The Only Answer is that Some People Are Above the Law

The great Matt Taibbi Asks, "Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail?," and he doesn't have an answer per se, but he does explain the consequences of the fact that the banksters are untouchable:

The mental stumbling block, for most Americans, is that financial crimes don't feel real; you don't see the culprits waving guns in liquor stores or dragging coeds into bushes. But these frauds are worse than common robberies. They're crimes of intellectual choice, made by people who are already rich and who have every conceivable social advantage, acting on a simple, cynical calculation: Let's steal whatever we can, then dare the victims to find the juice to reclaim their money through a captive bureaucracy. They're attacking the very definition of property — which, after all, depends in part on a legal system that defends everyone's claims of ownership equally. When that definition becomes tenuous or conditional — when the state simply gives up on the notion of justice — this whole American Dream thing recedes even further from reality.

This is the America that we live in, and Barack Obama and Timothy Geithner like it that way.

It really is a pity that the other side is so thoroughly contemptible, because there appears to be no good option.

Read the whole thing.