Wall Street Crimes: President Obama is "effectively encouraging future financial fraud"

[Karmadillo]

21. What

I'm wondering is why you're responding to my joke about the Justice Department's failure to go after Wall Street per the OP with post after post that doesn't involve the Justice Department. Are you arguing the Justice Department is going after Wall Street? Are you arguing the Justice Department isn't going after whistleblowers? Is Jane Mayer making things up? And here's another link in support of my #6 post, although, as you note, it has nothing to do with whatever distracting point you're trying and failing to make.

http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=4393

Extra! September 2011

Obama's DOJ Targets Whistleblowers
If they 'hate our freedoms,' maybe we need less of it
By Jim Naureckas

If you really believed, as many Americans claimed to after the September 11 attacks, that "they hate us for our freedom" (Extra! Update, 10/01), then it makes a certain kind of sense to protect against future attacks--by reducing our freedom.

That would seem to be the only kind of logic that could justify the erosion of freedom of the press manifested by the Obama Justice Department's concerted efforts to prosecute whistleblowers.

The first steps toward the criminalization of being a source for investigative journalism were taken by George W. Bush's administration, when those who revealed how the "War on Terror" restricted civil liberties were threatened with jail (New York Times, 2/12/06). But, as Salon blogger Glenn Greenwald (4/16/10) pointed out, "the Bush DOJ [Department of Justice] never actually followed through on those menacing threats; no NSA whistleblowers were indicted during Bush's term.... It took the election of Barack Obama for that to happen."

Since Obama took office, his Justice Department has arrested or indicted at least five individuals for allegedly passing classified information to journalists--compared to three such prosecutions in the previous 40 years (Politico, 3/7/11).

more...