Getting Away With It.

“I have been following the absence of legal prosecutions since 2008, and have posted on that subject more than 500 times. But this isn’t the obsession of one lone crank (i.e., me). Many others in banking, law enforcement and government who aren’t on the payroll of banks have reviewed the events of the financial crisis and have reached the same conclusion — that the law was broken repeatedly by bankers.”

In the wake of a ridiculous apologetic in the NYT — and news that the government now wants to waive sanctions for Credit Suisse — Bloomberg’s Barry Ritholtz re-asks one of the central questions of the financial crisis, and Obama’s response to it: Why have no Banksters gone to jail?

“Political access and lobbying go part way toward explaining the absence of prosecutions and, therefore, the lack of convictions…As we have repeatedly shown, Treasury Department officials, including former Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, had convinced prosecutors in the Justice Department of the dangers of prosecuting banks and bankers for the economy.” (Cartoon above via here.)

Holder: We Won’t Criticize It.

“The eight high-priority areas leave prosecutors bent on targeting marijuana businesses with a fair amount of leeway, especially the exception for ‘adverse public health consequences.’ And prosecutors have shown a willingness to aggressively interpret DOJ guidance in the past, as the many medical marijuana dispensary owners now behind bars can attest…But the official stressed that the guidance was not optional, and that prosecutors would no longer be allowed to use the sheer volume of sales or the for-profit status of an operation as triggers for prosecution, though these factors could still affect their prosecutorial decisions.”

In keeping with recent trends, and in what Ryan Grim bills as “a historic step back from its long-running drug war,” AG Eric Holder announces that DOJ will not actively challenge state marijuana decriminalization laws in Washington and Colorado. “A Justice Department official said that Holder told the governors…that the department would take a ‘trust but verify approach’ to the state laws. DOJ is reserving its right to file a preemption lawsuit at a later date, since the states’ regulation of marijuana is illegal under the Controlled Substances Act.”

Really, given that Obama himself was a documented bogarter-of-joints — Bad Form, Mr. President — any other policy towards Washington and Colorado would be extraordinarily hypocritical, even for this administration. And with that out of the way, may I offer some handy advice to my fellow Democrats, if we want to get to serious about this whole winning-elections thing? Take a page from Karl Rove’s old gay marriage playbook and get medicinal marijuana and marijuana decriminalization initiatives on as many state ballots as possible in 2014 and beyond — particularly in the midterm elections when youth turnout is low. It’s the right thing to do, and it’ll even further accelerate the ticking clock working against the GOP.

Orange is the Same Old Black.

“Last month, President Obama quietly did something that should shake every American to the core. Seeking to enforce federal crack cocaine laws that have since been repealed, the Obama administration asked a federal appeals court to ensure that thousands of human beings, mostly poor and mostly black, remain locked in prison – even though everyone agrees that there is no justification for them to be there.”

Yet another for the Hope-and-Change file: Obama’s DOJ urges the Courts to keep prisoners convicted under outdated sentencing requirements in jail, because…because…well, it’s hard to fathom, really. “For several years, federal judges have done nothing to remedy this injustice; one famously concluded that the prisoners sentenced under the old law had simply ‘lost on a temporal roll of the cosmic dice”. So, there are American citizens serving tens of thousands of years in prison because, according to all three branches of government, it’s just their tough luck?”

If you’re keeping score at home, folks, Obama’s Department of Justice has basically said at this point that whistleblowers and non-violent drug offenders should get the book thrown at them, but economy-toppling banksters and torturers should walk free. Yessir, they’re really speaking truth-to-power over at DOJ these days. What a courageous bunch.

Yes, We Tortured.

“‘[I]t is indisputable that the United States engaged in the practice of torture’ and that the nation’s highest officials bore ultimate responsibility for it…The use of torture, the report concludes, has ‘no justification’ and ‘damaged the standing of our nation, reduced our capacity to convey moral censure when necessary and potentially increased the danger to U.S. military personnel taken captive.’ The task force found ‘no firm or persuasive evidence’ that these interrogation methods produced valuable information that could not have been obtained by other means.”

A “nonpartisan, independent review of interrogation and detention programs in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks,” headed by two former Members of Congress (Republican Asa Hutchinson and Democrat James Jones) offers an in-depth investigative report on our national post-9/11 torture regime.

“The sweeping, 577-page report says that while brutality has occurred in every American war, there never before had been ‘the kind of considered and detailed discussions that occurred after 9/11 directly involving a president and his top advisers on the wisdom, propriety and legality of inflicting pain and torment on some detainees in our custody.'”

Of course, we have known all this for awhile now. And yet, just as with the folks who brought us the financial crisis, there has been zero accountability coming from Obama’s Justice Department or anywhere else. Instead, our powers-that-be have been too busy trying to round up purported public enemies like Bradley Manning and Aaron Swartz.

