Fraud from on High

Here is a story from McClatchey news pointing to knowing fraud by Bush's Secretary of the Treasury, Hank Paulson, and the then head of the NY Federal Reserve, Timothy Geithner. They knowingly misrepresented the condition of AIG in order to prop up the company and ensure that other banks got paid. For Paulson this looks like a conflict of interest because of his ties to Goldman Sachs which benefited by tens of billions from this "deal".



Sadly, it will be decades before all the criminality behind this financial crisis finally sees the full light of day. By then the principals will be dead. They will have gone to the grave with their ill-gotten millions (tens or even hundreds of millions) and with their reputations mostly intact. But the future will know the truth. But what justice is that?

History now knows how corrupt the Warren G. Harding administration was, Huey Long the "Kingfish" of Louisiana, Chicago politics was under Richard Daley ("Daley's well-organized Democratic political machine was often accused of political corruption and though many of Daley's subordinates were jailed, Daley was never personally formally accused of corruption."), etc. were. But none of these people spent a day in jail and didn't lose any money or sleep over their crimes. Hank Paulson and Timothy Geithner follow a long line of political manipulators who milked the system for their benefit and the benefit of their "friends" without the "long arm of the law" ever getting near them. Sad.