Photo by Redwin Law via Flickr


The Democratic Platform seems to have missed the central point of the banking mess: the Obama administration did not investigate the disaster, and didn’t indict anyone for the crimes that led to the Great Crash. In fact, the administration specifically refused to follow up on criminal referrals from the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission regarding one of the Goldman Sachs mortgage deals, saying as it always does, that it stinks, but isn’t a crime.

The Platform admits that

For too long, we’ve had a financial system that stacked the deck against ordinary Americans. Banks on Wall Street played by different rules than businesses on Main Street and community banks. Without strong enough regulations, families were enticed, and sometimes tricked, into buying homes they couldn’t afford. Banks and investors were allowed to package and sell risky mortgages. Huge reckless bets were made with other people’s money on the line. That behavior not only nearly destroyed the financial system, it cost our economy millions of jobs, hurt middle class and poor families, and left taxpayers holding the bill.

Then we find out the solution offered by the party in power:

The path to restoring middle class security is through the basic values that made our country great. We are a nation that says anyone can make it if you try – no matter who you are, where you come from, or what you look like. We know that America is strongest when everybody has a seat at the table and when the same rules apply to everyone, from Main Street to Wall Street.

The only reason the banks were allowed to play by different rules is that the Obama administration mulishly refused to enforce the law against them. There is no doubt that the law was broken, over and over. But the candy-ass prosecutors at the Justice Department won’t act, and the craven time-servers at the SEC are so worried about their careers that they fall all over themselves in admiration of the thugs who stole all the money and kept it, while millions of Americans lost their life savings and their houses.

The platform ignores the reality that the bankers got away with theft, wire fraud, bank fraud, loan fraud, securities fraud, and commodities fraud. There are two causes for this, both the responsibility of the President and Democrats in the legislature. First, the President hired a bunch of known bank sympathizers and fellow travelers to head up every part of the financial sector. At the head of the list are Attorney General Holder and Treasury Secretary Geithner. Holder hired a slew of white collar defense lawyers from Covington and Burling, and he and they will all return to their civilian jobs with their hands unsoiled by something so ugly as criminal prosecutions of their former and future clients. Geithner is a product of the inbred financial sector, a man unable to conceptualize the possibility that any of his trainers was a common thief.

Second, the investigative arm of every financial regulator is full of time-servers. The first responsibility of every incoming administration is to get rid of the moles left from the prior administration, the wreckers, the foot-draggers, the bureaucratic sludge, the people waiting their turn at the revolving door. Obama failed to do that, and he failed to instruct the head of agencies to do it either.

The platform asserts that Dodd-Frank is a common sense solution to the problem, and will prevent future problems. Nonsense. The agencies have been so thoroughly captured by the financial sector that they can’t even get their regulations into effect. The biggest banks are much bigger than they were, and even more dangerous.

The platform says that Democrats are “… holding Wall Street accountable, bringing new transparency to financial markets, and ending taxpayer-funded bank bailouts and the era of “too big to fail” and by “… by requiring them to provide relief for homeowners still struggling to pay their mortgages and to change practices that took advantage of homeowners.

So holding people accountable means a) we told the banks not to do that again, and b) we asked banks to help some of the people damaged by the banks get a few bucks out of the stolen hundreds of billions.

That is not the rule of law applicable to all. That is just a load of garbage dumped on our heads as if to say: you people get what you deserve.