Will criminal prosecutions of financial-sector misdeeds ever be more than a sideshow?

Don't think there's not shit you can do, ways you can at least slow down this angry demon. Each and every one of us must do something. Stand up, take a swing, fuckin' throw an elbow. For example, after your job steals your health care coverage, steal their staplers! It's the least you can do. Yeah, I may not be able to get the catscan I need, but good luck affixing two pieces of paper together, you twat-lickers! Or refuse to pay a parking ticket, when the state is trying to make up the money they lost by giving billionaires tax cuts. . . .

If you work for a franchise restaurant, give shit away for free. Tell the manager that table five didn't like their trademark potpie-a-rooney and they demand a free cheesecake-a-rooney, whether they did or not. You don't owe that franchise anything. Why? Just because they stopped calling you a waiter and started calling you an "associate" or a "friend of the company" or a "franchise cuddlebunny" or whatever-the-fuck? Man, if only the Southern slave-owners had known this trick, everything would have been different. "Hey, we're gonna stop calling you 'slaves' and me 'master.' Instead you're gonna be called 'associate,' or 'friends of the plantation,' and we'll be one big happy family. . . .

-- Lee Camp, in the video

by Ken

And this is almost the least of it. Lee is on fire, overflowing with ways we can fight back against the corporate masters. You're gonna die!

Meanwhile, in the new (June 27) New Yorker George Packer has a piece, "A Dirty Business," on "going after financial-sector crime," basically tracking the uncharacteristically successful prosecution of Galleon hedge-fund wizard Raj Rjaratnam by the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, Preet Bharara, made possible almost entirely, it appears, by the successful cultivation of informants.

A month after Rajaratnam's arrest, Bharara gave an unusually dark speech at N.Y.U.'s law school, speaking of "epic frauds surfacing with increasing frequency." He noted, "There is a lack of faith in the economic system; a lack of belief in the markets; and a lack of trust that the playing field is level." He made no apologies for ferreting out insider trading by using wiretaps, a practice that was unpopular on Wall Street. "When sophisticated business people begin to adopt the methods of common criminals, we have no choice but to treat them as such," he said.

U.S. Attorney Bharara elaborates for Packer.

In May, Bharara met with me in his office, on the eighth floor of 1 St. Andrew's Plaza, a brutalist concrete structure near the federal courthouse in lower Manhattan. His windows face south, and through the murky light of a damp late afternoon the towers of Wall Street were barely visible. "There are often two categories of reasons to do the right thing," he said. Category 1 is a sense of right and wrong. "But if that doesn't work for you -- and it doesn't for a lot of people -- then there's the Category 2 reason: you're going to get caught, your business is going to go down the tubes, you're going to go to jail. For a lot of these people, maybe Category 1 doesn't work but Category 2 should. But maybe there was not enough enforcement, such that they thought, What's the big deal?" Insider trading, Bharara observed, was unlike other federal crimes -- it wasn't committed by people with a violent outlook or a bad upbringing, or by serial lawbreakers who knew no other life. "These folks seem not to have been of that type," he said.

Packer acknowledges that some Wall Street observers have called this case "a sideshow." Filmmaker Charles Ferguson, who made Inside Job, "told me that Bharara's focus on an insider-trading scandal was misplaced, given that the financial crisis was caused primarily by shoddy mortgages and the cynical trading of those irresponsible loans. And --

Last month, the Times columnist Joe Nocera accused Bharara of displaying phony toughness while sending a message to Wall Street's élites that "crime pays." Matt Taibbi, of Rolling Stone, has taken the even harsher view that prosecutors have given bankers a pass because they covet lucrative jobs in the private sector.

And by the time Packer's done, even after Bharara has objected testily that people who assume his office isn't looking at criminal proseecutions of meltdown-related activities (he points out that grand-jury secrecy means that any grand-jury proceedings that have proceeded or are proceeding are, you know, secret) you have the sense that there are people who would like to do something of a criminal-prosecution nature about financial-sector abuses, but there are more than enough reasons why it's never going to happen.

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