By Maureen Dowd, Opinion Columnist, Sunday Review, Nov. 18, 2018<\/p>\n
WASHINGTON \u2014 When I was in Reykjavik in August, Icelanders were bragging about putting the corrupt bankers who ravaged their economy in prison. In America, it works somewhat differently.<\/p>\n
We let the corrupt bankers who ravaged our economy roam free with bigger bonuses, more lavish Hamptons houses and fresh risky schemes. The big banks are bigger than ever and prosecution of white-collar crimes is at a 20-year low. And, cherry on the gilded cake, we put white-collar criminals in charge of the country \u2014 elevating epic grifters to the presidency and powerful cabinet posts.<\/p>\n
Reading all the recent stories about the 10th anniversary of the financial crisis, it\u2019s easy to see the neon line leading from Barack Obama\u2019s failure to punish Wall Street scammers to the fact that Republican scammers are now infecting the entire infrastructure of government.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street rose up as opposite expressions of anti-establishment rage, nourished by the sense that colluding elites in government and business had got away with a crime,\u201d George Packer wrote in The New Yorker<\/a>. \u201cThe game was rigged \u2014 that became the consensus of the alienated.\u201d<\/p>\n President Obama and his Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. made a terrible mistake by letting the miscreant bankers off the hook rather than saying, as F.D.R. did, \u201cI welcome their hatred.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Some saw it as the end of the Democratic Party. Democrats were the party of workers, charged with protecting people from big money, big banks and big fraud. Obama, the great hope to revitalize the left, immediately folded. Some analogized that the failure to send bankers to jail or even on perp walks made the party\u2019s white blood cell count drop to the point that G.O.P. infections could run wild.<\/p>\n In his 2016 book, \u201cListen, Liberal,\u201d<\/a> Thomas Frank wrote that \u201cthe hope drained out of the Obama movement\u201d at the meeting between the fledgling president and Wall Street C.E.O.s in March 2009: \u201cAfter warning them about \u2018the pitchforks\u2019 of an angry public, Obama reassured the frightened bankers that they could count on him to protect them; that he had no intention of restructuring their industry or changing the economic direction of the nation.\u201d (After he left the White House, Obama followed Hillary\u2019s lead, buckraking on Wall Street<\/a>.)<\/p>\n David Axelrod, the Obama counselor who fought during the crisis to \u201ckick the offenders harder,\u201d as he puts it, says he still feels \u201cvery conflicted.\u201d \u201cWe feared that if you took a brick out of the wall then the whole damn wall might fall down,\u201d he said. \u201cBut it wasn\u2019t helpful, as far as Trump. To the extent that people felt the deal was rigged against them and in favor of the powerful, it gave him fodder.\u201d<\/p>\n Donald Trump scooped up \u201cthe forgotten,\u201d promising to punish Wall Street for \u201cgetting away with murder,\u201d and pledging to break up the big banks and force bankers to pay higher taxes.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n But it was just another Trump con. His administration, The Times reported<\/a>, \u201chas presided over a sharp decline in financial penalties against banks and big companies accused of malfeasance,\u201d sparing corporate wrongdoers billions in fines.<\/p>\n Asked about The Times\u2019s scorching investigation<\/a> last month on how \u201cself-made\u201d Trump received at least $413 million in today\u2019s dollars from his father\u2019s real estate empire, much of it through tax dodges, Kellyanne Conway shrugged it off, saying, \u201cHaven\u2019t they learned that the president always gets the last laugh?\u201d<\/p>\n Trump\u2019s White House started off like a branch office of Goldman Sachs, as Elizabeth Warren noted. Gary Cohn, Trump\u2019s former economic adviser from Goldman, showed that Wall Street\u2019s arrogance shines bright when he recently told Reuters that borrowers were just as responsible for the 2008 crisis as lenders.<\/p>\n \u201cWho broke the law?\u201d Cohn asked, adding: \u201cWas the waitress in Las Vegas who had six houses leveraged at 100 percent with no income, was she reckless and stupid? Or was the banker reckless and stupid?\u201d<\/p>\n Binyamin Appelbaum, The Times\u2019s economics wiz, riposted on Twitter<\/a>: \u201cA more accurate characterization of the housing bubble is that it was one of the largest orgies of white collar criminality in American history.\u201d<\/p>\n Speaking of orgies, Tim Leissner, the former Goldman Sachs banker whose guilty plea in the company\u2019s $600 million international fraud case<\/a> was unsealed this month, told the judge that his conspiracy was \u201cvery much in line\u201d with the culture of Goldman Sachs \u201cto conceal facts from certain compliance and legal employees of Goldman Sachs.\u201d<\/p>\n