President Obama Talks Jobs

Arrests of top bankers finally begin ...  in Afghanista­n!:

While Afghanista­n is hardly a model of the rule of law -- the arrests were effectuate­d by a corrupt government under severe pressure from outside factions on which they financiall­y rely -- it's nonetheles­s true that in the U.S., even that minimal level of accountabi­lity seems impossible:

In November 2009, Attorney General Eric Holder vowed before television cameras to prosecute those responsibl­e for the market collapse a year earlier, saying the U.S. would be “relentles­s” in pursuing corporate criminals.


In the 18 months since, no senior Wall Street executive has been criminally charged, and some lawmakers are questionin­g whether the U.S. Justice Department has been aggressive enough after declining to bring cases against officials at American Internatio­nal Group Inc. (AIG) and Countrywid­e Financial Corp. . . .


"Can that many companies have collapsed -- large financial firms -- and not one criminal case comes out of it?" said Peter Henning, a law professor at Wayne State University in Detroit who previously was a federal prosecutor and attorney for the SEC. "That seems to go against the norm of the savings-an­d-loan crisis, and the accounting frauds 10 years ago."

Some of the biggest Wall Street firms rebounded from the crisis stronger than ever. Goldman Sachs’s 2009 profits were a record for the firm and JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM)'s earnings in 2010 and the first quarter of 2011 have been at an all-time high.

A bitter cynic might suggest that such prosecutio­ns have not happened because both political parties are desperatel­y competing for Wall Street cash for the 2012 election, and nothing would doom the incumbent party's chances more than holding Wall Street royalty accountabl­e, along with the fact that the top levels of government are suffused with former bank officials and lobbyists -- but everyone knows that American justice isn't politicize­d that way, so that can't be it (just like everyone knows that political considerat­ions played no role whatsoever in the presidenti­al shield of immunity lavished on high-level Bush officials)­. 

Read the Article at HuffingtonPost