Department of Justice Lawyers on a Picnic, photo by CocteauBoy via Flickr

And by jury, I mean the candy ass prosecutors at the Department of Justice, who have made an in-house decision that it’s just too hard to indict anyone at MF Global, including friend of Barack Jon Corzine, for stealing billions of customer dollars. It’s just impossible that a friend of Eric Holder’s could be found to be criminally responsible for allowing a company to steal money from its customers to give to its bank, especially when the bank is the much-loved JPMorgan Chase. After all, the Department of Eric Holder is made up of peers of the MF Global crowd, so it’s just like a real trial.

These chicken-shits have been telling reporters from the beginning that there were really high hurdles to prosecution, as if this were some sort of Olympic event. They tell the reporters that “chaos and porous risk controls at the firm, rather than fraud, allowed the money to disappear”. The billions in losses were beyond human control, and nothing can be done, a phrasing which perfectly mirrors DOJ’s passivity in the face of one of the biggest heists in history.

The reporters, Azam Ahmed and Ben Protess of the Dealbook blog at the New York Times, add their own passivity: “But a lack of charges in the largest Wall Street blowup since 2008 is likely to fuel frustration with the government’s struggle to charge financial executives.”

These guys can’t tell the difference between frustration and anger, between irritation and hostility. Their repetition of talking points helps the Obama Administration fuel the sense of impotency among us mere citizens, a sense that nothing we can do makes a difference, and the certainty that the rich and connected do not face the same justice system as the operators of medical marijuana dispensaries and their pathetic clients.

But look over there, a bright shiny object: civil suits! The government won’t lift a finger to support investors whose money was stolen, so they get to spend vast quantities of their own money in the hope that some civil court staffed by George Bush from the ranks of the Federalist society will eventually, in some future decade, give them a few of their dollars back. Good luck with that.

This is one more confirmation of the findings of Fulmer and Knill:

…accused executives whose firms have contributed to political campaigns via a PAC are banned as an officer for three fewer years, serve probation for five fewer years, prison for six fewer years and are 75% less likely to be given both prison time and an officer ban (the most severe form of criminal and civil penalties)…

OpenSecrets provides the data:

MF Global’s employees gave generously to politicians at the federal level — and almost all of that campaign cash benefited Democrats once former New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine became chief executive of the company.

According to research by the Center for Responsive Politics, MF Global employees have contributed $408,000 to federal candidates and political parties since 2007. That sum includes $38,000 in donations to President Barack Obama, who is the largest recipient of MF Global employee contributions.

It must be really distressing to the customers of MF Global to see that they are just more roadkill for Wall Street hyenas. They probably thought they were in the protected class because they had a few million dollars, but it turns out they were muppets.