Hunt for Justice by Cynthia Hunt(Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, left, talks with Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke before the start of a House hearing on AIG.)
Is the United States Morally Bankrupt?
I’m not a negative person so it’s hard for me to think in that way, but facts are facts. I sit here day after day shaking my head about the financial crimes perpetrated by some of our nation’s finest minds and most educated individuals. It makes me worry about the moral health of our nation.
I’ve covered many violent crimes during my career as a journalist, and you can usually find the triggers. When you put a killer or rapist under a microscope, you almost always find a past that explains how the person transformed into a monster. Notice, I didn’t say it excuses them, but at least they are often explainable.
(Pic of Blogger Covering a Triple Murder in Houston)
Will White Collar Crooks Destroy Our Great Nation?
I find this new wave of white collar crimes grounded in greed and dishonesty more disturbing. I believe it reflects a moral decay in some of our nation’s most accomplished individuals. How could any AIG executive accept part of the $165 million in retention bonuses? Their company failed. They failed. A Big Fat F. We all know when you fail, you are not rewarded. We learned that in grade school Most of the executives receiving these ridiculous bonuses were from the same AIG unit that caused some of the insurance giant’s most severe problems. Accepting that bonus money is clearly stealing. Theft. A ripoff.
AIG is nothing compared to Merrill Lynch. Executives there rushed out $3.6 billion in bonuses. New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo discovered Merrill paid four executives a combined $121 million and distributed bonuses of $1 million or more to 696 employees. The firm lost $15 billion in the fourth quarter. Again, I call accepting or giving bonuses at a company that is failing theft. What would you call it? Kudos to New York Supreme Court Justice Bernard Fried for ordering the list of Merrill bonus earners be disclosed to the taxpayers. After all, Bank of America bought Merrill Lynch. Bank of America has been allocated $45 billion in federal bailout funds and the Treasury has guaranteed to protect it from potentially billions of dollars in losses from investments Lynch made in real estate loans.
These bonuses are just the latest crimes. Yes, I said crimes. Shouldn’t we investigate the executives whose potentially fraudulent decisions caused the failures in the first place. Let me again quote a Wall Street Journal editorial from 2006:
Today Enron Would Get A Bail OutI covered the Enron story from the beginning. We called the Enron guys' work voodoo accounting. They were put on trial, called liars and thieves, and sent to prison. Founder & CEO Ken Lay died before he went to the federal pen. Former CEO Jeff Skilling was sentenced to 24 years and recently lost his appeal. The damage Enron did is small compared to the Americans suffering now. This 2009 gang of white collar thieves is largely getting off except for the worst of the worst, Bernie Madoff.
(The FBI Arrests Former Enron CEO Jeff Skilling 2004)
Jeff Skilling was once one of America's brightest and brashest stars. I sat in his Houston mansion one night as he meticulously explained everything that went wrong at Enron and what he knew and when he knew it. I must tell you that he knew they pushed limits to create a new kind of industry. However, he never believed their company was in real financial trouble and would go down and destroy so many people financially. I am not defending just comparing. After he was convicted, he was ordered to pay $45 million in restitution to Enron investors.
I find Skilling more like a school girl when compared to this new gang of still unnamed executives--the people who ran their companies into the ground with complicated deals and shady investments and then stole taxpayer money. I am sure if federal prosecutors spend as much time investigating all of these huge companies as we did Enron, we could send a bunch of these modern suits to prison.
Let's not forget the politicians who gladly pocket donations from these sharp dressed crooks. I think they should go to jail first and stay the longest. Unfortunately, you know that will not happen when you follow the money trail.
A NEWSWEEK review of recent filings with the Federal Election Commission found that the political action committees of five big TARP recipients doled out $85,300 to members in the first two months of this year—with most of the cash going to those who serves on committees who oversee the TARP program. Among them: Bank of America (which got $15 billion in bailout money) sent out $24,500 in the first two months of 2009, including $1,500 to House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer and another $15,000 to members of the House and Senate banking panels.
We have elected crooks overseeing the hearings of the business crooks while the elected crooks pocket money from the business crooks they oversee. Instead of sending our 2009 crooks to prison, we, the hardworking taxpayers, are bailing them out. We strive for equitable treatment in our justice system. Should we bail out Jeff Skilling too? At least, he went before Congress and testified instead of cowardly taking the fifth or fighting in court to keep his name and his bonus amount secret. He didn't try to take taxpayer money as a bonus after Enron collapsed.
They say our economy will recover from this, but what about our national character? Politicians taking control of our banking sector is a dangerous development that keeps getting scarier. It's all so un-American. Many historians believe Rome fell because of internal decadence and excessive self-indulgence. Will we too?
