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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsQuestion: Why is Bernie Madoff the only Wall St. criminal to face prosecution? Answer:
liberal N proud
(60,349 posts)He pissed them so they threw him under the bus.
midnight
(26,624 posts)Egalitarian Thug
(12,448 posts)HiPointDem
(20,729 posts)cali
(114,904 posts)Chisox08
(1,898 posts)TrollBuster9090
(5,955 posts)I suppose you could add other details, like the fact that he was so incredibly stupid and lazy in the way he went ABOUT robbing the 1% that the other crooks were just plain EMBARRASSED. I mean, seriously, the guy was so feckless he couldn't even be bothered to pick up a newspaper and see what stocks were traded that day so he could claim to have traded them. He was just making shit up, and claiming he was trading it on days when the exchange wasn't even open.
I guess when Bush GUTTED the SEC it took all the thrill out of being a crook, and he just got lazy? Meh..
hughee99
(16,113 posts)he also wasn't able to keep it covered up long enough to get a bailout. The 1% is fine with him being in jail, but they'd rather have their loses covered with a TARP if that was an option. I suspect there were others engaged in criminal activity (even robbing from the 1%) but when bailouts covered losses, they didn't want a criminal investigation coming in to check the books.
kimbutgar
(21,237 posts)It's known that Madoff took money from the rich people not regular people that is why they came down hard on him. He ripped off the rich.
chowder66
(9,094 posts)My understanding is that Bush and his peeps legalized much of what was illegal or created loopholes and/or made vague many rules which now makes it extremely costly, slow and maybe impossible to prosecute some if not many of these cases ....again because some of the old prosecutable laws were made legal or muddied up in a way that it would be hard to prove criminal intent, etc.
With that said you can find out more about what the doj is doing, significant cases, etc by going here;
http://www.fbi.gov/stats-services/publications/financial-crimes-report-2010-2011
Mnemosyne
(21,363 posts)TomClash
(11,344 posts)This is the answer given by the guy on the third stool at Murphy's Tavern or The Bailey.
He ripped off the wrong people and it wasn't the 1%.
alcibiades_mystery
(36,437 posts)TomClash
(11,344 posts)He ripped off charities, colleges and little oldjewish ladies, and he did it directly and blatantly. No one wanted to defend him.
It was also the easiest case in the world to prosecute.
laundry_queen
(8,646 posts)Watch Chasing Madoff. There were some big companies involved in the whole scheme. THAT is why Madoff got arrested. Those large companies profited greatly off the ponzi scheme (feeder funds) and knew something was fishy, but enjoyed the profits. When the scheme collapsed, they needed a large scapegoat to keep their noses clean and Bernie Madoff was at the top. Funny how they didn't give a shit when they were making money off those lower on the pyramid, but once the pyramid collapsed they didn't hesitate to push Bernie off a cliff. Everyone knew his returns had to be falsified. The SEC had been informed for YEARS about it. Bernie Madoff had a lot of enablers that defended him until they couldn't.
WilliamPitt
(58,179 posts)TomClash
(11,344 posts)Madoffwas a victim in a sense and I get your drift.
rhett o rick
(55,981 posts)TomClash
(11,344 posts)were never investigated, let alone indicted. That was the least of Madoff's problems.
He was an easy target, a small fish to harbor the blame . . . while the real criminals roam free.
HCE SuiGeneris
(14,994 posts)Silly, Will.
Tigress DEM
(7,887 posts)Ken Blackwell just decided NOT to show up in court and with Madoff being prosecuted the papers had another story to use to misdirect the attention needed to bring Blackwell to justice.
http://truth-out.org/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=2319:new-court-filing-reveals-how-the-2004-ohio-presidential-election-was-hacked
The filing also includes the revealing deposition of the late Michael Connell. Connell served as the IT guru for the Bush family and Karl Rove. Connell ran the private IT firm GovTech that created the controversial system that transferred Ohio's vote count late on election night 2004 to a partisan Republican server site in Chattanooga, Tennessee owned by SmarTech. That is when the vote shift happened, not predicted by the exit polls, that led to Bush's unexpected victory. Connell died a month and a half after giving this deposition in a suspicious small plane crash.
Additionally, the filing contains the contract signed between then-Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell and Connell's company, GovTech Solutions. Also included that contract a graphic architectural map of the Secretary of State's election night server layout system.
http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2007/2920/
In a series of investigative reports dating to well before the 2004 election, the Columbus Free Press and Freepress.org have documented several dozen different means used by the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign to steal the official 2004 vote count.
The final official tally for Bush---less than 119,000 votes out of 5.4 million cast---varied by 6.7% from exit poll results, which showed a Kerry victory. Exit polls in 2004 were designed to have a margin of error of about 1%.
In various polling stations in Democrat-rich inner city precincts in Youngstown and Columbus, voters who pushed touch screens for Kerry saw Bush's name light up. A wide range of discrepancies on both electronic and paper balloting systems leaned almost uniformly toward the Bush camp. Voting procedures regularly broke down in inner city and campus areas known to be heavily Democratic.
In direct violation of standing federal election law, 56 of Ohio's 88 counties have since destroyed all or part of their 2004 election data. The materials were additionally protected by a federal court injunction in the King-Lincoln-Bronzeville federal civil rights lawsuit (in which we are attorney and plaintiff). To date, no state or federal prosecutions have resulted from this wholesale destruction of presidential election records, including 1.6 million ballots, cast and uncast, needed for definitive auditing procedures. However, two Cuyahoga County (Cleveland) election officials have been convicted of felony manipulation of an official recount. The Cleveland Plain-Dealer, the state's largest newspaper, recently editorialized that there is "no evidence" the 2004 election was stolen, but omitted mention of the destruction of the electoral records by more than half the counties in the state. The Plain-Dealer and other mainstream media have consistently ignored findings by the Free Press and others indicating widespread manipulation and theft