And yet, as this report unequivocally lays out, the evidence of an American torture regime, planned and carried out after 9/11 at the highest levels of government, is indisputable. For the rule of law’s sake as much as for the values we purportedly stand for, we still need a reckoning.

Score one for Paul.

“Barack Obama of 2007 would be right down here with me.“ Kentucky Senator Rand Paul delivers an old-school, 13-hour filibuster against Obama’s drone policies, and — with the exception of Ron Wyden — the Senate Democrats go almost completely AWOL. “Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) also took to the floor twice, but mostly to defend the U.S. government’s authority to target American citizens in ‘extraordinary circumstances.'”

Wrong answer. The policy FAIL here is obvious and egregious — Why would anyone of a lefty bent support giving a president unitary and unchecked authority to kill anyone he or she wants, without even a semblance of due process? Would they be this sanguine about it if Dick Cheney was holding the kill button? But even notwithstanding that, Democrats are making a terrible political mistake by letting Senator Paul, along with opportunistic slimebags like Mitch MConnell and far-right asshats like budding McCarthyite Ted Cruz, get to the left of them on this issue.

I get that some senators had procedural issues with the filibuster of a Cabinet nominee. But, at a certain point, this just looks like typical Dem spinelessness and situational ethics — Is preserving proper Senate procedure really more important than preserving constitutional due process? And if Rand Paul is the only person who’s going to stand up and call shenanigans on the administration for this chilling executive overreach, then thank you, Rand Paul.

It’s Time for the Brown Bag.

“The Attorney-General’s kind remarks are noted and appreciated. I’ve spoken to Ed Burns and we are prepared to go to work on season six of The Wire if the Department of Justice is equally ready to reconsider and address its continuing prosecution of our misguided, destructive and dehumanising drug prohibition.“

I saw this a few weeks ago, and Follow me Here reminded me of it: As we pass the fortieth anniversary of the failed war on drugs, Wire creator David Simon makes a deal with Attorney General Eric Holder: End the drug war for a Wire season six. As if there weren’t already enough good reasons to do so, S6 would be the cherry on top.

Too Big to Jail.

“Lloyd Blankfein went to Washington and testified under oath that Goldman Sachs didn’t make a massive short bet and didn’t bet against its clients. The Levin report proves that Goldman spent the whole summer of 2007 riding a ‘big short’ and took a multibillion-dollar bet against its clients, a bet that incidentally made them enormous profits. Are we all missing something? Is there some different and higher standard of triple- and quadruple-lying that applies to bank CEOs but not to baseball players?“

In Rolling Stone, a simile-happy Matt Taibbi reiterates the open-and-shut fraud and perjury case against Goldman Sachs that was laid out last month in the Levin report — a case that, thus far, nobody in a prosecutorial position seems to be taking up. Too busy going after Wikileaks, I guess.

“To recap: Goldman, to get $1.2 billion in crap off its books, dumps a huge lot of deadly mortgages on its clients, lies about where that crap came from and claims it believes in the product even as it’s betting $2 billion against it. When its victims try to run out of the burning house, Goldman stands in the doorway, blasts them all with gasoline before they can escape, and then has the balls to send a bill overcharging its victims for the pleasure of getting fried.”

The Wheedle and the Damage Done.

“The Fed accepted a total of $1.31 trillion in junk-rated collateral between Sept. 15, 2008 and May 12, 2009 through the Primary Dealer Credit Facility. TARP was nothing compared to this.” (Also, $500 billion of that junk was rated CCC or below, which — given the rampant grade inflation going on at all the rating agencies — means it was really garbage.)

So, yeah, Wikileaks isn’t the only document dump in town this week. As mandated by the Dodd-Frank Act (after much pushing from below), the Federal Reserve today released information about some of its dealings from December 2007 to July 2010. And, while folks are just now delving into the intel, it already seems that some of the bodies buried during the financial crisis are now floating to the surface: “A quick analysis…indicates that Citigroup was the greatest beneficiary, drawing on a total of $1.8 trillion in loans, followed by Merrill Lynch, which used $1.5 trillion; Morgan Stanley, which drew $1.4 trillion; and Bear Stearns, which used $960 billion.“

In very related news, former Alan Grayson staffer (and a Hill friend of mine) Matthew Stoller lays out a compelling case for a harder stance against the Fed from the Left from now on. Some brief excerpts:

“It is good that this debate is happening. It means that we will be able to examine the real power structure of the American order, rather than the minor food fights allowable in our current political system. This will bring deep disagreements, profound ones, but also remarkable possibility. Modern American industrial policy is to push capital into housing, move manufacturing abroad, build a massive defense establishment, and maintain an oligarchic financial sector. This system isn’t a structural inevitability. People built it, and people are unbuilding it…

Like most American institutions, the Fed has shrouded itself in myth, with self-serving officials discussing the immaculate design of the central bank as untouchable, secretive, an autocratic and technocratic adult in the world of democratic children. But the Fed, and specifically the people who run it, are responsible for declining wages, for de-industrialization, for bubbles, and for the systemic corruption of American capital markets.”

