For outrageous behavior by American organizations, only underlings are punished. Just as top people escaped responsibility in the Abu Ghraib tortures, the sole culprit named so far in the massive Goldman Sachs fraud is a 31-year-old trader named Fabrice Tourre, who is on leave and facing Congressional grilling today.
Even after filing civil charges, the SEC, according to a former government regulator, has not “kicked into gear fully, or they’d be naming [Chairman Lloyd] Blankfein and other senior leaders of Goldman…they’ve only gone after a junior person. And if they were really in gear, there would be criminal charges here.”
At the end of the day in the Abu Ghraib disgrace, Don Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney were embarrassed, the general of the military prison was demoted to colonel, but it was only low-ranking officers and soldiers who were put on trial and punished.
Rumseld said later he had twice offered to resign but that President Bush had refused to let him until after an election debacle two years later, and Jay Bybee, author of a Justice Department memo defining torture down, was named a Federal judge.
Now Blankfein, Goldman’s leader, is deploying an army of lawyers and lobbyists to defiantly defend his firm, admitting only that it “participated in things that were clearly wrong and have reason to regret.”