President Obama Literally Sent HUNDREDS of Financial Criminals to Prison. Why Doesn't the "Woke" Left Know This?



To the woke-Left, President Obama is a satanic villain who somehow commandeered 70 million votes through mass delusion and then betrayed the progressive cause. There are any manner of ways in which he is said to have betrayed progressives by passing landmark legislation that, depending on which side of the bed a Justice Democrat woke up on a given day, are “not enough,” “Republican-lite",” or if they are having a particularly woke day, “corporate slavery.”

On no issue does that fire burn hotter than the woke-left’s critique of Obama on his handling of the financial crisis that he inherited (and that caused the Great Recession). It’s not enough that President Obama made banks pay back the financial rescue money with interest and presided over the largest antitrust settlement in history. It’s not enough that President Obama levied the largest criminal financial penalties and fines from banks.

“But no one has gone to jail!” has become a rallying cry among the woke-left, with certain opportunistic presidential candidates joining in. It is also a slogan that unites the deranged right with the woke-left as both believe in the same “establishment” myth.

And that’s exactly what it is: a myth.

Of course people have gone to jail for crimes that caused the financial collapse of 2007-2008 that President Obama inherited when he took office in January of 2009. By the time President Obama left office in January of 2017, his administration had charged 374 people with financial crimes, of whom 269 had already been convicted, and 192 people had been sentenced to prison, according to the independent Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program. Others were either awaiting trial or awaiting sentencing.

44 of the people sentenced to prison were bankers, 37 bank-co-conspirators, 68 mortgage scammers, 14 defrauded the TARP program directly, and the rest were borrowers who conspired with one or more bank officials to defraud the bank. One should note that the financial system is so integrated that ‘banker,’ for the purpose of culpability in the financial system, is really indistinguishable from other financial players.

Those cases continued after Obama left office, and as of July of this year, 283 people were sentenced to jail, 369 convicted, and 428 charged (note that the vast majority of the charging, 374 out of 428, had happened under President Obama’s administration).

Understand that this was all done under extraordinary difficulty. After three decades of bipartisan financial deregulation, criminal prosecutions of institutions had become exceedingly difficult (because much of the things they were doing, like mortgage-backed derivatives trading, was legal at the time), and prosecuting individuals even more so. Pretty much the only avenue left for prosecution was fraud, and even that was made exponentially more difficult to prosecute.

And yet, criminal investigations started and charges filed by the Obama administration literally sent almost 300 people to jail. And he made them pay the highest fines in history. And he collected the largest antitrust penalties from banks. And though short of the original goal, he forced banks to refinance the mortgages of 1.6 million distressed borrowers.

In the only comparable time in history, in the aftermath of the Great Depression and under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, PBS reports, virtually no bankers were jailed, and much smaller civil fines were collected. That objectively makes Barack Obama the most successful president to have prosecuted the financial industry in history.

Those are the facts. Will the woke-left wake up to them?

I wouldn’t hold my breath.




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