This will be forever the legacy of Eric Holder, the man who changed the justice department policy to go after smaller 'fines' as settlements instead of prosecuting crimes.. only because of the simple fact that fines are easy to win, and criminal cases can be lost.
Justice is now escapable because it's been deemed "too difficult to pursue"
This policy change could also perhaps be attributed to lobbyists seeking to maximize profits and minimize risks for corporate clients who are knowingly breaking the law.
> Prosecution rates against crimes by large financial institutions are at 20-year lows. Holder has also endorsed the notion that prosecutors, when deciding to pursue white-collar crimes, should give special consideration to "collateral consequences" of bringing charges against large corporate institutions, as outlined in a 1999 memorandum by Holder. Nearly a decade later Holder, as head of the Department of Justice, put this into practice and has demonstrated the weight "collateral consequences" has by repeatedly sought and reached deferred prosecution and non-prosecution agreements and settlements with large financial institutions such as J.P. Morgan Chase, HSBC, Countrywide Mortgage, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, and others where the institution pays a fine or penalty but faces no criminal charges and admits no wrongdoing. Whereas in the previous decade the Bush administration's Department of Justice often sought criminal charges against individuals of large institutions regardless of "collateral consequences" such as cases involving Enron, Adelphia Communications Corporation, Tyco International, and others.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Holder#Criminal_investiga...
Also I get that it's Wikipedia, but the comparison to Bush is ridiculous. The Enron story is a long one. Here's Gray Davis's perspective on exactly what it means that the Bush DoJ "sought criminal charges:"
> "I inherited the energy deregulation scheme which put us all at the mercy of the big energy producers. We got no help from the Federal government. In fact, when I was fighting Enron and the other energy companies, these same companies were sitting down with Vice President Cheney to draft a national energy strategy."
Furthermore the whole reason Holder is using the term "collateral consequences" instead of "collateral damage" is because that term was used by Dick Cheney and the press to describe why he does not care about civilian deaths in Afghanistan and later Iraq. It would be a stretch, but surely the lack of investigations into no-bid war contracts like Halliburton's had as much to do with their "collateral consequences" on military operations as it would on their paychecks.
Obama inherited multiple quagmires due to disregard of the consequences of criminal justice policy.
Normal people will never be on the wrong side of a banking fraud, except if their bank goes out of business. What is justice there?
So while I believe bad people should go to jail, I sympathize with Holder's point of view.
We should be pointing the finger at the people who knew all these things and still put him in charge of the justice department. We should also be pointing the finger at the ones who have the power to change these policies now, but fail to do so.
At this point Holder is just a scapegoat.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirkland_%26_Ellis
Meanwhile, I'm some kind of "radical" for even pointing this out...
Only for entities which are wealthy enough to effectively defend themselves against the awesome power of federal prosecution!
Only if you're rich enough.