Frontline Video On Failure To Prosecute Wall Street Excecutives For Fraud

This video (via Manan Shukla) was released Tuesday.  It contains numerous interviews of lawyers and government officials who believe that Wall Street executives were guilty of fraud.  They are called The Untouchables in the documentary because the US Justice Department refused to prosecute a single Wall Street executive for fraud.  There are several explanations for the Justice Department's lack of interest in prosecuting the executives.  The Justice Department, and President Obama claim that fraud is too difficult to prove in court, or that their behavior was unethical, but not criminal.  That explanation seems weak because there was ample  evidence that top Wall Street executives knew that they sold toxic products, that were knowingly misrepresented to their customers.  That is the very definition of fraud.  Its also possible that the government was more interested in rescuing the banking system, and that it was willing to overlook criminal behavior in order to preserve Wall Street, along with several large international banks that were also guilty of fraud.  This was clearly the major focus of Timothy Geithner, who was one of the architects of the financial system rescue plan, and who was appointed by Obama to be the US Secretary of the Treasury.  A less charitable explanation is that our western democratic system has been corrupted, and that oligarchs in the US are just like oligarchs in Russia.  The government works on their behalf.  We define freedom as the freedom of oligarchs from government prosecution for criminal behavior.  Perhaps that is what we mean by a free market economy.  It also implies that we have a two tier criminal justice system.  We aggressively prosecute crimes committed by the weak, and we ignore criminal behavior by the powerful.  Perhaps that is why the US has the largest per capita prison population in the world.  It is one of our fastest growing industries.