In America the Criminal Class Never Goes to Jail

I recently saw an interview with Lloyd Blankfein from Goldman Sachs opining on the need for America to rein in entitlement spending.  Of course I would have appreciated the interview more if it had taken place where it should have, with him behind bars.   Our countries financial crisis has been beautifully covered by Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone, his latest “Secrets and Lies of the Bailout” is a wonderful look at consequences of the “bailout” http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/secret-and-lies-of-the-bailout-20130104);

We were told that the taxpayer was stepping in – only temporarily, mind you – to prop up the economy and save the world from financial catastrophe. What we actually ended up doing was the exact opposite: committing American taxpayers to permanent, blind support of an ungovernable, unregulatable, hyperconcentrated new financial system that exacerbates the greed and inequality that caused the crash, and forces Wall Street banks like Goldman Sachs and Citigroup to increase risk rather than reduce it. The result is one of those deals where one wrong decision early on blossoms into a lush nightmare of unintended consequences. We thought we were just letting a friend crash at the house for a few days; we ended up with a family of hillbillies who moved in forever, sleeping nine to a bed and building a meth lab on the front lawn.

Out of the initial bailouts we have moved to “Wall Street Reform,” i.e. - permanent government support to the big banks, and this has skewed the markets in favor of the big banks (crony capitalism at its worst);

The first independent study that attempted to put a numerical value on the Implicit (government) Guarantee popped up about a year after the crash, in September 2009, when Dean Baker and Travis McArthur of the Center for Economic and Policy Research published a paper called "The Value of the 'Too Big to Fail' Big Bank Subsidy." Baker and McArthur found that prior to the last quarter of 2007, just before the start of the crisis, financial firms with $100 billion or more in assets were paying on average about 0.29 percent less to borrow money than smaller firms.

Apparently the government support that is good for Mr. Blankfein and his merry band of criminals at Goldman Sachs and on Wall Street, but it is NOT good for working Americans who might actually need entitlements such as Social Security and Medicare to live on.