William Cohan takes grim-faced look how Wall Street has been getting off easy. One after another prosecution has been rejected by courts and the Department of Justice. They know where their bread is buttered. "What’s worse," Cohan writes, "not only did bankers escape with no penalty, they walked off with millions of dollars in their pockets while American taxpayers got left holding the bag."
The least the Justice Department could do, in declining to prosecute, would be to make available the reams of documents on which it based its decisions, so that the American public can understand why prosecutors let these people walk. Without seeing what the prosecutors have seen, we are left with a sense of frustration and injustice.
Why didn't we demand those documents?
It has always been a mystery to me why the American people’s reaction to this lack of accountability has been so consistently passive. Why is it that thousands will protest, for weeks, the efforts by the Republican governor of Wisconsin and his Republican allies in the state legislature to strip Wisconsin’s public employees of hard-won benefits and contractual rights, but there is barely a peep uttered — save from a handful of Code Pink activists — in the face of trillions of dollars of American treasure used to bail out the very banks and securities firms that caused the Great Recession in the first place?
Because protesting in Wisconsin is more fun and more congenial than poring through documents we half understand (if at all)? Or maybe because even if we took the documents and went to law school and took Wall Street to court, we know we would lose?
But now the worm is turning.
This Thursday, after a week of demonstrations, including at Goldman Sachs’s new headquarters on West Street in Manhattan and at Bank of America’s New York new headquarters on West 42nd Street, a group calling itself onmay12.org has organized a series of protests on and around Wall Street itself to “make big banks and millionaires pay.” The group is a coalition of labor unions, community and progressive groups that were catalyzed by Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s proposed city budget that cuts childcare services, teachers and public safety, among others, while continuing to give tax benefits to corporations that remain in the city.
“We are connecting the dots from the big banks that crashed our economy, destroyed millions of jobs and foreclosed on millions of family homes to the human impact here in the financial capital of our country,” said Michael Kink, the executive director of Strong Economy for All Coalition and one of the event’s organizers. In an interview, he cited similar protests being organized in Chicago, Charlotte and Oakland, and cited specifically his outrage at how Oakland is forced to close its public libraries — in order to save $5 million a year — at the same time the city still pays Goldman Sachs $5 million a year for interest-rate swaps. He wonders, where is the shared sacrifice? “This is a national effort to hold banks accountable,” he said.
Ball's back in our court.
