the record — including people that I’ve known for many, many years,” Ferguson said backstage.

He believes Americans, who lost homes and jobs in the millions because of shady mortgage lending and bank collapses, are disappointed that “nothing has been done.”

“Unfortunately, I think that the reason is predominantly that the financial industry has become so politically powerful that it is able to inhibit the normal process of justice and law enforcement,” said Ferguson.

For background on the subversion of justice to the powers that be, see this article from George Washington’s blog. Indeed, as I have repeatedly pointed out, fraud is one of the main causes of the financial crisis. See also this and this. As Bernie Madoff told New York Magazine:

“I realized from a very early stage that the market is a whole rigged job. There’s no chance that investors have in this market …

“The SEC,” he says, “looks terrible in this thing.” And he doesn’t see himself as the only guilty party on Wall Street. “It’s unbelievable, Goldman … no one has any criminal convictions. The whole new regulatory reform is a joke. The whole government is a Ponzi scheme.”

The economy cannot stabilize unless fraud is prosecuted. But the folks in Washington D.C. seem determined to turn a blind eye to Wall Street shenanigans, and is now moving to reduce the funding of enforcement agencies like the SEC and CFTC.

And yet the large corporate media never covers this issue. An October 2009 Pew Research Center study on the coverage of the financial crisis found that the media has largely parroted what the White House and Wall Street were saying. (The mainstream media is also pro-war.)

In fact, the financial industry seems to have become so politically powerful that it is able to inhibit the normal process of justice and law enforcement, and the American press.

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Posted by Ian Fraser on Mar 1 2011. Filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry