Holder's 'too big to jail' let the economy down

[progressoid]

The following editorial appears on Bloomberg View:

Attorney General Eric Holder, who plans to step down after more than five years in office, has efforts and achievements to be proud of, no doubt, but will probably be remembered above all for something he didn't do: prosecute top executives for their role in the 2008 financial crisis.

He declined to hold senior executives accountable not because he wished to be soft on financial crime but because of a strategic error. In a 1999 memorandum, written when he was deputy attorney general under President Bill Clinton, he'd explained how prosecutors could charge corporations as criminal enterprises. In 2002, the testing of that doctrine on Enron Corp. auditor Arthur Andersen caused the company to fold, and thousands of innocent people lost their jobs.

During and after the financial crisis, Holder kept the focus on corporations, but moved more cautiously. Fearing a repeat of the Arthur Andersen debacle, prosecutors were careful to leave companies standing, even as they extracted tens of billions of dollars from banks for transgressions ranging from mortgage-related fraud to laundering money for drug cartels. "Some of these institutions have become too large," Holder famously said in 2013 Senate testimony. "It has an inhibiting impact on our ability to bring resolutions that I think would be more appropriate."

...

more: http://www.chicagotribune.com/sns-wp-blm-news-bc-bg-editorial-holder26-20140926-story.html

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

1. What's remembered depends on who remembers it. And who writes books about it.

Realistically, most people will have forgotten Holder within a half century, pretty much the same as any other AG. Until then, though, people who do remember will remember what, if anything, affected them most directly.

[pscot]

2. He built a beautiful instrument

but never played a note.

[woo me with science]

3. He was a One Percent tool.

To be followed by the next tool.

In a sea of tools and puppets, up to and including the presidency.

[progressoid]

4. Yup.

It's enough to make me want to take up drinking in the morning.

[woo me with science]

5. IMO it's no sign of well adjustment

to be sanguine about what's being done to this country.

[woo me with science]

6. Protecting banks, imposing austerity,

All of it is bad for the economy. Three hundred economists warned PBO that the economy needed stimulus, not starvation. This garbage is malignant, and it's planned. It's good only for the small group of elites at the top who want consolidated power and a desperate workforce.