If wishes were horses "
If wishes were horses, we'd all take a ride. Spitzer's investigations blew up after a personal scandal. Cuomo's gubernatorial campaign interrupted his Bank of America case of 2009.
We now have the new attorney general, Schneiderman, and the leaked investigation. Robert Scheer praised the effort but expressed this jaded (and probably accurate) caution:
"Eric
Schneiderman will probably fail, as did his predecessors in that job;
the honest sheriff doesn't last long in a town that houses the Wall
Street casino. But decent folks should be cheering him on. Despite a
mountain of evidence of robo-signed mortgage contracts, deceitful
mortgage-based securities and fraudulent foreclosures, the banks were
going to be able to cut their potential losses to what was, for them, a
minuscule amount [by the state and federal consent order proposals]." Robert Sheer, Truth Dig, May 17
Sheer has been around long enough to know the odds against the good guys winning, at least for long enough to make a difference. But you never know. Success is often a matter of timing. This attorney general is certainly attacking Wall Street and the big banks at the right time.
The support for serious legal action would be overwhelming. There isn't be a venue in the country that would miss the opportunity to sock it to these and other institutions and put a some of their officials behind bars. Of note, the Martin Act can be used for civil and criminal prosecutions. But let's not get carried away. Trillions lost, a nation in economic distress, 150,000 foreclosures a month"and how many prosecutions have we seen? The only time these guys will do is in a Timex commercial.
END
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