Accountability And Justice Are Not Bloodlust But Billionaires Should Be Treated Like Everyone Else

Recently 48 Hours tried to persuade me to do a live interview about a friend of mine who was murdered. I've been resisting for a simple reason. Although the murderer, from one of the wealthiest families in New York, has killed several times and is demonstrably psychotic and was even caught with body parts of one of his victims, he was rich enough to get off. He's happily, walking the streets today, a free man. I'm going to go on national TV and talk about someone who murders with impunity and gets off because he's from a billionaire family? Nah… I don't think so.

A billionaire in America would have to be uncannily unlucky to get punished for his crimes, although its pretty much impossible to become a billionaire-- an existentially dangerous anti-social construct-- without a very serious criminal career. The entire ethos of greed, avarice and egoism that defines American capitalistic excess made it entirely predictable that none of the culprits in the on-going destruction of the American economy and middle class-- not the banksters and not the bribed and cowed political elites who enable them-- would ever face justice. The wasn't the kind of "change" Obama was talking about. Nor the kind of "hope."

Damon Silvers is Special Counnsel for the AFL-CIO and their Director of Policy. He served with Elizabeth Warren on COP, the Congressional Oversight Panel for TARP. Yesterday, as part of a conversation about Tim Geithner's Stress Test, he told me that "the issue is not pragmatism versus punishment. Its about bad economic decisions in the service of plutocracy." Generously, he continued:

The program of forcing households into debt peonage to keep the banks solvent with their bubble level balance sheets largely intact was crackpot realism. The legacy of that approach to the financial crisis, combined with the underpowered stimulus and the turn toward fiscal austerity Geithner says he supported, is a foreclosure crisis in its 7th year, unemployment at levels previously only reached in the depths of recessions, a continued credit crunch for small and medium sized business, seriously compromised regulators and Justice Department, and a Democratic Party that lost the ability to govern in 2010 just in time for redistricting. The long term consequences could well be a 10 year delay in any serious effort to address climate change, our infrastructure deficit or runaway inequality--all of which should have been on the agenda in 2011‎.
Geithner should have to address this economic catastrophe and its disastrous political consequences‎ for the President he advised and the country he served before the discussion of morality begins. Instead he stands amid the ruins hawking books saying there was no alternative. Of course the alternative of restructuring both the banks and the mortgage loans was what everyone from Paul Krugman to the IMF to the American Enterprise Institute was urging at the time, because that was what had been done in every other modern US banking crisis, and done successfully.

That said, there was an exemplary execution in Iran yesterday. The only countries that execute more people than the U.S. are China, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and North Korea. Somalia and Yemen execute fewer people than the U.S. But Iran got a big fish yesterday, one who would have never been jailed, let alone executed if he were lucky enough to be living out his criminal escapades in America instead of the Islamic Republic.

A billionaire businessman at the heart of a $2.6 billion state bank scam in Iran, the largest fraud case since the country's 1979 Islamic Revolution, was executed Saturday, state television reported.

Authorities put Mahafarid Amir Khosravi, also known as Amir Mansour Aria, to death at Evin prison, just north of the capital, Tehran, the TV reported. The report said the execution came after Iran's Supreme Court upheld his death sentence.

Khosravi's lawyer, Gholam Ali Riahi, was quoted by news website khabaronline.ir as saying that the death sentence was carried out without him being given any notice. Death sentences in Iran are usually carried out by hanging.

"I had not been informed about the execution of my client," Riahi said. "All the assets of my client are at the disposal of the prosecutor's office."

State officials did not immediately comment on Riahi's claim.

The fraud involved using forged documents to get credit at one of Iran's top financial institutions, Bank Saderat, to purchase assets including state-owned companies like major steel producer Khuzestan Steel Co.

Khosravi's business empire included more than 35 companies from mineral water production to a football club and meat imports from Brazil. According to Iranian media reports, the bank fraud began in 2007.

A total of 39 defendants were convicted in the case. Four received death sentences, two got life sentences and the rest received sentences of up to 25 years in prison.

The trials raised questions about corruption at senior levels in Iran's tightly controlled economy during the administration of former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Mahmoud Reza Khavari, a former head of Bank Melli, another major Iranian bank, escaped to Canada in 2011 after he resigned over the case. He faces charges over the case in Iran and remains on the Islamic Republic's wanted list. Khavari previously admitted that his bank partially was involved in the fraud, but has maintained his innocence.

And no, I'm not advocating that we execute Robert Rubin, Jamie Dimon, Ken Lewis, Lawrence Summers, Chuck Prince, Henry Paulson, Geithner… they haven't even been tried yet. Let's have trials first. Even Iran has trials first.