I would like to think of Eric Holder as cowardly and incompetent which would make our current situation with the Attorney General’s Office and the banks an easy one to understand and solve, but like most things in life, it just isn’t that simple.
The problem comes from the top. Barak Obama has decided, as he did with the criminals who ran this country before him, that our court system isn’t the place in which justice will be dispensed.
In the interest, he claimed, of putting the country’s problems to rest, Obama never tried to prosecute the criminals who thrust the nation into two unjust wars, one for personal gain. This allowed people like Karl Rove and Dick Cheney, who are unbelievably fortunate not to be speaking from a cell, to walk around loose and run off their mouths about stuff that they should be serving time for having done.
The problem now, is that by not prosecuting the heads of the big banking operations, men that are stealing and engaging in clearly unlawful practices which include money laundering, for criminal and terrorist organizations and doing it without any sense that they will be brought to justice, Holder sets up a situation where anything goes and any criminal activity is in an area, in which it can thrive without threat of consequence.
When the Attorney General of the country says that they are too big to jail, the laws of the country go down the drain. Why should these felons stop what they are doing, when their only censure, is a slap on the hand in the form of a financial penalty that amounts to a small fraction of what they’ve gained by their illegal activity?
Holder tries to mitigate his idiotic stance by saying that his problem is that the banks he has labeled too big to jail, are already too big to fail, and therefore that question must be addressed first.
The truth is that both questions must be addressed with all haste, but the truth also is, that Holder’s premise is wrong. In an era of entrepreneurial consequence, jailing the CEO, COO or CFO of a major company might have crashed such a company, mainly because, those companies depended on the unique talents of their founders to keep them functioning. Now in a time of public companies, no one man is responsible for the success or failure of any of them. Top management positions in major banks and other industries are achieved, to a great extent, by failing upward or by cunning subordinates possessing the skills to manipulate the structure above them.
If Jamie Dimon went to jail today, JPMorganChase would continue on as if nothing had happened because Jamie Dimon, arguably the best of his management peers, is just that, a manager, not a creator, and there are a whole echelon of panting usurpers waiting breathlessly below him on the corporate ladder, aching for a chance to take his place.
So, Holder lies, makes a false case from under which he can crawl, to excuse his failure to uphold the laws of the land. Unless of course, Holder isn’t the one setting this policy and that turns the finger of guilt toward The President. That’s traditionally, where the buck stops. It seems obvious that there are certain areas of national policy where Obama has no interest in treading and the banks are one of them.
When Obama took office he laid out a large spectrum of problems that were holding back the country and to be fair he has involved himself on a number of them. Healthcare was the first and obviously the most important to him. He pushed through a bill that, in the long run, with significant changes, could be hugely beneficial to the country and its citizens. There are some that will disagree with that position but all I can say about them is that they are either in the pocket of the insurance and healthcare industries or they are too dumb to have read this far.
With such a wide agenda, it is really too much to expect that Obama would have addressed all the diseased areas in the country. We were facing a huge debt, which would increase as he tried to plug holes in the GOP induced depression. We had huge problems with two illegal wars and the funds they are still draining from our tax base. We had a jobless rate that was through the roof and basic industries that were collapsing to create more joblessness. We had serious social problems like gay marriage and the abortion/contraception battle that were caused by non-governmental groups from the religious right and he had a staggering immigration mess. The existence of some of these problems, especially the social ones would help him get re-elected but despite the fact that many thought he should just let them fester, he has moved ahead in an attempt to solve them.
Obama has achieved quite a bit, considering the problems he faced when he took office but now, when he has been re-elected, he has a chance to attack the problems that he couldn’t while still needing to get where he is. He has taken a lot of money from corporate sponsors but he has taken just as much from individual citizens. It’s time to solve one huge problem that could be his greatest challenge, mainly because it goes to the question of what we are as a nation. Do we live by the rule of law or are we simply a conglomerate of unruly barbarians trampling the rights of those weaker than us, taking what we want, raping and pillaging at will, because our government finds itself too weak to stand up to the money arrayed against it?
This is where Obama finds out if he’s just another Chicago hack or a national statesman. This is where he finds out if he has the intestinal fortitude to change the way our fiscal universe is going, because by taking on the biggest financial interests he can set a precedent that will apply to all the rest of big the spenders who are decimating our country. If he can break up the banks he will put himself in a position to successfully take on the fossil fuel industry, the military/industrial complex, the medical/insurance conglomerate, the gun lobby, the tax loophole lobby and maybe, if there’s a little time left over, the electoral college fiasco.
It will be a big menu and frankly, more than any one man could accomplish in the 31/2 years left to Obama but breaking up the banks and solving too big to fail and too big to jail would be a giant start. Let’s hope the guy we voted for has the stones to do the job.