Tuesday, March 28, 2017

More than just a few bad apples

Judging by the account in the New York Times, Donald Trump fired the very best of federal attorneys when he fired Bharara Preet.

But according to well informed Professor Bill Black, however good Preet may have been relatively speaking, on an absolute scale he was simply not prosecuting many big crimes that insider whistleblowers presented to him.

Professor Black presents two well documented cases that Preet didn't touch.  In general, we know that the US Government did very little to prosecute banks and bankers in the wake of the 2008 financial collapse.  Preet was part of that overall dearth of prosecution, despite what has been said by the Times.

As the last commenter says:


Not for nothing, but Preet came out of Schumer’s office who has parlayed being Wall Street’s senator into dejure leadership of the Senate Dems and defacto control of the Democratic party.
Picking off egregious individuals like Madoff, who can be described as “bad apples” while ignoring systemic fraud is the playbook.

Indeed, picking off a few bad apples only is always the approach of a corrupt system.

Near the end of World War II, spymaster Allen Dulles, who was stationed in Switzerland, attempted to negtotiate an end of the war with Himmler, a deal which would essentially leave the Third Reich in place but remove Hitler as the Bad Apple.  Roosevelt understood this temptation years earlier, and had already established a firm position of accepting unconditional surrender only.  Now we know how bad such a deal as Dulles and Himmler were attempting would have been.

No comments:

Post a Comment