So Why Haven't the Crooks Been Prosecuted?

60 Minutes attempts to explain:

News, Etc.

It's an anniversary to remember, no matter how hard one would like to forget: It is the two-year anniversary of the fall of Lehman Brothers, precipitating the current economic mess.
_____

Delaware Republicans seem hellbent on throwing away a Senate seat after all.

Another whackjob like Nevada's Sharron Angle is running for the Senate there.
_____

The IMF is "concerned" and "fearful" of social unrest because of the worldwide jobs crisis, a crisis it helped to create.
_____

In what is likely a first, and hopefully the last, a parked car at Crater Lake National Park plunged 1,000 feet into the caldera with the family dog inside.

The dog miraculously survived, but the car did not. Apparently the car's owners failed to use the parking brake.
_____

It's time to take a look at the Chinese education system. It is much different than ours, but if the neoliberals have their way, millions of students will be pushed out of education at the end of elementary or middle school.
_____

Wall Street Mess

According to Robert Reich, the Dodd bill is a step in the right direction but it leaves some important things out in order to prevent another Wall Street meltdown. Reich names three critical reforms that are necessary:

1. Require that trading of all derivatives be done on open exchanges where parties have to disclose what they’re buying and selling and have enough capital to pay up if their bets go wrong. The exception in the current bill for so-called “unique” derivatives opens up a loophole big enough for bankers to drive their Ferrari’s through.

2. Resurrect the Glass-Steagall Act in its entirety so commercial banks are separated from investment banks. The current bill doesn’t go nearly far enough. Commercial banks should take deposits and lend money. Investment banks should be limited to the casino we call the stock market, helping companies issue new issues and making bets. Nothing good comes of mixing the two. We learned this after the Great Crash of 1929, and then forgot it in 1999 when Congress allowed financial supermarkets to do both.

3. Cap the size of big banks at $100 billion in assets. The current bill doesn’t limit the size of banks at all. It creates a process for winding down the operations of any bank that gets into trouble. But if several big banks are threatened, as they were when the housing bubble burst, their failure would pose a risk to the whole financial system, and Congress and the Fed would surely have to bail them out. The only way to ensure no bank is too big to fail is to make sure no bank is too big, period. Nobody has been able to show any scale efficiencies over $100 billion in assets, so that should be the limit.

Any Book

titled It Takes a Pillage is probably worth checking into:

The Second Great Bank Depression has spawned so many lies, it's hard to keep track of which is the biggest. Possibly the most irksome class of lies, usually spouted by Wall Street hacks and conservative pundits, is that we're all victims to a bunch of poor people who bought McMansions, or at least homes they had no business living in. If that was really what this crisis was all about, we could have solved it much more cheaply in a couple of days in late 2008, by simply providing borrowers with additional capital to reduce their loan principals. It would have cost about 3 percent of what the entire bailout wound up costing, with comparatively similar risk.

Just as great oaks from little acorns grow, so, too, can a Second Great Bank Depression from a tiny loan grow. But so you know, it wasn't the tiny loan's fault. It was everyone and everything that piled on top. That's how a small loan in Stockton, California, can be linked to a worldwide economic collapse all the way to Iceland, through a plethora of shady financial techniques and overzealous sales pitches.