Eric Holder, aka Barney Fife at Work

The Department of Justice is going after financial fraudsters, true. But in the grand scheme of things, what they are doing equivalent to concentrating on issuing traffic tickets while the murder rate skyrockets.

On Monday in Washington, Mr. Holder, the United States attorney general, announced with much fanfare the results of a new enforcement program: Operation Broken Trust. “With this operation, the Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force is sending a strong message,” Mr. Holder declared, highlighting the Ponzi schemes, affinity frauds and investment scams his department had prosecuted.

In all, Mr. Holder said his new task force had brought cases against 343 criminal defendants and 189 civil defendants for fraud schemes that harmed more than 120,000 victims throughout the country, involving more than $8 billion in estimated losses.
...
[I]n the two years since the peak of the financial crisis, the government has not brought one criminal case against a big-time corporate official of any sort.

Instead, inexplicably, prosecutors are busy chasing small-timers: penny-stock frauds, a husband-and-wife team charged in an insider trading case and mini-Ponzi scheme.

It's what we've come to expect of Obama's Justice Department. They are busy ginning up cases against loudmouths in mosques, but they don't do anything about the torturers among us.

$8 billion in estimated losses is chump change, compared to what the evil fuckers at Goldman Sachs stole. $8 billion probably doesn't even cover their bonuses, and that doesn't get into the uninvestigated fraudsters at Chase Bank, Bank of America, Countrywide, AIG, Wells Fargo, Lehman Brothers, Standard & Poors and all of the rest of the major participants in wrecking our economy for fun and profit.

Hell, $8 billion is less than a fifth of what Bernie Madoff stole, and he was no Goldman Sachs.

Sure, we expected a whitewash of an investigation out of the last Administration, which barely gave a shit how the criminals at Enron rigged the western electricity market, swindling billions of dollars. But some of us had a faint hope that these guys would be different, that they would try to strike at the heart of the financial fraud machine.

But no, they not only content themselves with only going after a few insignificant appendages, they congratulate themselves for doing it. The message that they are truly sending is this: If your institution is going to rig the markets and defraud people en masse, then aim high! Steal big or don't bother, for if you can get above the invisible line, then the DoJ will leave you alone.

So keep issuing those parking tickets, Mr. Holder. Barney Fife would be proud of you.