Facebook comment where I found this article:
Utah Phillips explained this to me years ago; Who controls the blame pattern? If the blame goes downward, you're not looking upwards. Why worry about a few people down at the bottom getting a LITTLE something for nothing, when there are those at the top GETTING A LOT OF EVERYTHING FOR NOTHING!
A problem I have with this article is that I can't imagine that the president had anything to do with a decision to prosecute someone for not reporting income from recycling cans, but Sirota writes as if he does.
http://www.salon.com/2011/12/06/why_no_ones_investigating_wall_street/singleton/
By David Sirota
Tuesday, Dec 6, 2011 4:00 PM Eastern Standard Time
When it comes to our government’s collective refusal to aggressively investigate — much less prosecute — Wall Street crime, one prevailing line of apologism implies that it’s all about resources. As the general fable goes, Wall Street is so sprawling and so lawyered up that public law enforcement agencies simply don’t have the resources to make sure justice is served, especially at a time of budget deficits. In this story, Wall Street is not simply too big to fail; it’s too big to even police.
The motivation for such myth-making is obvious: It wholly absolves elected officials for their decisions to let their financial-industry campaign contributors off the hook. Yet thanks to recent events, the whole “Too Big to Police” rationale is being exposed for the farce that it is.
At the local level, the same governments that plead poverty when they’re asked to enforce their laws on financial fraud have somehow found plenty of resources to deploy their militarized police forces against Occupy protesters. At the federal level, it’s even more blatant. As we learned in a little-noticed Washington Post piece on Tuesday, the same Obama administration that has refused to spend political capital and federal monies to go after Wall Street is expending new resources to crack down on the supposedly rampant problem of food stamp “fraud.”
Tracking an individual example of this phenomenon, Matt Taibbi makes clear that it’s really difficult to overstate just how revealing this kind of thing is. Wall Street crooks who stole trillions of dollars are rewarded by the administration with additional trillions in bailouts. Meanwhile, those crooks’ now-impoverished victims — so poor they are on food stamps, mind you — are being targeted by the same administration for criminal investigation for allegedly making a few extra bucks on recycling empty bottles.
Taken together, these microcosmic examples (and there are plenty of others) all illustrate an inconvenient truth: namely, that law enforcement decisions today are not being guided by resource questions or dispassionate analyses of priorities, they are being guided by political will.
In states, it’s not that governors and attorneys general (other than those in New York, Nevada and California) want to go after financial fraud but can’t; it’s that they don’t want to go after that fraud, and they do want to shut down anti-Wall Street demonstrations. Why? Because, in the words of Democratic Gov. John Hickenlooper of Colorado, they fear the demonstrations are “something that could easily catch on.”
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It’s the same thing today, and not just when it comes to financial fraud (though that’s the best example), but when it comes to so many different expenditures of law enforcement resources. Municipal governments, for instance, say they have no resources to maintain homeless shelters, yet they seem to have plenty of resources to enforce municipal ordinances making homelessness illegal, and to bust the Occupy protests. Police forces say they don’t have the resources necessary to adequately fight violent crime, but they’ve got plenty of money to arrest pot smokers. The list is endless.
No doubt, it’s disturbing to acknowledge these truths, because they make us see that our political leaders aren’t being forced to do odious things, as they sententiously claim. On the contrary, they are most often using their unilateral discretion and purposely deciding to do those things.
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