Matt Taibbi a very talented author and reporter who writes a lot about the American financial scene in Rolling Stone, is one of the most important writers around today, mostly because he understands what is, to most of us, a very confusing mélange of double crosses, enormous scams and blatant criminal fraud.
As important as I think his writing is, I often vague out when reading him, mostly because I am not sophisticated enough, in that area to understand all the intricate ins and outs of what exactly is going on. I think this is true for most of us. It’s especially true for Attorney General Eric Holder who is completely lacking in either the knowledge, the guts or the outside influence to go after the thousands of financial industry movers and stealers who are raping the US financial system and the American people.
Okay, so Obama made a mistake. So he appointed a guy as Attorney General who couldn’t cut it. So, now is the time to admit that mistake and cut bait, and who better to replace Holder than Taibbi himself. Here is a guy, equipped with a comprehensive knowledge of the whole financial situation and more important, a driving ambition to do something about the problem.
Right now there is no more pressing problem floating the justice department than the outrageous theft, running rampant in our under regulated financial institutions. Taibbi knows about it in detail and he possesses the moral outrage to pursue it to the ends of the earth.
Holder may know a lot about the drug problem, but pursuing that waste of time and money is just a smoke screen to keep him from messing with the big boys of finance. He may know something about human trafficking but if he does, he sure hasn’t shown any inclination to get involved there, either. He may know about organized crime but if he hasn’t got the stones to chase down a bunch of bankers how’s he going to grow them big enough to go after a bunch of killers?
Organized crime, human trafficking, smuggling, the drug war, they’re all important issues and all have to be solved, along with many other problems but none of them holds the national significance that financial crimes do. The drug war, the most costly and publicized of the group should disappear in a few years thanks to the savvy approaches of many intelligent opponents determined to turn its $80 billion cost into $300 billion in revenue.
Despite the horror of human trafficking and the destructive influences of organized crime, it’s the financial crimes that are the most debilitating to our society. Why? Not because they are any more important than the others but because, unlike the others they’re perpetrators are seemingly not even being pursued. This apparent lack of pursuit on the part of the justice department sends a terrible message to the American people. It says, we can catch these guys but we aren’t able to convict them because they are too important to the US economy and if we try to put them in jail the whole economy will crash. This is a lie. It shows the weakness of Holder and the failure of the White House to give him the support necessary to go after these crooks.
If we can’t hold the people who manipulate our money accountable to our laws then we have no business holding anyone else accountable to them and the whole system of society breaks down and we are left with chaos.
It’s not clear what failure of comprehension is responsible for the President not forcing his Attorney General to demolish this ingrained system of thievery that is the current way of the financial establishment but it is clear that it has to stop – immediately. Obama has to force Holder to do his job or he must replace him.
If it comes down to the latter, there could be no better choice than Matt Taibbi. No he’s not a lawyer but maybe that’s an advantage in this time of legal shenanigans and cynical disregard for the law. Maybe what we need as our Attorney General is just a guy with a sense of morals and a need to see things done right. That’s surely not what we have now.