Barry Bonds, Martha Stewart and the Banksters

William Rhoden's column in the sports section of the Sunday's New York Times talked about the Barry Bonds case and the multi-years' long efforts of the Federal prosecutors to put Bonds away for being an arrogant dickhead.

Maybe Rhoden is right and maybe he isn't. The Feds also went after Martha Stewart for some of the same reasons, both the legal reasons and the unofficial ones.

But I can't help think this: The Feds have, to all appearances, not put forth any effort to go after any of the banksters, other than the schmucks who were running obvious pyramid schemes. There has not been, as far as I know, any sustained series of perp-walks for the banksters who violated their fiduciary duties to their clients.

They've not hauled in the big boys who structured the "collateralized debt obligations" that bundled millions of sub-prime mortgages, wrapped them up in pretty paper and sold them as Triple-A rated securities. They've not paraded any of the clowns from Moody's, Standard & Poor's or Fitch Ratings, who closed their eyes to the odious stink of those CDOs and stamped them "AAA", which would be like the USDA stamping putrid maggoty meat as "prime beef".*

The reasons are probably two-fold. First, those cases may be hard to prove to a jury. Second, those banksters can afford to hire the very best in legal talent. And since they can, the prosecutors aren't going to go after them without the banking equivalent of a fresh corpse. Federal prosecutors, at least the appointed U.S. attorneys, are politicians to the core, most of whom have political ambitions beyond being a U.S. attorney. It doesn't hurt them to gin up some bullshit terrorism case, but they are not going to go after the rich and powerful without overwhelming evidence.

So Martha Stewart did time and Barry Bonds might. But the banksters will walk away scot-free.

Or, if you like pictures, this is how justice is supposed to work:

But in reality, this is how it works with it comes to the banksters and the DOJ:

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*Not that this was their first walk down Swindlers' Row. The ratings clowns awarded Enron AAA status until just days before Enron imploded.