So Much For The Accountability

President Accountability famously said about the Rhode Island teachers who were fired as a direct result of his Race to the Top policy

"If a school continues to fail its students year after year after year, if it doesn't show signs of improvement, then there's got to be a sense of accountability. And that's what happened in Rhode Island last week."

You see, nothing is more important in this world than holding teachers accountable for all the ills of society and blaming them when schools "fail."

But when it comes to holding the men who nearly brought the world financial system to collapse the past few years (and who made billions from the building of the bubble, the collapse of the bubble and the taxpayer-funded bailouts of the Too Big To Fail institutions that the Bush/Obama administrations handed out), not so much on the accountable.

That's the message from the SEC case against Goldman Sachs. The more I think about the case, the more I think Obama is doing what Primadonna said he is doing in this comment thread:

The whole thing may very well be a public relations thing. Make the public think the government is doing something. My question is why only a civil suit and not a criminal? Where was the SEC all along? So sick of the charade they put on.

Let me add that the guy the SEC named in the case is a mid-level guy who COULD NOT have been doing all of this on his own. The SEC has made this guy a fall guy while they let the real perpetrators of the fraud go free.

This article in today's NY Post says as much:

While the Securities and Exchange Commission hangs fraud charges on a Goldman Sachs vice president, several sources suggested the lower level executive might be taking the fall for his bosses.

Though Fabrice Tourre, a London-based trader for Goldman, was viewed within the firm as a smart "up-and-comer," sources noted that many of the alleged misdeeds he's accused of committing involved decisions that normally would be above his pay grade.

Tourre and Goldman are accused of failing to let investors know that a pool of loans used in a collateralized debt obligation, or CDO, had been cherry-picked by billionaire hedge fund king John Paulson, who planned to bet against the pool's performance. The investors lost $1 billion, while Paulson earned the same amount.

...

Several sources told The Post they found it unlikely that Tourre, 31, was able to accomplish any of these acts on his own. Indeed, these sources noted, Wall Street culture, particularly at Goldman, dictates that someone at Tourre's level never would have a wide enough berth to operate unchecked.

"I think that Tourre is just being used as the fall guy," said one Wall Street observer.

That has led some people to question the role of Tourre's superior, Jonathan Egol, a Goldman star mortgage trader who is widely seen as the brains behind the area in which Tourre worked.

As a senior member of Goldman's CDO structuring team, Egol helped create tens of billions of similar, made-to-order CDOs from 2004 to 2008. A Princeton graduate with an aerospace engineering degree, Egol is said to have produced upward of $11 billion worth of CDOs similar to the one at the center of the SEC probe.

Egol, who has not been named in the SEC suit, could not be reached for comment.

Let us also note that Goldman was not the only institution involved in this kind of fraudulent activity.

Paulson worked directly with Deutsche Bank creating similar CDO's to sell to unsuspecting investors.

And of course Paulson made billions in these transactions and is getting off scott free.

So once again, accountability is for the little guy - in this case the arrogant, greedy and stupid Tourre who wrote some idiotic emails that clearly implicate him - but not the men above him at Goldman Sachs who okayed the transactions and set up a culture where these kinds of transactions were valued (stealing from one set of customers to benefit another set of customers and charging fees to both sets - BRILLIANT!!!)

Nor are the men who created these fraudulent instruments, the policymakers who de-regulated the system to allow this kind of fraud to flourish, nor the regulators at the SEC or the Federal Reserve who missed even obvious cases of fraud being held accountable.

Hell, the SEC managed to miss both the Madoff and the Stanford schemes even when people told them funky things were going on and rather than be held accountable for the screw-ups, some of the officials were PROMOTED to positions of power in the Obama administration (specifically Treasury Timmeh Geithner and Mary Schapiro.)

This is accountability?

Uh, no, it isn't.

It's jive.

But that's what happens when you have a president - whether it is Bush or Obama - who is wholly owned by the corporations who are robbing this country blind and turning the United States of America into one big Ponzi Scheme/Rigged Casino.

And so we fire teachers in Rhode Island and talk tough about accountability for teachers and allow the same hedge fund managers and Masters of the Universe who rob and steal for a living and brought the country to the brink (and still may - NOTHING has changed, the punch bowl for Goldman and the rest remains as yummy and available as ever!!!) to create and run education policy while they take their ill-gotten billions and laugh all the way to the bank.

A taxpayer-funded, bailed out bank.

Heckuva job, President Accountability.