A friend tells me: the second part of Inside Job (the documentary that tells the Great Recession) is in the April issue of the English edition of Rolling Stone. In fact, after the cover that recalls the anniversary of the death of Jim Morrison appears a long article entitled A prison with Wall Street, with a summary that reads: "The financial criminals brought down the world economy, but the system is doing more to protect them than to prosecute them."
The thesis of the film and the article by Rolling Stone agree: no one has paid for their outrages with jail, and has saved the money of citizens, both banks and bankers. The author of the text is Matt Taibbi, familiar to those who have followed the ups and downs of the crisis, because in 2009 he published another long article on Goldman Sachs in the same journal, which caused a sensation. It described the investment bank as "a great vampire squid", whose role has been very active in all financial crises of recent decades. With a twist: his men, always in the highest positions of the U.S. government with both Democrats and Republicans have manipulated from within the same financial regulation and securities markets.
Taibbi immediately draws the reader's attention with the start of the article: "Nobody goes to jail. That's the mantra of the era of financial crisis, which has seen nearly every major bank and Wall Street financial companies embroiled in scandals that have impoverished millions of people and destroyed billions of dollars of wealth world and no one has gone to jail. No one but Bernie Madoff, a famous and flamboyant con artist whose victims were to be other people rich and famous. "
To Taibbi, committed fraud are crimes that involve an intellectual choice, committed by people who and are rich and have all the social benefits that can hold and act according to a very cynical calculation: we steal what we can and then see if the victims are able to claim their money through a captive bureaucracy. These mob attacked the very definition of the property, which depends in part on a legal system that has equally defend all claims in this case.
The journalist argues in his article to replace the system of fines which are theoretically punishes those who defraud (as people who committed the abuses that are never paid, the banks have defrauded shareholders often use the money to pay these bills with the law) by imprisonment. And gives an example with one of his betes noires: "You put Lloyd Blankfein [chief executive of Goldman Sachs] six months in jail and all this shit is over."
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