Also on this topic, it comes out today that Bank of America was given a break by the SEC on a securities fraud settlement “‘because of the nation’s perilous economic situation at the time’ and the fact that it had received billions of dollars in taxpayer aid, according to the report by the SEC’s inspector general…Specifically, during settlement negotiations, Bank of America won relief from sanctions that could have hurt its investment banking business.“

To tie this back to the top, according to Bloomberg’s Lizzie O’Leary, who’s also been parsing the new Fed data, “52% of the collateral Bank of America pledged to the #Fed’s PDCF was rated Ba/BB or lower, or didn’t have available ratings.” (And, let’s keep in mind, PDCF was only one of several emergency programs.)

So, in other words, the government kept banks like BoA alive by buying up trillions in toxic assets and looking askance at their illegal activity. They repaid us with record bonuses for themselves and an epidemic of foreclosure fraud — the “getaway car for the financial crisis,” as a friend well put it — that’s screwing over millions of American families. And in terms of fixing bad behavior on the Street, nothing changed whatsoever. Boy, that’s some deal.

Enemy of the State.

“‘To the extent there are gaps in our laws,’ Holder continued, ‘we will move to close those gaps, which is not to say…that anybody at this point, because of their citizenship or their residence, is not a target or a subject of an investigation that’s ongoing.“

After another embarrassing document dump by Wikileaks — this time diplomatic cables, next time Bank of America? — Attorney General Holder threatens the prosecution of Julian Assange, an Australian citizen — most likely under the Espionage Act, the same catch-all 1917 law used to lock up Eugene Debs back in the day.

First of all, Gawker‘s John Cook has already explained why this attempted line of prosecution doesn’t work. However docile the “nation’s watchdogs” remain on any other given day, the newspapers that published these leaks would have to be considered co-conspirators in any Espionage Act-related indictment. “We think its fairly obvious that the Department of Justice won’t go after the Times or any of the other papers involved in the story. But if it doesn’t, that’s just evidence that its attempt to use the Espionage Act to go after Assange isn’t about enforcing laws: It’s about retribution, harassment, and rattling sabers.“

Secondly, if Assange wants to avoid federal prosecution, perhaps he should just…I dunno…torture somebody? Or maybe rip off the American people for trillions of dollars? Or how ’bout just spying on Americans via warrantless wiretap? Apparently, disclosing those kinds of secrets is one of those look-forward-not-backward kinda things.

Let’s get real here. There’s no threat to our troops in these leaks — Even the Pentagon admits that. (A more overlooked problem, as a friend pointed out, is what this leak might mean for human rights workers.) Wikleaks’ methods are of the blunderbuss variety, yes. (That probably speaks in their favor: They don’t seem to tailor their leaks to suit a predetermined spin. They just dump data. And, hey, somebody should be doing the media’s job.) And, sure, Assange comes off as more than a bit pretentious, but what of it? If being a jackass were a crime, our prison system in this country would be completely broken…oh wait, it already is.

In the end, as Glenn Greenwald well put it, “our government and political culture is so far toward the extreme pole of excessive, improper secrecy that that is clearly the far more significant threat.” You’d think an administration that ran on unparalleled transparency in government might feel the same way. But, sadly, like its predecessor, the only crime this administration really seems to hate is whistleblowing.

“The Beast” is not contained.

“The relationship between the federal government and the oil company has been an awkward collaboration all along — “We have them by the neck,” Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said of BP in congressional testimony last week — but it reached a turning point Monday when the administration said it no longer wants to share a podium with BP at the daily briefing in Louisiana. Instead, the national incident commander, Coast Guard Adm. Thad W. Allen, will give a solo briefing wherever he happens to be.“

With “Top Kill” a failure, the way forward murky, the environmental impact likely irrevocable, and oil still flowing into the Gulf at a rate three times what BP tried to spin, the Obama administration begins to move toward a more confrontational footing, including having Attorney General Holder look into a possible criminal investigation. Yeah, I’d say there’s a case there. And it’d be a much better use of Justice’s time than its flat-out reprehensible war on whistleblowers. (Aquaman cover via Graphic Policy. And Spongebob fared little better.)

Update 2: “‘We will prosecute to the fullest extent of the law, anyone who has violated the law,’ Holder said. ‘This disaster is nothing less than a tragedy.’” I’m all for it — Let’s get some accountability here for once. But, hey, you know what else is a tragedy? Torture. And you know what else? Indefinite detentions. And you know what else? The fraud-fueled Wall St. meltdown. As I noted above, the only folks this Justice Dept. seems to have been cracking down on so far, in full defiance of 2008 campaign promises about transparency, are whistleblowers. Their priorities have seemed awfully screwed-up thus far, to say the least.